Ephesians: The Good Church (Week 1) - Keep the Unity

Ephesians one verse 3 Praise be to God, the God and Father of

our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly

realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be

holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us for

adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with

His pleasure and will to the praise of His glorious grace

which He has freely given us in the One He loves.

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the

forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of

God's grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and

understanding. He made known to us the mystery

of His will, according to His good pleasure, which He proposed

in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their

fulfilment, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on

earth under Christ. In Him we were also chosen,

having been predestined according to the plan of Him who

works out everything in conformity with the purpose of

His will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope

in Christ, might be for the praise of His glory.

And you were also included in Christ when you heard the

message of truth, the gospel of your salvation.

When you believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the

promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our

inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's

possession to the praise of His glory.

Amen. Take a moment and just sit with

those words for a moment. Christ above all things,

bringing all things in heaven and earth under Him.

And now you are invited into that family.

September 22nd, 1994. A big day in television, the

world premiere of Friends. Raise your hand if you are a fan

of Friends, right Friends was a giant hit, a television show not

about a family. A lot of sitcoms before that

were about families and the kind of hijinks and stuff that they

would get in. But Friends was a a story about

a group of young adults that had a found family in the city and

doing life together. And it was really this beginning

of this trend that we see through TV after Friends.

A few years later we have How I Met Your Mother.

How many people liked How I Met your Mother Marshall still one

of my favorite TV characters, right?

Same kind of thing, group of young adults trying to make it

in the city, doing life together.

We love shows like this, whether it's The Office, Parks and Rec,

Brooklyn 99. We love TV shows that are about

friends coming together and creating a community.

We love it in our movies, right? Like The Magnificent 7, if you

like Westerns, Suicide Squad, Guardians of the Galaxy, all

these stories about people that should be so different and not

get along, but they come together around a common

purpose. Everybody wants friendship,

everybody wants to belong, Everybody wants to be known and

loved and cared for. We love the idea of found

family. We love the idea of community.

But if we're honest, very few of us know how to make community

work. Because community, frankly, is

inconvenient. It's slow, it's costly.

It takes patience. It takes forgiveness, and it it

takes when it becomes easier to leave, it requires you to stay.

And that's why the church is hard.

It takes an intentional choice to belong.

In the 3rd century, there was a pastor by the name of Cyprian

who led the church. He was a Bishop, which is really

a pastor of pastors. He was born into a really

wealthy merchant family, so he had kind of a career set up for

him. He was going to do really well

in life, but then he came to know Jesus later on in life.

And his distinctive was it was that he loved the church and he

believed in the church more than anything else.

But while he was Bishop, persecution broke out OK, and

some believers, they they stood by.

But when persecution comes, it has a way of revealing what's

actually there and not just persecution.

When anything hard happens in our lives, it has this revealing

nature in our lives. So as this persecution broke out

during the 3rd century, some people stayed, some people left

the church because they didn't have, like, a firm foundation.

But when the persecution did eventually end, the real

fracture began to develop. See the church started to tear

itself apart over what to do with those who had left the

church. The church was asking the

question, those that that left are were they actually ever

there? Was the casual Christian that

they have a place to belong in the church?

Who was in, who had gone too far, and who was going to be

welcomed back. And Cyprian he, he saw something

that still feels painfully relevant for all of us today.

Sometimes the church survives suffering only to be undone by

division. And so he wrote a couple books

about unity of the church because he knew the deepest

threat was not from the outside of the church.

It wasn't culture wars. It wasn't persecution.

It was hurt people within the church hurting one another.

It was Christians wounded and disappointed attacking one

another. It was disunity.

And that's not just an ancient problem.

It's a problem that we still continue to have today.

See, we live in a world that teaches us to leave when things

get hard. Think about social media, for

example, right? You're on your, you're on your

feed. I don't know.

I'm if I call it a news feed, am I too old for that?

Is it so-called a news feed? Is that what TikTok has?

I don't know. But when you see something on

there, right, you see something you don't like, you see

something you disagree with, you see something that makes you

angry. We've been trained that our

reaction is either to unfollow, unsubscribe, unlike, or get

really mad and yell at it. Social media is not a place of

patient forbearance, am I right? We're not sitting on our social

media feed going, man, I really want to believe the best about

Greg. He's such a good guy.

I can't believe that he would say such a thing.

Instead, we immediately unfollow or unsubscribe.

We live in a culture that has taught us to divide when people

disappoint us, to protect ourselves at all costs, to keep

everything casual. Everything's curated, everything

is on our own terms. But Jesus did not save us into a

private spirituality. He binds us together as his

people. Scripture describes us as a

body, a family. This is the church and that

means if we want to have a life with Jesus, if we want to have

his his presence, if we want to be Jesus in our city, we are

also going to have to learn how to live with Jesus's people.

So this week we are beginning a new series.

It is called The Good Church and we started the series kind of on

purpose right after Easter. We're going to be going through

Ephesians 4 through 6, which if you listen to Pastor Ben, his

scripture reading, it's out of Ephesians 1 and Ephesians one

through 3 is all about Easter and what happened on Easter.

Easter is Jesus died and was resurrection, and through his

resurrection he defeated the powers of evil, death and

darkness, and he became enthroned in heaven above all

things on heaven and earth. And he took a divided people and

united them so that there's no Jew, no Gentile, no man, no

woman, no different social classes.

There's nothing that can divide us.

But now, underneath King Jesus, we are one body, one church.

And so Ephesians 4 through 6 begins to describe what does

that then look like? And so we're going to be talking

about that for the next few weeks, talking about being His

church, a people of grace, a people bound by love, a people

trying to disciple in the way of Jesus.

Together, my friends, we have to unlearn church as an event that

we go to or an organization that we are a part of.

It's not just like a weekly habit of something we need to

do. It is the living body of Jesus

in our world. And This is why the New

Testament talks about this unity of the Christian life over and

over again. And one letter Paul says, For by

1 Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or

Greeks, whether slaves are free, and we were all made to drink of

1 Spirit. Hear that language coming

together under 1 Spirit. No slaves or free, he says in

another letter. In addition to all these things,

put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.

If Jesus has saved us and invited us into life with Him,

then we have to trust not just the ends, not just the fact that

we have been saved, but also the means of how our life is to look

today. We have to follow the way He

designed us to live. So if you have your Bibles with

you, go ahead and open to Ephesians 4.

We're going to be in verses, verses one through 6.

We recommend a physical Bible for a lot of reasons, but it's

also going to be on your phone if you have the app or it's

going to be on the screen. And so like I said in the first

3 chapters of the letter, Paul has been talking about

orthodoxy. He's been talking about the

truth. He's been talking about the

reality of Jesus as King and him being above all things and

unifying all people underneath him.

And then in chapter 4, he begins to talk about what does this

mean for you and I? Chapter 4 verse 1 is a hinge

talking about how are we to live in light of what came before.

So let's start up. Ephesians 41 says, therefore, I

the prisoner of the Lord urge you to walk in a manner worthy

of the calling with which you have been called.

OK, first word I want you to mark if you have a pen or

something, circle it. The word walk, walk in in

chapters one through 3, Paul repeats a phrase over and over

again and it's remember, remember this, remember that

Jesus is king. Remember that you are a body.

Remember that there's powers in this world that Jesus is over.

Remember, remember, remember. It's it's education, language.

But then in four through 6, he begins a new word.

Remember stops and he begins to say walk, walk.

Paul has been telling us what is true, who Jesus is, what he has

done, and who we are in Christ. But it's going to now move from

theology to practice, from what we believe to how we live.

In other words, the gospel is not just something to think

about, it is a reality to step into.

Paul is saying you have been called by God, rescued by grace,

brought into a new humanity in Christ, and now live like it.

Let your life catch up to what is already true in Jesus.

Not a casual suggestion, but an invitation into a new kind of

life. You are not who you once were.

You are no long. You no longer belong to sin or

to the world or to a a story. You lived before.

You belong to God now. And if that is true, then there

is a way of life that He is calling you into.

The second word to notice is the word manner.

Now this is this is kind of cool.

The Greek word is axios and it means to have the weight of OK,

to have the weight of he is saying to the church that the

weight of of its life should measure the same as its

declaration. It should be who they say

they're going to be. If we're going to say that we

are Jesus in our city, the church should live like we're

Jesus in our city. If we say that we're a people of

grace and forgiveness, we should be a people of grace and

forgiveness. Apparently, the way that you and

I live together is just as important as what we believe

individually. The late formation writer Dallas

Woodard, One of the things that he talks about over and over

again is what is God's goal for humanity?

Why did he put us here? Why did he create us?

And he says that it's God's aim in human history is the creation

of an all inclusive community of loving persons with God Himself

as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

What he was saying was that the church is not just a good idea,

it is the idea. God's goal was to create a

community of love in which he could enjoy, and the church is

His primary way of doing this. So the church needs to walk in

the way that he called his people to walk as a people of

love for the sake of others, as an all inclusive everybody

belongs. Anyone that walks in these doors

is able to be a part of this community of love.

We are here for others. So how do we live in light of

that, right? If we're to live in this manner,

how do we begin doing that? He says in verses 2 through

three, with all humility and gentleness, with patience,

bearing with one another and love, being diligent to keep the

unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

There's a lot there to unpack, so let's do a small word on

each. But first, notice the movement.

OK, Paul begins with beneath our behavior towards other people.

He begins with the posture of our heart and then he moves

outward. Community is always downstream

of the person that God has created us to be or formed us to

be. He has to do an inner work

before we begin to treat people differently.

The way we treat others reveals also the kind of person we are

becoming. And so how are we supposed to

live first? How do we begin to live with

humility? And I don't want to spend a lot

of time on this. Pastor Ben just preached on

humility. He did a a pretty good job, I

think. So I recommend go back on Apple

podcast, give a listen to that sermon.

It's good. But I do want to say a couple of

things. First, Kyle Snodgrass wrote a

beautiful commentary and the book of Ephesians and he talks

about humility like this. He says humility is an awareness

that all we are and have is from God.

The humble person refuses to value self above others or to

assign more privilege or important to self than others.

The word humility literally means loneliness of mind.

Humility is the surrender of our ego.

It is a refusal to live under this illusion that we are

self-sufficient that we make our lives work.

Humility is what happens when you stop pretending you run your

life. Paul is saying that the first

step into real life together is humility, is to acknowledge God

first, God's presence in your life, how God has LED your life.

See, the church doesn't revolve around you and I.

It wasn't started by you and I. It's not sustained by us.

It's not built by us. We're not focused here on church

growth. The church is the work of Jesus.

It's the work of Jesus uniting, of Jesus's calling, of his

bringing people in. It's his work of grace and

mercy, and we get to join along with him.

All this means that the beauty and the unity of the church

cannot be brought together by you and I.

In fact, my friends, if you and I try to unite the church and we

try to force it to be united and at peace with one another, we

will do more damage than good. The only thing that can unite

the church, build the church, sustain the church, is for us to

surrender to God and His work in it.

Second word, gentleness. Now I'm going to be really

honest with you guys. I was working on this part this

morning because when we write sermons, when anyone's writing a

sermon, the first person that's getting preached to is the

preacher. Beware the preacher that is not

being preached to 1st. And often when we are working on

a sermon, God will put His finger on something painful in

our lives that He is working on. And man, let me tell you, every

time I would sit down with this word gentleness for the last two

weeks I thought this is not too bad, I agree with this.

And then last night happened. Our son is 4 month old and he is

in middle of sleep regression and sleep regression is really

hard. My parents, can I get an Amen?

You would be surprised on how little sleep you actually need.

And our son was having just a really hard time going to bed,

just a really hard time falling asleep.

And we were doing all the like parent moves.

We were trading off, you know, we were getting along really

well. We were rocking and while

sitting, we were rocking and while standing, we were putting

a bottle in his mouth and letting him eat.

And then we would do that like awkward, really slow set down

that you do with a baby. And then one of us would like

open a door a little bit and me and a wood creak and he'd wake

up. My wife said, yeah, the other

room didn't clear. And man, at first I was like,

peace of God, God with me. I want to be a great example to

my wife and my son. At 11:30, I'm getting a little

aggravated, but I'm still holding on.

And then my daughter has a nightmare as soon as my son

falls asleep and we're having to comfort her for like an hour.

And then my son wakes back up. And let me tell you, my cadence

was less gentle in that moment. I was finding myself just more

and more sharp. And I was laying in bed after

that at 2:30 in the morning, thinking about this message and

thinking about the word gentleness.

And God began to bring to mind all these moments during the

week. I had not been gentle, like when

my daughter was running towards a hot stove and I yelled at her

to stop. There were other ways of doing

that and I can make excuses about just wanting to keep her

safe, but it was not gentle. So I don't say this from a

elevated stand. I say this is a another

apprentice of King Jesus trying to figure this out.

OK, gentleness is strength under the control of love.

It is really easy for us in our world to hear the world

gentleness and humility and think weak because the tools of

this world are not to be humble or gentle.

Again, I mean point to any anything on the news, anything

on your social media feed. Social media is not built about

humility, right? Social media is built as a

platform to lift yourself up. But also look at the things that

do well on social media, the things that go viral.

They are hot takes. They're things that people will

disagree with. People don't guard their tongue.

We live in a world where humility and gentleness are

looked down on and are even thought to be weakness.

But it's not. Gentleness is strength under the

control of love. It is power that no longer needs

to control or prove itself. Gentleness is the power to no

longer force your will, to no longer need to prove yourself.

It is the kind of soul that is rooted in God, that it does not

have to dominate, force or wound others in order to achieve what

it wants. Let me speak to the the men in

the room real quick. Men, your significant other,

your wife and your kids need you to be gentle.

Gardens do not grow under forced will.

If I plant a garden and I am forcing my will look going out

and pouring as much water as I can and fertilizer and and just

yelling at it to grow, it's not going to do well.

Over and over again studies have shown that what children need is

a gentle hand in guiding in life and your spouse needs it just as

much. Husbands, if you find that

you're you're button heads with your wife, it feels like you

aren't getting along for some reason.

My challenge to you is check your gentleness, check your tone

of voice, check your cadence. Ladies, I say lovingly pretty

much the exact same thing. Your, your husband needs your

gentleness. You would be amazed at how you

can soften a man's heart by acting gentle towards them.

Gentle people do not make everything around them pay for

what is unsettled in themselves. Gentle.

Excuse me, this is not a sermon on gentleness, but I just, I

have a lot here, so I'm sorry, but the gentleness also reveals

what we care about. OK?

I had a time in my life where I loved to, I'm a giant nerd.

I loved collectibles like Funko Pops, collectible cards.

And one of my pride, like pride and joys of my collection are

back when Lord of the Rings came out, they came out with these

extended edition gift sets and they were beautiful.

And they came out with these like beautiful models that along

with the DVD. So like I have like this, like

very breakable Gollum and it's, he's beautiful, right?

Like my wife looks at it on our mantle and goes, man, I'm really

glad that my husband placed that there.

And then I have this beautiful, meanest turret and just, and I

remember like taking it out-of-the-box at like 15 years

old. And I was so gentle because I

cared about it so much. Or the first time holding my

kids. I'm gentle because I love them

so much. We treat things gently when we

do not want them to break, when we don't want to cause them

harm. Dallas Willard also talked about

kind of one of my mentors from afar.

He would talk about who should do the correcting in your

church. Often, if we are honest, we do

not correct out of love and we don't correct in gentleness.

We correct in order to fix a behaviour we don't like, even if

it's good or bad. But real correction needs to be

handled gently. And he would argue that the

people in the church that are able to do that are the the

older people that have walked through life and dealt with

their woundings, that are able to correct without trying to

control the other person. 3rd patience, bearing with one

another in love. Patience is the choice to bear

discomfort, pain, and more. It is a kind of inner strength

that does not give up. It perseveres.

Now, Paul is not talking about grim endurance.

He is not saying just tolerate difficult people.

He's talking about the kind of patience that is rooted in love,

which means that this is not merely about surviving one

another, putting up with one another.

It is about remaining open to one another, staying soft

towards one another, refusing to withdraw affection or mercy or

your presence when another person becomes difficult.

Notice love, not affection. If it were to bear with one

another in affection, we would have patience with those we

like, and then do away with the people that we do not.

Love turns patience from reluctant tolerance into willing

self giving. One more illustration with my

kids and then I'm done. Stop talking about my kids.

Raise your hand if you've seen Blue E.

How many of you have watched Blue E?

OK, how many of you watch Blue E more than once?

Twice. 3 * 4 * 5 * 6. Yeah, let me tell you, we have

watched Blue E so many times. I have watched Moana so many

times. I have watched it.

I have watched Frozen so many times.

Why do I do it? I patiently endure with my kids

because I love them, right? We need to practice a patient

that that comes out of love, a bearing with one another, out of

love. And then finally, Paul says

making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the

bonds of peace. Another way of saying this is

that we make an intentional choice towards unity.

We intentionally pursue unity as the church to stay together to

to value staying together no matter what.

Notice what is at the centre of this though.

OK, it is the unity of the Spirit.

God is not looking for a community of people that look

exactly the same, that all sound the same, with same gifting,

same kind of values and stuff like that.

All this. No, God has created us with

great diversity. This is one of the distinctives

of the church. There is a difference between

false unity that the world offers and the real unity formed

by the Spirit. 1 of Missy and my favorite shows from the end of

last year was Pluribus. Has anyone else watched this on

Apple TV? Maybe a couple of you?

OK, it's this really interesting show that is like a a take on

Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Basically everyone wakes up one

day and almost everyone has like a hive mind.

They're all of equal mind. They're all thinking the same

things, all feeling the same things.

Everybody is exactly the same except for the main character.

And here's the thing, when everybody was is exactly the

same, same mind and all of that, there is complete peace in the

world. War is over, people are no

longer fighting. People are completely sharing

resources. Things look really good.

But all throughout there is something unsettling.

And the question the show Act asks is, is this actually

better? See, our culture calls us to two

sides. On the one hand, we are called

to like a false unity that really becomes tribalism.

If we're honest, Tribalism is when our identity is completely

swallowed up by by a people group or a community or a

belief. Your belonging becomes

conformity and you're safe as long as you align with your

tribe, right? And that's the thing with tribes

is they're usually really open. They're willing to have anybody

come in unless they're different.

The moment someone is different than the tribe, they become at

least an irritation, if not a threat.

And we see a lot of this, like in our special, especially our

political discourse these days, the left and right are

incredibly fall apart, far apart, and they can't seem to

like see eye to eye at all. You have two tribes existing.

But if I'm honest, I don't see a ton of that in Ankeny.

What In Ankeny, I see the other side.

And that is complete self-sufficiency.

It's that belief that I have built up my life.

I, I control my destiny. I can be the only one to make

myself successful and the problem with that is, is that

you can't bear the weight of your life.

You can't control tomorrow. Tragedy could strike, you could

get sick, someone you love could get sick.

You are not as self-sufficient as you might think.

The problem with each of these is that they are both self

enslaving. In tribalism, you become

enslaved to the tribe and then self-sufficiency.

You become enslaved to yourself. One loses itself in the crowd.

One loses itself and cuts itself off from loving other people.

Because you cannot have love without others.

And if you are self-sufficient, you can't connect.

The only other way is the way that Jesus offers.

See. He gives an identity that is not

achieved by self and not bestowed by the tribe.

He gives you an identity through grace.

He says that you are deeply loved and that you belong.

He offers kindness instead of suspicion.

He offers patience instead of harshness.

He offers love and hope and healing and he says that you can

be a bit different in this community.

In fact, God created you a little bit different than the

others within. But the thing that you and I

church have in common is Christ. Pastor Ben and I are different.

Pastor Ben likes to go and fix things in his time off.

There's one, there's one time I think you'll be OK with me

saying this. It was one time I asked him what

he did with his weekend and he was like, I was in my walls

rewiring things. I'm like, what a freak.

That sounds exhausting, but what unifies us is Christ Jesus.

There's another friend in here who believes that Star Wars

Episode 3 is the best of the Star Wars movies.

Oh, brothers and sisters, I'll rebuke that later.

The goal is not organizational unity.

The goal is unity in the Spirit. Through Jesus, the church is

able to become this kind of community because our life

together does not begin with us. It begins with God.

And our unity is not held together by our personalities or

our temperaments or our interests or our ideologies.

It is only held together by the Father, Son, and the Holy

Spirit. And that is exactly where Paul

goes next in Ephesians verses 4 through 6.

There is one body and one spirit, just as you also were

called in one hope of your calling, 1 Lord, 1 faith, one

baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through

all and in all. These are the essentials, my

brothers and sisters. You could have other brothers

and sisters that are in this church, other churches, other

church traditions, and they still belong to the great church

as long as they hold to these other political ideologies,

other values. You're going to go to churches

that are are slain in the spirit.

You're going to go to other churches that have a heavy

emphasis on on serving the community, maybe more than us,

maybe, but everyone that follows these things belongs in the

church. See, once you think about an

orchestra, real quick, an orchestra has a lot of

different, different elements, right?

A lot of different instruments. I forgot the word instrument.

You don't want them to all sound the same, right?

If you had all violins, it would be a really boring orchestra.

But what do you have if everyone is playing something different?

You have dissonance. What brings unity, what brings

goodness and beauty to an orchestra is when they are

united in vision towards 1 peace through 1 conductor.

And that is who we are, my friends.

One God, we are united in him. So point #1 you cannot follow

Jesus without the church. Every time we try to do that,

church will feel wrong or our walk will feel wrong, Eugene

Peterson, one of our favourite pastors, wrote.

God never makes private secret salvation deals with people.

His relationships with us are personal, true, intimate, yes,

but private, no Dietrich Bonhoeffer around in World War

21 of the that the the rebel pastors against Hitler has this

beautiful book called Life Together, which is all about the

church living together. It's all about community.

And he writes not what a man is in himself as a Christian.

His spirituality and piety constitutes the basis of our

community. What determines our brotherhood

is what the man is by reason of Christ.

Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ

has done to both of us. We do not build community, Jesus

does. It is not about what we do, it

is about what He has done. And with Jesus being at the

center, we are apprenticing to him.

We are disciples together. One more Bonhoeffer quote just

for good measure. The Christian needs another

Christian who speaks God's word to him.

He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and

discouraged for by himself he cannot help himself without

belaying the truth. When you try to follow Jesus as

a self help thing when it is just a personal Jesus, you will

make a caricature of Jesus. You need Jesus revealed in the

in the diverse body of the church.

You need to hear Jesus through other pastors and teachers and

the people in your in your bands, the other disciples in

your community. Fill in the colours.

It's like Jesus is a colouring page and when you're sitting by

yourself, you don't have all the colours.

It's a black and white Jesus that you have made in your own

image, but the other people colour him in.

We cannot become like Jesus on our own.

We can't do any of these. We can't seek his presence.

We can't become like him, and we certainly cannot be his presence

in our city. We can only follow Jesus

together. Todd Hall is a professor and he

did this multi year study about what spiritual practices

actually form us into Christ likeness and he came up with

only three. And that is slow, quiet prayer

suffering, right? That's great.

And then long devoted community to one another.

We need community to be formed. But here's the tension beneath

it all. If Jesus has bound himself to

the church, and the church is one of the primary places of our

healing and formation, then why is it so often the place of our

wounding? Why does the church often become

not a home, but a place of disappointment, frustration and

pain? And let me be honest with you, I

have also been hurt by the church.

I have had relationships with other people.

I have relation, had relationships with pastors where

they have not lived up to who I thought they were, where they

have made choices that were either painful to other people

or painful to myself. And it is a special kind of

hurt. So I again, I speak as a as a

fellow disciple that there's something really painful about

church hurt because it hits your identity, right?

Like you begin questioning something about yourself when

when someone you've looked up to as a mature disciple or a pastor

says something that's hurtful, you begin thinking, was I not

good enough? Did I not follow Jesus right?

What's going on? Does God love me?

Is he still there? But I've also hurt people.

I remember so, so am I. I remember one of the first

times as a pastor, I was sitting down with someone and I said

something and I watched the pain in their eyes and I had to feel

completely humbled in that moment.

This is really hard because the church that we are a part of

should seem like it should be filled with people that just

look like Jesus, but it often is filled with really cranky

people, people that are really opinionated, people that are

weird. Do you know anybody weird?

You can just look up here. So how can we say that we're

supposed to belong to the church when it's so difficult?

And let me tell you, the reason that the church hurts is because

of sinners. We are all sinners.

There is no perfect church. The fact that I am a Sinner and

our church is full of sinners means that we are going to get

hurt. My friends, I feel blessed to be

a part of Presence Church. Pastor Ben, my wife and Susan

feel the same way. We've had very little drama.

We've had very little blow UPS. We have actually been really

unified, and that is a beautiful thing.

But if you are a part of Presence Church, you will

eventually get hurt by someone else here, or even Pastor Ben or

I, because we are sinners. So how do we hold this tension?

I think that by remembering that the church is not where perfect

people gather. It is where imperfect people are

being apprenticed to Jesus together, which means of course

the church will sometimes wound us.

Wherever real relationship exists, pain is possible.

Therefore, if there is pain in your church, there is real

relationship. Pain does not happen if there is

not true intimate life on life happening.

Pain can be the proof that there is love and formation happening

in the church. Just like someone that has gone

through surgery, usually there is pain as a part of the

healing. The church is not the place

where no one sins. It is the place where sin is

meant to be confessed, forgiven, and transformed by grace.

And so we are doing this series not because there's problems in

our church, but we're doing it so that we don't have problems

in our church. See, goodness does not just

happen accidentally. Chaos does.

And if we are not intentional about pursuing goodness in our

church, then we will be a Church of chaos.

I just want you to imagine for a moment too, Like imagine the

church that's completely united, not just presence church, but

imagine if like all the Ankeny churches got together and

completely united or the OR the global church.

What if, what if we had a church that wasn't perfect or polished

or or without difference, but deeply, genuinely united?

A people where nobody has to perform to belong, where wounds

are not ignored but tended to, where confession is normal,

where forgiveness is normal, where nobody is disposable,

where people stay. Can you imagine a church where

love is the atmosphere? Where gentleness shapes every

hard conversation, Where patience is deeper than

irritation, Where humility has pushed out ego, Where people do

not keep score, Where people do not quietly drift, Where people

move toward one another, not away?

We live in a world of suspicion, self protection, and distance.

But imagine a church full of love, forgiveness, peace, hope,

healing. Honestly, that would feel like

another world. It would feel like heaven is

coming closer than it is today. The power of the church is is

that brings heaven just a little closer.

It gives the world a glimpse of Jesus at the end of his life.

At his last dinner, what did Jesus say to his disciples?

That they were to love one another and that they would know

you are my disciples by your love for one another.

Our first job, my friends, as a good church is to pursue unity

with one another. And it is through that unity

that the world will bear witness to King Jesus.

So I've gone over my time, but three just really quick things

that I want to invite you to practice this week.

This is now I'm putting on my coach hat, something I never

thought I'd wear as a as a as a nerd.

It's a sports reference. Three quick things.

OK, these are really practical to just think about one of these

this week to try. First, pause before you react.

Stop, breathe. When you begin to feel that

tension, when you something feels like it's escalating,

stop, breathe, pray, say Jesus, bring peace to the situation.

Help me to act in the situation how you would bring your

gentleness. Second, interpret with

generosity. When someone says something to

you, interpret it as if they want something good from you.

We often walk around the opposite.

We often walk around believing people are trying to do

something to us. Let me be really honest with

you, most people are only thinking about themselves.

People are not out to get you. So instead, when you are talking

with someone, interpret what they're saying with generosity

and then finally move towards people with gentleness.

If relationship need action, don't gossip about it, don't

talk behind people's backs, don't try to avoid it, don't try

to people please, instead move towards them gently send the

text, make the phone call and just ask.

Hey, you said this, what's going on?

It made me feel this way. What, what's what's going on?

In this moment? Jesus has brought us together

and he has made US1 and what God has made 1 he is going to

protect. Unity is not something we

achieve, it is something that we receive.

And so that's the invitation today, my friends, my invitation

today is that we be a church that pursues unity, that we're a

place where we live with humility and gentleness towards

one another. We're patient.

And if, if you would like to be a part of that today, we have

like the next step of coming to neuter presents, we would love

to have you. But first, I want to invite you

to follow King Jesus because maybe you're not doing that

today. Maybe you're looking at yourself

and you're saying I would like to belong to that community, but

I don't know if I'm good enough. I'm not a gentle person.

I'm not a humble person. And that's OK.

Jesus wasn't calling the the humble.

Jesus wasn't calling the patient.

Jesus wasn't calling the perfect people.

Jesus calls you today where you are and all you got to do is

make the choice that I don't want to do that anymore.

I don't want to be that person and turn and begin following

him. And that's the beginning today.

And so as we transition into worship, I want to invite you to

go ahead and, and let Jesus know that.

And I'm going to have a couple people up here that you can come

up with and they can guide you through a prayer.

And then just the other invitation is look at look at

your life with the church prayerfully.

Consider how have I, how have I walked with the church?

Maybe you have hurt one of the dreams that we have always had

for presents. That would be a place for hurt

people that they could come and receive healing.

So if you need that today, if you've been hurt by the church,

come and pray with somebody up here.

Come find Pastor Ben or myself and would love to pray with you.

And then check yourself for humility.

Check yourself for gentleness. And if you don't feel like

you're any of those things, if you're looking at that list of

things that Paul mentions and saying this is not me and I'm

not here and I'm already following Jesus and what do I

do? The prayer is to ask the Spirit

to begin working on it. So let's be a church, a good

church. That begins with being a United

Church.