Worship + Communion Sunday

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

If you're new here today, my name's Dave, one of the pastors.

And uh thanks so much for the way in which you just honor this family time each time we do this each Sunday.

We feel like it's a very important practice for us to do.

And uh I've mentioned this before, but for centuries, ever since the church has been meeting, there's this kind of practice that we try to lean into.

Paul established it and he said these words when it comes to every time we gather, he says, greet each other with a holy kiss.

Now, there's been some cultural changes.

Uh thank, thank God.

All right.

Uh, but we seek to just honor the principle behind this command, which is really just to recognize the brotherhood and sisterhood that we have with each other, all uh woven together through the power of Christ.

And what we find within scripture is that there's many uh rhythms that God establishes for us.

And that's to ensure that we just remain connected to one another and that we remain connected to him as well.

And we have this kind of rhythm right here where we've been a church decentralized on mission throughout the bay, but he asks us on a weekly basis to gather like this, to assemble, to sit under the teaching of his word for transformation and to give him our collective worship.

And he also has us uh really lean into and practice rhythms of remembering, which we're gonna reflect and celebrate here today when it comes to the communion table.

Uh, but what we find throughout scripture is that when we lose our edge with these rhythms of remembering, uh, the actually the consequences can be uh pretty devastating.

One of the most uh uh dramatic illustrations of this is in Judges chapter 2, verse 10, it reads this after a whole generation and begathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who neither knew the Lord nor what he had done for his people.

Judges 2:10

So we can be a pretty forgetful people.

And when we lose our edge, when we lose our rhythms of these core tenets, uh the results can be, again, fairly uh uh devastating for us as as followers.

So therefore, we're gonna enter into this crucial rhythm of communion that Jesus established.

And we actually see Paul in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians, he actually describes it and then re-prescribes it again in 1 Corinthians 11.

And I want you to hear these words because we're gonna spend some time here doing something a little bit different, absorbing the gospel in a new way, but we're actually gonna approach the communion table here, and I want these words to be simmering in the back of your mind.

So just listen and receive the words of Paul here as he describes uh this rhythm of remembering that Jesus established for us.

He says this, For I receive from the Lord what I pass on to you.

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he'd given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is a new covenant in my blood.

Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me.

For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

And so, following a time that we're gonna have of some really deep reflection on scripture that's gonna focus us on this new life that's given to us through Jesus' death and resurrection, we're gonna partake in communion as a church family.

Now, listen, we know some of you may be here just visiting, you're trying to figure out the whole Christian thing and the Jesus thing.

Just observe.

No pressure at all, okay?

We don't want to feel any pressure.

Just lean into the mystery of what's happening, and there's some symbol symbolism here, and there's some uh metaphor, and I'd encourage you just to lean in and observe because it can be a very powerful act.

But as we approach the table, guys, we're gonna take, again, what I mentioned, some concentrated time to reflect on the power of the gospel, this loving and sacrificial act of our God to rescue you and I.

And we're gonna do that in a way that actually allows us to saturate on the gospel-rich words from the book of Ephesians.

It's this letter that's theologically profound written by the Apostle Paul.

And before we enter into this, I would say, saturation of scripture, I want us to back up and just get a better understanding of Ephesians, just so we have a little understanding of what we're about to hear.

Now, it was the Apostle Paul following his conversion of being this uh, he was uh essentially a Middle Eastern terrorist that turned into a serial church planner.

And uh uh he was an entrepreneur.

And one of the cities that he was drawn to for several years was Ephesus, which was this large advanced city that was also the epicenter of all these Greek and Roman gods.

And so prior to establishing himself for several years in Ephesus, Paul typically did a thing where he would kind of do a drive-by, drop off a few people, allow them to kind of get the groundwork going, and then come by.

And so he did that again when it comes to the city of Ephesus.

Does a drive-by, drops off this dynamic duo named Priscilla and Aquila.

It's this married couple, and they operated in a way that was actually fairly counter-cultural, but very biblically gospel-rooted.

I'm gonna say gospel-rooted, when it came to Priscilla, the female of this dynamic duo, actually being the main leader and the main overseer and authority of this process to the point of even giving instruction and correction to one of the main teachers of her day and his day, Apollos.

And so Paul then eventually makes his way to Ephesus, he establishes himself, and more and more people are converted to Christianity by the thousands.

And soon we have these little pockets and clusters of churches all over Ephesus, and soon this begins to infringe upon the false gods business of this city, and Paul is run out of town, which is very on brand for him.

This was a typical thing for him.

Paul only had really one other short moment to go back to Ephesus to speak to the Ephesian leaders, and it was just for a short moment.

Then several years later, Paul is imprisoned in Rome for his faith.

He's waiting to be terminated, and he sends out several letters of instruction to the churches in which he's helped plant.

One of those letters going to the Ephesians, this again, group of churches in Ephesus.

And it's there that we're going to uh lean into really just the first half of this book, because the first half he is simply talking about the power of the gospel.

The second half, it's like, okay, if this is the gospel, then how do you live it out within the unique context that you're in?

And what we find here is the purpose of Ephesians and the purpose of Paul's letter to this group of followers of Christ is really to get them back to the centrality and the foundations of the gospel.

Because what was happening is we had these uncircumcised people that they were known as, these non-Jewish people, they were called Gentiles that were converting to Christianity.

And essentially what was happening is they were experiencing all of a sudden this legalistic pressure from these Jewish Christians saying, yes, okay, you're partially in the family of God, but to truly be a part of the family of God, you need to take on these other Jewish Old Testament practices as well.

And then you're in.

And so what this was doing, it was cheapening the work of Jesus on the cross, in which he established a very new, all-inclusive covenant with anyone who believes in Jesus as their leader and rescuer is adopted into God's eternal family.

And so Paul begins the first half of this letter again, talking about the beauty of the gospel, and then second, he talks about, okay, how do you go and apply it?

And we're gonna immerse ourselves in the first part of Ephesians and just look at the power and the mystery of the gospel as we center then on the communion table.

And I think this is gonna do a beautiful job of just like right, like refocusing our minds on what we're about to do and the hugeness and the power and the mystery and the incredible grace of the gospel and his work on the cross.

Now, typically, when we approach the Bible, we read it, we interpret it, we apply it today, we're just gonna listen and we're just gonna absorb the sacred text of Paul within these first four chapters of Ephesians.

You see, Paul described in 2 Timothy that the Bible is God breathed.

That's why we say the Bible is God's word.

Because when Scripture speaks, God speaks, and he does so so through the personality and context of the author, and in this case, a Middle Eastern man named Paul.

And so, as Jesus treated the scriptures as divinely authoritative, we're gonna do the same.

Awakening, we're not hearing just the words of Paul, we're hearing the words of our living God right here, right now.

And so, to be the voice box of God's word, I'm gonna ask uh Say Khalili to join me up here if you don't mind.

So, can we welcome Sayah?

Oh, there you are.

Good.

Now, if you don't know Sayah, uh the interesting thing, a Middle Eastern man himself from Iran, and he is an elder at our church, which we call the Leadership Council.

He um, his wife, Shadi, oversees our prayer ministry.

You may know his daughter, Naseem, who was our discipleship pastor.

And uh thanks for being here.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Now, Say, you're gonna deliver us God's word in I think a very powerful and a profound way, in a stretching way.

Um, scripture memory has been something that's been a part of you for the last several years, but recently you've really catapulted your passion and desire around this.

Can you tell us just what was the thing that sort of uh kind of launched you at a whole different level when it comes to memorizing God's word?

Sure.

2023 was a very difficult year for our family.

Um I heard about my mom's sudden passing away back home in Iran, that's where I'm originally from.

It was unexpected, and then uh my dear wife Shadi was diagnosed with Parkinson's and uh was struggling with other related health issues pretty much throughout the year.

So it was a very difficult year.

I would say it's probably the hardest year of our life and I remember being shocked, being discouraged, being actually honestly angry at God for causing this or allowing this to happen.

And uh and then I finally the the season kind of ended, thank God.

I realized I need to pick up the pieces, and where do I start?

And uh the book of Ephesians was a book that I was reading at the time, and chapter six of the book of Ephesians, I felt God speaking to my heart through just a couple of words.

In chapter six, verse ten, it says, Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.

And I realized that I need to be strong at this stage in my life and be the voice of hope, the voice of encouragement to my wife, and so that we could pray through this season, pray the big prayers for healing from God, and seek, knock, and ask, and be there for her.

And uh and thank God, the strength that we all feel.

I mean, God doesn't just ask us to be strong like on our own, it's in him, and it's actually in his word that when we immerse ourselves in his word, which he says, by the way, it's the armor of God, that what happens is um with scripture memory, actually, there is a special kind of transformation that happens in you.

Paul says, put on the word of God.

So it kind of reminds me of like when we put on our clothes.

We all like on a cold day will put on clothes.

You know, we're we won't just go out without our clothes on.

And when you memorize scripture, it's like putting it on, and you carry it with you.

You carry it to places that you may not have access to the Bible.

In fact, the country I come from in Iran, people are persecuted for their faith.

So they purposely memorize scripture in case they got arrested and are thrown in prison without a Bible, and they thrive off of that.

And so 2023 and all its challenges actually increased my desire and thirst for God's work.

And I realized I don't want to just memorize like key verses, I want to memorize like passages, I want to eventually memorize like an epistle, and and that's where I am today.

That's awesome.

And you had you had mentioned this getting angry.

If you take one thing away, like godly people can get angry with God.

You even said last service, you you turned your back on God, but he never turned your his back on you.

That's right.

And I I think that's a key thing for us to remember is that we're on this journey together, and uh we have the peaks and the valleys, but God is there every step of the way.

The other thing I want you to capture is like when we do reading plans here, there's a purpose for it.

We have a lot of them, and we encourage you to engage in them because research continues to show what scripture points out is that the number one thing that catapults our spiritual maturity is simply Bible reading.

It doesn't even have to be Bible reading and journaling or Bible reading and memorizing.

Those are all good, but just the simple act of Bible reading, and it really emphasizes this truth in Hebrews 4.12 that says, For the word of God is living and active.

And guys, today we are going to experience the living activity of God's word as Siah gives us the words of Paul that are actually the words of God, and to allow that to direct our thoughts on the hugeness and vastness and the beauty of this gospel, of this loving act of Jesus and what he did for us on the cross.

And I feel like it's going to appropriately just move us to the table and allow that to shine its light on our oneness and on the sacrifice and on the hugeness of this act that we can never forget.

So as we prepare to receive God's word, I would love for us just to take a moment to pray.

So would you pray with me?

And so, God, we just um we just come to you now with a surrendered posture.

Just prepare our hearts, man.

Just give us the strength to be attentive.

Uh there ain't no commercial breaks, and we know our brains are wired that way.

But God, you say that your word will not return empty.

Therefore, we wait with great anticipation to see what you're going to do in these next 20 minutes.

God, we ask that you would renew our sense of gratitude and passion toward your gospel, and that when we come to those elements, the the the body broken and the blood spilled for us, may we do so with a fresh awareness of both sacrifice and unity displayed at that table.

Speak to us now, we ask.

Amen.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, to God's holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.

Grace and peace to you, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

In love, he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us.

With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when times reach their fulfillment, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.

In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we who were the first to put our hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory.

And you also were chosen in him when you heard the message of truth.

When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession.

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God's people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance and his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.

That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come.

And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live, when you followed the ways of this world, and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who's now at work in those who are disobedient.

All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts.

Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions.

It is by grace that you've been saved.

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

For it is by grace you've been saved through faith.

And this is not from yourself.

It's the gift of God and not by works, so that no one can boast.

Without hope and without God in the world.

His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace.

And in one body, to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.

In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.

And in him, you two are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.

For this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ, for the sake of you Gentiles.

Surely you've heard about the administration of God's grace given to me for you.

That is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I've already written briefly.

In reading this, then you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to people in other generations, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God's holy apostles and prophets.

This mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.

I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God's grace given me by the working of his power.

Although I am less than the least of all the Lord's people, this grace was given me to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God who created all things.

His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in heavenly realms according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In him and through faith in him, we may approach God with freedom and confidence.

I ask you then not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory.

For this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

And to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now, to him who's able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that's at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.

Amen.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you've received.

Be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love.

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all?

But to each one of us, this grace has been given as Christ's apportioned.

This is why it says, when he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.

What does he ascended mean?

Except that he also descended to the lower earthly regions.

He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe.

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, blown here and there by every wind of teaching, and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head.

That is Christ.

From him the whole body is joined and held together by every supporting ligament and grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work.

So I tell you this, and I insist on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking, they are darkened in their understanding and are separated from the life of Christ because of the ignorance that's in them due to the hardening of their hearts.

Having lost all sensitivity, they've given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.

And were taught in him in accordance with the truth that's in Jesus.

You were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires, to be made new in the attitude of your minds, and to put on the new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

Therefore, each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor.

For we are all members of one body.

In your anger, do not sin.

Do not let the sun go down while you're still angry.

And do not give the devil a foothold.

Anyone who's been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need.

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander along with every form of malice.

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Follow God's example, therefore, as dearly loved children, and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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