Clarendon Presentation
Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 11 viewsNotes
Transcript
Big Idea: We have created the “Community of Unity” that I cast the vision for on our very first Sunday at The Outpost Church. We have been effectively carrying out the mission of Jesus in our city and because of this our church looks a lot like the one in Acts
Explain that I am doing something I’ve never done before. I am going to preach a sermon (or at least an excerpt of one) that I have previously preached.
I am going share part of the very first sermon I ever preached at The Outpost Church with you and in conjunction with that, I want to share a report of everything that has happened since I last stood before you as well as where the state of the mission work is now.
Before I share that message with you, I think its important to give you a little context behind why I chose this sermon as the very first sermon ever preached at The Outpost Church.
Leading up to this sermon we had shared our vision and mission for the new mission work…which perhaps unsurprisingly is the same mission that Jesus had…to seek and to save the lost.
From the very beginning, I cast the vision that I wanted our church to be primarily targeted at reaching the lost in our city. While every church realizes this as the overall mission, the reality is that over 9 out of every 10 churches in the United States are actually geared towards reaching the already believing. Meaning that most churches reach for addition through transfer growth (new believers moving into an area looking for a new home church) or biological growth (that is the children of believers growing up in church and coming to faith in Christ).
BUT...I shared the vision with our early leaders that we were in fact after new growth (that is adults and their children with little to no background in church coming to know Jesus).
This wasn’t just some hopeful strategy either…every thing that we will do, I told them, will be geared towards reaching this demographic. And so, I told our core group of leaders that we are actually going to set out some success criteria to gauge how effectively we are carrying out this mission. And so,we actually applied numbers to this mission stating that we want between four and five out of every ten people who come to our church to be lost unbelievers. That means that if we are successful at this mission, that before long, nearly half of the people gathering with us on any given Sunday morning would need to be lost seekers or brand new believers that we have reached with the Gospel.
If that sounds like a lofty goal…it was. But, I knew if we were successful at reaching the numbers of lost that we wanted to, it was going to bring a whole new set of challenges not present in an established church where the majority of attendees were believers.
So anticipating that we were going to be successful at this, I started our very first sermon series by going through the book of Acts. I wanted to talk about what our church would have to look like and how we would have to operate if we were going to not just survive but remain faithful to the mission.
And so, I put together a series entitled Gospel Community aimed at answering one question.
What does a community of faith shaped by the Gospel look like?
Week one of that series, the part that I am going to share with you this morning was entitled:
A Community of Unity
So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to Acts chapter 16 and we will begin reading there in just a second.
Just to catch you up to where this story falls in the book of Acts, Paul has just had the dream we have come to call the Macedonian Call and has just set out on his second missionary journey. Paul arrives in the city of Philippi and typically when he arrives in a new place, he will immediately go into the local Jewish Synagogue. If there isn’t a synagogue he will go to wherever there may be some people engaged in spiritual or religious activities and begin to share the Gospel Message with them.
What we are going to see is the very beginning of one of Paul’s most successful mission works and the challenges they had to overcome in order to be so successful.
Here we go...
And on the sabbath we went out of the city by a river side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither.
This is the equivalent of Paul going to the local coffee shop on a Thursday morning hoping to catch some people in a Bible study. He is successful but essentially runs into a women’s group but that doesn’t stop Paul and his companions.
And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.
And when she and her household had been baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and stay.” And she prevailed upon us.
We are essentially doing a character study of three different characters here at Philippi and Lydia is the first of the characters that we are going to look at. Here is what you need to know about Lydia:
Lydia is an upwardly mobile independently wealthy fashionista.
Lydia is rich…like not just a little rich....really rich. Chances are, she probably had a second house in Thyatira where her business was. Perhaps her house in Philippi was just her summer vacation home or where one of her bigger trading ports was. Lydia was also from the city meaning that she was probably more liberal in her political and social viewpoints. Big cities being a hotbed for more liberal leaning ideologies is not a new invention here in America…that is how it has almost always been.
We also get a little here about Lydia’s spiritual background. The Bible says she was a ‘God Worshiper’ other translations use the term “God fearing gentile.” This just means that she had narrowed down that the God of Israel was the one true God. This should be seen as a radical departure from the normative pagan belief system in a pantheon of gods held by most in her status. Most women of her status would have a little shrine of gods probably gods of fertility, gods of wealth and business, and gods of health that they prayed to…but not Lydia.
We actually saw Lydia’s conversion experience. She is actively seeking out God but is missing some information about who Jesus is and how the good news of the gospel effects her. This is how Lydia is converted.
Lydia was engaged in a search for God and it is through a greater understanding of the gospel and having questions answered that she comes to faith in Jesus.
Maybe this was your story. Perhaps some of you came to faith later in life. Maybe you knew God was real but how God intersected your story was the mystery. What we have found is that this is the story of many people in the Pacific Northwest. They realize that spirituality should be a key part of their life and yet there is such a huge buffet of options (it Buddhism, Mormonism, Naturalism, or in the case of Yelm, we even have a New Age Enlightenment cult that offers answers to questions of spirituality).
What we have found out is that the Gospel of Jesus is like a light shining in the darkness in our city. It has the ability to cut through the darkness of these other inconsistent worldviews and when people have their deepest questions about life and death and spirituality answered in light of that Gospel, they come to put their faith in Jesus.
So this is our first character. Let’s move on to our second.
And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying:
The same followed Paul and us, and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God, which shew unto us the way of salvation.
And this did she many days. But Paul, being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour.
Our second character is this little girl who is enslaved by spiritual and physical evil.
In terms of character development, you couldn’t get a more opposite character from Lydia than this little girl. We learn about Lydia…this little girl isn’t even given a name. Lydia is wealthy and free and this little girl is destitute and enslaved to evil men. And while we see that it is Lydia’s intellectual pursuit that leads her to faith in Christ:
It is a move of supernatural Holy Spirit power that brings life where there was none.
Honestly, this spiritual evil was probably brought on through her own trauma. She was probably trafficked at an early age and forced into either harsh manual labor but more likely sexual servitude. The trauma she had experienced had opened her up to the possibility of demonic possession; a fact that her newest slaveholders were exploiting for financial gain. This little girl has probably been exploited her entire life and her soul is literally crying out for help in this moment. And in an act of Holy Spirit power, Paul commands the spirit to come out. Her conversion is both instant and assumed in the story insomuch as she is now rendered useless to her masters.
Maybe this isn’t your story, but perhaps you know some people who that is their story. The reality is that Yelm is a city where this type of physical, mental, and economical oppression is leading to very real spiritual oppression. In fact, the biggest spiritual influence in our town is ran by a woman who channels the spirit of a supposed 15,000 year old warrior from Atlantis. We see people enslaved by drugs, financial loss, hurt, mental illness, serious marriage problems and so on. All of these factors have led people to a sort of spiritual hunger that they are willing to fill with literally anything.
The good news of this is that it provides an incredible environment for the Holy Spirit to show up and work through the power of the Gospel. I can’t tell you how many people we have watched come that have stories resembling the little slave girl. What is amazing is that I can not give you a reason and I can’t point to a single thing that we have done that has led them there other than simply being obedient to God’s Spirit.
So this is our second character. Let’s finish up with our third character. So the loss of financial gain to the little slave-girls maters leads to some problems for Paul and his companions. They cause an uproar and are dragged in front of the town leadership:
And the multitude rose up together against them: and the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them.
And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailor to keep them safely:
Who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks.
Explain that throwing them in prison was meant to keep them safe from the rest of the town killing them until the leaders of the city could figure out what to do and how to stop this uprising before it got out of hand.
AND YET...
The jailor, who is our third character, takes it a step further and does something worse than intended.
The inner prison was where you put the worst of the worst. It was where they dumped human sewage…and so Paul and his associates were probably standing in a couple of inches of mud that wasn’t really mud if you catch my drift.
He also throws them in stocks…EXPLAIN STOCKS.
We also know that healthy battle-ready soldiers rarely worked in the Roman prison system. This jailor was probably an older battle-hardened soldier, too messed up from war to be of any use on the battlefield and so now he is serving out the last of his enlistment working as a jailor in a cushy job.
And so we meet our third character:
The jailer is a blue-collar, rough-neck mans man who enjoys his job a little too much.
Again, we see are meant to see this man as the complete opposite of both of the previous characters in the story. He isn’t rich but he isn’t poor either. He’s important enough to have a title but not important enough to have a name. He’s probably got his own demons that terrorize him from the things he’s seen and done but he’s put together enough on the outside to keep a steady job.
We get his conversion story too…let’s look at that:
And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them.
And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed.
And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled.
But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.
Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas,
And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.
And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house.
The jailor isn’t interested in an intellectual conversation with Paul about faith. The jailor isn’t so terrorized by spiritual oppression that he is begging for release.
No…instead:
It is a bold act of love that softens the jailers heart and opens him up to receive Jesus as his savior.
Paul and his ministry companions could’ve easily escaped. Honestly, if I had been in Paul’s position and saw that God had just miraculously freed me from prison…my first instinct would’ve been to have run…what about you lol? We actually see other stories in the book of Acts where this same thing happens and God did intend for them to run…what if that wasn’t what God intended in this instance? What if God did all that to set Paul and his companions up for the opportunity to display the type of radical love and compassion that could soften this battle-hardened soldier’s heart up to receive Christ? What if that was the only thing radical enough to get this soldiers attention and soften his heart towards the gospel?
This is probably the most common place I have seen people come from in our community. They have had their hearts hardened by hearing the gospel and hearing how churches and Christians are supposed to live and act and yet have never actually seen it. They have been turned off to the Gospel through hypocrisy in the church and in Christians who claim to believe one thing and yet go on to live something completely inconsistent with this. They have seen Christians that believe that love isn’t just a word and it isn’t just an emotion that true love cannot be separated from radical acts of love and compassion and yet those same people have never experienced that love. They’ve only felt the church’s judgment and condemnation.
Here is a question for you: What could our churches accomplish if they were filled with people who actually lived out the gospel?
What if the greatest tool we have for evangelism today isn’t a gospel tract shoved through the crack in their front door or a well-polished Jesus pitch with a list of memorized verses? What if the greatest tool we have for evangelism today is the radical love, sacrifice, and generosity of Jesus that only exists in us as the Spirit moves to sanctify us over time? What if we were meant to take that kind of love out into our world actively seeking to live the out the truth of the Gospels transformative power in tangible ways in our neighborhoods, jobs, and places of leisure?
Here is the deal…I could camp out there for an entire sermon series but that isn’t where I went with this first sermon.
Before we get to that, I just want to take stock of the characters we’ve talked about so far:
A wealthy female CEO and fashion mogul.
A poor little girl with an extremely messed up past living in slavery.
A rough-around-the-edges working class ex-military man.
I want you to think about something. You don’t have to do this but what do you find if you turn your Bibles forward about six books?
You come to the book of Philippians. If you’ve ever read through the book of Philippians you know that Paul has this incredibly deep affection for the people at Philippi. Philippians, unlike almost any of Paul’s other letters directed to a particular church, isn’t in a state of crisis. When we come to the book of Philippians we see a healthy, growing, maturing, group of believers that are willing to endure terrible persecution as long as it means they get to keep carrying out the mission of Jesus.
And yet, I just read you the story of how the Philippian church was started. It wasn’t started with a group of mature believers. It was started with the craziest group of people you could ever imagine. Honestly, in my mind, this group would’ve been doomed.
Can you imagine that first meeting of the church over at Lydia’s house?!? The little slave girl walks in and Lydia just quietly leans over to her husband and says: “Keep an eye on her…don’t let her touch anything…and hide the good silverware.” How about relations between the jailor and Lydia. You’ve got this rough around the edges, blue-collar, probably deeply conservative guy walking into the home of Lydia…who is not only a working woman but is basically the opposite of the jailor in almost every way. If this was today, I could just imagine the jailor walking past Lydia’s car in the driveway on the way in and seeing her Vote Biden bumper sticker on her car and meanwhile he’s got his Trump 2020 hat on his head…you get the picture? This group of people was potentially a powdered keg waiting to blow.
And yet…that’s not at all what we see in the book of philippians. We see a church defined by their unity and gospel effectiveness.
What in the world is powerful enough to move these three radically different people from where they started to the amazing and effective church committed to unity that we see just a few short years later when Paul writes his letter to the Philippians? Just know, whatever that is (and we will look at it here in a minute) isn’t just important for the Philippian church or for a church plant in Washington but it is desperately needed in every church.
Between COVID 19, politics, and a various assortment of social and racial issues, our country and our churches are at an all time low in terms of unity. Have you noticed this at all? The same power that led the Philippian church to unity has the power to bring unity in our churches as well.
Now…that is where my sermon to the Outpost church ended and we will look at the conclusion of that here in a minute and what exactly it is that promotes that type of unity but first I want to share our story with you in hopes of putting this whole message in context.
I last spoke here in August of 2018 I believe. Danielle and I were getting ready to go to assessment with an organization that help church planters be as healthy and as equipped as possible before launching out onto the field. It was hands-down the most stressful thing I’ve ever done and I’ve been to war in Afghanistan lol. We passed assessment and started our journey of church planting.
We started on January 4th of 2020 with a small group of around 12 people in a coffee shop in Yelm where I shared the vision and mission of this new church and attempted to recruit these families to help us out.
We met there for a few weeks and talked about our strategy and how we were going to go about reaching the unreached in Yelm.
Talk about Easter Egg hunt...
Talk about COVID hitting
Talk about getting out of the military in the worst possible time...
Talk about pop-up churches...
Talk about crazy launch experience (forest fires and algae)…120 people but mostly Christians… it was somewhat disheartening.
Talk about going into home groups with around 20 people the very next week…In fact, we had two home groups open and nobody showed up to ours. We had left ours open to any visitors and put all of the people already involved with The Outpost in the other group.
Grew home church to around 50 and in that time we signed a lease on an old rundown theater that was previously occupied by the New Age cult in town. The only reason it was still empty when we got it was because the formal estimates for renovation that businesses had gotten were well over $100K and nobody wanted to pour that kind of money into the place. Here is the secret…we didn’t have $100K either. We actually finished renovations for around $15K because we did all the work ourselves, we had a bunch of generous donations ($3K worth of chairs given for free & $1.5K worth of flooring work done for free).
In late November, the rules changed and we were no longer allowed to meet in homes with groups of people but by that time we had done enough to the building that we could meet there. Not safely mind you, we literally pushed two inches of sawdust to the sides of the room each week and tried to put anything away that could hut kids.
But there was a problem. Talk about losing 30 people overnight.
But we just went back to the mission. We went back to the goal or reaching the truly unchurched people in our city and essentially started over in January. We started January with an average attendance of about 30 people.
We grew to around 45 in February
We were sitting at around 55-60 by the end of March.
Meanwhile we were still doing things to try and reach out to the unchurched in our community. One example was our Easter egg hunt. Tell about the Easter Egg hunt that went viral.
Talk about Easter Sunday
Talk about attendance since Easter…(servicing 176 people with a high Sunday attendance of around 100 people since Easter) . Tell what ‘servicing’ means.
What is genuinely exciting about those numbers though is this...
On any given Sunday, anywhere between 40-50% of the faces you stare out at are completely unchurched or what we would call de-churched (meaning they may have had some affiliation with church growing up but have since walked away and are now returning).
It isn’t 176 people that excite me it is the fact that roughly 50% of that number is God seeking people who are showing up week in and week out looking for the transformative power of the Gospel. It also isn’t just numbers…its real people...It is stories like Tiffany
Tell Tiffany’s story
Its stories like John and Christina: Tell their story (focus on life transformation)
Its stories like Lucas and Melissa and Bob and I could go on and on and on.
It’s people with wildly varying political beliefs, ideas about morality, or sexuality, or marriage. It’s people coming out of the Catholic church or our landlord Steve who is part of the whole New Age movement who has since espoused a belief that God is real since he’s been working with me (he hasn’t put his faith in Jesus yet but he is way closer now than he was).
And so here is where we are now: Explain kids space problem, explain that i’ve got unchurched people serving in every area that I can (pushing buttons on the sound system or greeting people at the door).
We need to expand and in order to continue growing we need more space but in order to do that, we would need a couple of million dollars to buy and build new property OR we need to go to two services. We are facing challenges of leadership (with relatively few believers at the church everyone is running at full speed and with all hands on deck).
And so we find ourselves right back at the spot I said we would be in, if we were successful at reaching the unchurched people of our city and that is:
How do we take this group of God seekers and new believers and grow the type of unity that will allow us to continue carrying out the mission of Jesus?
How we answer that question doesn’t just affect the Outpost church. It affects Clarendon missionary baptist church or the churches in the Philippines or the church in China, and so on.
The power that creates this type of unity is none other than the gospel. Look what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 12
Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.
But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.
In this moment Jesus redefines all of our closest relationships and priorities. It isn’t family, it isn’t views on spirituality or politics, it isn’t the things that define our past, our greatest failures or biggest mistakes, Jesus redefines his family as those who follow after Him.
Look what he says in
“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.
“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.
Do you realize that the people who heard Jesus say these words originally had no idea He would go on to die on a Roman cross. They didn’t have the benefit of hindsight of the resurrection in mind. No, in this story Jesus isn’t portraying himself as a fellow cross-bearer, no, Jesus is portraying himself as the Roman soldier we follow. Meaning: does the person carrying a cross have any plans for tomorrow? NO! Not unless the guy they are following says they do. Can they just decide to turn left or right as they please? NO! Not unless the guy they are following says they can.
What is so beautiful is that we have the hindsight of the resurrection as we read these verses. This makes this passage particularly beautiful because we know that we don’t have the power to pick up that cross and effectively carry it. The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus did that for us as well and through his sacrifice, through his carrying of the cross He has opened a way for us to effectively follow after him.
That means that as we give our lives to Jesus, we are effectively saying that we will follow him wherever he leads…and he has already lived the life and spoken the words that define where that is.
It means that family has been redefined for us. It means that our ideas about morality, ethics, and politics give way to Jesus’ definition of all of those things. It means we are no longer defined by what we have done but have all been bought with the same blood of Jesus.
Jesus isn’t leading us in different directions. If we are following Jesus…and I mean really following Jesus and leading others to do the same then there is a grand hope and a beautiful story in the future of this wildly different group of people we have gathered up. It means that God is working in the Tiffany and John and Christina and Bob and Lucas and all of the others to conform them into the image of Jesus and empower them to carry out the Great Commission. It means unity.
It means there is hope for unity and Gospel effectiveness here at Clarendon and all around the world. It is only as we go back to this gospel and allow its message to shape our hearts and lead us every single day that this kind of unity is created.
I don’t know where you came in here at today but I know that the hope for this church…the hope for your effectiveness at carrying out the great commission, the hope of your life being transformed to look more like Jesus today than you did yesterday is found in going back to the gospel and picking up your cross to follow after Jesus. You can do that by going back and believing the gospel today, and tomorrow, and the next and seeking the same power that saved you to transform you.
If you have time read this passage.
If we have time I want to close us out by reading one final passage of scripture. I am not going to say anything about it…I’m going to let the power of its message speak for itself for it will do a much better job commenting on this than I ever will.
Look what Paul writes to this Philippian church in chapter two of his letter to them:
COMMENT THROUGHOUT THE READING
If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies,
Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.
Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.
Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:
That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;
And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.
Will you pray with me and submit to the power of this Gospel and as we seek to have the mind of Christ in us that will move us to a deeper unity?