CommUNITY

Well, a little over a month ago, we started a series called What Jesus Wants.

We've been going through John chapter 17, this really interesting chapter in the Bible where Jesus, really close to when he goes to the cross, it's the night that he gets arrested.

John 17 · chapter mention

Jesus is praying to God the Father.

So we have God the Son praying to God the Father.

Very cool thing.

And he's praying, not really about himself so much, but about us.

He's praying about his followers.

And he's talking to God the Father about what he wants to see happen, what he desires the result of his time on this earth and his ministry to be.

He's praying for you and for me.

And what blows me away about this prayer, beyond just the theological aspects of God praying to God, like that's a cool thought.

But what blows me away is the fact that I can live in such a way and I can behave in such a way that I, in my life, along with all of us, can live out this prayer.

I can live in such a way that Jesus looks at my life and goes, yes, that's what I want.

That's what I was praying for.

That's what I was hoping for.

And I love Jesus.

I want to do that.

I fall very short of that all the time.

This week's message was actually really challenging as I prepared it for me personally, and so that happens pretty often.

I'd say like weekly, but uh but this one, this one hit hard because there's things that Jesus desires for us more than we desire for ourselves.

I actually heard a pastor say years ago, and I'm gonna butcher this really bad, and I wasn't prepared to talk about this, so it's just kind of off the cuff.

But he said that if we saw ourselves and the world the way that God sees us in the world, we would pray for the very things that Jesus prayed for.

Like if we saw things the way God sees them, we would always pray for the exact same stuff that Jesus prayed for.

But we don't.

We have different perspectives, we have different priorities oftentimes, and so we pray for things that, and God listens to our prayers and he honors those and he can answer those, but you know, what Jesus prays, he prays differently because he values different things.

And so we want as much as possible to become like Jesus, to see the world the way he sees it, to desire the things that he desires, which are the things that God already desires for us.

So this is a really cool study.

And today we're gonna talk about community, about what it actually means to live connected to one another and to have the kind of unity that Jesus desires us to have.

So let's open up John 17, verses 20 through 23, and here's what Jesus prays.

John 17:20–23

He says to the Father, I'm praying not only for these disciples, meaning his immediate disciples at the time that he was with, but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message, and that is us.

Any of us who have who have put our faith in Jesus.

He said, I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one, as you are in me, Father, and I am in you.

And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.

I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one.

I am in them and you are in me.

May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.

This is echoing something that Jesus says in John 13.

He says to his disciples, I'm giving you a new commandment.

Love each other.

Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.

Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.

Jesus prays in John 17.

We also see it there in John 13, that the proof, according to Jesus, the proof that we belong to him is how well we love one another.

I hear that, not even how much we love the world or how much we love everybody or how much we love our own children or whatever.

It's like how we love each other as fellow believers, that Jesus says will be the proof to the world that God the Father actually sent Jesus.

Is our unity together so strong that it proves the validity of who Jesus is and what he came to do?

That's a challenging thought.

I don't know if you've ever had a relationship in life that you would describe as uniquely unified, like you have a bond with someone that is so tight that it's almost unbreakable.

I'm sure most of us have had something close to that, or at least I hope we have.

I've had several relationships that I would describe like that.

Um, a lot of times it's people you're related to.

Like, how many of you have siblings?

A show of hands, you have a sibling, okay?

How many of you love and hate your siblings?

Like there's a, yeah, okay, there we go.

You know how that is.

Man, I'm thinking about relationships where I've had unique unity, like a strong bond that nothing can break.

I thought about my little brother.

So shout out to my little brother Aaron.

He lives in Missouri.

Um, Aaron and I are super close.

He's uh six and a half years younger than me.

And when he came into my life, everything changed.

I mean, everything changed.

I love Aaron, and we grew up moving around a lot.

So I went to, gosh, I went to, let's see, um two schools in seventh grade, three schools in eighth grade, three schools in tenth grade.

And so we moved around a ton, and he and I were just really close, even though he was a lot younger than me.

We were close, but we were close like brothers, which means we tormented one another.

Right?

I don't know how many of you have a brother that you messed with or they messed with you, and it's a unique relationship.

Like we've done some horrible things to each other.

A lot of it was in good fun.

Like one time, I don't know how he did this, but he convinced me on a Saturday that I was late for school, even though it was Saturday.

He woke me up like at three in the morning.

I'll never forget.

He woke me up at three and he's like panicked.

He's like, Justin, we're late, we're late, we're late.

And I was like, What are you talking about?

It's Saturday.

He's like, No, no, no, we're late.

School's happening.

Mom, mom says, get in the shower, get in the shower.

He was so he was so committed to the the role that like he convinced me and I was like, okay, okay.

And I was like, he shepherded me into the shower and I turned the shower on and and then it hit me once the water hit.

I was like, wait, I know it's Saturday.

Like I'm certain that it's Saturday.

What in the world?

And then I hear him laughing and I was like, you jerk.

You know, like I I once conveiled him, uh I once convinced him that he murdered me.

Um he was like three, three and a half.

And so, yeah, I know, right?

That definitely did some psychological damage.

I am aware.

What happened was uh I made a matter, I can't even remember the situation, but he grabbed a pushpin.

There was like a pushpin that was on in my room.

I used to hang up posters and stuff of my favorite athletes, and so I must have had one laying around.

So he took a pushpin and he ran at me and he jammed it into my leg.

Like the whole thing.

It hurt.

I mean, it's like a mortal wound, but if you're not expecting that, or even if you are, I mean, just try it later, I guess.

But like, boom, all the way in.

And it was, it stuck.

And I screamed, but then I had a great idea.

You know?

Because he was only like three and a half, four years old.

I would have been ten at the time.

And so I just I just acted like I died.

And I had my eyes closed, I'll never forget this.

I remember him shaking me and being like, Justin?

Justin?

And then he started crying.

I know, I milked it.

And so I'd say for a solid minute, my three and a half, four-year-old brother was trying to figure out how do I tell mom that I killed my older brother?

You know.

And so we messed with each other a lot.

And if if anyone else, if like anyone else had come to my house and convinced me that it was Friday when it was Saturday and ruined my sleeping day, I would have been really mad.

That would have really strained our relationship.

If I had convinced anyone else that they had committed murder, they'd probably not be my friend anymore.

But there's something about that brother relationship where it just endured those things.

And we would do all kinds of stuff, like we would have fights where we would be at each other's throats, but then in a moment, when we realized that we might get in trouble, we would be like allies that no one could separate.

We got in a fight one time, and he pushed me into a door, and the door swung back and knocked a hole in the wall, and then instantly the fight stopped.

We're like, whoa, whoa.

What do we do?

And it was a door that went between our rooms, and we just decided if we never shut the door, mom will never see the hole.

And for two years we kept that door open.

For two years.

I mean, seriously, there might have been times where we shut it for a minute, but like we knew just the door stays open.

And mom would even be like, I just love how you guys just in and out of each other's rooms.

You guys are so close.

We're like, yeah, we love each other, mom.

You know.

We used to do stuff like that all the time.

Once, in fact, true story, and I'll I'll move on.

And I I think this is true.

I'm I can say this with a clear conscience, but I never like actually lit into my brother like fists until he was 12.

There were moments that I wanted to, but I was old enough.

I was always old enough that it was clear that I shouldn't.

But then when he was 12 years old and I was 18, he punched me in the ear really hard.

And I just decided he's old enough in that moment.

I don't know if you've ever been punched in the ear, but it is extremely painful, and you just get really mad, and so I just in a moment was like, yeah, and I just like punched him in the side pretty hard a few times.

The next day he came down the stairs, and I was in the kitchen with my mom and he had some bruises.

And mom's like, What happened to you?

And he went on, I fell down the stairs.

And it was clear that he was lying, but he covered for me, right?

And now what he what my mom didn't see was me being like, Oh, kill you.

No, I didn't do that.

Uh no, I was just like, and I owned it.

I said, Hey mom, I hit him.

And she's like, You hit your brother.

I was like, Yes, he hit me first.

It was one of those things.

But I'm just saying there was a unity in that relationship, and it's still there to this day.

Where because we're brothers and we went through a lot growing up and we love each other very much, we've endured a lot of a lot of stuff.

And even to this day, if he were to call me and say, Hey, this is something that's been bothering me, and you said something that really upset me, I would just be like, Man, I'm so sorry.

What do we need to do to patch this up?

Because we love each other that much.

I hope you have relationships like that.

Some of us don't, some of us have, and then they've still fallen apart somehow.

But what Jesus is saying as he prays is that we are supposed to have that level of unity and even deeper with fellow believers.

Like he prays that we would be as united together as the Father and the Son were united.

So we have phrases like, blood is thicker than water.

You know, family is supposed to be thick, but spirit should be even deeper than that.

Like we're called to live with a unity together.

And in this room, there's people that you've never met, but they have the same Holy Spirit inside of them that you have.

You'll spend the same, you'll spend eternity in the same place.

You have faith in the same God.

And we're called to have such love for one another and such unity that there's nothing in this world like it.

And it's actually the proof that Jesus is who he says he is.

And this, by the way, is something that scripture speaks to all the time.

In fact, there's few things that scripture is as strong in its stance against as division in the church.

And so we can go to Mark 3, for example.

This is an interesting story.

Jesus has done a miracle.

And it says that the teachers of religious law who'd arrived from Jerusalem said he is possessed by Satan, the prince of demons.

That's where he gets the power to cast out demons.

And Jesus called them over and responded with an illustration.

How can Satan cast out Satan?

He asked.

A kingdom divided by civil war will collapse.

And similar, similarly, a family splintered by feuding will fall apart.

And if Satan is divided and fights against himself, how can he stand?

He would never survive.

A kingdom divided can never survive.

And yet, here we have in the church, like holistically, you know, just thousands and thousands of factions and denominations who disagree.

That's what I love about us being, you know, I talk about this sometimes.

People ask, are you a non-denominational church?

And I'm like, yes, but we're also like an inter-denominational church.

Because we got people that grew up in all kinds of different backgrounds.

We're all recovering something.

Okay?

Some of us are recovering atheists.

How many recovering Baptists are in the room?

Like you're a recovering Baptist.

There you go.

Okay?

That's me.

How many recovering Catholics?

Any recovering Catholics?

Yeah?

Got a lot of us there?

Any recovering Pentecostals or anything like that?

A couple of those?

Okay, it's a joke.

Kind of.

Right?

No, like we all have these different backgrounds, and yet here we are, and we're united by Jesus.

Not the specific bent of our background.

And look, those traditions that you come from, in many ways, they all have immense value.

I am really grateful that I grew up in the culture that I grew up in, church-wise.

Because if you grew up as a Baptist, you're allowed to make fun of it, but say what you want to say.

There was a deep reverence for God's word.

And I learned scripture.

And if you grew up in a more charismatic church, or you know, Pentecostal, whatever word you want to use, you grew up to appreciate and understand the Holy Spirit.

And if you grew up in a more liturgical church, you understand the Father and the holiness of God in a way that others don't always understand and the value of tradition.

And here we get to come together and bring all of those experiences together, and the hope is that instead of being fractured and splintered like the church is in the world, we can be united and together.

But, you know, Jesus said a kingdom divided cannot stand.

And if a non-believer looked at the state of the Christian church in the world, I don't know if they would say, Man, they're so unified.

No petty disagreements, no divisions, they just get along so well, it would break Jesus' heart.

Romans 16, Paul writes, Now I make one more appeal.

This is as he's closing out Romans.

My dear brothers and sisters, watch out for people who cause divisions and upset people's faith by teaching things contrary to what you've been taught.

Stay away from them.

Such people are not serving Christ our Lord, they're serving their own personal interests by smooth talk and glowing words, they deceive innocent people.

We're supposed to watch out for anything that would cause division or any one that would cause division.

1 Corinthians chapter 1.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

And if you know the story of 1 Corinthians, this is so cool.

Because 1 Corinthians is written to the church at Corinth, and the Corinthians were crazy.

In fact, in ancient plays and dramas, if there was a character on stage from Corinth, they were always depicted as drunk.

Always.

Corinth was like the Las Vegas of its day.

And so, you know, you're at some play in the first century and someone comes up and they're a Corinthian and they're sloshing their words because, like, oh, the Corinthians.

Like that's how people saw them.

And if you read 1 Corinthians, it kind of tracks.

Because Paul's addressing some things going on in the church, and it is like bananas.

It's stuff that I am so glad as a pastor.

I've never had to be like, guys, cut out that stuff.

It's crazy stuff.

But Paul doesn't start with the salacious things that they're doing.

Here's what he actually starts with.

This is the number one priority he has when talking to the Corinthians.

He says, I appeal to you, dear brothers and sisters, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, to live in harmony with each other.

They're doing all kinds of stuff, and there's a lot of people in the church that are doing, like, they're almost having a hold my beer contest with sinning.

Like it's it's pretty intense.

But Paul doesn't start there.

He's like, I hear that there's division going on.

We got to address this first.

Let there be no divisions in the church.

Rather be of one mind, united in thought and purpose.

For some members of Chloe's household have told me about your quarrels.

My dear brothers and sisters, some of you are saying, Oh, I'm a follower of Paul.

Others are saying, I follow Apollos, or I follow Peter, or I follow only Christ.

Has Christ been divided into factions?

Was I, Paul, crucified for you?

Were any of you baptized in the name of Paul?

Of course not.

People were picking their favorites when it came to church leaders of the day and dividing into these factions.

And Paul's saying, stop it.

We all have one Lord, no division.

Titus chapter 3 says, Do not get involved in foolish discussions about spiritual pedigrees or in quarrels and fights about obedience to Jewish laws.

Titus 3 · chapter mention

These things are useless and a waste of time.

If people are causing divisions among you, give them a first and a second warning.

But after that, have nothing more to do with them.

For people like that have turned away from the truth, and their own sins condemn them.

He's saying, if people are causing divisions in the church, that's how intense we're supposed to feel about that.

One more.

Jude chapter one, talking about these people who are divisive.

They're grumblers and complainers, living only to satisfy their desires.

They brag loudly about themselves, they flatter others to get what they want.

But you, my dear friends, must remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ predicted.

They told you that in the last times there would be scoffers whose purpose in life is to satisfy their ungodly desires.

These people are the ones who are creating divisions among you.

They follow their natural instincts because they do not have God's Spirit in them.

If you don't have the Spirit, the only thing you can do is follow your impulses.

And that's just never going to lead you to a good place.

And Paul's saying that is the source of all this division.

And I'm not talking about this because we've got a bunch of division going on in the church that I've got to address.

Not that I know about, and if there is, knock it off.

But like I'm not aware of any right now.

I'm addressing this because we're going through John 17, and this is what Jesus is praying for.

We're supposed to value unity in a way that we just don't.

We are not, we are not taught as Americans, we're definitely not taught as modern Americans how to value unity.

Like we're good at division.

We are so good at it.

We've mastered it.

But we're supposed to be people who love one another so much that we refuse to let really anything get between us.

As I was processing and thinking through this, there was an author that came to my mind that I read for the first time when I was in college.

And I just have to say, um, you know, the cool thing is we we have Jesus.

That's why I follow Jesus.

Jesus is amazing.

There's no one that compares to him, and so it's okay to have people that you read or listen to and follow, even in some ways, that you know, follow like what they say, that are imperfect, because everyone's imperfect other than Jesus, right?

There's only one person that's ever died, and then said, could say to God the Father, I did everything that I was supposed to do, nothing that I wasn't supposed to do, everything that came out of my mouth, like it was all good.

And that's Jesus, no one else.

And sometimes we get kind of like the people Paul was talking to, we get led astray when we start following people who aren't Jesus a little bit.

Um so we gotta be careful with that.

That said, that said, there are people who have lived life and they've just lived it in such a way that you look at them and you go, I know they're not perfect, and I'm not gonna not gonna follow them instead of Jesus, but man, do they inspire me and they make me want to be like Jesus.

And this guy is one of those people.

And if you're a follower of Jesus, you gotta know this guy's story.

I don't have time to tell the whole thing, but his name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And if you don't know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I'm just saying you gotta know his story.

So here's a picture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He is a spiritual hero.

Um he was a pastor in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, and he was one of a very small number of Christian pastors who didn't simply keep quiet about what was happening in Nazi Germany.

We forget sometimes that Nazi Germany was a Christian place.

Martin Luther was German, the Lutheran Church originates in Germany, and so all the craziness that happened, all of the all of the racism and and the extermination of the Jewish people and all of that, that happened in a Christian nation.

And Bonhoeffer was one of very a very small number of pastors who didn't just decide to, you know, hey, let's let's we won't we won't endorse Hitler, but you know, we'll just kind of no.

Bonhoeffer decided we have to oppose him.

Like evil has to be opposed.

And it was a really troubling experience for him because he was extremely committed to nonviolence.

Like it was a huge thing in his life.

But Bonhoeffer felt like Hitler had to be stopped.

And so Bonhoeffer became part of this underground movement, this very small underground movement within Germany that was looking for an opportunity to oust Hitler.

And Bonhoeffer didn't do it through violent means.

Bonhoeffer was actually doing it as a pastor.

He actually started a seminary and was secretly teaching believers in Germany the truth and who Jesus is and why what was happening was wrong and evil.

But he was part of that same group nonetheless, and that that group actually did make an attempt on Hitler's life that failed not that long before the war was over, and they were caught, and Bonhoeffer, along with several others, were executed shortly before the end of World War II.

But while in prison, and before also, Bonhoeffer wrote a lot of books.

While in prison in Germany, because of his involvement with that group, he wrote a book called Life Together.

And it's an incredible book.

And it's kind of like a modern-day Paul, where he's in prison and he misses the community that he has with believers so much that he decides to write about it and help us understand it.

And in that book, Bonhoeffer reflects on the different types of community that we can have in this world and why the church is supposed to be so different.

And he says, you know, in this world we really have a couple of options.

We have spiritual community.

And that's what he talked about we have with believers.

We can only have that with believers.

And by the way, if you're here and you're not a believer, you haven't made that decision, that's not a knock on you.

It's just that if you've put your whole trust in Jesus, if you've decided that your entire hope in life is Jesus Christ and what he did for you on the cross and he's God and you're gonna worship him, there's just a there's a unity that you can have with people who share that same conviction that you just can't have with anybody else because it's so deep.

He says, spiritual community, that's what we're called to.

But what we often settle for, and this is what Bonhoeffer called psychological society.

That was his terms.

Super smart guy.

If you read his book, read it slowly, uses lots of big words.

Psychological society.

We might just call that society.

And he started comparing the two.

He said, here's what what he saw.

Spiritual community, true spiritual community, its foundation is the truth of God.

Its foundation is the truth of God.

What bonds us together is something deeper than our own opinion.

Or ideas, it is truth.

It is who Jesus is.

It is the reality of God Himself.

That's why we come together on Sundays to worship God, but also to open up His Word, because His Word is truth and we build our lives on it.

Even when we fall short of that, we're trying everything we can to build our lives on the truth of God.

He said, society, that kind of community, the lesser version, it's not built on truth, it's built on emotion.

It's built on feelings.

That's why society can get riled up so quickly.

He saw that happen, by the way.

Imagine being a Christian pastor in Nazi Germany and watching your nation get so fired up and follow someone like Hitler.

He understood very well how easy it was to play to the emotions of people.

But we don't have a connection that's just based on emotions.

It shouldn't be, at least.

It's based on a deeper thing, it's on truth.

Bonhoeffer talked about what the kind of love that these two different types of community have.

He said, spiritual community, the community that we have as believers, it's defined by the love of God.

This is called agape in the Greek language.

It's described for us beautifully in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verses 4 through 7.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7

When it says love here, it's not talking about romantic love.

It's not talking about the love you even have with a brother or a friend.

It's talking about the love that God has.

This is called agape love.

It says love is patient.

God's love is kind.

It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

God's love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, it always trusts, it always hopes, it always perseveres.

We are called to live with a love for one another that is all of those things that we don't keep records of wrongs, we don't keep track of who said what to us, we don't delight when someone struggles or fails.

We root for each other.

That love perseveres, that love endures through all the human stuff, it just endures through it.

It's a love built on forgiveness and self-sacrifice.

The kind of community you can have in the world that Bonhoeffer just described as society, it is not that.

It is not that.

It's built on something far more shallow.

It is shared opinions.

Like we love people who agree with us.

Like it's easy to love people who agree with you.

In fact, some of us are so good at understanding that that we've learned how to be really agreeable.

In fact, I had a friend years ago that was looking for a church and he found a church, and I was like, Well, tell me about this church.

And he goes, Oh man, it's awesome because I talked to the pastor after church and I brought up like 30 really important things that are important to me, and he agreed with every single one of them.

And I was like, dude, I don't agree with anyone on 30 things.

And I told him, I said, just be careful.

He's like, Why?

I said, Well, A, even if you agree with this guy on 30 things, like, I don't know how much you're gonna get challenged in a church where you already agree with everything.

You know what I mean?

So just think about that.

I said, but also that that's a huge sign to me that that guy is just really good at reading people.

Because I, again, I don't agree with, I mean, if we all of us got together and say, 30 things, make a list of 30 things, find someone that agrees with all 30, 30 for 30.

I mean, come on.

It's not happening.

I was like, he just might be a guy who's kind of good at reading people, and he told you what you wanted to hear.

I'm not saying that I'm not accusing him, I don't know the guy, so just be careful of that.

And be careful about building a relationship that's based on something as trivial as agreement, because eventually you're gonna disagree.

And what happens when you do?

Society, like that love that you can have apart from the church, uh, it's it's just built on shared opinions, shared interests, agreement, more shallow things, more emotional things.

He talked about what the leadership structures look like.

He said that in the in the church, as it should be, in the church, leaders are servants.

They help people and they pray for people.

They shouldn't seek to be honored.

And I, by the way, I am so grateful for how Stephen Susan, who started our church, built that into our DNA.

And some of you guys know this, like we don't use titles here, so I am Justin.

You can call me Justin.

You don't have to call me Pastor Justin.

It doesn't, if you do, if that's your tradition and it's hard for you not to do that, that's fine, but like just call me Justin.

Years ago, some somebody got a hold of our email list and tried to scam everybody, but in the scam email, some of you remember this, they said, sincerely, Pastor Justin McTear.

And everyone's like, that's not Justin.

Because I've never signed an email other than just Justin.

Um and I love that.

I love that that's how people were like, nah.

But you know, sometimes the church just becomes a place where everyone is is put on a pedestal and their titles and you know, their names on everything, and and you know, it's like like I'm so glad we don't have a sign in the front of our building that says Pastor Justin McTear.

I'm just really glad about that.

Because, you know, I like to be anonymous to some degree.

Uh it's just that's that's how Stephen Susan built it, and they actually built that off of Scripture.

Jesus said, Let no one call you father because we all have one father.

Let no one call you teacher, for we all have one teacher.

So we have roles, but not titles.

It's not a title to role, and that servant pastor or leaders, rather, pastors, whatever they are, in the church should be servants.

And so look, I'm saying this to you guys.

If you if you ever felt like my interaction with you, like I don't have a heart to serve you or help you, we got to talk about that.

And come find me, because I I will tell you, I love you guys.

I don't know all of you, because there's a lot of you, but I'm willing to know all of you.

And if you have something happening in your life, we want to help you, we want to serve you.

We have a whole team at our church that that's our our whole focus.

The leaders in the church are meant to be servants, but the leaders in the world, in society, they're they're all about charisma, it's all about power and influence.

It often becomes coercion and control.

It's marketing, it's all about getting you to follow them and do what they say.

And it usually is to serve their own interest in some way.

And he talks about the outcome.

He said, The outcome, this is so beautiful, the outcome of spiritual community through Jesus is freedom.

It's freedom.

That we love each other so much that we have enough trust to give one another freedom.

Where we say, yeah, I I love you enough to let you do your thing.

And and if that freedom leads to sin or it leads to heartbreak, well, you know what we do with that?

We forgive.

We have accountability, we go, hey, that's not, that doesn't line up with the truth that we're built on.

And we should have the humility to say, I'm sorry, but we have accountability, we have forgiveness, we have love, but we have freedom.

The society of the world, it's all about control.

Like you toe the line, you say the right things, you have the right opinions, you post the right stuff on your social media or else.

Like you're out.

And so Bonhoeffer sitting in prison, sitting in a German prison, awaiting execution by the Nazi Party for the sin of opposing Hitler, Bonhoeffer misses that community.

He says, There's nothing like it in the world.

And he pleads with believers to seek that out and not settle for just the lesser version of community that society offers.

And what's sad is that sometimes church becomes like that.

I mean, just out of curiosity, some of us that have grown up in church, how many of you have ever been part of a church split?

Like a church actually split apart?

Was it over something stupid?

I was part of one.

There was a church that I was at when I was in high school, and we had a worship pastor, and this was like, you gotta understand, how many, how many 90s Christians in the room?

Like you were a Christian in the 90s?

All right, there's a comedian named Nate Bargatzi who said that 90s Christian was the most Christian that Christian can be.

I don't know what that means, but it's funny.

And it's just because it was like the era of Christian bookstores, right?

And Christian music and everything was like Christian was like an adjective.

So, oh, you go to a Christian school and you listen to Christian radio stations, you go to the Christian bookstore, you eat Christian cookies.

That's not a thing, but I was just thinking Christian, it was like putting Christian in front of everything.

Um and so I was at a church and in the 90s, you know, it was just it was an interesting time, and so our worship pastor started doing less hymns and more praise and worship music, which at the time was Our God is an awesome God, basically.

If you know that song, it's a song that can never end.

That's a song that can go on for hours.

You don't know.

If you know that song, you know it ends.

Our God is an awesome God.

Our God is an awesome.

You go, okay, we're doing it again.

We're doing it again.

Okay.

So there's too much of that happening.

And I remember being a high school student and hearing the pastor who fired our worship pastor because he was doing too much praise and worship music.

And our pastor actually said this on stage.

He said, and you know what?

I'm not a fan of praise and worship music.

And the very rebellious, snarky teenager version of me, I remember having the thought, I don't think you're the audience of worship music.

You know?

Like, I don't think that's and our church really fractured, and it was because of musical preference.

The pastor didn't like the songs, and so he fired the worship pastor.

Like, it's so dumb.

It's so dumb.

Some of us have been a part of churches that split for really petty reasons.

Someone got their feelings hurt, and so they're like, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna take everybody with me.

That would break the heart of Jesus like few things.

Like Paul, if he was writing a letter to a church like that, if there was crazy stuff happening like in Corinth, he wouldn't start there.

He'd be like, I hear you guys aren't getting along.

I hear there's there's fractions and divisions among you.

We got to address this.

And so as Bonhoeffer is discussing all of this, I want to share a quote, and then we're gonna kind of wrap up because this is where this is what wrecked me this week.

And I kind of hope it wrecks all of us.

Okay, here we go.

No, in the in the good way.

I want you to think about this, it is brilliant.

So Bonhoeffer wrote, the person who loves their dream of community will destroy community.

But the person who loves those around them will create community.

The person who loves their dream, their idea of community will destroy it.

But the person who loves people will build community.

See, some of you, I use the church analogy, but we'll talk about other illustrations.

Some of you who were in a church where that happened, that that's what happened.

Is someone had a certain idea of what this ought to be, and someone else didn't live up to that idea, their idea, and so because they love their idea of what the community should be so much, they loved it more than the actual people in the community, they were willing to create division and pain in people to uphold their idea.

Does that make sense?

If you love your idea of how things ought to be more than you love people, you will actually destroy community and relationship.

And this applies to like everything.

So let's say, let's let's use some fun examples that will not uh be close to anyone's heart.

Let's say, for example, you have a child who gets married.

And you have a certain idea of what the family is gonna look like.

You know, like when you have a kid that gets married, now you're an in-law, everyone just dreams of being an in-law, right?

In-laws are never synonymous with that's never used in a negative sense, is it?

Like you, you, everyone, if I said, hey, guess what you get to do today?

Go to your in laws, you're like, woo, party, right?

No, like it's the tough thing.

When families come together and you're an in-law, right, it's your child that's getting married, you might have certain ideas in your mind of how this is gonna go.

And how this new family is gonna integrate with your family, and how they're definitely gonna do Thanksgiving and Christmas the way that you do Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Because, of course, your child loved your Thanksgiving and Christmas so much that they would never deviate from your perfect Thanksgiving, like, right.

That or you have this idea in your mind of what your son-in-law or your daughter-in-law is gonna be like and how they're gonna integrate with your family, and they're never ever going to in any way pull your sweet, innocent child who would never do this of their own accord, away from your family in some way.

And how many families, honestly, all jokes aside, all sarcasm aside, how many families have been splintered and ripped apart because a parent had a certain idea of how it was going to look.

And when this young couple that's kind of figuring things out didn't match that idea, the claws come out.

And there's drama and there's division and there's pain and there's hurt that often leads to years of division in the family.

Because someone loved their idea of a relationship more than they love the people in the relationship.

Take marriage.

Marriage always lives up to our expectations, right?

Right?

It's like it's like it's why when you watch, I was talking to our kids about it the other day, we were talking about like marriage and how marriage is interesting and difficult.

And you see movies, especially like uh fairy tale type movies, and it says and they lived happily ever after.

As an adult, you're like, how?

Like, how is that even possible?

They just went through an unbelievably traumatic experience together.

They've only known each other for a month.

How on earth are they set up to live happily ever after?

They're gonna need counseling, they're gonna need so much counseling.

This couple is doomed, right?

You can't live happily ever after.

No.

But like when you get married, you have an expectation of marriage, you have an expectation of your spouse.

And very often, we love our idea of marriage more than we love the other person, if we're honest, in our flesh.

And so when that other person isn't living up to your idea, you attack.

Sometimes it's passive-aggressive, sometimes it's just complaining, sometimes it's direct.

But then we create this culture in our marriage where we essentially say, it's your job to live up to my idea of what marriage should be.

And that is a recipe for disaster.

It will destroy relationship, it will destroy community.

If you love your idea of marriage more than you love the person you're married to, it won't work.

It won't work.

Take even your children.

Those of you who have kids.

Look, I'll just be honest.

I got a I got a teenager, I got a high school student.

And you know, it's it's great.

Uh, he's awesome.

He's he is, I'm super excited to beat him today in the three-point contest.

Um, I'm super excited.

I'm so proud of him.

But our our relationship, it's not what I thought it would be when he was a little kid.

You know what I mean?

And by the way, I pray for my kids because they get used as examples a lot, which is hard.

But we do have an understanding.

I will pay him$20 today because I'm using him as an example.

So he gets paid for this.

We have, yeah.

I have to pay an extra$10 if I use a picture, so I'm not using a picture.

It's just two.

That's true.

That's true.

That is an actual thing in our family.

Um, a guy gave me advice to do that years ago, it's worked.

But you know, when he was younger, like I had this idea of what our relationship would be like.

You know, one of the things that I pictured was just sharing movies.

It's a silly thing, but I love movies.

And I was like, oh man, I'm gonna love, like, when he's old enough, we're gonna watch some of the movies that I like.

You know, he was a kid, some of these movies, he can't watch these movies because, you know, he's just a kid, and these are man movies, you know.

And you know what he told me a couple months ago?

He said, I don't like movies.

I'm like, you can't not like movies.

You can't just not like all movies.

It's like, yeah, they're just too long.

And so I'm like, there's these awesome movies that I was saving for years.

Like, we're gonna sit down, we're gonna watch.

Like, I've I've never been able to sit down with my son and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Okay?

Like, I know.

And I've if I sat down, here's the first question you asked.

He's like, How long is it?

I'm like the length of a movie.

And he'll go, uh, I don't want to.

I never dreamed, I didn't, when he was four years old, he'd be like, I can't wait to watch YouTube Shorts with my son.

You know, just 15-second clip after 15-second clip.

Feels like you're on cocaine after a few minutes, you know.

I just can't wait.

By the way, I've never been on cocaine, it's just what I imagine.

Okay.

Just gonna throw that out there.

It's just not what I thought it would be.

And and he's he's an introvert, and I'm not.

So when I pick him up from school, I'm like, how was your day?

Good.

How are your classes?

Fine.

Like he only communicates to me in one to three word sentences, and they're all one-syllable words.

I am tired.

It was good.

Can we eat?

It's like everything, it's all that.

And I just imagine, oh man, we have so many shared interests.

We're just gonna, we're gonna talk, we're gonna talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Nope.

And all jokes aside, I I have I have at times in the last year, especially.

I think especially when it comes to matters of like respect and how I imagined a teenage son would speak to his father.

I mean, surely, after all that I've done for him, you know.

But see, when we start thinking like that, I mean you think about that with anyone.

I mean, if you're the that's what the whole in-law situation is, after all that I did for them, that's what the marriage thing is, after all that I do for them, surely they will, right?

We start to idolize that idea.

And I've actually created division in my relationship with my children because they're not living up to the idea that I had of what our relationship would look like.

And it leads to control.

So I try to control them.

This is how you will talk to me, and there's a certain level of that that's appropriate for sure.

But it doesn't work, it just pushes people away.

That's the thing about Jesus, he loves us more than the idea of us.

That's why he loves the church, which by the way, if someone is like a skeptic on church, and if you're here today, even you came with a friend and you're like, man, this church thing, there's all like there's so many hypocrites in the church, correct.

There's tons of us.

Some of us are even on staff.

Because we can't live up to this day in and day out.

It's really hard.

We fall short.

And there's been so many scandals in the history of the church.

Like there have been legitimate, horrible scandals in the history of the church.

Absolutely true.

It seems like every week there's a there's like, oh, another one.

That's embarrassing.

And yet Jesus still loves the church.

He loves it.

He describes the church as his bride in scripture, and he hasn't filed for divorce.

He's still in love with the church because he loves us more than the idea of us.

Does that make sense?

He loves you more than the idea of you.

Meaning that when you fall short in your relationship with God, when you sin, when you struggle, when you make mistakes, he still loves you.

Truly.

So what if we loved like that?

What if we valued community like that?

In fact, worship team, you can make your way up.

We got a couple people getting baptized.

I'll try to land this plane.

Let's read what his words were one more time.

John 17, 20 through 23.

I'm praying not only for these disciples, but for all who will ever believe in me through their message.

I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one.

He wants us to have a taste of what his relationship with the Father is.

As you are in me, Father, and I am in you.

And may they be in us, so that the world will believe you sent me.

I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one.

I am in them, you're in me.

May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.

He loves us as much as he loves Jesus.

And our love for one another is supposed to remind us of that.

And so here's, I guess, what that's kind of a different message.

I'll say it like this I love you guys.

I truly love you guys.

And I hope we love each other.

We don't have to agree on everything.

In fact, there's gonna be all kinds of things that we don't agree on.

In fact, when churches go off track, it's because they start looking less like the spiritual community that Bonhoeffer described, and they start looking more like the society where it's just shared opinions and emotions, and it makes me feel good, and that person made me mad, so I'm out, you know.

Take my ball and leave.

That kind of stuff.

But we're supposed to love each other more than we love the idea of each other.

And that's important in a church.

Because I promise you, there are people sitting around you that do not agree with you, and you'd be shocked to know all the things they disagree with you on.

Like you assume, you look at them, you're like, ah, I have an idea of this person.

And then they say something one day at lunch, and you're like, oh no.

I totally disagree with that.

But what Jesus says is that if you can agree that Jesus is the Son of God, that should give us this like, I gotta love them.

I'm compelled to.

I have to.

We have to love each other more than we love the idea of each other.

And in your families, do that.

Love your spouse more than you love the idea of your spouse.

And if your spouse isn't living up to the idea of your spouse, I'm not saying you shouldn't have conversations and you shouldn't say, hey, can we talk?

Because there's some things that seem off.

Like, do that.

But don't forsake love because things don't match your expectations.

I'd I legitimately had to apologize to a couple people in my family this week as I prepared this message.

I had to talk to my wife, I had to talk to my oldest son and say, hey, listen, kind of had a crisis this week preparing this.

I, in some ways, I have I've loved the idea of us more than you, and I've caused division because I've been frustrated when you haven't matched that.

I had to just say that.

So be willing to say that.

Love your kids more than you love the idea of your kids.

Love your kids' spouses more than you love the idea of them.

Like love the world more than you love the idea of it.

Love one another so much that the world in general looks at you and goes, that's unlike anything else.

We don't see anything like that.

And you're like, yeah, that's the church.

Same spirit.

Blood is thicker than water, but spirit is deeper than that, and we gotta love like that.

So with that said, let's take Lord's Supper together.

Because we're told in Scripture that we love because He first loved us.

This is what unites us.

Not a tiny piece of bread.

But this is what unites us.

Jesus.

This is his body.

This represents his body.

This represents his sacrifice.

This represents his life.

And he gave his life for us.

And he gave his life so that individually we could know God.

We could know our Father.

We could be restored to our Father.

But it wasn't just each of us individually.

He gave this to us so that collectively we could live in such perfect unity.

We love each other so much that we can look past all the human stuff.

And love each other in a deeper way.

So the way we treat one another, the way that we love one another, this honors him.

And I don't know about you, but I want to honor him.

So let's pray together.

Father God, we thank you for sending your son.

And Jesus, we thank you for dying on the cross for us.

And you actually said that no greater love is there than this, than to lay down one's life for one's friends.

You laid down your life for us.

You consider us friends.

You brought us into your family.

And now we know through you, Jesus, that God the Father loves us just as much as he loves you.

And that blows our minds and it doesn't seem possible.

But maybe that's because we've been taught by the world to love the idea of someone less than we actually love them.

And you don't look at things like that.

You love us as we are.

Help us love each other the same way.

As we take this bread, we're reminded of what you did for us, but we're reminded of why you did it as well.

And you didn't just do it to wash away our sins, you did it to unite us together and to create a new family and a new community on this earth, your church.

We thank you for that, Lord.

Let's take the bread.

And now the juice.

Jesus, we thank you for this juice.

This is your blood poured out as an offering.

It covers us, it cleanses us, but it unites us.

It unites us.

Because of your blood being spilled, we have the same Savior.

We have the same God.

We have the same Father in heaven.

We're part of the same family.

We are actually blood.

We're blood.

We're a deeper kind of family than even our earthly families can be.

Because we have your spirit in us and your blood covers us.

So help us treat each other like that.

We pray this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Let's drink the juice.