Why the Next Move of God Is Around Tables

Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast.

Church of the Lookout is an older Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love.

Visit us online at thelookout.church.

This person has been unbelievably meaningful to me.

I don't I I honestly could say today, um, I don't know that I would still be here in the same kind of capacity or role if it wasn't for the work of God through through John Peterson.

And I mean that sincerely.

Um the words that God sent him to me and to this church in a time where we needed specific kind of instruction from the outside and a caring heart, somebody who could hold us in prayer and with wisdom and help us navigate stuff over the last decade, really.

And uh and this morning we get to welcome John and Mindy here.

They actually just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in Hawaii.

Um but John Peterson leads fantastic ministries uh all in cities all around the world.

He runs an organization called City Table.

He's gonna tell you about it.

And I hope my prayer this morning is that as he shares and he shares some stories of where God is at work in cities and neighborhoods and around tables around the world, that the seeds of the kingdom of God will uh will come into you, they'll they'll come into your imagination, and you'll catch a vision for what that might look like for you.

So, guys, I need you to help me, all right?

We're not gonna do a week's us welcome, all right?

This is gonna be a serious one.

I need you uh just a full throttle welcome for John Peterson, everybody.

We're in good shape.

If that's what we got coming.

The nature of the spirit is so unbiased.

He he just loves to come on.

Anybody who says, come, you know, and the way you guys learn to experience his presence together, our learning, and the way you're passing it on.

Um here's here's the beauty of it.

This stuff is gonna start hitting the culture because it's no good in the church.

Who needs to get fatter?

Who needs to get holier?

Everything, all the fatness we have in the Lord, and I mean that spiritual, right?

The Bible talks about delighting in fatness.

It's talking about all the goodness of God.

He makes us fat with good stuff, and so you were blessed to bless the whole tribe of naphtali.

Naphtali meant the blessing of the Lord by the patriarch upon naphtali was that that that tribe of people in Israel were meant to bless people because they had been blessed.

And God is putting a naphtali spirit on the church right now, and he's training us to give what we have away into the context of our neighborhoods and everyday life.

Uh, where there's less and less separation between the culture and the church because the church is embedding itself in the culture and beginning to live the life of Jesus so that might see your good works and glorify the Father which is in heaven.

And now I understand a very rascally fellow was here last week named Steve Bruns.

Okay, Steve and Anna Kristen have to be some of the coolest people in the world, right?

Really, when you think about it all.

Uh, my partner, my uh ministry partner, and I were in Norway just last uh last fall, and we're hosted by Steve and Anna Kristen.

We're in their home.

Okay, what a treat to be in their home.

And then these guys know Stavanger Norway really well.

They're well placed in Emy Church, but also in the government.

Anna Kristen is in government, and the beautiful kids, and Julia's here this morning as well, which is really cool.

Um, and I'll show you an incredibly angelic picture of myself and Stavanger in just a minute.

Okay, so if we could start the show.

How many of you remember the old missionary slideshows?

Remember that?

The missionary would roll in and give his old slides slide.

My dad did that.

Uh, I was probably in five to eight hundred churches before I was 15 years old.

Seriously.

My mom and dad would take some like a whole year every five years and just travel America.

And I sat in the back of a 1957 Pontiac.

I was an only child, and then we go from church to church, each fried chicken every day, and mashed potatoes, and my dad would speak, and he would do his slideshow.

And I was preparing for this and I thought, good Lord, this is my dad would be so proud of me today.

I'm gonna do a slideshow.

And it's kind of a shameless uh promotion of our own ministry.

I have never publicly stood in front of a room and talked to people about what I do, ever.

This is the first time.

So I I do it because what we do is not a ministry to us in the sense of an organizational thing.

This this is just a snapshot of what God has entrusted uh Mindy and I and Ken and Julie or and uh Ken and Lori to do um to enable God's people to meet their potential in the cities of the of the world, including Boulder, Colorado.

Okay?

So what if the next move of God didn't happen on places like this, but actually happened at tables that embedded themselves all through culture.

And people were just gathering in spots, in boardrooms, in uh uh hospitals, uh in places here and places there.

Uh and I want to show you some pictures of what table uh what a table can look like, and I'll explain what the table is a little bit.

Next one.

The um the city table basically is people congregating together, right?

We live in a very individualistic culture, and the days of individualism are over because nothing happens by cool heroes.

Our movies are still giving us all these heroes.

At the end of the day, heroes don't change much.

Uh, not really, it's it's people who come together to hear God to do the work of God in the midst of a lot of messy stuff.

And so the table is just simply helping to embed people of God into culture, discipling the priesthood of all believers in their kingdom assignments, which results in the transformation of people and institutions in their cities.

The institution of foster care needs reformation.

Huh?

Adoption.

How about uh this sounds funny to you maybe, but rural health is a problem.

Getting health to folks in rural areas is a really big deal.

Recidivism, people coming out of prison and getting re-established back in culture.

If all you do is leave that in the hands of the government, we're in bad shape.

What if we partnered with them?

What if we came in with the heart and love of God and the wisdom of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar?

Nebuchadnezzar had wisdom.

It was misguided.

So you have a Daniel.

He actually said, um, I uh I kind of didn't believe everything that God was doing for me, so he kind of sent in a spirit of insanity to me, and I spent seven years on the side of a hill munching grass like a cow.

How weird is that! And then he says, and my sanity returned to me, and I when I recognized it is heaven that rules.

To not recognize heaven is a definition of insanity.

And God is really right now moving around the world with Anna Christina and the guys in and Steve and the guys in Emy Church.

We went from there down to Amsterdam, we went from down there to Bern to in Switzerland.

Same thing.

God is drawing people together to get his mess, to get his heart, fall in love with each other, and then begin to get kingdom strategies for how to break into the mess that we've got in this earth.

Okay, next.

So, really, we a table can look like a whole lot of things.

So I don't want to get too prescriptive.

But when we're talking about city level tables, and we come into a city, we're looking for four types of people.

We're looking for business leaders or marketplace leaders, we're looking for governmental leaders, we're looking for church and ministry leaders.

Uh a lot of our cities have nonprofit Christian organizations in them, and they're a real important part of the equation.

Uh there are churches in the city, there's house church networks, there's a real diversity of God's people.

We're looking for the leaders in that in that domain, if you will, who are willing to sit down at the table with what I call culture changers.

You ever been in the room with somebody that just makes everybody nervous?

Because all their questions are really hard to answer.

And most people like that get get kind of uh they get driven out of the church because they don't conform to the churchy stuff.

There are men and women of God right now that do not fit into the church culture because they're hearing God and the church doesn't like it.

They have to be embraced, they gotta be healed a little bit, they're a little beat up, they've been dumped on, and their their attitudes stink a little bit.

But man, we've got to love these folks because there are some spectacular new thinkers in the kingdom of God right now.

Yeah, we've got to find them, love on them.

And sit at the table, and it's the table of the Lord.

It's the table where you enjoy his presence, you study his scriptures, the apostolic doctrines of the church, you break bread, which means you eat tons of cool food, and you celebrate his death and resurrection.

It means that you are part of a family enterprise.

The word koinonia, fellowship, is the word for a family enterprise.

It's not just a little fellowship hall where you eat macaroni.

Right?

Remember the fellowship halls?

We're going after the service, we'll go to the fellowship hall.

Great.

Fellowship hall primarily we just ate food and did cool and fun stuff.

No.

Fellowship in scripture is powerful stuff.

It is literally that somebody has engaged in an enterprise from the king of heaven, and others are gonna sit at a table to help get that thing going and get that thing done.

Okay?

Next.

So there's three, we call it the three R's.

We when we come into a city or we come into a county or we come into a state, come into a nation, we're looking to rediscover what God has already done.

Right?

If you go to Norway, you'll hear about a guy named uh Hans Nielsen Hauge.

And he is, guy was dynamite.

Guy started in ministry in about 1796, just 20 years after our nation was founded.

And that guy was preaching the gospel, but the beauty of what he did really was he left a legacy of prayer in the country, and there was there are prayer houses around Norway that are still there.

And in just a little bit, I want to show you what happened as a result of Mr.

Hauge's incredible commitment to the Lord for his nation.

It was beautiful.

We'll show a picture of it in just a little bit.

So we rediscover what's God's plan for Boulder.

If you start with today, you'll miss the foundations that are already here.

If you don't research it, right, you've got to find out what God Himself breathed in it.

What's his thumpering on the land?

What's his I love this thing, you know, all the paddle boarding business and all that.

That was fantastic, man.

That's true.

Earth and wind and sky and sea, he's the Lord of all of it.

And we champion it, and the demonic powers have tried to uh there is a demonic power, I believe, that that tries to get people disinterested in what God's interested in.

It dumbs down stuff.

And one of the things that the Celts, the Celtic Christians had so beautifully was their love of beauty and of creation.

And I think God's restoring that to us.

Amen.

So all these things that that are in the history of our of our geographical areas, uh, we're helping people rediscover those.

We call it seeing the city through God's eyes.

Umce we begin seeing the things, then we begin to reunify around the Lord Himself.

Uh nothing's going to happen in our cities without Jesus Himself being the center of our unity.

We've had denominational unity, we've had theological unity, and none of that stuff has worked historically for 2,000 years.

Because the only thing we need to reunify around is a person.

Because the kingdom is fundamentally, fundamentally relational.

Can someone get me a little bottle of water?

I appreciate it.

And then the thirdly, we have uh we want to rebuild, right?

Once you reunify, we're not sitting around reunifying and enjoying our reunification.

We are reunified by the Lord.

We are brought together in unity in order to rebuild the walls that have been broken down.

Nehemiah chapter 1, verse 3 says that the people are in disgrace and the walls are burned.

Nehemiah 1:3

And that's the state we have.

And so through repentance, they came back to the Lord.

He repented of his own sins, the sins of his fathers, did all sorts, did all manner of cool stuff, and he got the favor of the king who gave him the materials he needed to begin to build the wall.

That wall had twelve gates, and at night, one night alone, on his little steed, he wore he rides around and he comes up with hey, thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

He comes up with something that God put in his heart.

The sun rises, he says to his guys, let's arise and build.

We can do this, but we've got to do it together.

Chapter 3 of Nehemiah, the little phrase uh together uh is used 22 times.

22 times.

Every family built rebuilt the wall up against their own family house.

Where do you rebuild?

It's not the big picture, let's take boulder for Jesus.

No, take your street, take your neighborhood, take the level of your own influence.

If you're if you're CEO of a corporation, take the corporation.

Invite Jesus to be the CEO of your company and stop being in charge.

I mean it gets serious.

This isn't Christianity.

We're not talking about let's be good Christians.

We're talking about let's be nasty, mischief-making, God-loving, freaky kingdom people.

And so it doesn't, it's it's not attainable on our own.

It's not even understandable on our own.

We've been given the Holy Spirit, who blinds us from our own stupidity and gives us something much bigger that you could never do unless he showed it to you.

And so we dive deep.

And so we have to rediscover God's purpose so that we can reunify together in love with one another and then begin the work of rebuilding up against our own houses, our own workplaces.

Next.

Okay, so we've we've started tables in Denver, Nashville, and uh Castle Rock right now.

Minnie and I are part of a little table.

There's six couples, and it's very simple, it's very embryonic.

Um, and then in Nashville is a whole different animal.

And this last year we were in Stavanger, St.

Louis, Colorado Springs, Scotland, Tune, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and the Netherlands.

Okay, so look next slide.

As I said, I don't like to do this promotional stuff.

Um, but I like to brag on God.

So here's what's cool Denver.

Uh I I didn't I honestly didn't have a heart for Denver.

Denver kind of it felt kind of uh dismembered.

It it didn't there it didn't feel like there was cohesion in Denver.

It felt like God's people and things are just they were just doing their thing.

Uh I didn't see uh I couldn't get the heart of God for Denver.

And I met tons of pastors and leaders, I've I've met a lot of people in this realm, and I just couldn't figure out why I felt this kind of a void when I was dealing with the city of Denver.

This is just me, this is my own journey.

And I realized it was because I was looking at Denver through the eyes of the way the church had been.

And I felt like the Lord was encouraging me, start looking at who I'm raising up for the future of the church.

Start looking at the 20-year-olds, start looking at the 30, mid-40 types, start looking to see who I've got.

So it was really fun.

Next slide.

Um the Lord started bringing us now.

The rascal on the left is my partner, and the right's on the other side.

He is not 20 years old.

He is this is Ken Yankee.

Ken and Lori are some of our dearest friends, and we're in in partnership with this thing called the City Table together.

Um, but you're looking at pastors and business leaders and their wives, and the ladies are very involved uh in business, and uh we have started the table, which is we have a training thing called the Greenhouse, and we take about eight months to go through once a month going through together.

Now, what these guys are doing, they have a map, a big old map, and they're mapping Denver.

They actually live and work between the Capitol Building and Denver University.

That's kind of their patch, okay?

So, in that patch, they're prayer walking that patch, they're meeting with other church leaders in the area, they're starting new businesses together, they're doing this uh an asset mapping, or excuse me, they're doing an audit, beginning to do an audit of that part of Denver to say who's here, what are the needs, and how can the church meet it?

And now they're beginning to share with other church leaders what God is showing them in their research.

Why?

They're rediscovering.

Remember the first star?

Rediscover what God's up to, then reunify so you can rebuild.

So that that journey is on.

Okay, the next one.

Okay, this this one.

I hope I don't get bogged down here.

Nashville, Tennessee.

Anyone not been to Nashville, Tennessee?

Okay, you have to go.

You have to go.

Fantastic city.

And many years ago, um, a young man, 31 years old, was um with me in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

He has just taken over his father's corporation in Nashville.

And we're sitting in the backyard of a widow and just talking about the things of God.

I was there for a conference I was speaking at, and he had flown over from the States.

He had been with us the year before.

Um, they were unable to have any more children.

And on our on the trip that he and his wife visited us, they conceived and had twin boys.

And we had prayed for them for fertility, that the Lord would bring life to their to her.

And so this is after that, so he's all excited, and God's been moving in his life.

And I said, What would you like to do?

What's the dream of God in your life?

And he said, Well, don't tell anybody, but I I I think in here I'd like to be the governor of Tennessee someday.

And he said, Don't please don't tell anybody.

Here I am telling everybody.

Well, that was a long time ago.

That was 1991.

And all these years later, that man has had a journey with God.

He's now in his second term as governor of Tennessee.

And boy, I don't have time.

But it's an unbelievable story how he got there.

And the night that he kind of he was still dizzy from all the stuff that had happened on the first day that he was inaugurated.

I I remember him saying to me, You need to know God put me here.

This is the call of God.

This is not about me, this is not about America, this is not about the Republican Party.

This is About the kingdom of God, and I'm his son, and I want to be as good into my for my nation and my state as I can be, but you need to know I'm doing it because I'm a son of God.

I said, So you're waving the cross and not the flag.

He said, I am.

You love the flag.

You love the flag.

But it's not the power of God and the salvation.

The cross is.

Amen?

We don't have to have one over the other.

We just make sure the order is right.

Okay.

Nashville, Tennessee.

So the governor's name is Bill Lee.

And whoa.

Next slide, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay, we're in the governor's mansion.

This is not Bill Lee.

Bill appointed a young man to be the head of the faith-based initiatives office.

And so Lance Villios, a 37-year-old young man who now heads up all the faith-based faith-based initiatives in the entire state of Tennessee.

And it's always been kind of a sideshow.

No real clause, no real, you know, a mandate.

Just kind of float around and look impressive and you know do the I'm the faith-based guy thing.

Well, they've now made it an official department.

It reports to the governor, and it's now been funded by the state.

Okay.

So this all happened through prayer and intercession.

What are we talking about?

Setting up tables?

Okay.

So Lance, now Bill's cross of the way here.

If you're offended by the whiskey on the left, please don't be.

It's a Tennessee whiskey, which is really good stuff.

And the next picture.

This the this was this is worse.

This is all cigars.

So this is a club in downtown.

This is the club in downtown Nashville.

One of the things I like to say is God wants to go to the seats of power.

Where did Paul go when he went to Athens?

He went to the Areopagus.

He went straight to the council.

He went to the place when he was on his imprisonment journey to Rome.

Where did he go?

He got taken to the leaders of the areas where he was imprisoned.

And so God is bringing us into power centers in cities and states and nations.

And he's helping us find the Daniels and the Josephs and the ones that have been being prepared of the Lord to actually get the mind of Christ for the city and for the state.

So I could go around this, but the table's represented here.

You got an actual table with political leaders, business leaders, you've got church leaders, you've got three pastors in here, including a vineyard pastor, beautiful guy, Grant Pemberton, wonderful man.

And you've got the gentleman, the African-American gentleman on the right, was exonerated, was released from prison by the former governor of Tennessee, but also the president of the United States.

And he was proven to be innocent of the charges against him.

He was left with no money, he had no job, he had nothing.

He's now one of his extremely wealthy man who's giving all of his heart, soul, and resources to the work of the kingdom.

Because that's how God works.

So that's who's at the table in Nashville.

More can be said, let's go to the next one.

Okay, Stang.

I like the little yellow house in the middle of the stone.

It's an American opinion of Norway, right?

The next one.

So just suffice it to say, this incredible guy, Mr.

Hauge, started a move of God, and he had next picture.

He had a uh, there were houses of prayer all over the nation.

So when we were in in town, this house, this building, this for sammelings, that's how they say it in Dutch, for sammelings, gathering meeting uh hall.

Now we're missing somebody right next to Steve at the end of the table.

The the president of the Chamber of Commerce was sitting next to Steve there for a while.

This may be before he arrived, but they the Bruns served a meal.

It was unbelievable.

We had such a beautiful time.

And the idea was we have here people from opposite political parties, we have people from uh different church denominations, we have uh an amazing businesswoman who was real involved with restaurants, right?

And then we had uh the Chamber of Commerce guy and a few others.

And I I can say to you guys, if our politicians in America need a picture of how to work together, amazing.

I mean, they don't have the same, they have issues obviously, and they fight and they do all the normal stuff.

But man, it was so beautiful to be in a room where when we talked about serving your city, they were on it.

They were on it.

They want to, they want to see an upgrade, they want to see a partnership.

Of course, immigration is a big issue.

Immigrants are coming in, no one quite knows what to do.

And so we talked about that quite a bit.

It was just a beautiful time.

Um, next one.

This is a this is my normal state.

I think I think out of Christmas so it took this picture.

Might have been Ken, I don't know.

This is patently untrue.

Okay, next picture.

That's right outside the prayer house, which is a just so fun to be in the historical place where the move of God was, where people have been praying for the Lord, meeting with city officials and business leaders in the place that God had stamped for himself.

Whew! Fun stuff.

Thon.

Thon is an old Roman city right by Bern in Kanton Bern, and it's on a gorgeous lake by all the ski areas up in there.

It's just phenomenal.

Okay, next picture.

So this one was really fun because we flew from Norway to Bern.

We're hosted by this beautiful little couple that live in a little town called Zolikofen, which is a suburb, uh a suburb of Bern.

And when the Mormons were looking for a place to build their first European temple, they chose Zolikhofen.

When the Buddhists were looking for a place to put their Buddhist center and training center and main temple, they chose Zolikofen, Switzerland.

Can you imagine?

This place is so demonized that I was sitting at bus stops and had being accosted by people manifesting.

It was really weird.

I'm in Switzerland for Pete's sake.

They make watches around here and eat bagels, you know.

Um so here we are.

We were invited to tune by a friend of mine that led the whole 24-7 Prime Ministry.

Actually, in Switzerland, it'll be Kwessong.

Um I look extremely bored here, as you can see.

I'm not.

I've got my antennas up, and I'm saying, dear God, what are we gonna do at this place?

Uh the Evangelical Alliance is a global phenomenon.

It's got uh leadership uh in many nations of the earth, and it's the attempt of the church to kind of come together across denominational lines and pray together and say, where do we go from here?

So it's a little deceptive.

There's actually about 30 people in the room here.

And uh Ken and I were invited in by my friend who is the 24-7 prayer leader for years, and she's on uh Susanna is on this team now for the EA.

And we sit down, it's all very formal, you know.

And this gentleman addresses us and he says, Okay, we're so glad to have Mr.

John Peterson and Ken Yaku from the United States, and we're really happy to have you here because we know that you have the plan from God.

And I said, like, the plan?

What is the plan exactly?

And they said, No, no, no, you guys are the experts, you know.

And um, and I said, I I hate to disappoint you, but there kind of there is no plan.

There's no plan.

Then I thought, why am I here then?

You know, if we're supposed to have a plan and there is no plan.

So I went around the room a little bit, and I said, Well, I have I have a question.

I said, What you guys, gals?

It was beautifully blended, male and female, which we need a lot more of.

Um, I said, what is it that's happening here in your midst?

Well, we're divided, straight out, we're divided, around should we be doing big events for God, or should we be going a little more low key and and do stuff at kind of a grassroots level?

So, which do you think is the better plan?

And I noticed I was sitting by a guy who's known in Switzerland as the number one uh, he does like Broadway plays, and he takes Christian themes and puts them into this thing.

So he had just finished a national tour with the orchestra and the dance and the drama and the whole thing of the life of Martin Luther King in Swiss German.

Okay, so this guy, and next to me is in him is his plan, uh recommendation to the EA and what they should do to try to uh impact the city with a big event, right?

So he looks at me and he says, So is it events or is it you know prayer walking and street to street, you know, that kind of thing.

It was just two different approaches to reaching your city.

And I said, Well, I hate to disappoint you guys, but it's neither.

It's neither.

Oh, he says, So I've got this beautiful proposal today.

He said, I guess I won't be.

I said, we don't know that because God hasn't spoken.

How can we know if we share it or not share it until we know that it's God spoken?

So they said, There is a plan.

I said, there is a plan.

The plan is become friends, learn to love each other from your hearts, quit trying to change your city in your own strength, and invite the Holy Spirit to tell you what to do.

And don't move until he tells you.

Oh! And this guy's the guys go, Well, I don't know if we can do that.

I said, Well, the gentleman in the corner, see that guy, kind of the round-headed fellow in the very corner?

He was very cantankerous.

He was very upset.

And he said, I've been coming to this EA for years, and every time I come, I'm afraid you're gonna ask me to do something.

I just I'm I'm loaded.

I have so much to do in my church.

We're trying to do a Christmas outreach.

I'm not getting any help, and I come here and I I feel like I'm supposed to do something else.

So later I referred to that and I said, our brother in the corner isn't feeling loved.

He's feeling like he is being asked to do stuff for God.

That will never reach this city.

So I said to him, I said, what would happen if we we just stopped doing everything we were doing and asked and spent the rest of our times for the next six months, every month, just becoming friends, hearing our stories, praying and laying hands on each other, asking the Spirit of the Lord to move in our midst, and then wait on him for his plan, like like Nehemiah did, riding his little steed around the and then God put it in my heart and I knew what to do.

Right?

Well, that works for a business, that works for a family, that works at every level.

Okay.

So at lunch, the moderator, the director of the EA came to me and he said, Our lives have been altered.

We will never be able to operate the same again.

Could you pray for us that we learn how to love one another, unify so that we can rebuild our place?

We need to learn to hear the Holy Spirit.

Okay?

Amen.

Next.

Okay, let's dump that one.

Let's dump all of them.

Peterson's gonna go rogue.

You know what you've just seen, basically, is if I say to you, church planting, what do you think?

Huh?

Church planning.

Should we be doing church planning?

Okay, it's a trick question, right?

Because it all depends what you think the church is.

Should we have more families?

Amen.

Should families have babies?

Oh.

All about the babies.

Did you love that this morning?

What's his name?

Wyatt?

Wyatt.

Oh, what a man.

That good man, he had a mission.

He really grabbed his daddy's leg.

Oh.

That was a picture.

Someone behind me said that was a picture.

That really was a picture.

You believe in families and you believe in babies.

And we we need to reproduce all that stuff.

We've actually been told by God we need to reproduce it.

But if I say church planting, it's almost like a step back.

Like, do we really need more churches?

Do we really need more, you know?

And planting new things?

We've got so many churches already.

Do we really know?

And we get into all that discussion.

That's because we don't see the church as a family.

What you looked at is church planning.

This is actually planting the church, birthing the church so that it becomes replicable into all of culture.

Now, what's happening in some of these groups is very interesting.

The work that we're doing at the city level is backing into their local churches to help them become more missional in terms of how they do discipleship in their own churches as well as into the city itself.

And so all this is is a way to be family and make babies.

That's all it is.

It's the mandate and the privilege and the joy of every believer to be fruitful.

And so we need transformation.

We need to be transformed.

In order to be a transformational people, there has to be a personal transformation.

In the 90s, we had a whole transformation movement.

It was called city reaching.

It was good, it was cool.

A lot of intercession, a lot of prayer, a lot of city uh initiatives, a lot of walking streets, a lot of all that stuff happened.

But it was interesting because we assessed it at the end of the decade and realized that we were no more in love with each other than when we started.

We had done stuff for God, but we had not fallen in love.

And so, you know, intimacy creates real life.

And we didn't have an intimacy in the work that we did.

It was just duty.

And we had to recess everything.

And we realized, Ken and I build all of our greenhouse training around the idea that unless I'm transformed, nothing else in my life will transform.

So if I if the church needs transformation to come more into the image of Christ, that starts with individuals being transformed into the loving image of Christ themselves.

They have to be.

And then for Pete's sake, how on earth will we reach a city with untransformed people and untransformed churches who've come under this beautiful new renovation of God where the Spirit of the Lord has given permission to come in and just strip you naked and then clothe you with his own righteousness.

So much more fun, too.

So transformation is a metamorphosis, right?

It's the butter, it's a it's the worm to butterfly thing.

And it it actually moves us from one identity to another identity.

I got in from Tucson, Arizona this morning.

Uh I woke up at 3:30 this morning in Tucson, Arizona.

I was up till midnight talking with my roommate from college 50 years ago and his son, who's a stunning young business leader, and we stayed up until midnight last night talking about this thing of transformation.

Uh and what will it take to see the Church of God begin to go through a metamorphosis to become less organizational and more family, to be more concerned about hearing God than doing stuff for God.

And so that that move is on around the world.

God is altering and changing and transforming us.

And that process is just simply a discipleship process.

That's all it is.

You know, I understand Steve's word last week was really a beautiful word on discipleship, on family, on mission, on being a missional people in our churches.

That we really understand that disciple making is the mandate of the Lord for us.

It is.

And I know as a leader, I have probably a circle of five or six that I can lean on for everything.

Anything and everything.

And they disciple me.

They they help me be more like Jesus, um, do like Jesus, challenge me.

Um I I was part of Navigators in college, and it benefited me immensely.

It was wonderful.

I loved it.

But I I soon realized when I left, there was nowhere for me to go.

There wasn't a continuation of a lifestyle of living in community.

And so discipleship starts with surrender.

In some form, it's got to begin to take on the life on life aspect.

In our little community called the table, uh, we're in each other's lives.

You know, we we someone has an issue, we help out.

We go there, we paint the house, we change the, we help with the plumbing, put in the fire pits.

You know, guys in their 60s, you know, you gotta have fire pits.

Everyone has a fire pit and a man cave.

So we've built more man caves than is humanly responsible.

Discipleship demands, oh sorry, discipleship is advanced by three basic things: Word, spirit, and life on life.

Word, spirit, and life on life.

You can't become, you you, you won't enter the metamorphosis process without the word of God.

You cannot be, you can't come full measure from worm to butterfly without the Spirit of God.

And the way that happens is when we rub and bump and love each other heart to heart.

Okay, so that's that's the genetic of some of the aspects of discipleship.

Because discipleship demands that we seek first the kingdom of God in his righteousness so that everything else can be added unto us.

So the mission of making disciples is that we do it in the context of seeking the kingdom, not seeking a better life.

The goal in life is not to have a better life.

Right?

What do we say?

I just want my kids to be happy.

No, you don't.

You want holy kids, you want righteous children, you want kids that are dangerous to darkness.

Oh, some of these guys up here this morning, they're well on the road to being mischief maker.

It's fantastic.

Happiness is not a goal, it's a byproduct.

When life is in order and Jesus is first, and your heart is for the kingdom, you will be happy.

Happy is the man who delights in the law of the Lord.

Happy is the man who loves his wife and eats lobster.

Well, I added that.

That's not lobster makes me happy.

So what you saw in picture form was an intentional approach to all of life in cities and in states and in and in nations, that we would carry a discipling spirit into everything that we did.

And that we would carry it with the Word of God, with the Spirit of God, that we would make sure that we were surrendering.

Paul said, I bear in my body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus be made manifest in the church.

The great apostle Paul lived a life of sacrifice because that was the generator for the kingdom of God to bring life to other people.

We have one purpose, basically, these days, is to move people from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.

We know that Jesus infiltrated our world with 12 rascals, and he didn't say to them, I'm here to give you a good life.

I am the life.

You get me, you got everything you need.

He says in 1 Peter 1, you have everything you need pertaining to life and godliness.

You get everything.

It's our God in heaven that gives us all things to greatly enjoy.

How do you get that enjoyment of other stuff?

Seek first the kingdom.

Surrender your future.

Surrender your children.

Quit trying to over-protect children from the world.

Let God move on them.

I say that because an over-secure family can actually turn a child against God.

I've watched it.

Over-protection can deny that child the beauty of a visitation of God.

Because they've been surrounded by rules and they've been surrounded by fearful hearts.

Surrender.

Surrender the 501k.

I said surrender ownership of it.

Surrender your job.

Surrender your friendships.

Surrender these things.

Take up your cross and follow me.

There is a huge fear in the church of what's happening in culture right now.

Huge.

People are disoriented.

They do not know how to navigate the world that we're in right now.

And so we're hunkering, we're fortressing, or we're charging out without a clear understanding of what it means to walk in the power of God, make disciples, and I love what he said about discipling nations.

And the word for nations there is ethne.

It's peoples, it's people groups.

I'm sure it includes geopolitical entities like Ireland and, you know, Norway and Japan.

But primarily it's about our discipleship is not only of individuals, but peoples and institutions.

How many know education needs a little brushing up?

There needs to be new models of it.

How many of you know that science is quickly realizing that evolution is not tenable?

Well, we need to be there.

There's a couple over at Boulder Valley Church that are that are um quantum physics, astro, something or other scientists, a husband and wife.

Is that cool?

God placed them in that place.

They've been called there by the Lord.

And then we'll start landing the plane here.

I can see Luke getting nervous.

I love to make pastors nervous.

And then you just make the excuse, but I was under the anointed, you know.

That doesn't give you an excuse at all, believe me.

The natural progression of discipline people obviously is that you they grow.

Or you get new ones.

And so there's there's a growth component to the thing.

Because the family is meant to grow.

And I I just want to make a little say a little word to you guys about um bringing people to a table, if you will, bringing people to fellowship around the Lord Himself, um that you can actually plan for.

You can plan to have children, but unless until you actually have real intimacy with your spouse, there's no babies.

You can plan through your blue in the nose, you can diagram it, you can talk about the stages of development of a child once it's conceived.

You know, you can do all that stuff.

And the the organic nature of God's family is such that I would say it's very hard to start house groups, cell groups, house churches, whatever you call them, it's very hard to start them unless it's started by people that are intimate with God and intimate with each other and have a calling from God to actually do it.

Because when the church center says, let us have house groups, let us do cell groups, and you line up all the sign-up sheets and try to find out how we're gonna get this going, it goes in circles a lot of the time.

Because remember, I think last time I was with you, I talked about Mr.

Potato.

You know, you have the little plastic potato, and then you get to decorate him with lips.

Those nasty lips, those big red things, you know, and big old airs that stick out.

But you can have a facsimile of the real thing by just plugging pieces in and having a strategy and a team and the whole thing.

I don't think the blessing of the Lord is going to be on that much anymore.

I think the Lord is looking for gestation.

He's looking for new life to come into the hearts of, let's say, 13 people in this room that God speaks and says, I'm calling you to gather people to a table in your house or at your boardroom at work, so that you can begin to go into the process of loving each other, getting into the scriptures, praying, holding each other accountable, and then seeking the Lord for the strategies that He's got to make you a mission of people.

It's a journey, takes time.

If we depend on church leadership to provide programs for us, we're gonna so fragment the church and make it all these pieces.

We've got the missions department, we've got the discipleship department, we've got the training thing, training team, we've got this thing, and we've got that thing, and we've got the kids, we've got the dogs, and we got we get everything.

All of a sudden we've got Mr.

Potato Head.

Because the church is an entity of life that comes from the Spirit, and when God gives distributes gifts to people, then we champion them to move on those gifts, the result will be family and the malt, and the result will be multiplication and health to take care of one another.

So we want house groups, house churches, it's a good thing.

I think the church is fundamentally cellular.

It is cellular.

But start with start with those who have a commitment from the heart to do that.

Find out who in your midst actually carries that that call from God and build around them.

House groups, Jesus cells are the seedbed of discipleship, and the rhythms are very simple.

The the apostles' doctrine, this is not Bible study, it's actually studying what the apostles laid down as a foundation for the everlasting church.

So it's it's not just good study.

Oh, let's have a study on you know how to do Christian massage therapy.

Or I had one group that actually was studying flag football to see how to how to do it together without getting hurt.

I thought, okay, people.

Um fellowship and prayer.

We're gonna do something fun here um this this morning, just very quickly, and I'm gonna leave it up to uh Luke to orchestrate this if you kind of come up, buddy.

Um but we do have a Thrive, a Thrive collaborative.

So my partner Ken and I are gonna be here uh coming up here in August.

We'll be doing a uh some training on the whole area of benefaction.

And when you hear the word benefaction, a lot of times what it means to people is somebody who has money gives stuff to people who don't have money.

That's that's not what it is.

It benefaction is very simply that we have a benefactor God that has been good to us, and we're gonna examine the whole idea of the goodness of God into culture and what does that look like?

How do I become impactful as a benefactor of God to my workplace, to my neighborhood?

Um, and uh the I'll let you go a little bit further on it, but the heart of it for us is to take the table genetic and begin to talk about it together, share what would that look like?

What would it look like if you had clear people in the church that did kind of deacon work, but who were actually benefactors at their heart level?

And they were helping uh the widows and they were helping to make things good, and they were helping uh with the strategic idea of how to bless our community, how to repurpose this facility, how to use this in such a way that we bring the benefaction or the goodness of God to everything that we do as Lookout Church.

Wouldn't that be cool?

So we're gonna have a day on that, so bro Luke.

Are you guys thankful for John Peterson this morning?

So I know we're kind of over, you know, what what we typically go for as first time.

One thing we so wanted to do, um, because we haven't had enough altar calls this morning.

We wanted to.

I I don't know.

I don't know.

Um it just happens sometimes.

Um so here's what we're gonna ask, we're gonna invite you to do, okay?

So John shared a lot about what it looks like to be sewn into the city, sewn into neighborhoods.

And some of you, uh it's it's something God is speaking to you about, He has been speaking to you about.

And but one of the things that we believe is so important for us to take up our identity and the places that God and the fields of work that God has given us is for us to actually be blessed and commissioned into those places.

So here's what we're gonna ask you to do.

First of all, if you're a parent, um, we're gonna do kind of a close here, and we're gonna ask you to go get your kids so we can relieve our um our children's workers and teachers, and if you can bring your kids back up here, well, what we're gonna do is we're gonna invite some of our elders and a few other of our ministry team members to come on both sides of the stage and they have a little bit of oil.

And the oil in the scriptures, as we know, is uh is a way that when we bless each other, we actually commission each other, and it's a way of saying we are marked by the Holy Spirit of God.

We actually smeared with the oil of God for the places that he sends us, that like in Joshua 1, 3, that every place I send you, every place your foot treads, I will be with you.

I have given that land to you.

And I believe this is so important for the days, just like John was saying, that for the days that we're headed into, that every single believer actually believes that the places where your feet land, God has given to you to be an emissary and ambassador of the kingdom of God on that square foot.

I believe that.

And we want to bless that, okay?

Some of you, maybe you have to go, and that's totally fine.

Maybe you just want to connect with others around the back of the room.

That's totally great.

But what we're gonna do is we're gonna invite you to come up if you want to be blessed in the in your place of work, blessed in a place wherever God has called you in life, we want to do that.

Does it sound like a plan?

All right, let's stand together.

Let's stand together.

And Jessie, if you could you could put on some music, and uh Bob and Kevin and uh Didi, Dennis, um, you guys can kind of come around the the front side of the room, and uh and and John will be here too.

I'll be up front as well.

I'm gonna bless us as we go, okay?

Some of you need to come up forward to get prayer, and we're just gonna put on some music.

Some of you just gotta go blessings as you go, alright?

But let me just say one last uh uh just speak one last word over us um as we kind of formally conclude this time.

I just want to pray the prayer as we go.

May the Lord bless you and keep you, may He make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you and give you rest, okay?

Let that propel you as you go.

For the rest of you come forward.

We are going to pray and we're gonna commission you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen?

Amen.

Uh, businesses.

If you've got business that you need commissioning into your business, students, you are ministers of the gospel in the in the schools, school place.

Uh those those of you that are in the professional world, how many of you have ever been prayed for and commissioned as ministers into what you do every day?

A few of you.

Not enough.

I I was at Boulder Valley Church some years ago and I asked the question how many of you are missionaries?

There are 800 people in the room.

How many of you are missionaries?

Three people raised their hands.

I said, give me 45 minutes, I don't want to convince you otherwise.

You are missionaries or messengers of the gospel of Christ, every day one of you.

And so you you get to receive, I believe, from the Lord an actual impartation to do what you do really well by the power of the Spirit.

And have your, I pray always that God will open your eyes to a new possibilities at the workplace and the neighborhood.

Okay?

So come on up.

If you'd like prayer, we'll have oil, we're gonna slather it all over you.

Wounded and forsaken, I was shattered by the fall, broken and forgotten, feeling lost and all alone, summoned by the king into the master's courts, lifted by the savior, and cradled in his arms.

I was carried to the table.

Seated away down beyond.

Carried to the table.