Reconnect

R and R. Take a deep breath right now with me. Let's talk about some soul R and R. This is a three-week series that we're doing because so many people have been telling me as a pastor, you know, I feel so tired on the inside right now. And it's no surprise, I mean, think of the last couple of years that we've had right with the pandemic and all the social upheaval and divisive politics and personal challenges and inflation. Let me just say this, you have earned the right to be tired. Don't add guilt on top of your exhaustion.

The question is how do we find deep soul rest? Well God has a plan. I want to invite you to grab your message notes that look like this. If you're joining us on the live stream you can download these at TLC.org/notes and I really encourage you to do that because there's something very special in these notes I'm going to be referring to later on that I'd love for everybody to be keyed in on. Now as you get those notes out, my name is René. I'm one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church and I am so glad that you are here.

In fact, if you're brand new here in person we have some gift bags for you with some major awards and valuable prizes inside and you can grab those at the desk and the lobby, the info desk, because we just want you to know as Elizabeth said earlier we are happier here. You are welcome. We've got a Twin Lakes Church coffee mug in there. We've got a coupon for the loft copy, not a coupon, a gift card for that. Yeah, coupon for the loft. Welcome to church. You get 10% off at the coffee shop. No, it's a gift card for loft. We are so grateful that you are here.

Well this is going to be a very personal message for me because I leave tomorrow on a three-month sabbatical and I'm so excited about it. Talk about getting some R&R. I'm grateful. So our pastors here at this church get every seven years we get the summer off and it is such a brilliant plan that our church board had because I think that's one of the reasons that we have such pastoral longevity here as a church because we do get that every seven years Sabbath period and I'm super grateful for that.

But you know this has forced me to think this is gonna be my last message until August. So what is the topic that I really want to leave you with? And it's got to be a good one, right? I'm good as in a crucial topic that we all really need to hear about and I thought of it in these terms. What do I think is the biggest challenge that our church faces right now? What do I think is the biggest challenge that our nation faces right now? And what do I think is the biggest challenge that you face right now to your spiritual growth and to your happiness? And the answer to all three of those questions is the same exact thing.

It's a big problem right now and before I name it I want to kind of set it up with a true story. Now I shared this with some of you about three and a half years ago but it bears repeating in this cultural moment that we find ourselves in right now. Sebastian Jungher in his book Tribe tells the true story of a very odd phenomenon that took place in early American history. In those days in the 1700s there were two groups of people living side by side in the territory of the United States colonies. There were indigenous people of course Native Americans who were living at the time the same way they'd lived for hundreds of years and there were the colonists who at that time were living with the highest technology that Western civilization had to offer.

And something interesting began to take place. A sizable number of colonists began to defect and live among the indigenous people. Now the odd thing was traffic only went one way. We have no records of indigenous people of their own free will coming to live with the colonists and even then everybody was noticing this phenomenon. Benjamin Franklin even wrote about it in a letter to a friend in 1753 he described this. He made it personal some colonists that he personally knew had been captured by indigenous people that lived nearby in a raid and then they were rescued and brought back to the colony and then as soon as they could they went right back.

He wrote in his letter quote "Though ransom by their friends and treated with all imaginable tenderness yet in a short time they became disgusted with our manner of life and took the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods." Why? What could it have been? What did the American colonists not have that the indigenous people did have that was so appealing? This was a topic of conversation among the colonists. One of them in a book that he wrote about this in 1782 said this "There must be in their social bond." He's talking about the indigenous people. "Something singularly captivating and far superior from anything to be boasted of among us."

Person after person started concluding they have a social bond. They've got connections. They've got a sense of community that somehow we're missing. Even back then people were noticing a trait in American culture that people are still talking about today. Another example Alexis de Tocqueville was a famous French author who traveled through America back then and he observed extremist individualism is the defining American trait. Now don't get me wrong. He liked it. He thought that was kind of part of our genius. It was what made Americans so inventive and pioneering but he also saw a dark side.

He said if left unchecked it will spell the abolition of humanity. Wow! But he meant it. Follow me here. De Tocqueville feared, listen carefully to this, that the spirit of American individualism which was great would if left somehow unchecked erode our unity and that would have two effects. Number one it would make democracy impossible and number two Americans would eventually get so lonely that they would literally start to die. Is that happening? The Gallup organization says Americans have been the loneliest people on planet earth for the last 10 years and because we are so lonely what happens is we sit in our homes and we become isolated in our own social media echo chambers and ironically loneliness leads to isolation which leads to tribalism and the pandemic has just made all this worse.

Harvard magazine recently had a story headline the loneliness pandemic. In the article that quoted a number of doctors and researchers one of them said this a major adverse consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be increased social isolation and loneliness. We are all lonely now. So what all those early American pioneers observed as kind of a flat side to the pioneering American culture has just become worse that hyper as de Tocqueville called it extremist individualism just got heightened by the isolation and so on that that was necessary for the health care protocols and so on but the dark side of that is it's made that isolation and loneliness worse and here's why it's really bad.

The article goes on to say the heightened risk of mortality from loneliness exceeds that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic and exceeds the health risks associated with obesity. So welcome to church everyone right? Here's the good news the Bible says God sets the lonely in families read that line with me out loud. God sets the lonely in families. God has a solution. He leads out the prisoners with singing but the rebellious live in a sun scorched land that's saying you can live in a desert of community or you can choose to live in an oasis of family.

Last weekend I talked about being distracted by all our news feeds and tech. Today I want to talk about being disconnected and the two are not unrelated are they? Somebody said we are mistaking connectivity for community. There's over a billion people connected to Facebook right now one billion and yet all the research says that if you do more than a half an hour or so of social media a day it just vastly increases your sense of loneliness. This is a problem and so what I want to do this morning is inform you but also challenge you and inspire you. I want to look at how God can reconnect us and restore our souls and make us more human again and here's how I wanted to define community since we're going to be talking about it today.

This definition and other parts of this message are from a great talk that I heard given by somebody named John Mark Comer. He defines community as this way the experience of close relationships where I am known cared for and grow. So my question for you ask yourself a hard question do you have this in your life right now? Are you experiencing close relationships where you are known? Where you're cared for? Where you grow? And before you either say well of course I've got that or before you say well I'm probably in the minority here but I don't have that.

So the other day I'm listening to NPR and they reported the results of an annual survey people were asked a couple of interesting questions. How many people do you feel know you well? Give us a number. How many people do you feel really know you well? For the first time since the poll was taken over half of Americans said zero. And then they ask another question have you had a meaningful conversation with a neighbor on your street in the last year? Only eight percent said yes. Eight percent. So most people in our country as de Tocqueville predicted over 200 years ago actually do not have community by this definition and we're seeing the results. People are getting sick because of this. Our country is being torn apart by this kind of rampant extremist individualism.

So I want to do what I want to do today is I want to take you to the three probably most important passages of many many passages in the Bible that have to do with community and how important this is to God and then we're gonna look at how to find it here in this church and in our community. So I want to start with Jesus that's always a good place to start. Did you ever notice how when Jesus shows up to start a world-changing movement one of the first things he does is create a community. He says hey you follow me and you follow me you follow me and let's all follow together and let's do life together.

In other words Jesus lived in community. He wasn't some hermit up on a mountaintop somewhere even though he could have been and still been awesome. Jesus Christ the Son of God chose to live in community. Second the call to follow Jesus was a call to community. The call to follow him was a call to community. Jesus didn't show up and say hey everybody here's some inspiring content. Now good luck go be a peaced out hermit somewhere up on a mountaintop. No he says let's do this together come and follow me together and then third Jesus called people to community who were natural enemies.

I mean look at the most famous verse that mentions the name of his original 12 disciples. The only two people whose sort of occupations are mentioned are and say their occupations out loud with me there's Matthew the tax collector and Simon the zealot. If you know anything about first century Roman politics in the province of Judea you know that you could not possibly have possibly picked. Two people for your group of 12 most intimate disciples who were further apart politically. The tax collectors were Roman collaborators. They were they got their role from Rome. They got their salary by collecting taxes to support the whole Roman Empire. They were like pro-Roman.

The zealots were a political party in Judea that believed by any means necessary God's people need to overthrow the Roman government. Inviting these two people to your group of 12 this would have been like inviting your niece who still has a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on her Volkswagen van and your uncle who drives a truck and always wears his red MAGA hat all the time and seating them next to each other at your 4th of July picnic. That's what this is like times a thousand. Can you imagine the dinner conversations these two would have had? I love this old engraving of this moment because Jesus is going you over there follow me you follow me and both of sides are going what? Follow that person no way. But this was not a mistake that Jesus made. This was intentional.

This is Jesus saying from the start I want my movement to be like this because no other community on earth is like this. And if we pull this off so to speak people are gonna sit up and take notice because this is a first in history. What Jesus is saying is this and please listen because I'm so my biggest fear in the Christian Church right now is that this is just being lost. I've literally wept over this sometimes when I hear what pastors are saying. Jesus is saying it is possible to have deep communion with people that you really don't have anything in common with politically or pop-culturally or chemistry wise or anything else. Ethnicity, language. How is that possible? Well it's kind of like the Venn diagrams right? In church you got people from different groups that might not have a ton in common different ages cultures politics but there is overlap in Jesus.

See Christian community let me repeat it's not the same as any other kind of community. We don't get together here because it's so nice to be with people who think exactly the same way you do. From the very beginning the Jesus movement was meant to be a group of extremely diverse people who from the outside people might look at them and go what do they have in common? Well they find common ground in the one thing in human history that truly transcends every culture and every time and that is the love of God in Christ. Amen? And you might say well this is some kind of an ideal that's not possible that doesn't happen. It absolutely happens. I look out every single weekend and most of you I don't know what your politics are but some of you have made them known to me and so I look out and I see people who worked on Democratic political campaigns and I see people who I happen to know are in the Republican Party and I see political independence.

I look out and I see older folks, I see younger folks, I see middle-aged folks, I see people with kids and with grandkids and with no kids, I see black and white and brown, I see Spanish speakers and English speakers and Tagalog speakers and Swiss German speakers. I see people who are for the rail trail against the rail trail. I probably even see Golden State Warriors fans and Memphis Grizzlies fans. Incredible but true. We can be so different but overlap in Jesus and here's why this is so important to grasp. The whole Bible is the story of God setting this up. The story of God, how God wants a relationship with us but that relationship is broken by our sin and so God went to extraordinary measures, came down to us to reconnect.

In Christ, Christ paid our sin debt on the cross specifically in order to restore our relationship with Him and our relationship with each other and when we focus on that overlap then it is so beautiful. You know in just a few minutes we'll close our worship service with communion and as we share together in communion it's so beautiful because we are reminded of the overlap and I hope in that moment you look around and you go, "well there's a lot of different people here of a lot of different views come from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different ages, speak different languages" but there's that over. When we take communion I'm always reminded of one of the most profound community experiences I've ever had.

I was in the jungles of Guatemala with a missionary, sometimes I just cry thinking about it, and we visited a village that was very remote. There were no roads there, we had to get there with a four-wheel drive crashing through the jungle and it was a village of indigenous Mayan people who spoke the indigenous language. They didn't even speak Spanish, certainly not English, so I was sitting there I didn't understand one word that was going on. So here's a church service where there's songs and there's a sermon where I'm not understanding a word and it's like what do I have in common here? And then at the end they served communion.

And as the bread was passed and as the cup was passed I'm looking down the rows and I'm seeing some of the people, tears starting to come down their faces because I know they're thinking of the same exact thing I'm thinking of when I take communion, what Jesus did for us on the cross. And in that moment there was such beautiful overlap. That's what it means to be a Christian. That's the community Jesus Christ calls us to. And what I see happening so much in churches these days from all sorts of different directions is they're no longer focusing on the overlap. They're focusing on all the things we don't have in common and all the ways we disagree. That robs us of the community that Jesus Christ came to create and it's actually heresy.

Now if that's the kind of community that Jesus Christ came to create, if that's what he designed, if that's what he calls us to, then why is this so rare? Why do we still lack community? Why are we such lone Rangers? Right? Especially if you believe all the stats I quoted earlier, especially us Americans. And I'll put myself in the same category. Even I as a pastor I should know better, but I sometimes push back against getting too close to people and getting in a home group and so on. Why? Well as I examine my own heart there's probably three reasons maybe you can relate to these.

First is that good old-fashioned American individualism, right? We're just designed this way. It's just a part of our culture and there's good and there's bad to this. But we gotta remember that the Bible talks many many times about how there's two aspects of a healthy spiritual life. There's the solitary life and there's community life, right? And we need both to grow. And if you look at the lifestyle of Jesus Christ, it's kind of like he goes back and forth into extremes on both sides. We talked last week about how the Bible describes every morning he goes off to be solitary, to be alone with God, and then it's like he comes back in the afternoon to be with his guys and hang out. That's the life Jesus lived, but I feel like if you look at the lives of most American Christians at best the line would look something like this. We're afraid to go for the deep dive really on either side. Just because kind of like that's our culture. We are so individualistic.

Then there's a second reason and that's this idealism. And what I mean by idealism is this. We think, "Oh yeah, the church, oh yeah, it's so beautiful and when I get into a church home group or when I go on a mission team, all those people are gonna be beautiful people and they're always gonna be super loving and they're gonna like have no body odor and they're gonna see everything in my enlightened way. And then when they turn out to be inconsistent, smelly, and moody, and they even dare to disagree with my biblically based politics, we get delusioned. And I've many times I've heard people say based on those kinds of things, "What do I have in common with these people?" Well, you have the overlap in common, the most important thing.

And this unattainable idealism is in my operation one of the biggest reasons people give up on church. But don't trade the beautiful real for the unattainable ideal. It's kind of like a young person who never gets married because they're waiting for the exact perfect flawless match made in heaven and everybody's got some flaws, right? And so they just never decide to commit. Listen, I'm gonna alarm you here maybe. If you watched me 24/7, I guarantee you there would be moments your jaw would drop and you're like, "This guy doesn't need a sabbatical, he needs to get fired." Like I heard one pastor say, "I do not levitate around two feet off the floor and some Jesus version of Zen all the time." If you spied on me, you would see me sometimes say words in anger. "Yes, lose my temper, get petty, or any one of a number of things." And here's the point, almost always I am that way with the people I love the most. Is it the same way for you?

Now why is that? Well partly it's because I'm still immature, but there's another reason it's because I feel safe with them. I feel safe with my wife and with my kids. I let my guard down with them. You know what really? It's not that I'm my worst self with them, it's I'm my real self with them. And that's okay. We all need that place to be honest that we can go to. That's what this whole church thing is supposed to be like and this is one of the reasons I love 12-step recovery groups. They're so effective because they are places where people can go to be totally honest and therefore find completely honest help.

So don't just look for you know an increasingly tiny echo chamber of seemingly perfect people who always agree with you on absolutely everything because you know what that's called? Occults. Real community is real people having permission to be real about all their opinions and everything else to be imperfect, to be honest. And then there's a third reason if I look within myself that I think we resist community and that's simple intimidation, right? It can be intimidating. The idea of getting into a small group or volunteering it can just be scary because people are weird. Especially church people. Take it from me. And people can hurt you. Especially church people. In fact some of you have been deeply hurt by a past church experience and if I had experienced what some of you experienced in church or in some religious school or something I'd probably be resistant to.

And of course you do have to set up boundaries. Don't get into some cult that's trying to control your life. But if you put a hard shell around yourself so that you will never get hurt again, guess what? You still get hurt because life and you can't experience the beauty of a community that can help you get through that hurt. And you miss the beauty of this. Look at what Paul writes, the Apostle Paul in these verses in Ephesians chapter 2. Consequently he's just been writing about what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross. Consequently you are no longer foreigners and strangers. The Venn diagram isn't just a bunch of circles floating around but there's overlap. Your fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his what? His family.

He's saying you get to be family and then he shifts metaphors to a building. He says built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. With Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone, the point that we all overlap, in him the whole building, all those circles, is joined together and rises to become a holy what? Temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which who lives? God lives by his Spirit. What's he talking about there? When we are in community something supernatural happens.

Just one example. I remember calling a family here in the church who had recently been through a tragedy with Pastor Jim Joslyn and we both got on the line and called him up and we said hey we just want you to know how you're doing. Oh you know actually it was a terrible thing that happened to us but bless God we don't know how we would have gotten through this without the community of our home group. It's been truly profound and we both said that's that's wonderful. Can we put you on the Sunshine Ministry meal train? Right? And they said you know what we appreciate that but actually we have more than enough meals from the friends in our home group and we said that's wonderful.

Hey can we come by this afternoon and visit you? We just want you to know that you're cared for and here's how they responded. You know you're always welcome to come over but to tell you the truth we want you to know we felt so embraced by the people in our home group. We're just we're feeling fine and the conversation went on this way and eventually I put down the phone and realized something sacred is happening there and I didn't have to organize it. I didn't have to plan it. The longer I'm a pastor the more I realize I actually don't have to scheme your spiritual growth because the Apostle Paul says by his spirit it's built. Jesus said I will build my church.

What I have to do is to preach the Word and then as a team provide environments where community can happen and then the Holy Spirit over the long haul does the rest. And when I mean environments where community can happen I mean things like the car club and the bookstore team and the grief support group and the 12-step groups and home groups any environment where people are honest with each other and getting together and just doing life. That's when we grow and that leads into the final point why we need community. Very quickly there's two reasons. First, community grows me. See there's two essentials to spiritual growth that can happen only in community. Vulnerability and accountability. You can't get these anywhere else. And frankly you can't get these just coming to church services.

When you have a place where you can really be vulnerable and accountable to some task or to studying the Bible together or something that's where growth happens. And this is part of my own story. I mentioned on Easter about growing up without a dad and here's a follow-up that I probably don't talk about enough. My church community growing up is what saved me from despair and from aimlessness. As a young kid like pre-adolescent I joined the church ham radio club. Anybody here remember ham radio? Learned Morse code and everything. It was me and a bunch of guys who were retired. You know this 11 year old and a bunch of 72 year olds. I volunteered with the children's ministry every single Sunday night. Honestly it wasn't because I loved kids and wanted to serve Jesus it was because I got to do puppets. But I was there every Sunday night.

I volunteered on a youth group mission trip, joined a youth choir. I volunteered as a church soundboard operator. My church friends dads took me with them when they went up to the Bay Area for Giants or A's games and so on. Now my church was far from a perfect church but it was the community that shaped me and grew me in so many good ways. It grows me in ways I cannot grow without and by extension it grows the kingdom. The kingdom of God. Look at how the Bible describes the very early church in the book of Acts at the end of chapter 2. Just look very carefully at this. Every day they continue to meet together in the temple courts so that big meetings but they also broke bread in their homes and what? Ate together with glad and sincere hearts praising God so they worshiped and watch this now enjoying the favor of all the people like in the broader community who weren't even Christians and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

That is not a coincidence that when they lived like this the community at large was like wow we think those guys are great and people came to Christ they couldn't keep people away because people thirst for community and this can happen again when we do what they did. You know I feel like we're at the end of a two-year parenthesis where churches sort of became primarily not exclusively but primarily content delivery systems and I'm grateful for the ways we were able to deliver content but I think we need to go back and remember all of these ways that the early church existed and bring them back to us again.

For example I mean you just go through this first. First there was worship right? We need to worship together again as they did and let me just address specifically the live stream audience. Live stream is a blessing. I'm so grateful for it. We get emails all the time. Just yesterday I got two contacts. Somebody who joins us every single weekend from New Delhi, India. Somebody else who joins us from Michigan. It's wonderful to have you all join us but can I dare say this if you are local please join us together again in person. Now you may not be uncomfortable because you know masking is optional now. Here in church that's why we reserve the balcony as a mask sort of super safe zone for the social distancing and mask because we want everyone to experience the blessing of in-person worship.

Now some of you are going, "Well you're going on three months sabbatical. I'll see you in August." Please don't do that because we got so many super fun things. Church is going to be better with me gone. Believe me. Mother's Day we've got the best Mother's Day award for all moms ever in the history of this church. You'll just have to come to see what it is. And then the next three weekends in a row Herman Hamilton, amazing speaker. So many more great weekends. Don't miss the worship. And then another part of community in Acts chapter 2 was what? They ate together. They had meals. So at least once a month this summer we're gonna have free meals here after church services like chicken and waffles after church today. Chicken and waffles are biblical. This is what I'm saying to you today.

The other day we heard that it's National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day in two weeks and we feel led to celebrate. There's gonna be free cookies for everybody two weeks because eating together brings us together. It just does. That's what they did. And then plug into groups like they did there in Acts chapter 2. They met in homes. There's so many opportunities to do this here. You can email Jim@tlc.org. But here is the biggest and in my personal life experience, the single most effective way to find community. And this is what I want to hone on here as we wrap up. Volunteer.

It says they served one another. This week I asked our pastors and directors, "Let's not be vague about, 'Oh we need volunteers.' Let's be specific." Because you know if you're not specific you don't know if God ever answered your prayers specifically. And so I asked them, "How many volunteers do you actually need?" Added it up and here it is. Look at page two of your notes. We need exactly 105 volunteers right now. And I think in a church of this size we can find them. Like look at that list. Video ministry. A director for camera ops. Church greeters we really need ten friendly faces to welcome people to church. I want to challenge you. Look through this list today. Choose something and then contact us at tlc.org/volunteers and please don't wait for someone to invite you. Be the one to reach out even if that's hard for you to do.

You know last Wednesday night and I'll close with this I was at our midweek classes. That's another great way to find community. And as the classes ended I ran into Max. Let me introduce you to Max. Max just started attending Twin Lakes Church less than a year ago. Professionally he's a therapist who practices over in Luscatas and I said, "That's great. Welcome to church. How do you like it?" He goes, "I love it." And so I asked some follow-up questions as I always do. I said, "Well why do you love it?" Because you know I kind of hoped he'd say something about the brilliant messages but guess what he actually said? No I love this. He said, "I love the community."

Listen to this. He said, "I plugged right into Wednesday night midweek classes, into home groups, into the men's group." He said, "I even went on the men's fishing trip though I don't like to fish and even feel sorry for the fish." But he said, "I went anyway to just hang out." And he said, "It has changed my life." So then one more follow-up question. I said, "How did you overcome the barrier as a brand new church attender to get involved in that way? You didn't know a soul less than a year ago here. Wasn't that kind of scary?" And here's his answer. He said, "Yes. It's hard when you're new but I know from research." Remember he's a professional therapist. "And my own experience with my clients. Life just goes better in community." And after he said that, I said, "Hold still. I'm taking your picture and quoting you in my sermon this weekend." So watch what you say to me.

The bottom line is this. Community is countercultural. It can be messy. It can be intimidating. It's inconvenient. But it is essential to spiritual formation. There are ways you grow in community that you would never otherwise grow. So together these next three months, let's do it. Would you pray with me? Let's bow our heads together as we prepare our hearts for communion. With our heads bowed, can I just address you with your eyes closed? Heads bowed. I want to make this clear. The first step to being part of God's community is to accept Jesus's offer when he says, "Follow me." And so if you haven't yet, I just invite you to tell him in your heart, "Lord, I receive your invitation. I want to tag along with you through life and I don't really understand that. I got lots of questions, but I know that's okay because you're gonna help me grow."

Now others here have already made that commitment, but like me, maybe you're realizing I haven't really been in community in the last couple of years. Would you pray with me? Lord, help me to commit to being part of community and not to keep putting it off. And Lord, especially bless anyone in this room who feels lonely. Would they know how much they are loved by you, the one who sets the lonely in families? Thank you Jesus. Amen.