Together - COMMUNITY

Amen.

Hey, thank you, worship team.

We guys put your hands together and just thank our worship team for leading us this morning.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Pastor Phil.

All right, good morning.

How are we doing?

All right.

All right.

Well, I um preparation for the sermon this week.

I want to tell you something I convictionally believe about this sermon.

Um, I I I believe that this is going to be one of the most important sermons that you hear in your life.

I know that's like that that's a big way to start a sermon.

I get it.

Um, I think that's because what we're talking today about is the idea of community.

And you and I live in a world where it feels like relationships are harder than ever.

And so we've got a problem that we've got to solve.

And our problem is how do we fight for relationships in a world and in a culture that seems to be driving us more and more towards isolation.

Here's my proposition for you to consider this morning.

You cannot have a flourishing life without rich relationships.

Okay.

That's my, you know, entertain that idea in your mind.

Like think it, weigh it, look at it from different sides.

You cannot have a flourishing life without rich relationships.

I I would guess like if you had a friend and um you called them and asked them, hey, how are things going?

And they said the following.

They were like, great.

Haven't left the house in six weeks.

Haven't actually talked or seen another human being.

You are the first person I've talked to in six weeks.

I don't really go outside.

I'm not really around other people.

You know, I get all everything I need delivered, but life is great.

I am flourishing.

You would first be curious, and then you would hang up and say, hey, I need somebody close to them to do a wellness check.

Okay, because this is not good.

Like we all know inherently that we cannot flourish apart from rich relationships with other people.

And yet we're living in a world where the current of the culture is pulling us further and further along to isolation.

You know, loneliness can actually be invisible.

Let me tell you, um, this Monday I um was at the orthopedist and in the waiting room because I decided the best way to turn 40 would be tearing something in my knee.

And um, so I'm, you know, got an MRI, I'm waiting in the waiting room, and I'm like working, you know, bring you into the life of a preacher.

You're always working on a sermon.

A friend of mine asks, hey, is this sermon done?

I'm like, the sermon's never done.

Okay, like it's always in process.

So I'm sitting in the waiting room, I'm reading all this research about community, and I'm like, okay, well, I know that one of the enemies of community is this, you know, little device that we all hold in our pockets.

Okay, so I'm gonna put my phone away, and I'm just gonna be aware of what's going on around me, okay?

Give myself the opportunity to have a conversation or whatever.

So guess what I do?

I put the phone down, I look around the waiting room, guess what I see?

Everybody else there is still on their phone.

So um then, you know, I just okay, I'm looking around.

Um, they have this little TV um that's scrolling stuff.

And um, you guys in the medical community, if you have any influence at your places of work, put on something interesting for us while we're waiting for y'all.

It would be great.

And so there's not sports or like home improvement, it's a bunch of these slides, you know, these advertisements for ever other medical services.

And um, then something came up that caught my attention.

It was basically uh all about loneliness, these slides.

And there were these three questions.

Some of you like are like nodding right now, maybe that's your hospital system, I don't know.

Um, but there are all these questions that were like scrolling around about slides that basically try to help people self-assess whether or not they are lonely.

Like they're asking, like, do you feel?

And people are like, wait a second, I do feel that.

You know, first if they were just asked, Are you lonely?

People would say, No, I'm good.

You know, I feel great.

And then they ask all these questions, revealing, wait a second, I actually am lonely.

You know, so I'm over there like writing a sermon on community, at least in my mind, looking around, and I'm saying, Oh, this there, there, there's there's a problem that we all have is that we can be lonely and not know it.

I think most of us either are or are in danger of becoming a person who used to have a lot of good friends.

If I were to do a keep the medical kind of image in your mind, we were to do a relationship checkup.

And I were to ask you, how are your relationships doing?

How would you how would you say they're doing?

Listen, we live in a world, we live in a cultural current that is pulling us.

We talked about this week one of this series, more and more towards isolation, and yet we know that we're never gonna flourish unless we're in an environment of rich relationships.

All right, here's a stat I was just curious about.

Um from 2020 to today, to the best of my you know limited ability, 140 million Americans have sold their homes and moved.

Guys, can you think about that?

That's like 30 to 40 percent of our overall population.

So, what happens when you sell your home and you move?

You don't move your community with you.

You have to start over.

Forty percent of our country is walking around having to reinitiate relationships to some degree.

Um, let me, I'm just kind of curious.

Let me get to know you a little bit.

How many of you guys in the last six years, my hands up, have moved?

Let me see your hands.

You guys want to look around the room?

When it comes to this topic of community that we're looking at from Acts chapter two, I just think like this is this is God speaking to us right in our situation.

So let me give you a little bit of background.

We, Harbor City, we're in this series called Together, and for five weeks, we're looking at six verses in Acts chapter two that describe the life of the earliest church.

And we've been asking ourselves questions about what God is saying to us about this church because one of the things that is so true and evident about this church is that they were a church that hears our word, that they were a church that was together.

And isn't together such a beautiful word?

Can you just think back to your middle school days?

To being maybe your new student in middle school and you walk into the cafeteria and you look around and you say, Where am I gonna sit?

And maybe you had a friend that you could sit with and you felt what?

Belonging.

You felt together.

But maybe you didn't and you sat alone.

You know what I've found is we're not middle schoolers anymore, but there's still a lot of us who are sitting alone.

We need to hear what God says to this passage.

Can we put up the um slide with like the gospel and the kind of the wheel thing here?

Um we're looking at this passage through five different lenses as we walk through it together, okay?

Week one, you guys, if you were here, you know we talked about the message of the gospel, that the gospel is the good news of the the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and what that means for all of us.

That's the gospel, the good news, okay?

That the gospel we said creates community.

As a matter of fact, if you remember, our through line for this series is that Jesus did not just die to save you from sin.

Remember?

He died to save you into a community.

And so we talked about that week one.

That's the message of the gospel.

We saw last week how when we believe the gospel, it creates us, it gives us a new way of worshiping.

And it gives us actually a shared worship.

We said last week, one of our big statements was that shared worship creates shared community.

And so when we believe the gospel, we worship.

And when we worship, we begin to have commonality with people that we would never have commonality with.

And that creates community.

That's what we're looking at this week.

We'll see, just to give you a little preview for the next two weeks, we're gonna see, and we'll even see this week a little bit, how community creates in us generosity and how generosity fuels the mission.

Okay, that's that's our framework for why we're walking through this, because what we're this is not just a series on being together.

This is a series on the very purpose of the church.

The very purpose of our church, to hear and believe the gospel, to worship God and Him alone, to do this in an environment of community, to express the love of God through generosity, to allow that generosity to fuel missions.

So places like Iran can hear the word of God and places like every, every every borough of Greater Charleston can hear the good news of the gospel.

This this is this is a this is a series about who we are.

So as we look at this passage again through this lens of community, I want to go ahead and give you up front my sermon in a sentence.

Okay, if you get a call and have to leave, if you just have this idea, you'll get the main gist of what I'm talking about.

Okay, you ready?

This is my sermon in a sentence.

You ready?

You were made to belong, but you will only experience the community that God made you for if you give yourself to it.

Okay?

You were made to belong.

But you'll only ever experience the community that God made you for if you give yourself to it.

So the whole point of the sermon.

I have an agenda.

It's to get you to give yourself to the family of God.

Acts chapter 2, beginning in verse 42.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And they devoted themselves.

Who's the they the they is the church.

That the 3,000 plus the 120 at the beginning of Acts, who all believed the gospel, the church, they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

We're gonna talk about those.

All four of those things are four different practices that the church does together.

They're not just A, they are the.

Verse 43, and all came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.

That all is a sense of worship, this sense of being before God Himself.

Verse 44, and all who believed were together.

Church, repeat after me, and all who believed were together.

That's where we get our series title, together.

That's what we're talking about.

And all who believed, believed what?

Believed the gospel.

Remember previous in Acts chapter 2, and all who believed were together, and here it is, and had all things in common.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

I'm going to talk about that here in just a second.

Verse 45.

And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need.

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.

What was the result?

And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Let me do this here, just to give you a little framework.

I'm going to point out some observations about this text, and then I'm going to walk through five different things that this text is showing us that that means for us as we pursue community.

All right, observation number one here, verse 42.

All right, the community is a community that's devoted.

Did you see that?

And they devoted.

They made it a regular practice.

That word devoted is a devoted is a Greek word.

That's it's it's been used for when a boat is tied to a dock, that it's tethered, that it's tied to something.

So this community is tethering themselves to these corporate practices, devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, the breaking of bread, the fellowship and the prayers.

Okay, that's uh detail number one.

Observation or detail number two here.

Um, the it's not fellowship in general, it's a term called the fellowship.

In Greek, it's it's a word called koinanea.

It's a much richer definition of the fellowship that may come to your mind when you think of like a fellowship dinner of just a bunch of people gathering together around food and being social.

It's not less than that, but it's more than that.

The word that's being described, this koinanea, is this idea of shared participation, that the individual is a part of the community and the community is a part of the individual.

It's this rich, rich relationship.

Matter of fact, my you know, if I go all the way back to my undergraduate Bible class on Acts, my professor said over and over again, everything else that unfolds out of Acts happens because of koinanea.

Okay.

So that is the fellowship.

Those who who became Christians devoted themselves to the fellowship.

So, in other words, not just services, but to the people of the fellowship.

You follow?

Everybody with me?

9 30, just nod with me a little bit.

Okay.

So I know, okay, great.

Um, keep going to verse 42.

Um, even the prayers were a shared rhythm.

The prayers didn't refer to just private prayers that individuals prayed, you know, in a personal quiet time or rhythm that they had in their home.

The prayers um is a reference to the Jewish practice of prayer at the temple at the third and sixth and ninth hour.

And so the the early church is dedicating themselves to praying together.

Listen, this is a whole little side tangent.

All right, but I need to ask you the question: how much in your life would change if you began to devote yourselves to praying together with other believers?

All right, let's keep going.

All right, look at verse 44 through 45.

Um, sorry, let me go back.

Their devotion was to a regular rhythm in their calendar.

Uh I had a little fun with this, and I'm I'm apologizing my fault, I don't have it for you guys, but um I was I I threw in this passage to Chat GPT and I said, Hey, if you had to create a calendar for a person in this church, what do you think their average week would look like?

It was just kind of a little exercise I did.

And it was just like I was looking at Sunday and Monday and Tuesday, and all these things that were present, the breaking of bread in each other's homes, the meeting others' needs through generosity, the devoting themselves to the prayers, devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, what it became a rhythm that life was lived around.

I love that image.

Verse 44 through 45.

Um, it's it's so interesting here.

Together becomes economic.

Now, let me tell you, um, when you see the phrase, and all who believed were together and had all things in common, all the capitalists in the room are like, no, like this sounds terrible.

What is this?

An abolishing of private property?

And listen, I did a study on this this week where I found something I never heard before.

I'm gonna share it with you.

That that is that's one, that's not at all the prescription here.

This is more of the language of family, right?

Like if you have somebody in your family who has a significant need, can't pay their hospital bills, and you have the means to pay those hospital bills for you sharing what you have with them.

That's not that that's the language of family.

The second thing that I found out this week is that there um was a Luke, Luke, the author of Acts here, is borrowing on the language of a Greek proverb.

Uh, it's a proverb that's attributed different versions of it to writers like Pythagoras, to Cicero, to uh Aristotle, and others.

And the proverb simply goes like this.

Listen to this.

Friends have all things in common.

Isn't that just interesting?

Let that hit you a little bit.

Chew on it.

Friends have all things in common.

Now listen, you know, you know that that doesn't mean that friends are identical.

That's not what friends are.

What what it's that that proverb is getting at this idea that true friendship, true love between one person and another is so deep that any possession that one would have might as well be at the disposal of the other.

Friends have all things in common.

Now, listen, again, a little nerdy, but follow me here.

In the Greek world, the highest form of love was friendship.

You know, in the modern world, our highest form of love is erotic love or eros or romance.

But that wasn't true in the Greek Greek world.

As a matter of fact, you know, Aristotle has some version of a quote that says, the life without friendship is not a life worth living.

So friendship was like the epitome in Greek thought.

And when they say friends have all things in common, it's supposed to be this defining statement about the ultimate human relationship.

Now, do you see what Luke is doing?

Do you see?

Do you follow?

What Luke is saying is what I see you Greek thinkers that you think is the ultimate human relationship, I'm going to raise you.

Because what's described right here is a deeper form of koinania, of fellowship, of community than even friendship.

It's a community that's that is bound around a shared Lord.

The community of the early church was deeper even than friends, so that people who were strangers with one another but only had Christ in common shared all things, they had all things in common.

Do you see it?

What we're seeing, the picture that Luke is writing is he's showing us that this community here in Acts chapter 2 is restored humanity.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

It's a glimpse of restored humanity.

It's a preview of the coming kingdom.

Let me tell you what I mean by that, okay?

If you read through the storyline of the Bible, we're gonna stop, make some stops in Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3.

We stop in Genesis 1.

One of the things that you as you read is God created everything, and when he did, he said that it was good regularly.

God made, he said it was good.

God made, he said it was good.

Genesis chapter 1, we get through it.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Everything's good.

We get to Genesis 2 and we hear these words come out of God's mouth.

It is not good.

Now, what do you suspect God is saying in Genesis chapter 2 is not good?

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

Anybody know?

It was not good that the man was what's the word?

Alone.

Now, remind me, because sometimes I forget.

Was this before sin entered the world or after?

Genesis 2.

Before.

Okay.

This is big.

So you're telling me that man, an unbroken fellowship with his creator, completely sinless, still needed other people.

You were made for community.

Um let me just give you a recommendation um for a book that I had the privilege of reading this week.

Um one of, by the way, uh one of our college students, uh the first sermon uh two weeks ago was like, hey, have you have you read this book?

A lot of what you're saying comes from this book.

I was like, No, I've never read it.

Picked it up.

I was like, this guy's saying everything I want to say, but better and truly better.

Um this is a book called Made for People.

It's by a guy named Justin Early.

And it is, it is phenomenal.

If you want a fully fledged working out of this idea that you are made for other people and what it should look like theologically and practically in your life, it blends both so well.

Highly, highly commend this.

Um you should leave here and run to the nearest bookstore and buy this.

And the second that you buy it, you should call a friend and say, we need to read this together.

Like it's that important.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, it's not.

It's the right word in the right time.

And again, the whole idea he's just drawing on is the biblical idea that you were made for other people.

Now, what happens in Genesis 3?

Genesis 3 is the account of sin entering the world.

That Adam and Eve, our first parents, rebel against the holy God and they sin.

And what's the effect of their sin, church?

What do they do?

They hide.

You know, think about this.

You can think about when we're made before God to have a holy and righteous relationship with him, and then when we begin to sin, we are filled with shame.

You know, sin is I've done something wrong.

Shame is I am something wrong, which makes us want to withdraw from community, from relationship with God.

Do you see it?

And so when Adam and Eve sinned against a holy God, and God saw them, and they they felt that guilt, their first instinct is the most human of all instincts is to hide.

Because why?

Because I cannot be seen and truly known and rejected.

Isn't that so human?

Isn't that the reason that we flee community at times?

We hide from community because we know it's like what what will happen to me, to my well-being, if somebody really sees me who really knows me, and then utterly rejects me.

We're talking about the goodness of community, isn't that the pain of community?

But what we see it's happening in Acts chapter 2 is God has restored a group of 3,120 people to himself relationally, right?

Acts 2 · chapter mention

I want you to See the theologically what's happening.

Their relationship with God has been broken.

They have sinned before a holy God.

They confess their sins.

They repent.

They receive forgiveness.

They're filled with the Spirit.

Their relationship with God is restored.

And that immediately leads in the exact same chapter chapter to doing what?

To restore their relationships with other people.

Do you see it?

God first reconciles us to Himself and then brings us into a community, the family of God, where over time and through relationship, we are reconciled to each other.

How do you flourish?

You're going to flourish through rich relationships.

And that begins.

Here, let's get into it.

That begins by believing the gospel, okay?

I talked about this a lot week one, so I'm going to try to go relatively fast with this.

First of all, let me show you what I'm doing here.

You guys can give me feedback of whether you like this or it works or whatever.

I'm trying to make a case of what's happening in Acts chapter 2, and I'm trying to build one idea on the other.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And so I've designed some slides to try and help you see that.

If this is helpful, tell me because I'll keep doing it.

If it's not helpful, I won't.

Okay.

So can you throw up the um uh the image with the table and the five things?

Okay, great.

So image of the table is this idea of fellowship.

That's supposed to represent good fellowship.

What we're gonna see is we're gonna see the foundation of fellowship that God works in his church through progressively through this passage.

Okay, we're gonna start with number one, that the gospel creates community.

Okay.

Number two, we're gonna see that the community begins to devote itself to these shared practices that we've talked about.

All right.

Number three, we're going to see that those shared practices create a shared life together.

Make sense?

All right.

Number four, we're gonna see that when people are sharing their life together, what's the natural result?

They open their hands.

They learn to be generous with one another, right?

Okay.

And then number five, we're gonna see that that generosity actually works as a reinforcement to strengthen belonging to the community.

All right, that's where we're going.

Number one, belief in the gospel brings you into a community.

Verse 44, again.

And all who believed were together.

Okay.

Do you see the sequence?

They believe, they're together.

All right, Christianity knows nothing of solitary religion or solitary spiritual practice.

To be saved into a relationship with the Father is to be saved into a relationship with brothers and sisters in the faith.

God doesn't have thousands or millions of single family, single, single-child homes.

You with me?

When you're saved into the family, you're brought into relationship into community.

And we see that lived out right here in Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

All who believed were, say it with me, together.

Okay?

Let's just try that again, okay?

Because I felt alone there.

All right.

And all who believed were together.

There it is.

And they had all things in common.

Jesus did not just die to save you from sin, he died to save you into community.

And listen, you need community in your life because community is going to be the vehicle God uses to make you like himself.

You need to read your Bible and you need more than your Bible.

You need to pray and you need more than prayer.

You need other people in your life.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote kind of the classic book on what I'm talking about here, a book called Life Together.

He was a German pastor and theologian.

He was actually caught up in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Fascinating story.

But he wrote this book about Christian community, really in the midst of persecution.

One of the things that he said is this is amazing.

The word of God is truer when it's in the mouth of a friend.

Isn't that interesting?

The word of God is truer in the mouth of a friend.

You need community to help you believe because sometimes you need somebody who knows you enough and knows the Bible enough to be able to bring the truth of God to your life in a way where it sees you and it helps you and it builds you up.

The gospel creates community.

We were made to be known.

And we live in a world that can simulate what it's like to be known.

You know, I don't, I'm not on social media.

My wife has a Facebook account every now and then.

I jump on it, and um, we see like some person's post about that we knew like 15 years ago.

The modern world can simulate connection.

We we can act like we actually know what's going on in so-and-so's life because we know what they ate at some vacation that they were on yesterday in Nashville.

And we can leave thinking that we're actually connected to that person, but it's just a simulation.

It's not real.

No real relationship has been exchanged.

I don't really know them.

They don't really know me.

You felt it.

How many of us have walked into church, seen 20 people we know, talked to five or six, and walked out the door, and not a single person knows that our dad just got diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

We live in a world that simulates connection but can never replace community.

And yet it is the belief in the gospel that brings us into a community.

Listen, um here, uh let me let me keep going here.

When we are brought into a community, that community shares life together.

Number two.

Gospel brings us into community.

Number two, community shares life together.

All right, did you see back in verse 42 that the the ever all who believed they devoted themselves to these practices?

The apostles' teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers.

Church for them, I love this.

I heard this this week.

Church for the early church, if you were to go up and say, Hey, I want to come to your church, what's the address?

They're like, Oh, we got lots of addresses.

Uh we meet at the temple, but we also meet at people's houses.

Church had two addresses, the temple courtyard and the kitchen.

Don't you love that?

And so community shares life together.

When you engage in these practices, you engage in the life of other people.

Um, I love this image, we're gonna throw this up of an aspen grove.

I don't know if you've ever been walking out in the woods and you see an aspen tree, but um I don't know if you know this, but an aspen tree is never a single organism.

If you were to actually look underneath the surface, all the aspen roots are actually tied together.

The root system is together, which means that if there's like a blight or you know, some sort of outbreak in one part of an aspen forest, all the resources in the aspen forest are rerouted from one area of the land that it occupies to another, and it can just continue to persist.

There are aspen groves that are thousands of years old because they have a shared root system.

That's kind of what's happening happening in the early church.

That they have this shared root system in these practices.

The things that they are devoting themselves to become a regular part of their life, and it creates this fellowship where they begin to know and understand one another.

Um, here's the uncomfortable truth.

You cannot build community with leftover time.

It's got to be regular.

Because you know what happens with leftover time?

It becomes occasional.

If you try to build church attendance, community group involvement, caring for a friend with your leftover time, it will be occasional.

And guess what?

In the culture, the current that we swim in, you're gonna have less and less occasions for it.

You've got to prioritize it.

It's got to go on your calendar.

You've got to say no to other things to say yes to it.

And listen, I know we live in Charleston, it's a beautiful city with lots of beautiful things to do.

Sometimes you're gonna have to say no to that, to say yes to community, because you can't build community with leftover time.

But if you don't, if you choose the opposite, you're never gonna have the security of knowing that you're attached to other people, like this image of this aspen grove, that there is a shared life that creates this community together.

Number three, shared life awakens generosity.

Shared life awakens generosity.

Um this is this is just it's so true over and over again.

You see this in Acts chapter two, that the closer that these relationships with the people in the church become, the more that they start to be generous with each other, right?

Like if you're in a relationship and you have something and somebody else has a need, it's just the most, it's kind of just one of the most human things ever to give.

It doesn't feel like generosity is like pulling a tooth, or it doesn't even really feel like a sacrifice.

Um, I heard a story from uh one of the members here last service about a family in our church who's going through something you know significant, um, a medical event, and the the the the big need for the person going through it was they they they couldn't um process solid food, they needed soup.

This woman who is in their community group found out about it, and she just loves to cook.

And for days and perhaps weeks, she's been cooking for them.

And you know what?

That generosity, if I were to ask her, hey, was that sacrificial?

She's like, no, that was joy.

Right?

So this shared community creates generosity.

Let me tell you, um, and by the way, sometimes I forget which stories I've told you guys or not.

If you heard this, act like it's the first time you've heard it, okay?

Um, but I have you know some different tools that care for my lawn, but I don't have an edger.

Okay, my neighbor does.

Okay, my neighbor's awesome.

Um, so I had this moment where I was like, literally about to go to Lowe's and buy an edger.

And I talked to my wife, and because I'm a man, all right, men in the room.

We want our own stuff, right?

We want control over our own stuff.

My wife is like, don't buy one, ask, you know, she mentions my neighbor's name.

Pulled out the phone.

I was like, hey, come in, can I borrow your edger?

And I press in and it kind of hurts a little bit.

And then, you know, pops up, yeah, man, come on over.

Okay.

I borrow the edger, we edge the yard, looks great, whatever.

But something else happened.

Um, when I went over to get the edger, we just talk like you do.

And we begin to engage in how life's going.

And he opened up about uh a particular medical thing going on in their family that is like so hard and difficult.

And guess what?

That never would have happened.

Apart from me reaching out for the editor.

Apart from me being needy and him being generous, the bond would never have happened.

Do you see how shared community creates, it results in, it develops this generosity in us?

Um when I'm when I'm writing these sermons, sometimes I like take a sentence.

I'm trying to capture an idea in like a sentence.

Um, let me share one of them with you.

Every time that you eliminate needing somebody, you may also eliminate an opportunity to know somebody.

We live in a world, guys, that teaches us don't need anyone.

It's the worst thing ever.

You can't stand on your own two feet.

Be an individual, be strong.

Uh arrange your life and your net worth and your the things that you purchase so that you don't need anyone.

And we made decision after decision buying that lie until we've cut ourselves off moment by moment, need by need, from the community around us, that would make our lives so much richer.

Guys, what if some of the needs that you have today are actually a gift that God has given you to help bring you into a relationship with somebody else?

Would that change the way that you pray about your circumstances?

Would that maybe give you some insight into why God isn't saying yes to some of your prayers?

He's like, maybe he's just saying, yeah, I'm going to meet this need, but only when you open up and you ask somebody else for help.

Because I don't want to just meet this need.

I actually want to create a relational bond between you and them.

This shared life creates generosity.

It it awakens generosity in the body.

And then number four, generosity strengthens belonging.

The giving and receiving of care, of goods, creates belonging in a community.

Does that make sense?

It is a good thing when a community practices generosity both in giving and receiving.

Generosity strengthens belonging.

Now listen, I know that we all want to be the one who is doing the giving.

Right?

Everybody wants to be the one who is the generous one, right?

We don't want to be the one with the need.

We want to be the one with the resource.

Oh, oh, you need that here.

Thanks.

You know, like you can take.

We are needy.

Can we just all say the truth together?

We all have needs.

And we need the courage to be honest about our needs with other people if we're ever going to enter into this beautiful relationship, this weaving together of human friendship that we call gospel community.

So here's a takeaway for you.

What what do you need that you haven't told anybody else about?

Maybe your your action step today is to take that step and reach out.

Something else happened.

You know, when that story about borrowing the edger.

Um it wasn't just that I had a need, but my neighbor had a need.

It wasn't until I was honest about the simple need of needing to borrow an edger that he was able to be the be honest about what was going on in his life.

You see, in the community of the church, in the community in God's family, you are all, we are all, both needy and needed.

If you pretend like you're not needy, we know you're lying.

And you're needed.

We need you to bring your generosity to church.

We we talk about generosity at the weekender, we talk about giving of our time and our talent and treasure.

We need you to give yourself away, and you need to give yourself away.

Um Pastor Tyler and I were talking about this.

We actually have all this research.

There's a lot of things that get cut from a sermon.

I wasn't able to bring this to you, but we have all this, there's all this research and church involvement that the group of people that feel the most connected to a church typically are not the people who are in community groups, it's not the people who give, it's not the people who go on mission trips, it's the people on serving teams.

It's not that those other three things aren't effective because they really are.

But when you serve, when you actually give away to others, guess what?

Sometimes you're gonna be serving with some people on your team, and yeah, you're you know greeting people, you're parking cars, you're caring for you know somebody and um uh somebody's uh child and Harbor City kids, but you're also you know be able to be in relationship where you're talking with other people on a serving team.

You know, some of us connect better face to face, community group, circle of chairs, think.

Okay.

Some of us will connect better shoulder to shoulder.

Does it make sense?

So when we have the opportunity to practice generosity, it strengthens.

Guess what?

When you serve in the church, it strengthens your sense of belonging to the church and the church's sense of belonging to you.

Like it's it's it's reciprocal.

Like when we just, you know, didn't do this intentionally, we're gonna bring it out here, but when we like think the worship team, we would not be able to engage in worship in the same way without them giving of their talents to us through leading on a team.

And listen, they rehearse, they get here early, they serve us, and what does that do?

It not only leads to the worship of God, but doesn't it strengthen our belonging together?

That's the same thing that happens when you serve.

Generosity strengthens belonging.

Um, last one, number five, and I love this one.

Belonging creates gladness.

Belonging creates gladness.

Uh I don't know if you see in the text, I think this is verse 46, but um you know, day by day they attended the temple and they broke bread together.

Then do you see that little detail?

Do you see how these two words are connected?

With glad and generous hearts.

Do you see how both gladness and generosity went together?

Isn't that does anybody else find that like interesting?

There's gladness, this shared belonging, this shared life, this shared community, you know, creates generosity.

The generosity strengthens the sense of belonging, and that belonging creates in this gladness.

To go back to that middle school cafeteria table.

You know, everybody can maybe remember when you just felt like you were completely alone.

But do you remember when you've had maybe the opposite experience?

When you walked into maybe it was a team, or maybe it was a band, or maybe it was just a group or a club, and you just felt like you were part of the club.

Do you remember?

Remember how that felt?

What did it make you?

Glad.

How much better is it when we experience that glad that gladness because we belong to the community God has drawn us into?

Gladness.

Is there a single person here who doesn't want to walk out of the room with more gladness?

What the the word of God is showing us if we commit ourselves to the community, this is one of the results.

Now, I've got two minutes left of this sermon.

I I've also got to acknowledge that when you give yourself to the community, um, there's gonna be things that are uncomfortable.

When you are vulnerable enough to share in a community group or a DNA group something that's going on, you actually give somebody else the tool to hurt you.

And because we're all sinners saved by grace, we're still sinners.

I know that sometimes that takes a lot.

Because when you it when when you begin to open yourself up to community, to some degree, you are also opening up yourself to be hurt.

And it takes courage.

But you're also opening up yourself to what God made you for.

Until somebody really knows you, there's all things that there's all sorts of things that they can never do to really speak life into you.

You know, we've said this before, the fake you is doing just fine.

How's the real you doing?

When you bring the real you, by the way, you don't don't bring the real you to everybody.

You know what I'm saying?

Like exercise some wisdom in that.

But when with a few, you say, like, this is how things really are, and they hear it and they say, Yeah, you know what?

That that's me too.

Like that that's exactly what I feel.

And this is what I've learned.

And maybe you could learn it too.

You know what you feel?

Not just that you're seen and known by God, but you're seen and known by other people.

And you know what results?

Gladness.

So listen, I started this whole sermon off with asking the question, what do you think is your next step?

You don't have to make giant leaps coming out of a sermon like this, but we do have to take steps.

Why?

And we have to keep taking steps because there is a mixing metaphors here, right?

There is a current that is pulling us one direction.

We got to swim kind of hard the other direction if we're if we're going to live lives of community and not lives of isolation.

So if you're gonna make that swim, what what's your next step?

Well, what is your next action?

You know, for some of you, um, you know, you you've been coming to Harbor City for a while, and we talk about this event called the weekender, it's your next best step.

Your action step coming out of this sermon is to sign up for the weekender and come.

We we talk through how all these things work out and how we try to live out these practices in the life of Harbor City in a very imperfect way, I'm sure, but to the best of our ability together.

Your next step is to come to the weekender.

How many of you um in this room, flash poll right here, have been to the weekender?

Raise your hand, just wave at me.

Okay.

All right.

I won't do the opposite and say how many of you haven't been here, but I just found out.

Um can I just tell you, I mean, just tell you, you need to come.

It's time to dive in.

It's time to swim upstream.

Isolation, loneliness, it's not going to take you to a place you want to go.

This is a community where every single person is a sinner who is saved by grace.

It's the only way we get in.

Nobody came in through the VIP entrance.

Which means there's room for more sinners saved by grace.

So we're not here to act like there's some sort of hierarchy.

As the as the old pastor said, you know, the ground is level at the foot of the cross.

There's it's time to time to jump in.

Some of you, you've been to the weekender, um, and your next step is we kicked off community groups a number of weeks ago.

You need to get in a community group.

Um, some of you are part of a community group, and you need to bring the real the real you to community group.

It'll be the first time he or she has shown up to community group.

And I know, I know, like I know.

It's hard to, it's hard to share.

It's hard, right?

We've been hurt before.

We've lived some years, we've seen some things.

And it's easy to come up and just have this mask on and we talk and we're like, you know, we we never take the mask off.

We're never the real us in the the discussion environment.

And what happens?

We leave and we're like, uh, that really, it was okay.

I just didn't get a lot from that.

That's because you took the fake you to community group.

You got to bring the real you, and that takes courage.

And I'm I'm not, by the way, I'm not like diminishing that.

Like to be authentic in a world that makes us want to live with mask on is a truly brave thing.

Some of you, maybe it's in your community group where you're like, you know, the community group becomes an environment where friendship can be formed, where you need to say to somebody else in your community group, Hey, I want to meet with you, you know, maybe two or three of us, and I want to go through, I want to go through this book.

I want to, I want to walk through something together.

And I want to take a step of really knowing and being known.

Maybe your next step is to get plugged into a serving team.

I don't know.

But listen, when we as a community devote ourselves to these practices together, we have this shared belief in the gospel, which creates a shared community, which creates this shared life, which will create belonging in you and in me.

And we need it.

We were made for it.

So this is the way I want to end.

I want to pray for you.

I want to pray for me.

The Holy Spirit would give us the courage to take whatever steps that He's putting in front of us.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray that you would send your Holy Spirit even now to take a very counter-cultural step that is just uncomfortable, to move from individuals who are isolated, who need very little, to being people who are known and know other people in community.

God, whatever the hesitation is for any person here, I pray that you would give them the courage to take the step that's in front of them.

God, maybe the step is simple.

Maybe it's not hard.

I pray that you would just give them the diligence to do it.

Maybe it's just to make participation in the life of the church through serving and through coming to coming to our worship services and to being a part of a community group and make that part of the rhythm on their calendar.

Maybe, maybe, Lord, it's they've, you know, there may be somebody here's done those things over and over and over again, but they haven't really been honest about where they are with the people that you brought them around.

I just know.

That can be such a hard thing.

It can be a hard thing to hear sometimes, it can be a hard thing to say.

So, Holy Spirit, I mean, once again, we just need your help.

We need you to work in us to draw us into this type of relationship so that we would be better together.

Give us this coin and nea, this type of fellowship that is true of your people.

Give it to us as today, 2026, Harbor City Church.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, church family, right now we are going to um go to the Lord's table together, as we've been doing really every week of this series in particular.

The reason we're doing this, you know, many, but one is when we look at this passage, one of the common practices of the church was what?

It was breaking bread together, which is alluding to celebrating what we call communion, Last Supper.

Um, and we're gonna do that.

Hey, if you're here and you're not yet a follower of Jesus, I just want to say, I want to ask you to not participate in what we're about to do.

Um, if you haven't trusted Jesus as your Lord and your Savior, this is something for those who've done that.

Um instead, the the invitation to you is to receive what what we're about to do point to, to receive Jesus Himself, not just to receive bread and to drink juice from a cup.

But for those of you who have received Jesus as your Lord and Savior, this is a family meal.

This is this is the our version of practicing the breaking of bread together, remembering the body and blood of Jesus poured out for us.

This is this is the thing that brings us together as a community.

This.

On the night that Jesus was betrayed, he gathered around his friends.

And he took bread and he broke it.

You want to talk about generosity?

Jesus gave himself to his friends.

He said, This is my body which is going to be broken for you.

And then he gave himself away to his friends.

And so, church family, when we come and we take this little wafer, this little piece of bread, we remember that our Savior was his body was broken for us.

And when we behold this, this is the love of God demonstrated for us.

That he did not withhold his only son.

So take this, eat this, and do this in remembrance of him.

The same way he took the cup, said this is the cup of the new covenant of my blood.

This this cup represents my blood, which will be poured out for the forgiveness of your sins.

Church family, every single one of us are sinners.

And every single one of us, because of the blood of Jesus, experience forgiveness.

Amen.

So when we hold this and we drink, we remember his blood is poured out so that your sin and my sin can be forgiven.

Take this and drink in remembrance of him.

Church family, let's stand and worship together.