Jesus-Driven Invitation

Good morning.

The sermon text today is John chapter 1, verses 43 through 51.

John 1:43–51

And you can find this in the pa this passage in the Blue Pew Bible on page 1615.

Or follow along in your device of choice.

The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee.

Finding Philip, he said to him, Follow me.

Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethesda.

Philip found Nathaniel and told him, We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and about whom the prophets also wrote.

Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

Nazareth.

Can anything good come from there?

Nathanael asked.

Come and see, said Philip.

When Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching, he said to him, Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.

How do you know me?

Nathanael asked.

Jesus answered, I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.

Then Nathaniel declared, Rabbi, you are the Son of God.

You are the King of Israel.

Jesus said, You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree.

You will see greater things than that.

He then added, Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven open, the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

Here ends the reading.

Glad to be together with you on this Labor Day weekend.

I'm actually kind of surprised that this many of you are still in town, actually.

This is the last chance for most people to get away for a weekend before school starts and we get back in the rhythm of fall.

And so I'm just really glad to be together with you here today.

If I haven't had a chance to mute you yet, my name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

One thing before we get into the message this morning is there is a church picnic that is taking place right after the service today.

If you didn't know about that, that's okay.

You're invited to the church picnic.

So the church picnic is not happening here, as is uh oftentimes the case.

The church picnic is going to take place at the Voigt's house.

Andrew, Jess, raise your hands.

Uh they are the ones who are hosting.

And so uh I'm going to speak on their behalf and say if you didn't know that there was a thing happening and you still want to come and you didn't bring any food or anything, that's okay.

We'll figure out how to feed you.

There's always enough food at these kind of things.

Uh so uh talk to them afterwards uh to find address details.

I don't want to just publicly shout that out for all of YouTube to hear.

Um so, anyways, uh I want to invite you to join uh in the church picnic this afternoon, right after the service.

Uh with that, let me ask you to uh join me in a word of prayer as we come to these verses today.

God, we come before you again this morning as we do each week, and we are so grateful.

We're grateful for the gift of your word.

We're grateful for the ways that you reveal yourself to us and speak to us by your Holy Spirit through your inspired word.

We are grateful for the chance to be together with other uh friends and other brothers and sisters who uh are followers of yours.

And we're just grateful, God, uh, for the chance to look into your word.

And so we ask, as we do each week, that you would speak to each of us, uh, give each one of us what we need here today, provide for us, God, every single thing uh that each one of us needs.

And we look to you for that this morning.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, in these last two weeks of the summer, we are looking at two things that we believe are especially important for us to grow in, to sort of lean into as we head into this fall ministry season.

And the reason that we're talking about these two things, which I will name in just a moment, is uh that uh we've seen uh God bringing some fruitfulness in different areas of our church life.

And one of those is that over the course of this year, we've seen more people visiting Elmwood for the first time than at any point in the last at least 10 years.

It might be 15, but for sure at least the last 10 years.

Uh so far this year, from January through last Sunday, there have been 94 people who have come to Elmwood as a first-time guest, who've never been to our church before, who've come, who've just are either you know randomly found us online or were invited by someone who's already a part of our church community.

And for a church our size, that's a remarkable, uh remarkable thing.

And so we're grateful for that that we've seen uh more people coming to Elmwood.

But it's not just that people are coming for the first time.

Of those 94 people, 17 of them have expressed to us an interest in sticking around and getting connected and putting down roots and being a part of what God is doing here at Elmwood.

And so, with that, uh with that those areas of fruitfulness and with that area of growth in mind, uh, we are thinking that it's really, really important for us as we head into this next season as a church to be really purposeful, to grow in these two specific areas, the first of which is hospitality.

We talked about this last Sunday, and uh if you know me, you know that I don't do this very often.

So uh take that for what it's worth.

If you were not here last week and didn't hear that message, would you please go back and listen to it?

You can easily find it on our website.

It's in the Elmwood Weekly Ministry email.

You can find it there.

Uh but please go back and listen to that.

Uh, we talked about hospitality and how it's uh more important than ever that we continue to grow as people who are uh people of hospitality in all the places where we live, work, learn, and play, and how it's more important than ever that we continue to uh become a more and more hospitable place here on Sunday mornings and every time we gather.

And so that's the first thing that we think is really important for us to press into, to lean into right now.

And the second is invitation.

So hospitality and invitation.

These are the two things that we think are uh especially important right now.

And if you've been around Elmwood for just about any length of time, uh you shouldn't be surprised by this.

Uh and the reason is because uh we express our mission by saying we are a multi-generational church family, inviting all people into the life-giving way of Jesus.

And so this idea of invitation is really at the heart of why we exist, and every single thing that we do as a church is towards the end of seeing people invited to follow and to know and to be changed by Jesus.

What I want to do today is I want to uh take this large and multifaceted subject and attempt to distill it down into something uh that is uh quite simple.

You know, when I think of things like the mission of the church, you know, or living on mission, that's sort of a big category that we can think about as followers of Jesus.

And when I think about that sort of umbrella, there's lots of other things that fall underneath that umbrella, things like evangelism, you know, uh sharing our faith with people in our spheres of influence.

There's things like apologetics and how do we uh it thoughtfully articulate what we believe to the people in our spheres of influence.

There's things like cultural exegesis, which just means the ability to see and understand the culture and the world around us so that we can, in loving and thoughtful and in winsome ways, articulate the good news about Jesus in a way that's intelligible to people in our cultural environment.

I think of things like faith formation, like socially and spiritually, what happens inside of people as they grow closer to Jesus?

What needs to happen?

What are the stages of spiritual growth that someone has to go through before they even make a decision to follow Jesus?

And each one of these categories is worthy of a lifetime of study all by itself.

And I, for one, personally, find it easy to get lost in all of these things and miss the simplicity of what invitation actually is.

The heart of living on mission is this.

We are inviting, we are, let me say it again.

We are introducing others to a person.

That's really the heart of what invitation and living on mission is.

We are introducing others to a person.

In our passage we're looking at today, we see an example of one person introducing another person to Jesus, and uh we see that the way in which that person, Philip, introduces his friend Nathaniel to Jesus, tells us something about who Jesus is.

And who Jesus is, what we learn about him here, should shape and influence the way that we go about living as people of invitation and our spheres of influence.

So let's look at these verses and see what it tells us about Jesus and then make a connection to our practice of invitation.

So the lesson, the thing we learn about Jesus from these verses is this Jesus is the answer to our deepest longings.

Jesus is the answer to the deepest longings of our heart.

Listen in verse 43, where it says, the next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee.

Finding Philip, he said to him, Follow me.

Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Betheda.

Philip found Nathaniel and told him, We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and about whom the prophets also wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

So in these first opening verses of the book of John, we see that Jesus has been gathering to himself this crew of apprentices.

And so in this passage, he invites this man named Philip to follow him, which means to become his disciple or his apprentice, to sit under his teaching and to learn from him.

He invites Philip to follow him.

And the very first thing that Philip did was he went and found his friend Nathanael and said, We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and about whom the prophets also wrote.

And we should be careful not to miss the scope of what Philip is actually saying here.

The law and the prophets together mean the Bible to a first century Jewish person.

So the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, as we call it, was summarized as the law and the prophets.

And so what Philip is saying to his friend Nathaniel is he's saying, everything in the Hebrew Bible, all of it, has been pointing forwards to this man, Jesus.

Now, of course, Philip didn't quite understand probably the scope of the claim that he was making as he said that, and he would come to find that out later.

But even here, we see that he understands.

Everything in the Hebrew Bible has been pointing forward to this man, Jesus.

So what Philip is saying to his friend Nathaniel is he's saying, We have found the one that we've been waiting for.

And as you read the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, what you see is that for generations, for century after century after century, God's people were filled with longing, and they were filled with expectation for God to fulfill his promises and to bring about their deliverance.

You can't read the Hebrew Bible without seeing the longing that exists within God's people.

And as you read it, you can see it in a couple different ways.

I'll just uh mention a few of them.

Uh you think about kings.

All the way back in the book of Deuteronomy, there is uh Moses writes about uh anticipating a king who would rule over the people with justice and with righteousness, who would rule by the instruction of the Lord and who would teach the people to walk in the ways of the Lord.

And so we see that expectation set out, and then you get the first king, Saul, who is not great, and then you get David after him, who is the best king that Israel got, and even he had all sorts of things about his life that were really messed up.

And then his son Solomon was pretty messed up, and then all the kings afterwards were pretty messed up.

And so, from the very first king all the way down through the very last one that we read about, you know, in 1st and 2nd Kings, the kings and the people are just circling the drain.

And so every time you read about a new king in the Hebrew Bible, you're left with a sense of longing for something better.

The people of God were left with a sense of this is it?

Is this the king we've waited for?

And there's a hope and an expectation that there will be a king to reign on David's throne because God promised, but none of these kings seem to be the one.

And so there's a longing and an expectation for a better king.

We look at the Hebrew Bible and we see all the promises that God made to his people.

You look at Abraham's life and how God promised him, I'm going to bless you.

And through you, I'm going to bring my blessing and my prosperity to the nations.

And then there's promises about the flourishing of Abraham's descendants, and there's promises about a land, a place that God's people could call home.

There's promises about a return home after the people have been brought into exile, and God promised, I'm going to bring you back out of exile.

There's promises of a new covenant, a new kind of relationship that God was going to forge with his people.

There's promise of a new heart so that God's people could know God in a way that they couldn't know him before.

And there's all these promises that God makes throughout the Hebrew Bible, and the people of God for generations and for centuries had longed for God to make good on all these promises.

They longed for all these promises to finally and once and for all be fulfilled.

And so when Philip sees Jesus and goes and finds Nathaniel, he says, We finally found the one that we have been waiting for.

We know exactly what it is like to long in the ways that they did.

All of our lives are governed by deep heart-level longings.

It's not just the Jewish people at the time of Jesus, it's not just religious people.

Every single person in this room, every single person who you will ever meet has a life that is governed by deep heart-level longings.

We long to be seen by others, to be known by others.

We long to be loved.

We long to know that we are important.

We long to know that our lives matter.

We long for the people around us to approve of us.

We long, especially for the people who are closest to us to be proud of us.

We long for people to like us and to enjoy us.

We long to be seen as competent and capable and smart and attractive and successful.

We long for meaningful relationships and friendships that will stand the test of time.

We long for meaning and dignity and purpose in our work and in our vocation and in our studies.

We long for safety.

We long for a world where we don't have to clutch our children in relief when they come home from school, like so many parents did this week with the school shooting that Benjamin prayed about.

We long for security both now and into the future to know that things are going to be okay.

We long for justice to be done.

We long for peace to prevail and to reign.

We long for comfort.

We long for a sense of fulfillment and a sense of accomplishment in all the things that we do.

We long for the enjoyment that can come through money and through material possessions and through all the good things that God has given us in the created world around us.

We long for the resolution of the things that bring us heartache and that trouble us and that and that cause us to feel sorrow and grief.

And we could go on and on and on and on.

But the point is we cannot escape the gravitational pull of these deep heart-level longings.

And every single one of our lives are organized around, bringing some kind of resolution to those things that we long for.

And of course, not all those things are bad to desire them and to long for them.

Sometimes the way we go about that is bad.

But all of our hearts long and ache.

And the Bible says that Jesus is not only the answer for the Jewish people, as we see here in this particular passage.

What the Bible says is that Jesus is the answer for our longings as well.

In Jesus, we are seen.

We are seen more deeply than we see ourselves, even.

In him, we are known more deeply than we know and understand our own selves.

In him, we are loved unconditionally, totally separate from anything that we do or accomplish.

In him, we find the approval that we so desperately want to find and spend our lives working towards.

In him, we have found an identity, an identity that so many of us spend so much time and money and energy and effort trying to create and craft for ourselves.

In him we find safety.

In him we find comfort.

In the presence and the communion of his spirit among us and the church and the relationships we have with our brothers and sisters in the faith.

In him we find joy.

Now, of course, we experience these things in part.

We don't experience these things as fully as we will one day.

We don't experience them as fully as we may want to experience them.

But it is in Jesus that all of those deep longings of our hearts can truly and finally be satisfied.

And so here's the connection to invitation.

Invitation is about introducing others to the one who can satisfy the deepest longings of their heart.

When we talk about living on mission and we talk about sharing our faith and any of that, really what we are talking about is introducing others to the one who can satisfy the deepest longings of their heart.

And the question is, okay, how do how do we do that?

What does that actually look like functionally?

Before we move on to you know talking about uh action steps we can take, uh, I do think it's appropriate to pause for a moment and ask a question.

Do you know him as the answer to your deepest longings?

Like, do you know him?

As the answer to the deepest longings of your heart.

The question isn't, do you go to church?

The question isn't, do you consider yourself a religious person?

The question isn't, do you believe even historical facts about the life and the death, even the resurrection of Jesus from the dead?

The question isn't, did you grow up in the church?

The question isn't whether you can check certain doctrinal boxes and just intellectually you can say, yeah, I believe all the things.

The real question is, have you experienced him as the only one who can truly satisfy your deepest longings?

Have there been times when you have read the Bible or you have listened to a sermon in a setting like this where you have sensed God's love for you?

Has there been times, maybe in a setting like this, where you have been together with God's people and you've been singing, and your heart has been stirred to worship him, and your heart has been stirred to adore him and to love him?

Maybe has there been times where you've been by yourself in your car with the music cranked up, singing very off-key badly?

And it doesn't matter because you met Jesus in that moment and he stirred your heart and it was a moment of communion and fellowship with him?

Have you experienced that?

Do you know him as the answer to your deepest longings?

Because you can.

You can know him as that.

Jesus wants you to know him in that way.

So how do we grow about go about growing to become people of invitation?

Let me suggest a couple different ways.

Number one, see his love for you.

So we think about inviting other people into our lives and into the life of our church and into the life-giving way of Jesus.

It doesn't actually start by us going out and doing anything with those people.

It begins inside with our hearts.

It begins with us seeing his love for us.

In this interaction with Nathaniel here, Jesus said something that's kind of cryptic.

We don't have time to really unpack this in its fullness today, so I'll just put that out there to save it for a different time.

But listen to what Jesus says in verse 51.

He says to Nathaniel, Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

You're like, what in the world is that talking about?

Great question.

The essence of it is this: Jesus is saying, a new pathway between heaven and earth is going to be opened.

And of course, he's anticipating, he's pointing forward to the cross, where through his death a new pathway between heaven and earth was opened.

Because of what Jesus did in giving his life for us and dying for us, we now have access to God, the Father, in a new way.

And so we look to the cross.

And as we look to the cross, what we see is the love of God for us.

What we see as we look to the cross is God's heart turned towards us in love.

What we see is the lengths to which God was willing to go in order to embrace us, to welcome us, to bring us back into his family, to give us spiritual life.

We see that he was willing to send even his son to suffer and to die and to absorb the sting and the pain of our sin into himself.

We see the lengths to which God was willing to go.

We see that God does not expect us to make our way to him, to find him on our own, but the cross shows us that God himself has come near to us.

God has made himself available to us, and all of this together shows us the overflow of God's love for us.

So the first thing we have to do is not do anything out there.

The first thing we do is we have to see his love for us.

So number one, see his love for you.

Number two, plant yourself in the soil of his love.

I don't think it's enough to have a one-time experience of that.

What we're after is a life of cultivating an awareness of his love for us.

And we do that, practically speaking, functionally speaking, through things like uh cultivating what we call spiritual rhythms.

You may have heard these, you know, some people call them spiritual disciplines.

I don't personally like that because I don't like the word discipline very much, I guess.

And it just feels, it just feels like, well, just do the thing.

And it's not about that.

You know, it's it's it's it's cultivating uh spiritual rhythms and spiritual practices and spiritual habits in our life.

And all those habits, you know, Bible and prayer and Sabbath and community and mission, all those habits create an environment where we can meet with and experience God and come to know him.

So all those habits do is create space where we can encounter God and we can grow in our love for him and grow in our awareness of his love for us.

And it's a way of uh like we never move on from the cross.

We never move on from God's love for us as if, like, okay, well, I experienced that once, and now I'm gonna go just like do a bunch of stuff.

No, spiritual rhythms are a way of going deeper into God's love for us, going deeper into the message of the cross and more fully understanding what it is and its implications for us and how we ought to live.

And so those spiritual rhythms are how we build our lives on his love.

So not only do we need to see his love for us, and we look to the cross for that, we need to plant ourselves in the soil of his love so that we can continually be growing in our awareness of his love for us.

And then having done that, we let his love turn us outwards.

So see his love for you.

Plant yourself in the soil of his love.

Let his love turn you outwards.

Uh, you may have noticed this, that uh in the modern world, uh, the gravitational pull is always inwards.

In unique ways in our modern context than it's ever been.

The gravitational pull is always, our lives are so busy with so many things, and there's all the stuff that we have to do, and so often we're like, I don't even have room in my life for one more relationship or one more time to engage with or connect with someone who I know is not a follower of Jesus because my life is just too busy.

How am I supposed to do that?

And the gravitational pull is always inwards to focus on only our needs and only what we want and only the things that we want to do.

And when we see his love for us and when we plant ourselves in the soil of it, that is going to turn our hearts outwards to the people in our lives.

So choose to be a person who invites other people into your life.

People from your sphere of influence who you know are not yet followers of Jesus, be the kind of person who cultivates a habit of inviting those people into your life.

That could look a million different ways.

I won't spell those out here.

But be the kind of person who invites others into your life.

Be the kind of person who invites others into spiritual conversations.

Be the kind of person who is curious about others.

Jesus is the answer to the deepest longings of our heart.

Do you, as you think about the people in your sphere of influence, co-workers, classmates, friends, family members, do you know the deepest longings of their heart?

Have you paid attention enough to see the things that they're afraid of, the things that grieve them, the things that they wish could be different in the world, their hopes and their fears and their longings, do you know that about those people in your sphere of influence?

Are you paying attention to people?

I don't know exactly who this was, but I heard a story once about a pastor who was asked, you know, if you were going to be sat down in a room with a person that you knew was going to die in one hour, and you had one hour to speak with this person, what would you say?

And the answer this person gave was, well, the first thing I would do is listen for 55 minutes.

And I think the idea is like, well, okay, this person has all sorts of things going on in their life and heart.

How do I know how to communicate the message of the gospel in a way that's intelligible to them?

In a way that makes sense to their heart.

And you can't do that without listening to people and paying attention to them and knowing the things that they fear and the things that they hope for and the things that they long for.

And so we should probably make a practice of speaking less than we listen when it comes to spiritual conversation.

Like for sure, there's a time and a place like we ought to be people who communicate and speak the message of Jesus, for sure.

But we ought to be people who listen really, really well, who listen maybe more than we think we ought to listen.

And then when we think we've gone too far, we should listen some more.

In part because doing so is going to gain us the credibility with people who know then that we're not just interested in changing them, but we we want to love them.

And we do so by listening well.

So be curious about others.

Listen to their hopes and fears and longings.

Choose to be the kind of person who invites people into your life, into spiritual conversation, who listens well.

Choose to be the kind of person who invites others into the life of our church community.

This may be through, you know, one of the big public uh events that we have throughout the year.

You may find it appropriate to invite someone here to a worship gathering on Sunday morning.

You may find it appropriate to invite someone maybe to a men's event or a women's event or some other sort of uh non-churchy type thing because you know that that person's not ready to come to church yet in a public setting like this.

And so they may need a different step.

But be the kind of person who invites others into the life of our church community, and all of this is for the purpose of inviting people into the life-giving way of Jesus.

All these ways that we choose to be people who invite others into our lives are so that we can introduce them to the one who knows them and loves them and is the answer to the deepest longings of their heart.

So see his love for you, plant yourself in the soil of his love, and let his love turn you outwards to the people in your sphere of influence.

As we come to the communion table today, I want to remind you of something that we have said, we've said this before, but this is a thing that is worth repeating over and over again.

It's a thing that I need to hear regularly, okay?

So remember that if you're here today and you're a follower of Jesus, you are here because someone in your life invited you in.

You are here today because someone introduced you to Jesus.

And can I tell you that that person who introduced you to Jesus had all the same fears that you have about spiritual conversation?

They had all the same insecurities that you have about I'm not gonna know what to say or how I should respond, and I'm gonna fumble over my words.

They felt the exact same way as you do.

And they took a risk, and God used that to bring you to where you are today.

So be for others what someone was for you.

See his love for you.

Plant yourself in the soil of his love and let his love turn you outwards.

As we come to the communion table, I'll invite you to take just a few moments for silence, for confession and reflection, and then we will come and celebrate Christ together.