Ten Truths For the New Millennium V, Life-Giving Relationships Be Connected

I heard Keith Kraft did a great job last week, and those of you who got the tape were disappointed that the whole message wasn't there. Well, they've corrected that and you can get an updated tape. The reason is he went too long. My tapes never go too long, so they'll be back there as usual. Well, the whole world, it seems, is getting connected. I thought about this this week. Probably the single most obvious advancement in our culture in the last ten years has been that of communications. These are everywhere, aren't they? These little cell phones? They're all over the place. I was going to have this ring for a dramatic moment, but, you know, I won't tell you who my carrier is, but it, well, you can almost hear her. It doesn't ring in here. It's kind of a blessing. I think more cell phones would go off. The reason is with all the metal and so, I suppose the signal just doesn't get through. Cell phones are changing the way we communicate. And think of all the other kinds of things that are happening. Think of all the ways they've changed just in the last eight or ten years. It's almost embarrassing. We have so many opportunities to talk. Now, this has made part of our culture very happy. I won't tell you which part, but most of you know which part. AT&T recently came out, by the way, with a program they call their Family Member Deal. All family members talk for free on their cell phones. And so they encourage you to buy one for every member of your family. And that's a great marketing tool, isn't it? But how many 14-year-old growers are going to call their 11-year-old brother? That's not the way it's going to work. And there's all kinds of things out there getting us to talk more and more. There's pagers and navigational systems and all. And then the Internet, the most obvious change in the last eight or ten years. There'll be 200 million Internet users by the end of this year. And experts say 500 million by the year of 2001. Billions of dollars, in fact, billions of dollars will be spent this year, 1999 alone, laying 28 million miles of fiber-optic cable around the world. And there are, as I speak, 1,500 satellites flying up above in the skies for telecommunications. Now, there's a wonderful message in all this, and the message is that people want to be in touch. People want to know what's going on and they want to be in touch with each other. This past Thursday, Carol was called to serve on jury duty. And so she, one time in the year, had to drive down Interstate 279 during rush hour. And on that Thursday, if you're a commuter, you know there was an accident there by the Bellevue-Westview exit, and things were backed way up. And so about a quarter of eight, my phone rings at home, and it's Carol on her cell phone. She says, Honey, I'm just stopped dead in traffic. Must be an accident. Now I'm thinking, Why is she calling me? What am I supposed to do? Get a helicopter and get in there and rescue you and get you out and get you down? No, why was she calling me? She just wanted someone to share her pain. Someone to experience what she was going through. And that's just part of what we're wired that way. We want people to be in life with us. Now our focus this morning is on something much more important than electronic communications. It's on relational connecting. I want to talk about connecting at the heart level. See, for the past 30 years, there's been a strong emphasis in our culture on personal autonomy. Self-fulfillment. Self-help. Get your own piece of the pie. Make things work. Prove that you can make it on your own kind of thinking. And that has produced a very disconnected society, at least at the relational level. I personally think that the whole communications revolution is in part a reaction to the absence of deep, meaningful relationship. People really don't know each other. The idea of neighborhood is losing its meaning in our culture today. In many communities, people just don't even talk to each other. I was personally embarrassed here not long ago. And we live on a fairly busy street. But our neighbor from across the street came over to show us some photographs that she had taken of the sunrise and some things that she thought were beautiful about her home. And she had to introduce herself to us. And I didn't want to tell her, you know, I'm Pastor Jay from Northridge. She said, well, I know who you are. I think you're from that real friendly church. You just don't know your neighbors. Look at the first scripture it says in your outline. It is not good for man to be alone. We have a universal need to belong. I mean, even Jesus, who was the most self-sufficient person that ever lived, had friends. In fact, John 11 says that he loved his friends. He wept when they went through pain. So if Jesus needed friends, if he needed connecting, do you think we might need it as well? Scripturally speaking, the word for this kind of connection, connection at the deepest level, is the word koinonia in Greek, or the word for fellowship. It's fellowship. Fellowship is much more than meeting together for coffee and cookies at the end of the service. It's not what most of us have associated over the years with being together, you know, at a dinner, covered dish, that's the fellowship thing of church. It's much more than that, friends. It's more than networking and touching base and making contacts. True fellowship is soul-to-soul connecting in humility, total honesty, and listen, radical dependence. I'm going to say that again. Fellowship, at its core, is soul-to-soul connection in humility, total honesty, and radical dependence. Something most people, listen, most people in the world today haven't experienced true fellowship. A lot of Christians have not experienced true fellowship. They don't really know people at a deeper level. Now, we easily have social connections and emotional ones and psychological kinds of understandings of what's going on with people, even sexual connections, but few have soul-to-soul connections. And they are what make life so rich, aren't they? I mean, aren't... I saw a bumper sticker this week that really gripped me. It said, Love is the sole purpose for living. Now, I don't know, that could have, I guess, been a mystical sort of New Agey thing, but I took it the way I believe the Lord would take it, and that is that people matter. Relationships matter. Love is what life is about. And if you don't know how to connect, you're not going to be able to love. You can go through all the motions, and this is what love and life is really all about. Now, why is this so important for you today? Well, let me give you three reasons. There are numerous studies, recent studies, studies that have been produced by universities around the country that say that your psychological, and even physical and emotional well-being are greatly improved by connecting. So the first one is, your personal well-being. That's why you should be connected. The second, and probably more obvious one to us today, is that your spiritual growth. Your spiritual growth will be greatly affected by whether or not you are connected. Friends, let's make this really clear today. If you're not connected, you will not become the person in God that He intended for you to be. An author that I came across recently, Edward Hallowell, wrote in his book called Connect This. He said, We are a nation of doers. We hurry from place to place, filling our lives with all kinds of activities, sometimes over-scheduling our kids and ourselves. But what really sustains us emotionally, psychologically and physically is connectedness. The feeling that we are part of something that matters, something larger than ourselves that gives life meaning. Isn't that true? I want to be connected to something that's bigger than my little world. And here's the exciting thing. You're in a church today that's bigger than your little world. You're in part of something that's bigger than just what you can affect. One of the things I love is that together we're going to affect thousands of kids all around the world. I couldn't do that in Jay's little world. We as a church are holding up hope to this whole community because we're doing it together. And that's exciting to me. That's thrilling to me. Now, let me talk about the pictures that God gives us in His Word. There's a third one, if you're taking notes here. And that is the spiritual contribution you're making to someone else's life. Let's make sure we get that one up there. You see, one of the things that brings great joy to my heart is the fact that someone will come up to me and say, you really made a difference in my life. And that only happened because someone made a difference in my life. I've shared this story many times. When I was 18 years old and I was sort of a lost, arrogant freshman in college, a young man reached out to me. I mean, he got in my face and said, I'm having a Bible study and I'd really like you to come. And I said, well, maybe. And I told this story before, but I kept resisting him probably for about two months until finally I said, oh, what the heck. And my life changed because of that. It changed radically. I had fellowship with that man over the years. I ended up, someone asked me after the first service, how did I end up in ministry? And the reason I did was because three years later, four years later, after school, college graduation, he went on to seminary and then he talked to me and I went out and followed him there. You see, you never know when a connection is going to change the course of your life, the contribution you're going to make to others. That could happen today as a result of being here. So, let me give you now four biblical metaphors, four biblical metaphors of what the church is to be like. And, you know, I want to say this, especially in this service, this is important because for many of us the idea of church is very tempered by what we've experienced when we were growing up. A lot of us remember church as the place we went on Sunday morning from eleven to twelve or we went to mass, we did our thing in church and that was the definition. Now, friends, I want to talk about it differently than that. It's really important that you grasp this because if you don't see church as more than the service that you're going to or what you're attending on Sunday morning, you're going to miss the essence. The essence of church is a group. The essence of church is being together. Listen to this, when you're together, you're warmer. Some of you are freezing right now. I'm watching you put your coats on one by one. Now, Darren, go out and check on that again, please. Seriously. So, just look at it this way, when you get really connected, your body heat will raise the experience of your life right here. So, look at it that way. I have someone checking on that and I'm not sure why it hasn't come back on. But the point is that being in church, being here on a Sunday morning, that's not what church is. Church is about a group of people walking together in the things of God. In essence, it's about relationship. And I really believe that a lot of you have yet to really grasp that. You know, this Sunday alone, there's going to be about 2,000 adults in services here at North Way. But only about 50% of you are really connected. And I don't think the other 50% of you are rebellious. I don't think that the other 50% of you are disinterested because you know that the people in this church are interesting people to be with. I don't think that it's even you're too busy. Because how many of you have time for what's important? You know what I think it is? I think that you have basically misunderstood what the essence of the Christian life is about. And I hope today that you'll reconsider that commitment. Because this is one of the essentials. This is one of the ten truths for the new millennium. You've got to be connected. Don't carry into the year 2000 disconnectedness. It will hold you back. And my prayer would be that you would not let that happen. Now let's look at these four biblical metaphors. What's it like to be spiritually connected? And by the way, these are all biblical pictures. There's lots of other pictures. I've heard North Way described as a hospital for people in need and you know, a bus station of diversity and all these different things. But let me just talk to you about four biblical metaphors. Here we go. Number one, it's like being a brick in a building. It's literally like being a brick in a building. Look at the first scripture. Let's read it together. You believers are like a building that God owns. Jesus, the most important stone in the building, is the most important stone in the building. And by the way, if you're offended about being called a brick, Jesus is called a stone. So he's the cornerstone. And the whole building is joined together in Christ. You are being built into a place where God lives through the Spirit. Now, let's grasp this because it's very important that you understand, man has always sensed the presence of God and always wanted to build him something. All the way back in Old Testament times. Wanted to build altars. Wanted to build places for God to live. If you've ever been overseas and seen some of the great cathedrals, there are places, monumental achievements of construction. Some of the cathedrals in Europe have taken five or six hundred years to build. I mean, imagine working on one of those. Where are you going today? Well, I'm going to put the next course of block on. Three hundred years later, how's it going out there? Well, we're up to about here now. I mean, five hundred years. Imagine being part of that giving campaign. Five hundred years. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to create, listen, they did. They wanted to create a place where they thought God would dwell. But the Bible says He doesn't dwell in buildings like this, no matter how spectacular they are. He doesn't just dwell when we have services. He dwells in the living temple. He dwells in His people. And each one of us form part of that living temple. That's where the Lord dwells. That's who's here today. That's who you experience, not because of any building, but because of the people that He's assembled together. Now, I remember when we were building this facility, just a little over five years ago, I would come down regularly here to watch the progress and to pray and to just envision how things were coming together and just make little changes that I could suggest and that kind of thing. And it was quite a process because everything really had to work well. And one of the scariest moments was several months into it, it was probably in the summertime of 1994, and this big auditorium, right about out here, where the blankets are, there was this huge center pillar right here going straight up. And I remember saying to Roy Thompson and Jack Lightbody, who were our building team member leaders, I said, you know, I'm sure that we designed this without any pillars in the main auditorium. And they reassured me. They said, that's coming out. They said, it's just in there for support. As we build up all the pieces that go together, there's like seven or eight big I-beams that meet up there. And I said, well, you're sure when they pull that out, that's... So the day came, I think it was early in August, to pull out that pillar. And I remember Jack called me and said, do you want to be here? And when they take that out, he said, no. Just give me a call when it's over. And they did, and everything felt perfectly in place and held. And it was, you know, how do you feel out there right now? Pretty secure? I hope so. And I noticed some things about the building. There was thousands of different parts in this building. It was a pretty complicated building, at least in terms of what I've seen happen before. And there were switch boxes here and wires there and tubes here and pipes and pieces of wood for this and that and windows and the whole thing. And every part of that building that got fitted into place was part of the building. And if it was a half inch too long, they had to cut it off so it would fit in. And if it was a half inch too short and didn't meet, it wouldn't work. And over time, all these different parts got picked up. I would walk in here some days, especially over in the office wing, and remember seeing just all kinds of, you know, piles of boxes of parts laying everywhere. And in the end, listen, there were hundreds of different pieces at one point that were in the building, but not part of the building. And some of it even got thrown away because it wasn't the right stuff. Do you see the analogy there? There are literally right now in our church hundreds of people who are in the building, but not connected to the building of God. And my prayer would be that every single person who's in this building would become part of the building of God. Because your experience will be dramatically changed. Let me assure you, once you get connected with other believers, or other seekers, if that be the case, you will find your experience of God's grace and love to be dramatically different than when you've experienced without Him. So, the challenge is up to you. You see, in the end, why does God have us see a metaphor of a building? Because in a building, the connected parts, here's the next blank, support each other. We support each other. The walls support the ceiling, and the roof supports the whole structure, and all the rest fits together, and it all supports each other. And friends, all of us need support. You may be in a wonderful, strong place right now, and you don't really need a whole lot of others, but you never know when you're going to need support. You never know when you're going to need physical, spiritual, emotional support. Where would you go if you don't have a family to go to? Where would you go if you need some support? And if you're in a time right now when you don't know where to turn, you know how important a building is. I want you to hear a testimony this morning from a couple that had a lot of things going really well in their life, but they hit a time in their life when they needed support. And give Peter and Karen Shogle a warm welcome as they come up to share. Thank you. And they've had a few members of their cell group here to stand with them as they share, because they're integral to this story. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. It's plenty warm up here underneath the lights, so if any of you want to share my testimony instead of me up here and warm up a little bit more, you're welcome to come on up here. Three years ago, Karen and I stood up here and shared with you our testimony of how we became Christians and how we found the Lord. And today we want to share how the Lord has worked in our lives and has connected us with others in His body. I want to share with you a scripture that is a theme for our cell group. It's Hebrews 10, 24. 10, 24 through 25. And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another in all the more as the day is approaching. We want to share our story of a group that has spurred Karen and I on towards love and has encouraged us daily. We want to encourage you to consider how your lives and experiences could be more fulfilling by connecting with others in a cell group or rebuilders or generations. In the fall of 1996, Bob and Cindy's aunts invited us to a cell group, which they were just starting up. Karen and I, as baby Christians, were energized by that and thought it would be great to share with other people. This was especially important for us since we were new to the area and were not from the area and we wanted to have an opportunity to make friends. Although this opportunity was great for us, it was pretty scary for both of us since we were both first-born personalities and overachievers. So the idea of us meeting with other people who knew more about the Bible and God than us was a little bit scary and didn't sound exactly like it would be a fun time for us. But we went, not knowing what to expect, and God and the group made it fun for us. How many of you can relate to that feeling when you went to Alpha or Discovery Group for the very first time and didn't know what to expect? In the cell group with Bob and Cindy, we met with six other families and the friendships grew very quickly. Karen and I grew by leaps and bounds in our relationship with each other and with the Lord. Bob approached us about interning. And for those of you that are not familiar with the cell group lingo, interning is the second, well, actually third in command in the cell groups. When Bob approached us about interning, Karen and I asked, you know, us? Lined up for leadership, God? Well, God, you have to be kidding about that. Apparently he wasn't kidding. Simultaneously, our paths intersected with new friends through another small group during our Alpha course. New members were interested in joining our cell group. And when the cell grows, it usually is a sign for multiplication. Multiplication is not a fun process with the cell groups. But God had carried us through and had plans for everyone in our group. God was moving our group towards growth and division despite us not thinking that we were ready for it. Since Karen is a much better storyteller and much more entertaining than I am, I'm going to let her pick it up at this point. Thank you for that vote of confidence. I'm going to pretend you're all five because it's easier to tell a story to a five-year-old. In January of 1998, Peter and I met with our brand-new cell group. And I have to tell you how amazing it was from the onset. We often started our discussion time with an icebreaker. And one of the very first nights we met, Peter said to the group, What's one of the most important things you've lost? I myself expected really superficial answers such as, Oh, I lost my wallet or my hard drive crashed and I lost a very important document. But that is not what we heard. Through the Holy Spirit's prompting, we received really personal responses. Things like, I lost a very good important friend. I lost my youth because of things I had done in my past. It was amazing to witness lives and hearts opening up each week as we met on Sunday evenings as the families grew closer and closer together. For Peter and I, the group became more than just acquaintances. These people became our families. We celebrated birthdays. We barbecued. We babysat for each other. It really became our family because we didn't have family in the area. I didn't really understand how important that was becoming until Peter and I experienced a very unpleasant happening. In the summer of 1998, Peter and I began to grow distant. On the surface, we looked like we had it all together. We were leading a cell group, right? It was great, but it wasn't great. We were not seeing eye to eye and we honestly were fighting often. I thought it would work out. Families fight. People fight. It'll be okay. It's just a season. And I was able to convince myself that it would be okay until one Sunday afternoon when Peter told me he had had it. He was finished fighting and he wanted to leave. I didn't call my mom on my cell phone. I didn't call my college roommate. I turned to these amazing people. I told you we met on Sunday evenings and wasn't it God's timing that this roller coaster ride began on a Sunday afternoon. I went to the meeting that night without Peter and from that night on, our lives changed and these people encouraged us. We were really able to rebuild our marriage. They encouraged us to seek counseling. They babysat so we could. They fed us. They didn't clean my house, but they took care of my children so Peter and I could really focus on each other and our relationship with each other as well as our relationship with Christ. Jay often speaks as he is today about community and it was these people that became our community. They became our family, as I said. I think God put this safety net in place for us so that he could knock on the door and say, hey, now you need to look at yourselves. And if it hadn't been for that safety net, and that support system, I don't think we would have made it through that time that he put us through. I'm happy to say that we stand here now in a much better place than we ever could have been without the support and love of these people. They encouraged us and they loved us and I would like to encourage all of you who may be displaced from your families for one reason or another or who may really be searching for intimate friendships, I would encourage you to look at the opportunities here at this place. And as it is written in Hebrews, let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up on meeting together as some are in the habit, but let us encourage one another and all the more as the day is approaching. Thank you. I want to thank Peter and Karen for their transparency, which helps us all realize that this spiritual journey that we're on isn't always a gold-plated road. It can have challenges. The second metaphor that comes up in Scripture, in fact it's the most common one that Paul refers us to, is that of a part of a body. He says that the church is the body of Christ. Romans 12, 4 and 5, let's look at that Scripture together. Just as there are many parts to our body, so it is with Christ's body. We are all part of it and it takes every one of us to make it complete, for we each have different work to do. So we belong to each other and each of us needs all the others. We're all different, we're all unique. Just one look up here will tell you that. Every person that God has created is unique. We all have different roles to play. Wouldn't it be weird if our body parts all did the same thing? What if everything was an eye? We had eyes here. It would be kind of grotesque, wouldn't it? What if every part of our body had digestive qualities? Just imagine how much pain there would be to that process. Our bodies are telling us something. The way things function with different purposefulness, that's the design of God. That's how the church is supposed to be. People say things to me like this. I've come here to North Way for a while. It's just so big. I don't know really that I can make much of a contribution. I feel so little and insignificant. I had one person say, I feel like a toenail in this body. Have you ever lost a toenail? I've had two minor surgical toenail procedures. Would you like some details on that? Very, very painful. Our bodies are created so that even the smallest little thing affects them. Have you ever had a splinter? You couldn't even barely see it, but it affected you. Size and significance have very little to do with each other when it comes to the body. And make no mistake, don't look at visibility and giftedness and all this. That means it's insignificant. In fact, the Bible says that it's to the humblest of parts that God gives the greatest honor. See, in my house, the most important light in my house isn't the chandelier over the dining room table. It's the little night light that's in the bathroom so I don't stub my toe when I get up at night. Or maybe someone said to me, it's the refrigerator light that comes on when I go in there at nighttime. What's the most important thing? It has nothing to do with size. It has to do with its purpose. And God has given each of us a significance in his body. You're not here by accident. And look what it says here. So we belong to each other. I want you to circle that. And each of us needs all the others. And when I was preparing this message, this jumped out at me. One of the things that gets lost here at our church is we sometimes don't understand that we're needed. That when you miss your small group, or worse than that, you're not part of one at all, that we miss the contribution of your insight and wisdom and your love and your gifts. We need each other. That's the way God designed the church to work. And so we must all be connected in order to provide that commitment to each other. You can't be an effective believer and grow spiritually without being connected. Why did God choose a body? Well, because in a body the connected parts grow together. They grow together. If my hand was disconnected from my body, would it keep growing? No. If a leg's disconnected, does it keep growing? No. And what happens is people get disconnected and they stop growing. And when they stop growing, they start falling. And when they start falling, all kinds of very bizarre things happen in their lives. Please don't make the same mistake that millions of well-intended Christians in America are making right now, and that is they're detached and disconnected, and it's the number one reason why the church in America has been ineffective in changing the culture. You want to know why the culture is the same as it's been? And actually slipping down in terms of the moral standard of where we are? It's because the church is losing its voice because so many Christians have chosen to be disconnected. If we would get connected, we could change this country. But we choose to just kind of play it sort of loose and just kind of come and go and slip in and out as we can. Friends, if you're serious about your spiritual growth, you must get connected to a body, a church body that will help you to grow. And this is made by the individual little decisions that you make every time you come in this place. We're going to see a little skit up here, and I hope you can all see this. Take careful note here. You're going to see two couples, and they represent really sort of the spectrum of what happens here at North Way on a given Sunday. They're going to capture sort of the essential decisions that all of us have to make when it comes to being part of a body. So watch this skit. Ask the question of yourself, which attitude has really gone on inside of me when it comes to being part of the body here at North Way? The skit's called Choices. Welcome. Thanks for coming. Good morning. How are you? It's good to see you. Welcome. Thanks for coming. Hi. Thank you. Wow. This place is really big. Yeah. So, uh, where do you want to sit? Somewhere down the center's fine. That's good. Hey. Hey, Eric. These seats are comfy. They look new. This place must be busy. Look at all the announcements on that big screen. Oh, look, Bill. They have a children's ministry for all ages. Each of the kids would have somewhere to go here. Now, honey, don't get excited too soon. We haven't seen the service yet. But we agreed that the church that we chose would have to have something good for the kids. I know, but let's see if it has something good for us first. Looks like they're about to start. Wow. Look at all those singers. Welcome. Excuse me. Yes. All right. Welcome. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Oh, Ralph, look, we're late. Everybody's seated, and they've started singing already. Good. With any luck, we've missed most of the singing part. Well, let's sit in the back so we can be close to the door. Oh, you just want to go. These people aren't going to get crazy like they do on TV, are they? You just want to go home to watch the game. Well, what's wrong with that? I enjoy sitting at home, relaxing in front of the TV, watching the game by myself. Ralph, we're always by ourselves. Well, it's more peaceful that way. People in your lives just tend to complicate things. I prefer to be by myself. Ralph, it's boring and lonely. Well, maybe we can find some new friends here. You know, like meet some people here. Look, we came here because we're new in town. You said we had to join a church. We don't have to go start meeting everybody in the place. Before we get started, stand and greet someone and tell them how long you've been attending the church here. Oh, brother. Like I need this. Ralph, are you sleeping? Are you kidding? It's too cold in here to sleep. Is he done preaching yet? He's about to take the offering. Uh-oh. All right, Irene, it's time to go. Oh, just wait a minute. Look, we have to beat the traffic rush. Oh, Ralph, you're the only one in a rush to get out of here. Look, we've done our duty for this Sunday. We've got what we come after. Let's go. What did we come for? So, Bill, what'd you think of it? Well, I