The Church Where People Find Jesus

Luke 2, verse 41,.

Luke 2:41

Every year his parents traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover festival.

When he was 12 years old, they went up according to the custom of the festival After those days were over.

As they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem.

But his parents did not know it.

Assuming he was in the traveling party, they went to day's journey.

Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends.

When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all those who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.

When his parents saw him, they were astonished and his mother said to him Son, why have you treated us like this?

Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.

Why were you searching for me, he asked.

Didn't you know that it was necessary for me to be in my father's house?

But they did not understand what he said to them.

Well, I have a bit of a confession to make.

Once, when my oldest was very young, like still a baby, do you remember supermarkets used to have those cradles like a car seat for babies For the trolleys you could push them around in, yeah.

And I got home to discover that I'd left my baby in the shopping trolley.

Have you ever lost a kid?

Well, my kid wasn't lost.

He took me about three seconds not three days, fortunately to realize and find him safe and sound.

We only lived around the corner and fortunately perhaps even more fortunately no one noticed my negligent parenting.

So I can solve myself with the reading today.

So I didn't take nearly as long to discover my child was missing as Mary and Joseph.

On the other hand, I guess Jesus was 12, so it was a little different, in fairness to them and not it to me the social setting was quite different.

Of course they were traveling as part of a group and it's likely that the men and women traveled separately.

So you can imagine Mary and Joseph both thought oh, the other one has Jesus.

They were traveling with friends and relatives from a relatively small village.

So oh, he's with someone else, they've got it.

They would have just made that assumption.

Until they get to their overnight stop and start to panic.

And by the time they find Jesus, three days have passed since they left him behind and Mary admonishes Jesus.

Why have you done this?

Why have you treated us like this?

And there's a lot we could unpack in this message this morning, but what really strikes me is Jesus' response to his mom.

He said oh, didn't you know I needed to be in my father's house.

Now there's a couple of ways we might read this.

At one level, we might read this as the excitement of a child who's become distracted.

But you know, I don't think Jesus needed to be in his father's house.

Like a child needs ice cream, it's like, oh, I'm craving it, I have to have it.

I mean, you can imagine, after three days, if that was the case, the novelty would have well and truly worn off and he would have needed to find his children sorry, his parents, but when they find him he's actually quite content there.

I think the need Jesus is talking about, the necessity of being in his father's house, was his growing sense of identity he had as the son of God who'd been sent on a mission.

It's necessary for him to be there.

He needs to be there, as in.

This is actually why I exist, this is why I've come.

This is what I'm here for.

Don't you understand, mom and dad?

Evidently no, they didn't.

Well, we're in week three of Advent.

Advent means coming, and at Advent we celebrate Jesus' first coming.

We open our hearts to receive Him anew and we look forward to His return.

Many people are on a search for Jesus, although they probably wouldn't put it that way or recognize it as such.

But the Christmas message what do we think of when we think of that?

We think of peace, hope, joy.

And I tell you why.

Everyone wants that, don't they?

I don't know anyone who doesn't want peace, hope or joy.

And Jesus is the Prince of Peace.

His gospel is one of hope and all who receive it can receive joy through the Holy Spirit.

Very often our lives are like Mary and Joseph we travel along quite happily, not realizing something is missing, something very important, as it turns out.

And then, when we discover it's missing, we go on this desperate search, and people search in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places, and the world is more than happy to help you along and, in fact, to make a buck out of doing it.

If you go on social media, you'll find no end of advice and courses and products that are guaranteed to improve your life.

I've been on a bit of an organization drive recently and, frankly, I've been shocked at how much people will be willing to pay someone to help them get a little bit more organized, make a better to-do list, a better organization system.

Now look, I guess if you're earning big bucks, it's probably worth it.

Right Time is money, but I'm not that desperate.

But what do we do?

We try meditation, we try travel, relationship advice and, of course, sex, drugs and alcohol when we get really desperate.

Those of us who are Christians know that ultimately, none of this is satisfying, not in the long term.

We live with an awareness of a transcendent reality that rises above all the clutter of the world.

We have given our lives over to Christ and we have a sense of a higher calling.

And yet we live in a world full of frenetic activity, particularly at this time of the year, and a world full of slick marketing campaigns, and it's almost impossible to not get distracted by it all.

Does anyone manage to resist the distraction and the spending and everything else?

But it's actually really important that we don't get distracted, or not too distracted, because people are looking for Jesus and the church is their greatest hope of finding Him.

Now you've probably heard that you don't need to go to church to be a Christian, and that people can find God in all sorts of places, and that's partly true.

There are certainly places you will not find God, though, and there are places you probably feel a little more connected to Him.

I mean, how many people feel just that little bit more connected to God when you're out in nature?

Yeah, I think most of us do, but I wonder how many places Mary and Joseph had to look before they found Jesus.

There was a lot of places where Jesus was not, and only one where he was in His Father's house, and because that's what Temple was, it was a place where God lived on earth, so to speak, was like his earthly resident.

It was a place where heaven and earth met.

That was the idea of a temple, and Jesus had a mission to accomplish, and his heart was drawn to his father's house, for whom he was accomplishing that mission.

Did you know that Jesus is still found in his father's house, but the address of the temple has changed?

In 1 Corinthians 3.16, paul speaks to the church as a whole in Corinth and he says don't you yourselves know that you are God's temple and that the Spirit of God lives in you, in you all.

We, the church, are God's temple, god's house.

Jesus had to be in God's house because he had a mission to accomplish and he still has a mission to accomplish and he's still in God's house to accomplish it.

People are looking for answers to life's big questions, to the needs and their souls, and we have that answer, or at least we know a guy right.

If they come to church, will they find the one in whom the answers lie, and I don't just mean in the songs we sing or the message we preach.

Well, I hope people will find there and I hope they'll find them in the Sunday service.

But I don't even mean that.

I mean, can they see Jesus among his community of followers, in the way we live for him and the way we relate to one another and the way we love our neighbor?

Can they see Jesus' present and the spirit at work among his people?

I think, thankfully, bentley is the kind of church where Jesus is at work.

You know I have baptized more people in this church than I have in any other place.

I've done ministry.

I've only been here three years.

But we have to be on our guard because sometimes even good churches can lose their way.

You know, every declining church was once a strong church, and so we can't take for granted that things will stay the way they are.

So we need to ask ourselves constantly what kind of church is Jesus founded, and how do we make sure that we maintain the life-giving flavor of a Jesus-filled church?

How do we grow even stronger in it?

How do we rise up?

Well, mary and Joseph realized Jesus was missing from their group and they went in search of Him.

They assumed he was there until they actually looked for Him.

And so we do well to take stock of our lives and our church and our ministries, that we're involved in our groups from time to time, just to make sure that Jesus is still with us.

It ought to be more accurate, actually, that we're still with Jesus because it's His program, right?

He doesn't have to get with our program, we've got to get with His.

You know, as we skip forward 30 years or so, jesus has returned to the Father and now the Holy Spirit comes on His church.

Truly interesting that that didn't happen in the temple.

We're told that 150 disciples were gathered in an upper room, presumably in someone's house, the house where God well changed location from the temple building to the hearts of His people, christ's church.

What a church it was.

So we see in Acts 2.42 what kind of church it was.

It says they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

So it's good to remind the cells of these four things.

It was a church that boldly proclaimed the gospel.

That was the apostles' teaching.

They were completely sold out to the gospel of Jesus Christ and they were willing to suffer and to die for it.

But they didn't just proclaim it in the church meetings but on the streets and to their neighbors.

Are we a gospel proclaiming people?

That's the first thing we can do.

We ask Jesus to come and fill our church and our lives with a gospel boldness so people who are searching for Him can find Him.

Secondly, it was a praying church and we see throughout the New Testament that prayer is both a response to God's love and a response to His grace and praise and in worship, but also a response to the church's own desperate need for God's power and protection so that they can resist evil and persecution and rise up and proclaim Christ's gospel.

Jesus is found in a praying church.

Are we a praying church?

It was a fellowshiping church.

Now, fellowship wasn't just a cup of tea after church, although I love our morning teas.

They were bound together by the Holy Spirit in a rich and deep and sacrificial fellowship, as they cared for each other in ways that got their neighbors talking.

Jesus is found in relationally rich, deep, loving, fellowshiping churches.

How are we doing?

Ask Jesus to deepen our fellowship?

And they were a bread-breaking church, which is to say communion, the Lord's Supper.

That was central to their life together, and this imparted their shared meals with a deep spiritual significance and constantly reminded them of their identity in Christ.

Communion can just become an empty ritual.

We need to watch that, but if we let it, it becomes a deep witness of the presence of Christ among us.

So the question for us is are these parts of our lives and our church and our groups?

Where do we need more of the presence of Jesus with us and we just ask Him to fill us.

We invite Him in.

There's not a whole lot more we can do.

Really is there.

We can't manufacture it, but we can certainly make space and be hungry.

So some questions Are there parts of our lives or our church that aren't completely submitted to His Lordship?

Are there areas in our lives we say not this part, lord.

Are there areas where distractions or little sins have taken hold?

Are there areas where our faith and our fervour for Christ is waning?

What do we do?

We repent and we confess it to God and we ask Jesus to come and fill those spaces.

And I think, like Mary and Joseph, we need to and look me with losing my son.

We need to not shy away from the fact when we feel that Jesus may be missing from parts of our lives.

We have to confront the truth and instead what we do is we can diligently search for Him.

There's always more to find.

I love CS Lewis.

In the last battle, the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, the cry is as these people find themselves in heaven, further up and further in.

There is always further to go.

It's an eternal quest for the more of God.

And so may we be a people who are diligently searching for Jesus, so that the people who are searching for something they're not quite sure what, but we know what it is that they can find Jesus among us.

Not that they find us, but that they find Jesus in His temple, the church.

Let's pray, father.

I thank you that it is the presence of your spirit among us, the presence of Jesus by your spirit, that transforms our gathering into something mundane, and from something mundane it feels so mundane to us, lord, but it's something supernatural.

Father, I pray that you will make us a people who are constantly searching for more in Jesus and, father, that we will be a church where people can find Jesus and find hope and life and joy and peace In Jesus' name, amen.