Restoring Relationships - Renovation of the Heart

Welcome to Trinity Sermons.

Thanks for listening in today to our sermon here at Trinity Church, Streetsville.

We are a church that welcomes people of all backgrounds and are at all stages of life,

and we are growing together in our love for Jesus, in living like Jesus,

in our desire to lead others to Jesus.

This is episode 5 and the final sermon from our series Fixer Upper, Renovation of the Heart.

We are also excited to be welcoming Erikan Olaie back with us for a second time this series.

She is going to be exploring relationships and how we can renovate them

as we move towards a deeper spiritual change.

I'm sure you're really going to find this sermon helpful and encouraging today.

Before we begin, I'd like to ask you to take a minute to rate and review our podcast,

so that way we can better share these good messages with others.

Thanks again for listening. God bless.

It is my delight this morning to read from the first book of John, chapter 4, verses 7 to 14.

John 4:7–14

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.

Everyone who loves God has been born of God and knows God.

Whoever does not love God does not know God, because God is love.

This is how God showed his love among us.

He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.

This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us.

He has given us of his Spirit, and we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.

This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning Trinity.

My name is Erikan Olaye and I'm an intern here.

And I want to say it is an absolute pleasure to be here this morning to share the message.

This is the last sermon in the series, Fixer Upper, Renovation of the Heart.

And today I'm going to be speaking to you about relationships.

But before I get to that, I'm going to start by expressing my gratitude to God for his gracious and ever abiding love towards all of us,

whether we're here in person or we're joining online.

A big thank you to Rob for the opportunity to be here to speak on this topic and for all the support and the work he's put into setting up the slides that we're going to be going through.

And also to Libby.

Libby just made sure that everything came together today and she wouldn't rest until she got that done.

So thank you so much, Libby.

And I want to thank all the staff, the volunteers, everybody.

It's our hands together that makes a day like this come to be.

Thank you so much for the support you have given me all the way till today.

Natalie, Sally, Mary, Elizabeth.

I couldn't name everybody, but thank you so much.

And thank you to every one of you that I have interacted with.

I really appreciate it.

And I am also going to say a big thank you to Rob and Scott, sorry, to Scott and Libby for allowing us to come into their home, granting us access to their home.

So we can see the parallels between renovating a structure and the renovation that God is doing in our hearts with our cooperation, of course.

So we started the series sometime in June and Rob spoke to us, you know, gave an introductory sermon.

And then we spoke about the costs of following Jesus, the cost of discipleship,

basically the cost of renovating our hearts.

And then we had a guest, Pika Luke, who came and spoke to us about feelings, you know, how our hearts get renovated in the area of our feelings.

And then after that, Rob spoke to us again about the fact that when people come to see a place that's been renovated,

they're not looking at the start and the things that are behind the scene, it's the exterior.

And so in the same way, the renovation that takes place in our hearts shows up in our character.

And so that leads us today.

We're going to be speaking about relationships.

And as we know, this is a very, very big topic.

Where do we start?

But what I decided was to go back and start and remind us that our faith is really a matter of relationships.

It's how God relates with us.

It's how we relate with God and it's how we relate with one another.

And I can take us back to the very beginning, to the narrative in Genesis when Adam and Eve fell.

And they distanced themselves because that's what happens when relationships are broken.

And God did not sit back on his throne and say, well, where are you Adam?

God came down.

The Bible says he came to the garden and he was walking there.

And then he said, Adam, where are you?

And if we take nothing away from the message today, that's what we need to take away,

that because we know God and that we have the God-like nature in us, it is always left to us

to be the one that will leave the comfort of our spots.

The way God left heaven and came down, he didn't say, Adam,

where are you? He came to where he last saw Adam.

That is our job.

We are the ones that will need to go to the place we last saw that person,

where we had the broken relationship and say to them, where are you?

It's always going to be on us.

And so I'm going to tell us right away that to rebuild or renovate our hearts in the area of relationship,

the first requirement is love.

I know you probably thought I had forgotten the clicker again today.

I didn't.

So relationships are built on love.

Unconditional, undeserved, agape love.

We grant others the dignity of loving them because it's the same kind of dignity that God has granted to us,

irrespective of how or whatever situation is going on in our lives.

And Dallas Willard in his book said that for us as human beings to be naturally OK,

that we have to be rooted in what he calls circles of sufficiency.

And those circles of sufficiency are the things that support us through life,

because, again, the Christian faith is not a do-it-alone kind of thing.

Dallas Willard used the and then he said, we are supported by the circles.

And these circles that support us invariably supported by the Trinitarian God.

And he kept using the Trinitarian God.

And I wondered why he was doing that.

Then it occurred to me that he just wanted us to know that God is three people in one separate, distinct and yet in relationship.

And so what I did was to try to scope out what I thought that could look like with us at the center.

And then we have our family and our friends and our church group and our church and invariably God.

And we're all, you know, so well protected.

But this is a perfect picture.

I doubt that any one of our lives really looks that way.

It's more likely that we have something that looks like this.

It's all broken. It's all fragmented.

Excuse me.

We have circles, you know, joints here and there.

It's because we're a work in progress, always a work in progress, always going through a sanctification.

And what he said was that it is very difficult.

And I agree with him.

It's very difficult for us to for us to find anyone who's gone through life without having been deeply hurt in their relationships.

And it could be our intimate relationships, our family relationships, our siblings, our children, our friends or any other kind of relationship.

But relationships come with a lot of hurt.

And when we get hurt, we tend to do two things.

We either attack or we distance ourselves, we withdraw.

And we end up with what looks like that broken circles, bits and pieces here and there.

And that's because when we get hurt, there is woundedness in us.

And I don't know where we are today.

Perhaps we're dealing with woundedness in one area of life or the other.

I want to encourage us and say, if you took a head count, a lot of us would raise our hands to that.

But there is hope because God knows our nature and our frailty.

And he has made provision in the Bible to encourage us.

And so we have Bible verse like Psalm 147, verse three, that says he heals the broken hearted and he binds up their wounds.

You see, to to prepare for the sermon, I had to make a few calls to a few people.

People that I felt I had to reach out to them one more time, one more time.

It was the only way I could come up here and deliver the sermon on relationships.

And maybe you will have to do the same thing when this is all over.

So, like we've said, it is not a do it yourself process at all.

Just like Scott and Libby need the right in the video, they said it.

They needed help. They recommended that you employ somebody that knows what they're doing.

We need help as well. We cannot do renovate or restore or rebuild our relationships all by ourselves.

We need the help of community, a good community that supports us.

We need the help of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes we forget that part of the work of the Holy Spirit is to guide us in all things.

To guide us on what to say to that person, when to say it, what to do and when to do it.

And so we cannot do it and just go off on our own.

We always have to invite him to support us as we take steps to rebuild, restore that relationship.

With that child, with the mother, with the parents, with the family member, whoever it is.

You're going to need a supportive group.

And sometimes you get it right the first time you try.

And sometimes it doesn't work.

But this is what the Bible says in the book of Romans 12.

It says, for as long as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

And so it always will always come back to us.

And so we continue to pray that God will take that person to the space where they are able to hear

and to know how much the relationship means to both of us.

So what are the kind of tools that we need for this renovation project?

We're circling back to love.

When we want to renovate our hearts in the area of relationship, love is the principal thing.

Because love bears witness to the nature of God in us.

In our reading today, we heard that God is love.

So the very nature of God is that of love, love towards us.

And that same love is the kind of love that will motivate us to love others unconditionally,

that will make us to reach out even when they are the ones that wounded us.

It doesn't mean we have to rush off to do it.

No, we have to heal and be in a good space.

But invariably, we're going to have to have that discussion.

And Scripture says that by this, by the showing of love is how people will know that we're the disciples of Christ.

That's so interesting.

Because it's not by how much we serve.

It's not by how much we preach.

It's not by the measure of our relatedness.

It's none of those things.

Those things are important.

But it's by how much we show love and we reach out to others in love.

And 1 Peter 4, verse 8 teaches us that love covers a multitude of sins.

1 Peter 4:8

I'm sure you can relate with this, given how many times you've had to forgive maybe your children or people around you.

But I'll tell you something about something that happened to me.

My son had a phone and I gave it to him and I told him, you know, this is the data limit and please don't go over this.

And he was OK with that.

And we had that agreement.

And then he went off for basketball.

And while he was away, I think he ran out of data.

And each time they texted him, do you need more data?

He said, yes.

Do you need? Yes, yes, yes.

And I was left with a bill that really shocked me.

And I said, I'm going to take that phone away.

How could you do this and this and that and the other one?

But even that one was covered, even that the multitude of the bills, it was covered.

I didn't take the phone away.

I taught him to be more responsible in using his phone.

But that's how God is towards us.

And the next renovation step would be to repair the broken links.

Like we saw in that diagram, there were circles, some of them full, some of them broken.

What are we going to do to repair them?

Yes, we're going to have love, but we're going to have to forgive for sure.

And how should we forgive?

We should forgive the way Christ forgave us.

That is something that each time it comes to my mind, it's very difficult for me not to forgive anything,

because each time I remember how Christ forgives us, how God forgives us.

When you remember that, you'll find it very easy to forgive other people and reach out to them.

It's important that we release the burden and not hold the grudge,

that we allow healing and restoration.

It's okay to be the first person to go and say sorry, even when you are not the person that was wrong,

because that's what you do to repair and rebuild the relationship.

Sometimes our hearts lock us in and lock us down.

We refuse to yield, but we invite the Holy Spirit to help us in that area.

We also need to reconnect.

Look for the stories that are common to you.

Look for the stories that you've shared that are good stories and thicken those stories.

Let those be the things you dwell on.

Dwell on whatever is good, whatever is pure, whatever is going to build up.

That's what we need to dwell on.

Finally, we need to yield to the Holy Spirit,

because again, this is a job that can only be done with the help of the Holy Spirit.

So, when we do these basic things, we forgive, we reach out, we reconnect,

we thicken the positive things, and we try to reunite.

What happens is that...

Did I lose a slide here?

We do have...

What happens is that we begin to have godly communities around us.

We have godly communities around us that provide support to us.

A lot of times we need a hand.

We need a hand up, we need a hand shake,

we need a hug, we need a lifting hand, we need a hand of fellowship,

whatever nature of reaching out or hand we need,

we will have people to support us.

The more we work on rebuilding and restoring those broken lines and links,

the more we're going to have a more fulsome support system.

And when our circles of sufficiency are completed,

as we work on building them and they become completed,

we have more stakeholders in our lives that will support us and lift us higher.

And so what we will end up with will not be that little us at the beginning when we started.

See the difference between where we started and what we have now?

We're still the yellow little one up there.

But look at all the circles at the bottom, we're higher now.

And we're more balanced and we're more stable.

And we're taller than we could ever be.

Because we took the time to rebuild this foundational support system of our relationship.

And like I said, it's a work for all of us.

We need the community to get this done.

And what are the kind of things that we can do?

We can join a life group.

If you are new to the church and you are still trying to figure out things,

you can join a life group, a group of people that have life like minds, like passion, like you.

You can settle into it.

You can grow and you can mature.

And there will come a time when you will be the one supporting others as well.

So just to round up, we need to be the ones that will reach out to other people and say,

where are you?

That's what God does.

He started that from the beginning of creation.

He's still asking, where are you?

Adam, where are you?

Erikan, where are you?

And that's what we need to do.

God knew a relationship had been broken.

God knew Adam and Eve had done something wrong.

But he went after them with his love and said, where are you?

That's what we need to do.

And we pray that the Holy Spirit will help us as we embark on the journey of renovating

our hearts, rebuilding, restoring the relationships that have been broken so that we will all

come to the place where we have full circles of sufficiency around us.

Amen.

Thank you for joining our podcast today.

If you found what Erikan said helpful and inspiring, please take a minute to rate and

review our podcast.

And make sure to listen next week as we start a new sermon series, Jesus is the Question.

Jesus asked a lot of questions.

In fact, perhaps he asked more questions than he gave answers.

Each week we'll be reflecting on one of these questions and learning a little bit more about

why he asked them and what we can learn from them.

Thanks again and until next time.

This sermon was taken from the July 16th, 2023 sermon at Trinity Church, Streetsville

in Mississauga, Ontario.