Romans 12:9-21 – Community

Morning everyone.

Welcome to you both in person and online.

I'm going to move that down slightly.

My name is Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at the church.

Thank you for joining us as we continue to look at those things that we value as a church.

What are uh what's woven into our DNA, or perhaps you're considering uh City Church and whether or not it's a church you want to be part of.

Uh going forward, and you kind of think, well, what are its values?

What kind of things does it prioritize?

And as I said last week, uh we I'm a bit boomy, maybe just turn me down slightly.

Um uh we don't do lots of things, uh, but what we do do, we uh hold uh dearly, and those things that we value highly are threefold.

They are gospel, community, and mission.

And so last week we looked at what the gospel is, and we outlined in detail what the gospel was, what it is that Christians believe, that message, that word of life that we are to not swerve from.

And really, these two weeks are in a sense outworkings of our convictions about the gospel, and so we come to thinking about community.

Uh, this might be a strange concept uh for you.

Uh, when you think about church, perhaps uh you were brought up in a tradition or your perception of church is that it is not something that goes hand in hand with any sort of uh depth of relationship.

It's something that happens on a uh on a Sunday.

Uh you attend a service, but in terms of uh pouring into anything beyond that, that's quite unfamiliar.

Uh uh church relationships uh wouldn't uh be described by you as some of the most intimate that you might have, uh, regardless of whether or not you come from a tradition that has the sign of the peace.

Where you're you're by and large shaking hands or now bowing to uh complete and utter strangers through the rest of the week.

And so perhaps this thinking of uh of Christians as being in community is a uh an alien one or an unusual one for you.

And yet, I'm sure that we all acknowledge on some level that each of us uh likes to be connected with others.

Uh we uh in fact, I think crave community.

One of the things that lockdown has uh exacerbated, perhaps, is how disconnected uh and how cut off from community we uh can be and how lonely that is.

I think that the the desire for community is not just a want, a nice augment to your life, it's actually a need.

Uh, something that you as a human being need.

You need to feel connected to others.

And some of you have found lockdown hard precisely because of how unconnected, disconnected, isolated you have felt from others.

These feelings are common, I think, to all of us to varying degrees.

Some of us do better on our own uh than uh than others, and yet I think those who like their own company still at one at one point or another need the input of another human being.

The reason why these feelings, I think, are common to all of us is because Christians believe that God made us for community, he made us for relationship with one another.

And so, actually, in order to understand why it is that we at City Church value community, why it is that the Bible values community, we actually need to go back.

We need to go back before uh the passage that was read that we will get to.

We need to go back in time.

Uh, we in fact need to go beyond time, we need to go back before a time to where God is.

We need to glimpse eternal realities and ask ourselves: well, who is God?

Because what we see there is that God Himself is a community, eternally, always relating.

We believe, Christians believe, that the Christian God is Father, Son, and Spirit.

One God, not three, one God in three persons, always existing and always relating, always pouring out love and joy and delight to one another.

The creation of the world is in essence an invitation to humanity, an invitation to all of creation to share in that eternal relationship of perfect love, perfect joy, a perfect delight.

Now this is important, isn't it?

Because what we read in the first page of our Bible is that you and I, male and female, are made in God's image.

And so part of what that means is that we were made to relate.

Well, relate to who?

Well, you can think of it in two axes.

There's the vertical axis.

We're made as human beings to relate to God, and we're made to relate to one another on that horizontal axis.

To be an image bearer, that is something that all of you are.

Whether or not you would describe yourself as a Christian, you are an image-bearer of God, that is what Christians believe.

You are someone who needs and craves community.

Why?

Because that's how you were created to be.

You were hardwired for relationship in that sense.

However, when as you read the Bible, you get to the third chapter in the and what Christians call the fall, when sin enters our world, what it does is it breaks that connection, it disconnects or disintegrates.

It disintegrates relationships.

Why?

Well, because sin is at essence a power grab.

It is self-love, it is turning yourself inward so that you're no longer orientated towards God on the vertical and others on the horizontal.

And so sin has fractured the relationship between us and God.

We see that in the garden in Genesis 3, when the man and the woman, what is it we read?

They hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cold of the day, and so they hide themselves.

They hide themselves from God.

But it doesn't just fracture the relationship on the vertical between humanity and our Maker, it disintegrates relationships on the horizontal.

Not only do the man and the woman in Genesis 3 hide from God, they also hide from one another in the covering of their nakedness.

And so we live in a world that is dealing with the effects of that disconnection, that disintegration ever since.

You know the effects of that disconnection in terms of both your vertical and horizontal relationships.

You know what it is to have relationships that be strained and then break down and disintegrate.

That is as a result of life in this fallen world.

We are hardwired for community.

One of the consequences of that in a fallen world is that sin perverts that and gives rise to tribalism.

Not only are individuals fractured one from another, but we form groups.

And those groups wage war against one another.

That's what you see again, just moving through these opening chapters of uh of uh uh of Genesis.

That's what you see as as sin permeates society.

Society begins to break down into factions.

Historically, we might have uh seen this as uh warring nation states, and certainly that's an expression of that, but it comes uh closer to home, actually, uh, to each one of us, in the form of identity groupings, how we identify.

You see that in our world today, as people uh shelter under their tribal identity, their racial grouping, their cultural grouping, their political grouping, their class grouping, warring with one another, seeking power over the other.

That was given an expression in the church at Corinth, when Paul hears news that some of the Christians in the church are saying, Well, you know, I don't I don't really follow Paul, uh, not really a Paul guy, I'm more of a Jesus person.

Uh I don't really love uh Apollos, Peter, it's great.

It's kind of akin to somebody saying, Um, not really, don't don't really like Mark.

Love Duncan.

Not that anybody would ever say that, uh, but that's that kind of factionalism rising up.

And we see that people, you when you take away the the identity of image bearer from people, you know, nature abores a but a vacuum, and so they will, human beings will always take a label to themselves because they need to make sense of their place in the world.

And what we're seeing in the world at the minute is uh people taking to themselves a uh a tribal, a group label.

And in order for your group to feel uh secure and cohesive and uh and integral, one of the things that you do is you set yourself over and against another group.

Christianity doesn't work like this.

Christianity explodes the tribalism and factionalism of our world.

Because the son, who always enjoyed the father's love and delight, left that eternity and entered our world of fractured relationships, of broken homes, of racism and social division.

And in his life, he pointed us all to the need for reconciliation, yes, between communities on the horizontal, between groups and individuals, but that only ever as an outworking of the reconciliation that must be effected on the vertical humanity needs to be reconciled to their God, and that is what Jesus came to effect, to achieve.

His death and resurrection for us achieved that reconciliation.

How?

By dealing with this sin that alienated us from our God, that separated us.

And so that that barrier was removed.

What is it we read in uh in the gospel accounts of Jesus' death, perhaps particularly in Mark's account, uh, when we read of the uh the the curtain in the temple being torn in two, that's access to God granted, that that sin barrier broken down.

And so what's happening now?

What's happening post the cross and resurrection of Jesus?

Well, it's that Jesus is gathering to himself a new community, a new humanity, where the old tribal markers of class and race, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, young, old, they no longer define us.

They are no longer your chief identity marker.

Why?

Because the Bible's contention.

What the gospel says to you is that you are more than those things.

You are more than your sexuality.

You are more than your skin color.

You are more than your bank balance.

For some of you, that comes as a great relief.

You are more than the sum of your achievements.

You are first and foremost an image-bearer of the eternal God, and then one who by faith in Jesus was purchased, redeemed, renewed by Him.

And so the gospel transcends those groupings, it transcends those tribes because it says, come all.

It doesn't say come white, it doesn't say come rich, it doesn't say come straight.

It says come all.

It's in fact what Paul is alluding to uh just earlier on in the book of uh sorry, in the book of Romans, when he says that uh the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

Uh that is not Paul saying that all will become Christians, but it in fact is Paul saying that all types of people can become Christians.

All who believe.

As I have said before, the the grind before the gospel is wonderfully flat.

It doesn't just parenthetically, it's not that it makes those other identity markers irrelevant, but it does relativize them.

It does make them all of relative importance.

Your most important identity is not the subgroup that you identify with, it is that you are a believer in Jesus, renewed by him.

And so what he is gathering is a community made up of every subgroup, every language, every tribe and tongue and nation, to use the language of Revelation 7.

And so, why are we talking about community?

It's all my way of introduction.

Uh, why are we talking about the community?

Because the gospel creates community.

The gospel creates a community that is more robust, more life-giving than any other grouping that we could run to.

Why do we prize community at City Church?

Because the gospel creates community.

We didn't people talk about planting churches.

We didn't technically plant the church of City Church.

What we were planting was the gospel.

You plant the gospel, and what grows is a gospel community.

Because people find their hearts renewed by by Jesus, they come to know him in faith, and then somebody else, and well, shouldn't we get together and uh and look at what it means to follow Jesus, and then somebody else gets added to that, and somebody else gets added to that.

That's what the church is.

We just happened to start with ten people, but what all we were planting was the gospel.

City Church is a community created by the gospel, and so now, seven years into its uh life together, is seeking to be ever more shaped by the gospel, and that's the thing that we need to keep coming back to.

That's why we do sermon series like this basically every year, because we need to be constantly kind of diagnosing how are we doing?

How are we being shaped by the gospel?

How can we be shaped by the gospel all the more?

It's like a it's like an annual feedback loop.

It's a good thing in the same way as it's good to remind ourselves of what the gospel was, as we looked at last week.

It is similarly good to do an audit of our family life.

I think particularly off the back of COVID, because I don't know about you, I have no idea what city church looks like as I look out on the dozen or so people in the room before me.

I don't know what the health of city is.

Not really, it'll take about a year, I think, to kind of figure that out.

But that's also comes as an with an exciting opportunity because it allows us to, if we are kind of brought back to uh to base zero, to say, okay, well, here's where we are, here's what we value, here's what we're moving forward and pursuing together.

So, what does that gospel shape look like?

Well, Romans 12 uh gives us some pointers, it helps us to diagnose where we are strong and areas where we need to grow in.

I say that that's all by way of introduction.

I have one point today.

It has four subpoints, but I have one point today.

What is the overarching theme of uh of Romans 12?

Of the verses that that Cameron read.

They can it can feel a little bit kind of scattergunny, like Paul is going, oh, and and by the way, uh make sure you're forgiving one another, oh, and pray continually.

What is the the group overarching theme of these verses?

Well, it is, I think, quite simple.

It is that we love one another.

If uh I have catchphrases, and I know you tell me that I do, one of the things that I'm always banging on about is how that the essence of the gospel is other person-centered love.

But the reason why it is something that I repeat so often is because it is something that is true.

Look at it again here.

Let love be genuine, verse 9.

Verse 10, he twice uh repeats the phrase one another.

Love one another.

With what?

With brotherly affection, with a real depth of relationship that we'll look at.

Outdo one another.

In showing honor, there's there's this orientation throughout the passage away from self and towards others, and you see that all the way through the New Testament.

Why?

Because our sin problem is that you become turned in on yourself, you become like a snail, you become just coiled round, navel gazing.

And so, and so the consequence of the gospel, the imperatives of the New Testament are always driving you to unwind yourself and look out at others and at God.

So I could have gone this Sunday to somewhere like.

Philippians 2, where Paul says that we should count the needs of others more precious than our own.

We should consider them.

We should have this mind amongst us which is ours in Christ Jesus.

That we become the servant of others.

There's this constant orientation out of ourselves.

You could do a study this week through the one-anothers of the New Testament letters, bearing with one another, forgiving one another.

There is this persistent emphasis on the other person-centered nature of our life together.

And where that really works and where that is so good is when you realize that that's not just about it's not just about me pouring out unceasingly to others and I get nothing in return.

It's when there is this dynamic reciprocity going on.

That as you give, you also receive and are blessed.

Those of us who are married, the best marriages work when you are both living in that reciprocal way.

Marriages get very tense when one person is making is making all of the overtures, is doing all of the service, and the other person is just receiving.

But joy comes when there is a reciprocity in the relationship.

And that's what that's a little microcosm of what the church is supposed to be like.

Not the other way around.

The church is supposed to be the place of that dynamic, other person-centered love.

The church is also how God has chosen to put his love on display to the world.

And so the church is to be regarded by us all as something that is precious.

It is not a mature Christian thing to say, I love Jesus, but I don't love the church.

That is to say, I love Jesus, but I don't have much time for the thing Jesus died for.

First of all, right there in verse 9, it expresses itself in a hatred of evil.

There's two sides to the loving one another coin.

You see that let love be genuine, abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good.

Why are we, as a Christian community in our life together, to abhor and shun and to turn from evil and sin?

Well, you think right back to what we talked about just about five or ten minutes ago.

It's because evil, sin, disintegrates.

Paul's saying don't bring that cancerous disintegrating element back into the into the body.

It harms one another.

There is also an implication here in that there's no such thing as a private sin.

You think, well, this isn't doing anybody any harm.

This isn't hurting anybody.

That is a misunderstanding of what sin does.

Your sins are not private.

They affect the body.

They affect the body.

Well, in what ways do they affect the body?

If you are in private sin and shame, it makes you less inclined to be here in this room because you feel ashamed to be here.

You implicitly feel the feel the conviction of the spirit, and that can be interpreted by you as you're being judged even though nothing might be said.

It affects the body because it uh makes you disinclined both to pray and to serve your brothers and sisters.

Because you don't feel like you can draw close to God, and you don't feel like you can draw close to others.

There's no such thing as a private sin.

So loving one another means cultivating and pursuing personal holiness and devotion to Jesus.

One of the quotes that encourages me, but also haunts me slightly, not slightly, haunts me a lot and comes to mind frequently as your pastor, is the is the quote that I think is from, I didn't write it down, so it's just out of my I think it's from uh the the Scottish pastor Robert Murray McShane, uh, where he says that a congregation will never surpass the pastor in holiness.

But that if anything is tempted to keep me up at night, it's that.

There's no such thing as a private sin.

Loving one another, secondly, means that there should be cultivated among us a depth of affection.

Loving one another means deep relationships, ever deeper relationships.

You look at uh so that second uh clause there in verse 10, with brotherly affection.

That points to depth of relationship, or you look down at verse 15 where Paul says to the to the gathered brothers and sisters, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

How do we expect to rejoice in the successes of one another and be invited to weep in the times of grief and suffering with one another if we do not know one another well?

Verse 15 implies a depth of affection, a depth of relationship, a foundation that has been built so that in the in the ups and downs of life we are there with one another.

We are by and large, I think an above average welcoming community.

We like people by and large.

We often are friendly to people when they come in through the door, by and large.

But there is also an area of growth here for us.

And that I think is that we find depth of relationship hard to achieve.

Maybe that's because we don't know where to start.

Maybe that's because you've been here for some time and you've been through the uh the cycles of uh becoming friends with somebody and then having to watch them leave, and you struggle to find the emotional energy to uh to do that again.

Or maybe you just feel like you don't have the time.

But pursuing depth as well as breadth is necessary for our church family to flourish.

It is necessary for you, it will sweeten your involvement, your participation in our life together.

How are these relationships initiated?

Maybe you think, I don't even know where to start.

How do I do this?

Well, a good first place to start would be to come on a Sunday.

I guess I could say that to people who are watching.

If you can come, it's time to come back to church.

But for us all to come to those places either on a Sunday or in community group, expecting, expecting to meet somebody new, expecting to have a conversation with somebody new, praying for that opportunity, praying for courage.

And maybe for some people, just to get you know really kind of nitty-gritty practical, maybe that requires for some of you to actually think about the kind of conversation that you're going to have.

You think I'm gonna be paralyzed, I'm not gonna say like hello is a real dead end to a conversation, isn't it?

Hello.

People struggle with what to say after that.

So maybe think about it.

Maybe think, well, okay, what are the questions that I can ask?

Where have you come from?

How did you hear about City?

Have you got information about the community groups?

Have you uh do you know it's uh citychurchdublin.ie forward slash connect, you can go on on that, and I'm sure Duncan or or Mark or somebody would they'll get in touch with you.

Um we're actually gonna go for lunch.

Would you like to join us?

Some people say yes, some people say, Oh no, I can't do it this way.

Okay, great.

Well, maybe another time.

Great.

Or even if you feel like you're running out of steam, you know.

Um it was really good to meet you.

I just need to go to the toilet now.

Um, there you go, that's how you finish it off.

Or I'm just gonna get more coffee.

Seriously, it's worth thinking through.

What are you studying?

Why are you studying it?

Oh, have you met this person from that college?

Or this person, they live near you, and this is great.

Bring them and introduce them, and then you can leave.

So if you're if you're introverted and you've maxed out your your conversational window, and if you can think of nobody else who has commonality with them, bring them to me.

Or bring them to Duncan.

Say, have you met, have you met or Ben?

You can bring them to Ben if you wanted, then like that would be okay.

Um, but mostly bring them to me or Duncan, I think.

Um you met one of the leaders?

Let me introduce you.

This is such and such a person.

Great, we'll help you with the conversation from that point.

What about depth though?

There are two things that are necessary for relational depth.

Yeah, they are two things.

One, time.

Two, consistency.

That's it.

Time and consistency.

Time and consistency.

Some people you will instantly click with.

Others it will take time and consistency.

And so you think, well, where will those opportunities come from?

Well, they come ultimately from your heart, because they come from the conviction uh that this person is either an image bearer of God, if they're uh not a believer, or that this is a Christian brother or sister that is worthy of my time and investment.

And so things like community groups are essential.

That's why we make it.

It's a non-negotiable.

When we when we institute uh membership in the coming weeks and roll out our constitution, membership will our attendance, regular attendance at community groups is a marker of being a member of City Church.

It's not an occasional add-on, it is essential to our life together.

It is why we have asked Nicole Thompson to uh be the uh the point person, as it were, for female discipleship at City Church.

That is that if somebody wants to get more connected uh to women's ministry, either serving other sisters in the church, or they themselves uh need pastoral care and uh and for whatever reason would feel more comfortable talking to a female than coming to me or to Duncan or to Ben or to Peter.

Nicole is that person.

Other one-to-one discipleship relationships, but all of those things are good in and of themselves, they are just their structure, their trellis on which the vine needs to grow, and so outside of community grip, those other times, those meal times, those times when you're doing a project and you could do with some help.

Now to those who would think, well, I don't have the time.

And I get it.

Like I would I would often like more hours in the day.

So how do we perceive time?

Well, there is perhaps a corrective in saying you will always give your time to what you value.

You will always give time to what you value.

And that if you if our community life is not something that you value, you are missing out.

You are missing out on the deep encouragement that there is, of the nurturing that there is for your own soul, the refreshing that there is for your own emotions to laugh and to cry and to hear the experiences and insights of another.

Of course, people have different capacities.

People have different capacities, different energy for relationship.

People find themselves at different stages of life.

Some of you are watching this because you have small children and it's hard to actually be with other people.

But at that point, it's worth thinking, well, how can my community life be integrated with the other things that I'm doing?

If I need to have a meal, I don't know, some of you eat from time to time, I'm sure.

Is there anybody that I can share this meal with?

I have a mountain of laundry.

Could anybody come and help fold it with me?

I don't know.

This is the thing.

All of this stuff, our community life together, it's not about adding more things on.

It's about doing the same things that you're doing, but with other people.

And so what I would encourage you to think, to ask yourself is what can I integrate other people into?

What can I invite others to participate with me in?

Am I going for a cycle?

Is there anybody in City Church who'd like to go for a cycle?

Or run if you like running?

Anybody want to play snooker?

I'd like to go and play some snooker.

That sort of thing.

Pengamasi is saying, can you come and help me build this?

That sort of thing.

And so I can't go through the whole litany and list of all of the things in your life.

It's up for you to think through, well, what things can I integrate?

If I eat 21 meals in the week, assuming you have three meals in a day, can I share three of them with someone else?

Is that possible?

Three out of 21.

We should be able to do that.

Other activities that we can integrate.

Third, loving one another means, first of all, abhorring evil, pursuing a depth of relationship, and it means service, service of God and others.

Verse 11.

Uh, do not be slothful in zeal, but fervent, excuse me.

It's a good job, this is a screen, isn't it?

Um be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.

Or uh verse 13, contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

See, there's service in both of these axes: service of God and service of others.

We uh I think proportionally, in terms of something to celebrate amongst us, I think proportionally in our church life, uh, we have a really good percentage of people who serve in some capacity or other.

You know, there's this uh kind of unspoken rule that 20% of the people do 80% of the the work at church.

I think we're we're probably, at least certainly last year, like when we had our celebratory meal for everybody in uh in service, we're probably at around about 40 or 50 percent of that.

And but there is always needs, always places where people can serve the needs of the saints, but there are also some uh corrections here, some things for us to learn and to grow in.

Let me talk to you just briefly about hospitality and what hospitality was in the ancient world, because we're told there in verse 13, seek to show hospitality.

What's ancient world hospitality?

Well, I apologize to Doreen in advance, but it's not the tea and coffee and after charge.

As essential uh to my functioning as that is.

Hospitality in the ancient world was uh a it was basically a travel system.

The idea of hospitality in the ancient world was that you as a Christian uh could open your home to other Christians, and that it was expected that if you went overseas that there would be somebody in that town who was a Christian who would open their home to you.

It was a way so that you didn't have to stay in an inn, or worse, sleep at the city gates.

It was a way of welcoming people in that you didn't know, but who, in a gospel sense, you knew deeply because they shared the same faith as you.

They were brother and sister who you had not met yet.

That's what hospitality was.

It was welcoming in people who you didn't know and people who, I'm sure, on the surface, were not an awful lot like you.

They were from a different town, perhaps even a different country.

They spoke differently, they had a different cultural background, different ethnicity.

They weren't like you.

We, I do fervently believe, are a welcoming church, but we do struggle to welcome those who aren't like us.

Because who are we?

Third level educated white people.

That's what we tend to be.

Paul in verse 16 also says, live in harmony with one another.

Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.

We need to seek ways that we can draw close to those people who are not like us.

You know the thing about hospitality?

This might be an encouragement or or not, as the case may be.

The thing about hospitality is that it's both a gift and a command in the New Testament.

It's the only gift that is also commanded in the New Testament.

And so what that means is that some people will be naturally disposed to, or supernaturally disposed, to want to do it.

Supernaturally gifted to do it.

You like having people in your home.

And then there are those who won't be.

It is both a gift and a command.

Why do we associate with people who are not like us?

Well, again, it comes from our heart convictions that they are people loved by God, made in his image, and who Jesus died for.

They are our brothers and sisters.

We just haven't got to know them yet.

And who knows?

Who knows who God might bring across your path by your willingness to welcome those who you don't know and who aren't like you.

I think also, uh, and this links in with the depth of relationship, a thing to celebrate with us at City Church is that I I think that we're pretty good at service projects.

I think we're pretty good at mobilizing and helping people.

Somebody has a baby, right?

Weeks of meals.

Get added to the WhatsApp group.

Who's doing this?

You're doing this, doing heads all that.

Got a project?

Good.

Need to move house?

We'll help you with that.

You know, Cameron needs to flee back to Canada at the at the uh at the start of coronavirus.

Okay, I'll, you know, it's like the it was like the last chopper out of Danang, you know, getting him to the getting into the airport, right?

We're good at that.

There's a need, and we'll meet it.

That's a good start.

And we need to rightly celebrate that.

That's a wonderful entry point.

But it is just that, it is an entry point to deeper community.

Because here's the thing: the people who need our service projects, they don't want to be a project forever.

So we need to be c we need to just caution ourselves that we don't just meet the immediate need and then move on from the person to another immediate need.

No, those are entry points to getting to know a person, to integrating them into the whole of the body.

And like, again, like in the same way that your holiness won't go beyond mine, as Robert Murray McShane says, I'm I'm a very project to-do list oriented person.

Don't always, you know, I'm not a complete or finisher.

Don't always finish the things on the to-do list.

Uh, my wife is laughing at home right now as she's watching this.

But my temptation can be, okay, all right, is this person being seen too?

Great, next.

This person being seen too, great, next.

And maybe that's kind of my quarterback sort of role.

Um, but I think the one area that I could lead better in is in that integration of how it is that people can be pulled closer to the body, not just that their immediate needs of food in the midst of uh sleeplessness in those early weeks of parenthood are mad.

Fourth.

Loving one another takes prayer.

Rejoice in hope, Paul says in verse 12.

Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul similarly encourages the saints to pray for one another, to lift holy hands for those in authority.

Our community life is strengthened and deepened by our prayerfulness for one another.

It's one of the things that I actually miss about the early days of lockdown, is how much we prayed together and for one another.

Some of the sweetest times in our community grip, though they were conducted over Zoom in these last months, where when we heard from those who were in grief or those who were just deeply struggling with circumstances in their family.

And we prayed for them.

Prayer is a sharing of the heart.

It deepens our community.

One of the things that I would love to think through with you all is how do we carry that forward?

I would like that prayerfulness to to be part of our new normal, to use that kind of you know, weary and hackneyed phrase.

I think we need that.

I think I saw us flourish in that when we would come on on a Monday evening or a Wednesday afternoon or a Friday lunchtime and pray for one another.

Other ways that you can think that we could do that again?

Should we have that again as a little set piece for people who could log in?

Maybe it is that you can find a couple of other people at City Church.

Do you know that WhatsApp allows you to carry calls, video calls with four other people?

And so maybe actually you could find three other people.

You could say, we don't even need to meet in person, maybe we can't do that because of the restrictions.

Maybe Dublin's gonna get locked down.

It's gonna be like escape from LA or something in in another couple of weeks.

But but maybe we could all go on a WhatsApp call just for 15 minutes.

We could send prayer requests, a point for praise, and a and a and a point for prayer to one another beforehand in our little group of three or four people, and we could jump on a call for 15 minutes.

Duncan, you would need longer.

Um and pray, just pray and encourage one another.

Could you maybe that's something that you can think through?

I haven't written it down, I'm just thinking off the top of my head.

How can you deepen your affections for one another?

The other reason why prayer helps is because of the reality of sin in our Christian community.

Yeah, I said it you know at the start there's no such thing as a private sin, and sin affects our community.

Well, you know, uh, I'm not a holiness preacher.

I'm not gonna advocate that you're you're somehow this side of heaven going to be perfectly sinless.

Uh that's not something that I can achieve, and so you're never gonna get there if Robert Mary McShane is correct.

And so, what do we need to do?

We need to pray for one another.

Because it helps us to do verse 18, it helps us to live peaceably with all.

If somebody is irritating you in your church family, in this church family, if you struggle to click with somebody, it's very hard to hate them if you're praying for them.

It's very hard to resent them if you are thanking God for them and praying his blessing upon them.

Living at peace with one another as far as it depends on us.

Cuts right across our culture, doesn't it?

It cuts right across our culture of entitlements and defensiveness.

It means that when we pray, one of the things that we should ask God for is for a heart of generosity and a heart of charity that reads people in the most generous and charitable way rather than in the most defensive way.

It's so easy, isn't it, when somebody says something, especially if somebody says something over a medium that is not voice, in your Facebook message or WhatsApp, text, to read it and go, I can't believe that they said it like that, because you can't pick up tone.

You think, well, am I reading this in the most charitable and generous way possible?

Why am I defaulting uh to the most negative interpretation of what is being said?

I know that's in my heart.

Praying for one another helps us to smooth over those grievances, to keep short accounts with one another, and to live at peace with one another.

And so I'll conclude, say one point, but you know, finished earlier last week.

Conclude with some questions.

As we start this year, where can you invest time and consistency with other people in your church family?

If you are a family that is married or married with kids, whatever, are there others that you can open your home to?

Are there students or singles that you can welcome in and have a meal with once a week, every week?

Pick a small group of people and say you're gonna have Wednesday night, you're around at our house, or every other Wednesday night, whatever, something that fit is integratable with your schedule.

If you're a dating couple, can I encourage you to find ways to conduct your relationship in the context of your brothers and sisters here?

Because that is good for you.

That is good because it allows you to serve others together as a pattern for your life together.

It also allows others to see patterns of health or not in your relationship so that they can speak words of admonition or encouragement, that they can speak wisely into your life.

How are you going to draw close to people who are not like you in church?

Who are you going to pray for this year?

Who are you going to pray with this year?

When we live like this, our community beautifies the gospel.

When we live like this, we become all the more the bride that Jesus died for.

And we catch a glimpse of the fulfillment of the longings for deep community that God has placed in our hearts.