Friendship is Contagious | Becoming A Praying Church, Week 7 | Rachel Taylor | New North Church

Hey, welcome to the New North Church podcast.

It's great to have you listening in with us.

Our vision at our church is to be an authentic community of Jesus followers who love and serve people.

So if we can help you in any way at all, just reach out to us.

The email address is hello at newnorth.church.

With that, let's go right to this week's message.

Good morning, New North Church.

It's so good to be with you guys here today.

I gotta say, I was at the 8:30 service and I didn't see any donuts.

Were there donuts this morning?

Is it next week?

All right, I'm gonna be here.

You don't have to tell me twice.

All right, well, um, I really love the sermon series that you guys have been in over the past six weeks.

I've been following along online, and actually, I've been following along all this year, throughout your year of prayer, and I've been so excited, it's been such a joy to watch your um your hunger for the presence of God just increase and to see him continue to form you as a church through that.

The series question that we've been looking at every week in this series is well, what kind of church is it that God is forming us to be?

And what I love about that question is that right off the bat, it acknowledges that God is the one forming us.

In other words, as God's church, there is already a power at work inside of us, growing us up, creating us to be the kind of church that He intends us to be.

And over the past six weeks, we've been seeing what kind of church that is.

And that's a church that sees clearly, is rooted in love, is wise and discerning, that walks in a worthy manner, is strengthened and encouraged with hearts that are directed towards God's heart.

And as we'll see this morning, a church who intercedes for the lost.

Now, I am not a gardener, but every spring there are wildflowers that pop up in my garden beds without me having to tend to them.

But in contrast, the plants that I try to grow, like the ones that I buy and read the little instruction card that comes tucked in the soil and water on a schedule and amend the soil for, for some reason, those never seem to make it.

But the wildflowers that grow, they just grow on their own.

And that's because God is the gardener.

He's the one that designed them to flourish exactly where they are.

They have all the resources they need to be the kind of flower God wants them to be exactly in the place they are in.

And that's what the church is like.

The church is like those wildflowers.

We are made to flourish in exactly the place that we already are, right here in the city and on the peninsula, in our places of work, in our families and our neighborhoods.

We have all the resources we need through the spirit inside of us to be the kind of church that God needs us to be right here.

It is good news about the new life of Jesus, the way that this works.

It's his spirit inside of us that makes this happen.

And once we get a taste for this kind of growth that we don't have to manufacture on our own, we keep coming back for more.

It's addicting, right?

It's so easy when we can lean in to the work of the Spirit.

So this morning we're gonna be looking at how God is forming us to be a church that interced for the lost, one that prays for those who don't know Jesus yet, and the full life and hope that is found only in Him, and that we pray for them with consistency and with passion.

It is good news that God is the one who's forming us to be this kind of church.

Because when we try to manufacture prayer for the lost on our own, when we s when we treat it like some kind of spiritual chore or spiritual to-do list, it is hard to maintain.

We feel like it is something we should be doing, and so we we pray for the person in our life that doesn't know Jesus, we pray for them once, we pray for them twice, and then life gets busy and we forget.

Time goes on, and then we start getting this nagging sense of guilt that we really should be praying for them more.

And so then we try again, we pray once, twice.

Life gets busy, we forget, time goes by and the guilt comes back.

The cycle repeats.

But why is it so hard and frustrating to pray for the lost in a continuous and passionate way?

I don't think that the problem is that we're bad people or lazy Christians.

I think our problem is that we're approaching praying for the lost out of a sense of duty or obligation, like we're servants trying to do right by our master, like it's something we owe to God that we're trying to give to him.

But that kind of effort when we try to manufacture resources on our own just isn't sustainable.

A sense of duty gets us started, but it doesn't have the power to keep us going.

I remember when I was back in college, I was in a campus fellowship, and evangelism was something that was really important to us.

And so our leaders would teach us how to do evangelism.

And for some reason, our model had a lot to do with riding in airplanes.

Now, this was 30 years ago, and I don't want you to do the math, but I need to tell you that because it was a long time ago when there were no airpods, no cell phones, no laptops, and so when you rode on a plane, you would bring a book to read because there's nothing else to do, right?

And you would actually talk to the person next to you.

And so the evangelism model was they would make these little gospel tracks, these little booklets that would show the story of the gospel in like picture form.

And you're supposed to pick the put uh tuck that into your novel that you take on the plane, and you're supposed to sit down to the next next to the person beside you, strike up a conversation, and then at some point along the flight, pull out that gospel tract and share the gospel with them.

So our leaders would have us practice this.

And I happen to fly a lot, like way more than my friends, because I was dating my now husband, he lived here and I was in Texas, and so I remember practicing with my friends.

And then I would get on the plane, I would sit down, I would look at the person next to me, and I would immediately immerse myself in my book for the entire flight.

I never worked up the courage to pull out that gospel tract.

And so I'd sit there for the entire flight, feeling guilty.

And then I would get off the airplane, go down to baggage claim, I'd be standing there waiting for my suitcase to come on the conveyor belt, just feeling terrible and guilty.

And I remember thinking, is this really what it's supposed to feel like to follow Jesus?

I mean, that was a burden that wasn't producing any fruit.

It was just guilt on a loop.

Surely there has to be a way to consistently engage in prayer for the lost and outreach in a way that captures God's heart for the lost.

We know that his heart moves towards the lost.

In fact, it's like the first thing he does after he creates the world, Adam and Eve quickly disobey God and they go hide in the bushes.

And what does God do?

He moves towards the lost.

It's in his nature, it's who he is.

And so if we're made in the image of this God, surely there's a way to capture that heart that just naturally moves towards the lost.

It should just flow out of us like it's something we were made to do.

So who is it that you want to know God?

Don't think abstractly.

Think of a face, think of a name.

Maybe it's a parent, a sibling, maybe it's somebody that you work with, maybe it's somebody back from your college days who keeps making bad choice after bad choice.

We all have someone like this in our life, someone who doesn't yet know Jesus.

And if we're being honest, we probably feel some complicated mixture of emotions when we think about their spiritual state.

We care about them.

It's just that that care for them hasn't translated into consistent, passionate prayer.

And I think there's a couple of reasons for this.

See if you identify with any of these three reasons, or maybe all of them.

The first reason is when we pray for them, it can often feel like it's not really doing anything.

It can feel like we're sending a letter with no address.

We say the words, but then it can feel like it's not connecting with anyone.

We don't see any change.

And so we we slow down in our prayers.

And for some of us, the second reason is we've actually prayed for them for a very long time, weeks, months, maybe years, but we see no change.

In fact, they might seem farther from God than when we started praying.

And so our hope starts to fade.

And so do our prayers.

The third reason, and this is my reason, the biggest reason for me, is that it is actually painful to hold the lostness of someone in our heart day after day, when our own daily lives are hard enough.

But what if it's not about willpower or discipline at all?

Our text for today is Romans 10:1.

Romans 10:1

The Apostle Paul writes, brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.

It's only one verse.

I don't want us to move past it too quickly, so let's read it again.

Brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.

Now to understand what Paul is saying here, we need to know who he is saying it about.

Paul himself is an Israelite, so he's praying for his people.

These are the people he grew up with, his neighbors, his teachers, his co-workers.

These are people he shared a table with, a bloodline, a history with, he shared a work with.

When I was in elementary school, there was a boy who lived around the corner from me, and we would walk to elementary school together every morning.

His name was Kurt, and so Kurt would show up at my door every morning, and I remember this very clearly.

He would always smell like syrup because every morning he would eat pancakes right before he came over to my house.

And then we would walk to school together.

And his parents knew my parents.

They would stand out in the yard talking.

I knew his sister, she would ride her bike up and down our street.

These are the kinds of people that Paul is praying for.

They weren't strangers or acquaintances, they were woven into his everyday life.

But then these are the same people when Paul started following Jesus that started rejecting Paul because of Jesus.

And this is deeply painful.

Can you imagine if your whole community rejected you because you followed Jesus?

And this wasn't only happening in his hometown.

The Apostle Paul would go from town to town, and usually when he got to a new city, he would first go to the synagogue and share with them the gospel.

And they would most often quickly reject it.

And then not only that, they would actually stir up crowds against Paul who would push him outside of the city or beat him or stone him.

One time they stoned him so badly that they thought he was dead, and so they drug his bat body outside of the city gates, leaving him there.

Now it's harder to imagine that it's Paul's deep desire that the Israelites be saved, because it's hard to keep a soft heart when people are persecuting you like this.

Like he didn't he didn't go no contact with him, right?

Even though they were being quite toxic to him.

But somehow he maintained a soft heart towards them.

So how do we catch this kind of heart for the lost that we see Paul has?

Well, we for sure don't catch it by trying harder, by giving ourselves a prayer schedule, or by feeling more guilty.

There has to be a different way.

However, Paul's heart was changed is the same way that our heart can be formed and softened.

Something has to get inside of us like it got inside of Paul so that this prayer for the lost just naturally flows out from us.

Like we don't even have to try.

It's just part of who we are.

So, what is the mechanism that God uses to transform us in this way and to form us as a people this way?

I think the answer comes from a single line from Jesus in John 15, 15.

Jesus says, I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business.

Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from the Father I have made known to you.

Jesus doesn't want servants working in his kingdom.

Servants perform tasks.

Servants do what they're told, and they usually do it from a distance.

But friends are close to each other.

They spend so much time with each other that they start to become like each other.

They start talking like one another, right?

Using the same phrases, the same cadences, the same tones.

They like the same music.

They like the same food.

They share each other's clothes.

They borrow each other's stuff.

They have the same friends.

They start to rub off on one another.

Friendship is contagious.

And this is the same thing when it comes to the friendship of Jesus.

The more we spend time in his presence, the more we start to become like him.

We start liking what he likes, caring about what he cares about, and noticing what he notices, and we don't even have to try.

Here's how the contagiousness of friendship works.

And I did this in the first service, and Rob let me know that I was mispronouncing this word, so let's see if you can understand me.

But the word is birria.

Is that better?

Birria.

Okay, burrilla tacos, right?

Who has ever had a birilla taco?

You guys, no one's had a birrilla taco?

Oh my goodness, I gotta take you for lunch after this.

All right, well, birrilla tacos, they are so good.

Once you've had one, you will keep coming back for more.

It is so good that they started putting birria into everything.

Like I've seen burrilla ramen, I've seen birilla pizza, and when you eat burilla, you have this meat juice that you you dip it in.

It's consume, and it is amazing.

So I've just seen this takeoff all around me.

Once you guys have tried it, you'll never forget it.

Um, but that is how friendship is contagious.

Like no one decides that they need to eat more burilla tacos, right?

It's just you go to a place with a friend, you try it once, and you get addicted.

They're so good.

That's not a decision, that's contagion.

And that's how friendship works.

And once we become the friend of Jesus, his friends start being our friends.

And this is what this is who he says are his friends.

Let's listen to Matthew 25, 40.

Jesus says, Whatever you did for the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner, you did it for me.

And he's not just talking about physical things, he's also talking about spiritual things.

So those that are spiritually hungry, those that are spiritually sick and need spiritual healing, those that are spiritual prisoners to the things of this world, those are Jesus' friends.

So that person that you thought of earlier that doesn't know Jesus yet, the person that you're trying to pray for with consistency and with passion, Jesus got there first.

He's already praying for them.

Hebrews 7, 25 says, Jesus always lives to intercede for them.

That means right now, at this very moment, Jesus is already on his knees praying for them.

Jesus is already their friend.

And he invites you to kneel down next to him in friendship and pray for them.

It's a circle of friends.

And that's how praying for the lost, interceding for the lost, starts to our sh to shift in our lives.

No longer is it just something on our spiritual to-do list, it's about relationship with that person, with Jesus.

We're meeting all together.

And even just that one shift, even just mentally imagining Jesus already praying and us joining him will start to change the nature of our prayers for the lost and will start to change us.

Now, the amazing thing about the friend about friendship with Jesus, we've already seen that he is our friend, he is their friend, but the amazing thing is that Jesus also wants us to be his friend.

Even though he's God and he technically doesn't need anything, Jesus wants a friendship with us that's reciprocal.

He wants the intimacy to go both ways.

We see this when Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane in the heaviest uh moment of his life, the messiest moment of his life, he looks to his disciples, his friends, who he has brought with him to the garden.

And he says, My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

Stay with me and keep watch here.

Stay here and keep watch with me.

In other words, stay with me.

Jesus does what any of us do when we're overwhelmed in the hardest, messiest moments of our life.

We just want to be surrounded by our friends who can be present with us.

We don't need them to fix anything.

We just need them to hold that heaviness with us.

And in the same way, Jesus is still, in a sense, on his knees in the garden, praying for the lost, those that are hungry and imprisoned and spiritual strangers.

And just like he invited the disciples to kneel down with him and pray and stay and help him bear the burden that he is bearing for the world, he invites us now to kneel down with him and join him in that prayer.

Have you ever been with someone when they're ugly crying?

Like not just the polite kind of tear or two that trickles down their cheek, but like the heaving, gut-wrenching, like snot flowing everywhere, kind of crying.

And has anyone ever been with you when you've been ugly crying?

This is when we really get to know a person, right?

There are no filters, like our raw emotions just come out.

I had a season when I was walking with someone through a tragedy in her family, and she was meeting with me every week.

And every week when she'd show up at my office door and see me, she would immediately burst into tears.

And um, she had just been holding them in all week.

And she cut kept coming back week after week, not because I could fix anything in her life, but because this was the one place where she didn't have to hold it altogether.

It was a ministry of presence.

That's what friendship does.

It stays with someone when it's messy and hard.

It doesn't, um, a friend doesn't try to fix things, they're just there with you.

And I've thought about that ever since that time, and I realized that this is exactly what Jesus does for me.

He lets me come to him unfiltered, and he stays with me.

So uh the verses we read earlier in Matthew 25 about the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner, those are the people that Jesus is still with.

The same way he stays with us in those moments, he's already staying with the lost.

And this is what the apostle Paul writes in Philippians 3.

He said, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

I want to know Christ.

Yes, to know the power of his resurrection, but also the participation in his sufferings.

And that phrase, participation in sufferings, that's the phrase of friendship, right?

That's the language of friendship.

That's how we really get to know someone when we participate in their suffering, when we're present with them through the hard, through the messy.

This is how God forms us into a church that intercedes for the lost.

But this is also where it gets really personal for us.

Because what we have to do first isn't just jumping right to prayer for the lost.

First, we have to let Jesus deeper into our own lives, into our own messes, the places where we're trying to manage life apart from Jesus, or maybe trying to numb the pain of life in ways that are away from Jesus and probably don't honor him.

Those are the two spaces.

That Jesus is inviting us to grow in our friendship within him.

He is inviting us to open ourselves up.

He's already in those moments, but there's something that shifts in us when we start talking to him in the middle of those moments.

I remember walking through one of the hardest seasons that my family has ever walked through.

We had said yes to foster care, which sounds like a great thing to do, and it is, but the circumstances that we were walking through in the moment were really overwhelming and more than any of us could bear, including my foster children at the time.

And I remember in the middle of it, just being exhausted and completely undone, and asking Jesus, probably the most honest, unfiltered question I've ever asked him.

And I said, Jesus, and this was in a moment when I was definitely ugly crying, right?

I said, Jesus, did you call us into this just to ruin our family?

Because that's what it felt like in the moment.

Things were so hard, it felt like I couldn't keep everybody together and I couldn't provide for everyone's needs.

The resources were beyond me.

I didn't have it in me.

And I remember his answer.

I don't think I've ever been answered by God so directly.

And it wasn't an audible answer, but it was as close to it as you can get.

It was just this immediate impression on my heart.

It was just, no.

Like no, I didn't call you into this just to ruin your family.

And he didn't fix anything at that moment.

But in that moment, when I received that direct answer, I knew that God saw me.

And I knew that he saw every single person in my family.

And he had been walking with each of us.

And something inside me just opened up.

And Jesus became a deeper, closer friend to me.

And what happened was that I somehow also caught his heart for people, even a heart for my foster children that was different than anything that I could have produced on my own.

God was forming me to be the kind of person that he always intended me to be.

And that's just one example of the church and how God forms us as the church, rooted and planted in the places that we're in.

This is how God forms a church that intercedes for the lost.

We don't decide to care about what Jesus cares about.

We catch it.

And this is what happened to Paul.

He wasn't always a man who had a heart for the lost.

He actually used to be the one who was persecuting the Christians, the one who was having them drug out of their homes and stoned to death and watching, thinking he was right.

But then one day Jesus met him on the road to Damascus.

And Jesus did what I find to be a very fascinating thing because you would think that Jesus would correct Paul, and you would think that Jesus would condemn him and lecture him.

But instead, Jesus introduced himself to Paul and started to help Paul get to know who he was.

And then Paul spent some time, mainly by himself, just getting to know Jesus more deeply.

And that's what created this heart that was tender and soft, and that desired the salvation of the lost.

That prayer from Romans 10:1, let me read it again.

Romans 10:1

Brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.

This wasn't a prayer of duty or obligation.

This was a prayer that overflowed out of Paul's heart, a heart that had been so thoroughly changed by the presence and friendship of Jesus that it couldn't stay inside him.

It just naturally poured out.

It was contagious, just like Berea tacos.

You guys are gonna thank me once you try them.

We can't sustain intercession for the lost out of guilt.

Guilt burns hot, but then it burns out.

Instead, we have to catch it from Jesus.

But we can't catch what we haven't been close enough to receive.

And so as we wrap up our time together in the Word, our application for this morning, I have a little application tool for you this morning.

It's a friendship bracelet.

It's in the pocket in the chair in front of you.

So kind of fish around in the chair in front of you.

You'll find a little friendship bracelet.

If you guys are on the front, there's one underneath your seat.

It looks like this.

And if you're not the bracelet-wearing type, that's okay.

You can tape it to your bathroom mirror, or you can put it on your desk at work, or my personal favorite, you can put it in your cup holder of your car in the console, where you see it every time you drive.

And I want this to be a prompt for you throughout this week and the weeks ahead.

But it's not a prompt to pray for the lost, because that would be just back where we were at the beginning, back to a spiritual to-do list.

Instead, I want this to be a prompt for you to lean deeper into your friendship with Jesus.

Let him in those areas of your life that you're trying to manage on your own, or the ways that you're trying to numb the pain apart for him.

There is nothing that shocks him.

That's what I love about Jesus.

He's already been in all those places with us, but something in us shifts when we start talking to him in those moments, letting him be a closer friend to us.

And once we do that, we naturally just start wondering who else Jesus is already with in the middle of their messes.

And we start to hear Jesus' invitation, the same invitation he gave the disciples in the garden.

Will you stay with Jesus there?

He's already praying for the lost.

Will you get down on your knees with him and pray with him?

So as we wrap up this morning, I want to go back to that first question that we started with.

What kind of church is God forming us to be?

It's a church of friends, friends with Jesus first, and then that friendship is contagious, and we grow deeper in our friendship for the lost.

We start spending more time with them because that's who Jesus is spending time with.

That's who Jesus is pursuing.

The mission of New North Church is to make and mature more followers of Jesus.

And what I love about this mission statement is it's actually two things in one, because as we mature in our friendship with Jesus, this is what creates in us the longing to make more followers of Jesus.

It's one thing.

We don't have to choose depth over reach.

When we go deeper with Jesus, our hearts just naturally move outward like the heart of God.

And so if you'll join with me this morning, let's let's come together before Jesus in prayer.

Jesus, thank you.

Firstly, that you're such a good friend to us.

Thank you that you've been with us in all the moments that we've gone through, all of our darkest times, the times when we thought we were alone, maybe ugly crying by ourselves.

But Lord, we have never been alone.

You have always been present with us.

There is nothing that you haven't seen.

There isn't any moment when we've been too far gone.

Lord, you are always pursuing us.

Thank you for that.

And thank you for the way that you pursue all of those that are far from you.

We want to catch your heart for the lost.

And so help us to allow you deeper into our lives and allow us to return that same friendship that you extend to us.

It's in your name that we pray.

Amen.

Hey, thanks for being with us, and we really pray that God spoke to you through his word today.

And we want to stay connected.

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And if you'd like uh more resources or to donate to our ministry, just simply go to newnorth.church.

Thanks again for joining us.

God bless you, and we'll see you right here next time.