Ephesians: Implications of the Gospel for Reopening Society

Well, happy Sunday from my family room.

If you didn't pick up during the greeting, we are in my family room in my house.

And the reason why we're in here is because this morning and the next couple Sundays are almost like family chats, like church family chats.

This week I'll speak from Galatians 5.

Next Sunday, Pastor Scotty Smith will speak from Galatians 5 again to us as a church family.

Now, this room behind me, this is our family room.

This is where it all happens.

I mean, this is the rug that my children sit on and they watch movies and they spill food all over the place.

This is the rug they practice all their cartwheels and their back bins.

I lay on the couch behind me.

I watch too much television.

I love television.

While I watch television, Christy sits in the chair just over that way, and she falls asleep while I watch TV.

And this is our family room.

This is where we are a family.

And so I wanted us to be in this room this morning as we talk about what does it mean for us to be a united, loving family of faith in this season, where this season has us in a place where society's reopening and there's different filters and views and behaviors that all of us are practicing?

What are the implications?

Here are the questions.

What are the implications of the gospel as our society reopens and we all make different decisions?

What does faith expressing itself in love look like today?

So Galatians 5, verse 6 and verses 13 and 14.

Galatians 5:6

For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

Verse 13.

For you were called to freedom, brothers.

And we say, brothers and sisters, you were called to freedom.

Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

For the whole law is fulfilled in one word.

So if you want to know what you're supposed to do as a Christian, the whole law is right here.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

This is always an amazing passage.

You probably heard it before.

It's an amazing book.

This letter of Galatians, Paul writes to this church is struggling with this difficult thing because a group of them had received the gospel, this one-way love from God to us in Jesus, where in the work of Jesus all of our sin is forgiven.

We are given his righteousness.

That is the work of the cross, and our status is secure with him.

And then this group within that church, this group says, you know, let's add performance back into that equation.

We really do need to perform and fulfill certain laws in order to be right with God.

And so there's this division, and Paul is writing this letter to these people to ground them in the freedom they have in the gospel.

And by the end, by chapter five, Paul's saying, hey, what are the implications of that freedom?

And so I want to share with you what I think are four implications for us, Redeemer Marietta, of our freedom in the gospel to be a united, loving family of faith in this season.

Number one is this to start out by just saying, we're a family of faith.

That's what we are as the church.

We are a family of faith.

There's times in the room behind me where I sit in the chair right here, our land the couches in my two spots, and I hold the remote control, and I am king of the room, and I'm basically deciding between what nerdy fishing show to watch.

Now, those are times where I'm in the room by myself.

You guessed it, right?

Because if anybody else is in the room, if Christy's in the room with me, or the girls are in the room, that is not what's going on.

They will not put up with that.

So my individual and personal desire has to yield to the communal or the family desire.

And this is what we see happen over and over again, right?

And this is what's going on right now for us is there is a shift from individual consideration to family or communal consideration.

Many of us in the last two months, we've we've been living so isolated that we've had to give little thought to communal behavior.

Really, I mean, outside of maybe like we go to Kroger and we don't know most of these people, but when we're starting to come into actual community and family of faith, this is a different level of consideration of the other.

We're not the lone wolf anymore.

Our family isn't the isolated island.

We exist, I know it doesn't feel like it, it hadn't felt like it for a couple months.

We exist as a family of faith, as a community.

And that means that we exercise our freedom for the good.

We exercise our freedom for unity, we exercise our freedom to love the other.

So that's the first, just starting out, we're a family of faith.

Number two, we get to view interruptions as invitations.

That's what this room's all about, viewing interruptions as invitations.

I mean, forget taking a nap on that couch.

As soon as you fall asleep, I mean, there is a daughter busting through that front door, performing a cartwheel, thinking you wanted to see it while you're taking a nap, or the UPS man knocking on the door, letting me know there's a package there, right?

I mean, the dog starts to bark.

It's interruption after interruption, right?

It can drive you crazy, but every interruption does invite you into something.

The UPS man saying, hey, there's a package out here.

I'm inviting you into the to come get this package.

My daughter's inviting me into whatever playfulness she has.

My dog is inviting me with that bark to say, what's outside?

Maybe you need to take a look.

Every interruption is an invitation.

These Galatians did not plan on having a segment of their people forming this new belief or reverting back to this old belief of their need of law and performance.

But they had to deal with it.

And it became an invitation in a way because out of that they received this letter, this amazing letter that has grounded Christian faith for so long about the lavish love of God, the freedom we have in Jesus, and what that freedom causes inside of our hearts to have a free heart that can love another person without needing that other person to justify us.

Interruptions are invitations.

I know your spring got interrupted.

You had plans and they didn't happen.

But I wonder what you were invited into.

And I I know your summer, some stuff has been interrupted, hasn't it?

You had certain plans, and maybe even your fall has been interrupted.

I I certainly didn't plan on preaching in my family room, and I didn't plan on walking the rows of our empty sanctuary during worship over and over again.

But interruptions are invitations into something.

And I wonder what it has been for you.

I I wonder what it's gonna be for our church.

My thought is it's gonna be a deeper and greater appreciation of community and gathering and worship than we've ever had before.

Point number three is this we receive the lavish love of God and lavishly we give the love of God.

We receive love and we give love.

So the room behind me, this is where we do our family meetings.

I feel like we have a family meeting probably every three months.

We're not big family meeting people, it's more like once we hit a point of crisis and breakdown, we'll have a family meeting.

Every family meeting is almost identical.

And it's us sitting down as a family, and basically I lay out two rules because what we have found over and over again, if there's two rules and these things are heard and followed through, everything works.

And the first rule is you have to listen to mom and dad and follow through.

That's number one.

So much works well when that happens, of course.

I believe that I'm the dad.

Number two is treat each other with kindness.

And it is amazing when we do those two things, how great our family works, and if any of those break down, how quickly our family breaks down.

And I think there can be a breakdown.

A lot of churches are going to experience a breakdown.

I don't want that to be us.

We don't have to be that.

But we have to know sort of what some dangers are, what some possibilities are.

And I think number one is it'd be easy for us to forget the family.

It'd be easy for us not to be steadfast, to isolate even more, to choose entertainment over community.

And in that, in that ease, because that could be so easy, to be entertained more, to escape more, to isolate more rather than to find increasing ways to find community, even while it's more difficult than ever.

There's gonna be a lot of loneliness.

There's already loneliness.

That's the unspoken epidemic inside of this pandemic is loneliness.

And as people step outside of the family and outside of community of faith, so where they are known and they're being known, more loneliness will occur.

It doesn't have to be us.

Even this summer, we're working on a summer group study that you're gonna hear about through email in the coming weeks, and that's something that could be for you.

To step into that, to be known and to know people.

Number two is this.

What would be so easy for us?

A danger.

Number two is this is to act like a bratty sibling, to act like that bratty sister or that bratty brother.

Maybe you grew up with that one, or maybe you were that one, I'm not quite sure.

But we do that out of self-justifying our behavior, don't we?

We act bratty or judgmental because if they are wrong, it makes us feel even more right.

But we have to remember Galatians 5.

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters.

Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Listen, we're gonna have different views on face mask and when and where and how, what they do, and whatever.

We have different views on play dates.

Gonna have all sorts of different beliefs on some of these things, but they cannot create dissension amongst us who are one in Jesus.

I once saw an Alabama fan inside our church hug an Auburn fan.

That's how united we are in Jesus.

That happened.

We have existed for seven years as Georgia fans and Auburn fans and Alabama fans.

I've even seen an LSU fan in our church, and we are a community of love and faith.

Because of Jesus.

I think, I think we can handle face masks.

And here's what we're gonna do, and I stole this from another pastor, but it's so good, I'll steal it.

Three things.

We're gonna do three things.

We are going to trust in God's sovereignty, we are going to act wisely, and we are gonna love each other.

And that is how we will make it through this reopening as long as it takes.

As much as we plan for it and the plan doesn't work, and we scale back or we scale up, whatever that looks like, that's how we're gonna make it through.

We're going to trust in God's sovereignty over our church.

We are going to act wisely, and we're gonna love each other.

Last point you can trust God is faithful with you and for you.

You can trust God is faithful, he's with you and he's for you.

For the first two months of the pandemic, I felt a pretty low amount of anxiety.

I don't know how much you felt.

I know a lot of you felt a lot of anxiety because of economic reasons or job reasons.

Praise God, thank you for your continued giving that our church has done pretty well so far.

That's an amazing thing of your generosity.

So I felt sort of in control in some way.

I mean, I could stay home, I could avoid people, I could wash my hands a lot, I wiped down a lot, I did that.

And in the past two weeks, I've noticed just an increase of anxiety and this reopening.

Right?

I'm working on this plan, and the elders are gonna review it, and we're gonna vote on it, this phasing plan of phase one and two and three and four, of what it means for us as a church to reopen.

And as I look at this plan and all these different, you know, like criteria and different parts of our church that can do what, when, and how they'll open and when.

I mean, all that kind of stuff.

I'm just realizing that you know this anxiety is building up because I don't know how you will react to this plan.

I don't know if I'll even like this plan.

I don't know if this plan will work.

I don't know if this plan is gonna have to be super flexible or we can hold to it.

I don't know how the COVID cases in our county are gonna go next week or the next week or next month or in the fall.

I don't know who in our city is gonna get sick.

I don't even know if you've been laughing at my bad preacher jokes.

I don't know that.

I can only suppose you're fast forwarding through parts of the sermon because I'm fast forwarding.

I mean, could you imagine, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, the gift of fast forwarding through church?

Oh, you imagine that as a child?

What a gift.

Maybe the biggest gift of Corona.

You fast forward through church.

So I said we're gonna do three things as a family, and the first one is I said we're gonna trust God.

It feels so hard.

Trust is brutal.

Trust is brutal because it means we release control.

It means we release control of having to know everything to move forward.

Moving into the summer and to the next school year, and your job and your family, and all the many decisions you will have.

There's gonna be the question: will I trust the Lord with this also?

Or will I only trust the Lord with the things I already have under control?

I was reminded of Proverbs 3, 5, and 6.

This is one of the first verses I memorized in high school.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding in all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

What a calling and what a promise.

I love that verse, and I know even as I read it, I will not trust him perfectly.

The calling is still good.

And I'm so thankful for Jesus and this good news that God is faithful to me even when I don't trust perfectly.

He's always been with us as a church.

From the very beginning, when we started in a dentist office, and 20 or so of you were with us.

And when we moved into the Walker Preschool, remember there were primary colors everywhere.

It was a distraction everywhere, and then we bought our building, we didn't have enough money to renovate the building.

Then we get in the building, we're starting to have cash flow issues, and an anonymous gift pays off our mortgage.

God has been with us always, and he will be faithful to us as a church, but also to you.

He's with you now, and he's with you in all your moments of great trust, and he is with you in all of your weak ones as well.

This is what makes him trustworthy.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that you are faithful to us, and this is why you are worthy of our trust.

Thank you that our relationship with you is not based on the level of our faith, the strength of our faith, the level of our trust, the strength of our trust, but is based on your faithfulness to us, and in that we place our trust.

And in the great work of Jesus, we find our freedom.

Help us to know in the coming weeks what it means for us to exercise our freedom in Jesus to love each other, to freely love.

Thank you for the great work of Jesus for us.

May our lives be shaped by Him.

Holy Spirit, would you do your work in us personally and as families, relationships, and as a church?

Holy Spirit, would you create new life?

Would we hear the invitation into something new where we have seen and heard only interruptions?

Thank you that you will do this work.

You are a resurrecting God.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.