Church on Morgan
August 23, 2015 | Psalm 84:1-4
Our scripture this morning comes from Psalm 84, verses one through four. "How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts. My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Happy are those who live in your house ever singing your praise." This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Thank you. Good morning. This is good to be here today. I am Ashley, and I get to work for the church, which is the funnest job in the world. It really is. I get to worship in all the services, which is so cool, but it's fun to be here with you today, and I'm really excited to preach. My girls held my back. I just looked at my text, and somebody in my missional community said, "You look great. Rocket." That gave me some encouragement. I love the way I'm loved and supported here, pull up my jeans and get going. Today I am preaching a sermon that I desperately need to hear. This was the last week of summer, which is a blessed relief in many ways, but also it was just an intense week with all the back-to-school hubbub. On Wednesday, I took little Liam -- that's his own little Instagram name -- took Liam to Ligon Middle School for half a day of orientation, so I'm trying to fit that in and then take the other two kids to their back-to-school, and then Owen realized he wasn't going to be in a class with his best friend and just melted and wouldn't even meet the teacher, and all of this is going on, and we've got missional communities starting up and trying to squeeze in, kind of get my job done, and around all of this. So it's been totally nuts, and on Friday I'm at the hairdresser, which is a happy place, a relaxing place, and she -- and my hairdresser is Nicole Marlow, who worships here and is up with our kids today, and she just asked an innocent enough question, "What are you going to do this weekend?" And I started with a small, like, "Oh, Sarah's got a swimming birthday party tomorrow, and then I've got a really fun wine and design wedding shower for some girlfriends, but I haven't bought any of the back-to-school stuff, and we don't have any supplies, and the kids don't have shoes or backpacks or lunch boxes or water bottles. Oh my gosh, and I have to go to the grocery store, my bank account is low, and I'm sobbing in her chair, and it's like the rational Ashley is like, "Get a grip, it's okay. You go to the grocery store three times a week, you can handle it." But it was just insurmountable, like all of that pressure, and turns out that my sweet husband, who thinks I'm totally crazy for crying about having to go to the store and target the weekend before school starts, he did all the back-to-school shopping. Awesome, awesome. But last week and many times in my life I have to confess I feel unsettled, rushed, like there's too much to do and not enough time. I sometimes have this feeling like I'm blowing it. I know I'm blowing it somewhere, either something with the kids or something at work, what's wrong? Where am I blowing it? I don't even know what it is, and I hate that, and I don't know if anybody here can relate with that. Psalm 84 has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks ever since I went on a walk with a good friend, Vicki. Vicki is Tracy Rose' mom. Vicki is a wise woman who's been following Jesus for a long time. She loves people so well. She's been through a training to be what's called a spiritual director, which means she opens up her life to journey with others in their spiritual lives. So she actually said to me, actually, I would love to meet with you and just hear how God's at work and moving in your life and pray for you, which is, I mean, how often do people say that? So I'm like, yes, thank you. So she and I went on a walk a few weeks ago, and I just unloaded about life, about family, about worries about the kids, and at the end, she's just this calming presence and she prayed over me about all that I had shared. And then as I'm walking out the door, she said, wait, I just, I really need to give you the scripture, too, from Psalm 84. Even the sparrow has found a home and the swallow and nest for herself, a place to lay her young near God's altar. Today, we're looking at nests from the scriptures. We might be stretching it because we're on week 312 of beautiful things, but nests are in God's word, and they show us something about God. They're in our scripture for today. If you go on Pinterest, there's thousands, well, hundreds, I don't know, lots, lots of nests. People love nests. I have this cute little charm with three eggs in it, my little nest charm. It's a fun thing that's seemingly popular in the decorating world, I suppose, but, you know, nests in our word today tell us something about God's character. In the same way that mountains and waterfalls and skies and stars show us God's grandeur and majesty and God is bigger than we could imagine, nests tell us something about God's character. They tell us that God wants to be our home. God is not only majestic and beautiful and grand and beyond, but God shows us through this scripture today, that nests, nests are something that show us that God is a God of such attention to detail, just even to our lives, such a God of invitation, such a God of intimacy that God wants to be our home. So I told Justin, I was going to preach on nests and God being our home, and of course he's smooth with a hashtag, so he's like, "Oh, you mean a God who is our home." So today's topic is nests and how God wants to be our home. In the cool and humbling thing when you get to preach, which I don't get to do every single week, so it's just a huge honor and gift that I take very seriously. And I get to seek out God's word not only for myself, but for all of us, and that's a really beautiful and powerful thing. And so I've been asking God, what is the word, not just for me and my crazy week, but what do your people need to hear? This is what I sense God is wanting me to share with myself and all of us. God's saying, "I want to make my home in you, live near my altar." That is where real life is found. Now it is true that we use the word nest a lot when we're talking about moms and kids. I mean sweet Shelly Mason, glorious, gorgeous Shelly is having a baby in a few weeks, and I can only imagine she's nesting, getting all the little shower gifts put away and decorating for sweet little baby girl, Penny, who we can't wait to meet. And even this morning, Tracy Rose said, "Hey, do we have meals lined up for Shelly?" I mean, people are out in front of you as your nest, Shelly, but this is not a mom sermon. This is not even a woman sermon, because the truth is we all have nests. Young old men, women, single, married, divorced, it's complicated, all of us. It doesn't matter if you live alone. It doesn't matter if you have a roommate, a roommate you get along with great, like Taylor Meadows, I would love to be a roommate. She has such a fun friendship with her roommates. I had the kind of roommates in college who were so cheap that they would buy those color dot stickers and put it on the mayonnaise so no one would use their mayonnaise. But you know, we all live with people or we live alone, nests, and we put a lot of time and attention into our homes, into our physical homes. Matt and I are about to do a renovation finally after just talking about it forever. We've got the plans and that the thing that has made us go so slowly is it's so dad gum expensive, and we're going to have to move out of our house and we want to do it, but it's a big huge deal. We put a lot of effort into our homes, our physical nests, a lot of us spend a lot of time online shopping for the perfect things to decorate our homes. And I live with a modernist architect, which means that I have learned to be a minimalist. So in my house, if there's a table, if there's one picture frame on it, the clutter, oh my gosh. So we try to live by William Morris's quote, William Morris is from the late 1800s. He was a British textile designer and he was actually the leader in England of what became the arts and crafts movement. He said this, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." We put a lot of thought into our physical homes, many of us do. But what about our interior homes, our souls, our spiritual nests? What kind of thought and attention are we putting into those? What we allow in? What we put up to decorate the walls of our minds and our hearts and our lives? God wants to be a home for us. God wants to take up in a beautiful way the interior space of our lives. Can we just take a quick second to marvel together first that the God of the universe wants to take up residence by the Holy Spirit in our lives? That's mind-blowing. The God of the universe. You know, in the Old Testament times, the Jewish people had to go to great lengths to get anywhere near to God. Only the priests could approach the temple in certain places. Only the priests who had had all the training and even them, they had a rope tied around them as they went into the holy of holies, only on certain days with the perfect unblemished sacrifice of an animal. And they had that rope in case being in God's glory would kill them dead. Just being in the glory of God and nobody could go in after that priest so they would be prepared with this rope to pull the priest out. These are the lengths people had to go to to get in the proximity of God. And yet the God of Jesus, the God we know wants to be our home, wants to make a home in us. And yet we try to play house in so many ways that don't satisfy. We try to find a place of belonging. Will it be the kickball team? Let's try that. Will it be the CrossFit group? I hear they're great with community. Will it be drinks with coworkers after work? I mean, what? What do I have to do? Or maybe just a place that I choose to check out to forget about it all. For us, sometimes it's the nightly wine and Netflix to numb us down so that we can actually go to sleep after the day. Or many times it's the iPhone zone out. It's a horrible admission, but I've told Matt when I'm doing this, I'm saying I want to quasi-connect, if you can call it that here, so I don't have to be involved with what's happening here, because this is stressing me out. I don't want to connect with you and the kids. I want to do this and escape. And that's just sad, but it's true for me sometimes. We're wired by God with a longing to belong and connect to know and be known, and the places we try to do that so often come up short. And we have wanderlust. I wonder if there's a better job or even a better career or better girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse or a different city I should live in. I mean, we're always wondering these things, and many of us wind up feeling homeless. Not physically but spiritually. They say home is where the heart is, but our hearts don't know where to land, let alone rest. I read a really interesting article this week called Why Millennials Should Travel Less. And by a 30-year-old, and she had some really interesting reasons, but one of the things she said is when we constantly travel just every weekend, here, there, and do your laundry after working just off, every weekend, is that we avoid learning from our loneliness. If we paid attention to our loneliness, we'd see that we hunger and thirst for even more than yet another weekend get away with the college friends can provide us. Our souls are restless, and that's not a new problem. St. Augustine from the 4th century said, "Our hearts are restless until we find rest in you, O God." And so again today, I sense God saying, "I want to make my home in you, live near my altar." That is where life is found. Today will you allow God to make God's home in you? Maybe for the first time, or maybe to do it again. And I don't want to make this sound easy because it's totally not. To nest in God means you give God access to all of your life. So God is at home in you, and you are at home in God, and that's not easy. I remember when I was a teenager, I was part of a ministry called Young Life, and they had these little booklets called My Heart, Christ's Home, and the idea is each part of our life is another room, and will you allow Jesus invite God into all the rooms of your life? But doesn't it usually go something like this? We'll invite God into the entryway where things look nice and beautiful, and there's a flower arrangement. But stay out of my office, God, because work is where I find meaning, and I'm just going to keep doing that. Stay out of my bedroom, God. Don't come near my addiction to pornography, too much shame, too much embarrassment. Lord, you can stay in the formal dining room where the china is so beautiful, but Jesus don't come into my kitchen. Denying myself food is how I maintain control over my body and my life. Or eating and drinking excessively is how I dull the pain of grief or loneliness. Surely we all have parts of our lives that we shut God out because of fear, of giving something up, or letting go. I think of Jesus in the temple courts we read in the gospel when the money changers are making a profit and just ripping people off as they go in to make a sacrifice and how angry Jesus gets. But he's turning over tables, and sometimes I wonder if that's what God wants to do in my life and my heart to just overturn those places where I'm clinging to my own way, my own pride, my unforgiveness, or whatever it is that I'm putting my hope and trust in that's not him. Maybe all these things we cling to are just various ways we see this truth. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Is it shame or fear that's keeping us from allowing God to be our nest? Then we need to trust God is a God of forgiveness. That God did not call us to be known by him just to stay stuck in guilt and sin and shame. And God will actually change us, forgive our sin, and make us different. And when we nest in God, this is what comes, peace, assurance, and security, even when life is crazy all out here. Throughout the Old Testament, nest is used as a metaphor for a place of refuge, safety, and security. And I love how Psalm 84 is nestled in the Scriptures. It's a pilgrimage psalm, otherwise known as a psalm of Zion. A Zion psalm. Zion is the other name for Jerusalem. And so people would sing Psalm 84 and other psalms like it as they went on pilgrimage as they approached Jerusalem for the high holy days. But what's cool is Psalm 84 is sandwiched in the complaint psalms. And I love that Psalm 84 is in the midst of the life sucks psalms to show us that when we make God our home, God is a place of refuge, even in the middle of the pain. It's not that we no longer have pain or difficulty, but rather God is our home despite the despair of life. In Psalm 91, a few psalms later makes the same point about God being our safe place. It says this, "He who dwells in the shelter of the most high will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, God is my refuge and my fortress, in God I will trust. Surely, God will save you from the foul or snare, from the deadly pestilence. God will cover you with his feathers and under his wings, you will find refuge. His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. And it goes on about God as a safe place for us. When we nest in God, we have safety. So we can quit trying to orchestrate every single thing to make sure that we're safe and okay. Let me say that again. When we're in God, when we nest in God, we have safety. So we can quit trying to orchestrate every little thing. So we're safe and we're okay. We don't have to put all of our energy into trying to protect ourselves and our image, trying to make every little thing just right the way we look, our job performance, our kids behavior, we realize that we are safe because God is our home. When we nest, we have safety. If God is our shelter, we don't have to shelter ourselves and protect our futures and our kids. When God is our home, God is our safety. We can send our kids to Ligon Middle School when they're this high and there are 1,300 other kids there. In hallways, you will get totally lost because God is our shelter. When God sees little Liam, God is our shelter. We don't have to shelter the same way anymore. When we nest in God, we have safety. We can continue to hope and trust in Jesus even when we face life's uncertain stuff, illness, job changes, the ups and downs of relationships, the frustrating and overwhelming and confusing enterprise of trying to find a date that's not crazy, much less a partner, amen, in this sexually charged and confused world which is the dating world, the tender world of 2015. Some of my friends are single. I know of which I speak. Here's the really hopeful part for me. When we nest in God, when God is our home, we are free to take our eyes off ourselves. For long enough to enjoy the loveliness of our God, we're free to rejoice in God's presence and this, this I love, extend our lives outward, not be all clutched up, clenched up, crouched up, worried, protecting. No, we are free to live with lives and hearts and hands extended, breathing room, breathing room for our souls. I put on Facebook that my one and only glass of wine on Friday helped my shoulders to lower a whole inch and spiritually, when God is our home, we have breathing room. Have you ever had an experience where you're like, "Oh, I needed this. I am home." A few weeks ago, a friend invited me last minute. She's like concert tonight in Greensboro. It's free for you. Ticket to Hillsong concert, the outcry, and I'm like, "Okay." So I go and there's thousands of people and it's dark and we're worshiping and you can't hear yourself or one another because the music is so loud you're feeling it and it's dark and I'm like, "Oh, I needed this. I'm homesick for this worship." I didn't even realize how I was longing and how that felt like worship was coming home in that time. So God moves in and makes our lives his home at our invitation. And so even though God takes the initiative to do that, there are things that we can choose to do to purposely live and nest near God. And so in wrapping up, I just want to hit on a couple of those things we can do. We can invest time and energy in knowing and following Jesus, okay? God takes the initiative to move into our lives but we can invest time and energy in knowing and following God. So how does that look for us, practically speaking? For me, it means I spend a whole lot of time at church with church people and people who love Jesus because I want God to be my home and I want to nest in God and I want to live near God's altar. But I don't stay there either. I get my strength there, I get my meaning, I get my reminders, I get my identity. But then we go out with that love. We don't stay here always at the altar. We come and we go and so that's what it looks like for me. You know when you're looking to buy or rent, you hear location, location, location, isn't that true for our lives spiritually? Doesn't it all depend upon where we locate ourselves? Well I want to locate myself near God, near God's altar. People who have unbounded joy are more often than not nesting in God. I'll say that again, people who have unbounded joy are more often than not nesting, living at home in God, in near God's altar. Andrea Overfield, Martha Roberts, Chris, Jefferson, looking so fly in this bow tie today. These are people whose lives are full of joy because they nest in God and they live. They purposely, they make an effort to spend time near God's altar and worship. So locate yourself near God 24/7, not just at 11 o'clock on Sunday mornings. Sometimes I think we treat God like our home, Airbnb style. Like I'll just come and go, you know, I'll just pop in here and there. So for you, I just want to know for you, what's the next step going to be? Maybe it's committing to be at church two Sundays a month as opposed to whenever it works out. Maybe it's being intentional about making a friend in church, someone who knows you're trying to follow Jesus. You know, following Christ, I truly believe is not something we do best on our own. In church on Morgan recognizes that we need each other and following Jesus, we need each other to help us do that. So we've got some things in place and this is how I want to wrap up is to invite you to consider these two things. One, on our website, we have something called rhythms. We believe there's actual stuff we can do every day that will help us nest in God. And one of those things is to read scripture and to pray and at the end of the day to reflect on your day. You can do that on the website. We have those rhythms laid out, the scripture, the prayer. Just make that a regular part of your life to live near God. And the other thing we have is missional communities. Another hashtag, Allah Justin, is hashtag better together. We have three missional communities at church on Morgan. And the purpose of these groups are groups of about 30 adults plus kids. They meet twice a month in someone's home for dinner. And then the folks go out together to serve regularly, monthly or more. And the idea is we're better following Jesus together than we are on our own. I mean, the truth be told, I always wanted to be the kind of person like Jesus who serves. But without missional community, I'd lack the follow through. I'm just not going to get organized and put it on the calendar and go serve. But because I have a group holding me accountable, we go out together to neighbor to neighbor every week. I have a place where I'm investing my life beyond myself and my family and my home. And I think God wants that for us. And as we serve out in the community, as we love one another, we're shaped to look more like Jesus. So this picture up here is from Thursday night at our missional community. It's clear Ashburn giving my Sarah, who's a rising second grader, her Bible. And Y'all Sarah is so pumped about this Bible, highlighting it, leaving little verses all around. Like she wouldn't be pumped about the Bible just from me and Matt. You know? It's all of y'all who know her name, who love her, who tell her, "This is God's treasure for you and your life." And so I just want to encourage you to check out one of our three groups. We have two on Thursday nights and one on Monday night. The leaders are the Ashburns meeting in Boylan Heights at Tracy Rose House. That's on Matt Rose House, in Page Rose House on Monday nights. And we serve at Neighbor to Neighbor, which is a place for at-risk kids doing some tutoring, doing some basketball, just helping out in any way. Another group meets on Thursday nights. It's led by Richard and Lindsay Blinkenhorn. There's Lindsay. It meets at Jacob and Leslie Ward's house in Mordeche, lots and lots of kids. One is welcome, single married young old. And then the third group is the Jetsons. So Emory and Chris Jepsen meeting at the McPherson's house off of Wade Avenue. I would love for you to get involved. And it's awesome. It's a game changer to see how the kids even are saying, not my kids, but like talking to y'all's kids, "Do we get to have a party and eat dinner with our church family tonight?" This is shaping us as we follow Jesus. So I'd love to close in prayer. God, we want to make our home in you. Thank you for this song about nests that helps us take a moment to consider how you're calling us to nest in you. Thank you, God, that you want to be our home, not just a place we visit from time to time. Lord, would you help us? Would you help us take the next step in having you be our home? God, may we live near your altar so that joy flows out so that we can trust you in all things and not live a life clinched up, worried about ourselves. God, we want to know you. We want to be like you. Help us to be at home in you to make our nest in you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]