11: Undivided Redemption

Let's pray and then we'll get into our text for today.

Father, thank you so much for attending our worship.

Lord, we we ask that you would apply your word to our hearts as we wrap up this series, that you would grant us a vision together as a church, and that that vision would be guided by a hope in you and a hope in your resurrection and your present care for us.

Lord, we pray that your spirit would attend this time.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So this is our last week of our sermon series called Redemption Applied.

Uh last week, uh Kyle Boyd preached for us, uh, which was excellent.

So can we just give Yeah.

Right on.

First sermon ever.

That's insane.

I would never do that.

Uh so yeah, it was it was exciting to have um yeah, another one of our elders up here preaching, uh something that we're going to make more consistent.

Um, and I can see the other elders sinking in their chairs.

Uh so uh yeah, it's exciting to just kind of fill this space more.

Um but uh this is our last week in this series, and what we've tried to do is cover uh it sort of thematically what the vision of Redemption Church Denver is.

And so the most fundamental thing is that we believe that the gospel is the power and the purpose of all that we do as a church, and that by the power of the gospel, our hearts are transformed, our community is transformed, and our city can be transformed.

So that sort of forms the uh the sort of trifecta of the places that we want to see transformation occur in our hearts, in our community, which is our church, and in our city, which is Denver.

So heart, community, Denver.

Don't forget it.

Uh this week we're gonna kind of wrap things up, and we're gonna we're going to uh start with by looking at just this one verse, which is 1 Corinthians 15, 58.

This verse is an exhortation and it's the motivation to be steadfast in our labor for the Lord.

Uh if you're given an opportunity, even if it means waking up early and just moving a bunch of speakers, you should be steadfast in your, if one of those opportunities comes across, you should sign up in the app.

But we are, uh this is an exhortation and a motivation to be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

So let's start there.

1 Corinthians 15, 58.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Two things, the exhortation, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

Be committed to the work of the Lord.

Now, what is that?

I I used to think that that was just ministry work.

I used to think that was just something like this, like preaching or being part of the setters and breakers, or you know, something like that.

But it it's it as I've grown in my understanding of what the redemptive process that's taking place in scripture is, it includes all of our labor that is done in as Christians seeking to bring Christ's kingdom into the world.

That happens in all kinds of ways.

That happens when you're there for a coworker who needs it, happens when you do your job well.

You know, the classic example of how does a Christian airline pilot uh do the work of the Lord?

They land the plane.

And so we're surrounded by these opportunities to be doing the work of the Lord, and then this verse exhorts us to be doing that steadfastly, and then it motivates us to be committed to that work by saying that our labor in the Lord, in Christ Jesus, is not in vain.

Our labor will really matter in this ultimate sense.

Those uh things that we've sought to do and those realities that we've tried to bring into existence will really matter.

Now, life wars against this idea that our labor matters.

We are constantly surrounded by things that are deteriorating, falling apart, breaking.

Entropy rules the day.

It proves that time has an arrow, and that arrow points away from progress.

You know, 20 years ago it was the conservatives saying the world's going to end soon, so none of it matters.

Here we are, now the progressives say it, the world's going to end soon, so none of it really matters.

And our future has been cut off with this hopelessness.

If we look at some of the greatest minds in history, we see that they all look at hope as something that's just naive.

It's foolish.

We don't consider hope when it's really manifested.

It looks like uh somebody who just really hasn't had enough life experience to know the difference.

What happens is we get real life experience, and then when we become wise, what we really mean is we become cynical because we're aware of the way that the world really works.

Nothing has real value anymore.

Everything, all real value that was once there is ultimately just going to deteriorate and blink out and wink out.

Even the Disney vault, it turns out, you can open for just$7.99.

There's no real value.

So when we discuss hope, since there is no real hope off in the future, we try and find meaning just here in the present.

When we're forced into the present, we're forced into a moment that's incredibly anxious and incredibly angry.

And so what hope starts to mean is not things will get better in the future.

What hope starts to mean is just escapism.

It's just a word that we use as a sort of tonic to avoid the real pain, looking in the eye, the real hurts, the real dangers, the real sin, even corrupting our own hearts.

Hope becomes a way of avoiding reality, not something that lines up with reality.

And so then you consider a verse like 1 Corinthians 15, 58, which says, continue steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord, we start to just lump that into the category of, sure, that's a nice thing to say.

Of course, that would be a nice thing to believe, but we know, we know that our labor is actually in vain.

We know that the things we make, when we're honest with ourselves, they will go away, that our lives will likely be forgotten, that these things that we're fighting for will probably not amount to anything, or might just get us to some sort of average.

But what happens when we interpret this verse that way?

When we interpret it as just an escape hatch, an escape button, pulling us out of the real world into this fantasy world of hope, is we've made one of the first mistakes of good Bible study.

We forgot to ask the simple question about 1 Corinthians 15, 58, which is what is the therefore therefore?

That's right.

I know who all the nerds are now.

What is the first rule of Bible study?

What is the therefore, therefore?

When you see a therefore, ask yourself, what's it there for?

And that's because this is the conclusion of an argument.

And when we take it out of its context and we see that uh we're just being proclaimed that your labor is not in vain, we should be asking, we should be really puzzled, how could that possibly be true?

Because I've written papers and they've been completely deleted on accident.

That labor seems to me that's just in vain.

I have friends that I've prayed for a lot.

For now, those prayers seem fruitless.

So that labor, if I'm gonna judge it, it seems like it's in vain.

You know, we've all been a part of things, we've worked to start things, and they didn't.

There's no evidence of their existence anymore.

How could that not be vanity?

Isn't that the definition?

So, what we need to see, what we're going to move through, is the rest of the chapter of 1 Corinthians 15.

We're not going to do the whole thing, it's a really long chapter.

This is the end, 58 verses, that's super long.

But as we move through this, we're going to see that Paul concludes that our labor is not in vain because of his understanding of the resurrection.

And when we understand the resurrection, we're going to be able to see that this is not some hopeful escapism.

This is living in line with reality as it is, because Jesus really died and really came back to life.

And that means that our labor in the Lord is not in vain.

So we're going to look at the resurrection, and we're going to see how the fact of the resurrection leads us to this exhortation to continue laboring for the Lord and this hope that that labor is meaningful.

It does not amount to vanity.

We're going to see that the resurrection is, we're going to see five things, you note takers.

We're going to see that the resurrection is real, the resurrection is complete, it is organic, mysterious, and victorious.

Real, complete, organic, mysterious, and victorious.

So let's go ahead and jump in.

Oh yeah, and afterwards I'm gonna ask you all to become members of Redemption Church.

But I'm gonna slide it in at the end.

You're gonna be so keyed up by then, you're gonna be busting out the app like crazy.

Alright, so let's jump in.

Uh, first of all, Paul's first point, the fur premise one of this argument that concludes with, in the Lord, our our labor is not in vain.

Premise one is the resurrection is real.

This is 1 Corinthians 15, 3 through 6.

Paul writes, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

So this first point that Paul makes is that the resurrection, the fact that Jesus was a person and he died and then he came back to life, Paul's first point, that really happened.

So take a moment, take a deep breath, feel the arms on your chairs, pinch yourself.

You know how you're real?

You know how you're a real thing out here in the world?

So was Jesus.

And when he died, he really died.

And when he came back to life, he really came back to life.

Now, at school, I'd studied philosophy, and we studied Western analytic philosophy.

And there that means that I'm not interested in things that really happened.

I'm interested in ideas.

Those are the important things.

And there's this new school of in like Western philosophy called applied philosophy, where you like do studies and tests and use data.

That's science, you guys.

That's not philosophy.

You know what you need for philosophy?

A chair and solitude.

You can prove the existence of the universe.

And so, you know, we're all kind of in that type of tradition.

To where we read the, we read scripture, and what we're looking for are, okay, it's interesting that that happened historically, but what are the principles?

What are the principles here?

And I'll draw out those principles and then I'll use those for my life.

But the reality of it happening, well, that could be true, it could not be true.

Paul is no armchair theologian.

Paul does not have a disconnect between what really happened and the principles of that happening.

They are totally and completely woven together.

Listen to the dance that Paul does as he describes the reality and the principles.

He says, I delivered to you as of first importance, but I also received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.

See, to Paul, it's not just that it happened, but that it happened in accordance with this grand narrative of redemptive history that's described in the scriptures, saying this thing really happened, and it really matters because of the way the Bible describes it.

And he uses that same phrase again.

He says, He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

The scripture and the fact that it happened are totally woven together.

You see that the scripture and reality for Paul map perfectly onto each other.

They are the same thing.

Jesus living and dying and being resurrected, it happening in accordance with the scriptures, these are all part of the fabric of our reality.

These are not other things.

This really happened in our world, and the scriptures attest to what it is that actually happened.

And so we can know things about his death.

We can know that his death wasn't just someone dying, but it was the atonement for our sins.

That his death really accomplished a real redemption, a real thing happened.

Our sins are real.

And his resurrection means that the effect of his atonement is real.

It actually happened.

That means that the gospel is not some psychological tool that we can use, which we frequently reduce it to.

The gospel is the way that I'm able to experience self-love because I can always know that I am beloved of God.

You know, and so the gospel really, whether it happened or not, it's it's this tool that I can use, the psychological tool that I can use to talk to myself and improve my self-talk.

Maybe, you know, it's good to know that we're beloved of God, but it's a way different thing to know that we're beloved of God because his son really lived here and really died.

And that death really atoned for our real sins.

That's a totally different thing than a psychological tool that we just happen to find useful.

It's real.

This is a real atonement.

The resurrection actually happened.

Okay.

So turn the page.

It's real and it's complete.

Real, complete.

First Corinthians 15, 20 to 22, as we skip ahead.

Says, but in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

So Paul is uh describing it here, we're gonna move into the completeness of the atonement, but Paul is describing in here the mechanism for why it is that Jesus' death and resurrection actually accounts for our salvation.

And the reason is because you are always.

Uh we were talking about this just last night at dinner.

We were talking about like 23 and me.

I might have used this example before.

I think I have actually.

Here we go again.

23 and me.

Uh what it's doing is it's it's exposing that we have histories.

We really came from somewhere.

We aren't just these isolated beings that were thrown into existence.

We really come from a real lineage.

And the Bible so is so grounded in this earthy reality of our lineages.

That's why scripture is just obsessed with tracking lineages.

If any of you are still doing our Bible reading plan, hang in there, not much longer.

You're almost done with it.

It's a good book.

You can say you've read it.

And if you're in it now, we're in Chronicles.

Whoa, that's a lot of names.

And the thing to remember is the Bible, to us, it's just like names, board, skip it.

But that means the promise of scripture, the promise of salvation, was never detached from real people in their real lives.

The lineage mattered.

And what our lineage means as people is that we come all from the line of one man who is Adam.

And in Adam's sin, we all sinned, because there's a sense in which we were all in Adam while he was sinning.

And so now we inherit, it is imputed to us, it is a fact of our lives, like it or not.

Did you choose it?

No.

But you also choose it every day and every time you sin.

It is in us.

We are in Adam, which means we are in sin, which means we are destined to sin and destined to die.

But then, how do you break out of a system like that?

How do you break out of a system where it's like, look, I inherited the sin and I know I'm acting according to it, and so I deserve it, but still, there's no way out.

We need a new Adam.

We need a new representative of humanity that can come in, atone for our sin, and say, instead of lining up behind Adam, now by faith you can line up behind me.

I will be the one who represents you before God.

And that's what Jesus did.

And so we see that Christ's atonement, because of the type of being he was, because he was God and therefore perfect and sinless, but he was also completely a human.

The radically transcendent God was was one of us.

What if?

What if God was one of us?

That was the come on, guys.

So we have been taken out of the kingdom of Adam, and by faith we were placed in Christ into this new kingdom.

But the kingdom doesn't just start, excuse me, doesn't just stop at our hearts.

Paul describes the march of this kingdom through history.

He continues in this next verse, he says, but each in its own order, 1 Corinthians 15, 23 to 26, each in its own in his own order, he's describing the order that Christ's redemption is applied.

Says, Christ the first fruits, so Christ the first one to resurrect, then at his coming, those who belong to Christ.

So when Christ comes back a second time, we all resurrect.

Woo-hoo! And then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.

Now, this is the part that we're in.

So he did the beginning of the redemption, Christ, the resurrection, the first fruits.

Then he says, then at the end, when Christ comes back, we're all gonna resurrect with him because it was really effective.

And then he says, okay, now let's talk about the middle section here.

That's this four.

It says, For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

So what moment are we in now?

We are in the moment now where Christ is reigning.

And as he reigns, as he has transformed our hearts, his community is moving forward by the power of his Holy Spirit, and it's heralding Jesus is king.

Jesus is king now.

And people are saying, like, well, it doesn't look like it.

It doesn't really look like Jesus is king.

And we're saying, no, he really is.

He really is.

And it and it's gonna look like it more and more.

But in order for it to start to look like it, our our hearts have to be transformed.

Gotta abandon that old kingdom you're a part of and come into the new kingdom of Christ, which takes place just by faith, that he really is Lord.

And so we are in this time where he is reigning until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

All those effects of sin, all those things which make us say that the world is just vanity and meaninglessness.

Christ is marching forward over them all, turning all of this meaninglessness into something meaningful.

Until one day he comes back and it's complete.

Abraham Kuyper has this famous quote that I love.

He says, There's not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine.

Not a square inch in the whole domain of existence.

So consider where your labor takes place.

Consider how your where your relationships with your family take place.

Consider where your recreation takes place.

It's in the domain of existence.

Heard a guy this past week at a conference I was at, and uh he's this he's a theologian, his name is Richard Mao.

Uh and I was really thrilled to see him because he's he's very old, and I I don't think he'll be with us much longer.

Uh, so it was exciting to see him.

And he's he's he's uh he studies Abraham Kuyper, who said this quote.

Uh, and he said, you know, what's been amazing to see is this this development of this whole virtual world and this virtual space that's taken place.

Like when I was a kid, we never would have imagined something like this.

He said, and you know what I've really thought about it is you know what?

There's there's not a there's not a single square inch of virtual reality over which Christ, who is Lord, does not proclaim mine.

You know, all this development that we're making, the purpose is that Christ would be Lord there, and that it would look like Christ is Lord there.

Consider your work, your life, where you spend your time, all those areas of your life where you see Christ is not really Lord here.

You know, I have not brought this into submission to Christ.

It means it's out of step with reality.

Christ accomplished a real redemption and a complete redemption.

Where there is brokenness, he will bring renewal.

Where the effects of sin reign, wherever they are, as far as the curse is found, Jesus will bring his renewal.

In our language at Redemption Church Denver, we say that God is doing this by the power of the gospel, transforming our hearts personally, and he transforms our community.

And through that we'll flow out, and he enacts the transformation of our city as well.

When we're talking like that, what we're doing is we're we're acting in faith that Jesus is Lord now.

So Christ's redemption is real, Christ's redemption is complete, but it's hard to make that connection between our everyday labor and the death and resurrection of Jesus being real and affecting a complete redemption.

The reason is we've got to gain this better understanding of what our uh, excuse me, I just totally mind-blanked.

We've got to gain a better understanding of how the resurrection connects to our view of the world.

If the resurrection really happened, that means we need to learn to see reality as fundamentally changed.

So that means we need to better understand the resurrection.

The resurrection is organic, mysterious, and victorious.

First, organic.

1 Corinthians 15, 35 to 38.

But someone will ask, how are the dead raised?

With what kind of body do they come?

You foolish person, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.

But God gives it a body, as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

Okay, let's unpack that a bit.

So when we say that the resurrection is organic, we mean that there is something about the death that is organically connected to the resurrection.

So when you consider Jesus' resurrected body, Jesus' resurrected body was in many ways the same body that he died in.

It really was.

It was really Jesus.

The tomb was empty.

This was not a floaty, ghosty body.

This was not a replica body.

This is the same body that Jesus lived in, that Jesus was born into.

It's that same body.

And yet, his resurrected body is also very different.

In his resurrected body, he is dwelling in heaven now, bodily, dwelling in heaven now.

In Jesus' resurrected body, he's passing through walls and appearing in buildings.

You know, that seems like a very strange, for strange thing for a physical body to be able to do.

In Jesus' resurrected body, he can no longer die.

Death no longer has any dominion over him.

And so, in some sense, it is the same body, but in another sense, it's something totally different, so much more glorious, imperishable.

So the analogy that Paul uses is the analogy of planting a seed.

So if you were to look at a kernel of grain, and you'd never seen, you know, wheat before.

Let's do corn.

You'd never seen corn before, because it's important to get a lot of corn in your diet.

A lot of us aren't getting enough corn, and it worries me.

So you see a you see a kernel of corn, and you imagine you've never seen corn before, and somebody comes up to you and is like, okay, here's the seed.

Now draw what corn is like from just seeing the seed.

Draw what the what the corn is gonna be like.

Odds are pretty good you're not gonna draw corn.

It's weird.

Like it goes up and it's got those weird leaves that shoot off, and there's the ear with a bunch of kernels around it, and you gotta shuck it.

You just wouldn't draw that.

And yet there's a real sense in which the kernel and the and the corn that it grows up into are the same thing.

They're the same, they're the same thing, they're organically connected, yet one is far more glorious than the other.

Tim Keller, in his book Every Good Endeavor, recounts the story by J.R.

Tolkien uh called Leaf by Niggle.

And it's a story that Tolkien, it's a short story that Tolkien wrote to kind of process how difficult it was to finish the Lord of the Rings.

Can I get an Amen?

I get it, there's a feast.

And the uh so he's in this process and he just thinks I'm never going to be able to finish this these stories.

I'm never going to actually see these exist.

So he writes this short story about an artist who has this in his imagination of this tree that he's going to paint.

He's going to paint the ultimate tree, like the platonic form of a tree.

And so he's, it's his life's work, and he's working on it, and he's drawing and drawing and drawing, and all he gets done is a leaf.

And then he dies.

And when he when he dies, he goes to heaven, and he's walking, and he says, That's the tree.

There is a tree.

All I was able to contribute was just this leaf.

All I could actually accomplish in this life was just this leaf, and I had this imagination.

My life was just frustrating, and it felt futile and useless because I was never able to actually see the tree.

But then he sees that heaven is the place such that there is a tree.

Our labor is the same.

Rarely do we get to stand back and say, yes, it worked.

Preaching is the weirdest, right, Kyle?

Because it's like energy, energy, energy.

Okay, I don't, I hope that worked.

Are you sanctified now?

But all so much of our work feels like that.

Is this accomplishing accomplishing anything?

Is this amounting to anything?

But in faith, because of the resurrection, even when all we get to see is just belief, we have this faith that one day there will be a tree.

One day this glorious kingdom of heaven that Christ has secured and promised that we are aiming towards.

Our labor will not be useless, but it will be incorporated into it.

There is a tree.

Now, there's this organic connection, and uh the resurrection uh there requires this sort of organic connection, but it is also mysterious connection.

First Corinthians 15, 51 to 53 says, Behold, I tell you a mystery.

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

I'm zeroing in just on this uh the introduction that Paul offers.

He says, Behold, I tell you a mystery.

This is so important for us to understand.

If we get too obsessed with it being an organic connection, if we get too obsessed with our work really does contribute to the new heavens and the new earth, to the to the glory that God sees unfolding.

It's our evangelism that makes people Christians, it's our prayers that brings people in.

If we get too into that road to just the connection without the mystery, we'll be living constantly discouraged.

Constantly trying to come up with some new way of praying because this one doesn't seem to be working, or coming up with some new way of meeting together because it doesn't seem to be fruitful when we're doing this, instead of receiving by faith the means of grace that God has given to us.

But when we get the mystery, which is this, how could it possibly be connected?

How could there be an organic connection to this future glory where it's really meaningful?

Not just a fantasy hope of meaning, but really meaningful, really matters.

When I spent all this time to get my application perfect, and I didn't get the job.

When I spent uh all that time and money fighting for this marriage and it went away.

When I worked so hard to get this business started and it didn't start.

If we lose sight, that look, we are beholding a mystery here.

The fact that our work should actually be something that God uses as one of his causes by the power of his spirit, that he uses our tiny little labors to be bringing about a real redemption that is connected to something eternal, that these perishable things will one day put on the imperishable, that's about as good a job as we can do of describing it.

It is deeply mysterious.

And when we hold the mystery, we're able to hold what God has given us by faith.

Not giving up saying there is no connection between the labor that we're doing now and the future kingdom of heaven that we see to come.

There is a connection, it's an organic one, but it's a mysterious one.

And it's going to be littered with failure along the way.

But what brings more meaninglessness than death?

So that's why we need to remember that Christ's resurrection is victorious.

1 Corinthians 15, 56 through 57.

It says, the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

In Jesus' resurrection, what we see is his future and final victory breaking forth into history.

It's like the future comes from way out here and it pierces its way into the present, into what's now for us history.

And so Jesus' resurrection becomes this type of what will be happening as redemption moves forward throughout history until the final consummation at Christ's return.

We know that the victory has been secured.

And the victory is over that one thing, which is the source of all the pain, all the problems, all the issues and terrible things that we experience in life.

What is that thing?

It's sin.

It's why you can be surrounded by circumstances that anybody looking into would say, you should be joyful here, and yet you feel terrible and isolated and alone.

It is sin.

It's why, even to your own knowledge, you would find yourself doing things that you would never imagine yourself to do.

It's because we are radically corrupted by sin.

It's why our relationships as people have a natural tendency to drift apart until we never really know and are never really known by anyone.

That's sin.

In order for Christ, in order for our labor to be meaningful, the real problem had to be addressed.

That is not a problem we could address.

It had to be addressed by a Savior who came and offered a real rescue.

And when we see Christ and His resurrection, we see that rescue is certain.

Our victory is certain.

So Christ's redemption is like his resurrection.

It is real, complete, organic, mysterious, and victorious.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

You've got to know this.

In the Lord, your labor is not in vain.

There's no other hope.

There's no other hope which allows us to legitimately say in a non-escapist way that our labor is not in vain.

The only hope for this is the resurrection of Jesus.

Our only confidence of victory is the resurrection of Jesus.

Our only confidence of seeing his kingdom come, our sin atoned for, in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

So we look forward to his return.

And before he does, we're going to act like what he said is really true.

So this gives us this new framework for living.

And this is why we're looking forward to a move that our church is going through.

Like this is why, like when we're looking at this town, this little neighborhood, the slice of Denver in the Berkeley neighborhood, we're thinking, you know what?

If Jesus really died and his atonement was really complete, that means he's looking to go over every square inch of creation.

And that we're going to be living there and developing a community there and trying to reach out to that part of our city in order to see that this, the labor that we do on our way there and that we do there, we know it's not in vain.

So we can continue together.

We can continue steadfastly, immovably.

We can be always abounding in the work of the Lord.

No matter what we see happen, no matter what comes down the line for us in our church there, we can continue on.

We will know it's not in vain.

It's not in vain.

Because when we looked at Jesus' death on Friday, it looked like the end.

But it wasn't in vain.

Because of the resurrection, our hope as a church, the fuel of our mission, is the simple gospel.

Jesus came back from the dead.

So now we have hope.

Early next year we're going to be moving to Berkeley.

And at the beginning of this series, uh, we didn't know where we were going to be going.

Now we know.

And as we're going, the the fuel of this is as I just said, it's the it's the fuel, the simple gospel is the power and the purpose of all that we're doing as a church.

So we're moving into a new part of the community.

We hope that by pressing into the word, by by go, by developing relationships together, our hearts will be transformed, our community will be developed, and we will move into this space with real hope that our labor there will have an eternal purpose, that we will see eternal consequences from our move into this neighborhood, that people will be saved, that we will see marriages saved, and we will see the community become more rejuvenated and hopeful and peaceful and humane and joyful, that Berkeley could be like a light in the city because we decide to move there.

Do we hope too much?

I don't know.

He came back from the dead.

Remember?

That changes things.

That changes the way that we live.

And so before we move together, before we move into a new building together, uh, I'm getting used to this pastor thing, and one of the things that I I try and recommend is uh before you get married, uh don't move in together.

But before you move in together, you should get married.

There it is, I said it.

And we are uh we're as a church, we're all about to move in together.

This is the analogy I'm using, like it or not.

Um and so that means uh we're coming up on time where we should, we should, we should get married.

And what that means, what that looks like for a church, is membership.

Um membership means that we are committing to each other.

Membership means that we are saying uh we're going to move as a body on mission together.

And we're going to commit to the structures that the church has in place, and we're going to we're going to formally come together as a body to say we're going on mission together.

Now, why does it have to be formal?

Why do we have to come out and say it?

I heard a uh uh this this past week, it was at a conference in Houston.

Um lovely this time of year.

Uh uh and we are uh uh it was with the Gotham leaders.

We do the Gotham Fellowship.

Here at our church, it was with the Gotham leaders from around the country.

And part of the Gotham Fellowship is we do this thing called a cultural renewal project, which is where you basically step back and you intentionally say, okay, how can I move into uh this little slice of the world that God has given to me with a real redemptive purpose in a tangible way?

I heard such a great example of uh how simple one of those projects can be.

Uh current Gotham Fellows, listen up.

One of them uh was this guy who ran um like an investment firm or something, I don't know how the world works.

And he had a lot of people that worked for him.

And when uh uh and they'd worked for him for years.

They're really close.

And he was developing in his faith, and he went through the Gotham Fellowship and he said, You know what?

You know what I'm gonna do?

What's the you know, top two commandments?

Love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself.

Said, what I'm gonna do is I I'm gonna tell the people that have worked for me for all these years, I'm gonna tell them I love them.

Weird.

Uh, but it was also transformative, as the story goes.

Uh these relationships with people who he did really love and really cared for in as as you know unstrange of a way as possible, he told he just told them, Look, I I love you.

I'm pulling for you.

Jesus accomplished a real redemption.

So one of the reasons we're wanting to press into a formal membership is because sometimes we just need to say it to make it real.

And this is a way of saying it.

I know that the church has gone through a lot of trends of like membership is so bureaucratic, and it is.

I hate bureaucracy, right?

Any elder who's been in a conversation with me recently can attest to that.

But it's so important to really say this and really make these commitments, especially when we're when we're about to go on mission together.

So I'm sure I'm running long.

Uh so I'm gonna wrap this up.

Uh Membership is coming.

Uh right now, what we'd like you to do is if you would like to become a member of Redemption Church, uh, what you can do is, of course, go into the app, tap connect, and there's a RCD membership tab.

Tap that, and there's basically a white paper on what membership means at Redemption Church Denver.

Read through that.

If having read through that, you think, okay, yeah, this makes sense, then tap the sign up.

Our intention is to ultimately move through some more uh teaching on what exactly membership is and what it will entail for our church.

And finally culminate it with uh personal interviews with each person who would like to become a member.

Now that means we aren't going to be moving through our membership process until after the move to Berkeley.

Uh so we've just kind of got a lot going on right now.

Uh, but know that this is coming.

This is something that we want to commit to together.

So uh uh yeah, that's the information.

You can sign up in the app.

We ask that you would.

We also asked that you would sign up to be one of the setters and breakers, uh, which is also the name of Zach's new band.

All right.

Uh I'm running late, so no more questions, Your Honor.

But uh one last thing.

Uh uh today after the service, uh, we're going to pray again.

So for 15 minutes after the service, stick around.

We'll pray together for Berkeley and for our transition.

Uh okay.

Let's pray.

Father, let our hearts settle on the reality of your resurrection.

Would you go one level deeper in our hearts?

That the fact of it might be confirmed?

If we consider what does it mean?

How would my life be different?

How would my thought life be different?

How would my relationships be different?

If I really thought this happened?

Lord, would you uh guide us through a meditation like that?

Would you apply the truth of your gospel to our hearts, that they might be transformed?

Would you knit us together in love?

Lord, we pray for our city that we might see the welfare of our city happen, that in its welfare we might find ours.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.