Getting Our Lives Together | Essential Discipleship

So our teaching Scripture this morning comes from Acts chapter

Acts 18:24

18 verse 24 to chapter 19 verse 7.

It says now there came to Ephesus a Jew named Apollos from

Alexandria. He was an eloquent man, well

versed in the Scriptures, and he had been instructed in the way

of the Lord, and he spoke with burning enthusiasm and taught

accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the

baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the

synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took

him aside and explained the way of God to him more accurately.

And when he wished to crossover to Achaea, the brothers and

sisters encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him

on his arrival. He greatly helped those who

through grace had become believers, for he powerfully

refuted the Jews in public, showing by the Scriptures that

the Messiah is Jesus. While Apollos was in Corinth,

Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus,

where he found some disciples. He said to them, Did you receive

the Holy Spirit when you became believers?

And they replied, no, we have not even heard that there is a

Holy Spirit. Then he said, into what were you

baptized? And they answered into John's

baptism. Paul said John baptized with the

baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one

who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.

On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord

Jesus. When Paul had laid his hands on

them, the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke in tongues

and prophesied all together. There were about 12 of them.

This is the word of the Lord. It's great to see you all this

morning. So we've been in a sermon series

the last couple weeks called The Spiritual Journey, and it's been

an opportunity for us to focus on some of the ways that God

speaks to us in different ways across our journeys and

relationship with him. And now I'm a bit of a nerd, but

I can't think about journeys without thinking of The Lord of

the Rings. But the thing about the Lord of

the Rings trilogy is, whether you've read the books or watched

the movies or simply lived in the 21st century, is that

there's a longer journey that frames the entire narrative.

There's a journey to Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power.

But within that big journey, there's all these big journey,

this arduous task that has little hope of success.

There's all these little smaller journeys, so it begins with the

journey out of the Shire pursued by Black riders, then the

journey across the Wilds to reach Rivendell, then the

journey through the minds of Moria, and so on and so on.

Each of these segments of the journey are part of this bigger

journey, and what Frodo and his companions need on each step is

a little different. It's a bit like the spiritual

life as well. Sometimes you need the work of

getting your body into shape that the hobbits need to get out

of the Shire. Sometimes you need the hope of a

warm bed and safety that's going to propel you forward.

Sometimes you need a resign determination that you will

consider whatever the cost, you will continue whatever the cost.

When we think about the spiritual journey, so we think

about the ways in which God's invitation might differ in

different parts of our lives. There are many ways of telling

that story. For this week and the next

couple of weeks or the next week, we're going to be using

this framework by the Catholic priest and writer on

spirituality, Ronald Rohlhizer. He frames the journey in a

series of steps. Last week, Parker talked about

the experience of life before encountering the living Christ.

He shared about the way in which encounter with the grace and

forgiveness of Jesus can radically change our lives.

And after having our lives changed by Christ, Roll Hyzer

describes the first steps in your spiritual journey as what

he calls essential discipleship. And that's getting your life

together. And the next step he calls

mature discipleship, and that's giving your life away.

So this morning I'm going to be focusing on that first step, the

getting your life together. And after Parker's sermon last

week, you might imagine that this is only for relatively new

Christians, but I wouldn't want to frame it in that way.

Certainly after each of us encounters in a real way the

love of God through the person of Jesus, we do need some work

to get our lives together. Because I think that anyone here

who's been attempting to follow Jesus for a while will tell you

that beginning to call yourself a Christian doesn't make all the

problems in your life go away. You become a Christian and you

feel like your life has been radically changed.

But then you remember that you have the same job that's boring

a lot of the time. You have the same family who

grows irritable in fights with one another.

You have the same stress and worry about the future, and

maybe you're able to relate to those pieces of your life

differently. I certainly hope so.

But all of those parts of your life are still there, and

they're still in need of conversion and change.

And that's part of what role Heiser means by getting your

life together. This moment of encounter with

the Spirit is great, but you also have to let God into all

these other areas of your life too.

Just why? The sermon isn't only for those

who feel like beginners. The reality of our lives that

they're always pieces of us that are farther along in the

spiritual journey than these other parts of us.

And that's totally fine and normal.

We are finite and limited people, and we can't work on

everything in our lives at the same time.

We aren't usually capable of receiving healing in all of

these broken areas all at the same time.

Rather, we're all on this individualized journey towards

God. And at different points on our

journey, God has different invitations for us.

And so at these different points in our journey, we have

different invitations. But then also in these various

parts of our lives, there are these different invitations as

well. Certainly there are seasons when

we are more in a posture of receiving than a posture of

giving, but there's also a piece of our life where we're more

have something to give and a piece of our life where we still

need to receive healing. And so I think that most of the

time there's a space where God is always inviting you into

receiving the healing, receiving the connection you need with

him. And at the same time, there may

be another part of your life where God is inviting you to

give yourself away. And those things just coexist

together. But what does it mean to engage

in some of this work of essential discipleship, of

getting our lives together? I want to look at that through

the passage that Parker just read from the book of Acts.

So in Acts, that's the story of the beginnings of the church

following the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

It chronicles the spread of the Church, empowered by the Holy

Spirit, out from the disciples in Jerusalem to their nearby

neighbors in Judea and Samaria, and then to the far ends of the

earth, at least as Luke the author would conceive of it as

the Gospel spreads to Ethiopia and to Rome.

Throughout Acts, there are stories of people encountering

the person of Jesus and the Kingdom of God in these

surprising and miraculous ways, stories of heaven breaking in

and lives being changed. But as you might imagine,

people's lives being changed by the result of these itinerant

ministers who just pop in and share the gospel and then leave.

Those people still need formation and guidance on their

spiritual journey, and that's where we'll pick up this

morning. So the passage begins with the

arrival of a man named Apollos, who the text describes as

Apollos, a native of Alexandria. He was an eloquent man, well

versed in the Scriptures. So someone quite impressive

seems like they've appeared. Apollos is on the scene and he

seems really important. Not only is he an eloquent

speaker, he seems to know the Bible really well, and it seems

like he's a good candidate for someone who has a good grasp of

having his life together. But not only does he have good

preparation in the spiritual life, the text tells us in the

next verse that he had been instructed in the way of the

Lord, and he spoke with a burning enthusiasm and taught

accurately the things concerning Jesus that we only knew the

baptism of John. So as the story progresses here

in the second verse, we learn that Apollos is a little bit

misinformed. So when he says he only knew the

baptism of John, it's saying that Apollos only knows the

beginning of the story of Jesus, but that's still enough to

change his life. He hasn't experienced this or

heard of a baptism of the Holy Spirit.

He hasn't witnessed the power that the apostles experienced

that transformed their lives and sent them outward.

He doesn't have the full story, and we'll get back to that.

What I first want to draw attention to in this passage is

that Apollo spoke with a burning enthusiasm.

This burning enthusiasm is a characteristic of our lives when

we are getting them together. We come to some sort of

encounter with the power of Jesus, and we find that we are

filled with this power and this outward energy and this zest for

life. We're moving out into the world

and sure we might miss some things.

That doesn't mean that the enthusiasm is bad.

This outward force is part of what makes us human.

It drives us out of our parents homes into the world to find

ourselves where we going to love the encounter with things of the

world and where we enjoy life. If any of you have ever met a

teenager, you probably know what this is like.

This outward force is part of what makes us human.

And I want to be really clear that this enjoyment of your

life, this engagement in the world, isn't a bad thing.

So I think that sometimes Christians get a reputation for

being a bit of a killjoy, which is may be deserved given how the

church has shown up in particularly the late 20th

century America. We think of stories of

conversion. We often think of someone who's

become a lot less fun to be around, someone who loses a lot

of their liveliness, someone who no longer enjoys dancing or food

or drink, no more activity and action.

But this account of what following Jesus looks like

misses a lot of the point of this desire, this enthusiasm,

this energy that comes through our encounter with God, because

God is the one who made us with all those desires in the 1st

place. Early and medieval writers named

this outward force Eros, drawn from the name of the Greek God

of romantic love and passion and desire.

And a culture that's kind of worried about showing that much

energy. It can be dangerous, but this

desire outwards into the world is also placed deep in our

hearts by God. Ronald Rohlhizer calls it a holy

longing, and he talks about an aching pain or a delicious hope.

Those are like really like gotta roll instinct words.

This sort of zest of life is what we're dealing with when we

talk about the essential discipleship, when we talk about

getting our lives together, and as we think about how do we need

to get our lives together. I don't want to set up desire as

the enemy. It's good to lean into this

energy. This energy is what drove

Apollo's to action and enthusiasm of sharing the life

of Jesus with those he met. Apollo's had encountered the

reality of the living God meeting with him.

The goal of Christian spirituality is not the

repression or the ignorance of that desire.

It's not encouraging Apollo's to sit down and stop embarrassing

everyone. It's to channel and direct that

enthusiasm and power in the right way.

Following Christ isn't about rejecting desire, it's about

intensifying it, preventing it from being dissipated.

In his book, Jared talks about this with an image of a hearth.

A hearth is a box surrounding the fireplace.

If you have a fireplace in your home, it doesn't just constrain

the fire, it actually intensifies it and makes it

hotter. So the fire burning inside your

fireplace is actually feels a lot warmer than the fire at a

campfire that spread out into the air.

What I want to think about as an invitation for this morning is

to reflect on do we have that kind of space to intensify the

desire? Have we channelled our desire or

have we just let it drift away? I think that's part of why we so

often get caught up in media about young people.

We're trying to shock our way into re encountering the desire

that we had and we've been craving to find again.

But rather than seeking the community we long for, we just

binge watch Friends. Or rather than taking the risk

of setting out on a journey towards the vocation that God is

inviting us to, we just read Jack Kerouac.

Or rather than seeking to understand the restlessness we

feel in our lives, we instead just learn about Luke Skywalker

learning that he is a Jedi. And that's something that has

been a temptation for me. It's always easier for me to

pretend that I don't want something than to risk it not

happening, and I wonder if that's the same for some of you.

The spiritual journey isn't about losing our desire, it's

about finding the place where we can intensify that desire

towards God. So what happens with this

outward energy that Apollo's is experiencing?

What happens when Apollo shows up in Corinth or in Ephesus?

He encounters this community, this check, this channeling of

energy. The text says he began to speak

boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard

him, they took him aside and explained the way of God to him

more accurately. So Apollos needed Priscilla and

Aquila to be involved in his story.

He's filled with this outward energy.

He's filled with the excitement of his deep and real encounter

with Jesus. But it also, if you look at the

story, seems like he's been going at this alone.

He shows up in Ephesus all by himself.

He starts preaching. He's not part of a team.

He's not part of the community. He's full of energy, but he

doesn't have the structure to sustain that energy over the

long haul. Priscilla and Aquila see this

man full of enthusiasm, and they don't try to shut him down.

They integrate him into their community.

They take Apollos to the side and explain the way of God and

explain to him this encounter with the Holy Spirit.

And this is the key part of the spiritual journey.

We have to allow ourselves to be formed by a community.

We have to allow ourselves to be integrated into the community of

God. It's really easy to try to go at

it alone, but it's only through relationships that were actually

transformed and all of that outward energy.

This zest for life is able to be settled and channelled into this

kind of life that we say we care about.

Relationships are the key X aspect of our lives during

getting our lives together. The work of learning to be in a

community is the work that sustains this outward energy.

It's only in a community that we actually start to face

ourselves. It's only in community that we

face the reality of who we are. Because when you're really with

people, they will tell you how you are.

Without relationships with real people, it's so much easier to

live in the ideal rather than in the reality.

And only in the reality is a place where we actually meet

God. The relationships of the people

who surround us can be like that hearth that's intensifying and

deepening the fire that God has placed in our hearts.

It's so easy to idealize the Christian life.

It's easy to idealize the church.

But something I've loved about this church here at Central

Vineyard is that it's a place where you don't have to pretend

to be the ideal community. This church has always been a

place where it's OK to be a bit of a mess.

This church has always been a place where we can show up and

say, this is the reality of our lives.

And it's been a place where you can find healing, or you can

find a place to channel these fears of dissipation and

insubstantiality and restlessness.

The work of our the spiritual journey is learning how to face

reality, learning how to grow into a reality that is not as we

have imagined it to be, but how it is.

And facing reality means we actually have to look at those

parts of our lives that really need work.

We're able to see those places where God is inviting us to lean

in and to touch. That's part of what Parker

invited us to reflect on in the Silence.

Is there a space in your life where you feel that gap?

Maybe you find yourself there that's this morning, and you

feel like you need a community for healing.

So I'd invite you to take the time you need from God.

Sometimes you need to rest in the healing care of others.

Maybe even as I've been talking, or as you were reflecting in

silence, you know that space in your life where you need help.

And we'd love to hold that for you as a church this morning.

We'd love to get you connected into deeper communities.

We have the central communities that are relaunching soon.

We would also just love to pray for you and hold whatever that

is in your heart before God. But these relationships aren't

the end of the story. Instead, finding our lives a

little more put together leads to something powerful.

It leads to this energy inside us being channelled outward into

life. And so the outcome of this

direction, this channelling of direction, is more ministry for

Apollo's. It comes when he gets to see

more deeply the reality of his calling.

So the sire, the text says when he wished to crossover to IKEA,

the brothers and sisters encouraged him and wrote to the

disciples to welcome him. And on arrival, he greatly

helped those who, through grace, had become believers.

Part of the work that Apollo's does here is learning where it

is that God is actually inviting him towards.

It's not here in Ephesus where he thought he needed to be.

Through the community, he learns that it's actually over in IKEA,

which is also known as Corinth. So part of the work of following

Jesus is finding where in your life is God inviting you.

There's always more that you want to do in your life than

you'll be able to do in your finite lifetime.

When you talk to kids, they have dreams of the future, of being

like a Princess, astronaut teacher, or a superhero doctor,

veterinarian, or a musician, firefighter, baseball player.

We start our lives with so much openness to the future, so many

things we could do, and this outward energy that God has

given us pushes us out into that world.

So we're looking for a world that looks more like the Kingdom

of God. But as we grow up, we learn we

can't do everything. Our college classes on pedagogy

leave little time to train to be an astronaut.

It turns out that staying up all night fighting crime isn't a

recipe for succeeding in our pre Med classes, and practicing the

guitar doesn't leave a lot of space for perfecting our

curveball. And while those are stereotypes

of the kind of careers children want, we all face this

disappointment in our adult lives too.

We realize that every choice we make does preclude some other

choices. Deciding to buy a house means we

have less disposable income to travel the world.

Deciding to get married means we have less time to pursue our

eccentric hobby. Deciding to pursue a career

known for long hours means we might not have as much time for

free play with a young child. The temptation in our spiritual

lives is to begin to see those choices, these limitations on

our energy through the lens of resentment.

But I would caution you that this is a path that mostly just

leads to destruction. Instead, I think that part of

the work of getting your life together is to discover your

sense of vocation. So now vocation often gets

really tied to what our job is. And while sometimes that is part

of your vocation, what I want to focus on is more that vocation

is how God is inviting you to shape your life.

What is God inviting you towards Who isn't what God inviting you

to care for? Vocation is about the deep work

that God has given to you. And sometimes that's a job, and

sometimes it's not. It's ultimately about being

faithful to the call of God. It's about recognizing that the

choices we make do preclude the multitude of possibilities.

But that's not a bad thing. The narrowing of these choices

is actually part of what it means to respond to the call of

God. God invites us to particular

places, to do particular things with particular people, not for

everyone all at once. And that's what Apollos

recognized in this passage. He comes to find the community

that he needs to discern. What is it that God is inviting

him to? It's not to Ephesus where he

thought he was being invited to. It's about one way of the

importance of getting our lives together, The story here in

Apollo's. But that personal work of our

own lives, our own vocation, isn't the only thing that's

important. Apollo's, as we chose, move into

the next chapter of Acts just fades away.

The story of Acts again picks up with the apostle Paul, who is

back in Ephesus where he found some disciples.

And the passage goes on to say when Paul shows up, he looks at

these disciples and he says, did you receive the Holy Spirit when

you became believers? They replied, no, we've not even

heard there is a Holy Spirit. Then he said, into what then

were you baptized? They answered into John's

baptism. And Paul said John baptized with

a baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe and the

one who was to come after him, that is in Jesus.

On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord

Jesus. When Paul laid his hands on

them, the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke in tongues

and prophesied all together. There were about 12 of them.

Side note, I just love that there was only 12 of them.

And I think a lot of times in Acts were like look at all these

thousands of people. But actually, this is recounting

just these 12 people, and that really matters to God.

But this mass passage, it moves us away from Apollo's seemingly.

It might be that these are people that Apollo's has

ministered to because they seem to have the same gap and

understanding that Apollo's has. But they are a group of people

who are trying to get their lives together, who are trying

to follow Jesus. But what these people are

missing is an active encounter with the Holy Spirit.

They don't even know who the Holy Spirit is or that there is

a Holy Spirit. And that's sometimes the way our

lives play out too. We sometimes do a pretty good

job of seeming like we have all of our lives put together, but

we've been mostly doing everything under our own power.

We've been trying really hard to follow God, or at least follow

our image of what following God looks like.

But we've missed that power that we need.

We've been really building some really great channels and banks.

Maybe we're trying to build a hearth.

We feel like we're missing the power that needs to fall through

them. Because that's the thing about

getting your life together is that it's ultimately the Spirit

of God doing the heavy lifting. The Spirit is the one enabling

this transformation, empowering us to get our lives together at

all. And ultimately, in the book of

Acts, the main character is not all of these human characters

that are kind of hops between, like it's going between Apollos

and Paul. It's the Holy Spirit who is

doing the work of joining people together and letting them get

their lives together. The Spirit invites us

individually into getting our lives together.

But through the power of the Spirit, we actually join this

larger story of the Kingdom of God breaking in, transforming

the whole world into a place where God's will is effective

and where the world looks like how God wants it to look.

So I opened this story by talking about the journeys of

the Company in The Lord of the Rings.

But the true part of that story is that these small journeys

make up this longer journey. But even that longer journey is

part of this bigger story, the work of ages.

Tolkien loves to write all of these other stories that no one

reads. The great tales never end.

And the Spirit is part of that bigger work in the world,

shaping the entire community and people into the likeness of God

in our movement of getting our lives together.

It's just one part of that larger work as well.

But for us this morning, I do think there's an invitation to

take a little step down this path.

For those of us who feel like we're still getting our lives

together, or we have this piece of our life that we're really

trying to get together, I think God is inviting us to welcome

his empowering and active Spirit.

We have work to do when we're in a season of getting our lives

together, but I don't want to say that that work is the most

important thing. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit is

the one who's doing the work for us.

We move just the tiniest bit and the Spirit does the rest.

So this passage from Acts for this morning concludes with when

Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them and

they spoke in tongues and prophesied this morning.

I want you to take a moment and just think, is that something

that you want with you this morning?

What kind of following of Jesus is God inviting to you to do?

You need the Holy Spirit to empower you to do it.

So I'd like to invite our prayer team to come to the sides, our

worship team to begin to make your way back up.

Just I'd invite you all to stand.

We're going to take a moment before we start worshipping to

pray together. So if you feel comfortable, I'd

invite you to just open your hands.

There's nothing magical about that.

It's just a way of opening yourself up to the presence of

God. I pray, Lord, come Holy Spirit,

you'd move among us. I pray you'd even now be

highlighting places in life where people need healing, they

need the Holy Spirit. If you feel like something's

going on with you, I'd invite you to get some prayer.

There are people here on the sides.

You can move now if you want to.