Sermon Tone Analysis

When we think about the culture of Renew, I think there are two things we need to think about.

First, the culture of our surrounding society.

Second, the culture we desire to build for Renew, as expressed in our values.

Gold Coast Society

So what is the culture of our surrounding society?

This is something I researched way back in my role as Apologist in Residence at Mosaic.

I found that the Gold Coast attracted people because of its offer of an ideal life-work balance.

But what is an ideal life-work balance?

For Gold Coasters, it means the opportunity to get outdoors and do stuff, especially water sports, but also things like cycling, walking, hiking, and so on.

On the GC, team sports are popular for kids, but overall because the Coast is really about self-indulgence.

We have great shopping centres to indulge our desire to buy, buy, buy.

We have amazing homes with great views, or large yards, or pools, or great entertaining areas so that we can indulge our passions at home, perhaps with select guests.

We have lots of gyms and health places to indulge our obsession with fitness and beauty.

We even have numerous, sprawling and luxurious aged complexes to allow us to age in luxury and privacy.

The GC is, at its heart, a hedonistic society.

We worship pleasure and we have sought out this beautiful corner of the world in which to indulge in it.

A phrase you’re likely to hear on the Gold Coast is “This is as good as it gets!”

This is also why so many of the Gold Coast’s churches are Pentecostal churches aiming to be mega-churches.

The focus of Pentecostal Christianity is on experiencing God’s blessings in this present life—a goal that can be very compatible with the Gold Coast’s focus on experiencing blessings in this present life.

That sort of church is often slotted into the normal Gold Coast life, adding a little depth and perhaps some relational and spiritual pleasures.

Renew’s Values

Which brings us to Renew.

You might have noticed that we are not a Pentecostal church, and we’re definitely not mega.

Rather, our values are built around three core, Biblical commands: to love God with everything we are, to love our neighbour with the same love we lavish on ourselves, and to make disciples for Jesus of all people.

How does this fit into GC culture?

First, I want to emphasize that we should appreciate the beauty and the appeal of the Gold Coast.

We all enjoy this gorgeous place we live in, and many of our church activities take advantage of the blessings of the Gold Coast.

Nor do we advocate living in a way that separates us from the pleasures available at the Gold Coast.

I love our lakeside home, the Groves and Dunns love their acreages, I know we all love the various aspects of our lives that are made pleasurable by the infrastructure and opportunities of the Coast.

But we hold these pleasures lightly—they are not what give our lives meaning.

If we lose them, our lives will not be destroyed.

I did not come to the Gold Coast chasing pleasure, I came here to work and to serve.

I stayed here because I thought it was a great place to raise kids.

I live here now because of the opportunity to serve and love.

I know that you all have similar stories.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Renew and the incipient prosperity gospel of our Pentecostal sister churches is that we do not flinch away from the recognition that paradise hides pain.

Lots of pain.

The Gold Coast is a lonely place.

Its exaggerated individualism encourages family breakdown.

Its obsession with youth and beauty creates crippling anxiety and physical pain in those who pursue this impossible goal.

Its obsession with wealth and possessions creates devastating debt, which itself tears apart relationships.

Our answer to this is not “God will protect you from pain and suffering in this life, if you can just be obedient” but rather “God will redeem you through the inevitable pain and suffering of this life.”

Let’s look at what our values really mean, and how Renew can distinctively live out these universal, Christian truths.

Biblical Discipleship

Our first value, Biblical Discipleship is how we, as a church, fulfill the Greatest Commandment:

Remember that love for God is expressed in many ways, including loving his creation (a big part of GC culture), loving our neighbours, and loving one another.

It’s important to recognise that we are not humanly capable of this total love for God.

If we try to love God by loving his creation, that creation becomes our idol; if we try to love God by loving others, they become our idols (or our tyrants); if we try to love God through religious practice, we become pharisees.

None of us can work our way to heaven:

So loving God will all we are is not something we do.

Rather, it is something we become through God’s deep involvement in our souls.

This idea of abiding is core to who we are.

We live, we exist in God, and he in us.

Without that mutual indwelling we are just dry branches, lifeless things that will be thrown into the fire.

Tragically, this is the fate of all Gold Coasters who reject Jesus.

They have no life.

When they boast, “It doesn’t get better than this,” they are sadly correct if they continue to reject Jesus, but sadly wrong about the possibilities of true life in Jesus that they are missing out on.

How do we love God, though, how do we abide in him?

Jesus makes it clear to his disciples: “keep my commandments.”

How do we know Jesus commandments?

By reading his Word!

But we have seen how vast the gulf is between obedience to Christ and the priorities of the surrounding culture.

How can we persist with such a different life-style?

Only by supporting one-another in our journey:

And that, my friends, is what Biblical Discipleship is.

Grounding ourselves in God’s word so that we can live in him and he in us, and doing it together, supporting each other in the journey, so that we can all make it to the end of this difficult road.

Which leads to:

Gracious Community

If we are to support one another in our journey of discipleship, and in our endeavour to fulfill Jesus’ command and to bring light to this world, then we need to build a community of love.

The type of love in the second greatest commandment:

But living as Jesus’ disciples is hard work, as the preacher of Hebrews tells his listeners:

You don’t become a great surfer by only going to the beach every so often.

You don’t get a buff body by working out when the fancy strikes you.

You don’t get to own your own house without pouring your wealth into it.

You don’t grow closer to God without focusing on him and the family he has adopted you into.

So Renew is a community—a group of people bound together by mutual love of God and one another.

We don’t get together because we love Mary’s cooking or Nicole’s singing or Mable’s activites or my talks.

We get together because we love God and one another, and we want to get each other home to God, and gather others to join us along the way.

Now because we don’t get together because of these worldly or cultural connections, we must be a gracious community.

Grace is not tolerance, not as our society understands tolerance, anyway.

Modern tolerance means that you put up with someone’s behaviour so that they will put up with yours.

No, grace is forgiving wrongs that have been done to you.

Grace requires a recognition of what is right and what is wrong.

It is not grace to forgive someone for making a dish that you didn’t find tasty—that is mere personal preference.

It is not grace to forgive someone for saying something you found offensive—your emotions are yours to manage.

But it is grace to forgive someone for saying something meant to hurt you.

It is grace to forgive someone for failing to provide for you.

Grace is not a human activity, it is a supernatural activity.

We show grace because we have been shown grace.

We must remember that everyone of us is a profoundly broken creature.

As Paul explains:

And so we put on the new self that Jesus has given us, and we live differently:

And you know what?

Living like this doesn’t just change us.

It changes the world:

Which brings us to our final value:

Light to the World

This value is both the natural outcome of our first two values, and also one of the reasons (perhaps the main reason) that we are here on earth rather than in heaven with Jesus.

The last two verses of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ life tell us of Jesus great commission for his disciples:

This commission informs our first value, Biblical Discipleship.