Ephesians: "One New Humanity"

Do you know why Jesus died?

Do you know why Jesus died?

If I was to go up to everyone in this room one-on-one and ask you why did Jesus die, I think that we would probably all maybe have some form of the same answer to that question.

Even people who don't know Jesus can usually kind of answer that question a little bit.

Most of them can say, you know, to forgive me of my sin.

Some people may say, like, quote John 3.16 right off the cuff, like, Christ died so that I can have eternal life, that I would not perish, but have eternal life.

And you would not technically be wrong, right?

Like there's there's a lot of different scriptures that tell us why Christ has died.

And a lot of them have to do with being forgiven by God and experiencing eternal life.

But I wonder if anyone any of us would give this answer that Paul gives in this text.

When writing about why Christ has died and one of the things that he has died for, he says this 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.

If someone were to come to us and be like, hey, why did Christ die?

You're like, well, you know, the 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 uh he put to death their hostility.

And everyone would be like, What?

What does that mean?

What are you talking about?

And yet, Paul in this text says Christ's purpose in this was to create in himself one new humanity.

And in a lot of ways, a lot of people's opinion is that this is really the hinge point of the book of Ephesians.

That kind of a lot of people, when they do a series to Ephesians, they call it a new humanity.

This is one of the ways that that that the church is pointed to is called a new humanity.

And yet, this is a scripture that gets a that gets ignored by a lot of people.

And yet it's in Paul's opinion, it encapsulates two things.

One, why Christ has died, and two, who the church is and how it's meant to live.

This word new, when he describes new humanity, it's the Greek word kinos.

And and and this word means new in quality.

It's kind of paint, it kind of paints a picture of innovation, like something that's new, and a new invention, something that has never been seen like this before, fresh in development or opportunity.

Unseen before.

This is a new kind of community, a new kind of humanity.

This is something completely different than maybe what you've heard over, what you've what you've experienced.

Paul is saying Christ has died to create a new form of humanity, like never seen before, never experienced before.

And so the reality of this, if this is true, is this that if we are not doing our part to embody God's vision of a unified, compelling community of love and mission, then we are actively resisting one of the key reasons that Christ has died.

Have we ever thought about this?

Like when people think about the church, do people think that man, my embodying this, my actually working together with brothers and sisters in Christ in order to create or embody this kind of community, that if I'm not actively pursuing that and doing that, I'm actually resisting one of the key reasons that Paul says Christ has died.

Like he's actually died to do this, to give us this.

And he's invited us and called us to embody this and walk in this.

Now, the reason I think this is super, super important is because of a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, I think it's super important because of the cultural moment that we live in.

There was an article in the Atlantic called The Antisocial Century by Derek Thompson.

I encourage you to go find it and read it.

Super eye-opening article.

And I'm just going to read some quotes.

I read back through it yesterday to kind of get keep it fresh of mind.

And I'm just going to read some quotes because he calls this moment, he calls this moment the antisocial century that we're living in.

A few of the quotes.

So, first and foremost, he says, self-imposed solitude.

That's the phrase he uses.

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century.

Self-imposed solitude.

He goes on to say Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period in which we have trustworthy data going back to 1965.

From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20%.

Specifically among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35%.

And Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021.

Can you remember what was going on in 2021?

A global pandemic.

And he's saying that in the years following forced isolation, we are actually self-imposing more isolation on ourselves years after government-enforced isolation.

Interesting.

He says that we're spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data.

Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

So much so that during the Biden administration, Vivek Murphy, Biden's surgeon general, actually actually said that diagnosed America as saying that we have an epidemic of loneliness.

An epidemic of loneliness.

But this is an important distinction that Derek makes in this in this article.

We're on a first name basis.

That my boy Derek makes in this article.

Is he says that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

Remember, he's talking about self-imposed solitude.

And he says, look, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

According to NYU sociologist Eric Kleinenberg, he actually says that it's actually a very healthy emotional response to feel loneliness.

That cue is the thing that pushes you off of the couch and into face-to-face interaction.

He says, loneliness is a pain that you feel to let you know that you're not living in alignment with the way that you're meant to live.

And that loneliness, that pain actually pushes you towards friendship.

He said the real problem here, the nature of America's social crisis is that most Americans don't seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people.

Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping.

A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness declined by roughly a third from 2021 to 2023, even as solitude rose.

So day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life and its comforts.

But convenience can be a curse.

Our habits are creating a century of solitude.

This is the anti-social century.

So notice what he's saying.

He's saying that even though we are self-imposing solitude and we are alone more than we have ever been in in history, in recorded history, that we are actually feeling the pain of loneliness less.

So let's let's connect this to maybe a medical thing.

Your body feels pain to let you know something is wrong.

And it's actually a disease, it's a diagnosed disease that if you can't when some when someone cannot feel pain.

Football coach Tony Dungey had a son who was actually diagnosed with a dis this disease where he could not feel pain.

And so they would go to the doctor and find out that his son was living with broken bones, like that he had all of these injuries, but they did they were unaware of it because he could not feel pain.

And so essentially what he's saying is that we have a social disease, and there are social injuries that we are all living with, but that we actually don't feel the pain of those injuries in order to get the help that we need.

He said, in a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue.

I'm alone and sad.

I should make some plans.

But they aren't.

I forget the guy's name, but it's a book written in 2000 called Bowling Alone, covers up here.

What's his name?

Robert Putnam.

Had to shout him out.

Robert Putnam, I want you like this is an article I read in 2023.

Robert Putnam wrote a book in 2000 alerting everyone to this.

And notice the title of the book is The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

And so he was hoping that he would be on the precipice of reigniting American community.

But in actuality, it's just gotten worse since he wrote this book.

And he he connected a couple of things to the reason that this was happening.

He said, he said, first and foremost, specifically in America, there's unbridled individualism, that this is the ultimate value that's driving a lot of Americans, is unbridled individualism.

No one can tell me what to do.

We're the land of the free, the home of the brave, free.

We are free.

You can't tell me what to do.

We are we are a nation of rebels.

We were birthed out of rebellion.

And he says, like, there's this individualism that is in Americans, and this is that value that they have, that they've got to be able to stand on their own two feet and do this on their own.

And then he said that there were behaviors or certain technological advances that that developed this.

And he said that was the development of the automobile and the television.

And so he said that connected to the value that Americans have, that we have individualism, unbridled individualism, and then you bring on these technological advances of the automobile and the television, we found an ability to be more hurried and more distant than we'd ever been, and also more isolated than we've ever been.

I lived in a in a in a subdivision before we we moved here when I was when we were I was working at a the church before this.

And one of the things I remembered is that it was, you know, kind of a small, you know, small houses, kind of cookie cutter houses, right?

And and every single one of them, you look at the front and they have two things.

They have a front door and then they have a garage door.

And one of the things that we would always pay attention to is that we would see the garage door go up in the morning, people would pull out, the garage door would go down, and then people would come back in the evening, garage door would go up, they would pull in, the garage door would come down, the light would go on, and we'd never see our neighbors.

Live right next to them, never saw them.

We actually became front yard people as like an act of rebellion towards the back patio and backyard.

Like we have become, we don't use our backyard.

Uh we are front yard people.

We have forced it.

Have you noticed that even the way architecture and the way people design homes isn't does this?

When's the last time you saw a front wraparound porch?

You don't see them.

You see a front stoop or front step and you see a back deck, right?

And so you have privacy and isolation that keeps you away from the world.

They've actually changed architecture to support our social disease.

I remember I talked to my dad one time and he was telling this story about, yeah, man, when I was growing up, we would stay, you know, we'd always go to, you know, so-and-so's house.

It was, you know, I'm from central Alabama, so it was like, you know, ain't, you know, ain't Marlene and Uncle Jimmy Bubba.

And so, you know, whatever.

And and so everybody has these funny names.

But like, I, you know, but he he would literally tell me, he would go, he would go, man, we were always hanging out in the front.

I was like, Dad, I've never heard of any of these people.

What happened?

And he said, Well, you know, they lived on a dirt road.

And come to think of it, they paved the road.

That's what he said.

I remember looking at my dad going, You have no idea how powerful that statement just was that you said.

He said, They paved the road and everything changed.

Things started moving too fast and people got too busy.

They paved the road.

And so what we're seeing in this social disease, right, is that we're a culture of individualism, isolation, hurry, distraction, and we're getting more and more alone, yet we're feeling less lonely.

And that's not good.

We're being hurt and injured worse and worse, yet we're feeling the pain of it less and less, and that's not good.

You know, we've actually seen, you know, we've seen values even kind of raise up and erupt in our current culture.

And it's so hard, especially, especially in the church, you know, that that this kind of next part of the talk, I literally wrote, when the culture comes to church, because that's a little bit of what's happened is that the church and the way that we do community has actually been shaped by this disease, has been shaped by the world in a lot of ways.

So much so that when you actually read the biblical narrative of community, when you when you look through the New Testament, it actually makes you uncomfortable because you can't imagine feeling that close to people.

You like the idea of calling someone family that it's not actually your nuclear family can make you can make you uncomfortable in a lot of ways.

Imagine if if if you met someone in here and they said, they said, Yeah, that's you know, that's my brother and that's my sister.

And then you went up to me and go, Yeah, that's you know, that's you know, I've met your brother.

And you know, and I'm like, you know, so y'all, y'all share, y'all grew up in the same place, you'll have the same family.

And I was like, oh, no, no, no, we actually met a couple years back.

And they're like, but he said he said he was your brother.

She said there was your sister.

And this is the kind of like intimacy and connection and relationship that you saw in the New Testament that right now we would say something's crazy with that person.

Something's wrong with them.

They don't actually, they're not from that person's nuclear family.

And yet the New Testament narrative is hey, we're actually more intimately connected as family and brothers and sisters in Christ than you are to your nuclear family.

And yet, when people come to the church, what do they feel?

Obligated.

Like when someone you start to feel obligated when it comes to serving or when it comes to community or when it comes to any of those things.

And that's not the spirit.

Right?

Like when we think about family and you have chores in family, you don't necessarily think of that as an obligation.

You think of that as a role that you play within a family.

When you think about being a provider or a protector in your family, you don't think about that as being an obligation or a weight or a burden that you have to carry.

It's a role that you play within your family.

When you think about loving one another and living life together and doing things together and prioritizing one another, you don't think about that as an obligation.

You think about that as being a member of a family.

It's a privilege that comes with family.

And so and so when we actually start to look at the New Testament, we begin to think, I think oftentimes, we begin to look at it and go, yeah, that was back then.

Things worked different back then.

Now churches, it's different now.

And you know, we actually see, you know, we actually see people kind of be frustrated when when churches don't don't necessarily play along the lines of the American game of get bigger, grow fast, keep people distant, keep people busy.

And when you begin to kind of see churches rebel against that, people actually get uncomfortable with that.

When you start to go, hey, we're actually going to go slower so that relationships can get more intimate.

And you're gonna ask us to do more things and more events, but we're actually gonna, we're actually gonna try to push you to have more deep relationship rather than sitting and attending an event so that you can get smarter, have a dopamine hit, but not be obligated to anyone as a family member.

And people go, well, it's easier for me to sit in a seat and listen and hear than it is for me to show up for people, than it is to be known, than it is to have community and relationship.

Because the cultures come to church rather than the church invading the culture.

And so we see individualism, isolation, busyness, and convenience defining the church.

You know, and I think a lot of a lot of people, the temptation, you know, when I when I read this article, I remember, you know, you go through all of this, all of this article around the antisocial century, and you get to the end and you're going, so what's the solution?

And there were three things that they said.

They said, hang out with friends more.

One of them actually said party more.

Said, hang out with friends, party more, and try to have intentional friendships.

And I was like, that's that's what's gonna fix the anti-social century.

That's what's gonna fix us.

I just remember being so disappointed and let down, but you know what it showed me?

They actually don't have an answer to this.

They don't have we all they know something's wrong with us, and they can see the ways in the past.

They're going, they're going, man, we used to be, we used to do things like this, and culture used to be so much healthier because people had this relationship and community.

They had this second-tier relationships.

Now all we have is loose connections and and nuclear family, and we don't have anything in the middle, and they're going, something used to work way better than us, and now it's broken, and so hang out with people more.

Go to dinner more with your friends.

And and it's going like, oh, you actually don't have a solution to what's broken in us.

And the temptation for the church is to go, well, go to church and go to small group.

Hey man, attend Sunday and go to small group and that'll fix you.

See, but the problem is going to church doesn't automatically change this.

You don't go from old to new humanity through church attendance, you don't go from old to new humanity by simply attending a small group.

The church just ends up getting filled with unhealthy, isolated people who go to the same things together.

So, what's the answer?

Something has to change in the core of your values, your behaviors, and the conviction of how you live your life.

You've got something has to change in the core of who you are.

And this is this is what Paul is getting at in Ephesians chapter 2 is this for us to become the new humanity, you have to become a new person.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

For us to become a new humanity, you have to become a new person.

Are you noticing that 11 through 22 is right on the heels of 1 through 10?

Right?

Where Paul, Paul starts out in Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, and he starts out and he goes, Hey, you were dead.

You were dead in your sins and your trespasses, you know, you were following the prince of the power of the age, you're you know, going living in your flesh, and you know, you were just wilding out, messy.

Something was wrong with y'all.

He said, But God, but God did something crazy, he did something really cool, and he made you alive.

And he brought you into this family, and he put his spirit in you, and he made you new, and you're a masterpiece in Christ Jesus.

And then verse 11 literally goes, Therefore.

Therefore.

And so he's he's looking at at 211 through 20.

He goes, He goes, Yeah, man, you need to become a new humanity, but if that's gonna happen, first you got to become a new person.

Something's gotta change in you, or else what you'll end up doing is you'll take your you'll take your old person into what's trying to become a new humanity, and one of two things are gonna happen.

You're either going to be in a space where you feel deeply uncomfortable, or you're gonna make this thing sick.

Right?

You're gonna make the host sick because you're bringing in kind of the disease.

And what the hope is, what the hope is is that through a transformation with Jesus, we can become new people, get a vision for this new humanity.

That way, when we step into this new humanity, we actually allow it to start to change us, right?

And another beautiful thing that can happen is sometimes these unhealthy people can step into the new humanity and they can change through the new humanity.

That community can actually impact them.

See, for some of us, your life wasn't changed through a sermon from someone that was just preaching at you.

Some of you were changed through community, right?

And all of us are changed in ways through community.

Some of us, it's it's we put our faith and trust in Jesus through a sermon, but then our lives were conformed to the image of Jesus increasingly more and more through community because that's the way he's designed.

And so, and so anyway, what as we think about the old humanity and we think about the new humanity, let's start to kind of diagnose some things.

So, what when we think about the old humanity, what is it?

Old humanity is ultimately alienation.

And this is the problem with us that when we look at what's happening in the culture, what's happening in the way that it that it gets into the churches, what is that?

Well, old humanity is ultimately rooted in alienation.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines alienation as the concept of alienation identifies a distinct kind of psychological or social ill, namely one involving a problematic separation between a self and other that properly belong together.

And so alienation isn't just isolation, it's separation.

That that there's this, there are these things that are meant to be together, and one is now alienated from the other in which it's in which it belongs.

And so when Paul actually starts out in verse 11, he says, he says, so then remember that at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcised by those called the circumcised.

Some of y'all are reading that going, like, you're gonna have to explain that one.

So so ultimately, in the in the Old Testament, the the Jews who were God's set apart people, they had an external sign that they belonged to God.

And they would do it to their flesh, and it was circumcision for the males.

And so they would they would circumcise themselves to show that they were God's people, that they were, that they were Jewish people.

And then the Gentiles were uncircumcised to show that they didn't, they were outside.

They were they were outside, they were foreigners, they were outside of God's chosen people.

And so they had an external sign.

And what Paul is pointing to in the New Testament is he goes, he goes, hey, it's no longer through an external sign, but it's through an internal transformation that shows you belong to God.

And so he goes, it's no longer the external sign of circumcision, it's the internal transformation of the spirit.

And so now the spirit is what shows you belong to God, not what you do on your body.

This is why he makes a distinction.

Hey, this is a thing that is done in the flesh by human hands.

Once again, he's coming back to if we're going to become the new humanity, you've got to become a new person.

You've got to change.

The Holy Spirit's got to change you.

And he says, at that time you were without Christ, excluded from the citizenship of Israel, and foreigners to the covenant of promise, without hope and without God.

And so it's alienation.

It's alienation from God, the alienation from self, it's alienation from others.

You see this in Genesis when sin kind of enters into the picture.

Is what's is the the fall is ultimately more than anything a relational breakdown.

So when sin enters into the picture, what happens?

They hide from God.

It's the first thing they do.

They hide from God.

They run away from him, they hide from him.

There's alienation from God.

They used to dwell with him in intimacy and relationship and connection.

Sin enters into the picture, shame enters into the picture, and they begin to hide and run rather than to draw near.

Alienation from God.

There's alienation from self.

That's that picture of shame.

That shame is kind of this inward brokenness, this awareness, this internal thing that goes like something's wrong with me.

And now you're alienated from yourself.

And in your shame, you begin to put, you begin to put out a performance that doesn't match up with the reality of who you are, right?

And so you begin to pretend or perform in order to try to cover up your shame.

What they did is they sowed themselves fig leaves in order to try to cover up themselves.

Because they were alienated from themselves and they were aware that something was wrong with them.

And then the third thing is they were alienated from each other.

What's the what's the one of the first things they begin to do?

Blame each other.

What'd y'all do?

Well, it was her.

No, it was him.

No, it was the snake.

They just begin to blame each other.

And now there's alienation relationally from one another.

And then what Paul says is because of all of this, you're ultimately alienated from hope.

Hope.

You're separated from hope.

You're without hope in the world.

Like, man, you're in the world and you're looking forward, and there's no hope there.

You don't know where you're going.

You don't know where it's ended up.

You don't know how he goes, man, that was that used to be y'all.

You were separated, you were alienated, you were excluded without God and without hope.

And then Paul paints the picture of the new humanity.

And so he starts in verse 18.

So we skip down to verse 18 and he says, For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father.

So then you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

In him, the whole building being put together grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him you are also being built together for God's dwelling in the Spirit.

So he goes from, you were once excluded, alienated from God, alienated from self, alienated from others, alienated from hope.

And then in verse 18 he goes, But but in Christ, he wants to build a new humanity.

And this new humanity looks like people who have access in one spirit to the Father, who are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens locking arms together, members of the same household together.

That you who once had hostility are now together in the same family.

You're being built on the same foundation with Christ Himself as the cornerstone.

In him, the whole building being put together grows into a holy temple.

And then he connects that temple and he connects it back to them.

And he says, in him, you, not just the temple, you are also being built together for God's dwelling in the Spirit.

That now what he wants to do is create a new humanity where God's Spirit dwells.

And pay attention, he doesn't just dwell in you, it says dwelling in us.

That we become a temple where he dwells.

The new humanity.

And so the new humanity isn't characterized by alienation, but it's characterized by restoration.

By restoration.

That the new humanity is a healing humanity that is that is developing in the way of wholeness and healing and restoration.

And so all this division and brokenness and things that were were dividing us from one another, we begin to find healing.

And so first and foremost, we see restoration to God.

That through Christ, that's the hinge point in the middle of this, right?

We see the old humanity and then we see the new humanity right in the middle is Christ has become our peace by way of the cross.

And he says, now through Christ, we can be rest re we can be restored to God.

We can have right relationship with God.

The reality is that some of you in here today are alienated from God, longing for right relationship with God, and you don't know what sits in the middle.

And what Jesus wants you to know is that's Him on the cross in the middle.

And he says that He has already done what is required in order for you to have restoration to God.

And then he also hits on that, like, man, there's a restoration to self that needs to happen.

How many, how many of you, when I was talking earlier about shame, you're like, yeah, that used to characterize my life, and then you encounter Christ and something changed in you and your relationship with yourself completely transformed?

Right?

That that we are no longer characterized by shame and hiding and running away, but we actually get to the point where we where we see ourselves as God sees us, and we have a right relationship with ourselves, where we're able to lead ourselves well, care for ourselves well, all because we've been restored to right relationship with God and right relationship with self.

And then thirdly, we have we have restoration to others, to one another.

And so I I think it I think it's important, I think it's important for us in this moment to kind of put ourselves in the text a little bit.

Because this is what Paul's trying to hit on.

Is he riding once again, he's riding to a collection of churches that were kind of birthed out of Ephesus through a discipleship movement that you can read about in Acts chapter 19.

Acts 19 · chapter mention

So Paul goes to Ephesus on his third missionary journey, starts a discipleship school in in Ephesus in Acts chapter 19.

Acts 19 · chapter mention

And out of that, out of that missionary school, it says, it says that over two years, all of all of that region had heard the good news of Jesus through this discipleship journey.

And out of that, these churches are planted and birthed.

And so they these are now gathering in homes, and he's sending these letters and they're being read in these homes.

And and and what's in these homes is the thing that's really that that's really supernatural, is that is that it's not just it's not just Jews who were God's chosen people with Yahweh, waiting for the Messiah.

Jesus comes in as the Messiah and and ultimately births a new covenant with them, but ult, but but but there's also this Greek community of people who five minutes ago were worshiping idols, who are uncircumcised, who don't know any of the any of the tradition, any of the language, any of the worship, any of the law, any of the right things to do.

They they they hate each other.

They hate each other.

In the temple in Jerusalem, there was literally a wall.

So when this text says that Jesus has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, there was literally a dividing wall in the temple that would separate the Gentiles from the Jews.

The Jews could go into the inner parts of the temple.

The Gentiles could not access the inner part of the temple.

And that wall literally said, if you are a Gentile and you cross this, like essentially you're gonna lose your life and you will have only yourself to blame.

It's legit.

There's an engraving on the wall that said, if you're a Gentile and you cross this, you will lose your life and you'll only have yourself to blame.

And so when he talks about Jesus breaking down that wall of hostility, he's got an actual picture of a legit wall in his head.

And he's saying that Jesus has broken that down to give you guys access together.

But the problem is now you've got all these people bringing in all this baggage into one spot.

Like this room.

Like all y'all are messy, right?

Like I am messy.

Ask my wife.

And what and what happens, right, is you, and some, some of y'all, some of y'all you can connect with this because either either you've experienced this in community, some of y'all have experienced this in marriage.

Hollet Chapoy, is is y'all get married and you are bringing your own stories and your own baggage into this marriage together, right?

One of the things that I do when we do premarital is I'll usually have people do it, do what's called a genogram where they'll actually like look at their family history and their ancestry.

And it gives them a way on screen to kind of or on paper to look at it and see all the baggage and all the history that they're bringing into marriage.

And it just kind of gives them an opportunity to go, like, oh, we're not just like a blank slate entering into this thing.

And then you start talking to them, and it's like, that's how y'all did stuff in your house?

Oh my gosh, poor you.

And then someone else is like, This is how we did stuff in my house, and we did it all right.

And you're like, actually, I didn't break your heart.

There's some stuff there.

You did what?

And so, and so you bring all this stuff into a union, right?

And and now what are you trying to do?

You're trying to build something new.

But the temptation of each person who's coming into this is to go, like, hey, I need you to like get in line and start doing things the way that I always did them, right?

Because we're this is the right way, and then there's your way, and it's cute and it's great, but here's the right way.

And then that other person who got in is going, like, I think you should kind of get, you know, get over here and do things my way, because this is the culture that I want in my home.

And then you go, yeah, but we've got to create something new.

And so one of the things that we always say is like, hey, this isn't this isn't two families becoming one.

This is two families becoming three.

You're creating something new.

And this is the same thing that Paul's talking about when he talks about this.

He's going, look, this isn't the Jewish people are coming in and going, like, hey, you gotta start doing things our way with our traditions and our rules and our rituals.

Paul actually says Jesus has has fulfilled that old covenant and he's he's created something new.

And the Greeks, the temptation for them is to stand in there and go, like, hey, can we bring some of our stuff in this too and we can kind of match it together?

And they're going, no, no, this doesn't, this doesn't work that way.

Jesus is coming to create something new.

He's creating a new humanity in the place of the old one.

And this is ultimately what he's doing here is it's a restoration to his original design.

So I'm gonna I'm gonna throw, I'm gonna throw this kind of graphic up here to kind of help us a little bit as we kind of look through the story of scripture, is obviously we see things start in the garden.

That might be really small print.

I'm just gonna go ahead and apologize.

And if there's any typos, just know human error, okay?

So when we look, when we look at this, it kind of gives us a little bit of a picture of what of what Jesus is saying that he wants to do in here as he's talking about creating a new humanity.

Is it's really he's trying to he's trying to get restored back to God's original intent and original design.

And so in the garden, what we see is a united people, humanity, image bearers, literally the word there is icons that are partnering with God to advance creation.

And so God is with them in the garden and he's co-working with them and co-laboring with them, and they're partnering with him and his vision for creation, these icons reflecting and displaying the glory of the creator, but then the fall happens.

And now we see this alienation happen, right?

A divided people.

And so rather than a united people partnering with God to advance his creation, instead, what we see is a divided people separated from God, advancing destruction.

And rather than become becoming expanders and multipliers of God's design, they become multipliers of the fall of that which is broken.

Romans actually calls us enemies of God.

And what he's painting there is that is that enemies are those who are working in opposition, and that's exactly what creation was doing, that we were working in opposition to God.

Rather than fulfilling his vision, we're trying to fulfill our own.

And a great picture of this is the Tower of Babel, where they literally say, Hey, we're gonna try to build something and we're gonna make sure the top reaches into the heavens and we're gonna we're gonna build our own.

And essentially that same language is connected to temple language.

And so they're saying we're trying to build our own way to God.

This is what we're trying to do together.

And God ends up having to separate them.

Why?

Because they're trying to build their own kingdom, and that's not the design that he had.

He wants to partner with them in his vision and in his design rather than them rebelling against him and trying to create their own way.

And so then what God does is he creates covenants, he establishes covenants with people.

So we got one with Noah, Abraham, Israel, David, and there's some other minor covenants that he that he kind of makes throughout the Old Testament.

And ultimately, what he's doing is he's choosing people and he's calling them to himself and he's saying, Hey, I want you to live differently in the world so that people can see you and give glory to me, knowing that there's something else.

And essentially what he's saying is, I need you to live as a microcosm of redemption.

I need people to look at you and see you as a window into what I'm like and what and what life is like when I'm in control.

Ultimately, they failed to do this because they were constantly pointing to one who is to come, constantly pointing to one who is to come.

Who are they talking about?

They're talking about Jesus.

Jesus is ultimately the perfect icon, the perfect image bearer, the image of the Father.

And Jesus fulfills the Old Testament covenant and establishes a new covenant for the sake of redeeming God's original intent and reversing sin's curse.

That's what Jesus does.

And then Jesus in Matthew 16 says, I'm gonna build my church.

I'm gonna build my church.

And now this church is anyone that can come to God through Christ and kind of called to try to redeem kind of an e it an hedonistic type of living that's now with Christ as king, partnering with him in his vision for the world.

So now we're called to be a united people once again, partnering with God to advance his new creation, to be redeemed and restored, icons, filled, marked, and transformed by the Spirit, reflecting and displaying God's glory.

And then ultimately this leads up to the restoration of all things, the new Jerusalem that we read about in Revelation 20, is this new covenant is fulfilled and embodied, all of sin's curse, reversed and healed.

Everyone who's in Christ, now perfected, resurrected, glorified, every tribe, nation, and tongue united as a family, around God's throne, partnering together with Him and with one another in the new creation.

And what Paul is saying is that that's not something that we're just meant to get saved and wait on.

That's something that we're meant to be get to we're meant to be saved, filled with the spirit, transformed, and actually start to embody now.

He's saying it's not a it's not a get saved and then wait.

He's saying, man, you get filled with the spirit and you begin to embody.

And what and what you and what we get to start with Christ, Jesus is gonna come and he's gonna finish and complete with the birth of the new Jerusalem.

So the question now becomes how do we live as this new humanity?

How do we live as this new humanity?

So we're hearing God's vision for this new humanity.

We know that it happens ultimately through Christ, but how do we how do we live this way?

How do we live this way?

I know this is really teachy today, so I appreciate you hanging in.

Living as the new humanity, there's really three core things that I think Paul hits on here.

It's first and foremost, there's a new story.

Second, there's a new identity, and third, it's a new kind of community.

He says there's a new story, a new identity, and a new kind of community.

And so, once again, as we talked about with the old humanity, when you step into that old humanity, we're all bringing our story.

We're all bringing our own story that we've been living out of.

And so every single one of us are shaped by a narrative, a way of life, a worldview that you hold as truth that kind of shapes and directs the way that you live, the way that you look at the world, the way that you look at others, the way that you find your role in life and try to and try to operate in that role.

We're all bringing a story.

And what Paul says is, man, when you when you step into this new humanity, you get a new story.

You're now guided by a new narrative.

And there's really two kinds of stories that that ultimately kind of kind of hit on here is that first and foremost, there's the meta-narrative of scripture that we just looked at.

That ultimately God's been telling a story this whole time.

And now we're stepping in, we're stepping into our moment of history and our role in the story, that Christ has come, Christ is raised, he's birthed his church, we are now the church, and one day Christ is going to return and redeem and restore all things.

And we're we're the one before his return.

And so we have a role to play in this.

And so we're not, we're not waiting for the Messiah.

The Messiah has come.

We're not waiting for the church.

The church is here.

Now, what we're doing is we're partnering with Jesus for the sake of redemption and restoration until he comes and finishes what he started and what he's building through us.

But then, second, we all have a personal testimony.

We all have a personal testimony that if you're in Christ, you have a personal story.

And the reality is every single one of our details of our personal story are going to be a little bit different, but the reality of our personal story is going to be the same.

And so, for instance, some of you, some of you, you were born and raised in church.

And if I were to ask you, hey, how's your testimony?

You would go, pretty boring.

I don't really have a good testimony.

It's always my favorite.

I don't have a good one.

You know, it's kind of like, so do you wish that like you were, you know, Jesus, I had a revelation of Jesus when I was face down in a ditch one time and picked me up, placed me on solid ground, and changed everything.

And it's like, you wish you wish that was your story?

Praise God.

I hope I hope my son has the most boring testimony ever.

I hope my son is like, look, man, I had a revelation of Jesus when I was two in my crib, gave it all for him right there.

And I praise he's got the most boring testimony in the world.

If you got a boring testimony, I can tell you this your parents love the fact that you have a boring testimony.

But the reality is you don't have a boring testimony.

Why?

Because you were dead, separated from God, could not get to him, and could not get to him under your own power.

You literally needed someone to come and rescue you and change you and transform you.

And Jesus did that by his grace.

Some of you, you were dead because you were religious.

Like your heart was hardened because you didn't think you needed Jesus.

And for some of y'all, like that took a long time for him to break through.

Right?

And then others of you, yeah.

You you got some ratchet in your story, okay?

And praise God that that same grace was able to bend down and pick you up, restore you, pull you up, put your feet on solid ground, and make you new.

But we've all got a personal test, we've all got a testimony.

All of us were dead, separated, desperate, devastated, needing help, and Jesus, Jesus pursued us and saved us.

And this is what this is what Paul is is is kind of hitting at in this in this passage.

He says, He says, Look, this is where you were, remember where you were, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

He's saying, Look, this is all y'all's story.

You were far away.

You were far away, and he has brought you near.

Not you have walked closer, he's brought you near.

How?

By his blood.

Like he died on a cross, shed his blood so that he could bring you near.

What does that say to you?

He loves you.

You were far away, he saw you far away, and he was aching and longing to get you back so much so that he laid his life down so that he could bring you back.

Because you were you were far away.

He goes on, he says, He himself is our peace.

You were alienated.

You needed someone to be a mediator, a peacemaker between you and God, between you and yourself, between you and others.

And Jesus stood in the gap, said, You can't do this on your own, so I'm gonna stand in and be your peace.

I'm not just gonna give you peace, I'm gonna be your peace.

And now he has made the two one and destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility between you and others, between you and yourself, and between you and God.

And he's reconciled, reconciled you to God through the through the cross by which he put to death the hostility.

He's done this, and this is now your story.

That you were once far off, but you've been brought near by the blood of Jesus.

We have a new story.

Secondly, we have a new identity.

We have a new identity.

Paul continues on and he says, he says, Look, consequently, what does that word mean?

He's saying, Look, because of this, because Jesus has done these things, consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people.

You are members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone, and in him the whole building is joined together.

And you've become a holy temple in which the Spirit of God dwells.

Like that's your identity.

It's your identity.

You know, in a few weeks we're gonna we're gonna celebrate baptisms, and one of the reasons we do this is because baptism is a picture of a new identity, that this is something that has happened to you.

That you go from death to life, you you're you're buried with him in death, you're raised to walk in new life, and you now have a new identity.

The scriptures would say that the old person is literally dead and gone.

And the picture of it is that he's is is that he or she is dead in that water, and what's been raised up is someone totally new.

Someone totally new.

And that becomes your new identity that you now walk in and embody.

That that with this new identity, you have a new allegiance, that you're no longer your allegiance no longer is for the things that it used to be for, but it's in Christ.

That your mission, that you're that you're now defiant to the things that try to pull you out of your new identity, the lies that now that try to speak old things over you that are no longer true about you, that you begin to be defiant towards those things as you rest in your new identity as a beloved son and daughter, as a new temple of the Holy Spirit.

And you know what this changes?

Everything about your life.

How do you steward your body when you believe you're a temple of the Holy Spirit?

Paul writes later on, and he goes, he goes, if you are wholly, purified, temple of the Holy Spirit, why would you go and take that and put that together with something that's not wholly impure?

And what does he root it back in?

Not morality and work harder, try better.

He goes, you don't see yourself the right way.

If you saw yourself the right way, you would embody that reality completely different.

He says, Man, your identity is different.

And you know what also changes?

If everyone in this room's identity has changed, the way you love them, the way you look at them is totally different.

And so you no longer get divided over secondary, tertiary things.

You stay united in your common identity and your common story.

And then lastly, we it's a new community.

A new community.

The way we do community becomes completely different.

We become a new humanity.

So this isn't that we try to compete with the world, we don't try to look at the world and go, like, man, pickleball seems to really be working.

How do we bring that into the church and really have the greatest pickleball community ever?

And we can just pray at the end of pickleball, and that'll be like holy pickleball community.

And this is what we do, right?

And rather than rather than looking at it and going, like, we're meant to be something new.

Like he's saying, like, you're a new humanity, you're something different.

You know, the reality is the greatest enemy to the community that God longs for you to have is your own expectations.

Right?

I've I've before before this season of my life, I was a college young adult pastor.

And uh I had this conversation so much with people because they just struggled with that transition from college to adulthood.

Because a lot of people experience really great community in college.

A lot of people do, some people don't, a lot of people do.

Like, I guarantee you, some people, when we had that conversation started, you were like, Man, in college, I was a part of this ministry, or I was a part of this group, or I was a part of this fraternity, or this sorority, or the cult.

Sorry, if that's your story, totally sensitive to that.

Sorry, that's that wasn't in the notes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has this quote we share it all the time when we talk about community.

He said this the person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create it.

Some of you have a dream of community in your head, and it's keeping you from experiencing the community that God is bringing you.

You've been experiencing loneliness, you've been experiencing isolation for way too long, and you've been living in disappointment because you refuse to receive what God wants to give you as a gift.

Because you're holding on to something that is gone and will never be back.

Like I had to I had to look at some people a few times and just go, I love you so much.

Can I tell you something really hard?

You're never gonna have that again.

You won't have that community in that way ever again.

But you can have something really beautiful in new.

You can have something different.

And like God is God is not only not just wanting to provide that, he's also wanting to use you to build it.

I mean I to brag on you guys for a minute.

Because y'all know I'm an introvert.

Some of y'all tell me how bad I am at text messages and different things.

But I've literally heard people go, I've never experienced a community like this talking about you.

And can I tell you something?

You built that.

Like by God's Spirit, you built that.

And if we all showed up with some idea and expectation of community, waiting passively for that thing to fall into our lap again, you know what would happen?

Nobody in this room would be experiencing any kind of community.

And the reality also is that some of you are here and you're not experiencing the greatest community right now, and you're thinking about dipping.

Right?

You're like, man, this just isn't what I thought it would be.

And once again, it's not because you have a passive role, it's because you have an active role that maybe you're not stepping into.

What if I helped create this?

What if I actually stepped into what God's calling me to to receive what He's placed before me?

You know, as we close, Alex is gonna we didn't.

There's not a slide, Alex is gonna walk slowly towards the front and just ignore it, just ignore it completely.

You know, there's so much we can say about this new community.

You know, man, when you when you look at the New Testament, there's so much that you can honestly look at it and get and just feel overwhelmed by like, man, are we like that doesn't feel tangible, it doesn't feel realistic, it doesn't feel like we could ever experience that or look at that.

And man, the beauty of it is I guarantee you that if you would have told the early church before the spirit was poured out that hey, this is the kind of community you need to go and build, they would probably have felt the same way.

There's no way.

Do you know what the Greeks have said about us?

Do you know do you know what we've all been through?

Do you know what they've they've done to us?

We never could build that.

And the beauty of it is the spirit was poured out and the spirit built it through the people.

Right?

You know, the church is meant to be a prophetic witness to a greater cosmic reality.

And what I mean by that is is we just talked about in the beginning of this, this anti-social social century that we live in.

And what's what's meant to happen is that the church is meant to become a new humanity, living in the midst of the old one that serves as a prophetic witness to something that's greater, to a greater truth, to a greater beauty, to a greater relationship, to a greater power.

NT Wright says that the point of the church is to demonstrate to the watching world who God is.

Jesus' followers are to display God's gracious new creation to the world.

They're not just to talk about it, they're to display it, to be it.

You know, Jesus creates a new humanity who are willing to move toward one another because he has first moved toward us.

You look at it and you go, man, we who are once far off, he's brought near by the blood of Jesus.

What has this person done?

What personality quirk can I not get over?

What political opinion can I not get over?

And it's not because it doesn't matter, it's just because it's not central.

Like these churches had core.

Core.

Like disagreements and experiences and wounds.

Justin Martyr, talking about the early church, said, We who formerly hated and murdered one another now live together and share the same table.

We pray for our enemies and try to win those who hate us.

That's new humanity.

Imagine, imagine if Justin Martyr was sitting at table and you go, Man, why'd you leave that church?

Why'd you walk away from that community that you said you loved?

Well, election season came around and there was just this thing, they disagreed, and I I voted one way, they voted another way, and then yeah, man, I just decided like that was it.

And Justin's like, oh, okay, like one of my brothers in Christ tried to murder me one time, but hey, no big deal.

No big deal.

That's a really important issue.

We who formerly hated and murdered one another now live together and share the same table.

We pray for our enemies and try to win those who hate us.

In a letter to Hadrian, Aristides, who was charged by the by um the emperor to kind of investigate the community of Christians and ultimately to try to find reason to persecute them and kill them.

And he wrote this back to Hadrian, and it's actually called the Apology of Aristides.

He was sorry that he could not find a reason to kill these people, and that now he had become one of them.

He said, Christians have the commands of the Lord Jesus, the Messiah himself, etched into their hearts.

They keep these commands, looking forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

They do not engage in adultery or sexual immorality, and they do not bear false witness.

Neither do they covet that which belongs to others.

They honor father and mother, love their neighbors, judge according to justice, and do not do to others anything that they do not wish to be done to them.

They comfort those who injure them, even trying to win them over as their friends.

They are eager to do good to their enemies.

They are gentle and easy to approach with an appeal.

They abstain from unlawful lifestyles and impurity.

They neither neglect the widow nor oppress the orphan.

What each one has, he is willing to give freely to care for the one who has nothing.

If they see one of their number outcast, they take him under their roof and rejoice over him as they would over a brother.

For they call themselves brothers and sisters, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.

They are even prepared to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the Messiah.

And then this is the line surely this is a new people, and there is something divine in them.

And so what transformed Aristides wasn't the fact that someone hopped up on a stage and gave a really powerful word.

He didn't scroll past the TikTok video or Instagram video and be like, man, that changes everything.

He saw new humanity embodied.

And man, that's what we long to be.

You know, there's a lot of talk about revival.

And one of the things that you see in the New Testament is that this kind of unity is a necessary prerequisite for revival.

Got that, Danny?

But you see in the New Testament that this kind of unity is a necessary prerequisite for for revival.

Before the Spirit is poured out, they're united in one place and in one kind of prayer of one accord.

And the question that I have for us is as we end our time is can we be entrusted with a move of God?

That when you think about the Spirit being poured out, one of the things we pray all the time is, Holy Spirit, would you would you pour out?

Would you pour out?

Would you fill this place?

Would you fill us?

Would you do something extraordinary?

And I think sometimes the Spirit is going, man, I would love to.

But I'm gonna wait until you guys love each other.

Man, I would love to, but I'm gonna wait till y'all are really one.

Because the worst thing that can happen is if power is poured out upon an immature and divided people, because that's destructive.

But when power is poured out upon a humble and united people, that is dynamic.

Do you love each other?

Some of you are sitting here and you're going, I don't know these people.

But do you love each other?

So as we as we move into a time of response, the reality is this that you don't create the new humanity, you don't dream it up, you don't strategically plan it.

You enter it by grace.

You enter it.

You respond to the invitation of Jesus and you enter it.

And then you make a commitment with one another to help preserve it, to embody it, to protect it.

Christ has made peace.

Christ is peace.

Christ has torn down the dividing wall of hostility.

Christ has brought us near by his blood.

Christ has already created the new humanity through the cross.

You are called to participate in it, to embody what he has already created.

So our question today, church, is will you be the new humanity in the midst of the old one?

Our prayer team is going to be here.

And there's really two things that I that I kind of want to charge us with today is I think I think first and foremost it comes back to we cannot be a new humanity until you become a new person.

And so there's some of you here today that either you haven't put your faith and trust in Jesus and you've not yet experienced becoming a new person in that way, or two, you've not yet taken hold of the newness because you still harbor things in your heart.

Some of you, you harbor wounding, you harbor things that you use as a way to have power over relationships, and it's keeping you isolated, and it's keeping you alone.

And what you need more than anything is to forgive and to release so that you can experience and become and embody and step into being that new humanity.

And then man, some of you I think, I think you've just been alone.

And you maybe just need prayer for boldness to step into community, to come to God, whatever it may be, but to be ministered to.

So, man, if that's you, we have we have a team here that would love to pray for you.

And so, Holy Spirit, as we respond, we thank you for your word.

We thank you that this is not something that we have to make up, this is not something that we have to try to create in ourselves.

We can't do it.

If you gave us a list of ways that you wanted community to be and said, Hey, can you go create that?

We would mess it up.

But Jesus, you have done this through the cross.

That you, we who were once far off, you've been you've brought us near.

Why?

How?

By the blood, by your blood.

And so, Jesus, now we enter into this new humanity.

And so, God, if there's anyone here who's withholding from that, who's not stepping into that, who's not embodying that, God, would you draw their hearts to you?

Would you help them become a new person and help establish the new humanity that you came to create, Jesus?

Minister to us, Holy Spirit, as we respond.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.