Movement | Embodying Jesus to Our Community - John 1:14 | July 28

Music.

Okay. Well, good morning. After Zach talking now on the microphone,

it sounds really loud, but I'm really glad to be here with you guys.

Continuing this talk of vision casting of mission.

It's something that I'm really passionate about, about talking about what is

to come. How can we join together in the mission of Christ as a body?

Listening to Zach and Josh talk about what does it mean for us as a church? What are our goals?

How are we going to accomplish what God has called us to is really exciting.

So to get to be a part of talking about this with you guys as a church is really exciting to me.

And so before we dive in, I'm gonna read our mission statement and then we'll

dive into embodying Christ.

So our mission as Mountainside Community Church is to be a place where heaven

meets earth by proclaiming the universal reign of God and embodying Jesus to our communities.

Inviting our neighbors to join us in becoming real people who are part of a

real family who worship a real God.

And so today we're going to be talking about embodying Christ to our communities.

And so we're going to break it up into two ideas or two parts.

We're going to talk about the reality of what it means to embody Christ.

And we're going to talk about our response.

What is the reality? What does it truly mean to be the body of Christ?

And what I have here is the reality is that you and I, we, the Church of Mountainside,

as part of the global church, we are the very presence of Christ on earth and

we're gonna break that down what that means.

And our response is to take up that calling of embodying Christ so that our

communities and the very cosmos would know the eternal reign of our King.

A quick caveat, I am still learning. I am super excited to share what I have

learned, but we as a church get to go on this journey together figuring out

what does it mean to embody Jesus.

So there's things that I say that you're like, I don't know about that.

Then let's talk about it. I think that's what the church is for.

And so a lot of these ideas are foundational.

Perhaps they're very familiar. And so if we go through and you finish like,

oh, I knew all that. Well, that's great.

Like I am seeing this with new eyes, it feels like. And so I think we're going

to be talking about some very foundational or familiar ideas.

My prayer is that God allows us to see more of his character.

And so before Before we dive in, we are just going to pray really as a group

together. So Father, we just, we want to see you rightly.

We want to know what it means that we are your body here on earth.

So as we study your word and as we go out this week, would we meditate on truths

and would your spirit be revealing who you are to us?

So one of the foundational verses for the idea of embodiment or embodying Christ

to our communities comes from John 1.

And as the body of Christ, we're going to actually stand up and we are going

to read John 1 and 14 together. And so, this isn't the totality of it,

but we're just going to read what's on the screen together.

Ready? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

So, before you guys sit down, if you are interested and you want to grab a Bible,

they're at the end there. I made it easier for you guys to walk over there and

get them because you're already standing.

If you don't, that's fine as well. But we are going to be taking a good trip

through Scripture together. other.

So if you're interested in that, I remember the first time that I learned what dwelt meant.

Zach talked about it two weeks ago about it means tenting or tabernacling.

It was Christmas 2019. And my mom had my family doing a talent show. It was a high stakes.

My cousin moved an Oreo from his forehead to his mouth. So it was a big deal.

And I was in college at the time and I was studying Arabic in college.

And so I thought, you know, I'll read John 1 14, 1 through 14 in Arabic to my

family. I thought that's going to be nerdy and cool.

So I'm in my room, I'm studying, and I come across a word that I don't really

know. I didn't know many of them, I'll be honest.

But this one I really didn't know. And I Google translated it and it came up camping.

And I thought, that's weird because I don't know where camping is in John.

And really, I don't have a framework for camping in the Bible.

And, you know, we know that the Israelites camped in the wilderness.

But so I did a bit of digging and it actually, the word was related to tent.

And then it clicked in my mind. And this was before the Bible project.

I don't know if any of you know the Bible project. So like seeing something

like this, where my mind realized that this, that John was talking about the

tabernacle without having the Bible project to, you know, help me get there

was like, it was an epiphany, it felt like.

And so, it was made me really excited to see scripture come alive in this way.

And so, what we see now, what Zach really identified was that when Jesus came

and dwelt among us, he was meant to be the fulfillment of the tabernacle.

So we see here, for many of us, this passage is familiar.

We've memorized it, we've studied it, we've written it on home decor during

the Christmas season. It's a foundational verse to being a Christian.

It's central to this idea of living incarnationally or embodying Christ to our

communities. It's actually the very reason that we are Christians.

We believe that this man from Nazareth, born of the Virgin Mary,

was the very image and being of Yahweh made flesh. That idea alone,

the unseeable God becomes seen, is truly enough for us to end on today.

That being said, we're going to continue to press into this mystery of why God would do this.

Why is God a God in pursuit of man, of humanity, of men and women,

me and you? And John's writing.

It's not written in a vacuum, but it was drenched in the language of the Hebrew scriptures.

So we're going to look at a few of those scriptures today to help fill out our

framework for what John was calling Christ, the tenting of God among us.

And we're going to start as Maria von Trapp would say, for those of you who

are fans, at the very beginning in Genesis 1.

And in Genesis 1, we see it says this, Then God said,

Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion

over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock

and over all the earth and over every creeping thing on the earth.

Then God said, let us, or I think it goes next.

Yeah, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God,

he created him. Male and female, he created them.

And God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply,

fill the earth and subdue it.

The image of God is manifest in humanity with the mandate to fill the earth with the image of God.

It is a humanity blessed and sent to rule and reign over the earth,

perpetuating and advancing the image and nature of God.

So as our topic this week is the embodying Jesus to our communities,

we begin, we start at the very beginning to see what was the original design.

And we find that it was humans ruling and reigning in the image of God.

And they're ruling over the whole earth. And this is crucial to our understanding

Christ and our role in the current historical moment.

While we don't necessarily see the tabernacling image here, the narrative is

ripe with image imagery.

Humans are created as the very image of God.

And in the lines following, in the pages following, we see that Adam and Eve,

instead of ruling in accordance with God, they step outside of God's design

and they decide to grasp after power in their own way or in their own manner.

And it leads to a fracturing of the design that God had.

But the story continues. And even then God in that moment, when Adam and Eve

do that, they, God is not done with humanity or with his vision and call for

humanity to be his image.

And so the story picks up with Abraham. That's where we'll pick up the story.

And God says to Abraham, we can go.

And I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your

name great so that you will be a blessing and in you, all the families of the

earth shall be blessed. And this blessing is actually repeated to Isaac and then to Jacob.

And it's repeated all throughout the rest of Genesis.

And it's this idea that through the offspring of Abraham, all the families of

the earth were going to be blessed.

The descendants of Abraham were going to be a family, a nation that carried

out the original call to Adam and Eve to be the image of God that fills the earth.

And then the story really gets exciting for what we're talking about today.

Picks up in Exodus and Israel has just fled from slavery.

And they're at the base of the mountain, Mount Sinai, where God met Moses in the burning bush.

And they are meeting with God, the cloud of God, the glory of God is on the mountain.

And God says to them, and you Israel shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

And then a little while later, he says, He says, so let them make me a sanctuary

that I may dwell in their midst.

And this is where this idea of dwell really picks up steam.

It's that God wants to move towards humanity and make his dwelling place among them.

God says that he will make Israel into a nation of priests.

Israel will now be the group of people that intercede on behalf of humanity

before God, and they will reveal God to humanity.

And so it's interesting in this passage that God says that he will make his

dwelling place in a tent.

And I want to make a note here that I think John was trying to articulate in

his gospel and that it's that God dwells in the same manner as humanity.

Here in Exodus, what were the Israelites dwelling in? They were dwelling in tents.

And so what did God choose to dwell in? He dwelt in a tent.

And then in the time of David and Solomon, I don't think it's a coincidence

that it's only until after David has built his house that God builds the temple.

And so that's something that we can think about and meditate on maybe that is just a coincidence.

But as I read scripture more and more, I find that like Zach says,

there really are no coincidences.

So the image, then Jesus comes on the scene and we're skipping ahead a little

bit, but as the image of the invisible God and what manner does he come?

He comes as a man, he comes in the same manner.

So perhaps one of our first takeaways for living incarnationally is that we

are as the body of Christ to be in the same manner as our community.

If we're called to inner city missions, then we live in the inner city.

If we are called to the mountain climbing community than we mountain climb.

If we're called to be sacraments, the sacrament community, we know this through Paul's writings too.

We as Christians are to seek to be like our communities in the same way that

Christ became human to restore humanity.

So we know that the tabernacle became the place where God dwelt,

where the infinite God was among humans.

And Israel was meant to be a unique nation, a nation that pursued righteousness,

unrighteousness, right relationships, and hated injustice.

Israel was meant to be a nation that protected the orphan and widow,

the stranger and the foreigner.

They were to be a nation that lived according to the wisdom of God,

not grasping after their own knowledge of good and bad.

But we know they did not do that. They oppressed the poor and the vulnerable.

They made military alliances instead of trusting in God.

And they failed to represent God to the world and they failed to intercede on

the world's behalf before God.

So God hands them over to the consequence of their choices, which is exile.

Yet even through exile, God was not done with his vision for humanity.

God was still working to make a dwelling place among humanity.

So we pick up the story in Ezekiel. And even in the moment, Ezekiel is writing during exile.

And it seems that all hope is lost.

The prophets enter the scene though, and begin to describe that God is still

in pursuit of man. And here's what Ezekiel says.

It's a long passage, so we're going to read it together. And I will vindicate

the holiness of my great name, says God, which has been profaned among the nations,

which you have profaned among them.

And the nations will know that I am the Lord declares the Lord God when through

you, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes.

Notice God's preoccupation with how the nations perceive him.

God's vision was always for all people to see the character and goodness of God.

So God says to Israel, I will take you from among the nations and gather you

from all the countries and bring you into your own land.

And I will sprinkle clean water on you. That's baptism imagery.

And you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols, I will cleanse you.

I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.

I will move the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and

be careful to obey my rules.

And a little while later, he says, and my dwelling place will be with them and

I will be their God And they shall be my people.

Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel when my

sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.

What Ezekiel is looking forward to is the day in which God's presence is not

distant from humanity, but present within them.

God is speaking to an exiled people, encouraging them that he has not abandoned

them, but is working through history for the fulfillment of his ultimate plan.

And here in Ezekiel, God says that he longs for his dwelling place to be with humanity forevermore.

And this is where the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures end,

the longing for restoration of God's dwelling place among humanity.

So through the Hebrew scriptures, we see that God is a God in pursuit of humanity,

that he made humans in his image to spread across the whole earth,

to rule and reign with him, that the offspring of Abraham, Isaac,

and Jacob would be a blessing to all the nations, that God chose Israel to be

a kingdom of priests where his glory would dwell.

And that even through exile, God still wanted to dwell with humanity.

And this is the environment, the stage in which Jesus actually enters the scene.

And Jesus is this ultimate fulfillment of the idea that God is in pursuit of

humanity, God dwelling among us.

Yet Jesus seems to take it a step further.

In John 14, he says to the disciples, he says, Sorry, if you love me,

you will keep my commandments.

And I will ask the Father and he will give you another helper to be with you

forever. For he dwells with you and will be in you.

In that day, you will know that I am in my father and you and me and I in you.

And even a little while later, he says that if we love and obey the instructions

of the father, then his home will be made with us.

So Jesus seems to be saying, not just I will dwell among you,

but now I will dwell in you.

And I think we actually see this displayed in Acts 2.

In Acts 2, the disciples are all gathered together after Jesus has ascended

into the skies and they're praying together.

And it says, on the day of Pentecost, when it arrived, they were all together

in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.

And it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

We can go to the next slide, sorry. And divided tongues as a fire appeared to

them and rested on each of them.

And they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues

as the Spirit gave them utterance.

This imagery here is replaying the

moment where God's glory fell on the tabernacle and fell on the temple.

And what it reveals is that these disciples have now become the very temple of God.

Paul uses the words in Ephesians. He says, and I think they're up there.

Yeah. He says, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole

structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

There's so much that we could say about this topic specifically.

The idea that we are to embody Jesus by literally, perhaps in some symbolic

real sense by being his body.

And I would encourage you guys over the next week to really look into the rest

of the New Testament to see where this theme comes alive.

That's the writings of Paul's thoughts on the body of Christ,

or Peter saying that we are a royal priesthood, quoting from Exodus.

I believe that the New Testament authors truly believed that the church had

become and still is the physical manifestation, the very presence of Christ on earth.

And we know that this is actually fully realized in Revelation when the reunification

of heaven and earth is complete.

And so, we know that there's a hope that we still have, but it says that there

is no more a temple in the city for the presence of God dwelt,

or I guess it's right there, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. am.

And so, this idea is fully realized in that future moment, but for now we live

in the present because that's where we are.

And so, in the present, what is the reality?

Where we are now, where has the story come to at this point?

I believe that the story of the Hebrew scriptures is one where God desires to dwell with humanity.

And in Christ, the Hebrew scriptures are fulfilled filled in humanity has become

the very dwelling place of God, the church.

So, so not just all community, but the church has become the very dwelling place of God.

God doesn't just want to dwell with humanity, but make the church,

make humanity his dwelling place.

The church has become the very presence of Christ on earth.

So as I read this and thought about this, I was like, man, are we saying that we have become God?

And I think that would be like saying the tent of the tabernacle became God

when God's glory dwelled there.

And I think we know that not to be true just by the mental exercise of working through that.

But I think this reality is worth meditating on. And I don't think it's a trite

metaphor that we are the body of Christ.

I think it's a deep, an immensely deep and mysterious reality.

So then what do we do? If we are the presence of Christ on earth, how do we respond?

How do we do this? And I think there's two ways.

I mean, we could talk probably for the rest of our lives on this,

but today we're going to talk about two ways. And the first one is we become like Jesus.

And how do we become more like Jesus? Well, we grow.

And there's this diagram that I stole from John Mark Comer, the growth diagram,

or maybe many of you have seen this from his practicing the way or are familiar with it.

But there's a number of different aspects here. You have teaching,

practice, community, time, experience, all under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit.

And so we're going to kind of break these down a little bit one by one to think

about how can we grow to become more like Jesus.

In Matthew 28, Jesus instructs his disciples to teach future disciples how to

observe the instructions of Christ.

Learning at the feet of Jesus through sermons or podcasts, books,

et cetera, is critical to our growth and becoming more like Jesus.

We see in the New Testament, Jesus gives these long speeches or parables to

instruct his disciples, how to act more like him, how to operate in the kingdom of God.

That being said, in modernity, we're descendants of the philosopher Descartes

who says, I think therefore I am.

And we tend to believe that sometimes, especially when it comes to Jesus.

I believe therefore I am.

Yet we know that even the demons believed in Jesus.

So there must be something different about us as a body of people,

as a group, as we embody Jesus to become more like him. And I think that that

might be where practice comes in.

We don't just learn, but we actually implement, we practice,

we have these holy habits that shape our lives.

And so we know we cannot just think I am a runner and be a runner,

nor can we say I want to be a runner and be a runner.

In order to truly be a runner, we have to run.

And depending on how far we wanna get into the culture, it can really transform our lives.

It can transform the shoes we wear, the clothes we wear, can transform what we eat when we sleep.

Our practices and our habits can shape our affections as we pursue what we love.

And so, there's a modern philosopher named, and Christian thinker named James

K.A. Smith, who talks a lot about these practices.

His retort to Descartes is, we don't think, therefore be, rather we become what we love.

And Smith takes it a step further, and he says that our loves Loves are shaped

by our habits, or maybe our habits shape our loves.

He uses the example of a teenage consumerist, right?

He says, what teenager watched a good lecture about being a consumer and then became a consumer?

No one. It was through their habits, their daily lives, he calls them cultural

liturgies, aka habits, that the teenage consumerist is created.

Whether that's watching television or looking at their phone or seeing their

friends wear new shoes through the practices and habits that we have, our loves are shaped.

So we as believers know this to be true. It's why we value worship.

So I value coming to church and reading scripture, fasting and praying or solitude.

And all of these things, they shape our affections for Christ.

And it's important to know that each of these practices is just that. It's a practice.

Paul uses this idea of substance and shadows, and the shadows reveal the outline

of the substance, but the substance itself is Christ.

So as we engage in practices, it's important for us to always desire the deeper thing.

So as we fast, we should be fasting so that we might encounter Christ.

As we read scripture, we read scripture so that we might see and understand who Christ is.

So the question we can ask with practices is what habits are fueling or stirring

my affections for Jesus and what habits are robbing my affections from Jesus,

which leads us into the next idea,

this idea of community. And I won't belabor this point.

I think our church at Mountainside, we know and value community.

We know that growth occurs through community, that brothers and sisters encourage

us, support us, call us out, help us see our blind spots. so that we might look more like Jesus.

And you see the words high control, low control. And all that means is you and

I, we can choose what teaching we listen to.

We can choose what community we're a part of or what practices we engage in.

So we have some semblance of control over that, but there's also things that

shape our growth that we don't have control over.

And this next one, time, is something that I am passionate about and I think

is important for us in our current age.

And I don't know each of your stories or backgrounds, but some of us likely

came from a Christian tradition where the immediate and miraculous working of

God was his primary form of working, his plan A,

his primary form of growth and deliverance.

Yet that sentiment that God's plan A is outside of time, I'm not sure if it's

a holistic view at the movement of God.

We spent the first part of this sermon traversing literally thousands of years

for God to accomplish his goal.

And I think that proves the point that God loves to work through time and bringing,

us individually and humanity and the cosmos into looking more like God,

into being nearer to God.

I'm not claiming that God does not intervene outside of time or doesn't work

in the miraculous or the immediate, but I do think that God created us to be

creatures who inhabit time and we grow with him through time.

Our current cultural moment seeks to war against time by making all things accessible now.

Yet scripture appears to be making the argument that God is willing to work

over thousands and thousands of years to accomplish his mission.

I just wonder, could the same be true about how he moves in our lives?

And I think where that leaves us is extending grace to ourselves and extending

grace to each other as we each are growing more like Jesus through time.

In his book, How People Grow, Christian psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Cloud describes

his battle with depression.

And he would often pray and he describes how he would pray and seek God's plan

A and what he thought would, which was an immediate deliverance from depression.

But he said it wasn't until many years had passed and engaging with the community

of God that over time he worked through or found that no longer was he struggling with depression.

And so for him, it was a big awakening to realizing God's movement through time.

And the last idea here is experience. John Mark Homer, he actually uses the

idea of the hard knocks of life, but I'm not a millennial, so that didn't really resonate with me.

And so I think experiences, good and bad, they shape us.

They teach us to be resilient or they teach us about who God is as we experience life.

They have a massive impact on our psyche and our spirit.

Whether it's our childhood family life to our adulthood experiences,

what we experience shapes us.

And we as Christians should seek to have tender hearts that work alongside under

the tutelage of the spirit to have those experiences shape us into being more like Jesus.

So if becoming more like Jesus was one way that we embody Jesus to our communities,

perhaps the other way is we do what Jesus did.

And what did Jesus do? Put simply, Jesus prioritized people.

He cared about their deeper needs and he moved towards them.

No longer was the dwelling place of God in an immovable temple.

It was among the people moving towards them, healing them and calling them into the kingdom of God.

So for us now as image bearers from Genesis one, we are the descendants of Abraham

calling the bless with the calling of of blessing all nations.

We have become in Christ a royal priesthood meant to intercede on behalf of all people.

We are called into a unique kingdom that elevates the lowly,

that seeks righteousness and hates injustice.

We have become the dwelling place of God, the place where people encounter God.

Our body mountainside is part

of a global trans-temporal body that God's spirit has chosen to dwell in.

We prioritize people because that's what Jesus did. And that is the character of God who dwells in us.

So if, if prioritize people are like, okay, great. I can prioritize people.

There's something more though, that I want to be a part of. I see this kingdom of God as, as expansive.

And so I want to figure out what, what I can be doing in that.

Well, here's some intangible, maybe more ethereal ways that we can think about

the kingdom of God and advancing it among Boone, North Carolina,

whether it's wholeness or justice, beauty and reconciliation.

This is from Surprise the World, a book that our church went together a few months ago.

When Jesus came, this is what he did. He sought wholeness.

He carried out and measured out a merciful justice.

He cultivated beauty and reconciliation among people and people to God.

This vision for this new humanity and the worship team can come up while grand

is only grand because the God of the universe has called us into this mission.

As we understand the elevated role God has created for us through his indwelling,

our worship and praise for God increases.

We so desperately desire for his kingdom to come and his will to be done that

this vision should inspire awe and wonder at the majesty of our King.

The King who has made us his dwelling place.

Father, there are mysteries that we do not understand, but your spirit has been

placed inside of us and is present among us as mountainside and as we are part of the global church.

Music.

Music.