Community III

My wife is, she's really letting me know that in future videos I probably won't be invited to speak at all. So it's okay. You know, this is great. This is actually the first time I got to see that little piece. We're talking about community in these weeks, right up through Labor Day, because it's so critical to experiencing the life that God has for us at North Way. We've said all along that life change happens best in small groups. It's just, I mean, it's just been at the heart of what we're about. We started as small groups. I like to say we didn't start with the program of small groups. We were small groups for about three months before we ever met to worship. So it wasn't something we added on, it was something we were. Actually, worship was added on to our small group ministry. So if you're new and wondering what this church, what really keeps it going, these folks said it very well. I mean, it's like dynamic things happen when people, yes, it's an investment, yes, it requires some time, but it's just so amazingly helpful in our own personal journeys. Now, Pastor Doug spoke the first week on being one church, you know, and talking about that and that whole idea that, you know, we're different from different backgrounds, but we're one church. And then last week, Pastor Kent just poured it on about all generations. And, you know, look around the room, friends. There's folks in their 70s and 80s, and there's lots of young people in here, and that's the way it is in all of our gatherings. There's just a broad spectrum, and leaving a legacy was a great message. And I'm going to talk just briefly, actually, this evening about multiple locations, because I think you get the gist of it. And I just want to touch on a few points that are really important to us doing this effectively. By the way, the multiple, I mean, it's, multiple locations is, well, it's sort of the toughest of the four. What's next week? Freeing people to follow Jesus, which, I mean, how hard is that to say, and who wouldn't want to do that sermon, right? So you have to understand how this works. We have a teaching team, and we have a great team. We talked about that a couple weeks ago, just how these brothers are just stepping into their positions. And, you know, Pastor Curt and Doug Kent. And so, you know, when we were doling out the assignments, I get the multiple locations, because there's two things I found now after 35 years of teaching and preaching that the congregation tends to be the quietest about. One is sharing their faith in evangelism, because they just, you know, that's like difficult, and you know, we live in this sort of a, you know, a society of tolerance, and you know, I mean, it's big now in the news, isn't it? You know, we're, don't jam religion and all that kind of stuff. So people get quiet when you talk about, hey, this, Jesus gave us a great commission, you know. And we don't really like to hear that. It's just, it's a great suggestion. No, he told us to go out and make disciples. So we, that's what we're doing. We're going out. And the other thing, what's the other thing people don't, it's money, right? I mean, you talk about money, and immediately, the decibels just go down to like zero. I mean, if you drop a bobby pin right now on the carpet, you could hear it, talk about money. Guess what? You are so forced that you came here, because we're going to double down and talk about both of those tonight, okay? So I don't expect, like, we'll hear a sound for the next 20 minutes. But the reality is that the two go together. Now, you know, as I said, we had Doug, and then Ken, and Kurt, and Jay. I think Kurt's next week, right? Yeah. So Scott's getting left out. So we're going to have him preach the next, you know what the third quietest sermon is? Can a female apostle be demon-possessed? Scott has that one, and he's studying, he's trying to really come up with whether or not that can happen. And I'll be here for that message. So take your outline out, and let's just look at this real quickly. I'm not going to even begin to try to go all the way through this, but one thing I want to say, many small groups, including my own at times, we use this as the content for our small groups. And there's a lot of Scripture, and then there's always questions on the back of it. So this isn't just a toss-away thing. I'm glad to see... I know people that have binders, they put these in, keep them, and it's a great idea because it's useful at any point. And so here we are, looking at the context of the challenge of sending a group of people into a new community, and we didn't get into this, and we won't get into it a whole lot this evening, but one of the things that's critical to the Swickly Valley campus thriving is being really sensitive to that unique culture. Just like in Oakland, we have to do that, and wherever else the word sensitive is, we have And it happens to us. You don't just have the same exact thing. It's not... That's real important. It's not a franchise in that sense. You got that? It's not like going to Wendy's, and each one of those communities would have the same exact menu, and you'd get it the same way. That's not the way we do it. The message is the same, and that's what makes it so exciting because that means is whatever way the wind of the Spirit's blowing around the city and the region, we'll all be going that way. But it's unique to that particular community, and as challenging as it can be to figure that all out, just think how much more difficult it was for the early church, the first folks going out. I mean, they were trying to introduce into the populace a new faith. Imagine if somebody came here into our community and said, I've got a whole new religion that you haven't heard about, and it's not Jewish, it's not Catholic, it's not Presbyterian, it's not that North way... And they start off in some crazy thing, and that's the context that Paul... As we read, Paul and Martin, they got sent into a culture, and really, there wasn't media out there. There wasn't any way to get this word... Everything was word of mouth, so there was probably some awareness that somewhere there was a story about someone who died on a cross, and it was supposedly he was innocent, and then he was seen by 500 people for about 40 days afterwards, and I mean, it was a crazy story, who would ever believe it. That's what they had to go and tell people to stake their eternal lives on. How'd you like to do that from scratch? So yeah, we're going to have a few challenges here and there, but we don't have anything... They didn't have a Bible. I mean, there wasn't a Bible to say, well, here it says the word of God. They didn't have books. I mean, this was so difficult. I can't imagine... When I was preparing about this, I was thinking, I would not volunteer for that, but you? That would scare me to think about trying to do something like that, and by the way, the other people, the churches that sent them out, those early followers, they're just like you. They had families. They had jobs. They had responsibilities. They had a government. They had, you know, personal issues going on, so all of what I'm going to just share here in summary tonight, there's parts of this that really are relevant to your personal life, and I don't want you to lose that. One of the fears that I have when we talk about the church's mission is you think, well, that doesn't really help me with my situation at home. Oh, yes, it does. In fact, if you look at the sign on the way in, and here's what I said. I said, when we grow, you grow. I'm going to say that again. It's not even on your outline or anything. If you lay hold of what it is we're talking about here in terms of obedience and faith for the church, when you say, I'm going to embrace that for my life, when we grow, you grow, and you can apply what we're going to be saying corporately to your own life personally. One of the reasons why some of the people like Roy Thompson was up here for 27 or 8 years he's been here is because he has grown over those years because he's leaned into it. As we've grown, he's grown, and that can be true for you. If you're brand new, this is your first time, you say, oh, I don't even get all this stuff. Just start embracing, and as we grow, you lean into it, you'll grow as well. Very important principle. Don't want you to miss it. So the early church, by the way, didn't run right out and do what Jesus said. You know that, don't you? I mean, the first few chapters of Acts are real exciting, but there's not a lot of people going out and, in fact, it takes some persecution up in Acts chapter 8 for the church to finally understand that Jesus was serious about getting out. And so the church got sort of scattered about in a difficult way. And it was the Lord's way of saying this. He was saying, I saved you from what sin had done in your life. I gave you new life and the promise and hope of eternal life. Not so you could just, you know, gather around a campfire and share your cool stories about the days that Jesus was resurrected and broke fish or bread and ate fish and all that. No, I saved you for part of my redemptive purpose for the whole world. I want to pause for just a second, too, because I will say this as a person now that, you know, has lived probably longer than I'm going to live. I want to say something that's real important to some of you who are younger and wonder about what really matters. Purpose really matters. Having a reason to live, to get up every day really matters. I can't tell you how many of my peers and close peers wonder about that, ask the question in their 50s, highly successful or whatever, is this it? Maybe, by the way, some people find purpose in their family and that's fine. I mean, it's wonderful, but that's not the reason why God put you here. Some people try to find purpose in their career and that's, you know, a lot of folks, a lot of guys especially, but women as well now, they throw themselves in to somehow think that there's going to be this inner fulfillment that happens if they climb up to the top. Do you know some of the most miserable people I know live there? Because it's not fulfilling. God created you for His purpose and when you lean into that, it does something that nothing else can do. So being part of that plan is to your benefit. I just want to encourage you, if you don't know what that is, then these folks that are heading into Seweekly and they're going to be experiencing new challenges and new things, they're going to, I promise you, we'll have a day when we're going to celebrate sort of maybe just put the general flow of things aside here and let them come back and say, here's what happened in the last year. I want to do that. Write that down somewhere, guys. I want to do that. Just say, wow, this happened to me and I, this happened and I changed this way and this is what I've experienced because this is how growth in life takes place. It says here on your outline that the church often gathered to celebrate how God was opening doors of the gospel message and we want to be sure to do that too. We want to celebrate. We celebrated just a little bit what's already happened and I've heard story after story, conversations, people saying, I hear there's a new church coming, but I heard this one. I heard, I heard there's a new church coming, but it's not like the other ones. I said, well, there's, this is, there's a lot of good churches around, I guess, but I will say this, it's a unique church and the only way you can really understand it is to experience it and that just piqued their interest even more. And so that's part of what we're about is fulfilling God's purpose for us. Now, in the midst of that, and here's the part that is really interesting. I want you to notice halfway down your outline, it says, along the way, Paul and Barnabas were presented with opportunities to lead and mature through difficulties or tribulation. Okay, the Greek word there is thlipsis. It's one of my, I don't say favorite words, one of the words that I come across, it's 54 times in the New Testament Greek, it shows up, John 16, 33, take heart, in this world you will have thlipsis, you will have tribulations, but take heart, I've overcome the world, Jesus said. Here it is, they encountered tribulation. There were times when the people said, this is an interesting message, tell me more. And they would tell their friends and their friends together. But there were also times, folks, listen, when people would say, wait a minute, who do you think you are? And they, even in one case, tried to stone them to death. I mean, it was not an easy duty to go out and be a missionary pioneer in a place that had never heard the gospel. And I want to just announce to you, when you step out in faith to do something that hasn't been done, you can count on one thing, you will have tribulation. It's going to happen. It's going to happen to churches, and it will happen to you as a person. And in fact, what I've learned is when that, I'm just waiting for when it comes, say, it's sort of like confirmation. When things, when something happens, it's like, the word, by the way, means stress, it means difficulty, it means pressure, okay, philipsis. Those things happen. It means I'm on the right track. And so here we are. We're just weeks away from launching here, you know, and bringing up the teams. And this, this happened to us. We've encountered some philipsis, and this is just, it's interesting. I didn't expect it, and no one really saw it coming, but here, I'll just kind of summarize it sort of in a quick and easy way. We as a church made provision for Swickler. We saved money, and when I say we, I'm talking about all of you. And I think, you know, there's just no way to say thank you enough for having the faith to do that. And we put money aside and so forth. But of course, when you put money aside for another thing, you take it from someplace else, you could use it. And we're doing that now for future campuses. So here's the part where I need to share with you some philipsis. This is some unexpected things to overcome. We budget a year as a church to make sure that we don't overspend, and make sure that we don't overreach, and try to be faithful and good stewards. And we based on the previous year, and then what we anticipate God's going to do, and by the way, and I'll just say this as background, we always want to spend as much as we can to share the gospel, and we don't want to have this big stash of savings somewhere that we can say, oh, let's just, you know, let's just all have big party nights. That's, no, we try to live year by year. That's it. That's the way we do it. And so here's one little shot of what we thought this year would look like in terms of budget. And it's a little rough in terms of, don't pay a lot of attention to the detail. It's not, it's really, the idea is this is kind of the way things go, and then we really shoot up at the end. That's generally the case. And so that's how we budget, more or less. Now, if you've been watching the notes, and we said this faithfully, Scott has said it faithfully every week, the red line is going to show you that we've dropped below, and for a while we were a little bit ahead, but then the last, starting right here in June, and here we are right now, we dropped into this little area, and we can put up the next one, okay? This has created that little gap. Now, that's how much short we are from our budget. Now, real quickly, normally, because we've experienced this now for so many years, what happened is we established years ago with our bank that has our mortgage, a little line of credit so that when, because, put that back, keep it up, please, when we get to that season in there where there's that dip, we don't have to come and say, yeah, we need more of this. We just kind of borrow, because we always know you're going to come back, and for example, did you know that last week attendance and giving jumped 20% in one week? Why? Because a lot of you came back from wherever you've been. That's just the way it is, and you're going to stay, and that's just, you know, but things don't stop in here. And so when you're living kind of near the edge, so we would take this money from this line of credit, and you didn't know about it, and every year we'd pay it back when we got here so we weren't going farther in debt and all that kind of stuff. Good stewards. It was just good stewardship. So out of the blue, a week ago Friday, the bank that holds our mortgage, and by the way, the mortgages, I mean, again, I know there's some people who disagree with this. It's like your home. You know, the mortgages, most of us have home mortgages. I can't afford to just go out and buy a house right now, but maybe you can. That's, you know, that's good, but we don't want to live in, you know, paying things on debt, but with this little line of credit, it's not much, a couple hundred thousand dollars, but the bank said, you know, we give money to a lot of churches all over the country, and they called, they said, and our church portfolio isn't doing too well, so we're going to freeze your line of credit. Well, what does that mean? That means you can't use it, but wait, it's right here. This is where we are, and look at all that yellow. We don't care. We're mean bankers. We're just one tick above. No, never mind. I'm not going to name any other professions. I have friends that are in those professions. Okay. Pastors. Okay, and so here we are, and literally, I thought, and a whole team thought, well, the bills are still there. We still have, you know, screens and lights and ministries and all that kind of stuff. What are we going to do? Well, we have two options, friends. Here's what we're going to do. We can say, oh, man, well, I guess we, I mean, I guess God's not really blessing us, or I guess we're just going to be, I mean, maybe we should call Lee Strobel and say, don't come, or Kevin Lehman. Maybe we should stop some of the other ministries we have, students or kids, or, you know, maybe we should just pull back on all that stuff. Maybe we should just say, well, I don't know, you know, this is the economy, and I know the economy's difficult. It's sort of a given anymore. Or we can say, well, wait a minute. Maybe this is just an opportunity for us to say, will God be faithful if we decide as a church family, all of us, and everyone who will hear my voice over today and tomorrow and through the next week over the internet and so on, and we say, wait a minute. We believe that we are in the center of God's will. We believe that we are a people that's been called by God to do these things. We believe the ministries that we've prepared are going to change lives, our lives here as well as lives out there, and we are not going to let a bank tell us that we can't do it. I told you how hard it would be. That would have been a great place to say amen. It's not really a big deal. It's just a little test. It's a test to see if we'll all just shrink back. I went into the little guy's bathroom, the children's bathroom's closest to the place that we prepare, and I went in there this evening, and I opened the door, and I hear this voice, and he says, and one of the stalls says, there's someone in here. And I said, yeah, I could tell from your voice. He said, don't come in. I said, no, don't worry, I won't. He said, because I'm just a little kid. I said, you know what? I'll come back. You just go ahead. He was just, I guess it was a new experience for him to be on his own. Mom and dad weren't, nobody was out there. I didn't know. Knocking his stall door down. But we just get all like frozen up. Instead of saying, wait a second. We can do this. So here's the challenge. It's simply this. Over the next weeks, and real quickly, if you'll look up on the screen, I think we have a list of four or five things. Number one, some of you made pledges toward the startup of things, and I hope that if you made that pledge, you'll be in a position to fulfill that in the next few weeks. We said September 1st. If you could do that in the next few weeks, that's number one. It'd be real important for you to fulfill that pledge, and that goes directly toward helping us to pay some of these obligations. Here we go. Let's put them up. So fulfill your pledge. Second, if you're new, and this is a place that you feel, you know, I've been coming for a while, but I haven't been giving anything, this is a good time just to help out a little bit. Maybe just a little bit, but help out. If you're new, you'll feel part of the solution, okay? Some of you, by the way, have, I'd say there's quite a few of you who have this sort of practices. You have a tendency to give your biggest gift at the end of the year, because that's when you sort of look at things and say, well, here's what happened. And can I suggest that maybe some of you might want to, if possible, move that year-end gift to now, and that would help a great deal, instead of waiting for December to say, all right, I can do that now, and just that would help a lot. And then finally, we on our end are going to do as much as we can to eliminate any expenditure that's not necessary. And if we do those four things, we'll easily meet the obligations, and that'll be the end of that. And we'll get through this philipsis, and we'll look back on it and say, you know what, devil? As I taught a few weeks ago, we just took a stand. We took a stand and said, we are not going to give up. We're not going to stop our mission. We're not going to be afraid. We're going to press ahead. How many of you would vote for that being the better way to go? All right? Amen. Okay, thank you. You don't need to applaud, but I appreciate that. That's good. That's the way God would have us to act. I think that's the way the early church would have acted. In fact, one of the verses that most convicts me in 2 Corinthians, and I don't remember the exact location of it, but it says, in their desperate poverty, the church in Corinth begged Paul for the opportunity to give to the church back in Jerusalem. I'm looking around, and some of you might be hurting, but I don't think there's anyone here in desperate poverty. But they so in their heart wanted to be in God's will that they said, please let us give. Why? Because there's a great joy in it. It just fulfills you. And then God, friends, the side of this that you'll learn is God will bless you back. He'll return to you what you gave and more because He's not a God who will ever be in debt to anybody. And so I just want to encourage those of you, if any of those things are helpful, just tuck them away and then respond as soon as you're able because this is something that's right now. This isn't something that, you know, we need in November. This is something that's right now. All right? So, let me just close this way. I have great anticipation, and by the way, the next, if those of you who are really blank, like maniacs, and your whole night will be ruined if you don't know all the blanks, the next, the next one is they receive wisdom through submission to one another. That's in Acts 15 where they go back. What I just shared with you, that little plan, that was born out of just meeting with some of the leaders, and that's the plan that we came up with. And then turn your outline over. They sought the strategy of the Spirit of Jesus. In other words, we're not just doing our own thing. We're doing what the Lord's called us to do. And that's important that you keep that in front of you. And then the final one is this. Paul was emptied of his own strategy. Let me tell you something. I don't think Paul knew how difficult it would be, but he received the desires of his heart in an unexpected way. Let's put up 2 Corinthians 12 too. I don't think it's on the outline. It's a wonderful book. I'm sorry, 2-12. 2 Corinthians 2-12. Now, when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened the door for me, I still had no peace of mind because I did not find my brother Titus there. He's gone. So I said goodbye to them and went on to Macedonia. But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ, and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. Leave that up for just a second. Thanks be to God, who always, not just on occasion, leads us in triumphal procession in Christ. And what I have a picture of right now, friends, is this. It's just sort of kind of odd, but I see a sort of processing into the Sewickley Valley as one big church in a triumphal way, saying we're not anything special, but the God that we love and serve has a message of hope for you who have a need, for you who are hungry, for you who are searching, for you've been caught up in religion, and we are going to share it with you. And it'll have a fragrance of the knowledge of Him. I don't know what that fragrance actually smells like, but the implication is that it permeates our being. And so as one church, would you stand with me together and let's say, Lord, we're going to obey you and we're going to go ahead and we are going to become a church all over this city, united in your purpose.