We Are Church | God's Dream for the Church - Acts 10 | May 11

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All right, Acts 10. There was a man in Caesarea named Cornelius,

a centurion of what was called the Italian Regiment.

He was a devout man and feared God along with his whole household.

He did many charitable deeds for the Jewish people and always prayed to God.

About three in the afternoon, he distinctly saw in a vision an angel of God

who came in and said to him, Cornelius.

Staring at him in awe, he said, What is it, Lord? The angel told him,

Your prayers and your acts of charity have ascended as a memorial offering before God.

Now send men to Joppa and call for Simon, who is also named Peter.

He is lodging with Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the sea.

When the angel who spoke to him had gone, he called two of his household servants

and a devout soldier who was one of those who attended him.

After explaining everything to them, he sent them to Joppa.

The next day, as they were traveling and nearing the city, Peter went up to

pray on the roof about noon.

He became hungry and wanted to eat, but while they were preparing something, he fell into a trance.

He saw heaven opened, and an object that resembled a large sheet coming down,

being lowered by its four corners to the earth.

In it were all the four-footed animals and reptiles of the earth and the birds of the sky.

A voice said to him, Get up, Peter, kill and eat.

No, Lord, Peter said, for I've never eaten anything impure and ritually unclean.

Again, a second time, the voice said to him, What God has made clean,

do not call impure. this happened three times and suddenly the object was taken up into heaven.

While Peter was deeply perplexed about what the vision he had seen might mean,

right away the men who had been sent by Cornelius, having asked directions to

Simon's house, stood at the gate.

They called out, asking if Simon, who was also named Peter, was lodging there.

While Peter was thinking about the vision, the Spirit told him,

Three men are here looking for you.

Get up, go downstairs, and go with them with no doubts at all,

because I have sent them.

Then Peter went down to the men and said, Here I am, the one you're looking

for. What is the reason you're here?

They said, Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God-fearing man who has a

good reputation with the whole Jewish nation, was divinely directed by a holy

angel to call you to his house and to hear a message from you.

Peter then invited the men and gave them lodging.

The next day he got up and set out with them and some of the brothers from Joppa went with him.

The following day he entered Caesarea. Now Cornelius was expecting them and

had called together his relatives and close friends.

When Peter entered, Cornelius met him, fell at his feet, and worshiped him.

But Peter lifted him up and said, Stand up, I myself am also a man.

While talking with him, he went in and found a large gathering of people.

Peter said to them, You know it's forbidden for a Jewish man to associate with

or visit a foreigner, but God has shown me that I must not call any person impure or unclean.

That's why I came without any objection when I was sent for.

So may I ask why you sent for me?

Cornelius replied, Four days ago at this hour, at three in the afternoon,

I was praying in my house.

Just then a man in dazzling clothing stood before me and said,

Cornelius, your prayer has been heard and your acts of charity have been remembered in God's sight.

Therefore, send someone to Joppa and invite Simon here, who's also named Peter.

He's lodging in Simon the Tanner's house by the sea. So I immediately sent for

you and it was good of you to come.

So now we are all in the presence of God to hear everything you've been commanded by the Lord.

Peter began to speak. Now, I truly understand that God doesn't show favoritism,

but in every nation, the person who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.

He sent the message to the Israelites, proclaiming the good news of peace through

Jesus Christ. He is Lord of all.

You know the events that took place throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee

after the baptism that John preached,

how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power,

and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny

of the devil. because God was with him.

We ourselves are witnesses of everything he did in both the Judean country and

in Jerusalem, and yet they killed him by hanging him on a tree.

God raised up this man on the third day and caused him to be seen,

not by all the people, but by us whom God appointed as witnesses,

who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed

by God to be the judge of the living and the dead.

All the prophets testify about him that through his name, everyone who believes

in him receives forgiveness of sins.

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came down on all

those who heard the message.

The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were amazed because the gift

of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles,

or they heard them speaking in tongues and declaring the greatness of God.

And Peter responded, Can anyone withhold water and prevent these people from

being baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?

He commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ,

and then they asked him to stay for a few days.

So, as we think about Acts chapter 10, can I tell you about a crazy dream that I've had?

Acts 10 · chapter mention

And I don't really often remember my dreams. Most of the time,

I don't remember my dreams, actually.

So when there's one that is not necessarily weird,

but if I feel like there's something more to it than just a crazy dream,

If I remember it distinctly, I remember the details, and I feel like maybe there's

something I need to think about, and there's a message there.

I'll write it down. So this is from...

When is this from? This is from October of 2023, this dream.

And it starts off in sort of like a boardroom or maybe like a lecture hall, something like that.

There's a lot of chairs and tables and desks and things like that.

We're having church and it's a dream.

So all of this weird stuff begins to happen.

For some reason, the minister at the church that I grew up there in is there

and he's got his iPad and he's like preaching from it.

But then he turns from preaching to like DJing the moment on his iPad.

And I realized during that time that I had forgot to upload the slides into

the presentation pro presenter.

And I think there was a video that was supposed to be played that day.

So I'm crawling under tables, pushing box.

I don't know why there's boxes, but I'm pushing boxes out of the way.

I'm pushing cords out of the way.

I'm actively praying out loud that God would help me figure out this,

this problem and just trying to make everything work.

And for some reason, we don't have a projector.

What we have is one of those media carts from elementary school in the 1970s

where the TV is like strapped to the top of the media cart.

So that's all happening. Meanwhile, in the corner, one corner of the room,

there's this guitar lesson going on. I don't know what that's about.

And then, you know, I'm trying to get everything going.

So I'm trying to get my, I guess I, my sermons on an iPad and I got that.

And so I'm using it gets, keeps getting stuck on other apps and I'm just trying

to get to this passage that I read.

And, and somehow I end up shirtless in this dream more than once because it's

a dream and it wouldn't be weird if that didn't happen.

And people keep, new people keep walking in. So I'm just audibly processing

how this is the weirdest thing that's ever happened. and I promise it's not

usually this weird here.

And then also because it's a dream, suddenly we're outside.

Because that makes sense. And somehow I've ended up down around a corner and

I'm sitting there at a table alone.

My notes are gone. The presentation is gone. Technology is gone.

My shirt is lost apparently.

And I'm just sitting at this table alone. And I'm speaking through one of those

awful, ridiculous Britney Spears microphones.

You know what I'm talking about? All of us are mostly old enough to remember those things.

And I'm just hoping that the people, wherever they are because I'm down and

around a corner by myself, just hoping that it's getting, my voice is reaching

them, that it's getting to them.

The people I can't even see anymore and everything is unraveling.

Everything's falling apart.

But then someone comes and sits at the table with me and then another person

and then another person.

And I've written down, I don't remember any of this. This is all things that

I've written down from back in October, two years ago, but I wrote that I just

say, come on, if you want to come join me, come, there's plenty of room at the table.

And so these people come and we're sitting there together and at this long table together.

And so that was my dream from October of 2023.

And it's interesting that I flip open my phone, I'm like, oh,

I probably got some weird dreams. And that's the first one I open.

Because what we're going to talk about today, the fact that Cornelius and Peter

have these dreams, and dreams are powerful things.

It's why they stay with us, why they move us.

Sometimes they're just so bizarre, like in our subconscious,

unconscious thought, our brains throw in this party without adult supervision.

And then sometimes even in the chaos, there's this beautiful thing,

this strange little bridge that happens between us and the transcendent,

us and heaven, us and God, where he comes and he speaks to us even in the chaos

of a dream. And it's no coincidence.

It's no coincidence that one of the most significant speeches of the last century

started out as Martin Luther King Jr.

Stood up and said, I have a dream. And his dream was that all of God's children

would come and sit at the table of brotherhood.

That was a part of his I have a dream speech. And that's the part,

actually my favorite parts of the speech are parts that no one ever puts on posters or t-shirts.

One of my favorite parts of what Martin Luther King Jr. said is I have a dream

that one day, every valley shall be exalted.

Every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain

and the crooked places will be made straight.

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This was part of his speech, but Dr.

King wasn't dreaming up something brand new when he said this,

when he was delivering this.

He wasn't coming up with his own thoughts. This is straight out of Isaiah chapter

Isaiah 40 · chapter mention

40, where God says, fill in the valleys and level the mountains and hills,

straighten the curves and smooth out the rough places.

Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all people will see it together.

The Lord has spoken. I mean, depending on the translation.

I'm sure that Dr. King directly quoted Isaiah 40 in his speech.

It was probably missed by, at least nowadays, it's missed by everybody.

They picked out the pieces that don't include God, but his dream was that everybody,

all people would sit at the table of brotherhood.

And this is God's dream, that one day we would all sit at the table together as family.

And this isn't a new dream. This has always been God's dream from the very beginning.

His heartbeat has always been for the world.

It's always been for the nations. The world includes everyone,

every tribe, every tongue, every nation.

And we see this from the moment that Jesus speaks in Acts 1.8,

which Jenny led the kids in memorizing a bit this morning, that when he laid

out that ultimate game plan,

that you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

He was already from that moment. That's the dream. A gospel that doesn't stay

contained within Jerusalem.

A gospel that doesn't just stop with people who look like Peter and who talk

like Peter and who worship like Peter.

The dream is that this gospel would break every boundary, cultural,

sociological, economical, political,

spiritual, that the gospel would go out to the ends of the earth.

And that's where it's headed to the ends of the earth.

And this dream, as I mentioned, has been present from the beginning.

God didn't change his mind along the way.

We see in the old Testament, Isaiah 49, it says that the Messiah is described

as a light to the nations.

And of course, Jesus is called this as well.

Coming from this verse, Psalm 67, the praise, may all the peoples praise you, God, all the peoples.

Way back in Genesis 12, the very beginning, God says to Abraham,

through you, all nations will be blessed.

This has been the gospel. This has been his dream.

God's dream has always been global. It's always been for the outsider.

It's always been for about reaching out to the people from every walk of life,

every background, every story.

And that's been the highest heartbeat since the very beginning.

One of my favorite verses that demonstrates this and brings this to life,

for me at least, is Psalm 46.10, which you're going to be familiar with the first part.

It says, be still and know that I am God. You've probably heard that part before,

perhaps you've sung it before, but let's go to the next part, the rest of the verse.

Don't miss the rest. It says, I will be honored among every nation.

I will be honored throughout the world.

That our stillness in the presence of God is to result in the honor of God throughout the world.

It's not for us to just sit down and feel the awe and warmth and fuzziness of

being in the presence of Jesus.

It is for that, but it's also that His name may be honored. And this isn't a

wish. It's not a hope. This is a declaration.

God will be honored among the nations. He will be.

His dream will come to pass.

It can't help but come to pass. What God has set in motion, no man will interrupt.

So he will get his honor from every tribe, every tongue, every nation.

Jenny and I got a really powerful glimpse of this. I'm not sure if you can point

back to a time where you really experienced every nation, this every nation

idea, this global call of God's mission and dream for the earth.

But Jenny and I got a pretty powerful glimpse of this when we lived in Moldova.

We ended up settling at a church called ICF, International Christian Fellowship,

is I think what it stands for, where every Sunday, every week,

we gathered together in this small room. It was Moldovans. It was Central Asians.

It was Americans. It was Norwegians. It was people from all over the world.

Some of them have been following Jesus for a long time. There are a lot of missionaries.

There are also a lot of people who were just working in government work,

There were Americans that were expats over there, or English people.

There's people from all walks of life.

We gathered together. We had Catholics. We had Baptists. We had people from the Assemblies of God.

We had every church experience that you could have imagined gathering together.

And yet we were worshiping together. We were singing to the same God.

We were hearing from the same scriptures.

We were praying for one another like family in this gathering,

this church, this family that God had established in Moldova.

And I have a picture if we want to put it out there.

And so the beautiful, here's the crazy part.

I guess I'm going to stand up now. I don't know the majority of these people.

And you probably can't even see them. But Jenny and I were kind of looking at

this yesterday. And I know where they are positionally.

This is Brian and his wife, Catherine.

They live and serve orphaned girls in Moldova. And they've been doing that for

almost 20 years, probably, if not more.

And Tommy and his wife, Tanya, and their kids. Tommy is Norwegian. Tanya's from Moldova.

And they got two or three kids.

And Jenny remembers a lot more of the names than I do. This is Paul and Galena.

And Paul took over the church not too long after we left.

And 90% of these people, I don't recognize. I have no idea who they are.

I don't know their names.

And it's because God wasn't done working.

He still was calling people towards himself. He was still drawing people into this fellowship.

God's dream didn't stop when we moved. God's dream didn't stop when our friends,

moved away that were leading the church.

It kept growing. It keeps expanding and the table keeps getting longer.

And that's what the kingdom of God looks like.

We don't get to control it. We can't stop it. We don't get to put limits on

it. The table keeps growing.

And that's the beautiful part, that God's dream has always been bigger than what we can see.

It's always been greater than we can imagine or hope.

And it's this dream that changes everything about the way that we live. This is God's dream.

And I guess you have to ask for yourself, is Zach lying to me this morning?

But if this is God's dream, then it has to change everything about the way that we live.

God is drawing people to himself from every nation, every background,

every story, every walk of life.

And so we can't afford to exclude anyone. We can't afford to count anyone out.

No one is outside of the scope of God's love.

No one exists beyond the reach of God's grace.

And so we can't put limits, we can't gravitate towards certain people over others.

This is God's dream and He's calling us to live it out.

And so we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to join Him in this mission

to embrace His vision for the church and to love those that He is calling to

Himself, whoever they might be?

So let me ask you this.

What are we expecting when we come to this gathering? Are you coming with expectations?

Because what we expect will shape what we experience.

Our expectations shape our experience. And so if we're expecting comfort for

everything to go, just as we've always known it, if we're expecting to be comfortable

around people when we come here, I know these people, I'm comfortable.

It's not, there's not too many. I know their names.

Then when, when something unexpected happened or something happens,

or when something disrupts that, that sense of control or comfort that we are

looking for our expectations,

then what that's going to result in at the end of our time together is us walking

away going, I didn't really hear God speaking today.

God didn't meet me as I thought he would, that something just felt off. Something was missing.

But it doesn't even have to be that dramatic. It doesn't have to be specifically onto that.

Sometimes what we can do, whether we realize it or not,

is expect when we come together that everyone would be like us in the sense

not necessarily that they would look like us and come from the same walk of

life with us, but that they would think like us, that they would believe the same way that we do,

that they would experience and express God in their life the same way that we expect them to.

And when that doesn't happen, when it throws us off, we miss what's going on.

Because here's the thing, the family of God was never meant to be uniform.

It was meant to design to reflect the multitude of heaven. It is a beautiful mess of diversity.

And not just in the obvious ways that we see here in Acts chapter 10,

Acts 10 · chapter mention

where we have Jew and Gentile,

but even in the more subtle ways where we just have, yeah, different cultures,

but also different people with different stories and different backgrounds,

different experiences, different ways of connecting with God.

If we're doing this right, if we're doing church right, then church should challenge our comfort.

It should challenge how we expect God to meet us as we gather.

And this is the broader lesson that Peter is learning.

He's learning a more specific lesson, but this is the broader lesson that Peter had to be shown.

Literally, God had to reveal this to him in a dream multiple times because he

didn't get the first time, because we know how slow the disciples are.

And of course, that brings us comfort because we also are slow in listening to God.

But God had to disrupt everything he thought he knew. He turned it upside down in this moment.

And Peter had to learn that the kingdom wasn't just for people like him. It was for everyone.

And so let's take Cornelius, for example, this guy, this Roman soldier.

He was a Gentile, of course. That is the most defining feature for this disruption for Peter.

That most Jewish people would have dismissed him as unclean.

And then on the extreme side, there was lots of Jewish tradition that said that

Gentiles were garbage and not all they were good for was fueling the fires of hell.

This was a way that Jewish people looked at Gentiles in this time.

And so this is exactly the radical shift that Peter had to make.

Because in God's eyes, Cornelius mattered.

In God's dream, every person matters. And people from every tribe,

every tongue, every nation, they matter.

And so that's why we get this powerful statement from Peter when he finally

gets it, when he goes to see Cornelius, when Cornelius is talking to him and

Peter is sharing, because God didn't tell Peter what to say and God didn't tell

Cornelius what to say in this vision.

So they show up and they're like, what do we do now? And Cornelius is like,

I thought you would know.

And so Peter shares the gospel with him, right? And Peter makes this beautiful statement.

He says, I see very clearly that God shows no favoritism.

In every nation, he accepts those who fear him and do what is right.

So this is a huge moment. This is a massive moment in the Bible because this

is where God's people finally begin to understand what he's been dreaming of

from the very beginning.

They catch on to God's heart to welcome all kinds of people into the family.

That this is God's dream, that all would be welcome, that all would belong.

And this has massive implications for us as well.

Because it means that, yes, that God's family will be ethnically diverse.

Yes, although that is difficult to achieve in Boone, God's family will be in

the end ethnically diverse.

But it also means that there's going to be a diversity of stories.

There's going to be a diversity of backgrounds. There's going to be a diversity

of personalities. There's going to be a diversity of experiences.

There's going to be a diversity of ways that the spirit is expressed in people's lives.

And this can cause huge disruptions to our expectations.

In fact, it will cause huge disruptions to our expectations.

And there are sort of two realities that take place as we join God's dream.

And first is sometimes that people won't respond the way that we expect them to.

That happens within the church, that happens outside of the church,

that we look at Acts nine, when Saul has his dramatic encounter with Jesus,

you would think that some of those religious people, those religious leaders,

his buddies, would see his transformation and they would celebrate his conversion.

And you would think that the church would celebrate as he is transformed,

but he's met with suspicion. He's met with his friends trying to kill him.

He's met with the church being terrified of him.

And so Paul ends up rejected, isolated,

alone for quite a long time until Barnabas stands up for him and talks about how transformed he was,

that the very people that you probably expect to respond in a way that you expect

would probably disappoint you.

And I think Jenny shared with me a couple nights ago, I'm not sure where she

read it, but just this beautiful statement that the people that Paul martyred

were rejoicing in heaven as he was converted.

They got it. They saw it. They understood. But some of you may have experienced this.

When you become a Christian, when you're changed, when you're transformed,

and you share that with the people around you,

that we have this hope that they would celebrate with us, but at least some

of them instead, we face skepticism, distance,

maybe even opposition with the people that we would hope and expect to embrace

the gospel, that they're the ones who reject it.

And then on the other side of that, that the opposite is also true.

Sometimes sometimes the people we least expect it, the Pauls in the world,

the ones that we overlook, the ones that don't fit our mold,

the ones that we don't naturally gravitate towards,

the people that we would at least expect that God is already calling those people to himself.

God's already speaking in their hearts.

And Cornelius didn't fit the categories of who we would expect to be welcomed

into the kingdom based on Peter and based on the Jerusalem contingent, let's say.

No one could have predicted it, except we know the story, so we can predict it.

But Cornelius was listening, he was ready, and God saw him.

And so here's the thing, you'd be amazed at the people who God is already working on in secret.

He's already calling to himself. He's already working in their lives.

It's the people that you may not even notice.

So we can't count anyone out.

People are near to the kingdom of heaven than we might assume.

And it may not be the people that we naturally gravitate towards.

It may be the very people that cause us disruption, but God's dream is bigger than we think.

And it's made of the unexpected. It's made of the unqualified.

It's made of the unlikely.

Everyone has a seat at the table. The table's been prepared.

And here's the key that God doesn't just send messages through dreams.

He sends people. He sends us to cross boundaries, to break down walls to invite

people into his family, to have a seat at his table.

And there's this powerful story that I want to share. It's from a parable in Luke 14.

And it's one of those things that has stood out to me as some of us have been

reading through the New Testament in our discipleship groups.

It's a powerful testimony that Jesus tells the story of a man who has planned

a great banquet and he sent out his invitations.

But when the time of the feast comes, all of those guests that he has invited,

they come with their excuses.

So one man had just bought a new field. One man has just acquired a new oxen

and he needs to try it out. Another man has just gotten married.

And so they have all of these lame excuses that don't prevent them from going

to a feast that's already been prepared.

But they had something more pressing in their life that they believed was more

important than this banquet.

And so the master of this banquet, the master of the house is angry,

as you might expect. He's furious, but it's not because he's petty.

It's because the table has been prepared and the people that he invited don't care.

And so he tells his servants to go quickly into the streets and alleys of the

town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.

And then there was still more room. So he sent his servants out again to go

gather whoever they could find and bring them in, no matter who they were,

no matter what they looked like, people from all walks of life.

And so what stands out to me is that God isn't just waiting around for the respectable

to show up and care about him.

For those who fit our tidy expectations of what church should look like.

He's not calling people who won't interrupt our carefully cultivated spiritual experiences.

He's reaching out for the ones we might overlook.

He's reaching out for the ones that don't fit our mold. He's reaching out for

those who challenge us, who stretch us, who maybe make us the most uncomfortable.

He fills his table, not with the expected, but with those who are willing,

with those who are open to him.

And this parable ends with, this story ends with this statement in Luke 14, 23,

where the master, the character that's representing God here,

says, go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you

find to come so that my house will be full.

This is God's heart, a full house, no empty seats, no room left at the table, no one counted out.

And here's the kicker. God is sending his servants to invite and to make sure his house is full.

And so in this story, we're not just the honored guests, but we are also the

servants that God is sending into the streets, into the alleys,

into the unexpected places to bring people in.

Just like Peter was sent to Cornelius, just like Paul was sent to Ananias.

And that's the surprising twist of this story in Acts 10.

I don't think it's surprising that God speaks to people through dreams.

We might not believe it, but I don't think any of us are surprised that the Bible says that.

So that's not the surprising part. It's that those dreams always lead somewhere

and they always lead to direction.

And that direction pretty much always leads to a person.

If we think about Paul's story, when Paul is blinded on that road to Damascus,

God doesn't drop all of the answers in his lap right then and there.

He sends him to Ananias, He told them to go find a person.

God doesn't just drop the answers of life into our laps. He sends us to people.

When these people in the Arab world are having dreams about Jesus,

story after story I've heard, tells them to go and find this person,

this missionary, to tell them about who He is.

And Cornelius was a good man. He was praying. He was prayerful. He was generous.

But he still needed more. He needed Jesus. And so he needed to be sent to find out about Jesus.

And for Cornelius, being good wasn't good enough.

For Peter, being good isn't good enough. For us, for you, and for me,

it's not just good enough to be good.

We need Jesus. And the Bible tells us that to know and to have faith and to

believe, we need someone to tell us. How will they know? How will they understand

if someone doesn't tell them?

So we gave Cornelius a name. He gave him a person. He gave him a messenger.

So God sends messages through dreams, but he also sends in those dreams,

directs people towards others, towards people. And that's how God works.

He doesn't just drop the wealth of his knowledge through a dream,

but he sends us to people.

He sends people to us and he's sending you as well.

So are we paying attention? Are we aware of the people that God has placed around us?

Because he's drawing people to himself. One thing we can be sure is that God

is drawing people to himself.

And honestly, they may not be the ones that we would naturally gravitate towards,

not the ones that would make us the most comfortable.

They might be the ones who challenge us the most, but our response can't be

in that moment, God's gonna send somebody else.

God, please send someone else to this person. Don't send me.

Send someone that looks more like them, that thinks more like them, send somebody else.

Because God's dream isn't about us staying in our comfort zones.

It's not about building a place where we surround ourselves with people who

experience him and express his spirit and who think like us and who believe like we do.

It's a beautiful, messy picture of diversity.

So if that becomes the goal, to find our comfort,

to find people who think like us and who don't disrupt our lives,

then we're missing the point of this passage in Acts 10 because it's about creating a beautiful mess.

It's about breaking down walls and inviting people in from all walks of life

to have a seat that's already been prepared for them at his table.

And so we should expect diversity in the church.

Yes, again, diversity of race, diversity of culture, and also diversity of thought,

diversity of personality, diversity of background.

And we should be united in what matters most. We should be united by the gospel that God came to us,

that Jesus lived a perfect life, that he was crucified, that he poured out his

blood, that he died, that he rose again,

and that he's coming back one day.

And that he's sent his spirit to be with us in the waiting.

And there's an interesting little, I have another detour I want to take,

so I don't want to take too many detours, but there's an interesting thing I heard this week.

And I don't know if it's true, but on the very smallest investigation I gave

it, it seems to pan out that there's three prepositions that are used with regard

to the Spirit in the New Testament or in the Bible.

There is with, there is in, and there's on.

And it seems to pan out.

Whenever in or with is used, it is more of a general reality that God is with

us, the Spirit is with us. And so it applies to not just believers,

but it applies to everybody that God is with us. He is omnipresent.

And then when we talk about that God is in us, this is the reality of our conversion

experience that the spirit comes to dwell in us.

This is probably where we get the whole invite Jesus into your heart thing.

Because when the spirit is in us, it's referring to Christ in us, the hope of glory.

It's referring to believers and it's referring to conversion.

And what it's referring to is an experience that does not manifested externally.

Something that happens within us and that is oftentimes imperceivable.

And so we get to this third preposition when the spirit comes on us,

then that is always the empowerment of the spirit.

And we talk about acts that we will be his empowered witnesses.

This is the spirit falling on his people to do his work and to show those the

spirit in an external manifestation.

That's just an interesting thought that when we get this right,

when we embrace the diversity and messiness of God's kingdom,

that's when we start reflecting God's dream for us to be his family.

And that's when we truly become the body of Christ, a family united,

not because we're alike.

In fact, we're united in all of our differences with Jesus at the center.

And so here's the detour I'd planned to take, which if it's planned,

then maybe it's not a detour.

But I think it's important. I listened to a conversation between Tyler Stanton

and Tim Mackey, and Tyler Stanton has a podcast he puts on YouTube as well,

where he's been interviewing people, and a lot of them revolve around the Holy Spirit.

And so many of you, some of you have read Tyler's book on prayer, and so that's who he is.

Tim Mackey, as many of you also know, is the lead scholar behind the Bible Project.

And so they're having this conversation. They're good friends.

They've known each other for a long time, and they're having a conversation about the Spirit.

And as they were talking, Tim said something that really stuck with me.

He described the spirit as the most real presence, but also the least perceptible by our five senses.

And so they talked about how this is, in many ways, this is kind of like love,

that you can't measure it, you can't see it, but you know that it's real.

In fact, love is possibly one of the most real things about you.

And so this is the Spirit, but it's deeper, it's more mysterious, it's more powerful.

So it's that, but to an even further extent.

And the Scriptures are full of stories where people encounter the Spirit in wildly different ways.

And that's the depth of their conversation. And it's hard to pin down what is

the experience of the spirit, that this is by design that the Bible has a beautiful

array of stories of spirit filled experiences, that it's not one size fits all.

And that the spirit tends to not conform to our expectations, our comfort zones.

And so when Luke talks about the spirit, when Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit

and Luke, he's talking about power.

He's talking about wonders and signs. He's talking about tongues of fire and

acts and these bold proclamations, the empowered witness of the spirit.

But when John talks about the spirit, when Jesus talks about the spirit in the

book of John, he's talking about intimacy.

He's talking about relationship.

He describes the spirit as a comforter, as a helper, as an advocate,

not less powerful, but deeply more intimate, more tender.

And we need both. We need both of these experiences, both of these outpourings of the Spirit.

We need to surround ourselves, not just with faith that looks like ours and

sounds like ours, because then we shrink down God into the size of our expectations.

And when we end up expecting church to feel a certain way and to look a certain

way, and for people around us to respond a certain way and the spirit to move a certain way,

anything outside of that experience falls flat and we miss it.

But what if surrounding ourselves with the beautiful mess of God's dream.

Surrounding us with the people that make us uncomfortable, who have experienced

different things, who stretch us. What if that's the missing piece?

What if that's the part that makes the body whole?

Remember, Misu used to talk about everybody can't be a big toe or something like that.

We need Luke's power and Luke's fire, and we need John's tenderness.

We need both power and presence. Because if we want to be a people who live

by the Spirit, then we have to understand and be open to the fact that God moves

in greater and richer and deeper and more diverse ways than our preferences.

And so we can't get locked down into our expectations. That's not where God

lives. We have to stay open and stay humble.

Because the Spirit of God might be moving right next to us in our neighbors,

and our coworkers and our fellow students and our friends,

he might be moving right next to us in unexpected places and places we're not used to.

And God's dream, because God's dream is bigger than we expect.

It's deeper than we experience.

If we close ourselves off to the unfamiliar, we might miss it.

So we gotta be open to the messiness and the beauty of radical diversity.

Of what he's bringing together. The fact that we should be open to the spirit

because the guarantee is that he is always working, but maybe it's in the people

that we least expect and that we've overlooked.

So I've been trying to engage God in this way. And it's just really simple. It's nothing fancy.

It's just sort of an honest prayer throughout the day.

What do you, where do you want me to go? What do you want me to do?

What do you want me to say?

Because I don't want to live my life on autopilot.

I don't want for my daily choices, my words, my presence, to just be the background

noise of somebody else's story.

I want every interaction that I have to be an opportunity to partner with God.

For God's dream of the world to come to life and be a reality.

I want to live with that reality, that awareness that God is moving in and around

me. He's moving in people all the time because he is. It's truth. It's real.

And that's the heart of this story, that the Spirit of God is not just moving through visions.

He's not just moving through dreams, but he's moving through people that are the least expected,

that are the most different perhaps, so that we realize what he's been trying

to teach us all from the beginning is were not really that different after all.

Cornelius was closer to the kingdom of heaven than Peter had imagined.

In the same way the people around us are closer to the kingdom of heaven than we might realize.

The spirit is stirring in places we wouldn't expect. The people we've written

off, those who might seem the farthest away, neighbors, co-workers, family members,

they might be a Cornelius just waiting for us to show up and speak Jesus.

The kingdom is nearer than you

think. the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is nearer than we think.

It's breaking in now.

Every time someone is welcomed in to take their place at the table,

that's been prepared ahead of time.

I guess that's the irony of that parable

in Luke 14, is that the table was prepared for the people who came.

It wasn't prepared for the people who were invited. They didn't show up.

It was prepared and the seats were ready for those who came.

Every time someone says to Jesus, yes, every time the church makes room at the

table, God's dream is unfolding through us.

God's dream is bigger than ours. His house will be full and he's inviting us to be a part of that.

As long as we can ask him, where do you want me to go? What do you want me to

do? What do you want me to say?

It's the WWJD bracelets that we grew up with.

What do you want me, in this moment, what do you want? How do you want me to

respond, Jesus? And then let's do it.

Let's respond to God's dream and be part of something far greater than anything

we could hope or imagine.

Here's a passage I want to just leave you with. Jesus said in John chapter 12,

John 12 · chapter mention

Jesus said, I don't speak on my own authority.

The father who sent me has commanded me what to say and how to say it.

And I know his commands lead to eternal life.

So I say whatever the Father tells me to say, that we would live like that,

that we would speak like that, that we would say and do what the Father tells

us, that we would go where He sends us,

and we would trust that His dream is unfolding in front of us right now.

Music.