With Everything, With Everyone

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We exist to awaken this generation to a new life in Christ.

Thanks for tuning in to find out more at awakeningchurch.com.

Wow, Awakening.

I mean, last Sunday was incredible.

And I think last Sunday was so good for a couple of reasons.

One, God is faithful.

Our church is eight years old.

Amen.

And praise God.

Um, but secondly, it was just good to have a slice of normal church Sunday, albeit social distanced, masks, driving through, all of the precautions we took.

It still felt so good to have a Sunday that was a little bit like what we remember Sundays to be.

And that's that's a little bit what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about the change that we've undergone through this pandemic, but particularly how it's affected church and how it's affected our experience of what church is.

You know, the birthday was so great because Sundays have been a little odd and a little different.

We're experiencing Sundays all in isolated environments.

To come together was so, so great.

But you know what's so funny?

I've been thinking about as Sunday has been different.

Um, I've been thinking about what we believe the Lord is leading us in as a church.

You know, back in January before the pandemic, we shared some vision pieces of the church, and Ryan said, one of the things we believe God's calling us to be is not just a Sunday church, but an everyday church.

Well, now that Sunday has been, you know, changed up, it's maybe put more emphasis not on the one hour of Sunday, but the rest of our days in how we live our life for Jesus through the week.

That's what I want to talk to you about today.

I want to talk to you about the 167 hours that you have coming up.

The series is called 167 hours because that's how much time you have in this week after you log off this service-ish, right?

These services about an hour long.

Afterwards, you'll have 167 hours through your week and you'll do all the things you do.

You'll walk your dog, you'll hang with your roommates, you'll be with your kids, you'll zoom on some meetings, you'll scroll through your phone, you'll eat some dinner, you'll fall asleep, you'll wake up, you'll live the pandemic life for 167 hours.

Well, where does your faith come into play through those 167 hours?

If the one hour on Sunday is digital and different and strange and not always like the birthday we had last week, well, how is that gonna affect how you live your life through the week?

You know, community formation and church, it's actually really difficult right now.

I want to just start right there.

Forming community is difficult right now.

It's just really, really hard to do.

And church is all about forming a community that glorifies Jesus Christ and helps us grow in our faith and pushes us into those 167 hours that we have every week.

But it's hard to do right now.

And I think it's hard for several reasons.

The the first reason I think community formation, it has more obstacles than ever right now.

And you might be thinking that, Chris, my 167 hours, they're just complicated.

Like I don't know what's happening.

Every day I wake up and I try to just deal with it.

And it's complicated and it's difficult for me to form community, to do church, to even think about church, whether it's Sunday or not, because things are complicated.

Or what about the 167 hours just being really precious, right?

You might think community formation, it takes too much time, and my time is too precious.

It's too important.

Or community formation right now, it takes too much time.

So it's just like, you know what?

My 167 hours are booked.

They're just booked up.

I've you maybe your type A, your whole calendar is just filled.

Well, I want to talk today about what we should maybe prioritize because that has to be the question for a lot of us.

What do I need to prioritize through my week?

Like, how do I live the Christian life for these 167 hours after I log off of church and life gets booked up, complicated, the time is precious, we're cycling through all these difficulties.

How and what should I prioritize?

You know, Jesus was actually asked this question in one form or another.

You remember at some point, somebody came up to him and said, What's the greatest commandments?

Of all the teachings you give, what's the greatest commandment?

And if you're familiar with the New Testament, you'll know he said very simply this in Matthew 22, verse 37, he said, should love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your mind.

Matthew 22:37

Then two verses later, you're familiar maybe with this, he says, you know, the second is like this.

You should love your neighbor as yourself.

And so we've always understood the Christian life to be hanging on these two verses.

To love God and love neighbor is the Christian life.

In other words, the best way to spend your 167 hours is by loving God and loving neighbor.

That's the best way to spend your time.

But you know, when Jesus was saying these things, he wasn't actually saying anything new.

Jesus instead was quoting from the Old Testament, if you know this.

Jesus was not inventing a new command so much as hyperlinking us back to an old command in the Old Testament.

It's almost as if you double-click on this, you'll be sent to a larger landing page of commandments from the Old Testament.

And when Jesus said you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, the original audience of Matthew would be actually causing, uh, being caused to kind of read backwards towards the Old Testament.

Matthew's audience was uh Jewish primarily.

And so they would look back towards the Old Testament, hear, oh, love the Lord your God, and they'd be sent back, hyperlinked back to Deuteronomy chapter six, where is uh the command called the Shema.

And in Deuteronomy chapter six, the Shema, that's a Hebrew word that just means um listen or obey.

It was one and the same word.

That's almost the whole sermon that we could go down with with listen and obey being the same word.

So fascinating.

This prayer was called the Shema, and the Hebrew people they they would recite this in the morning and at night.

And so when Jesus replied this, being the greatest command, it shouldn't have been shocking too many Jewish people.

This was an obsession of theirs.

But you know, I think the context for this verse is actually super important for us today.

You see, Deuteronomy, as we're gonna look at in a second, if we're if we're sending our minds back to Deuteronomy, let's send our minds back to the context of Deuteronomy.

Maybe you don't know this book.

It's in the first five books of your Bible, and the word lit the word Deuteronomy literally means second law.

It's because this was the reiteration of the law.

It Deuteronomy is a book, it's a collection of sermons from Moses, and it's him impressing on the people the most important commandments from God and his promises.

It's a beautiful book, and there's a series of talks in the book of Deuteronomy where Moses is just reminding the people this is who you are, and this is who God has been to you and who he will always be to you.

It's a constant reminder.

Now, the timing of Deuteronomy is important.

The series of sermons that Moses is giving, impressing upon the people the identity of God and the identity of people, happens after Egypt, being freed from Egypt, and before they enter into the promised land.

It's what the scholar Carmen Imams, she says, it was a liminal space that God was working in the people.

Liminal means transitionary, it means a space of transition.

Liminal is like the time that you have already gone to past something, but you're not yet to completion.

Liminal is the road trip.

Liminal is the space between home and your destination.

And that liminal space, God does work in that liminal space.

And Deuteronomy, it's all about the important lessons that God is building into his people before they arrive at the Promised Land.

And I've been thinking, this is kind of where we're at today.

We are in a liminal space.

We're in a transition or transitionary space as a as churches, right?

Like we no longer gather together physically on Sundays and we don't know when we will again.

But you know, I get a little frustrated when I hear people just obsess over getting back together again.

Like it's the only thing that matters right now.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a pastor.

I don't prefer preaching to a camera.

I would love to get together with all of you.

And being at the birthday a couple weeks ago, being socially distanced and everything, it felt so good to be together.

But you know what I've been thinking about?

We can't miss the lessons of the liminal space we're in right now.

Could God be forming in his church something so important in this liminal space that if we miss it, we will not be the kind of church he wants us to be on the other side of this?

You see, God is doing something right now.

He's not waiting to do something right now.

We have a liminal space.

He is active within it.

So Deuteronomy picks us up in that space of tension.

If we have ears to hear, what are the most important things God has for us?

Deuteronomy chapter 6, a famous passage, says this.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

Hear, O Israel, and that hear means sh uh in Hebrew was Shema.

Shema, O Israel, hear and obey.

The Lord your God is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your might.

And these words that I command to you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit at your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and you sh and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Deuteronomy says, in this liminal space, the most important thing you can do is love God with everything you have with everyone around you.

You should love God in the liminal space, take the 167 hours, however crazy they are, in this transitionary period, the most important thing the people of Israel had was to love God with everything they had with everyone around them.

Let's look at three aspects of this.

The first aspect is that loving God, quote unquote, it introduces a community to us.

Notice that the text is addressed to a group of people, the nation of Israel.

Hear, O Israel.

It doesn't say, hear, O Israelite, individual.

It doesn't say, hear, O Moses.

This is not just about Moses.

It's not about a particular Israelite.

It's about the nation.

And this is because in the Old Testament, in particular, the people of God did not understand their relationship with God as individual.

They had no concept of this.

They had a complete communal concept of what it meant to love God.

Either we all love God or we all don't.

We're all in this together.

And the New Testament kind of takes a little bit of this family-nation metaphor into the church, saying, now every nation, tribe, and tongue is placed into a community upon meeting Jesus.

This is actually a major emphasis in this great book I read by a man named Joseph Hellerman.

He has this book called When the Church Was a Family.

And he's a New Testament scholar at Biola, and he says, there's actually no biblical precedence for what evangelicals call a personal relationship with Jesus.

Personal relationship, personal savior is not something you find in the Bible.

God, in his monstrous salvation work, does this for all people and on behalf of all people.

And he's always worked this way.

Now, do you have personal interactions with God by yourself?

Yes.

Do you yourself have a personal relationship with God?

Yes.

But it's always in the context of a family, of the church.

Likewise, the Israelites all had individual relationships with God, but that was set in the context of being an Israelite.

You and I, when we love God, we are introduced immediately to a community, simply put, and maybe a little, you know, interestingly put, I don't think you can love God alone.

I think you can experience the love of God alone, but I don't think it's possible for us to experience the fullness of God's love without the fullness of the family that he expresses it through.

You see, this has been an important thing from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

Hellerman opens his book with this powerful quote.

He says this spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community.

People who remain connected in the local church almost invariably grow in self-understanding and they mature in their ability to relate in healthy ways to God, to their fellow human beings.

Long-term, interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life.

Look at how simply he puts this here.

People who stay also grow.

People who leave do not grow.

In his study on the church, that's as simple as it got.

Just as the people of Israel were given the opportunity to rededicate to their community before entering the promised land, to spend their 167 hours through every week they had to dedicate to the community, so we today have the opportunity to rededicate to the church before this pandemic is done.

You have the opportunity to step more into the community you are introduced to than step out of it.

And that's the liminal lesson.

I'm gonna have little liminal lessons for us.

Here's the first one.

Step into community right now and don't drift away.

Step in and don't drift away.

It's my experience as a pastor.

Most people don't step out of community, they just drift away from it.

But everyone who's in it steps in intentionally.

So it's weird.

You don't drift into community, but you totally drift out of it.

And so today, could you rededicate, just as the Israelites heard, hear, O Israel, could you hear this?

Hear, awakening church.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

This is to us as a church to experience the love of God together.

Well, what does it mean to step in?

Well, that's secondly, is that loving God, quote unquote, it actually will clarify what community looks like.

It's gonna clarify community.

As we step into this, it will, we will understand what it really means to love God as a community and what that community means.

Because that's the place the text goes.

After it says, love the Lord your God with art, all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, look at what Moses says.

Look at this.

I've highlighted some of the emphasis here.

Talk with of them, of the statutes and the commandments, when you sit, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rot uh rise, bind them, write them on the doorposts, put them on your gates.

You know, this is actually a current Jewish practice.

There's something called a mezuzah, which is a small, usually kind of metal object.

It's like the size of a pencil.

They'd stick it on the doorposts.

And if you have Jewish friends, they some of them will have this.

On their doorposts, a small little metal piece that they screw into the doorpost, and it has the Hebrew word shema, which is to point them as they're entering their house to the reality that they love God in a community.

You know, if you open the door to my house, by the way, we've kind of sort of done this.

And right when you walk in my house, there's this little thing that one of my former students made for me, and it says, delight yourself in the Lord.

It's from Psalm 37.

And what does that do?

It's just when you walk in the door, it reminds you who I am and who I'm connected to.

I'm connected to God and I'm connected to his community.

This is another way to say to clarify community is it means that we're going to be kind of immersed in the love of God.

Like Ajeeth Fernando, he's a Sri Lankan scholar, and he notices the levels that Moses breaks down here for how clear the community is.

He says, it's personal, meaning on your hands and your foreheads, write the law on your hands and your foreheads.

It's familial.

He says, talk about the love of God and his commandments in your houses when you're going to sleep, when you're waking up.

So personal, familial, and then civil.

He actually, you know, Moses says, we're gonna put these on the gates of our city.

Like, this is how immersive the community and love of God should be in our lives.

So, how are you surrounding yourself with the love of God through your relationships and through your practices?

I love one of the scholars I read said he would translate loving the Lord your God with all of your strength, quote unquote.

It's a hard way to translate from Hebrew to English, I guess.

And he says, I would just translate it this way, with all of your muchness.

It's like with everything you have, how are you surrounding yourself with the love of God through the 167 hours that you have through the week?

In what ways do you have that sticky note on your laptop?

Do you have that reminder on your phone?

Do you have that friend who texts you to remind you of things?

When you need prayer, do you have that person to reach out to?

You see, it's not just the Israelites did not understand loving God as a thing they learned about on Sunday or Saturday.

No, the love of God was something they surrounded themselves with in community.

And so what are those practices?

And again, you might be thinking, Chris, I don't know if I have time for this.

And you know what I've learned?

The rhythm and the practice of what I'm talking about right now, surrounding yourself in the love of God, surrounding yourself in the people of God, the rhythm and practice of that, it certainly changes through season of life, right?

But the importance doesn't.

You know, sometimes I think about back in college, it was like my life was one bubble, you know?

My whole world was one thing.

It was on campus with my friends in my classes, they all went to the same church.

It was like a bubble.

That doesn't really translate the older you get, you know?

Now you have all these other little bubbles as you age, you know?

And you have kids, then you have this whole other community, right?

And all these different communities kind of bifurcate your community life.

Life will never be like that again for me in college, maybe.

But as the rhythms and practice changes, you know what I've realized?

Community only becomes more important in my life.

To dedicate to surrounding myself in God's love becomes more important.

All of the things change in the way that is that you practice community, but it will not change the fact that you need it.

You need people to remind you of God's love.

And um amidst this pandemic, you guys, I think it's clarified for us what true community means.

You know, Silicon Valley is like an expert in fake community.

Now hear me carefully here.

Like when you get a job in tech around here, as many of you have that I talk with, like the HR rhetoric is so big on community.

You're a part of the Twitter family or you're a part of the Apple community, right?

And all of this speak about, you know, human resources and PR, it really makes you feel like your work is your family.

And the only problem though is how can your work be your true community if they can fire you?

You know, it's as much as they say that they want to be family with you at the end of the day, if you don't perform, you're out.

You know, this is something maybe you've recognized too, is that work was maybe the one place you went to every day and filled your 167 hours mostly hanging out with people at work and now you're working at home and you don't have those relationships.

See, your best work relationships actually transcend work.

They they go beyond the company you work for and other interests and things that you value.

And Derek Thompson was wrought about this last month in The Atlantic.

He says work, it doesn't necessarily make for the ideal community.

But in the past few decades, the office has served for many people as the last community standing.

In an age where various associative institutions are in retreat, including the church, by the way, moving on, he says, there is one place where the majority of adults ages 25 to 55, they just kept showing up, right?

Almost every day, every week.

It was work.

Work was the place we were showing up.

Now we're not showing up there anymore.

And some of you, I think, have been relying on your work community in a way that is not only no longer available now, but would have never lived up to the promises you think they were making.

See, now we have this liminal space where we get a lesson here and we realize we actually need to make some of our social bubbles a spiritual bubble.

Okay, we we need to think about who are the people I'm actually in community with?

Who are the people that even if I got fired, if I lost my job, if I had a debilitating disease, that they would still be there for me.

This is the local church.

The church of God is the community that no matter what happens in your life can be there for you.

The community that whether you work at a tech place or you don't work at a tech place, whether you have a career or you have a job that you just need to work to get by, the church exists in multiple levels of socioeconomic classes and exists why?

For the love of God.

So right now, you and I, we don't have um the luxury of relaxing into other communities.

At this point, we must, friends, listen, we must create spiritual bubbles.

Okay, now let me use this bubble metaphor a little differently, this pandemic.

A lot of us, um, we have our bubble of our family, right?

And we're trying to shelter in place and continue to socially distance.

But what we've noticed at Awakening is that a lot of us um have involved other families into our bubble, okay?

Or roommates, for example.

Some of you are all roommates together, that's your little social bubble.

Well, some of you are dating people and they end up in your social bubble.

And what we've just noticed is we've seen a lot of community formation happening through these social bubbles.

You hang out on Friday or Saturdays, you'll go eat brunch outside socially distanced or in a park, you'll, you know, hang out on blankets.

And one thing we want to encourage you to think about is to take whatever social bubble you have and turn it into this spiritual bubble.

Here's my point.

If you're hanging out with people in your own little quarantine bubble, a couple families, on Saturday morning, why not make that a Sunday morning experience too?

Hang out together at 9:30 and watch the service and have some discussion afterwards.

We have some families doing this right now.

We have some roommate groups doing this right now.

That on Sundays they gather together and they listen to the sermon and they respond to Jesus and they pray for one another.

Again, as they are comfortable, it's great.

I know for some of you, your social bubble actually, they don't go to church, and it's awesome.

You like have this great witness to them.

But for some of you, some of your social activity is with awakening people, and all we're saying is, hey, why don't you make that a spiritual bubble?

And we're calling that church with friends.

Church with friends is just a simple way to say, how can we serve you as you just have church with the friends that you are around?

We can't organize it because there's so many complications to this right now.

We understand that different people have different levels of comfort, but here's the deal: we want to support and we want to pray for you.

Would you go to our website, awakeningchurch.com, and click on church with friends.

There's actually this simple form that if you so happen to say, hey, you know what, I've been hanging out with a few people, and yeah, I want to just hang out with them on Sunday mornings, watch service together, maybe pray together, maybe immerse myself in the life of God, not just have this social life, but have this full spiritual life.

You can go to our website and fill out this form and we'll find ways to support you.

We're not gonna send people to you, okay, because we know these are bubbles.

We're not gonna, you know, infiltrate your space, but we're gonna pray for you and encourage you and start to see maybe how this community can be formed.

Here's all we're saying.

We want to commit to growing in our ability to gather as a community when and where it's possible.

We understand it might not be.

We understand for you, it just might not be the season.

We understand it's not at your comfort level.

But for those that are maybe having a social bubble, I want you to really think about this is your time to become the spiritual community God has already made you to be, to surround yourself in the love of God.

I can't emphasize this enough.

I I don't think you and I can afford right now to just have friends that are social but not spiritual.

We need people to pray for us, and this is why.

Very finally, guys, loving God, when we truly love God and community, it actually solidifies community among us.

Let me just give you this final last liminal lesson in the space of transition.

God's community around us reminds us of God's commitment to us.

You see, this is why you need a spiritual bubble if you can make it happen.

If you've got even just a roommate that you could watch service with, um, this is why you need it.

Is because when we surround ourselves with community, we actually hear God's love for us in a different way.

Um, you know, my group has recently gotten back together over Zoom every Wednesday night.

And I just realized for Ali and I, for my wife and I, we need our group because we need to hear God's love coming from other people.

I hear it from God's word, I hear it from the preaching on Sunday, I pray on my own, but I need someone else in my group to go, this is God's love for me, and sharing that.

And that's what Deuteronomy actually says, you know, a couple of verses later, Moses says this.

He says, There's gonna come a time where your son comes to you and asks you, like, why do we love God?

Look at what is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules?

Like, why are we doing this?

Don't you love it?

Leave it to a child to ask the most obvious but best question.

Why should we love God?

Why should we dedicate to community?

Look at, he says, this is what you're gonna say to your son.

We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out.

Why do we love God?

Why do we commit to community?

Why in this liminal space do we have to receive this word from the Lord right now?

Why do we have to emphasize a spiritual community more and above social and work communities now?

Because you need to remember that God has rescued you.

You need to remember the gospel.

See, in the Old Testament, the people of Israel said the reason we are a community is because God brought us out of slavery.

And the New Testament community says, we love God and are dedicated to a community because we've been freed from the slavery of sin and death.

Because Jesus Christ on the cross purchased for us the life that we could never purchase for ourselves.

And maybe most beautifully and succinctly, the apostle John put it this way: We love because he, God, loved us first.

You love God and you dedicate to community and you exist in your 167 hours dedicating to the love of God and the community of the love of God.

Why?

Because we were once slaves.

Because we were in Egypt and God brought us out.

And if God brought us out then, will not God bring us out again?

If God has done what he has done, will he not bring us through this liminal space into a kind of promised land?

We don't know what the future holds, but we know this.

God has loved us, therefore, we will love one another and love him.

Let me pray.

Jesus, we need you.

Father, show us your ways and show us your love so that we might love you in return and love one another.

We need your help with this.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.