Created For Community

Automatically generated from the video captions and lightly tidied, so expect the odd misheard word.

Thank you so much, Pastor Arthur. How do I follow that? Sorry, you'll have to forgive me being extra with all my stuff. It's just easier for me to have to handle, put stuff down, but it is a joy and a privilege to be with you. Lovely to meet you. Hope we'll get a chance to meet all of you in person before the day is out, but it is a genuine privilege.

We love what God is doing here in Galway and through L 15 and we love your pastors. We love these guys and support them. We want to thank you for the invitation to be with you. Can we just take a minute and honor your pastors because anyone who obeys God to the level of wanting to start a church deserves honor. And I hope you guys will just really rally around your pastors in this season and expect God to honor what they have done by being obedient to God. So, we just bless you guys and we thank you for the invitation to be here with you today.

You've you've met my family on screen and maybe in person as well. My husband who's just been leading us in worship is from a small little place in North Wales called Wrexham, which you may know thanks to a certain football team that became famous a while ago. But, you know, you were proud before they became famous, right? They've been there all along. So, he's one of our worship leaders and a prayer coordinator in Abundant Life and Mia and David are family with us as well. A little bit about myself, I'm originally from the other side of the country from Wicklow, but we've been living in here in Limerick 20 years.

So, a bit of a mixed confusing accent, so that would be why I don't really sound like I'm from either place. I'm an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God in Ireland, which we call Christian Churches Ireland, and as Pastor Hazel said, I have the joy and the privilege of serving as one of the pastors on team at Abundant Life Christian Church, which is planted right in the heart of the city of Limerick. It's a very busy, thriving, interesting church to be a part of. We have over 500 people coming regularly and over 64 nations represented as well, so there's always something happening. It's a It's a vibrant, life-giving, exciting community to be involved with. And as Pastor Hazel says, I'm always involved in freedom ministry there, in the discipleship side of things.

And I also carry a passion for women in leadership in the church, which is why I started Rise Leadership Network in this country. But above all, I am a follower and a servant of Jesus. And that's my heart. My heart is the same as your pastors here. Our heart is for you today to find and follow Jesus. And we pray that today would be a step in that direction for you, however you've come to this place.

And today I really want to lean into that in a very practical way and look at what it means for us to live in godly and biblical community. And so my title today is moving from crowd to community. When we say yes to Jesus, we're not just agreeing to believe in something privately, personally. We're choosing to live in the way of the cross. We're learning how to love God well, and we're learning how to love people well. And I don't know if you've ever noticed, but this symbol of the cross that we use to display our faith in God, it has two beams.

And it's on the screen behind me there, so you can see it. There's a vertical beam. There's our relationship with God. God has reached down to us in love. He gave it all as we were singing this morning for you because of his love for you. And our response to that as we reach up to experience that love.

And so there's that dynamic of me and God, but there's also another beam in the cross. There is a horizontal one which speaks to our relationships with each other. And there's a lot of emphasis in the church on the vertical, on me and Jesus. And that is critically important. You know, without a personal relationship with Jesus, there is no hope. There is no purpose.

There's There's nothing in this world that can give you outside of what Jesus can give you. But at the same it's very easy to be so influenced by the materialism, the consumerism, the individualism that we have in our culture that we can forget that God calls us to more than just a me and God mindset. So if our faith is only vertical, if we don't do life with other people and it's all about just me and God, we can become isolated. We can become incomplete because the God who created you wired you to need people. At the very beginning when he creates Adam in the garden, he says it's not good for him to be alone. I'm going to give him people.

I'm going to give him a companion to share life with. And so when Jesus died and rose again at the cross is symbolizing that, he reconciled us to God as we sang this morning, but he also reconciled us to each other. He's also doing a work with us and other people. And so if the cross is vertical and horizontal, following Jesus for us is horizontal as well as vertical. We see so clearly in this Bible that Christianity's always been a shared faith. It's something that we don't just believe personally, but it's lived out and practiced with others.

And I believe that God's heart for every believer is to move from the crowd into community. So what does that look like? First of all, I think we should start with defining what it means when we talk about godly biblical community. And I would define it like this, a godly biblical community is a group of people who come together united in Jesus for his purposes. Here we all are, all different personalities, all different backgrounds, all different stories, walks of life, and we're brought together in this room for one reason. We're brought together for one purpose.

And whatever your reason for coming today, whether you come regularly or whether this is your first time here, I believe that God's got a reason for you to be here, that God has brought you here himself. That whatever your reasons are, he's drawing you. He's inviting you to come closer to him, to get to know him and to discover not just who he is, but who he has created you to be. He has good plans for your life. And so, no better person to look at in the scripture when we talk about what godly biblical community is than Jesus himself. He modeled godly community in his own life and in his own ministry.

Right from the very beginning, we see he grew up in a family, and that family unit practiced their faith in a wider Jewish community. But as he grows up as an adult, we also see he's got vertical and horizontal connections. He we see him very strongly connected to his father. There's always a withdrawing from people to be with his father God, but he always had people around him as well. Various different circles of people who related to Jesus in different ways. And there are lots of different groups that we know about the 72 disciples.

There's a group of 120. There's all these different groups and circle sizes in Jesus' life. But today, I want to speak into three particular groups. And it's this, the 12, and the three. When we look at the crowd, we see that Jesus ministered to many people. There is a scripture in Matthew 4.

If you have your Bibles, you can turn to Matthew 4, and if you don't, don't worry, it's going to be on the screen here as well. But Matthew 4:24, starting there, says, "News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures and paralyzed, and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Judea, Jerusalem, and the region across the Jordan followed him." And when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them. I want you to imagine what this crowd would have been like. Bit like this crowd here, a few of us all sitting down together from different parts of the city or different parts of life, and we're all sitting focused in the same direction.

The crowd is this place of inspiration. It's a place of hope. It's a place of energy. There's a buzz. Something's going on. Something is interesting that we want to know about or we want to check out.

It's a place where we can feel belonging, where we can have our needs met, and we see this Jesus meeting needs in the crowd. And it's a place where we hear what Jesus has to say. For some of us, it's a place of safety. Some of us, it's a place of curiosity, a place where we sense maybe there's something more to life than what we've experienced, and that is why we're here. And maybe you're here today, you're just checking out this whole Christianity thing. You maybe you're you're wondering what is going on with L15, what is that about?

And if that is you, I just want to say I'm so glad that you're here. I am excited and just expecting that as you go through this journey, as you get to know the people here, as you lean into what's happening, that God will speak to you. And I pray that curiosity will lead you to the person of Jesus, that you'll meet him yourself personally. You know, Sundays matter. Gathering together matters. Being able to create spaces like this where people can encounter Jesus, it really matters.

It's It's biblical. It's good. It's necessary. But here's the thing. I've been following Jesus for a very long enough to know I don't always get community right, either. And here's something that I have You can come to church every week for your entire life, for years.

And you can remain unknown. You can remain unchanged. You can remain unhealed. You can remain completely as you were 20 years ago. Never heal. Never grow.

Never get involved. Never find out what God is doing and be part of that. And to miss that is to miss so much of what following Jesus is all about. Because we were not meant to stay in the crowd See, the crowd is a great place. It's an exciting place and I'm glad that you're here, but it's a place to meet Jesus, and yet it's not where we become like Jesus. Every time in the scriptures where we see a life is truly changed, it was when they stepped out of the crowd.

It was when they became known to Jesus, where they were real. This is my situation. This is my dilemma. This is where I need you. This is what's going on in my life. And as they trusted Jesus with their story, as they opened up to other people, that's where miracles happen.

That's where lives change. So, following Jesus always leads us closer to him and closer to his people. The second group I want to talk about is the 12. Jesus discipled and trained a team. He called 12 people and took a very different relationship with him to what he had with the crowd. Now, I used the word discipleship.

That's a little bit of a churchy word. I don't know if you've used that phrase, if you know what I mean when I'm talking about that. But what is discipleship? It's not a typical common word in the world. So let's break this down. It's not a class.

It's not content. It's not a program. Discipleship in scripture is a lot more simple than that. It starts with us reaching out to Jesus. Then we be with Jesus. We practice being with Jesus.

We learn his heart. We learn his voice. We learn his ways, his perspective. And as we do that, we become like Jesus. We learn on the job. Our life is constantly being shaped by him and changed by him and healed by him.

And as that happens, we start to do what Jesus did. We serve like him. We love like him. We forgive like him. We give like him, like we've already heard today. And we bring God's kingdom to other people.

And we do it with other people, those who have a like heart and a mind. And that's what it means to be a discipler, a disciple, a follower, if you want to use a different phrase, a follower of Jesus. So very simply, it's this concept of being with Jesus and becoming like Jesus over time. Mark 3 reading from verse 13 tells us how Jesus called the 12. He said, "He went up on a mountain side and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him. And he appointed 12 that they might be with And that he might send them out to preach and have authority to drive out demons and heal every kind of disease.

Jesus took 12 people to be with him. To watch him, to learn from him, to practice what he did. Some of you might follow preachers online if you're walking with Jesus, maybe subscribe to their teaching, maybe it's influencers that you follow and you subscribe to what they tell you to do and their influence is in your life. I want you to imagine what it must have been like for these 12. So whether it's preachers you're interested in or whether it's influencers on social media, I want you to imagine words start spreading, there's a trend that's going on everywhere and everyone is talking about this new guy, this new preacher who is healing the sick. He's preaching with authority which wasn't really a thing in that time.

He's changing lives and everybody's buzzing about who this guy is. What is he going to do next? What's happening when he's in the room? And then someone announced, he's doing something really interesting. What is he doing? He's not leading a leadership conference, he's not going online every day to the socials to encourage you with some stuff.

No, he's taking on interns. And this is the most exciting guy on the planet right now. But he's only got 12 spots. And so this is this is a chance to sit under his teaching that is renowned, famous all over the world. So many people want to be in the room. It's not even being in the room to have him pray for you, which would be amazing enough, but this is hands-on coaching, private learning, public ministry alongside the guy.

To eat with him, to travel with him, to learn up close, watch how he does things. Talk about the response. Can you're very quiet, guys. If this was your favorite influencer, if this was the person that you feel is most influential in your life and you had a chance to eat with them, to travel with them, to ask them questions, to lean in and learn exactly how they are successful, how they did their things so that you could glean, wouldn't you be You'd show up to the interview, right? There'd be interviews. There'd have to be interviews.

Like, why do you really want to follow Jesus? What exactly have you got to offer to be included in this They'd probably ask you, "Where do you see yourself in 3 years?" A lot's going to change in your life in 3 years. And they probably also asked, "Are you willing to relocate permanently? Cuz we don't know where you're going to end Right? This would be a tough thing, but if you're anything like me and you love Jesus, you would want to be in the 12. You would want to be at that interview because of the invitation to be with him up close.

But here's the thing. You don't just get him. You get 11 other people. Different personalities, different backgrounds, different ways of doing things, things that would probably wreck your head. Peter, who acts now and thinks later. I would not enjoy that.

Brothers arguing over who is the best, who's the greatest, who's got the more to give. Don't love that pride. I got to Maybe Matthew cheating in all your This is the reality. And you don't just get Jesus, you get all this motley crew who came with the package that you never asked for and probably were not on your list to be one of Jesus' interns, right? Yet this random unlikely crew of people was exactly who God chose. And Jesus calls them, he draws them close to him, and he forms them into like a circle.

This is a group walking side by side, each with their own vertical relationship to him, but also working out the kinks and the difficulties and the challenges of horizontal relationship with each other. So, imagine what that must have been like, 3 years intensive of Jesus correcting them, shaping them, explaining what he means when he teaches, empowering them over dinners, over travel, watching them learn together, failing together in real time, bonded by those shared experience. You know, those have to be there moments, you can't explain it unless someone else was there. They went through that a lot, and it shaped them. And you see, here's the thing, the goal is not information. You hear a lot of information in the church, you get told a lot of things in the world, we are full of information, far too much of us, if you ask me, but the goal is not that, transformation doesn't happen from platforms, it happens around tables.

It happens when you're looking into the eyes of someone else, sharing your real life, showing up without a mask on as you really are, not as you want to be seen. It's where you do the good and the bad and the hard and the holy and the ups and the downs of life with other people, where you're close enough to support them, where you're close enough to find safety and trust with them, close enough to navigate things like misunderstanding and friction and conflict and growth and forgiveness and all the hard things and choosing to stay in that relationship when it's easier to walk away. Those are the things that make us more like Jesus. See, it's so much more than just hanging out with people I like or people who look like me or sound like me. This is what the Bible calls covenant community. And a covenant community is a commitment to walk together with people in real life, not just have a shared belief.

It is a long-term commitment like I have with my husband that says, whatever happens, I'm going to show up for you. I'm with you in the long haul. We are connected and we are committed to each other. And that's the kind of community that God calls us into as the church. And you know what else about covenant community is that the devil hates it. That's why he attacks marriages.

That's why he attacks churches and friend groups and tries to do whatever he can to make us disconnected and isolated and suspicious of each other and try to go it alone. But when we look at the New Testament church, the word God calls this church is ecclesia. It's a Greek word that means called out ones to be a reflection of God's covenant-keeping heart because God has said to you, no matter how rough it gets, no matter how much you let me down, I'm committed to I'm not leaving you. I'm not abandoning you. I'm not going to say, that is enough. You've tested me too much.

I'm gone. No, God is committed to you long-term. No matter what. And that is the expression of community God calls the church to be on this earth. This is what Paul is trying to paint the picture of when he talks to the church in Corinth when he describes we are one body and we have many parts. We are connected together, fused together, dependent on each other.

That is how we are to act out this faith. And we see it so clearly in Acts 2:42-47 when it says, "They devoted themselves to eating together, praying together, connecting together with sincere What I love about the scriptures here is that every New Testament letter to the church, none of it is addressed to the lead pastors. None of them. They're They're addressed to the church. They're always to the church. And in fact, in multiple churches in usually a city or in a region because early Christian communities were interconnected.

Their letters weren't just written privately to the pastor to read in their office and worry about how they were going to implement everything that Paul said. They were read out publicly, like this, for everybody to hear. And then Paul would say, "Your letter, swap it with that church, and you take their letter, and you read what I said to them, and they're going to read what I said to you so that everybody can learn, everybody can grow, everybody can be corrected, everybody can become mature and follow instructions into how to do church well, how to become like Christ well." And this is why it's so important for us to have good relationships with other churches, to bless them, and to do kingdom work together because we belong to one another. That's what the Bible says. Now, for some of you, maybe this whole idea of community sounds like something you're looking for. It's It's speaking to something that maybe you see a need in your life to live for something greater than yourselves.

And for others, maybe that actually feels more like risk. Maybe your experience of church has left you more with wounds than with Some of us are really good with Jesus. It's just Christians we're not sure I have been there. I understand what that means. I understand how to navigate that. And in a place like a church, it is always going to be full of flawed people who are learning their best how to follow And God uses those imperfect people to heal us.

Sometimes I don't know how he does it, but he does it when we lean in to community. And if you just feel, "Okay, look, it's too soon to engage, to go there." That's okay. Jesus always invited people, but it was their choice. He said, "Come see what I'm about. Come see what my heart is. Come see.

Come learn. Come discover for yourself. Don't just take my word for it. Don't just take your pastor's word for it. Come and see him for yourself." And then God will show you who he is. There's one more category that I want to touch on, and that is the three.

I find it really interesting that in a world where Jesus ministered to the crowd, and yet he gathered 12 around him to form this circle and to change their lives, he also had three within that 12, and he went deeper, and he was more vulnerable with the few than anybody Mark 9:2-3 says that after 6 days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him and led them to a high mountain where they were all alone. And there he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white. There are three instances in the gospels where only Peter, James, and John were invited to witness the most vulnerable moments of Jesus' life. Where he was in Gethsemane, sweating blood just before going to the cross. They were the only ones in the room in Jairus's house when he raised his daughter from the dead. And here, as he revealed the truth of who he really was, only three people got to experience And this is Jesus who doesn't need any of us.

And yet he shows us and models it that he has more trust with certain ones who are the closest. And we all need that, right? We all need those few safe spaces where we can be our most vulnerable, where we can be our most honest, where we can truly reveal without filters, without masks, without all those things that we often do when we're relating to people. We need those is key. Proverbs 27:17 says, "Iron sharpens But it's only possible with close contact, right? You can only sharpen iron when you've got friction.

So it takes being close to someone else to be sharpened. You cannot do it from a distance. In the New Testament, there are up to 60 different commands, what's usually called the one anothers. Things like serve one another, encourage one another, build one another up, be kind and tenderhearted, and forgive one another. But here's the thing, you cannot one another without one another. Right?

You can't actually fulfill the New Testament at all without having deep meaningful connections to God's people. If you keep people at arm's length for whatever reason, you will never have a need to forgive them because no one's going to get close enough to hurt you in the first place, right? But here's the thing, self-preservation is not a fruit of the Spirit. That does not come from God. That does not model in Jesus' model for us. The crowd can feel safe.

It can feel enough. It can feel like the right place to be, but I believe God is calling you to He's calling you into circles to be known, to be heard, to be seen for who you really are, and to be shaped to truly belong. That's something that we all crave, even those of us who are hiding in the back hoping somebody won't call our name, but we all have that need to be seen. Rachel Held Evans has this beautiful Christianity is meant to simply be It is to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people. They remind me that try as I may, I cannot be a Christian on my own. I need a community.

I need the church. Just as I wrap this thing up, Jesus didn't preach community on its own. He built it intentionally around So, if Jesus needed deep relationships, so do we. If Jesus modeled this in his own ministry, we need this, too. We are created for community. That's a big part of what is in you.

It's a need that needs to be fulfilled. We are called into community, and we are changed by community. So, as we were going to move into a response song now, but just as we do, I just like you to take a minute. Just close your eyes. Just to forget about the person next to you. And I want to ask you, what category are you in?

Are you in the crowd? The circle? The core? Who is here in your circle? Who you doing real life with? Who is influencing you?

Who is speaking into your life? Training you in the faith, encouraging you to follow Jesus well. Who are your safe spaces? When you don't know who to turn to, who do you have? We must make a choice to move from crowd to community. And if you're not sure, I want you to speak to the Holy Spirit right now.

And if you're not used to doing that, you can just talk to God just like you're talking to your best friend. This is where I am. This is what's going on in my heart. This is my reality. I need you to help me. I need you to help me take a step and respond to your invitation to be known, to be seen, to contribute.

Even if it's unfamiliar territory because you are a gift that God has given someone else. They need you. And someone else is a gift to you, and you need them. And they are probably in this room. And just as we're we're praying, we're talking to God, we're asking him to show Holy Spirit, I just pray you'd speak to your people right now. Reveal what you see.

If there's reluctance to step into community, Lord, I pray you would reveal why. You would show us the state of our hearts. You would show us our fears. You would show us the things that are stopping us from stepping into what you have. You can open your eyes if you want, but if you're continuing to have a conversation with God, I'd say stay Keep speaking to him. We're going to We're going to respond, but if the Holy Spirit is speaking to you, I encourage you to do a couple of things.

One, if you're curious, if you're checking out this whole Christianity thing, you want to know more, get connected to the Alpha course. Sign up. Start asking questions about Jesus. It's this beautiful safe space where everyone's on the same page and there's no wrong answers. There's no wrong stupid questions. You can just come with all of your stuff and find out about who he is.

So, if that's not something you've done before, get connected to the Alpha course. Talk to your pastors about how to do that. You could contribute. Be a blessing to someone else. Give something away. Add value to someone else.

Ask your pastors, "How can I help?" This church is successful when people take on ownership. When everybody carries the weight of this thing. So, ask, "How can I give? How can I invest? How can I partner with what God is And the last thing I'd encourage you to do is connect, to get to know someone else in this room. Maybe it's an invite for coffee.

Maybe it's an invite to your home for a meal. Maybe it's a phone call. "How you doing? How can I pray for How can we get to know each other? What's your story? How can I help in your life?" Or maybe you need that.

Look for people you can connect with to build relationship with because we all have that need to be seen and to be known and to feel valued. That is part of what the church is called to be. Today Jesus is calling your name out of the crowd into messy, authentic, imperfect with a bunch of other imperfect people who are just learning how to do following Jesus. And church, there is no other blueprint than what we see in this book. This is So, let's be the healthy, biblical, godly community that he calls us to be.