Mission

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Between a high school breakup, a mild existential crisis, uh, and then, this is a dumb story, uh, navigating everything that comes with being on your own for the first time. My freshman year of college was really hard for me. Um, I had just broken up with a girl that I was dating for a long time in high school.

And that just brought an onslaught of mental issues that I didn’t know that I had suppressed and not dealt with, like a lot of fear and loneliness and anxiety and doubt. I started doubting God and all sorts of things, and then I was on my own for the first time. It was the first time I was away, you know, having to be responsible for myself, and I wasn’t really ready for it, as much as I would have said I had been prepared and readied.

And I found myself really lonely, and I imagine this is not, this is a pretty common feeling. You go somewhere new. Uh, for those of you, you know, you turn 18, you go off on your own, you do your own thing, and it’s, you’re kind of hit with a sense of loneliness, and so I knew I needed friends, um, but I didn’t have many options.

So I thought, you know, my, I had roommates, I, I lived on campus, uh, but my dorm was like a mile off campus, and it was near like, uh, a broken down McDonald’s and like a shady underpass, it was in between, I was gonna, it’s Tucson, so I went to the U of A, when you imagine Tucson, whatever comes into your head, like, that’s what my dorm was like, it was called Babcock, uh, and nobody, there were like four other people in this dorm, it used to be an apartment, it’s a long story, anyways, making friends in my dorm was not, It was not the solution.

Uh, I had a roommate that I was going to try and be friends with, because proximity, and he was not, we learned very quickly, we were not going to be friends. And that’s okay, I think that’s an okay thing to learn sometimes. He wouldn’t talk, like ever, like he would actually say nothing. I would ask him questions like, What are you studying?

What class are you taking? And he would just say nothing. He would either say the word nothing. One time I said, What are you majoring in? And he said nothing. And I was like, okay, man, good, good talk. And then other times he’d just ignore me, put his headphones on, and I would get the hint, I’m not supposed to talk to you right now.

Uh, we did not hit it off. I’d love to say that he was like the best man in my wedding ten years later. That’s not the case. I’ve never thought about him or spoken to him since, I haven’t spoken to him, I haven’t thought about him since I was prepping this message. Uh, my best friend who was in, you know, my best man at my wedding, we did not hit it off.

So he, he came to college with me. We came from the same high school. Uh, but we didn’t really, we weren’t friends in high school. We just kind of knew each other. So, as I was navigating life in college for the first time, trying to find friends, we ran into each other a few times. And I recognized him, and I said, Hey man, how’s it going?

And he said the same thing, and we would usually just kind of, you know, go on our way. But then we thought we should probably start hanging out with each other because we had a mutual friend. And that mutual friend wanted to get us in the same room, and hopefully just become friends together, and and I hated that, so every time I hung out with him I realized I did not like this guy.

I did not like who he was. I didn’t like the jokes that he told, I didn’t like his interests. We had nothing in common. We were in proximity, but we were not fans of each other. But the more I hung out with him, the more I realized that he also didn’t like me. So this went two ways. There was nothing, we had nothing in common.

It was mutual hate. Until Like all good friendships that start in college, we bonded over, uh, late night pizza and FIFA. Uh, which is a, uh, it’s a video game where you play soccer. And, and none of us knew anything about soccer, none of us had played soccer, but it, when you’re in a dorm room, and you have nothing to do, and you’re tired of just arguing with each other, and you want to take your mind off of something, you play video games.

And, and that’s how it happened. So we would go to the dorm. The lobby area and we would challenge all of his other, you know, the people that live in this dorm to FIFA and we would lose. They would mop, wipe the floor with it. We were terrible at this video game. Fast forward ten years and because of FIFA, our mutual love of late night pizza and our mutual distaste for like everybody else that lived in our dorms, uh, we became best friends.

So, making friends is hard. And hopefully, you have an easier time making friends than I did in college. He was the best man at my wedding. And now, uh, we talk all the time, and it’s great. I share, I know, I look happy. I share that story because, One, I think it’s funny. I think it’s funny to remind each other that Had we not just suffered through all the awkward stages of friendship, the dislike, the proximity, the smelly guy dorms, and the discomforts of being on your own in college, we would not have the friendship that we have today.

He would not have been the best man at my wedding, and I would still be lonely. Uh, but it started because of pizza and because of FIFA. But I also realized something that I think is really pertinent to what we’re talking about in this series, and that is that your, your friendships need a focus. That’s the thesis of the whole, this, that’s, we’re going to come back to that later, hold that in the back of your mind, that’s the main point of this whole thing.

Your friendships need a focus. It wasn’t until we stopped trying to be friends that we actually became friends. We stopped living eye to eye, we started living shoulder to shoulder, playing FIFA, but still, we had a focus. We had something else that we were focused on. And so, as we close out this vision series, that’s what we’re looking at, is what is the focus of our friendship?

And so, uh, if you have a Bible, turn to Jeremiah 29. Uh, we’ve been spending the past month focusing on, uh, what we want the trajectory of our church to look like in the year of 2024. So we’re, we want to be formed by Jesus together for others. That’s always a vision statement. But what does that look like for us specifically here in Queen Creek, like here, the church, this church in this room, what does it look like for us to do that?

And what we’ve settled on is the very complicated, simple, but, um. impactful task of making friends and loving other people. That’s all we want to do this year, is make friends and love other people. But we’ve noticed that friendships are hard. And, and the tagline we’ve used is that they’re common sense but not common practice.

So there, there’s a good chance you, you, you know what it’s like to feel lonely. And you know what it’s like to not have friends, and you know what it’s like to be isolated. The older you get, I think, the harder it is to make and keep good friendships as well. And so we’ve been trying to work through, you know, the four movements of friendship.

The intentional steps that we have to take to form good community that sustains us, and makes an impact in the world around us. Because, again, this stuff doesn’t happen by accident. So we started with proximity. Step one, just get near people. Like, just be around other people. Do things with other people.

You spend time in proximity, um, you get to know people. And you bring people into your life, and you start to act differently, you start to see the world differently, and that has a profound impact on your ability to relate to others. That’s step one. Step two, we talked about week two, is vulnerability. And so, with vulnerability, uh, this thing happens, where the more time you spend in proximity, uh, the more you’re like, your mask falls off.

So we all project, like who, everybody does this. It’s normal. It’s not good or bad. It can be both. But we all project a version of ourselves to others around us. And, and what happens if, if you make a commitment, this happens in groups all the time. This is why we’re such big advocates for together groups.

If you spend time gathering regularly with the same people, week in and week out, you make that commitment to each other, that mask is going to fall off. And it’s either going to happen by accident. So some of your kids are going to interrupt discussion, you’re going to snap at them, or someone’s going to say something you don’t like, you’re going to feel like you disagree with them, and who you really are starts to shine through the cracks of that mask.

Or we do that voluntarily. We let the guard down a little bit, and we share who we really are with others. We talked about woundedness, wickedness, and weakness. And in a Christian community centered around the love and grace of God, what we find when we take that mask off is not shame and guilt, but healing, freedom, and love.

That was week two. In week three, we talked about practice. So, last week we looked at what happens when it, we can do that. But if we don’t consistently make that a priority, if we don’t center our communities around practicing the way of Jesus, eventually we’re going to start living our lives by preference instead.

And when that happens, we lose the depth of the community that we’ve built, and we lose our ability to make an impact in the world around us. And so today, we’re going to talk about that. What is the impact that we should have? Or what should the focus of our friendships be? That’s what we’re looking at this morning.

We’re going to look at Jeremiah 29. We start in verse 4, you can follow along with me. This is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says to all the exiles I deported from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Find wives for yourselves and have sons and daughters.

Find wives for your sons, and give your daughters to men in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. Pursue the well being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive. Now there’s, there’s a lot to unpack there, and a lot of different directions we can go.

Um, and you, you, you might see where this message is headed already. You, this, you might not be able to see that connection. So, for the sake of brevity and clarity, here’s, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you three points, and then a way forward. That’s where we’re headed. Three points, and a way forward.

Sound good? Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Trey. Yeah, I’m with you. Alright. Point number one. Uh, point number one, we live in Babylon. Now, the context of this passage, you might know this passage already. This is where the famous line, Jeremiah 29, 11, comes a little later. I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, prayers and promise for you, not to, you know, all that stuff.

The one that goes on the coffee mugs and the t shirts, everyone likes that. This is earlier in that passage. And so, Jeremiah is writing to exiled Jewish people. These are people who, you know, we talked about last week. They built their community around preference instead of practice. And so God gives them the law, a set of practices, to define them and set them apart from the nations around them.

And they did well for a while, but then eventually, they started adopting other preferences from the cultures around them. And here’s what happens when you do that. This is what happens to these people. God says, okay, you can have what you want. And if you want to build your life and your community and your friendships around preferences instead of practicing the way of God, um, you can have that.

I’m going to remove my protection, my presence from you. And so that’s what happens to the nation of Israel. They’re immediately overtaken, uh, by the nation of Babylon, which is a really powerful sort of evil, but also very powerful, strong nation surrounded them. And as soon as they, they kind of left the way of God, Babylon comes in.

And essentially destroys like 90 percent of Israel. And, and whoever survives, uh, are exiled. They’re, they’re kicked out of the promised land, the land that God has given them, out of Jerusalem, and they’re meant to live in, uh, Babylon. So they’re finding themselves in a culture that’s not their own, in a society that is not only unfamiliar, but actually hostile to the way of God, where they are supposed to worship one god, Babylon worships many.

Where they’re supposed to sacrifice to one god, Babylon sacrifices to all sorts of gods. And they want to know how to live. And so Jeremiah is writing to these people that are exiled. They feel not at home. They feel like they’re in a place that’s not their own. And they know that that’s not where they’re supposed to be.

But they don’t know what to do until they get there. Now, you and I live in Babylon today. And we’ve spoken a lot about this in the past. I’m not going to spend too much time here. If you’re interested in this, we did a series last summer on Revelation. Go and listen to that. Uh, even a couple years ago, we did a series on Daniel.

Uh, we talked a lot about, about how to live in exile. How to live in Babylon today. So if you want those resources, those are on our website. But for our purposes today, here’s what we need to know about Babylon. Babylon in the Bible is a real place. Right. It was an actual nation. It was an actual city that oppressed Israel, uh, but it was also symbolic.

And so you’ll see anytime this is a Bible study tip, when you read about Babylon in the New Testament, especially in the New Testament, there’s a good chance they’re not talking about the literal nation of what was left of Babylon. They’re talking about the cultural systems, the empire, the world around the people of God that are hostile and antagonistic to the way of God.

And our hope, we talked about this in Revelation, our hope is that one day God is going to defeat Babylon. And the people of Babylon are going to have the opportunity to witness the grace and the love of God, but those who don’t are, are committing to Babylon, and God’s going to take care of that. That’s not our problem.

Our problem is, how do we live in Babylon today? Now Babylon is both powerful in its influence and subtle in its nature. So it’s powerful, right? You cannot live with a blind eye towards Babylon today. If you don’t recognize the way that the world persuades us and pushes us away from the way of God, then you are likely to fall victim to its influence.

It’s powerful, but it’s subtle. It doesn’t come the way that we would expect. It comes like Satan comes. Satan comes deceiving, through lies. Notice in The Garden, Adam and Eve were not Tempted away from God through brute force and violence, they were tempted with a subtle lie. Did God really say? And that’s exactly what happens in Babylon today.

Did God really say that friendships are better than loneliness? And here’s why this matters, because you and I know this. The cultural air that we breathe is becoming more and more hostile to the way of Jesus. But it’s not hostile in the sense that it’s hostile in other world, other, other nations around the world.

We don’t experience violent persecution of the body. But we do experience subtle persecution of our souls. So we don’t exper I mean, there’s a good chance you’re not gonna be arrested and imprisoned for your faith tomorrow. Here in America. There are countries where that happens all the time. But what we do experience, and what we will experience more and more, is this emotional, this social, relational tension we feel because of our commitment to the way of Jesus.

You see this in how we define sexuality? We like to talk a lot about that. You also see this in the way we, we handle money. The way of Jesus, we just, simplicity was really hard for us because that’s, I think, a lie of Babylon that’s seeping into our lives we’re not recognizing and willing to let go of.

The way of Jesus is about generosity. It’s about radical simplicity. It’s about a carefree, sort of, not carefree, but a reliant on God for provision. a worry free life when it comes to our finances and our material possessions. We see this when it comes to work. How we view our work in the world around us is becoming increasingly at odds with the way of Jesus.

We see this when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Everything that the early church stood for, based on the way of Jesus, it’s becoming harder and harder to live by. And so it’s, it’s getting harder to avoid our preferences. If we’re going to form communities, uh, centered around the practices of Jesus, that’s going to put us more and more at odds with the world around us.

And here’s what’s going to happen if we don’t take note, if we’re not aware of it. Like, this is why making friends is so hard. One of the reasons I’m so convinced is because it’s, the kind of friendship that we see in scriptures that we’re trying to lead our church through is so counter cultural and like, against not just the world, but also our nature.

To be near people, in proximity, in vulnerability, centered around a committed practice that has an impact around the world, that’s not how the world builds friendships. And the more we center our lives around these practices, the more we’re going to feel that tension. And so the world’s way of making friends and loving others looks like non commitment.

It looks like dipping when things get hard. It looks like, not, I mean, Only doing things, participating, consumerism, when you get something out of it. The minute that someone stops serving you, it’s easy to cut them out of your life. That’s the way of Babylon. Tribalism. We talked about that last week. And so, to practice community, the way of Jesus is to reject the culture around us and find others hostile to our mission.

That’s, that’s what’s gonna happen. The more we do this, the more hostility we’re gonna face. I remember one of the first, um, experiences this I had, well, lately. When I first started this job, um, About six and a half years ago, I was, uh, I feel like it’s been like 20 years. You guys, like six and a half years.

Uh, it’s not that long. It’s been so good. I’m a little under the weather. That wasn’t like, oh, it’s been long. It’s like, I’m just, I’m a little tired. Uh, we, I was working on the college campus, which I still am doing. But there’s, um, a student there that we had who, uh, we were kind of discipling. She was a student leader.

Really wanted to, like, witness, share her faith with her friends. Uh, be what the New Testament calls a witness and let them in on, on the, the goodness and the grace that she had found in our community. And so she had started this study group, and this is a school primarily of engineers, right? These are very intellectual, highly, like, academic and, and study focused students.

Uh, she started this consistent study group with her friends, and when she finally said that she was a Christian, she wanted them to come to church, they all, like, shunned her. They said, we thought you were smarter than that. They were so used to her, if she lived this way, where she was communal with her friends, excelling in her work, as smart as she was, they just assumed that she, she, that didn’t fit to them.

The way that somebody can follow Jesus and still live that life didn’t fit. It’s the same thing that I thought when I quit my, um, You know, when I took this job, I quit my highly prestigious, sought after job of overnight dairy manager at Albertsons. I told people, if you were like, why are you leaving? I was like, what do you mean?

Why am I leaving? That’s, um, why are you, no, no disrespect. I don’t know if you’re a dairyman, whatever. No disrespect. It wasn’t for me. Uh, when I told them that I was going to go to seminary and work for a church doing ministry, they’re like, I thought you, that doesn’t make any sense. You can’t, I thought you were smarter than that.

And I finally buckled under the pressure and just started saying that I was going into a counseling type of program. Um, which is a lie, but it’s not, I mean, it’s kind of true. There’s a little bit of counseling in pastoral ministry. Anyways, if you live this out, here’s what that means. If you live this out, you will experience hostility.

And that’s gonna make friendships harder, but it doesn’t make them less worth it. Because this is nothing new for the people of God. The people of God have always found themselves in the minority. They were rescued from Egypt and immediately surrounded by enemy nations. In the New Testament, oppressed by Rome, after Jesus rises again, still persecuted by Rome.

The people of God have always had to deal with living in the minority, living in a home that’s not theirs. And so our goal, as followers of Jesus, is not to take back enemy land. Our goal is to learn how to live in the midst of it. Which gets us to point number two. We have a choice. So God’s people have had to deal with exile in a variety of ways, but you can mainly sum them up in two ways.

One is assimilate. And so a lot of the people at this time that Jeremiah is writing to would do this. They would just add Babylonian pagan worship to their worship of Yahweh. It wasn’t like they would leave the Ten Commandments and God’s law, but they would just kind of add to it. That was assimilation.

They would mix their devotion to the Babylonian kings with their devotion to God. Or they would separate. So they would isolate themselves from Babylon completely and at times violently insurrect from their oppressors. And notice this is sort of similar to the choices that we have today. We live in Babylon.

We can choose to assimilate with the world around us, meaning we don’t commit to community. We define our friendships based on values that seem important to us but aren’t defined by scripture. We don’t sacrifice for others, we only do things that serve and benefit ourselves. We live in tribes, we detest those that are not like us, and we keep the weird Jesus stuff to the weekends.

Or we can separate. It’s sort of the us for no more mentality. We’re good with who’s in this room. We don’t care about those who are lost in our city, not knowing that they’re living in Babylon. This is doomsday prep. We’re just waiting for God to beam us up out of here so we can go to heaven, and God can wipe out this earth entirely.

All we have to do is sit tight and wait. And that’s, that’s, that’s a community that has a focus, but it is not a good focus. That focus is about getting us out, building up walls, and keeping others outside of the life that God offers. But notice that both of these reactions don’t actually lead anywhere. And they’re fear based.

And so you talk about the Christian trifecta, the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, living in exile, by default, gives us the opposite of those. Fear, despair, and anger. We’re fearful of the future. We’ve given up hope, and we get angry towards those who are making our life harder. Those are our two choices.

But notice that Jeremiah’s instruction to the people in Babylon, It does not include either of those. There’s no hostility and there’s no escapism. It’s neither assimilation nor separation. It’s actually a third way, which is our third point. We have a job. Now these people are living in a type of exile that I would say, I’m pretty confident to say nobody here in this room will experience.

This type of exile away from our community in isolation, uh, that they’re experiencing is not what we feel. And still, notice how extreme and ha and, and, yeah, extreme and aggressive Jeremiah’s, uh, commandments are. But not aggressive in the sense that they’re taking back land or separating themselves from it.

It’s so counterintuitive. And notice how communal they are. They’re not to assimilate and find ways to merge their convictions with Babylon. And they’re not to separate and just kind of make do with what they have. Instead, he gives them a job. Number one, build houses, plant gardens. Meaning, stay in your community.

Make commitments to the place that you’re in. Don’t look for a way out. Commit to the people that you’re with. That’s the first thing he says. Build houses, plant gardens. When, uh, a few century or two after the life of Jesus, uh, happened here on Earth, uh, you had these little, sort of, groups of people who found themselves in exile, and, and, uh, there’s a lot of history here I’m skipping over, but, um, and something that’s so compelling to me that I admire and is really tough for a lot of us is, uh, they would live by what they called a rule of life, um, which is our secret plan.

That’s what we’re trying to get you to do by the end of these nine core practices in a couple years, so you’ll learn more about that later. Um, but part of their rule of life was this, they, they had, um, It’s called a rule of stability, meaning if we’re gonna, if God has put us here in exile, we live in community together.

We are making the commitment, unless God makes it abundantly clear that we’re supposed to go somewhere else, we are gonna plant roots here and we’re gonna die here so that we see the renewal of our city. And in a culture like ours that’s so transient, where we chase job opportunities and the better offer, that seems really tough.

To say no to something that looks like success but costs us our relationships. the communal work that we’ve put in. Jeremiah says stay. And I’m not saying you can’t leave. Go where God leads you. But what if, what if God is not actually calling you somewhere else? What if he’s inviting you to say no to something that seems better but is actually costlier?

Stay. Build houses. Plant gardens. Live in community with each other. Second thing, start families. Who are they starting families with? With each other, but they’re not related, so it’s not weird. It’s, these are people in the community of God that are living in such proximity and vulnerability together that they are getting close enough to one another.

And again, marriages worked a little bit differently back then, but the point was the same. Get near each other and become family to each other. Commit to the people that you’re exiled with because there’s no one better around. You might have the ideal in your head, but that ideal doesn’t really exist.

Stay. Start families. Multiply. Increase. Become familiar with the people that you’re around. And then lastly, pray. Pray for the well being of your city because when it thrives, you will thrive. Along with prayer comes this idea of a communal focus, not just on themselves as a community, but on the others that are outside of it.

Do good work, live your life, enjoy each other, and do this so that your city is a better place because you’re in it. And this is the same job that God’s people have had since the beginning of time. This isn’t anything new. Repeated throughout Genesis into Exodus and at other points throughout the New or the Old Testament, you see this line of increase, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, meaning create.

When God puts Adam and Eve in the garden, it’s It’s a job that he gives them to create, to subdue the world, meaning cultivate it. Make it better because you’re there. Work together so that the Garden of Eden expands and God’s goodness and presence is seeping out of that space and covers the entire world.

This is what Jesus means when he inaugurates the kingdom. The kingdom is here. The kingdom is this overlap where God and earth exist in one space. And according to the New Testament, that’s what we are. When we leave this place, we’re a temple of the Holy Spirit, meaning we are that place where heaven and earth overlap.

We expand, we do good work, we make our cities better because we’re there. In other words, the job of God’s community is to make the places they find themselves in thrive. Wherever we are. And this is how God’s rescue mission for the world has always been. It’s always involved. A small group of people radically committed to each other to expand God’s kingdom and bring renewal to the world around them.

And this promise, or this job exists whether in the promised land flourishing or in exile diminishing. It doesn’t change. The Old Testament word for this is a remnant. There’s a remnant of people, meaning a small group of people who are so committed to the way of Jesus. That they actually change the world around them because of their commitment to God and their commitment to each other.

And so we circle back again to our main idea. That I learned with my friend in that stinky dorm room, eating pizza and playing FIFA. So our friendships need a focus and if every friendship needs a focus then this is ours. Pursue the well being of our city so that we can all thrive. And I’m convinced that this is how we live out Jesus’s great commission.

So Matthew 28 and 19, this is the last thing Jesus says according to Matthew’s Gospel before he leaves earth and goes to reign in heaven with the Father. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you and remember I am with you always, even to the ends of the age.

Making disciples. Did not just involve sitting down one on one with your lost friends explaining the gospel, though I am for that. When most of us think of making disciples and evangelism, that’s usually what we have in mind. Something like a one on one conversation or maybe a gospel track. That you hand them over, you know, coffee or something like that, and that’s a good thing.

Or maybe, on the not so good end of the spectrum, your experience with evangelism is awful. It’s street preaching on a corner or door to door, bargaining, debating, and arguing until you are able to win them over to Jesus. And maybe your experience with that is that it’s been negative. And evangelism has no place in the kingdom of God that’s defined by love.

But I’m convinced. That evangelism, the way of Jesus, involves bold proclamation and declaration of the truth, and that can happen over one on one conversations. It can happen street preaching, though I’m a little wary of that tactic. The early church took that to mean, hey, that means we have to impact the world by how we live.

New Testament scholar Michael Green estimates that 80 percent of evangelism in the early church happened grassroots style, meaning the mission was a natural and organic byproduct of people living together in proximity. vulnerability, and practice. As they did those things, the mission happened. The more the church gathered together and loved each other around shared practice, the more others outside of those gatherings wanted in, and the more that people were let in, the more radical and countercultural that church grew.

And so the church was ridiculed. You can read these documents by early Greek and Roman philosophers that would mock them for their inclusion, saying they let women and children and slaves in there. And when Paul talks about class in the New Testament, he’s, he’s describing a place where it doesn’t matter if you were a slave or a master.

When you walk in these walls, you are both the same. Our proximity to each other unites us around the gospel. We experience the love and the grace of God. This was the people of God fulfilling the Great Commission. They were living the commandment that God gives them in Jeremiah 29. Settle down, live with each other.

Enjoy life. Commit to one another. Pursue the well being of your city. Paul picks up on this in Romans 12. He says, Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, meaning, when you get in this space, you’re going to meet people who aren’t like you, who have different giftings than you, who have different, um, talents and abilities and interests and passions than you.

Paul doesn’t say to isolate and don’t let others in. He says that everybody has different functions. In the same way, we who are many are one body in Christ. And individually, members of one another. Notice the contrast. You come in here with your own life story and your gifts and all of that, but you come here as a member of something greater.

According to the grace given to us, we have different gifts. Meaning the church is a community of people who compliment and supplement each other’s gifts for the shared purpose of pursuing God’s mission. Now Peter picks up on this idea as well in his first letter, 1 Peter chapter 2. He says, Dear friends, I urge you, meaning this is not optional.

Peter’s saying like, if you get one thing, get this, as strangers and exiles, notice that language, to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul. What’s that? That’s practice. That’s community centered around practice. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles. Gentiles is a blanket statement that just meant those not a part of the family of God.

Non Christians or the lost. Conduct yourselves honorably among them, so that when they slander you as evildoers, notice that’s Babylon, what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna slander you. You’re gonna feel tension. The more you live this out, the less you’re gonna look like those very Gentiles. But notice what happens.

They will observe your good works. Alright, how are you responding? Are you assimilating? Are you separating? Are you pursuing the well being of their city? They will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits. Meaning, live well, become people of practice, and the mission of God will happen.

And so this last movement of friendship, of mission, is less of an intentional step and more a natural byproduct of what happens when the people of God live this way. We live, when we, seriously, in this room, I’m not just talking about the church at large, I’m talking about all of us here in this room in Queen Creek that meet in this cafeteria middle school.

When we live together this way, our city will thrive. John Tyson paints the vision of this type of Christian community this way. A Christian community in a web of stubbornly loyal relationships knotted together in a living network of persons in a complex and challenging cultural setting who are committed to practicing the way of Jesus together for the renewal of the world.

It’s that simple. And here’s why I think this is so hard for us. Our friendships grow the most when we realize they’re not about us. As C. S. Lewis put it this way, the very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice.

I don’t know why he chose those two. Like, what was happening when he was writing? I don’t know. Like, those are his interests? He’s like, even if it’s just this. Uh, those who have nothing can share nothing. Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers. Friends, our community is going somewhere.

And today it’s becoming harder and harder to acknowledge that, which means it’s becoming harder and harder. But more obvious that this takes an intentional step of practice. And for us, that’s something else. That direction of our community is nothing less than the renewal of the world through our city.

Our city needs us. We need us. To commit to each other and live together. This is the end goal of our friendship. So, three points on the way forward. What’s the way forward? How do we do this? If mission is a byproduct of our community, then what do we actually do? Next week, we’re starting our fourth practice as a church family.

It’s a practice of hospitality, and we’re convinced this is such a great place for us to start. We’re very excited about leading our church through it, because we see the practice of hospitality as a long lost art of adopting people into the family of God, for them to experience the love and the grace of God that the early church was able to expand by demonstrating to the world around them.

We’re so excited for that next week. Come back. But between now and then, what can we do as a group, as a community? Uh, here’s what I would posit. Do something for others with others. This could be anything, you’re going to talk about this in your groups, but as trivial as meeting the need of someone outside of your community, or as intense as creating a rhythm of practicing regular service projects, do something for others with others.

So what happens is we, we live such fragmented and disintegrated lives that the thought of Relational friendships? Sound draining? It sounds like we don’t have the energy because we split our spiritual life, our work life, our home life, our family life. These are all split lives. Then when we think about adding friends to the mix, now you have less energy to give to others.

It seems really, really hard. What if the answer isn’t about doing less or cutting something out? What if it’s just about bringing people in? Doing something with other people, this harkens back to week one, harkens, this goes back to week one. We live in proximity with each other, that means we invite people in.

So to get that energy might require us to make sacrifices and decisions, but what if it’s as simple as that? Refocusing our lives and reorienting them around the mission of God by becoming the people of God who love each other. Live in proximity, share vulnerably, and center around practice. And the goal, again, is not just to deepen our friendships.

We don’t want everyone to just be a better friend at the end of this, though we do hope that happens. Our end goal is to become a community so close and so deep that the love of God seeps out into our actions and renews our city one neighborhood at a time. Why don’t we stand and respond?