Message: Community

Series: Christianity, It`s not Rocket Science

SE101109
ROCKET SCIENCE
5. Community

My brother grew up on a Canadian farm. Very similar to the home I was raised in. But after getting married, he was transplanted to the deep south: Atlanta, Georgia – or ‘Lanta as the natives call it. He’s really acclimated to his new environment… to the point that this Canuck is now a fully converted redneck:
- He converted from hockey to Nascar overnight, and now he has a southern accent!
- And he uoused to tawk like this, eh?

However, he still hasn’t gotten used to Southern restaurants where everything on the menu comes with “grits.” He was never sure what grits really are made of, so one time he asked a waitress,
"What exactly is a ‘grit?"

Her response was,
"Honey, there ain’t no such thing as a grit. A grit don’t come by itself. They come as grits, or they don’t come at all."

Well today the lesson is simple: Human beings are grits. They don’t come by themselves. They’re communal. And God’s design through Christ was to inaugurate a NEW Community were we could.
- have intimate relationships,
- serve people lavishly,
- share our stuff,
- have people you can entrust our secrets to
- have people you laugh, praise, pray and cry with.
- have people who tell me the truth.

This NEW COMMUNITY has a name: CHURCH.

Let me explain something that isn’t rocket science. Church is people. Write it down somewhere. Church is people. The word “church” means “Assembly”. Which is a word like grits or… scissors – can you have a “scissor”? No, it’s plural by DEFINITION… Church is people, any other definition is a misunderstanding of the idea.

But we do misunderstand CHURCH… for two reasons:

 They want to be financially independent – I don’t depend on anyone for money
 Professionally independent – I don’t want to report to anyone.
 Relationally independent – I don’t need anybody or answer to anybody.

o Two is technological advancement. Someone once said the fabric of community has been cut by two things, the invention of A/C and garage door openers.
 Before the air conditioner, people sat outside on a thing called a PORCH… and sipped cool drinks, played checkers and shared their lives.
 Then we got garage door openers and you now don’t even have to get out of your car to go from one Air conditioned environment to another, without getting out, or talking to anyone. Without front porch/open garage connections, most people today do not know their neighbors names.
 Then we got online shopping and texts and emails so we could avoid all long conversations and interaction. What we saved in time we sacrificed in depth.

o  Third thing that plays into isolation is bad theology. What I mean is that in America, we hear an Americanized perversion of Christianity which says you come to Jesus mainly to get help with your problems. This Jesus is like a product you buy on TV, or dope for that matter. Get Jesus and get happy, get money, get peace.
 After watching some TV evangelist from the comfort of our own living room, without any human contact, we look to get Jesus working for our business, our family, our health.
 Well, getting Jesus does bring benefits but ONLY if it first means Jesus getting all of US.
 Without that, we’re set up to think it’s “Jesus and Me”

In contrast to that ignorance and isolation, compare this picture of Christianity:

Eph 2:18-22 says: For through [Christ Jews and Gentiles] have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's [family], …In him the whole building is joined together

A while back someone comes up to me and expresses some concern in their life for not being connected at all, at church. But then they follow up this statement by saying, in a slightly defensive way,
“don’t get me wrong, my relationship with God is great, it’s totally fine. God and I are ‘awesome!’ no problems there.”

But I want to say to that person, how can your relationship with God be so “awesome” when God himself has laid down the model and plan that we do life together? They’re trying to live the Christian life in a distinctly non-Christian way. That’s like saying, “I’m a great citizen but I don’t vote or pay my taxes or obey the law, but I LOVE America!”

One of the ways you know that Christ’s grace is operative in a person’s life is that they are joined to the church, which we said was not a building, but a collection of people joined to Christ.
- We have access to the father…
- CONSEQUENTLY we are a family.

You say, I know some churches that are so dead – they’re not families at all. They don’t seem to have access to God’s love, God’s joy. It’s true, a church might be a collection of individuals living out American individualism. Their idea of community is staring at the back of someone’s head for 60 minutes a week. They’re content to
- Tolerate one another
- Ignore one another
- Pretend to be spiritual with one another.

But that’s a church that’s not working right. I read a different set of “One Another’s” in my bible. I read:
- Encourage One Another
- Offer Hospitality to One Another
- Be Kind to One Another
- Honor One Another
- Be devoted to One Another
- Greet One Another
- Agree with One Another
- Serve One Another

How can you do that in a service? You can’t. So our life together has to be more than service time, right? Churches have to be more than public services, it has to be a Community. So I want to highlight 4 particular ONE ANOTHER’S from the Bible that summarize what our life together is supposed to look like.

1. ACCEPTANCE ONE ANOTHER.
Jesus said,
"Do not judge."
Later, the apostle Paul would write,
Rom 14:13 Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another . Instead accept each other just as Christ accepted you.”

In other words, what Jesus does for you, do that for each other. And the kind of judging Jesus says is bad, is different from good discernment of right and wrong. No, the core of the judgmental spirit that Jesus is forbidding is a heart of superiority.

You all know Don Shula was the famous coach of the Miami Dolphins. He and his wife were on vacation one time and went to a small town in Maine because he wanted to avoid being recognized. It was a rainy night, so they went into a movie theater with just a handful of people. When Shula and his wife walked in, people in the movie theater applauded.

Shula puffed himself up and said to his wife,
"Well, I guess there’s nowhere we can go where people won't recognize me."


They sat down and Shula shook hands with the guy next to him. "I’m surprised you know who I am.” He was even more surprised they were applauding a Dolphin coach in New England! But the guy looked at him and said,
"Am I supposed to know you? We’re just glad that you came in because the manager said he wasn't going to start the movie unless 10 people showed up."

That’s humbling. An experience like that reminds us that in the eyes of God, we’re all the same. We’re sinful and separated from God – all of us, rich and poor, American, Foreigner. Everyone. There’s only one man who never sinned, and that’s Jesus. The rest of us stand on level ground in front of His cross where the Perfect man was…
- condemned so don’t have to be condemned.
- experienced a death so we don’t have to experience eternal death.

Therefore, in light of those LEVELING truths, we reject superiority and accept everyone. There’s no place here for
- racism
- sexism
- ethnocentrism
- egotism
- spiritual elitism

Because if God accepts us when we were broken and spiritually poor, by what right do we not accept someone because they are also broken?

Now I know what some of you are thinking. You think acceptance breeds license for bad behavior. That’s nonsense, IF your example and lifestyle are strong. See I don’t need to speak condemnation over you 24/7 for you understand that I think some of your behaviors are not healthy or God pleasing. I just need to do it differently from you WHILE accepting you.

Can you do both? I say yes.

A pastor friend of mine a long time ago fell into sexual sin and he resigned from his post. And many in his former church that knew him were shocked that we accepted him and maintained our friendship with him. Some were terribly upset. Didn’t we know that accepting him would be interpreted as license for what he had done? I supposed that was possible. Perhaps some could be so blind as to make that connection.

But so what? They would be wrong to make that assumption. We neither approved of his sin, nor were we trying to be mavericks in bucking the tide of judgment against him. We just accepted him.
And because we could accept him, we could come up next to him for positive impact that he would have surely rejected if our stance was one of superior condemnation.

So when a church is a church, it’s accepting people as they are… but also when they…

2. SPEAK TRUTH TO ONE ANOTHER.
The Bible says:
Col 3:16…admonish one another

That word admonish means, “to warn, or rebuke mildly.”

A lot of Christians think a Church community ought to be this place that looks like a lot of Christian music looks: happy, happy, joy, joy. NO problems here! Consequently every conversation is surface. But a real community doesn’t have that kind of fakery going on… it pushes past the tendency to avoid tough truth, and conflict and it speaks the truth IN LOVE, as the Bible teaches.

Do you?

In EXTENDED they’ll be teaching on conflict resolution. In real community we don’t gossip, we go straight to the person we have an offense with. WE speak the truth, boldly, but also humbly and without judgment, keeping “ACCEPT ONE ANOTHER” in our minds eye as we do.

We “Get naked with each other.” Friend in college confronted me on an unhealthy friendship I had. Changed me.

But lastly we build this kind of rugged truth telling on the most important one another of them all:

2. LOVE ONE ANOTHER
Jesus said, 
John 15:17 This is my command: Love one another.

When I was a youth pastor, I used to use community building games. I found that some of them didn’t foster community quite like I had hoped. For example: BALLOON STOMP. Every student ties a balloon to his of her leg, and the object of the game is to pop everybody else's balloon while protecting your own.
Last balloon un-popped is the winner.

It’s a ruthless, brutal game… But really fun to watch! I would blow the whistle, and it was Darwinian; survival of the fittest, dog eat dog! The aggressive kids stomped on toes, the less aggressive kids retreated to the corners or would actually caudle their balloon to protect it. Every person was out for himself of herself.

Well, one time a man was visiting his son’s 4th grade gym class playing "Balloon Stomp" when a class of mentally handicapped kids came in to play the same game. The whistle blew, but these kids didn't have much of a clue about what was supposed to go on. The only idea that began to trickle through was that balloons were supposed to be popped. So they started popping balloons, but not like the other students.

Instead of protecting their own balloons or chasing everybody else's balloons, they began intentionally to go around helping each other get their own balloons stomped on. One little girl held her balloon like a place kicker holding a football. A little boy stomped on it, popped it, and she squealed in delight.

All over the room, these kids helped each other pop balloons. When the last balloon was popped, all the kids applauded and cheered. They got the job done together, and no one was left out. Everybody won.

That's not the way the game goes in this world, is it?! There’s pushing and shoving to see
- who’s going to win,
- who’s number one,
- who’s the most important,
- who’s the most powerful and
- who’s the most successful.

But in the church that kind of dog eat dog thing ought to go away. A sign that Church is really church is that we are loving each other. Supporting each other. Encouraging each other. How do we do that? Well, think of the balloon stompers. I can be real protective of my balloon, or I can share what I have – my resources, my stuff and my time.

That’s why we meet in small groups at this church. To share. To do life together. To love one another. In the early church it says:
Acts 2:42-47 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. …All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he 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, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

That might be one of the greatest descriptors of loving community in the history of the human race. Look at this group:
- they spent time together in each others homes,
- studying God’s word
- devoted to each other
- sharing their stuff with each other

A woman was in an airport, bought a little bag of chocolate chip cookies and sat in a waiting area to await her plane's takeoff. A guy was sitting across from her she didn't know. He apparently was from India since he was wearing a turban and didn't seem to speak English.

In between them was the bag of chocolate chip cookies. Much to her surprise and without saying anything, this guy reached over, opened up the bag, took a cookie and ate it. She was taken aback by this, so she reached down, took a cookie and started to eat – it to assert her ownership.

He just smiled, nodded, reached down, took another cookie and started eating it. She reached down, took two cookies and ate them both, although she wasn't really hungry by now. She wanted to send a message! The guy smiled again, took two cookies and ate them. They kept going like this until the whole bag was empty.

She was livid. She walked onto the plane, took her seat, looked into her purse and found the bag of chocolate chip cookies that she had bought. It had been his bag. Not only had he not taken her stuff, she had taken his stuff without asking for it and he had been pleased to share it.

Well friends, could we just have a change of heart right here today?
- That we wouldn’t hold our stuff quite so closely.
- And then we would love each other more richly.
- Be devoted to each other more truly.
- Help each other more faithfully and share with each other more relentlessly.
o That’s why we feed the poor… we’re sharing our money and our stuff
o That’s why we meet in small groups… we’re sharing our lives, our homes
o That’s why we serve each other in ministries… we’re sharing our talents to encourage and not to stomp on each other.

I want you to consider a question. Who in your life has “REFIDGERATOR RIGHTS”? That is, who have you given access into your heart and life such that they can walk into your house, unannounced and come and open up your friedge and grab a pop or a sandwich? Who? You say no one. Friend, you can do better. We can do better. We can love better than that.

I want to challenge you with it that phrase: Refrigerator Rights. Some of you, it’s time to open up your home and let people in. Not just anybody, but a few people that you would intentionally build loving Christian community with. And now is your time to step up and take the risk.

Some of you, your heart is beating a little bit faster right now because you are thinking, I'm done going it alone! But I want to share.

This message is for you friend! From the standpoint of what the Bible has to say, what really matters in this life are people. And church is people, therefore, how are you leveraging your STUFF
- to build people, instead of building aloneness,
- to build a church family instead of doing it by ourselves,
- to make sure that the Message of God’s love for human beings in Christ is spread to everyone instead of just being happy that the message reached you.