Northside Church - Sydney
The WHY Behind Church Week 1: A Man Made Institution?
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Well there's been a new sensation sweeping the world. Last year was their year. I'm talking about a unique sort of family, I'm talking about the Kardashians. If you haven't seen them there everywhere they're prolific, they're from magazine stands to billboards even on credit cards. I had a few issues with a credit card company that were going to sponsor that. What was pretty crazy about these Kardashians, Kim, Chloe, Courtney, if you haven't seen them on MTV and that sort of stuff is, what I couldn't get is that they were a family that really haven't done anything at all. They've been totally plucked out of obscurity through no effort of their own into this incredible visibility right around the world. In fact one of the girls was the most googled topic on Google last year in 2010, it was just unbelievable, incredible visibility, incredible influence. The unique thing is that they're almost a reflection of the culture that we increasingly see around us, they run a fashion store, they're into the glam, they're into the money, they're into themselves, they just love each other in themselves more particularly and that's the culture that we're up against as a church and as a people. So my question for this new series, the series Churchy, the why behind church really is what do we do in the church up against that and the society that's becoming increasingly consumer oriented and individualistic, how are we to respond and what does that mean for the way that we're going to approach church? So this week we look at some of the, we're going to look at some of the common misconceptions that people might have with the church tonight, we go, is it just a man-made institution? And what we'll see from the passage and for the teaching tonight is that at the heart of it, we'll see that the purpose of God's created community. Why we do church is to call out a new and a distinct society to demonstrate who he is and what he's doing in the world. And part of the problem we have is that the word church has lots of different meanings. I mean, we think of old school church buildings, we think of stained glass, we think of our guys in white robes, we think of Italy, we think of the Catholic church. Look, church wasn't as to how we understand the word that Jesus used, he used a word called ecclesia, which literally meant the gathering of his people. And so we see that in this Christian community, Jesus didn't just leave a book, Jesus left a community. And we're a part of that today, Christian community is the demonstration of the plot of the kingdom of God, that is in the relationships to each other and the relationships to the world, Jesus as followers, his disciples, his community would demonstrate to them what God has been on about since the beginning of time. Wow, expressing what who he is, what he's done, the churches meant to show us what it's like to be truly human. Tonight I'm going to use the phrase, because it's so distinct, so different for this one reason, the gospel. One of the ways to describe it is gospelized community. And that's what we'll hear about from the scriptures, if you turn to 1 Peter, chapter 2 verses 9 through to 12, it's just a short verse, but it's packed with some of the most wonderful descriptions about really what God is saying about his church. Peter says from verse 9 onwards in 1 Peter 2, "But you're a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world to abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul, live such good lives among the pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day that he visits us." You see, what we see first and foremost is that gospelized community deconstructs. When you deconstruct something, you pull it apart in the literary sense, you pull something apart to uncover the hidden assumptions underneath. That's what the gospel does to what? Gospelsize community takes you from me to we. Gospelsize community. The church is not like every other community, every other organization. Look at corporations. You're going for an interview with a corporation. What do you do when you all suit it up and you've got your compendium in front of you? You're thinking in your head, "What is this company going to do for me? What's it going to do for my career? Where's it going to take me?" Well, you join a health fund and you join a health fund because they sell you the best membership benefits. They've got the best payout. These organizations, the decision is inherently about what can they do for me. Gospelsize community eventually deconstructs our individualistic bias. You think, "I don't think individualistically." Let me try and use a piece of Scripture to see if we can uncover that a bit. It's from the Old Testament. It's a unique sort of story. It's in Joshua chapter 7. Joshua is right in the middle of the Battle of Jericho. We see a situation from a guy called Aiken. When Israel went into the Promised Land, God says, "You've got to go in there." They didn't inhabit the Promised Land. There were going to be people there. They were going to have to fight for it. One of the things that God decreed was that when you went into the Promised Land under no certain circumstances, they'd go in and take the plunder from the people who you're conquering. We have this situation where they're right in the middle of the Battle. Joshua's going nuts because they're about to be defeated. The Lord reveals to Joshua that someone from Israel has taken some of the plunder from the enemy that they were fighting against. It all gets revealed. Aiken comes out. You can read through this in your own time. I'm just paraphrasing here. Aiken comes out and he says, "Hey, it's me." So part of the response is that Joshua and all the nation of Israel, it says, in verse 20, Aiken says, "It was me, I did it." Then Joshua, verse 24, "Together with all of Israel takes Aiken, the silver, the robe, the gold wedge, his sons, his daughters, his cattle, his donkey, his sheep, his tent," and all that he had to the Valley of Aikor. Then Israel stoned him and after they'd stoned the whole clan, the rest of the family, and they buried him under a pile of stones. Now, I'm sure the boss is thinking, "What are you telling this story for in church?" This is not the message that we're trying to get out about Christianity here. And maybe you and your head are thinking, "This is outrageous. This is absolutely outrageous." Here's why you're probably thinking, "Yeah, he did a bad thing, but don't take his family. Don't take the kids. Don't take mum. Don't take grandma and grandma. Don't take the donkey." All right? What was Aiken's sin? He was the one who's punish Aiken and not the rest of them. What's happening is it's revealing our inherent Western individualistic bias. You think individualistically? You see, the punishment was so severe the whole lot is because so much of the Bible is written to a community, and Aiken's sin was a violation against community. Now, you think, "Oh, it doesn't happen today, well, what does that look like here? Give me an example." When I was about seven years old, I was holidaying up at my holiday house in Port Macquarie, and my auntie, who owned the retirement village next door, had to go off to work and show a whole heap of clients around, and she left my cousin and I, Howard, out in the backyard to fend for ourselves for the day. And Howard thought it would be a really good idea to get the speakers from the stereo system and put them right towards the screen doors out on the veranda. And then turn it up to 90 decibels, which is about the volume of the music that you heard tonight, and start cranking out a wonderful album by a great artist called Guns N' Roses. And Guns N' Roses was one of those artists that you get the funny little black sticker that says, "Warning, explicit lyrics." And so at 90 decibels, my cousin is belting out these explicit lyrics straight towards the retirement village. And we do this for about two or three hours, and then eventually we see my auntie there with the clients that she told us that she had to look after for the day, and you should have seen the looks on their faces. Absolutely horrifying, and I thought we are in so much trouble. She comes back, we get grounded for the entire afternoon, which I think was just the most lenient punishment I've ever had in my life for something so serious as that. She comes back, she says, "Not only did I lose the clients that I was showing around, but I also lost the people that were living next door in the retirement village." And here I was fuming upstairs, here's why, I wasn't the one who put the music on. That was Howard, that was Howard's fault, Punnish Howard, I was just hanging out with him. You see, for the first time, for the first time I realized how I was moving when you're in close community from the me to the we. I'll put it here, if it's funny how this is what the people would have been thinking about owning a shell when they saw this going on, they're thinking, "If that's how you run your kids and your family, and how the heck are you going to run a retirement village?" You see, although I had nothing explicitly to do with it, what I was beginning to realize is that when you're in close community, there are consequences, there is corporate responsibility. What I had seen is an indeed community, there's not only a deconstruction of your individuality, suddenly, it was no longer a good enough excuse to say that was Howard's fault, but the individual actions bear corporate consequences, the first time I understood about moving from the me to the we. Then what's interesting, when you look at Peter's language in the chapters before this, he talks about a new birth and his obedient children, and you're born from imperishable seed and talking about growing up, but look, what's he assuming here? He's assuming family. He's saying when you're born a Christian, you're spiritually born into a new family. What he's saying is you can't, as a Christian, come into this family and play the individuality card, there's a corporate responsibility for your actions. What it means, and most importantly, is that gospelized community church is also a challenge to your individuality. No longer as a Christian, do you have the right to say, "I'm just here for me." It means church. If you want to see church as an organization, it's the only organization in the world in which the underlying attitudes of its members are not, "What can I get out of membership, or what can I give in, what can I contribute, what can I bring to the party." You guys understanding why it's so important to see the why behind church. It also hints, these funny little story hints at God's purposes, because we also see that gospelized community is distinct, it's different. The church is called to be distinct from the world. The purpose of Christian community, it's not just to have nice feelings, but it's to forge something radically different. Let's go back to Aiken's situation for a second here. We look back at this sin that he committed, an offense against God, a sin that was a violation of community. Here's why. It wasn't just a violation of some law that he set up for individuals, but God's command of not taking plunder, of not taking booty from these people was part of his challenge for Israel to be a holy nation. Amen. He wanted them to be different and distinct, that's what holy means, different, distinct, set apart. There's a difference. God's saying, "I want you to be a new society, Israel, a human society unlike any other society, and here's one way that you'll be different, because here's how you'll be different and how people will know. When you go in and you take the promised land under no way, you're going to start taking other people's wealth in order to benefit you individually like every other soldier would have done. Instead, it's to come back and it's to go into the corporate coffers of the community and in preparation for the tabernacle where you'll worship me, but you're not going to take it for individual advantage. Get this. Why it was so serious is because he didn't just break a rule, Aiken was causing Israel to fail to be a holy nation. He was causing the fail to be different from all the other nations out there that went and plundering and stealing and all that sort of stuff. This is a community that was supposed to be a light to the nations, they were supposed to be different, supposed to be like in Deuteronomy chapter 4 verses 5 to 8, it says, "See how I've taught you these decrees and laws," this is Moses speaking, "observe them carefully for it will show your wisdom and understanding to all the other nations who will hear about these decrees and here's what they'll say. They'll say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. What other nation is so great is to have their gods near them in the way that the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to them." See what it's saying there? It's saying the whole idea is for the nations to find out who God is by looking at Israel as this different society, like no other society, distinct as a community, the way they treat each other and they love each other and they do justice and they do relationships with each other. That was all the way that the community was going to show the world who God was. It was me. And so Aiken wasn't disobeying a single law, he was destroying the holy nation, the community, the community, this counterculture. And so the whole mission of God as we see here is to create a new community of people that's going to show the world his glory, show who he really is, his nature by being so totally different from other communities and societies and cultures that people say surely that's the nation that worships the God of Israel. Reason was so serious is because Aiken was destroying the mission of God. So here's why we went through all that there. And you now see why it was so significant, the words that Peter was using that you are a holy nation. And what's interesting, whereas the Old Testament was talking about Israel as a single people, holy nation, here he's literally hagoi ethne, literally meaning a holy ethnic. Now, why would he be saying that? He's saying that to a church that's being persecuted and pushed in and against society. It's incredibly individualistic and consumeristic. Is it's the only that different to what we're dealing with here, church? And the incredible thing is because of the Pax Romana, the incredible piece of the Romans had bought to the entire country for the first time in world history. Nations, Greeks and Jews and Romans were all coming together to do church together, to do life together, to do life together with one another. And so what Peter's writing to a whole range of different ethnicities, and what he's saying is as a wholly separate ethnicity, you have to be different, you have to be called out, you have to be a culture within a culture. That's exactly the difference, you know what cultures are like, if any of you had a little sister then maybe at one point in the time, she did what was called a fizzy, right? And if you've ever been to fizzy, it is a whole unique experience. There is more fake tan there than a Miss Universe pageant, even the mothers look like the daughters at physical culture. But it's not a culture, it's a club, it's a difference between a club and a culture. You see, a club is when you come in and you've got 30,000 different things different about you and each other's life, but the only connecting point, the one point, is you're both doing fizzy. You see, but a culture, a culture invades everything, part of a culture tells you how to eat your peas, it tells you how to hold your knife in fork, a culture tells you how to do business, a culture tells you how to do life, a culture tells you how to be dating, a culture tells you how to do sex, a culture tells you how to dress. You see what I'm saying? And so what Peter is saying here is that when you're born again, when you become a Christian, you're so radically changed by God's community, you become a culture within a culture. You become a culture that's going to show the world how God intended humanity to be. And so why that's incredible, because you go through a radical transformation. What that means is that, yes, you've still got some connections for where you've come from, but your Anglo-Saxon second and you're a Christian first, you're Asian second and a Christian first, you're Indian second and you get what I'm saying? The Christian culture is so pervasive that you become distinct from the world. Now here's where we could run into problems because you think, what does that mean? We sort of get shifted off to the side and we just become our own little safe haven. Now finally guys, now tonight it shows us that gospelized community demonstrates, it's not only distinct but it demonstrates, the church is called not only to be distinct from the world but to demonstrate to the world. That's what we're seeing the pattern from the nation of Israel. You know, look, when we talk about the centrality of the gospel in all of our lives, it's not just another thing, it's not another thing on the side, it's something that just invades our lives, it shapes the way that we do everything. And so the question is, shouldn't we think about community in the same way? If the gospel creates this community, shouldn't we think of it in that way? But I don't know about you, but when I first became a Christian, I just thought that community was another thing that we tacked on the end. You know, we do Bible study, prayer, witness, service, and then fellowship, right, and that's when we all come and do what we're doing here and it was just one of the things that we tacked on the end but it doesn't, that attitude doesn't show properly the centrality of what community is about. Look, let's take witness, let's take mission for example, we've talked about this before, the quality of our community is going to be the secret to our mission. You see, because you know, if you're an individual hero and we've got people like that around the church, that it just by God's grace upon their lives and their effort with their spiritual discipline are just incredibly, wholly wonderful people, but I don't know if you've ever had that experience, you come up against someone like that, they can be a bit daunting. How am I ever going to be like that? And not only that, like people that are exceptional, even other organizations have exceptional people to get a bit of a following and, you know, like they could still grow a community by being exceptional there, it's not all that inviting but an exceptionally loving community. Now we're talking, a community that's not intimidating and you know, no matter where you've come from or what your background is, it's just incredibly loving and gracious and accepting, totally different story. And see on the night before he died, Jesus, Jesus got this, this is how he intended to be. He's the most intimate prayer to his father, to his dad. He prays for us in John 1720 and he says, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray for also those who will believe in me through their message. He's praying for you that all of them may be one father, just as you're in me and may they also be in us so that, get this so that the world may believe that you have sent me." What Jesus is saying is the world, the world's going to know that the gospel is true by the quality of the community that Jesus leaves behind. And so same sort of concept and look, why else do you want to invite someone to church? What is the one thing that you're so nervous about when you invite someone along to church? Lord, please, I just pray that the experience they will have is the very reason why I believed in you in the first place, loving and accepting and gracious. Jesus is saying, look, if the world doesn't see extraordinary living unity in the deep community, they won't believe, first of all, that there even is a God. But that Jesus, the one who preached his gospel, is from God. You see, if it's not like that, then we're just going to look like another man-made institution. So centrality of community, not only a result of the gospel, but a demonstration of the gospel. Guys, are you beginning to move from the meet-it-we yet? I know what it can look like. I know what it can feel like. I've been there 5.15 p.m. on a Sunday night, and that's hot outside, it's been a heat wave or week. And should I go, and I'm wondering who's preaching and is the music going to be good, and what's it going to be like, and I'm feeling a bit tired, or I'm feeling a bit sunburned, and look, will it be air conditioned? Guys, look. So what a decision to gather tonight is a decision, it's a demonstration that you consider yourself to be part of a plot of human redemption that's been in place at the beginning of the time. Your decision to gather for worship is God's church tonight. That decision you've made is a decision that demonstrates to the world that there's something greater. It's a decision that demonstrates the world that there is a spiritual reality. It's a decision that demonstrates to the world that there's something better, and it's a decision that demonstrates the world that they too can be part of something bigger for their lives. Here's the point, if the world can see that we look no different, if the gospel's not working its way through our minds and our hearts and through transparent lives and manifested in love and grace with one another here, if it's not doing that, then we're no different. If it's not doing that, then we're not Christians, we're the Kardashians. We're simply a family that, through no effort of our own, has had this incredible visibility around the world that looks absolutely no different to it. Now, let me balance it out here, because it could sound a bit harsh on what I'm saying here, but here on this stage, this morning, Graham interview to Young Mom, his daddy had a baby being dedicated and only been here for a matter a couple of weeks, a couple of months, and he asked, "What drew you to this place?" And she said it was just the warmth and the love and the authenticity of this community. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to get us to understand the why, but that does not mean that we're not already seeing this incredible, wonderful overflow of what gospel In fact, you may very well be here tonight because of your experience of this gospelized community, but it's important for us to understand the theology of it, the why, the church, God's new community, not only a result of the gospel. Gospelized community not only deconstructs our individualistic tendencies, but through its distinction from the world is a demonstration to the world that God is real, that God exists, that God loves us and that he loves them through his community, the church. Look, why should I be different, distinct, distinct, separated, apart, sanctified? It was exactly the term that Jesus used just before. He prayed that prayer in John 17, he says, "Father, for them, I sanctify myself, for them, I set myself apart." What's he talking about? He's talking about going to the cross. Jesus Christ went and demonstrated the very foundation of what this holy, set, apart, different community was supposed to embody. It was self-sacrificial love. So friends, no matter what other sorts of stuff that we're doing around church here tonight, may we come to understand that Jesus went to the cross for us, not just to save us as individuals and get us into heaven, but to put us into a new alternative society that's assigned to the world, that he's the Lord of the world, he's going to redeem creation that it all started through self-sacrificial love, the very character of this community that we should embody tonight. So a man-made institution? No, the church is the people of God, a holy nation, distinct from the world, for the world. Christian community is therefore not a man-made institution, but the comprehensive, distinct way to be truly human and deep relationship with other Christians who have been transformed by the gospel. Look, my question you don't know, if you don't, if you don't, if you haven't followed Jesus, if you've been skeptical of the church, can I invite you tonight to be part of the fam? Please, if you think in that way, please don't judge us on the music, don't judge us on the preaching, don't judge us on how snazzy the building looks, but judge us on our heart and our desire as a church to be different from the world for the world. As a church, we're not here to be perfect, but as a community of self-sacrificial love for one another, we're here to point you to the one who is Jesus Christ. Let that be the basis for it all. Now you think about new, gospelized community, what it really means to be part of a church this year, let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you that we've been wrapped up in this incredible story, incredible story of rest of you, of restoration. Tonight, Father, for those that call Jesus Christ our Lord, there is a great burden on our hearts to recognize that the lives we live, not just the lives here on a Sunday, but the lives amongst family and amongst friends, the shining lights into a world that is yet to fully understand and comprehend the self-sacrificial love that was displayed in your Son Jesus Christ. The Lord, we're going to need your spirit to help us to live that out, to be bold in the moments of confrontation with people, to be subtle and gentle also in the moments of skepticism from those outside the church. Man-made institution, Lord, I pray tonight, if there's anyone that's come in with that perception, if there's anyone tonight that's not been a part of your family that, Lord, through your spirit, you might prompt them, stir them, guide them to understand that tonight, now they can be something part of much greater, they can step into the ultimate plot line, a line that there is a God who has been before the world began that loves them dearly and calls them into new humanity. Father, may there be that opportunity tonight after the service to just talk with the ministers here and to thresh that out, but most of all, Father God, for this church will help us continue to be through lives of transparency and transformation, gospelized community. We pray this now in Jesus' name, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]