So where have we been this last month? You know, we've had these conversations on, what does it mean to follow Jesus in the 21st century? And we've been asking that self just so we know, but also with this expectation, what is God asking for us as a church in this next year? The very first week we talked about this, we talked about how our culture does not create followers.
You know, our secular culture does not create followers of Jesus, but also our church culture does not necessarily create followers of Jesus anymore. And the second week we talked about how following is what creates followers, and there's a biblical pattern of imitation that goes throughout scripture and throughout the life of following Jesus. Last week we took a really, really quick lap around all of the Apostle Paul's life in the book of Acts and in his letters, and we learned about what his mission and decision making looks like. How does Paul make the decisions?
And also how is Paul flexible with an unchanging message, but it's flexible in how he presents that message to people. And this week, what I want us to think about is just to take a moment and how do we discern where God's mission might be leading us? I want us to finish this conversation on following Jesus by asking, you know, how do we prayerfully discern these places of mission and these places of following where God might be at and up go as far as creating new followers, but even being a better follower of Jesus, ourself. If you've been on Foundry for any length of time, you know that we have always just found our vision and our understanding of our mission and our purpose in John chapter one verse 14.
We're gonna read this together real quick this morning. This is what it says. The word became flesh and lived among us. And we have seen his glory, the glorious of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
Inside of this verse, we see two things work out. We see the incarnation, idea of God becoming fully divine, fully man. We also see about the glory of God. The glory of God is always the truthfulness of God.
If you were to ask Wednesday this week, you heard me talk about that. Inside of God's glory, we see his revealed truthfulness. We see God in an honest point and we see God for who he is. The presence of Jesus Christ shows us the reality and the truthfulness of the living God.
We ask that question, who is God? Who do we think God is? If Jesus is showing us who that is, who is God? When I was a kid, I thought God looked like my dad's grandma, my great-grandmother, Granny.
Because Granny was the nicest person I knew. Granny always was wearing a house dress. That's the nice name for it, Moo Moo. And inside the front pocket of her house dress, she always had a bag of those little orange sugar slices and gummy ones.
You give it three for 99 cents to the gas station. Granny always had some of those. She was also the oldest person I knew. So that might have been why I thought God looked like Granny.
And I thought God looked like Granny until I saw Granny go out in the back yard and chop her chicken's head off and then put the chicken in the front pouch of her house dress next to her orange slices. Now after that, I still thought Granny was pretty cool. Granny was really nice. I was like, I don't think God would put a chicken in the front of his house dress.
I don't think he rolls that way. But who is God? You know, I also shared the next week in an invitation about how I still to this day look up to my mom's dad, my grandfather, it was B. He'd tell you, on the birth certificate, I was a William Jean Hawkins.
He would say, B.G. stood for big gun Hawkins. But I still idolized. If you come to my house, you'll see like things of his all over the place.
And sometimes I think we almost look at God, I look at my grandfather. The only problem is my grandfather's dead. He's important to me. He matters to me.
He deeply formed who I am now. But I can't talk to my grandfather anymore. He's not around. So many times we think of God being this benevolent, but also disconnected deity.
You remember the very first week I talked about how the way our culture doesn't create disciples of Jesus Christ, because what we actually believe most of the time is this thing called moral therapeutic deism. And I'm going to list off the five pillars of M.T.D. again. And I feel horrible saying this, but like one of the benefits I get on Sunday morning is I can see your looks and reactions towards things.
And y'all's jaws were dropped when I read this list off last time. I gave this look of sheer terror almost. But if we aren't seeking a fundamental assumption that God is active and is alive and is living and is with us, then historically we have to ask ourselves to question, are we even being Christian? Because so many of us struggle with the idea of following God, because we believe God is not active and involved in us.
Here are the five pillars of moral therapeutic deism. The first thing that most religious sociologists say is how our world is functionally Christian right now. The first pillar is this, a God who exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. The second pillar is God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by most other world religions.
The third pillar was the central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself. The fourth pillar is God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. And the last pillar of moral therapeutic deism is that good people go to heaven when they die. Friends, this isn't the word Christianity.
This isn't the type of faith that creates followers of God. This isn't the faith that Jesus died for us for. This isn't the faith that the Apostle Paul traveled the known world for. And this isn't the faith that the church has upheld for 2000 years.
Our culture does not create followers. Foundry, what we've done to really kind of just try to get around this. It goes back to John 1 14, the word became flesh made its own among us. We've seen his glory, the word father's only son.
As we've always assumed four things about Jesus. If you've been around Foundry for any week of time, you've heard us talk about these four things before. The first one is that we assume Jesus is here. The second assumption is we assume Jesus is doing things.
The third assumption is we believe Jesus invites us to do those things with him. And the fourth assumption is our greatest fulfillment in life will be found as we participate alongside Jesus in his message. This is what we assume we live into because we realize what we're up against. Now we did those four things years ago.
We've clung to those four assumptions for years. We also have four of the things. Remember back earlier this month in January, we had Vision Sunday. I told you, you know, we're going to echo back some of the things that we did five years ago when we started Foundry because we believe that this new building that we don't want to waste what that is, that we do not want to step into that in an unintentional way, that we want to move into our new facility later on this year with the greatest point of impact ever.
And we're going to bring back up some of these older practices that we had so that we here at the church can be formed in the way of Jesus in order to have a greater mission among the people that we are with. And so one of the things we had the very beginning, we're going to talk about this morning, and we had the four Jesus questions. They were core to our original discovery and our mission. We've got a lot of big, huge post-it notes with our answers to these questions.
We took over this and a handful of y'all are part of that. And I said, we're going to be coming back to this a lot over the next six months. Well, this morning, we're going to ask those four questions. And there's a way I want to invite you to engage with us this morning.
I'm going to do something that most people say you're not supposed to do at church, but I want you to take your phone out. Okay. We've got a URL. I'm going to throw on the screen behind you.
Okay. So I want you to go to this right now, but I don't want you to do this right now because I don't want you to jump off in this instantly. I want you to be able to have the space to come back to this. Maybe this afternoon or this week as you prayed about what these four questions are.
We're also going to put this on social. So if your phone resets or you forget it, you can have access to this URL. But these are just the four questions. And I want to want this morning to talk about these four questions.
And why these four questions matter to us discerning what the mission of God is doing in front of us. So it's bit.ly slash four Jesus questions. And that should take you to a portal. Like I said, don't get too nervous.
We'll put this down on Facebook later on today. But the first question about that we ask is this. What is Jesus passionate about? What's Jesus passionate about?
And we have to kind of define something. I feel like I throw a term around some and people might not understand what it is. But I use the word mission a lot. And this might be kind of confusing.
I grew up Southern Baptist going to RAs and going to mission friends and Wednesday nights and a lot of times when I think missions, I think about I'm going to go to Africa and live in a hut and take a canoe everywhere. Like that was my kid understanding of what his missions look like. Alan Hirsch is an Australian pastor. He really popularized this term mission all about 20 years ago.
This is what he says about it. A proper understanding of mission begins with recovering a missionary understanding of God by his very nature. God is a sent is a sent one who takes the initiative to redeem his creation. This doctrine known as Missio Day.
That's a Latin for the sending of God is causing me to redefine their understanding of the church because we are the sent people of God. The church is the instrument of God's mission in the world. I think about that lesson. The church is the instrument of God's mission in this world.
John chapter 2, 13 through 17, early in the ministry of Jesus is a fun story. I like a lot, but it helps us understand what is Jesus passionate about. It reads this, the Passover of the Jews was near and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves and making money changing and money changing their seat at their tables.
So making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins and money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, take these things out of here. Stop making my father's house a marketplace.
His disciples remember that it was written zeal for your house will consume me. In the scripture, whenever we talk about passions, we see it defined in a few different ways. It uses the word zeal. It uses the word passion, but also uses the word jealousy.
And what's so interesting though is whenever we find this word used in a positive context, as is here, in a negative context, it's usually translated as jealousy or jealousy. But whenever we find it translated in a positive context, it usually talks about imitation. But it's imitation to the point of aggravating annoying behavior to take on the desire and the shape of others. One of y'all walked in this morning and said, what are my younger friends?
They were dressed just like their daddy. I said, are you going as your dad for Halloween this year? We think about what means we imitate somebody. My grandfather, I still have his clothes.
I still want to be him. You ever seen someone who so desperately wants to imitate somebody that gets annoying and aggravating? It's beyond the point of being cute. Now it's like, OK, we get it.
Please stop. Is imitation to fully take on the character of someone else? What the disciples remembered is this Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah saying that zeal for his house. The imitation and the passion for what does the presence of God mean.
And the Jewish people believe the temple to be the physical dwelling place of God. That's where God lived. And inside of that temple, they were part of a sacrificial system. A system of blood was given to God where the lifeblood of animals was spilled out in order to restore a right relationship between God and his people.
And the New Testament, what we see is in John 1 14, the word became flesh and made his home among us. The presence of God no longer is in one place. The presence of God is this whole earth offered to all of us. When Jesus died on the cross, the moment of his death, the veil that kept the Holy of Holy Separate and Temple was torn into.
The sacrifice of Jesus Christ makes that presence and makes that glory spill out into all the world for all of us. If we ask the question, what is Jesus passionate about? If we go through everything, Jesus is deeply passionate about people reuniting with the Father and having a publicly expressive relationship with him and his purpose. We took all last year to just sit in the gospels on Sunday morning.
I probably read the four gospels more than any time I ever read in my life combined. And I'll tell you, it all goes back to this. Jesus is deeply passionate about people being restored to the Father and having a publicly expressive relationship with him. Like this is the measuring stick from here on out.
And our relationship with God as individuals, but also our relationship with God as the church that it serves as a vehicle for that passion to move from the global to the local. To move from the general to the specific. We say Jesus is in our neighborhoods because we realize that Jesus being in your neighborhood, it very well might mean a different thing from Jesus being in my neighborhood, even though we only go about half mile away. That through God's people, he's able to get very specific with the needs of this world.
You know, as far as we understand about this imitation, this is about us telling people, this is how Jesus is passion for me. His rearranged and redefined my whole life and has turned me into a follower of him. The second question we ask is what issues would Jesus care about? When we talk about issues, we think about negative, right?
Like you might have even said this week, that person has issues. No issues to us, this is a thing that we are going to debate or discuss. Whenever I hear someone talk about issues, I'm always great. This is not going to be pretty.
If anybody else ever stepped into somebody with issues, I'm excited about this. Let's talk about your issues. Not a very holy thing, is it? In Scripture, Scripture is a carry that's idea of issues so much, what it talks about is the mind.
That the mind is a place to develop an attitude based off of careful thought. Philippians chapter two, verse 5 through 11, this is called the Christ Tim. And this is what Paul says. Chapter two, 5 through 11, very first verse.
Let the same mind be in you, let the same issues dwell in your mind that was in Christ Jesus. Who though he was the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. But he emptied himself, taking a form of a slave, being born in human likeness, being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend and heaven on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God, the Father.
Having the mind is to have an attitude that's based on careful thought. Sometimes we throw ourselves into issues because we've not thought about it, right? We react quickly. We don't deeply consider what's at stake.
Scripture says, what's the same mind being you carry the same issues that Christ carried himself? And we really see two things are the predominant issues that Jesus cared about, no matter what, those two issues are healing and forgiveness. To healing and forgiveness exist inside of this. To healing and forgiveness, is that the things in the front piece of your mind is you relating to people?
As we see situations that we believe Jesus needs to be in, is the first place we are going, how is healing and forgiveness being offered here? So many times for us evangelism can be a dirty word. We're going to talk more about that later on this morning, but our evangelism cannot be separated from our mission, because how are we offering healing and forgiveness to people in situations in a contextually appropriate way? One of the things you've heard me say before, high irony on first Sunday of the month, we take up stuff for the food pantry, is that all the church of Satan can have a food pantry.
How are we offering the healing and forgiveness of Christ in the ways that we are reaching out to people? Well, also what I appreciate about this is that healing and forgiveness does not just have to be offered to one class of person either. You know, healing and forgiveness is something each of us need in our own life. That's the issue Jesus cared about.
Are you offering healing? Are you offering forgiveness? And if it doesn't do this, if it doesn't do healing and forgiveness, can we really say it's good? The sarmon on the Mount Matthew chapter 5, 6, and 7, it's in many ways.
It's just like entire purpose, the way that he speaks about things. And if we quickly condense a sarmon on the Mount this morning, relax, we're not about to read all three chapters of Matthew. That would take 18 minutes. I've timed it before.
But three things. If we read the sarmon on the Mount, three things are on the front of the mind of Christ inside of that. The second thing that Jesus cares about is that everyone is valued to God, even that person you don't like. Or the fact that person that you disagree with fundamentally is loved by Jesus just as much as you are.
The third thing that we see inside of the sarmon on Mount is that Jesus does not depend on himself. Jesus depends on the Father. Even the Son of God is in a depending relationship with God. How are we extending healing and forgiveness in situations we come up to?
And that brings us to our next question is this. Where would Jesus spend his time? I'll tell you what, and one of the reasons I told you all to hold back and wait and not fill that out right now is I'm going to tell you an easy answer for this question on that survey and then I'm going to ask you that answer adequate enough because what we could say is, oh, Jesus, let's go. Let's make sure we go to the football field for this.
Let's make sure we go here. And as long as we stick a foundry logo on the water bottle will be safe. These kind of very passive mission projects we might fall ourselves into. If you're around, you've heard me say before when foundry was starting, if somebody told you to do it in a book and we did it, it would fail horribly.
If people said it was, if people said all this will never work, it would usually work really great for us. I think back to this. Some of y'all might know this and if you really want one, I still have three boxes of them somewhere but we made these giant foam fingers for starting to high school at the number one. Let me try the phone fingers we gave away, we gave away a thousand phone fingers one night.
And our goal was to early early on two three months and that's trying to start foundry. Our goal early on was okay we're going to get people a phone here but to get a phone finger. They're going to fill a card out so we can get their email address. We gave away a thousand of things.
We've got two cards and only positive benefit from that was showing in high school got me to clean their football field for three hours from tiny pieces of foam finger that ripped part of the game that night. That's a passive strategy of what does it mean to find out where Jesus would spend his time. Let me ask you this question instead. What if we intentionally step into this question?
Where would you spend his time by believing that Jesus and his graciousness and through our willful faithfulness will be giving us places of influence. And it's through these things that he gives us the holy ability to speak directly to the people that Jesus asking us to and to bring the presence of Jesus into the places he is asking us to do. What places can benefit they figure the place out. What places can benefit from us carrying the presence of Christ in a way that offers healing and forgiveness you've heard me say before that you are the best person to reach the people that you know.
As I read the gospels as I read the stories of the apostles Peter and of Paul and James the brother of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament more and more and more I'm fundamentally believing that in our faithfulness and through our faithfulness Jesus puts us in the places he wants us to for specific reasons. And that he is giving us as individuals he is giving us as a church places where we can be the only ones to bring the presence of God into that situation. It's not an accident. It's not us just going to try to get covered.
I love it every single time I'm in a public place talking to somebody about Jesus lately somebody else comes up to me and gives me their churches invite card. It's like Jesus I'm safe to give this card to this person like y'all this isn't about passive strategies. This is about us actively believing Jesus is putting people and places and things in front of us. And when I read these passages back in the gospel system much has been given much is expected the thing that keeps me up at night now is how am I not being faithful and what might he take away at his faithfulness because I simply wasn't willing to be faithful in that place.
Where would you spend his time he spent his time in places he is calling you to go to where only you can go and do those things. And the gospel is one of my I've not started chasing this rabbit yet but I'm really curious about how much time Jesus actually spent in ministry in those three years and where was he some kind of making some notes on maps right now. But we see Jesus kind of comes back to Capernaum is his base camp a lot Capernaum was where Peter lives where he called that there's some scholars even think Jesus lived in Capernaum like he actually had a place there. And I said I'm not chasing that line yet but y'all let me tell you about Capernaum.
If washer taught parish was Judea Capernaum at this non-washer parish called it will be Chatham. It's the town you go to get bait at before you go fishing. Jesus started off his ministry at the bait shop. The town town with a flashing yellow light and a gas station pizza grocery store fuel in one building all mixed up into one.
As God's habitat Jesus chose what was small for great things. Friends where you can find comfort in that there is no place that Jesus might be sending you into that is insignificant. The last question is this how would Jesus reach people. Remember we said his passion is healing and forgiveness how can he bring healing and forgiveness places how can we bring healing and forgiveness in a place.
One of my favorite stories in the gospels is John chapter four the woman at the well Jesus meets this woman at the well and for the sake of time we're not going to read that and go into that. Let's just say that she had been destroyed her entire life thinking she was insignificant and did not matter and Jesus came in there and rectified those three things. We see three different things happen that story that I believe are part of the process that Jesus did when he reached people that we can take on ourselves. The first thing is this he challenged assumptions.
In the conversation with that woman she tried to get out of an awkward conversation by getting into a religious conversation. In both of those places Jesus challenged her assumptions about the way things work. The second thing is that Jesus offered her greater stability. Her issues in life came to the fact that she had nothing she didn't have any stable and there were multiple things that happened in her life that created instability and Jesus offered her greater stability.
And the after effect with that was the healing and forgiveness that Jesus offered her she runs back to town and says come and meet the man who has told me every single thing I've known about myself. Y'all if I've done sketchy things I don't want people to talk about. If you've done sketchy things do you want somebody to go and talk about it. What's even worse is like when you know something's not right and somebody comes to you and tells you what's going on.
And they're reading you to a tee are you normally a good movement that happens. This lady picks up and runs the town and says hey this guy just read me the riot act and he was 100% true and it's amazing. Healing and forgiveness when it's offered can do amazing things. A lot of times we think the word evangelism is a dirty word.
It's a frustrating word. There's a meme template that's getting kind of hot right now. If you've y'all seen this yet. This is a two by meme.
It's actually a sousaphone but nobody wants it. Nobody can spell sousaphone. But you see this I think a lot of times we think about evangelism. We've been one of these two people.
We might have been the person blowing the sousaphone at somebody or more often than not. We're the person whose head is completely surrounded by the bell of the tuba. And I think back to stuff that I got kind of roped into when I was younger and sent off to when I was in middle school and high school just knocking on doors bugging people harassing folks. Friends this is not evangelism.
This is not a man. This is not teaching people and reaching people for Jesus. No evangelism isn't knowledge transfer. As much as I read as much as I like smart things as much as I like us to talk about smart things here on Sunday morning.
That's not evangelism. It's also not behavioral modification. Because we have a really tough time doing behavioral modification without offering healing and forgiveness. So let's just take that off the table because we do a bad job at that evangelism.
We look in the life of Jesus and how Jesus reaches people. He does it in a respectful way and a loving way and an honest way at every level and it happens inside of a relational context. It does not happen with strangers. It's about us offering healing and forgiveness is we ourselves have experienced healing forgiveness.
And as we are currently experiencing healing and forgiveness. It happens in the reality and the truth of our life. So why don't we talk about these things this last four weeks. What was so important for us to take four weeks to talk about following Jesus.
Y'all there's a temptation you've heard me say it before. But there is a deep temptation that we have in a handful of months when our sanctuary is finished for us as a church to feel like we were done. Y'all would be really easy to ride this out. It'd be really easy for us to say, okay, let's just make sure the money's there.
The bills are paid and let's just be normal. Quit talking about crazy things. Quit doing church services at a bar. That was weird.
I've gotten phone calls for that for the first time ever. That was a lot of fun. I actually had a lot of fun. But you know, normal doesn't create followers.
Normal doesn't reach people. Normal does not bring healing and forgiveness. As much as we feel like we are church in our community that there is an overwhelming estimate of 65% of people do not have a relationship with the local church. And I'm bold enough to say that I believe it's really tough and they're impossible to do the Christian life without a local church.
Jesus didn't build up that way. He called us his body. He called us his bride. When we started the church, we said this one thing.
If we want to reach people who've never been reached before, we have to be willing to do things that have never been done before. Friends, what's different in our world now is offering healing and forgiveness. What's different in our world is going against the idea of a disembodied God who barely cares about me. What's different in our culture now is saying and being bold enough to say, I'm following Jesus.
And if you want to follow him, just do what I do because I'm doing what he does. Being different is being a person who realizes I have to be worthy of imitation. God is calling us to continue to do different things. But he doesn't call us to do different things and leave us alone and leave us absent.
He calls us to do different things to bring his presence by continuing to offer asking us to come into his presence. It's the greatest example and gift of presence that he gave us.