How To Really Love Santa Cruz 2021

How to Really Love Santa Cruz is the title of our message this weekend. I want to invite you to grab your message notes that you got when you came in so you can follow along. And if you didn't get these or if you're joining us online, you can download these at tlc.org/notes. You'll not only get the message notes for my message this weekend, but also on the back there's discussion questions that you can use for your own personal devotional time or also your devotional time with your family.

And I'll start with this. The Mysterious Benedict Society is a children's book series that first came out in 2007. And it's now a new TV show. It's a series on Disney Plus. Just a quick show of hands. How many of you have heard of or have read any of the books in this four book series, The Mysterious Benedict Society? Can I see a show of hands? A few fans here. We had a few more last night.

Well, let me recap the story. The big picture is a man named Mr. Benedict recruits four very special, very gifted young people for a special mission. Here's a still from the show. All of these young recruits have been abandoned by their families. They're living as orphans. But then they're chosen by this father figure, Mr. Benedict, to help save the world from a creeping despair that is taking over the planet. And everybody's feeling this despair. Even the orphans, in fact, in the very first episode, one of them says, "You know, every morning when I wake up, I feel like something terrible is going to happen." And there's nobody in charge who can stop it. And everybody is so scared all around us. Can you relate to that?

Need I remind you, this was written in 2007. But I think a lot of people, maybe most of the people on the planet, are feeling this way today. Well, the recruiter tells the orphan who says this, "Oh, that's the emergency." And in the universe of the mysterious Benedict Society, the emergency is this thing that sort of hangs in the atmosphere that keeps people on edge and frightened all the time. And the world needs to be saved from this because it's causing everyone on the planet to give up hope and to act in destructive ways. And so the kids need to be part of this mission to save the world from the emergency.

Well, later on, the kids ask him, "Why have you picked us, Mr. Benedict, to be part of this secret team to save the world?" And he says this, "I picked you because it was clear that you possess a quality that's severely lacking in our society." What is it? Empathy. Empathy. Say that word with me. Empathy. Say it again. Empathy. Empathy says you see others. You care for others. Would you agree with me that empathy is almost like a superpower that is very, very needed right now?

You know, I think that book predicted our world today in some eerily accurate ways. In fact, would you agree with this? People around the world right now are behaving in toxic ways. Would you agree with that? Ungracious ways, combative ways, self-centered ways, even Christians. But God has called you and me higher. In fact, you could say that God has called us to be part of his mysterious society, to come against that hatred and fear with empathy and grace.

The problem is that it's so easy for us all to be distracted by the emergency, and there's always a new emergency. It's so easy to get distracted from God's mission by all of the chaos and the strife all around us. And so what we're going to do this weekend is we're going to study a powerful passage of scripture in 2 Corinthians 5, starting in verse 14. What this is all about is this. Once a year here at Twin Lakes Church, we re-examine and refocus on our mission as a church. Why does God have us here as Christians on the planet? And this is one of the many verses of the Bible, one of the many passages of scripture that talks about that.

If you are joining us for the very first time this week, I think you picked a great weekend, because this passage is all about what you could call the DNA of TLC. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to read this whole section through once, and I want to challenge you to listen carefully, because this passage is kind of like God telling all of us, misfits and orphans that he's chosen from all around the planet, "This is the task to which I have called you. This is your assignment in the midst of the emergency that is gripping our planet."

So listen to these verses carefully. The apostle Paul says to a distracted church there in the city of Corinth 2,000 years ago, "For Christ's love compels us, because we're convinced that one died for all and therefore all died, and he died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again." So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view, though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, that person's a new creation. The old is gone. The new has come. Amen?

All this is a what? A gift from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's what? Ambassadors. You heard Miss Yolanda talk about this just a minute ago. As though God were making his appeal through us, we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

I see in this passage four key truths that refocus us on our assignment from God as his people in this distracting world. We need to remember the task to which God has called us. We're not called to be Christians, to be followers of Jesus, just to make us feel better or to make us feel a little bit more self-assured or confident. We are given a mission. We're part of a society that has a task. What is it? Four key things that we need to remember in this distracting world.

First, I need to refocus on my motive. What is my motive? What motivates us as a church to do what we do? Fear, judgment. Paul says, in fact, read this section of this verse with me. Let me hear you say this. For Christ's love compels us. Read it again. For Christ's love compels us. What does it look like to be compelled by love?

I was speaking once at a conference in Uganda for missionaries. All kinds of missionaries were there. Pastors, traditional missionaries, also health care workers, all kinds of missionaries. So after one of the sessions, a young woman named Ellie comes up to me. She's in her mid-twenties and she's just weeping. And I say, Ellie, what's on your mind? And she said, I had to leave them. I said, what are you talking about? Well, it turns out that Ellie was part of a five-member missionary team. They were all medical health workers. And they were assigned to a very remote village in Northern Africa. This village was so remote, so removed from what we would call civilization that they had never before even seen plastic. That's quite remarkable, isn't it?

Well, they had served there for a few months when the village elders called all five of the missionaries together. And they told them, okay, we just have to let you know we're going to kill you one by one, one day after another, starting tomorrow. Because when you got here, a drought started and we had plenty of rain before, so it's clear that you stole our rain. And so we're going to sacrifice you to the rain god until the rain comes back. This actually happened just a couple of years ago. So they had to flee for their lives in the middle of the night.

And as Ellie finishes telling me this story, she's just shaking with tears. And I figure, well, she's, poor thing, she's scared to death. She is traumatized. And so I start to tell her, Ellie, this is so dumb in retrospect. I say, Ellie, let me just give you some tips on how to handle fear. Like, like I know, you know, my biggest fear here in Santa Cruz is like falling off my paddle board or something. Let me give you some tips on how to handle fear in your situation. And she looks at me surprised and she goes, no, no, you don't understand. I'm not crying because I'm afraid. She says, I'm crying because I love those people so much. And I want them to thrive. I want that village to have health and to have hope in Christ. And then she starts crying again. And I had to leave them.

That was a soul compelled by love for people who threatened to kill her. And by the way, she did get back to them. And as far as I know, she's still there ministering to these people because she loves them so much. And I heard that and it just struck me. What motivates me when I think of Santa Cruz and wanting to minister to Santa Cruz or to change Santa Cruz? What motivates you? Are you motivated when you think of Santa Cruz County or the state of California or the nation? Is your primary emotion, you know, irritation? What kind of like how messed up it is? Or is your primary emotion, fear about all of the the sin and the danger you see around you? Or is your primary motive kind of a sense of rightness like like they're so wrong and we know the truth?

I mean, there's there's a portion of truth in all of those reactions. And I got to be honest, I feel all of those things at times. But what Paul is saying to Christians who lived in a Roman society where they could have responded in all of those ways, he's saying, but what ought to compel us as we think of our culture, as we think of our neighbors, as we think of the people around us? What ought to compel us as we as we look at the homeless people in our neighborhoods? What ought to compel us as we look at the drug addicts in our neighborhoods is love. What ought to compel us as we think of our neighbors is love, because you know what? People can tell what motivates you.

People can tell if you're talking to them out of a sense of superiority or judgment or fear or love. When I think of Santa Cruz, am I moved to irritation or am I moved to tears? Am I heartbroken with love? That's a question we all need to ask ourselves as we refocus on the task to which God has called us. And then the second thing we need to do is really refocus on our mission, on our mission, our assignment. The reason that we were chosen as Christians. This is so important. And here it is from God. Paul says, I don't know if you caught it in 2 Corinthians 5:20. We are, in fact, read this section of this verse out loud with me, too. Can I hear you? Here we go. We are therefore what? Christ's ambassadors. Say that word with me again. Ambassadors. Ambassadors.

This is so important. Paul did not say we are therefore Christ's pit bulls or we are there for Christ's, you know, guerrilla warriors or we are there for Christ's judges. Even though the way a lot of Christians act, you'd assume that that's what's in the scripture. Now, we are ambassadors. Another way to put it, we are diplomats. Now, think of how that changes everything about our approach to our culture around us, because guess what? Diplomats are diplomatic, you know, the way diplomats respond in their countries is out of grace, not harshness, humility, not pride, empathy, not judgment.

In fact, if diplomats don't respond this way to a country that they're assigned to, they're probably going to be fired. Being diplomatic means in a winsome way, you're exposing people to the culture of your foreign country. We're like diplomats of heaven, giving people a little taste of the love and the joy and the beauty that they would experience in the presence of God, because that is what is compelling. Our motive is love and our mission is ambassadors of the kingdom of heaven.

Let me show you what this looks like. Last weekend, we celebrated several baptisms at the end of our 11 a.m. outdoor church service. It was so great. These were 11 people who were taking their next step of faith, publicly proclaiming their identification as Jesus followers. And by the way, our next baptism is at the beach. It comes up October 3rd. Would love to have you a part of it. But seeing these people getting baptized reminded me of another beach baptism from a few years ago. And I want to remind you what one of the people that year, Cindy Gears, said about how she was brought to faith in Jesus.

Listen carefully. Christianity was never on my radar. I had no thoughts. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was broken. I wasn't looking for anything. And then we welcomed Hannah into our home for four years. We were her foster parents. And today she's here while I'm getting baptized. But just every, you know, just the light in her eyes when she talk about Christianity and Jesus. And it just kind of, you know, wiggled its way into my heart. And every time we go somewhere, all the parents of the kids were just so happy and joyful and things didn't bother them. Like things bothered people where I worked and different people in my life. It was just so really, just a really it just really attracted me. I'm just in love with Jesus. I don't know what else to tell you. I love that. Don't you love that?

So what would you say made the difference for Cindy? What did she find compelling? Was Cindy argued into her faith? No, what made the difference for Cindy? It was love, right? And this is how our faith grew in the first place. Think back to the Roman Empire, the first three centuries of the history of Christianity. How did Christians really conquer Caesar? How did we win the hearts and the minds of Roman authorities who at times were determined to extinguish Christianity, spread all kinds of slanders about Christians? You know, the Romans believed that Christians were cannibals. How did we fight those slanders with lawsuits, with shouting matches, with armed insurrections? None of that.

How did the Roman Empire go from being antagonistic to Christianity to being a Christian nation in about two and a half centuries? How did that happen? There's a brilliant guy named James D. Hunter. He's a history of religion professor at the University of Virginia. He has a book published by the University of Oxford about the four historical Christian approaches to culture. This is so good. He calls them domination. That's when through political power, Christians tried to get even unwilling people to follow biblical standards. Domination, assimilation. That's when Christians, you know, tried to be so relevant to the culture that they basically became just like the culture and started losing Christian distinctives. Withdrawal, that's the instinct to withdraw to smaller and smaller communities and circle the wagons and cocoon into tight little Christian communities to stay safe from the world.

And he says the problem with domination, assimilation, withdrawal is they all historically seem to work at first. But they end up collapsing on themselves and weakening the Christian witness in the community and weakening Christians too. He says, and he says this as a historian. I don't even know if he's a believer. As a historian, he says if you look back on the way Christians interact with the world, these things don't really last. He says the only approach that lasts, and in fact, this is the approach that changed the Roman Empire, is what he calls faithful presence. Where Christians stay in their community even through epidemics and pandemics. Even through fire and flood. But they show I'm there for you, even though you might hate me, I'm there for you, even though you slander me. I'm non-retaliatory, even when you persecute me.

And over the centuries, this is the only approach that builds up the church, that improves the church's witness, and in fact, ends up changing society for a long time. I looked at that and I thought, faithful presence? The way I see it? That's just another way of saying ambassador. And this is exactly one of the reasons why every fall we do what we call acts of kindness. You'll be hearing more about that this fall, like raising money for the food bank, like cleaning the beaches, like recruiting people to be foster parents. You can get more information about our fall acts of kindness by going to TLC.org/AOK. Get that? Acts of kindness? Kind of like the way that turned out. TLC.org/AOK.

Why do we do this? Because we believe good deeds lead to goodwill that leads to openness to the good news in the long run. Faithful presence. That's how we can be ambassadors to Santa Cruz. That's our mission. So I need to, I really need to remember my motive is love. My mission is ambassadors. It's diplomacy. But I also need to refocus on my message. My message. And Christians can really mess this one up. I want you to think back on those scriptures. Look at the one word that the Apostle Paul keeps repeating. All this is a gift from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of what? Reconciliation. You think he's trying to get a point across?

In a word, our message is reconciliation. You know what that means? I heard an old joke last week about a couple that was married for 50 years and they decided to move out of their big place into a smaller home. And as they're boxing things up, the husband finds a shoebox under his wife's side of the bed. And in the shoebox are two little crocheted dolls and a wad of money surrounded by a rubber band. And he kind of does a cursory count. It's $30,000 in the wad of money. And so he says to his wife holding up the shoebox, "Well, what is this?" And she says, "Well, 50 years ago when we were married, my mama told me, 'If you ever get into an argument with your husband, don't take it out on him. Just take all that negative energy. Don't say a word to him and just kind of crochet a little doll.'" And the husband sees that there's only two dolls in the box and he feels pretty good about himself. "50 years of marriage, only two arguments." And then he asks, "But what's with the $30,000?" And she says, "Well, whenever I finished a dozen dolls, I would take them down to the craft fair and sell them for 10 bucks."

That is not reconciliation. That's sublimation, right? That's sticking your head in the sand. God does not sublimate when there's a rift between us. God reconciles. God makes things right. Reconciliation means making enemies into friends. Imagine something. Imagine a rift between you and a friend. And you want to make it right. You don't like that tension. But you know what? You're kind of afraid to even reach out to your friend because you think they might hate you or something. And so you choose to live with that tension. We've all probably been there. And then one day there's a knock on the door and you open it up and there's your friend. And your friend says, "I wanted to take the first step to tell you I miss you and I love you and we're OK." That is what God did for you and for me.

The Bible says there was enmity between us and God. But God came to earth and on the cross, on his initiative, took that huge step of reconciliation. In fact, I just want to speak to a minute to speak to people who today might feel distanced from God. You feel lost. You feel guilty. In fact, you know you blew it perhaps recently, perhaps a long time ago, and you almost didn't join us today because you feel so unworthy. God is here now to reconcile with you today in this moment. Like that song that we sang earlier, "Jesus sought me when a stranger wandering from the fold of God." Jesus sought you, the lost sheep. You just have to open the door now that you hear him knocking. That's reconciliation. That's such good news.

And Paul says God has committed to us that message of reconciliation. This is so important because our message is not behave. If you ask most people who are not Christians who don't normally come to church, kind of what's the message of Christianity? If you look at all the surveys, roughly 90% of them would summarize it something like this. Well, if I go to church, their messages behave. Be better. That's not our message, according to the Bible. Our messages be reconciled. And once we're reconciled to God, then our soul is purified and transformation happens. And it's so easy to lose focus on our message. And that's part of our task from God.

I love what Tim Keller says. This is such a brilliant quote. He says, "We must never lose grasp," watch this, "of the difference between gospel grace and religious moralism." Religious moralism is another way of saying behave. He says, "Why does the church continually fall into the temptation to self-righteousness, dominance, and exclusion?" Because it loses its grip on the very core of its faith. He says, "When we lose the existential or doctrinal grasp on the truth that we are saved by faith alone through grace alone because of Christ alone," watch this, "we not only lose our joy and fall into fear, but we also lose our graciousness and fall into pride."

If the church continually moves toward dominance and control rather than love and service, it shows that it doesn't really believe the gospel that it preaches. And that is so rich, so powerful. Let's remember our motive, which is love. Our mission, which is to be ambassadors. Our message, which is not behave, but be reconciled. The God who took a million steps toward you and all that's left for you is to take that final step toward him. And then there's one more thing I need to remember as I think about my mission from God as a Christian, and that's who is it that I'm working for? You know, who's my boss? Who am I answerable to?

I need to refocus on my master, on Jesus. My master is not social media likes. My master is not what some other pastor says. My master is not what some news channel on the left or the right tells me to do. I want to skip a few chapters for one final verse. Later in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes, this is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. I'm afraid, however, that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your mind, and by the way, this isn't about Eve and women. This is about the human race and how easily it is for us all to be deceived by lies. Your minds may be led astray from what? Your simple and pure devotion to Christ. Say that line out loud with me. Simple and pure, say it, devotion to Christ.

Are you being led astray from a simple and pure focus on Jesus? The other day I was talking to a good friend of mine here in Santa Cruz who is a scientist and is also an atheist. So one of his relatives had just visited from out of town with his family and I asked how it went. And he said, oh, you know, I always get into trouble with my Christian family. That's an interesting first sentence, isn't it? Yeah, you know the Christians. I'm always in trouble with them. I said, trouble? What are you talking about? He goes, yeah, like they're always on me about something, like swearing. And they always talk about Christianity, like all the time. Like I never get a break. It's always Christianity all the time.

And I said, really? Like what do they talk of? What do you mean they talk about Christianity? I want you to listen carefully to his response. This is word for word what my friend told me. Oh, you know, Christianity. What they hate about politicians, what they hate about culture, what they hate about the shows I watch on TV, what they hate about our country, you know, all that faith stuff. And I said, did they ever say anything about Jesus? And he took my question very seriously and he paused, he looked down, he thought for a long while. And he looked up at me and said, nope. I wanted to cry. Because in his mind, what is his relatives faith stuff? Politics, culture, TV, language, and nothing about Jesus.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do not share most of our cultures values or assumptions. And all those things kind of drive me crazy at times, too, when it comes to our culture. But we can't allow even our frustration with the way our culture is going distract us from. And it's such a distraction from our pure and simple focus on Jesus. Because what's that that's going to do? Do you remember James D. Hunter's four point rubric about the way Christians approach culture? What that's going to do is it's going to tempt us to respond to culture with dominance, with assimilation, or with withdrawal. Because we're so focused on all these things that we don't like or we're afraid of or we want to be accepted by. Don't focus on those in any way. Return to a pure and simple focus on Christ so that you can live as a faithful presence in your neighborhood.

Really, all four of these points are accomplished. If we just do this last one, retain a simple and pure focus on Christ. Because he's not only our Savior, he's also our model. As Tim Keller says, one final Keller quote here. He says, "Think of how God won you over, not by taking power, but by serving you. Not with a sword in his hands, but with nails in his hands. Not coming to judge, but coming to bear judgment." And that's the model for us. How to really love Santa Cruz is how Jesus loved us.

Now, refocusing on Jesus and on the essentials of our mission, that's an uphill battle. Why? Our challenge, as we've been saying, is distraction by the world. I saw some stats this week that were so incredible, I could hardly believe them. And so I kind of triple-checked them, and they're apparently accurate. The average American spends six hours a day consuming media from a screen. And this does not count time, you know, working in front of a screen. This is recreational screen usage, like binge-watching shows. Adrienne talked about it. Scrolling social media, doom-scrolling. And this is average six hours a day. There's two demographic groups that consume far more than that. Do you know who they are? Teenagers and senior citizens.

Now, here's the problem with that. Sherry Turkle, a researcher at MIT, says increased time on social media correlates with a measurable loss of what? Empathy. The ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. And that's one reason why we see exactly what we're seeing right now in our society. Everybody's all cocooning, tribal, getting mad at everybody else, not serving one another. So how can we as followers of Jesus fight against that? Of course, the solution, if the problem is distraction, the solution is a refocus and immersion in the Word.

And this is exactly why, as you heard Adrienne say during announcements, we're launching this immersive series, Faith Forward. It is a verse-by-verse study in one of the most profound chapters of the Bible, Hebrews chapter 11. I'm going to preview it next weekend, but it starts the next week. It consists of weekly sermons, daily readings, daily video devos, weekly small group studies, community service projects. That's a lot of content. Why? To immerse you in something other than junk food for your soul. To immerse you in something more positive than angry talk show hosts and bigger than superficial binge-watched TV shows.

To refocus us as a church on these four things that we've been talking about in this message. I started by talking about the mysterious Benedict Society, but you know what? You are part of a mysterious society. The Heavenly Father picked you and picked me and a whole bunch of other misfits and orphans to be in his society. To be his agents of empathy and hope and grace in a world where there's so much emergency and so much hatred. We can be different. I'm in. Are you?

Let's pray. Lord, I know that there are people listening right now who want to say, "God, I want to be part of your society, your assembly, your community, to be an ambassador of heaven." And I know that starts by receiving your grace. And so I hear you knocking and I open the door to you. I don't know exactly what it means, but I want to commit myself to you, Lord. And others of us now, I think, need to repent of letting other things become our focus, of being distracted. Help us to refocus on our message, on our motive, on our mission, on our master. I pray that Twin Lakes Church will grow as an embassy of heaven full of diplomats for Jesus. And I pray that as people see us grow in grace, they would see that as evidence that you're real and that you love them. And that revival, true revival, would be brought to our county. Help us to really love Santa Cruz as you love Santa Cruz. And we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.