Explore God: Celebration Weekend

Why were we put here? I think everyone wants to know, why were we put here? Why are we on Earth? You have to experience it for yourself. I think it's something hard to describe unless you're actually willing to go there. Welcome to the final weekend of our fall series, Explore God. My name is René, one of the pastors here. Who is happy to be in church today? Who feels like celebrating today? It is a good day to be in church. It's always a good day to be in church. It is so exciting.

This series has been all about questions, questions we might have of God, questions about our faith, and everybody's got questions no matter who you are. In fact, even little kids have questions. One of my favorite books is a little book called Children's Letters to God. How many of you have seen this book? It's a classic. And this is actual letters written by third and fourth graders to God in Sunday school classes. That's an exercise. And I love some of these like this next one.

Dear God, my grandpa says that you were around when he was a little boy. How far back do you go? It's a good question. Dear God, is Reverend Coe a friend of yours or do you just know him through business, Donny? That's profound. Dear God, how come you didn't invent any new animals lately? We still just have all the old ones. Now, adults have different faith questions and we've been going through these for the last eight weeks. Questions like does God even exist and why does God allow suffering and what's the meaning of life and why should I trust the Bible as Christianity to narrow.

If you've missed any of these weeks, you can find them at TLC.org/exploreGod. It's been a great series and today is celebration weekend. Looking back over what has God done through us in this journey of faith together. Really you helped write much of my message today as you've emailed me your experiences and your pictures. And if you happen to be joining us for the very first time today, you're like, well, I haven't been here the last eight weeks. I've never been here in my life. You picked a great weekend because this is going to reveal to you what this church is really all about.

But before we take a look back, a quick look ahead. For the next two weekends, gratitude and grace is our sermon series for Thanksgiving about the power and the source of gratitude. Would you agree with me? In this world right now, there is so much bad news. We really need to get disciplined about gratitude because it is probably the most important spiritual practice.

And then in December, a new series, Christmas Surprises, the Christmas story and the Gospel of Matthew. It is full of surprises, fascinating stuff that you may have never. Is there something about Christmas that you have never heard before? I would venture to say you might learn something from our series in the Gospel of Matthew. Plus great Christmas singers. We've got a Christmas choir, lots more good stuff.

And let me just give you a quick sort of a teaser about next fall's series. Every fall we do one of these eight week series, right? Well next fall, I'm writing it right now. We're editing the videos. It's called "Flawed Follower, Hope for Imperfect, Inconsistent, Unqualified, Confused People Who Still Love Jesus." I relate to that right there. So this is about Simon Peter. And what we did was we went back to the footsteps of Peter.

We went back to the very place that Peter was first called on the shores of the Sea of Galilee by Jesus. And we went back to the place where Jesus was killed on the streets of Rome by the Emperor Nero and all kinds of places in between like Jerusalem. I even got to go fishing with some fishermen. Peter was a fisherman. And I got to go fishing with these guys. They operate the oldest continuously operating fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee. And they shared some fishermen stories with me, talked about some of the storms they've been in.

We got to build a fire on the shores of the lake where Peter met Jesus. It's going to be fantastic. I'm really looking forward to it. I appreciate your prayers as we write this in anticipation of this. And we're going to be doing this together with a lot of the churches in the Bay Area that have done this Explore God series with us.

Well, in this series, we have looked at reasons for believing God exists. And we have quoted on that week only, you might remember, scientists, and only formerly atheist scientists who turned to faith partly because of their science. We looked at reasons for trusting the Bible. We took you to archaeological sites with scholars from Oxford and Princeton. We looked at reasons for having faith.

And you might recall we looked at medical studies looking at the positive correlation of faith with physical health, mental health, longevity. It's like we human beings are wired for faith. Faith is the fuel that we just run better on. So now what? We've on this journey, we've looked at all of this different evidence, and where does this lead us today? Well, it leads us to an inflection point, doesn't it, in our life of faith.

You know, I was thinking about this the other day. We are in the same position as the disciples were after three years of following Jesus around. You ever thought about this? Those first disciples were actually not Christians, at least not at first. They were drawn to Jesus. They were intrigued by Jesus. They followed Jesus around, but they were not at all sure what to make of Jesus.

And after three years as they gathered evidence and saw increasing reasons to believe, he was divine and heard increasingly revolutionary teaching. And toward the end of that time, after all that evidence gathering, Jesus had three challenges for them. And he has three challenges for you and me today too, as we finish this series of kind of evidence gathering. And they're in your message notes if you want to grab these, or if you're joining us online at TLC.org/notes.

Now listen carefully. These are not three challenges for the person sitting down the row from you. These are not three challenges for your kid or for your grandkids or for your spouse. These are three challenges from Jesus for you. Whether you'd call yourself a veteran churchgoer or maybe you are a newbie to all of this. If you want to grow closer to Jesus, if you want to start your faith, you want to restart your faith, you want a faith that lasts, your responses to these three challenges will make the difference.

And the first is this, Jesus has a question for you. And he asked this question many times after a season of teaching, like in John 11:26, "Do you believe this? Do you believe this? Do you believe this?" Or Matthew 16:15, "But what about you? Who do you say that I am?" Jesus always asked people to make it personal.

You know, I was so glad to hear from a lot of people during the series who did make it personal. I shared with some of you one scientist who had previously told me, "You know, I'm not a Christian. I just attend church to please my wife because she's a believer. And, you know, I want to be a good husband." And, you know, a good husband would come to church with a puppy. "I'm not into it. I listen to you and I take out the principles, the moral principles," he told me. But I edit all the Jesus stuff out. I just want you to know that.

And then on week two of this series he told our small group, "I am now a Christian." And I told this in my sermon on week three, and his kids all looked at him and said, "Dad, you what?" He hadn't even told his family yet, and that was his coming out as a believer. And another man told me, "I started with week two. Why believe in God? I realize I was ready to receive God into my life after 45 years." And another woman wrote me, "I have rededicated my life to the Lord after many years away." And many, many more.

And it was happening over at TLC Espanol too. Our Spanish service, I thought you'd like to hear a report from our pastor, Julian Pizarro. Watch this. This past seven weeks have been an amazing journey exploring God together. Until TLC Espanol last week, and 12 people made a decision to make Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior. What an amazing opportunity we have in our hands as a church, as a community to share the gospel. So let's continue doing that, exploring God, reading the Word of God. And you'll see the results not only in your life, but also in the life of our community. God bless you.

How about that? All these people saying yes to Jesus. Let's celebrate together. Give God the glory. That's awesome. And you know, one of the coolest parts of the series for me is that we've been doing this together with over 170 different churches all around the Bay Area. Large churches, small churches, black and white, and Hispanic, English speaking, Spanish speaking.

Because a lot of these pastors, honestly, are friends of mine. And although we are from wildly different denominations, different kinds of churches, we've been meeting together and we realize that one of the objections people can have at times to Christianity, understandably, is there are so many denominations, Christians judging each other. They're all at war with one another. And we wanted to show, no, we love each other. And we feel like God's going to bless this kind of a series if we do it together. And he really has.

And I just want, I get to have a peek into this world and I just wanted you to have just a taste and a look at what God's been doing. So I asked just five, only five of the 170 pastors to give me 30 seconds on what God's been doing, how lives have been changed in their churches. So check this out. This is Kevin Harney giving a quick report for Shoreline Church way down in the south of the Bay Area here in Monterey.

We saw an amazing work of God. We saw a young couple in their 20s both raise their hands and come forward to receive Bibles, started Journey of Discipleship as new believers in Christ. We saw a couple in their 70s become followers of Jesus and come up and celebrate together their new life in Jesus Christ. I could tell you more stories. That's all I got time for. But God bless you. We celebrate with you and celebrate with what God is doing. Have a great day.

Hi, my name is John. I'm part of the pastoral team at Cornerstone SF in San Francisco. And we were blessed to see 25 people come to know Jesus for the first time through this initiative. Praise God.

Hello, this is Angie Ibarra Miller and Keith Miller, both with Generations United. We serve in an area called North Faroe Oaks, sandwiched between Redwood City, Menlo Park and Atherton. And we found ourselves excited about the invitation to explore God and we did it in Spanish. So Exploradillos was conducted here in North Faroe Oaks at the community center. We partnered with David Vargas of the Salvation Army and it was just such a treat to hear the story of our friends on week two who rededicated their lives to Jesus as a result of that. That was just so very exciting and sweet. There were tears. It was beautiful and we're so happy about it.

What's up everybody? My name is Herman Hamilton. I'm blessed to be the founding and senior pastor of New Beginnings Community Church. Today we're wrapping up our Explore God series. What a series. What a journey we've had. And it's been a pleasure to do it with so many Christian communities across the Bay Area. As it relates to us, we had about 176 small discussion groups that were shaped around Explore God. One of the most important pieces for me, the most fulfilling I should say, is that in my own small group with my family, etc., we reached out to a couple of folk who don't come to church but they're part of our family. One is my nephew. And not only did my nephew Kim just about every single one, I think he missed one, but I discovered that he was sharing my messages with people that he works with.

He is a dude that hadn't been to church in years, wasn't even quite sure where he was in terms of his faith. And it's just been a joy to watch him grow. So that's part of my own personal testimony. Hey, check this out. Last time I checked, we're going to have over 20 people that were going to be baptized and coming out of this experience. So it has been a blessing. God be praised for Explore God. Can't wait to see what God will do next in the Bay Area and beyond.

My name is Danny Strange and I serve as senior pastor here at Three Crosses in Castro Valley. And Explore God for us was an unbelievable series. We paired Explore God with a back to church call for our entire congregation. This weekend, we are celebrating 25 baptisms at the end of this series and we are so excited to see the work of God continue on the other side of Explore God. Isn't that great? Praise God. So thrilled for that.

And Three Crosses Church is where tonight we're going to be celebrating a combined Explore God Bay Area church worship night. 6 p.m. Hope you can make it. It's going to be really thrilling. Actually, Ian Pitter is going to be leading worship. It's going to be outstanding.

Now, maybe to Jesus's question, you would answer, "Well, I do believe this." Then what is your next step? Or maybe, honestly, you do not believe this yet. What's your next step then? Well, it's actually the same step in both cases. And that's Jesus's invitation to you. No matter where you are in your faith journey, he says, "Follow me." Me. Look at all the places he says this. This is his most common invitation in the Gospels. "Follow me."

Now, I think we tend to over-spiritualize this. We tend to imagine that he's asking the disciples to commit to all kinds of theological constructs and so on. Jesus just meant, I'm convinced, literally, "Follow me around. Tag along. Let's go. Let's do life together. Watch me as I work." You know, maybe you've listened to these messages and you're still not quite there in terms of faith. Tag along. Follow Jesus around.

And the way we do that these days is we serve together with his body, the church. Because our faith isn't just about agreeing to theological propositions or making personal commitments. It's about meeting a person, Jesus Christ. And you meet Jesus as you hang out with other believers in the church. You serve God together. You do life together.

You know, one time I met a man in my office who told me Christianity wasn't working for him. And he said, "This is kind of like my last-ditch effort. If you can't help me, then I'm out of here." So I'm like, "Okay, well, tell me about it." And here's what he said. "I tried Christianity and it doesn't work. I don't know how to do it and it's too hard." And this sort of thing. So I wrote all his phrases down on a piece of paper. And I said, "Now, look at these sentences. What word is the common word in all of your sentences?" And he looked and he thought and he realized it was "it."

And I said, "I think maybe that's your problem because the Christian life isn't an 'it.'" The Christian life is a person. The person of Jesus. And that day, Mark Spurlock became a Christian. No, just kidding. It wasn't Mark. But that man did turn back to the Lord. Now, so many of us, even Christians, fall into his category. You see, this is the way I put it. We're distracted from him by it. By the system. By the controversies. By the politics. By the culture of Christianity. Some parts of the culture maybe we don't like. Don't get distracted from him by it. Because it's not about it. It's about him.

Jesus didn't say, "Believe in this set of propositions." He said, "Believe in this person. Me. Follow me." Anne Lamont is a bestselling author and she was a hard, agnostic, practically atheist. But she started going to church. She lives up in Sausalito. And started going to church for the music only, she told herself, because it was culturally beautiful. Long before the sermon, she would always leave determined to never even consider believing in such nonsense as she called it.

And then one Sunday night after church, she said, "I felt the presence of Jesus with me." And you've got to understand, this is not a person who even believed in Jesus at the point. And she didn't want to feel the presence of Jesus. And she said, "Somehow I knew a person was there calling me to trust in him." And here's how she wrote about it. She's a great writer. She said, "And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant, hilarious, progressive friends. And I thought about what everybody would think of me if I became a Christian. And it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, 'I would rather die.'

But then, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me. Wanting me to reach down and pick it up. Wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen. You let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. And then one week later, when I went back to church, I felt like something was rocking me and it's bosom holding me like a scared kid. And I began to cry and I left and I raced home and I felt that little cat running along at my heels. And I opened the door and I stood there a minute. Then I hung my head and said, "Expletive, I quit." I took a long deep breath and said out loud, "All right, you can come in."

So this was the beautiful moment of my conversion. But what happened there? You know, she met the person of Jesus Christ. And the risen Christ is here now with you. Asking what he always asked. People who have been looking at the evidence for a while follow me. Now maybe you think, "But will I have to throw my brain out the window or become some kind of a fundamentalist or extremist to be a believer?" Well, one whole point of this series is you don't have to throw your brain out the window.

There's a man, for example, who attends TLC with his family. He's a scientist, a marine biologist. In fact, he teaches at UCSC and at Duke University. The author of many scientific journal articles, a leading researcher in his field. And he's a strong person of faith. I want you to meet him. Brandon Southall.

Hi, my name is Brandon Southall. I'm a marine biologist. I work in the field of bioacoustics, which is how animals make sound here and are affected by sounds in the ocean. Some of the work that we do gives me the privilege of going to some amazing places. Work in Antarctica, Alaska, the Mediterranean, and work in New York. Some of the work that we do here in the Bay is listening to the Bay, how animals make sounds, when they come here, what they're doing here. We have the privilege of working with some charismatic animals, whales and dolphins and seals and sea lions.

I've had a few really captivating moments, and some of them are in these grand scenes of flying over glaciers in Alaska. And those have been grand, but I think, you know, some of the small moments of fishing on Monterey Bay with my son and, you know, the sun breaking the horizon and us being together and just feeling that connection. Recently, we were with a thousand dolphins and just the sun's coming up and it's as far as you can see, you know, with these beautiful animals.

And I think those big moments and sometimes those little moments of being in a beautiful place and just realizing how much richness and how much life there is. I think many people feel faith and a connection to faith through experiencing beauty and nature, but there's also a part of being in science and seeing in a detailed statistical and quantitative and genetic way what the diversity of life is and means and what the facts of evolution are, which to me is not any kind of indication of the absence of the hand of God. It's a brilliant revelation of it.

I spent two summers working for the Appalachia Service Project, which was an all immersive service of people in extremely impoverished areas. And I met some people there that had absolutely nothing lived in destitute poverty and had the most real and deep faith that I've ever experienced. As a scientist and someone of faith, I've experienced judgment and criticism from both sides of that, both in churches about the existence of evolution and my role in publishing things in evolutionary journals. But I've also gotten it at cocktail parties with scientists where you say something about church and you just get people looking away or rolling their eyes or things like that.

And I think in the course of my life, I've sensed that changing and more people in science being willing to share their faith and more people of faith being willing to accept the existence of facts as not conflicting with faith. Isn't that awesome? Brandon did such a great job showing how facts and faith do not conflict. But did you hear the three things that kind of compelled him toward faith? There was just beauty and there was actually the science. But then the third thing he mentioned in the video was the beauty of the community of love that he song among very impoverished believers in the Appalachia Project.

And that actually leads to our third and final point, Jesus's instruction to you about what a life of faith. We talked about all the evidence for faith, but what does a life of faith look like? What does Jesus want you to do? Well, he made it very simple. John 13:33–34. So now, you know, this is the Last Supper. He had a few hours left with the disciples. He had to really hone it down, boil it down to something very simple and sweet and sticky that they could just remember forever. He says, "I've given you a new commandment." Not 40 new things, not 18 principles, not 25-year-old, management principles for the church. He says, "No, one new commandment, love each other." It's all wrapped up in that.

Then he says, "Just as I have loved you, so you should love one another." How did Jesus love us? By dying on the cross for us, for our sins, sacrificially, when we did not deserve it at all. And then after his resurrection, seeking out even the disciples that had deserted him, all of them, denied him in the case of Peter, and showing grace to them too, lavishing grace on them, cooking breakfast for them, this is how we are to love others. Love one another. That is a huge part of our faith life.

And one of the things I've loved about this series and about all our fall series is that we took seriously the value of love. We did the series together with small groups. We did it in home groups, in study groups. Here's some of our groups from all over Santa Cruz County, San Benito County, Santa Clara County. We did life together. We explored these questions together. We searched together, loved together. Our world needs this kind of thing to happen a lot more, with everybody just siloing off.

And here's how important this is. Jesus said, "Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples." In this series about evidence for faith, we took very seriously love as the greatest evidence for faith because Jesus said it was the greatest proof for our faith to the world. As a church, we did some very large projects. We assembled 100 hygiene bags for the unhoused, 275 winter coats, 1,000 new pajamas, a beach clean-up day. But then many, if not most, or all of our small groups also did so many projects. They just adopted on their own. You guys are so creative. I loved hearing your reports.

Like one group wrote me, "We meet over in Morgan Hill, and this Sunday we're going to be joining church online. I see you. Why are they not here with us in person?" Well, during Sunday services we will be serving the unhoused. We put together care bags, clothes, blankets, tarps, food. Here are a few of us getting ready for this morning's distribution and ministry. You know what? If you want to miss church to serve the poor, I'm pretty sure Jesus is totally okay with that.

Bob Corbett's group bought new equipment for a summer camp for kids in the foster care system. A group in Ben Lohman said, "We chose to bless Valley churches with much needed food for their food pantry." Kathy Moller wrote, "Our small group joined with Jim Joslin to adopt Soquel Leisure Villa. We turned an unusable ramp into a proper wheelchair accessible ramp, replaced, repainted the entire fence at that senior center." Indiana and Jill's group in Santa Cruz collected socks for those in need. Nora Alverd's group wrote, "We delivered nearly 100 new pajamas to Casa in Watsonville yesterday. And so much more. Can we just put our hands together and thank all these groups and all their projects and everybody who participated in loving one another?"

And of course we have one last project. Next weekend we're wrapping up our food drive. We hope to collect $200,000 for Second Harvest Food Bank. They are literally a bank of fresh food they get from local growers, which we and other schools and nonprofits and churches withdraw food from that bank to feed needy people. They can buy three healthy meals with each dollar, so it is a great deal. Again, the deadline is next weekend and you can give it, tlc.org/food.

Now, let me ask you a question. Why do you think I, as one of your pastors, want you to know all this? Why do I want you to know about the projects and the food drive and all these churches that we're doing this together with in harmony? Because this is a series about evidence for faith. And when you hear, and you will hear, people say, understandably, Christians should stop judging each other and should start loving each other and should start helping the poor. You can say genuinely, "That is what we do. That is a huge value of our church." Because that's what Jesus told us to do, so we do it.

By the way, you want a concise statement of the mission of our church? I cannot put it more concisely than Jesus did in these two verses. We love each other as proof to the world because he, we love because he first loved us. Now, be very careful. There's a danger here that I've seen Christians fall into. You know what it is? We don't do all of these things I've been talking about to try and get brownie points from God. Like, "Lord, I served the poor and I was super nice to that jerk. And now you have to make the Niners win this morning. You know, that's the bargain I made."

Getting back to that book, Children's Letters to God, there's letters like this which I love. "Dear God, thank you for my baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy." Or this, "Dear God, if you give me the genie lamp like in Aladdin, I'll give you anything you want except for my money or my chess set." Or, "Dear God, okay, I kept my half of the deal. Where's the bike? Burt." I think we all pray like Burt sometimes, right? "God, look at all the stuff I'm doing. Where's my stuff?" But of course, God owes us nothing. But God is so gracious that he offers it freely.

Our faith is not transactional. It's relational. So all you need to do is receive it. Kind of like the little boy in this final letter. "Dear God, count me in, your friend, Herbie." And what I'd love to do as we wrap this series is to give you a chance to basically pray Herbie's prayer. Count me in, no strings attached. And here's how I'm going to suggest that we do it.

One time in my life I was holding onto a part of my life that I didn't want to give to God. And at the time I was speaking for a week up at Mount Hermon, the Christian Conference Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I was the evening speaker. A man named Mike Romberger was the morning speaker, and we were the speakers for the whole week at the summer camp. So picture this. I'm sitting in the very back of the auditorium listening to Mike preach. I usually sat up front, and every other session this time, for some reason, I chose to sit in the very, very last row, and it proved to become a complication.

Because Mike says this, "I am going to close the service now," Mike said, with what they used to call an altar call. And what happens is the band's going to play, and you can come to the steps leading up to the altar and just kneel and pray during this final song. And we'll also have counselors and pastors up front to pray with you if you'd like to pray with a human. And he said, "Maybe you want to give your whole life to God for the very first time, or maybe there's an area of your life you want to say, 'I've been trying to run this. It's definitely not working out too good, so God, I give up control entirely to you.' Or maybe you just need to give God a worry or a fear or a need.

Mike said, "There's no pressure here, but I have found that a physical act helps to cement an invisible spiritual commitment." So he said, "If you want to come to the front during this final song, just kneel and pray, 'Lord, I give you my life or this area of my life. Give me strength.' Then after you're done praying up here, you can return to your seat." And I'm back there in the back row going, "Lord, I know I really need to give this area of my life to you, and I really think this is going to help to cement it in my spirit, but I'm one of the speakers!"

And if I go forward, people are going to go, "Why is he going forward? Was our evening speaker not even a Christian?" I wonder what scandal he's repenting from, and the rumors will fly. So the music starts playing, and I knew if I overthought it, I just wouldn't do it. And then, all I waited for somebody else to start, because my strategy was to kind of shadow them up to the front so that people wouldn't notice me or something get lost in the crowd. But no one moved! And I'm thinking, "Why did I choose to sit back here?" But finally, I started that long walk, and I knelt at the front steps all alone, and I just prayed, "Lord, you know what? I've been clinging to, and I just give this all to you. I'm yours a hundred percent."

And I was crying, and I got up to walk back to my seat expecting to feel all eyes on me, but they weren't. You know why? Because by that time, all kinds of people were streaming forward down the aisles. And I have to tell you, since that day, I have felt the power of that moment in my life when I made that commitment, because I can remember that day. Sometimes it's hard to remember the day you just sort of prayed a prayer in your bed. But man, that day cemented into my memory.

So, I can't think of a better way to close a series about faith than to give you a chance for a faith moment like that. Let's stand together and pray. Would you stand with me? And I want to first give you a moment for a reflection. So, let's bow our heads and let's close our eyes. And I want to ask you, where in your life are you hearing Jesus say, "What about you? Do you believe that I am Lord and Savior? In that area of your life, that I'm Lord and that I'm Savior. You follow me now." Jesus, thank you that you're real, not just a concept. Thank you for the answers to some of our questions. And thank you that those some of our questions don't get answered maybe ever in this life. We can trust you, your love for us. And so we want to say, "Count me in. I believe. I trust you. I don't have all the answers to all the questions, but I trust you. I want to follow you by your power in me. Count me in. Amen.