Hey, y'all, I'm Claire. I help with Foundry Youth and Foundry Kids. And our teaching text today is gonna be out of Acts chapter four, verses 32-37. All believers were one in heart and mind.
No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. From time to time, those who owned land or houses sold them brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet.
And it was distributed to anyone who had need, Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus whom the apostles called Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles' feet. This word is true and can't be trusted. So my sophomore year of college, I was at this private Southern Baptist University and I decided to join a fraternity. And so just so you know, yes, a fraternity at a private Southern Baptist University is an oxymoron.
And if anyone's curious what rushing a fraternity at a private Southern Baptist University is like, did you ever go to use camp? And there's that one afternoon of like super gross messy games, it was that for a month. And it all culminated in somebody having to kiss a hogs head. And they forgot that we were all rednecks and that wasn't that odd of a thing for any of us to have to do.
Like I said, oxymoron. But as part of our rushing, we had this chapter of Psalms that we had to memorize and just repeat it at every single weird moment like phone calls middle night, say the verse, that sort of thing. And whereas I still don't have this verse memorized anymore, I still have it imprinted in my life. And it's Psalm 133, I want to read this to you this morning.
So what it says, how good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity. It's like a precious oil poured on the head running down from the beard, running down Aaron's beard, down the collar of his robe. It is though, it's the do of Herman was falling on Mount Zion. For there, the Lord bestows on his blessing, even life forevermore.
This chapter of Psalms is great. I love it. And it speaks to the benefit and the beauty of life together. And today we're going to continue on this series on spiritual community, about talking about the reality of God's people and community and what that does, what that gives this sort of thing.
And this Psalm is so visceral because of its speaks and how relationships are like anointing. In the Old Testament, only two groups of people were ever anointed. It was kings that were anointed and there were priests that were anointed. We think of an anointing with oil.
You might have seen somebody do it. I've done it. I always have a nice cute little tiny vial. You get a little bit on your forehead.
And you just picture another dumping things on your head, just like running through all the nooks and crannies of stuff. This oil symbolizes the presence of God just washing over these people and going down completely over them from the top of their heads to the bottom of their toes. Now, I've had popcorn stuck in my beard before. I've never had oil poured into my beard.
And I would much rather think of the presence of God overflowing on my own life and my own body like this. It's anointing of the presence of God that we cannot have if we are not in relationships with other people. There's a space where we begin to stop experiencing God if we're not doing it alongside of others. So today we're going to talk about this really in two ways and two things.
The first is this, but how spiritual relationships are beneficial, but they're also different from other relationships. And the second thing we're going to talk about is why trust is a really big key in this. We have to think about trust. So Jesus in John 15, he said this, my command is this.
Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends. You know, his last night and last words and explanations of sad things, he grounded his relationship with the disciples with that statement. Now, we can read that verse and we can hear it.
We can instantly begin to think about the sacrifice that Jesus made for us in the utmost way. Then we begin to think about us making a very similar sacrifice. It begins to get frightening, doesn't it? That sounds great.
When we hear it, it doesn't sound that good in physical practice. It doesn't. So sometimes I think we read this verse and we kind of file that back into Jesus' stuff that only Jesus does fold her in our life. But if we pull back a little bit, we begin thinking of all of the words of Jesus, of all of the actions of Jesus, the things that we see him do and say and all the gospels, it begins to put a little bit more of a truthfulness around it and we begin to realize that love is the empowering action that allows us as followers of Jesus to take on a different posture of the world.
Instead of us living in a place or living realizing for us to succeed, for us to be happy, for us to have things, we have to do it by climbing on top of the backs of others and always putting ourselves in opposition, making sure we're always on top. Rather than living like that, we realize that Jesus, you lay down your life. And when Jesus says to find your life, you have to lose your life. We see how all of this happens inside of love, but also inside the willingness to live outside of ourselves for the sake of others.
H.A. S. Wabada says this, true community is not born of our efforts in creating a sense of community. It is the natural outcome from the act of loving other people.
When we try to do community quickly, we try to do it without sacrifice, we fall into, M. Scott Pitt calls it pseudo community. The pseudo community happens when people try to purchase community cheaply, when they just want to live in a life of conflict, avoidance, and they want to deny individual differences. We're all together, we're all the same, isn't this great?
That pseudo community is fake. Biblical community isn't fake. It's people together at various stages of spiritual development and maturity and life and all different things at all different levels together in community and simultaneously in love with God, in love with each other, submitting to God and also submitting to each other. In our teaching text, which Claire read for us in the book of Acts, it's where we see the first community, the first spiritual community, respond to each other.
And in this passage, it was all about basic needs. So if you're nervous that Chad's gonna go on this financial rant about everyone being poor, sharing things, that's a really bad misappropriation of what this text means. Like let's look off how it starts off, it's all about the first sentence right there. So that they're doing it.
All the believers were one in a heart in mind. All of the believers were together in one heart in one mind. See, this is a unity, not a financial equilibrium. This is a unity of purpose.
This is a unity of belonging. This is about having a vision of life together that's larger than your own. It's what happens when we move out of living life in suspicion of others, to living life with the necessity of others. Mark Sayers talked about this really well, with this idea of there's a horizontal self, and there's also a vertical self.
When we are living life with a horizontal vision of our self, it means that we are living in our own world, and that we cannot see beyond our own life, because we have made our life the foundation of all things. More horizontal self, we cannot look any higher than where we are right now, with any degree of certainty. But the only thing that we know to be true and trustworthy is just ourselves, because we are seeing us as the pinnacle, and us as the foundation. When we're living a horizontal self, we can only look sideways.
We have no wider or taller story to believe, and we can't find identity in anything beyond ourself. Scripture talks about the people of God being united together in heart and in mind. United in heart, the way they see life as working, and the way they find meaning in life. And united together in mind, the purpose that they attach themselves to, and how they make decisions.
So the picture of what the vertical life looks like. Where you realize you're part of something higher than yourself, and you are called to something higher than yourself. And you realize that there are foundations that are not you, there are things to aspire to that are not you, and there are other people that are part of that. It's much more of a wider vision of things, together, in heart and in mind.
The second thing we're talking about today is trust, and why trust is key. And all we call, I've been thinking about this in reality, before we got really, really deep into trust, we have to talk about a couple of things. You know, number one, there are people in life that have significant trust problems because of the church. There are people who have significant trust problems because of people in the church.
I also can't deny the fact that there's people that have significant trust problems because of folks that are in my position, the spiritual leaders. And I also know I've had to parade this week knowing that no matter what, all of us have broken others' trust at times, including myself. We can't talk about trust in church without talking just for a moment and acknowledge that for some people, trust in church is an oxymoron, that is just too messy to mess with. I could not go further today without just making sure we put that, I don't like elephants in rooms, do you like elephants in rooms?
Let's talk about elephants, we just talk about elephants. So trust is big, trust is difficult. You know, when we want to create this sort of biblical community we find about, y'all, we're not gonna do this in one sermon and a home sheet. It doesn't happen that way.
Citizens all 91, I will say of the Lord, here's my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. Trust happens only inside of action. If we don't feel like we need to trust anyone, we are never going to experience what trust is like. To tell somebody I trust you is a pretty serious thing, isn't it?
We don't put that around lightly. To say I trust you means that we're willfully given a portion of ourselves over to other people. No broken trust is a real thing, but so is real trust. In scripture, we see this journey of trust happening based off of personal engagement, but also communal engagement with the actions of God.
No, a biblical trust is a journey that all of us take when we recognize that the best way for us to explain our existence, explain our meaning, is this idea of covenant life with the living God, with the Father, with the Son, with the Spirit. It's an intimate and it's a mutual commitment we make with the people that we are in spiritual community with. That's why these relationships matter, is because these relationships are uniquely different from other relationships. They're not just friends, I'm sure you might find great friends in church.
You might find your best friends in church, but it's a different relationship than just friends. It's a different relationship from the idea of work family or ball family. There's a purpose that's attached to spiritual relationships. It's not attached to any other relationships we have.
It's united not by who we are, but by who God is and what God is doing. Trust requires three things. First one is this, trust requires recognizing a need. We talked about a little bit of this already, but you can't trust if you don't need the experience and necessity of refuge.
If you're living that horizontal self, you've got everything's great. You can always take care of yourself. There's nothing that can get thrown at you that you can't get your way out of. You're gonna struggle with understanding what trust is.
We can only experience trust when we understand the necessity of refuge. You can't trust if you're still self-obsessed. It's about a reality of life larger than ourselves, as for members of a vertical life, not horizontal life. The need of trust can only be triggered by the realization that our own potential or our own ability simply isn't strong enough for what our life needs.
The second thing about trust is this, trust requires sharing the need. If we look at our acts passage, we see how trust got worked out with these folks. They had a mutual desire to see and to live in a different world. And this different world came with unique circumstances.
The circumstance that they had is there was some sort of economic equilibrium that was broken there. And so they had to realize if we were committed to this different world, that means that the commitment and the responsibility of thriving in this different world comes from the community. It means us intentionally stepping into this life and this world together to discern the unique circumstances that are going to arise with this kind of commitment, especially those circumstances that are going to contrast the world around us. We read what the first biblical community had to deal with, and we will have things that we have to learn together as well.
And acts it was physical circumstances. For us and our, well, it might be emotional circumstances. There might be mental circumstances. There's absolutely going to be spiritual circumstances.
And you know what? For some folks, in some ways, it might be economic circumstances. The needs can only be met to the degree of communal trust that we have. You know, if trust is low, needs are going to be deeply unmet.
It'll be surface level. It'll be pseudo community that's focused on just not having any conflict on things being easy. To be associated with somebody is to have low communal trust. To be in covenant spiritual community with somebody, it's someone that you have a high level of communal trust with.
Trust requires sharing the need. It always is going to involve another person. You can't self trust. Trust requires giving and then growing the need.
You know, needs are not just unmet desire. I mean, there's a lot of things that we feel like we need in life right now, right? I was talking to some folks earlier today. I really feel like, due to a deep YouTube rabbit hole over the last week, I feel like I need a 3D printer in my life.
I've been trying, I've been poking my earmaul a little bit already. Hey, what's cool stuff we can do? I can organize things better. Needs are not just unmet desires.
We live in a world where we think we need everything that tickles our hearts, our minds, or other parts of our party. But this vision of trust that we find in scripture requires us from moving from a focus on ourselves to not just a focus on another person, but to focus on other. That vision of trust, it means us placing the same level of trust in other people that we are placing ourselves because here's the thing, this is the wild expectation that we finally move into this level is that God might be speaking to us with our deepest needs through someone else. We're waiting on him for us to hear it and there very well might be somebody else that has it and wants to bring it to us and tell us, but are we able to hear it?
This means us realizing that our unique spiritual personal needs will not be met personally, but will be met corporately with the people that you're in community with. Now we bear spiritual burdens for each other. That's what we do when we pray for each other. We say, I'm gonna pray for you.
It's just me, oh, it's nice. I need another person to say my name to God because that's gonna fix everything. Like I'll tell you, I'll say it, sideboard. You know what the best form of religious procrastination is?
Or to get out of an awkward conversation? I'll pray for you. Back on track now. Okay, that's not what prayer is.
When we agree to pray for someone else, that means that we are taking on every single level of burden that that person has. We are taking that burden on willfully ourself for them and we are uniting together with them to bring that to the throne of God. That we are sharing whatever level of spiritual power that we have in authority in our life, we are linking that together with them to pray to bring that to God. Eugene Peterson asked this question in his book, a long obedience in the same direction.
So the question is not, am I going to be part of this community of faith? But how am I going to live in this community of faith? The decision saying, this is not about me meeting. My needs, this is about me coming together for all of us to link our needs.
He also goes on to say this about people who do make that decision. Some determined to find out what God has in mind by placing them in this community called a church, learning how to function in it harmoniously, and joyously, and develop the maturity that is able to share and exchange God's grace with those who otherwise might be viewed as nuisances. That's not pseudo community friends. Let's moving into a biblical vision of life together that is so much stronger in the way we naturally do it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer says this, "'We need others as a bearer and a perclaimer "'of the divine word of salvation. "'We need the other solely because of Jesus Christ. "'The Christ in our own heart is weaker than the Christ "'in the word of someone else, "'where our own heart might be uncertain, the other is sure. "'Our lives are not meant to do everything.
"'If you're a high anxiety person, "'you're not supposed to do everything. "'We're also not supposed to spiritually do everything. "'We have gifts, we have grace, "'we're going to explore that a lot more next week. "'But this is about us coming together, "'us realizing we can't follow Jesus "'and be in spiritual isolation.
"'It's about us realizing that there's an exponential increase "'in the actions of faithfulness when we do this together. "'We realize our own personal holiness, "'is us building up spiritual authority inside of the community "'that we've committed to be part of. "'No way that we bear each other's burdens "'allows us to continue at the same pace together. "'When I was a kid in high school a couple of times, "'went backpacking in New Mexico, "'but 10, 12, 13, 14 of us every time.
"'There's always a few adults and a bunch of kids. "'And I remember the first time we went, "'the first couple of days were rough, "'because we don't have mountains, "'and we're losing on it. "'I've been to Mount Driscoll, it's a joke. "'Have y'all been there?
"'It's a joke. "'My brother and I always swore that a slag pile "'at the wig nightman he worked at "'was actually taller than Mount Driscoll. "'But we were there losing a number of ways "'nealing with mountains for the first time. "'We're trying to do all this, we realize, "'we're just taking forever, but I mean, you're like, "'10 miles back back, 50 pounds on your back, "'it's just tough, it's rough.
"'Can't do it, it's hard. "'A couple of days into it, the very first time we realized, "'it was always the same people that were slow going uphill. "'And it was also always a different group "'of the same people that were slow going downhill. "'And you get in trouble, like you don't wake up and say, "'this is the order we're going to walk into today, "'like you kind of drift in your friends, "'or talk on your share, but it gets really scary "'and you're out there, it's hot, "'you realize that 8-10 people are stretched out "'over a quarter of a mile.
"'It's not fun, it's not safe. "'But then we realize, you know what, "'if we take the folks that are always "'the slowest going uphill. "'And every time we start going uphill, "'we put them up front. "'It sets the pace for everybody.
"'Stay safe, also stay is fun. "'And every time we start going downhill, "'and there's always the slowest person downhill, "'which was me, you put them up front. "'And they set the pace for everybody, "'and stay safe, and it stays fun. "'You know, friends, that's what a lot of this issues "'of trust is, is that saying we know what people are good at?
"'We know where the people that are strong at, "'and we're going to spiritually link arms together, "'and we're going to allow people to set the pace "'at a level that continues to make this fun. "'But also makes this safe. "'We can't do this if we're not willing to, "'a, accept our own weaknesses in the places "'where we need to trust, or we might have let other folks "'trust down, or also step into relationships. "'Hey, listen, I'm willing to move beyond just niceties "'in pseudo-community with you.
"'I'm willing to set the pace for you "'in the times you need me to, "'and I'm willing to let you set the pace for me "'in the times when that's what I need. "'You know, individual Christianity is one "'that's judgmental and approaches failures "'in some sort of broken system of fake religion. "'The biblical community that we find in scripture "'is focused on mutual support, "'s focused on honor, "'and it's on a shared corporate vision "'of what God's inviting us alongside of him to do. "'We keep it safe.
"'We make it fun. "'We keep each other safe. "'We make sure each other's having fun.'" To finish this out, y'all, mostly y'all know me. I'm a little data nerdy, right?
But there's something we've got to talk about before we go into next week with this. We've got to talk about this as we finish this up. Because I hope that I'm discerning the same thing you're discerning. It's the spirit of God speaking us today in a unique way to our hearts, but the reality where we have done well in this and where we've also failed in this.
But there's something as a church we need to talk about before we take another step further in this. If you've been here forever, you're probably gonna say, yes, Chad, I know what you're talking about. If you're new, if you've not been around here this much, what I hope you here is that, okay, Chad doesn't mind elephants in rooms, he'll talk about elephants in rooms, but also these are normal people. They're not perfect.
They're trying to figure this stuff out. Before the virus came in, we had spent years trying to figure out the best way for us to be at church. This is not just a Sunday morning church, it's not just a serving church, but it's a relational church where community is built. And right before the virus came, we were finally getting traction on that.
I know it was tough when you beat for four years in a high school gym to do that. We were intentional and focused, hired staff around that idea, everything, we were finally getting some traction in that. And we've lost that traction completely. There's all the conversations I have with folks and just looking back and seeing things, really I feel like there's three groups of people that are at this church right now.
I feel like every one of us, for the most part falls in one of these three categories. The first one is this. The first one is I don't really need community. I've got tons of friends.
I don't have empty relational holes in my life. I come to church because it's nice, it's fun. I enjoy it, I like serving, but I'm not looking for the church to build up my relationships. There's a second group of folks that say, you know, I would really like that sort of community.
That sounds novel. I might be serving, I might be in other places, but that's saying I am coming to church because I want to find that. There's a third group of folks that are here that love this church, love what they get, love what they see, but they're saying I need that community. This is moving beyond a want, but it's a necessity.
I really need this. And the more and more, I just kind of, we kind of shake the filter down to try to figure out what's going on. What a lot of it's boils down to where we have always struggled with this as a church is the fact that just getting off, if you've been around for a long time, you've heard me use the phrase critical mass. It's just having enough people willing to commit to it, to make it work well because we are all super, super busy.
Super busy. Does anybody have tons of extra time on their hands or trying to find a way to fill up? No, thanks for your honesty, buddy. I can take care of that if you want to.
We had dropped them off at two o'clock on Monday. You push it, dumpster. But this is what I ask you to do. There's two things.
There's a home sheet on the back that asks some questions about trust and that sort of thing. You can find that also online at myfoundry.life. That's a great thing to take home, to think about as a person. But there are three things, two things I would like to ask you to think about this week.
Before we come together next week, first one is this, what bucket do I fit in? Am I the person that does not really feel like I need or I want spiritual, I'm not looking for that at church? Love something more, love that, it's great chat. Everything's cool.
I just don't have that hole in my life. Or you may be like, no, I want that. To me, that's part of church. I want that.
Or you might be a need person. I say, no, I need that right now. I've got specific relational holes in my life that I know can only be filled by spiritual relationships. So first of all, think about that.
Which one is bucket stuff I fall into? The second one is this, where I said that we all filter our lives down. This level of commitment is about priorities, but what am I willing to make time for? I want you to think about this.
We all have different filters in life. I just want to ask you this, where is your church filter? Is church the thing that's that tiny thin one, that whatever is really, really super tiny gets down to the very, very bottom of things? You might have some bigger filters.
You might have a work filter. It works important. You got to eat, right? Does anybody want to sell everything and do the export thing?
We got to work. No, but you might have an extra curricular activity filter. You might have a Netflix filter. You might have a bedside Baptist on Sunday morning filter.
Like I just really like my soft pants chat. I'm just staying at home. This one asks you to do. The biggest thing that's going to help us grow in this is commitment.
This one I'm not going to ask you to live up here. But I want you to think about what your filters are. And I'm going to ask, would you be willing to take that filter and move it up one more level? One more level.
Friends, I think these conversations are conversations that are going to set the tone for our church for years to come. And I want to ask you to be prayerful about that as well as we're inside of this season. And let's go to the board and prayer. Father, we thank you.
I thought that you were always here. As Mallory was leading us earlier at the band, you're perfect in all of your ways. God, the thing I was thinking about is we were seeing that is even in these situations where I'm having to learn trust and deal with the hardships of trust or you're perfect in your ways. Or the vision of life, this expansive, beautiful thing we get to do alongside of you is perfect.
God, the healing that we each need to experience uniquely and personally in our life is perfect. God, the people that are set before us in relationships, God, that want to be alongside us, God, are the people that might have things for us that we need. And we've been looking for ourselves and expending tons of energy and hopes and frustrations and doing good things and wrong things and just not the right things. Realizing that those things we're looking for is just somebody else who might be sitting five feet away from us.
But God, I pray for our trust to grow. God, you're perfect in all of your ways. And when we claim that perfection, God. God, we also say this one of the you are holy, you are unique, you are different, you are distinct, you are set apart, God, but in your love, you draw us back into your set of partners.
Your son, Jesus came, healed the brokenness, divide, all out of us back in relationship with you. And it's always allowing us to pat God as you just make us perfect as you're perfect. You call us to be distinct and set apart just as you are. As a Lord, we just pray come Holy Spirit.
We'll fill our hearts with love, with vision, with trust. This year we pray together, amen. Let us stay in and continue in worship.