Making The Mundane Miraculous VI, Mid-Year Report

I'll line out the notes nonetheless and let's look together at God's Word today. That was a great song, John. Super. 1 Peter 2 and verse 4. As you come to Him, the living stone, rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to Him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says, See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in Him will never be put to shame. Now to you who believe this stone is precious, but to those who do not believe, he's the stone the builders rejected and it's become the capstone and a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they disobeyed the message which is also what they were destined for. But you, I love every time the Scripture says but, because upon those buts hinge our destiny. You are 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. Just about two years ago we were right in the midst of the construction of this facility. Things were in high gear and I'd been out of town for a few days. One evening I came back to visit the site and steel was being erected everywhere. They had the classrooms and the offices going up and all this sanctuary space is going up and I walked in around this way out here and through some of the maze of the steel and to my incredible shock and dismay, right here, right here, there was this huge pillar and it went from the ceiling, it was connected up there all the way down here to the ground. And I looked at that thing and I said, that's not right. I mean we'd spent months planning this building, in this room especially, months. I said, that can't be right. I mean it's right in the middle of the room and I said, I had no idea what happened because I'd been out of town. Maybe the architect started putting something in there and he realized it wasn't going to work or something like that and I said, it's right in the middle. I mean can you imagine a Christmas pageant with a donkey going right into the pole, you know, or a wedding when the bride and her dad have to separate to go around. I mean it was just terrible. And all these things are going through my mind, what happened here and you know, where's Jack Lightbody when you need him and Roy Thompson, these people, they're doing their job, what's going on here? And I was, you know, this was like a 15 second conversation going really fast on all these things and that moment I saw a construction vehicle come up. It was one of the folks that was working on the site and I went over to see him. I said, can I bother you for a minute? I said, this pillar doesn't seem right to me and he said, yeah, you know, it really is ugly, isn't it? Oh, you know, confirming my worst fear. He said, but it's temporary. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, it's just part of the process. Once they do all the connecting, I look at it, it was already connected to my eye, but it wasn't connected all the way through. He said, once they get it all connected, then they pull that thing out and on that day, they know what kind of work they've done. I made a point of being here on the day that that old pillar came out. Friends, I want to talk to you just for a little bit today about the church that God is building and this message is going to be right from my heart and it's going to be about us as a people and it's also going to be about you as an individual and the kind of life and family and ministry that you're building because we only have one life. I say this time and time again, you know, it goes awfully fast. You only have one crack at this thing called life and I want to share a little bit about what I sense God is building among us and I want to have you look with me at what his purpose might be and how you fit into that and what your role might be. You see, this passage in 1 Peter, again, I'll take you back to the first week in this series, is written to discouraged Christians, Jewish Christians at this point, scattered throughout the region, wondering what was going on, why life had gotten so complicated and such a mess and Peter encourages them with these words and he basically says to them, listen, Jews who've become Christians, he says, God's kind of enlarged his plans just a bit. You need to know this. He said, there used to be a promise that was just for you. Now it's been expanded and it includes the Gentiles and that promise, by the way, was the presence of God would be with you. Remember two weeks ago, we talked about the Korem Deo, the awesome presence. Peter says, you exclusively had that presence for a while but now God has enlarged the plan and he's including a new group of people. What God has been doing, you see, on the earth ever since the beginning of time, is creating a dwelling place where he could be present. This is so important, folks, get this right now because it has to do with why you're here. It's a question many people never ask until they're about to die. God has been about the business since the beginning of time to establish a dwelling place for his presence. Now, Peter knew very well that the Jewish people to whom he was writing would understand this in terms of some other little images and so he talks about temples and different things about Zion. The first place that God chose to show his presence to the people of God was in this structure. Who knows what that was? What was that? No, it's not a pop tent. What is that? It's the tabernacle, right? It's the tabernacle. You read about it in the book of Exodus when the Jews were brought out of Egypt and their slavery. God, as he told him in explicit detail, exactly what that little structure was to look like. That was the mobile home of God's glory, if you will. All right, I'm stretching, but that's what it was. Look at your notes. Scripture says clearly there, Exodus 40-34, the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. It was so glorious when God showed up in his presence that the priests bowed down and they couldn't minister there. Well, then time went on and the people of God became prosperous and finally Solomon became king and Solomon built God the next dwelling place of his glory. Remember what it was? Solomon's temple. Many historians have said the most ornate building that's ever existed, even to this day, overlaid with precious jewels and gold and, I mean, just an incredible building. And look at your scripture. Solomon dedicated the temple to the Lord and 2 Chronicles 7-2 says the priest could not enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it for some reason. Again, God chose to bring his presence, his awesome presence, his koramdeo into this place to manifest his life to the people of God. But as we all know, through disobedience and disregard for God's commandments, the people rebelled and sinned greatly and God withdrew his presence. And that temple was destroyed by the enemies of God about when? About 486 BC. It was level. And for 400 years, God was silent. His presence was not to be found in the earth. No prophecy, no manifestations, no evidence that God was still caring for his people. It's called the intertestamental period in our Bibles. We don't know what happened in those 400 years. Have you gone through a period of your life where you wonder if God really is there? The Jews did, man. But God, in his infinite mercy, one more time said, I'm gonna do this right. And so he sent his son, Jesus, who lived a perfect, sinless life and then died on a cross for something he didn't do. And here's where 1 Peter comes alive because Peter makes it very clear that even then the Jews still tried to reject what God wanted to give them. And you know, rejection, I don't know if you saw it in verse 4 and verse 7, rejection is a very strong theme through these verses. God is rejecting. He's rejecting. He's rejecting. And again, it seems that people said, Jesus cares. And so he was crucified, as John sang, and died. And then he was raised up. But look what happened. God said that was part of the plan. Look at the next verse. Read it out loud with me. You are fellow citizens with God's people, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. You see that? What God is doing is still the same. He's looking for a place to live, but it's not going to be in that tabernacle and it's not going to be that temple. It's going to be in the spiritual house that we are as his people. God now lives in the midst of his church. And that is the purpose of history, friends. I'd love to digress on this point. You want to make sense of history, you've got to look at the church, because apart from the church, God raising up a people in which to dwell, it doesn't make sense. So now today, the Lord is putting the final living stones into this temple. I believe we're in the last days. In the fall, I want to tell you right now, I already know one series I'm going to do in the fall, it's going to be on the end times, because I believe that many Americans are kind of just being a little sleepy about how critical the times are. We are moving toward the end. God's putting the last stones in the spiritual house. And the question is, how are we fitting together? What's going to happen in these final days? Will we become the dwelling place that God manifests himself? And you see, when I was praying through this, and I'm just going to share my heart real honestly here, I said, Lord, it just seems to me in our church that the glory that I believe you want to display, the way I believe you want to show up, the people I believe you want to heal, the things you want to do don't seem to be happening the way I wish they would happen. And certainly you want that more than I do. It seems that there's some pillars kind of in the middle of the floor, God, and the spiritual house. And the Lord made my heart come alive and said, those things which you think are obstacles I have put there to cause you by faith to depend on me. There's supports that I have put there until such time that you complete the building of the structure of the house as I've ordained, then I'll pull them out. And then, then things will flow. Then things will happen according to what I've ordained. And those of you who've been here for three or five or 10 or 15 years know what I'm talking about. We've seen great things. I am very encouraged. This is a positive time in the life of our church. But friends, we ain't seen nothing yet, to use great English. We haven't seen the beginning of what God really wants to do. Let me touch on very quickly five things that I think have to happen. Five pieces of steel that have to come together in the spiritual house. If God's to pull out those things and let the thing flow. All right, follow with you very quickly. I'm going to touch on these, move quickly through this five things. And by the way, I'm going to ask you to do something at the end of each one. Yesterday, the promise keepers, one of the things that affected me was when coach McCartney talked about raiding his marriage. You know, he had that conversation with Howard Hendricks and so on. And well, I think there's some benefit to quantifying things. So I'm going to ask you at the end of each of these points to rate yourself on a scale of one to five. One being, man, I'm out of it. Five being, I'm hitting a home run. All right. So get ready because I'm not moving to the second point until I see Penn's moving on this thing. So here we are. First point is this. First thing we got to do, and Donna's going to help me. We're going to use a diagram here. Do you have just a blank diagram? Yeah. Just imagine this being sort of the roof of the spiritual house that God's building. It's a Pentagon. This room isn't really Pentagon, is it, Rob? You're an architect. You could stretch it a little bit, right? Use your imagination. All right. Here's the five things. The first thing is, let me just say it this way. Determined to put the kingdom of God first in your life. That's the first blank. Determined to put the kingdom of God first in your life. Jesus said it this way. Seek first the kingdom and his righteousness. We must recognize God's church as the central activity of all of history. Folks, put it first. Here's my point. I know that many of you today said, you know, Jay, get real. I've got family. I've got business concerns. I've got debt. I've got career issues. And I do my best with church and all that stuff. But what do you mean, put it first? What I mean is this, friends. Look what Peter said. He said, come to him. The first thing in our lives every day should be that we come to him. It should be what draws us out of the bed in the morning. It's to come to him. And for many of us, it's not. In fact, if we're having a good day, we squeeze it in at the end of the day, you know. I wonder about that. Is the priority of your life to come to him? And the way we do that is through prayer. That was the first beam we put up. It's through prayer. Now, you want to know what finally ultimately motivates us to pray, friends? It's when we need something really bad, isn't it? When we don't need anything, well, prayer's okay, but it's for somebody else. Ever notice when you really need something, you get serious about praying about it? I was at the gym a few weeks ago, and a guy came over, as is always the case. He put his stuff down right next to my locker, so we were like this. But this guy, he was a younger guy. I mean, he was in great shape. I mean, he was cut, you know. And he looked at me. He's a nice guy, friendly. He said, you're kind of regular here, he said to me. I go to the gym three or four days a week at least, and he said, you're kind of regular here. And he looked at me as if to say, why are you so puny? I had that look at him. I said, well, yeah, I'm kind of regular here. I said, because I've got to be. I've got to be here. Because if I don't work out consistently, my back hurts, my leg tingles, my body aches. And I said, you know, if you told me 10 years, I'd be spending three or four different days a week, five, six hours a week in the gym, I'd say, you were nuts. And I was, you know, let it loose, outdoor kind of guy, do that kind of. I never would have dreamed of doing what I'm doing right now and liking it. You know why? Because I need to be there. And I've done a little survey here in the gym here recently. I just had my ear open a little bit. You go around the gym, and every guy there, oh, blew out my knee, you know, and now I've got to work out or else my knee hurts, shoulder, bypass surgery, back problems. 90% of the people in the gym are there because they've got to be. There's only about 10% that are there just because they want to look better. Now, what's the parallel? Well, to me, folks, if we're really honest about where our church is, we've retreated from the front lines of prayer as a church. I'll just tell you, that's how I feel. I mean, we give opportunity after opportunity, and yet, you know, we just, we're so busy, can't quite make it. And I have to tell you, I think it's because success, which is very illusionary anyhow, has made us just a little bit, well, what do we need to pray for? We must pray. We're nowhere near where God wants us to be. We need to, first of all, pray that God would let us see ourselves as we really are, and then He'll draw us into that place. And I just want to commend those of you who are regular prayers intercessors. You're helping us to keep going. I want to ask you all, rate yourself right now. How are you in coming to God? One is, man, I don't get to God very often at all. Five is, every day I have a time with God consistently. Three is, some days I do, some days I don't. All right, put the number down because I'm not moving until I see your pen move. All right, where are you? Good, okay. Second point, develop your relationship with other living stones. Develop your relationships. As I view our church, this is another being that's not quite connected in large numbers of our lives. You know, we live in this constant tension, don't we? I mean, this tension between my personal stuff and what I've got to take care of and all my life and my deal and what God has done in the church. I know this. I know this attention I live in. Listen to what Chuck Colson, former assistant to President Nixon and a man who was powerfully changed by God in the 70s, now leads a ministry called Prison Fellowship. He says this in his book called The Body. When Peter made his confession, now at Christ, the Son of the Living God, back in Matthew, Jesus didn't say, hey, good Peter, you're now saved and you'll have an abundant life, go in peace. Instead, he announced to the church, he announced the church and established a divinely ordained pattern. When we confess Christ, God's response is to bring us into his church. We become part of his called out people. When we become followers of Christ, we become members of his church. And listen, this is the key. And our commitment to the church is indistinguishable from our commitment to him. Show me someone's commitment to the church and I'll show you their commitment to Christ. That's what he's saying. We cannot live isolated, once a week I show up and worship kind of life. That doesn't get it. That's not what the Lord calls for here. Peter says, look, he says, you are living stones. You're being built. You're being built. And friends, sometimes when you're built together with someone, you rub up against them. And I know that's an unpleasant experience. You get next to a rough rock that God hasn't quite honed off yet. And you know, stuff can happen. But nonetheless, it's part of what God's doing. I am so blessed these days. I hear about these PK groups, men meeting six in the morning on Saturdays and, you know, eight o'clock at night. And I hear about women meeting in small group Bible studies and our home groups and all these different things. But if the truth were known, listen, less than half of the people in this church, less than half, have any kind of connection beyond Sunday morning. And this so burdened me last year, last summer, that I committed myself. I said, Lord, what should we do? And we began 11 months ago, very quietly. Most of you don't know this. We began to totally rearrange the infrastructure of our ministry. The pastor's assignments were different. The elders affirmed and got on board. And we are changing quietly how we do ministry behind the scenes. 11 months later, we've gone from six little groups now to 30 of these groups that we're calling community groups. They're really little cell groups. They're a little different than anything we've ever done before, because they are intentional and purposeful in meeting consistently to build the spiritual house. More than fellowship, more than care. They're about building the kingdom of God. And let me tell you, this fall, we're going to go after this really hard. Why? Because, listen, thousands of people have come through these doors in the last 20 months, thousands, thousands, and they've gone right out again because they didn't get connected. And people tell me, you know, it's just kind of hard. It's hard to find. Well, by the grace of God, he's going to change that because we are going to be little miniature temples, little 12 stone temples, 10 stone temples, little self all around, vibrant with life, young people, mixed groups, black and white. I personally, right now, am in an African-American cell group. I love it. We are growing together to love each other. We communicate, and that group's going to multiply in the fall. And we're understanding what it means to be part of the body of Christ. Rate yourself one to five. Are you in a consistent weekly group with living stones? Give yourself a five. Are you not in any kind of group consistently at all, but you really want to be? Give yourself a two. If you don't want to be, give yourself a one. That's the first place you got to start, all right? Maybe you were in a group, but you haven't been in one for a while. Give yourself a three. Next point. Third thing you got to do, the third thing that's got to connect is to deploy your gifts and resources. Another beam that must be fully in place in this structure is that every person has to realize that God has given you a gift. God has given you something wonderful to contribute to this spiritual house that's going to live forever. You know, to this day, Satan is very clever at telling people that they don't matter, that what they do doesn't count, unless they can sing like a John Walton, you know, or if they can teach a lot of people. Those are the only things that count. And friends, that's not the case. Every one of you has a gift. It says right here in 1 Corinthians 12, 7, everyone has a manifestation of the Spirit. I looked out my window the other day, Wednesday, and there were, I don't know what, Jeff had a hundred and some little children at the kids camp running all over the grass and out in the yard and stuff. And I looked at, and it was a whole group of young teenage girls and guys helping with these little kids. You know, laughing and smiling and hugging these kids and playing ball with them and demonstrating love to them at a young age, giving something to them, giving away. And it may be organized in a little framework like that, or it may be something totally spontaneous. There's a guy in my cell group, he's here in this service today. Now, he doesn't know this, but because he came to the cell group and because he opened up his mouth and just shared one night about how much God's been doing in his life through the church, he had ministered to me. And I went home and told Carol, when Carol and I were together, and I said on the way home, I said, I said, boy, that was great tonight. And it made me stronger because I heard someone say, hey, you're doing something right. It sounds good. You see, I was edified by that because someone gave out of his heart to me. Friends, we need to do that one to another. We need to give. And obviously this includes the resources that God blesses us with financially. This is very important. This is part of what it means to be in a church. There's this little virus that's going around. It's still in this church. It's not a, you know, it's not a lethal one. It's a virus that gets ahold of people that causes them to be afraid when it comes to talking about giving. And they shut down, they turn their hearing aids off at this point, and they say, well, you know, that's for somebody else. Somebody else will do it. I want to be as clear as I know how. In the patterns that I showed you, the tabernacle and the temple, how did God say, pay for this? He told the people, bring your tithes and bring your offerings. And that's how my work will be sustained. Friends, it's no different in the living temple. Lord says, bring in your tithes and your offering, and my work will go on. But here's the most important thing. Your life will be greatly blessed as you obey the pattern of God in this matter of giving. God, what, how many believe God has enough to give you what you need? Your need is chump change, okay, for God. But he's just waiting for us to get aligned. And it's not that we don't have to wait now and then. It's God just waiting for us to line up. Do you know where you were one year ago today? This day, July 14th, where were you? It was a Friday. It wasn't a Sunday. Where were you? Any idea? On the beach? Work, yeah, on a Friday. I can tell you where I was. I was in a hospital bed. I had my legs wrapped with those funny things that send pulses through your legs. I was one day out of back surgery. I was miserable. I need healed from the memory of that, actually. That started six weeks of low-profile kind of living in my home. Can't do much. Carol prayed every day that God would supernaturally intervene and heal me, get me out of that bed, and get me moving. And that began a very difficult year. Not only was the recovery from the surgery much more prolonged than I had anticipated and all that, but we were doing this reorganization of our infrastructure, and there was a lot of things going on in the staff to realign ourselves. But there was this other thing that kept hanging on, and that was the pressure of the financial weight that all of this had created. We knew it was coming, but listen. You see, we also anticipated that many would step up and say, I'm part of that, and I want to be part of it, and I was sharing it. And frankly, folks, the great weight of most of it fell on a surprisingly few number of shoulders. Many people choose just to come and receive and not to give. And that made for a very difficult time. Now, how many of you remember New Year's Eve? God moved and supplied a huge amount of money in one day, and we made that payment and so. But, you know, because so many of us have still not settled this issue of giving God what He's called a tenth of our resources as an active faith to trust in Him, we still just continue to barely make it. And I want to show you something here just about how difficult this becomes and what a pressure this becomes on your leadership and on me. And we're going to turn the house lights down. I want to show you a little chart. I asked to do this. No one asked me to do it. I want to do it to show you something. Here's what the season of giving looks like in this church. See it? Things start there, and then they really pick up in the middle of the spring, and you head into April and May, and they peak early in May, and then things tumble down. Now, why do you think they fall down so far in July and August? Sure, vacation time. People go and, you know, sometimes they just kind of forget about things and so on, and then it picks up. Now, here's how the expenses look in the year. I hope you can see that. They don't go down. They stay, stay, and actually increase a little bit. Lay one over top of the other, please, John. Okay. Now, how many of you know where we are right now today? Yeah. We're in the Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt is heading down, if you've been to Kennywood. Okay. But you see, this would never happen if we were just regular about our tithes and offerings. Now, where does that money go? Well, just real quickly, here it is. It goes to missions. This is what sends our missionaries around the world, ministries here at North Way that all of us benefit from, the salaries to cover all the staff costs, the overhead, you know, folks, the air conditioning, lights, all that costs a lot of money in this place, and the mortgage payment. None of this is from the building fund. None of that. You know how much that comes? You need to know this, so this is clear in your head. This is what it costs every week. Turn to someone and say, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money, isn't it? Forty-two thousand dollars every week. Okay, put the lights back up, please. Now, what I want you to know is, God has given more than enough resource in this body. It is not a difficult thing for this church by any means to do that, if everyone deploys their gift and gives as God leads you. Friends, I'll just lay it right there. Are you obeying God, or are you just kind of dodging this one and hoping it'll go away? I believe God has great things for us. Many things can't happen until all of us are on this part of the mission. It's one of those beams that has to be connected up there. All right, go ahead, rate yourself. Five is, I give tithes and offerings every week. One is, I don't know what the offering basket looks like. I don't know, I don't have a ministry where I serve. All right, go ahead. Let me speed up here to come to the conclusion. Number four, fourth thing that, fourth beam that needs to be put in place is a desire to lead, to be a leader. Peter says that some lay hold of the message and believe it and become committed and others don't believe. And friends, the difference between a loser and a leader is simply believing what God says. Let me say that again. The difference between a loser and a leader is simply believing and acting on what God says. We're living in a day when the church is crying for leaders, for men and women who would step out and say, I won't wait for someone else to show the way, I'll show the way. I won't wait for someone else to step up. I'll step up and I'll count on the pastors and I'll count on the apostles and prophets and people to train me to do what needs to be done in the church. Leaders who are more committed to Christ than they are to their own satisfaction, more passionate for what moves his heart and what's on their mind. Leaders who are willing to affect others by serving the vision that God's brought them into. Why did coach Bill McCartney, why did he leave a very successful coaching career? He was in the pinnacle of it, but friends, he'd won a national championship in 89. His Colorado teams are highly respected. Why did he quit right in the middle? He wasn't burned out because he caught a vision for what God could do with his life. And here's this football coach, and frankly, I mean, he's a, you know, he's a real passionate, pump him up kind of guy, but he hasn't had the training or the preparation quote that's supposed to be appropriate for that. Here's a guy, a football coach, never really been much of anything in terms of kingdom faith, speaking to 42,000 pastors three months ago, and 1.5 million men this year alone. Why? Because he said, I'm not going to sit back and wait for something to happen. I'm going to leave. How many men would stand up and say, I'm going to be a leader. I'm not going to stand around and wait for someone to take. I'm going to leave my cell group. I'm going to leave my home where my wife and kids are waiting for a leader. I'm going to lead in student ministries. I'm going to step up. Body of Christ is crying out for men. I want to talk a lot more about that, but I'm not going to today. I'll get back to it perhaps in the fall. Final thing that I believe before we go, rate yourself. Are you stepping out in any leadership? Are you leading in your home? Moms, are you leading your family? Showing the way in Christ in terms of where your children will be and serving perhaps. Rate yourself one to five. And finally, to declare the praises. I love this. Peter says it so powerfully here. Declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness, verse nine, into his marvelous life. The final beam is the one that causes me the most perplexity. Did you put that one up already? Thanks, Don. Down here in the corner, it's missions and evangelism. And friends, this is what drives the church. By the way, after the first service, someone gave me this nifty little thing. Let's see if I can get this right. Who said, ooh, is that like you? See, I can get right to it. This in a hand of a teenager in this place would be deadly. I would never get the sermon. Okay. There's three things here that I think are indispensable. In fact, in any church in the world, these three things, prayer, relationships, and this one, mission and evangelism. The other two really are byproducts of those three happening, for example. Those three are indispensable. And what really staggers me, just perplexes me, is why it seems so difficult for so many of us in our church to lay hold of what it means just to share our simple faith with other people. I struggle with that. At the promise keepers rally just a little bit ago, the first night, and we had several testimonies in the first service about this. We didn't have them in this service for whatever reason. The very first thing, when the rally started, there was a little bit of worship, not a whole lot. And Tony Evans got up and gave a message. And it was a good message. I would say, he would probably say, wasn't a great message. It was simple figures. And it wasn't like there was anyth