Northside Church - Sydney
Finding You In Community Week 2: Doing Life Together
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Before we start, look at this verse verse 42, verse 42, the one before the reading brought to us by Ronnie. They spent their time in learning from the apostles, taking part in the fellowship and sharing in the fellowship meal and prayers. This was close communal living. And it just seems worlds away from where we are here in the city life, in the city like Sydney. Here's a question. Have you ever experienced close communal living for any length of time? Some of you, I know, live in apartments and judging from some of the stories, it's pretty tough these days to live in close community, in some apartment blocks. And what about, have you ever, your family has gone to live with another family for any length of time? You know what that's about? Or have you been on holidays with another family in really close community? I'm not talking about, you know, four or five caravans or one, I'm talking about really close, sharing everything, really being vulnerable and really getting a sense of what each other's family life is like. Have you been in the armed services? If you have, you probably know what close community life is like with a dormitory kind of existence. Have you been in prison? It's all the past. But I believe that's pretty close communal living as well. The closest Devon I ever got to communal living was, and the first three years of our training in college in Melbourne, they'd converted some little rooms that were formerly occupied by single students. But now the new rule was you could come to college as a married person. You couldn't do that before. But they changed the rules. And so they'd converted these six little rooms for three couples. We had a bedroom, we had a living area, a kitchen. But they were separated by an open veranda. So even just the open veranda, you got to see lots of things you wouldn't normally see as people were dashing between the two rooms, you know, we had to share the bathroom, had to share the laundry. And just beyond us was a whole about another 30 people who were single students and married students living in very close community. It was really, really close, I mean, very close, right? And when things went up, when astray and when tension builds up, you usually have issues like cleaning and tidiness, you know, when you're sort of trying to maintain a bathroom with three couples and each got different standards and things were often sort of came off. I remember one night, it was a big kerfuffle, and I went out and up on the top floor of the singles of the singles block, there was a guy throwing one by one the prized African violence of his flatmate from the second story, something had come and stuck with their relationship. And you're thinking, well, these guys are training for the ministry. Yes, hello, but, you know, human, vulnerable, points of weakness, and it was all happening. Well, I think Bevan and I would agree that when we left that communal, that tight communal existence in the fourth year and went to a man's, it was quite a relief. I think we were, you know, first year was a bit of a novelty, but we were pretty much over that level of closeness, and I think our experience probably helped to prove a point about how most of us are wired. And it's this, we are created for community, and while part of us longs for it, there's another part of us that resists it, you know, there's a sense in which when humankind fell from grace, and we inherited the tendency not only to hide from God, but to hide from each other under certain circumstances. We struggle with conflicting desires. On the one hand, we want to be close to others. On the other hand, we want to hold them at arm's length. They've learned to be suspicious of people's motives. Some of us have been hurt and ripped off, and we don't want to be burnt again, and so we build up barriers around us, designed to protect us and protect our vulnerability. We're wary of letting people get too close. Now that's in sharp contrast to what we see here in Acts, right? In other words, something very special happens within the body of Christ, and really the church in the establishment of caring, open, transparent, genuine communities, genuine community life, there's something very distinctive about the Church of Jesus Christ, and it can make a huge difference to individuals, to families and to the whole neighbourhoods. Something very special about the unity we experience in the Christian life. It doesn't happen automatically, and not every group that calls themselves a church has this close sense of unity, but where there's a strong desire for God to achieve this level of community, where there's an openness to the Holy Spirit that it might happen, and where people are actively trying to achieve this outcome, a unique level of unity, trust and synergy is possible. That's precisely what happened here in Acts chapter two. That's exactly what happened. Some things spectacular happen on the day of Pentecost. You know the story so well. Pinnigarpy preached. The Holy Spirit moved. People came to Christ in droves. Barriers were broken down, language barriers, cultural barriers, ethnic and racial barriers all went, and a unique community was established that would ultimately transform the then-known world. That's how it was. Most people discovered in no uncertain manner the awesome power of doing life together. The support, the encouragement, the confidence that's possible when you're enjoying high levels of unity. They were eating together. They were praying together. They were worshiping together. They were serving together. They were celebrating their unity. And friends, that's where there's a direct link between their experience and what we are trying to achieve all these years later in 2012. You see the reality is finding our place in the community of faith means, among other things, celebrating our unity. Now Christian unity has a number of special components to it. God draws his people together in a way that's quite unique in all the world. There's nothing quite like it. Our unity is born out of our love for God, our gratitude for what he has done through Jesus and our desire to see his kingdom flourish. First of all, his first thing, it's a mystical unity. It's a mystical unity. You can't easily explain the togetherness that you can experience as a Christian all around the world. Anywhere you go. I know many of you as I have experienced this, you know, wherever you go as a Christian. If you're meeting with God's people, if there's fair dinkum discipleship happening, there's an instant welcome, there's an instant acceptance, there's an instant connection, and it's really beautiful. It's just so heartening. They'll just treat you like they've known you all their lives. We do it here at Northside. We've had it happen to us in other places, here at the local level. I mean, look at the way in which God has brought together so many different people with so many different ethnic and social and racial backgrounds and cultural backgrounds. We serve together. We pray together. We worship together. We do life together. And friends, the key I believe lies in a verse like we're going to go a little further along in Acts, Acts chapter 4 verse 32, it says, "The group of believers was one in mind and heart, the group of believers was one in mind and heart." Now there are three words there, they're very important, believers, mind and heart. Because this reveals to us that at the very center of our mystical unity, it's a matter of faith, that's why the word believer is there. It's a matter of emotion, heart and it's a matter of will, mind. And when you get people of diverse backgrounds signing off on the lordship of Christ in the area of faith and emotion and mind and intellect, wow, you've got a force that's to be reckoned with at the local level and even in the world scale. You've got a group of people, that's what happened in the Acts, they changed the world, they turned the world upside down. There's another component to our unity in Christ and it's this, as members of the community of faith, we have a ministerial unity. You see, Francis, there it is, a church can enjoy a mystical unity, they can give a cent to all the right doctrines, they can revel in their coziness as a group, they've got a mystical unity, but they may not get traction when it comes to ministry and some of you maybe have been in churches like that where it's very close and cozy, but not just happening ministry wise, the unity is great, but you know, like what's happening in terms of impacting the life of those in the community. In the case of the early church, it's clear from the scriptures, their togetherness led to very effective ministry within their community. Verse 46, have a look at it, day by day, they met as a group in the temple. They had meals together, here it is, they had meals together in their homes, eating with glad and humble hearts, praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. These are the unsaved people, this is the community saying, wow, what's going on down there? It's fantastic. And at every day, the Lord added to their group those who were being saved. Let me look at the cumulative picture of what was happening in the early church. The mission and the ministry that was being undertaken, we see it in the writings of Paul, we traced it a little bit, certainly in the writings in the book of Acts. What were they doing? What did it involve? It involved relief to the poor. It involved care for the widows and the orphans. It involved food for the hungry, rest for the weary. No wonder the church was growing, people's needs were being taken seriously. And they were being ministered to in the name of Jesus. Do you know one of the most satisfying things, and there are many satisfying aspects to being on the leadership team here at Northside, but one of the most satisfying things is you get a kind of a helicopter view of what's happening in any given year, for instance. You just get to review a whole year and you get to see the impact of our ministry on the lives of people. You get to realise that we have played a part in helping the homeless of our inner city because of our partnership with Hope Street and our financial support for that particular mission. You get to think about those who pass through divorce care and you see that people have been given a new sense of hope for the future having been through the plane of divorce. You get to see the people who have done search for life and found out more about why they act as they do and try to deal with some of the past issues and look forward to a much more confident future. You get to see the couples who have been through the marriage course, and we're going to do that again in August this year. And that was a tremendous event last year of strengthening marriages and helping couples discover and rediscover the richness of being together. You think about the residents of that little section of Glebe who look forward every month to the arrival of our team and our team does the do some gardening and they run the barbecue and they help in the op shop. This was written up in the local Glebe press just in the last couple of weeks, and made reference to this last week. You get to think about the mothers who come from these surrounding high-rise buildings. Many of them have been just come to Australia, their husbands have been transferred here, they're working somewhere in the city. The mums just long to get out with the little ones and come to play group or to mother to mother time. You get to think about the local residents and some of the local workers who come Thursdays to participate with Jan Wiley in the meditation group, just to sort of take time out of the frenetic pace of life in Sydney. And of course this year we'll be able to look back on the struggling peoples of Madagascar and realise that in a small way we will have played a part there in helping to bring a bit of hope and a bit of healing with our mission field team going over there in August. Now friends, these are all expressions of our unity and ministry, they really are. Because although we can't all be there on the front line doing it, we can all pray. We can all give. We can all support in that sense, just being here together today, sitting shoulder to shoulder with some of the people who are involved in those ministries, that in itself is an expression of unity. Even the provision of this ministry centre in which we operate, I mean over the years it's never been about the buildings, it's never been about the buildings, but it has been about the resources and the tools for ministry we can attract through these buildings. That's what it's been about, not the buildings, but what we can achieve through this beautiful ministry complex. But there's one more component to the unity experienced by the church in Acts and it has relevance for us as well. And that is our material unity. These guys shared everything, did you get verse 45? They would sell their property and possessions and distribute the money among all according to what each one needed. And you read a verse like that and you kind of swallow a hard go, well, what's that saying to us today, in a world of mortgages and the need to get property and plan for your future and all that sort of thing. What is that saying to us? Well, we've got to understand that these people, one thing about the early churches, they believe the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. They believe that it was just going to happen at any time. And so the thinking was, and you see this in Paul's writings, it's all through his writings, particularly in Thessalonians, where people were saying, "Look, Jesus is coming again, we don't need houses, we don't need to work, we don't need to get married, like any moment He's coming back, so just let it all happen because there's no future where we're going to be with Him." That was the thinking, right, so that explains some of the amazing generosity. Now, here we are, 2,000 years later, we're still waiting for the return of the Lord, but the message is crystal clear, irrespective of what their eschatological viewpoint was, in other words, their view about the return of Christ, irrespective of that, what you do see in this is amazing generosity. Is that not right? Amazing generosity. Now, that's the application for us today. As a community of faith, we can achieve great things, friends, we have achieved great things. We can achieve great things for the kingdom of God by putting people before possessions, by putting prayer and creative thinking into the use of our money rather than into the acquisition of our money. There's a big difference there. In essence, by taking the words of our Lord really seriously, when He said, "It is more blessed to give than receive." I think today, only in the church will you hear that theory really espoused, it's not very popular. It is more blessed to give than receive. Because as a wrap-up, you know the main message I drew from this passage, looking at it during the week, is the idea of doing life together, doing life together. Now, that's a phrase that wasn't around years ago. I didn't grow up with that phrase. You didn't do life together in the churches that I grew up in. But now, in churches that are seeking to grow and become effective for God, that's a new phrase which has a lot of meaning because churches are striving to achieve that within their membership, where there's a sense that we're doing life together. We do it, of course, primarily through connection groups here at Northside through the small group experience. And so today it's a chance to thank God for the small group you're in and to think about getting involved in the small group if that's the step you are yet to take. Because a lot of these forms of unity, mystical unity, ministry unity, material unity, they really reach their fulfillment and their ideal level as we're doing life together in close company with each other. Can I read that incredible verse one more time, verse 46 and 47? Look at this. Day after day, they met as a group, as a group, you get that? They met as a group in the temple. They had their meals together in their homes, eating with glad and humble hearts. Praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people and every day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved, doing life together, fulfilling our mission, our calling. Friends, we are the church we are because a lot of you are doing life together. You're in close proximity with each other in some form of small group setting. The benefits are huge. If you're yet to get involved in a small group setting, can I urge you to talk about it with us, pray about it? We'll enhance our mystical unity, our ministerial unity and our material unity as we increasingly get a sense of unity and doing life together. Let's bear in prayer, shall we?