Life in God’s House / La Vida en la Casa de Dios

Intro

Let’s Pray

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the yearly Coca-Cola Christmas commercials, yes?

They’re generally known for being very artistic, feel good commercials that inspire us with a sense of family, of friendship, of love, joy, peace. Sometimes there is a Santa involved. I remember seeing a lot of polar bears in these commercials growing up. There’s log cabins, Christmas lights, festive fire places… all of these images that are intended to move our hearts toward a more wonderful life.

You might have seen this year that Coca Cola has come under fire because they used AI to create the commercial this year. So rather than using a large team of artists and actors, they used a much smaller team of people who just used AI to create everything. Historically, these ads required at least people to create; the AI ad only takes 20. In response to the criticism, Coca Cola actually boasted that they are using smaller teams than ever before to create their commerical. Of course this means less cost for them, and higher profits.

One of their executives was interviewd on the criticism and he simply said, “The genie is out of the bottle with AI, and you’re not going to put it back in.”

In other words, we’re going to do whatever we can to make the most amount of money, and you can’t stop us.

I want us to take two things from this story this evening.

First, we should know that Pepsi would never do us like this.

Second, Coca Cola’s commercial may seem like a small thing, but I think it is a great example of the hustle culture we live in. We live in a society that pressures us into thinking that we can be self made; Our sense of worth is determined by what we do, what we produce, and what we consume.

Every one of us is being pressured into being a hustler and we may not even realize it. The hustle mindset is why we don’t like to share ourselves with others. Its why we don’t like to rely on others. It’s why we are relentlessly trying to prove ourselves to people. It’s why we may see most of our relationships as optional commitments when its convenient, rather than as anchors that determine the order of our lives.

The powers of the world want to convince us that the hustle is good. But if we’re honest, our experience of the hustle is one of loneliness, exhaustion, selfishness, and sadness.

You were never meant to be self made. You simply cannot bear the impossible burden of holding life together on your own. Only Jesus can do that.

The hustle says that we have to determine the order and meaning of our own lives. Jesus says our lives are determined by him.

Last week, we started a sermon series where we’re exploring why it is important for us to belong to a church. We acknowledged that joining a church can be a challenge for us because of the pain we’ve experienced, or the hypocrisy we perceive among churches.

Yet, in a church that is focused on Jesus, we are transformed in his love.

This week, I want us to see how a local church gives us so much more than the hustle can. “Why should I belong to a church?”

Because in a world that pressures us to find life in ourselves, the church is where we encounter God who gives us life in Jesus.

The Church is Where we Encounter God

We’re looking at verses 14 and 15.

Let me remind you of the situation that the Apostle Paul was addressing in this letter to a younger pastor named Timothy in Ephesus.

The church in Ephesus had been infiltrated by all kinds of predatory false teachers who were corrupting the church. Rather than keeping Jesus at the center of the church, they created all kinds of twisted and manipulative teachings to gain power and control for themselves. As a result, everything in the church was falling apart.

Paul orders Timothy to stay and resist these false teachers so that the love of Jesus and his gospel would be known in the church once again.

Our verses tonight are one of a few places in 1 Timothy where Paul is summarizing the purpose of his letter. He said, I’m writing these instructions to you so that… “Instructions” here is literally “things”. He’s saying I’m writing to you all these things in this letter so that you will know how you ought to conduct yourself in God’s house.

So, one of the ways Paul summarizes his own letter is that he’s trying to bring order in the chaos. Everyone was going their own way, they were only looking out for themselves, and life in God’s house had become a disaster.

If you remember, Paul later wrote a second letter to Timothy where he followed up on these same issues. In that second letter, Paul described the situation this in this way:

2 Timothy 3:2–4 “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”

In summary, the people had become hustlers. They thought only of themselves. They had gone their own way. And as a result, everything was spinning out of control.

So, this letter was written to heal what the hustle had torn apart.

We will look more at the specifics of the instructions in this letter in the next two weeks. However, I want to briefly summarize for you the content of these instructions so you know, at a high level, what Paul addresses in 1 Timothy.

In Chapters 2 and 3, we’re told how to live good lives under the care of godly leaders. In chapters 3 and 4, we’re shown how to uphold the truth of the gospel against error. And in chapters 5 and 6, we’re shown how to care for those in need.

And yet, I want to draw your attention to something significant here. When Paul chose to summarize the content of his letter, he didn’t do so with a list of rules. He didn’t say I’m writing these things so you would know you need to do this, that, and the other thing. He didn’t say that you need to clean up this mess you’ve created. He didn’t summarize with expectations, standards, or requirements.

What did he say?

I want you to know how things ought to be because you’re in the house where the living God dwells.

The church is not a place where we first and foremost go to keep rules or membership requirements. Its a place where we go to meet a person, the living God, Creator and King of the universe, who set up the church so that we could meet with him.

A church might have the most polished rules, the most well executed programs, and the most beautiful building. And yet if the people are not gathering together to encounter the living God, then there is no spiritual life in that place.

This is just an aside. Perhaps a question that we should be regularly asking ourselves is, “If God’s presence were to leave our church, would we know?”

God, as creator and ruler over heaven and earth, reigns from heaven over all things. So, in a very important sense, God dwells everywhere at all times.

Yet throughout Scripture, God promises to be with his people in a special way, in local gatherings of Christians that we call a church.

Scripture always uses this language of “God’s house” to refer to the way that God uniquely meets his people as they gather together. You have a couple examples of this in your worship guide, let me point you quickly to Hebrews 3:6:

But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory. 

It is in local churches, like this one, where we go to encounter God in a unique way that we cannot find on our own. It is in a local church where God promises to meet us and bring order and gravity to our lives.

How many of you know what this is? It’s a landspeeder from Star Wars. And this? Princess Leia. These are actually original action figures from the late 1970’s.

They’re important collectors items now, but I didn’t know that as a kid.

When I was a small child, I had a landspeeder and a leia figure that I thought were just lame bath toys. They once belonged to my older brother Joe, who was 18 years older than me, and who himself had been a teenager when Star Wars first came to theaters. But he never took the time to explain to me what they were, so I didn’t know how special they were.

So, when my family had a garage sale in 4th grade, I sold my landspeeder and leia figures for 50 cents. A few years later, when Joe and I went to see the new Star Wars movies coming out, I learned what I had given away, and I was crushed. I felt so dumb. Joe just laughed at me.

Joe committed suicide when I was 12 years old. When that happened, it felt like the Sun in my solar system went out. Joe was the glue that held my fragile family together. Maybe some of you have lost someone like that. His loss is the moment when my life began to spin out into chaos. No matter how hard I tried to hold everything together, my life just fell apart.

I bought these figures recently as a reminder of my life before it went dark.

When God promises to meet us in the church, in his house, he doesn’t say he’ll take away the pain and the loss we have experienced. My relationship with God cannot replace the loss of my brother.

What he does promise is to become the center of gravity for our life that will hold all things together. He will bring order out of our chaos. He will bring healing to what has been torn apart. He will put us in a safe place when we have only known fear. He will give us rest when we’re weary from trying to go it alone.

That’s what it means to encounter God in his house.

Is that what you’re looking for tonight, friends? Is God drawing you in closer to himself by being a part of a local church? Are you tired of the hustle of being self-made?

Then we would love to talk to you about that. And even if that’s not here, we’ll help you find a church where you can be plugged in. Because God hasn’t promised himself to any one church. He has promised to be with any local church that is faithful to Jesus, the Son of God who gave his life so that the church would find life in him.

Life in Jesus

So the church is where we encounter God who gives us life in Jesus. This is our second point. We’re considering verse 16.

When we hear the word mystery, we think an unsolved crime, its a mystery. Or we think someone hiding in the shadows, they’re mysterious, oooo.

That’s not what Paul meant by the word. For Paul, a mystery is a truth that was once hidden but has now been made known by God. So Paul repeatedly used the word mystery to say that there were things we couldn’t know until Jesus came into the world. It is in Jesus where we find the truth about ourselves, the truth about our lives, and the truth about God.

So, verse 16 says, Here is where we now know where true life comes from: it’s Jesus.

You see these six lines printed here: He appeared in the flesh, and so on, and then it concludes he’s taken up in glory.

It’s written almost like a poem in the Bible because these lines are special. They are one of the first Christian belief statements that the early church settled on. The churches had gotten together, and they agreed, these six statements, these are the core of what it means to have new life in Jesus.

In reading these words tonight, we are agreeing with what billions of Christians around the world have agreed upon for over 2000 years. I think that’s pretty cool.

I’m going to restate a point I made a moment ago, but in a slightly different way.

The way we live together in the church matters. But our conduct doesn’t first come from a set of rules or expectations, it comes from encountering the living God together. As God dwells with us, he gives us life in Jesus.

It is Jesus who orders our life together. It is his life that gives our life meaning. We experience life in Jesus together in a local church.

So if we believe these six statements about Jesus then they should, over time, shape the life we share in our church.

For the sake of time, I’m not going to comment on all six of these lines here. Instead, I want us to look at three of these lines, and consider how what is said of Jesus here shapes our life together.

We care for each other in the ordinary details of our lives.

The eternal Son of God took on flesh and became a human man.

What does this mean to you?

Many of the older drawings of Jesus picture him in such a way that he’s altogether different from the people around him. He’s radiant, with like, sun beams coming out of him. He’s levitating over the ground. His clothes are well kept, his hair is perfectly combed.

Is this how you picture Jesus when he was on this earth? Because nothing could be further from the truth.

When the Bible tells us Jesus took on flesh, it says that he experienced life as we experience it. He pooped in diapers. It’s true. He learned how to read and write. He learned how to work. He got splinters in the shop where he worked as a day laborer. He experienced grief when his loved ones died. He was loved by a mother. He got sick after eating a bad lamb stew. He experienced joy in friendships. He experienced betrayal by people close to him. He knew what it meant to be hungry, and he knew what it meant to enjoy a good meal. He knew how to laugh, and he knew how to cry.

Jesus took on flesh and lived life as one of us.

Do you know what this means? It means God cares about the little details of our lives. Life with Jesus doesn’t just mean we put our faith in him and then wait around to go to heaven. God sees and cares for the daily realities we face, all of the highs, and all of the lows.

When this becomes our experience of Jesus, it shapes the way we care for each other. We don’t gather on Sundays just to go back to the hustle the rest of the week. I want to invite you to look around this room, and think of one person here you could reach out to this week, either to check in on, or to share yourself with.

2. We make Christ known in our community.

The fourth line reads, “He was preached among the nations.”

This is the mission of any local church: to make Christ known through its presence, deeds, and words.

We do not exist for ourselves. The church is not a social club. We exist so that people would know Jesus.

Hope Church of Haughville exists so that people in our neighborhood would know Jesus. We believe that there are people right here, on this street outside, who God wants to save and bring into the life of a church.

You do not need to be a pastor or a leader in a church to be on mission. Every Christian is on mission. Some of us are more gifted with our words to tell people about Jesus. Some of us are more gifted with our hands to show people Jesus. Some of us are more in touch with our emotions so that people can feel Jesus.

Together, we share a purpose of inviting others to come encounter God and find life in Jesus.

No one is interested in our rules. No one is interested in our social club. Can our neighbors join us to encounter the living God?

Then that is a gift we must share.

3. We live as people with hope.

The last line reads, “He was taken up in glory.”

When Jesus died on that cross, his followers thought it was over. There they were, huddled in that upper room, scared, grieving, and alone. Their Sun went out. Their gravity was gone. God, they thought, did not keep his promises. They thought they would have to go back to the hustle they knew before.

Then three days later, hope walked in through the back door.

God had kept his promise. And just as he said he would, when he raised Jesus out of that grave, he defeated sin, death, and the devil once and for all.

Though they had turned their backs on him, Jesus told them they were loved and forgiven.

Though they were afraid, he said I will be with you always until the end of time.

Though he was raised up into the heavens, the angels appeared and said, don’t you worry, he’s coming back in the same way that he left.

And that means we live as a people who know that there is always a reason to keep going.

We don’t need to hustle to get by, because Jesus was raised in glory.

Our neighbors need to know that pain and loss will not have the last word, because Jesus was raised in glory.

Haughville needs to know that Oppression will not destroy us, because Jesus was raised in glory.

We need to believe that our sin cannot keep us from God, because Jesus was raised in glory.

We are a people filled with hope for the restoration of all things, because Jesus was raised in glory.

Lets pray