Life on Life at City Church: Deep and Wholehearted

The kingdom of God cannot be understood without the cross, nor the cross without the  kingdom. Jesus' main message was the kingdom, and his main mission was to go to the cross. Kingdom and cross always go together: kingdom through the cross. 

Forgiveness is essential to following Jesus. We are never more like our Lord than when we forgive. But among Christians, forgiveness is more often mentioned than practiced.  

In our busy and hurried lives, deep, intimate relationships are often the first casualty. But in the ancient world, friendship was considered the greatest of the types of love we could experience. The Bible talks about friendship all through the Old and New Testaments. You could construct an entire theology of God's love around the theme of friendship. Jesus dares to call us his friends. 

We have an enemy who wants to steal, kill and destroy life. We need to know this enemy, his schemes and how to stand firm in the LORD.

Emotional health is an integral part of spiritual health. You can't be spiritually mature unless you are emotionally healthy and a vital part of emotional health is learning to name and engage your emotions in God's presence. God invites us to PRAY our emotions.

Sin is a power, greatly misunderstood and underestimated, with far-reaching consequences that affect our daily relationships with God, with others and with ourselves.

When it comes to how people change, if you could only choose one way to help people at all levels of spiritual maturity grow in their relationship with God, the choice is clear: encourage and equip people in how to read the Bible, how to meditate on God's word. There is no way to grow in the knowledge of God, deepen your faith, grow in your love for God and increase your hope without engaging daily with the Bible. How can reading the Bible move from “need to” to “get to,” from a duty to a delight?

What are we going for in these 242 groups and HOW can I be a more effective leader? This lecture was given to our leaders on Sunday, January 15, but is available for anyone to listen

Spiritual formation is wholly dependent upon God's power in us to change us and yet it requires our active, deliberate participation. We are not trying to be like Jesus; we are training to be like Jesus. That may sound small, a distinction without a difference, but understanding the difference between training and trying makes all the difference in the world. If we want to become mature disciples, that requires a whole new lifestyle, learning from Jesus, how to walk in his way, what Jesus calls his “yoke,” (Matt. 11.28-30).  

Prayer is to life with God what oxygen is to our physical existence. At its heart, prayer is growing in friendship with the God who first loved us. Prayer is the most important activity of our lives, but most of us feel like we're horribly bad at it. To help us, Jesus gave us the Lord's Prayer – so simple a small child can memorize it, but so profound that it can sustain and nourish a lifetime of prayer.

The gospel is not just how we begin the Christian life. The gospel is also how we grow in the Christian life. It's not just the ABCs of the Christian life; the gospel is the A-Z of the Christian life. It's what we always must come back to in order to grow.  Growing in Christ, growing in holiness, becoming strong, mature disciples of Jesus – these are all different ways of saying the same thing. The New Testament writers expect that we will grow (Eph. 4:15, 2 Pet. 3:18), but no matter how much we progress in the Christian life, we never get beyond the need to go deeper and deeper into God's unfathomable love for us. "Always we begin again."

We need habits of life that help us abide in the Vine, in Christ. Spiritual disciplines are necessary and essential for spiritual growth.

The Bible makes the astounding claim that we are temples of the Holy Spirit, God's dwelling place on earth (1 Cor. 3:16, Eph. 2:22). If we don't have the Spirit then we don't belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). And yet, for far too many of us, the Spirit remains an anonymous, faceless aspect of the Divine Being, unknown and unappreciated. The Spirit is how we experience God's presence and power in our lives today, and the real agent of change in our lives. 

Sin and repentance must be understood in conversation, but both are often misunderstood. Repentance has come to sound negative, narrow and restricting. But Jesus' call to repent is actually an invitation to life and freedom. It's not a burden he imposes, but a gift of grace he asks us to take up because he loves us. 

How much do you make of being God's child, of God being your Father? Being a child of God is not something we are by nature; it is something we become. And the word for this becoming is adoption. Many theologians consider adoption the highest privilege of the Christian life. 

One of the Bible's most provocative teachings is that idolatry is both our biggest problem, and the sin underneath every other sin. Idolatry, the worship of other gods, is not merely the domain of ancient peoples in primitive places. God tells us, in the Ten Commandments, that idolatry lies at the heart of our biggest problems.

You can't understand the gospel without understanding justification. Here is the way a child's catechism from the 17th century defines it: Question:      What is Justification? Answer: Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein He pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone. 

Union with Christ is the very heart of the gospel. Nothing is more central or more basic than union with Christ. It is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation. To be saved means to be united to the Savior, and unless we are united to Him, all that He has done for us remains useless and of no value to us. 

Life with Jesus begins and always goes back to one foundational posture: humility. Humility is reality. It is a right estimation of who we truly are before God. Humility does not consist in hanging our heads or wearing raggedly clothes. It consists in being grounded, grounded in reality, namely, that we are dearly loved beggars, who live in constant need of God's grace and mercy. It is only through utter defeat, one writer says, that we take the first steps toward liberation and strength. It turns out the admission of personal powerlessness is the firm bedrock for a happy and purposeful life. 

In our discipleship vision, the center of the target we are aiming for is deep wholehearted discipleship – men and women who love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength. We aim to become mature and maturing disciples of Jesus who want to see every part of our lives conformed to Christ's life.  

Jesus never used the word Christian. He simply said, “Follow Me.” That was the first thing he said to Peter, when he called him, “Follow me.” Matthew 4, verse 19. Jesus preferred method to describe those who followed him was “disciple.” In Luke 14 v 27, Jesus says, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” In the NT, followers of Jesus are called Christians 3x, believers 15x But disciples? 235x. Jesus' call was not to invite him into your heart OR say the sinners' prayer. Jesus' call was and is: Follow Me. But what did Jesus mean when he said, “Follow me?” Jesus' last words to his disciples were "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded." How did Jesus' so-called Great Commission become our Great Omission and what it might it look for the church to rediscover the Jesus' way today?

Join us as we embark on a journey of exploring together what it means to be a real-life apprentice of Jesus, learning from Him how to live in the Kingdom of God today. In this pilot episode, we look at Jesus's most famous story, the so called "Parable of the Prodigal Son." But we see that it is really a story about two sons, two different ways of being "lost" what it means to be "found" and what it looks like to live as a forgiven, beloved child of the welcoming Father. All discipleship, a life of following Jesus, begins and always goes back to experiencing and living out of the Father's inexhaustible love. This is from a sermon preached at City Church Evansville on June 13, 2021

The kingdom of God cannot be understood without the cross, nor the cross without the kingdom. Jesus' main message was the kingdom, and his main mission was to go to Golgotha. Kingdom and cross always go together: kingdom through the cross 

Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) once wrote that suffering constitutes the greatest challenge to Christian belief. A sensitive spirit must ask how suffering can possibly be reconciled With God's goodness and love. Nothing can undermine faith like navigating inexplicable suffering. For that reason, a would-be disciple of Jesus must be equipped with a theology of suffering, a way to process the trials that are sure to come.

We've talked about many important themes vital to the Christian life over these 20 lessons. In a very real way, today's topic is where these themes come together. You could say the proof that Christ is our Lord and that His life has taken up residence in our life is in our ability to forgive. No word is mentioned more but practiced less among Christian than forgiveness. But we are never more like our Lord than we choose to forgive.  

Probably the most misunderstood concept among Christians is SIN. We don't really know what it is. We have almost completely severed it from its Biblical context. This failure of understanding has drastic consequences that show up every day, most conspicuously in our relationships. How we relate to others (particularly in their failings), how we relate to ourselves (in our failings), how we relate to God (as we perceive His attitude toward us) – all of our everyday relationships are colored by our functional understanding of what the Bible means when it talks about sin. 

The Bible says of the Devil “we are not unaware of his schemes,” (2 Cor. 2.11). But today, for a variety of reasons, we have become increasingly unaware of how the Devil affects our world or even how sincere and thoughtful followers of Jesus are to engage this controversial theme. Let's take up spiritual warfare under three headings. ·      Know Our Enemy·      Know His Schemes·      Know How to Stand Firm

In our busy and hurried lives, deep, intimate relationships are often the first casualty. But in the ancient world, friendship was considered the greatest of the types of love we could experience. Aristotle concluded his famous Ethics by pointing out that friendship is essential for a good and happy life. The Bible talks about friendship all through the Old and New Testaments. You could construct an entire theology around the theme of friendship. And Jesus dares to call us his friends. 

Prayer is to life with God what oxygen is to our physical existence. At its heart, prayer is growing in friendship with the God who first loved us. Prayer is the most important activity of our lives, but most of us feel like we're horribly bad at it. To help us, Jesus gave us the Lord's Prayer – so simple a small child can memorize it, but so profound that it can sustain and nourish a lifetime of prayer.

When it comes to how people change, if you could only choose one way to help people at all levels of spiritual maturity grow in their relationship with God, the choice is clear: encourage and equip people in how to read the Bible, how to meditate on God's word. There is no way to grow in the knowledge of God, deepen your faith, grow in your love for God and increase your hope without engaging daily with the Bible. How can reading the Bible move from “need to” to “get to,” from a duty to a delight?

Spiritual formation is wholly dependent upon God's power in us to change us and yet it requires our active, deliberate participation. We are not trying to be like Jesus; we are training to be like Jesus. If we want to become healthy, wise, mature, loving people who always know how to respond in the right way, with the right spirit, at the right time, that requires a whole new lifestyle, learning from Jesus how to walk in his way, what Jesus calls his “yoke” (Matt. 11:28-30). Remember Lessons 12 and 13: we are not laboring to make ourselves more fit to be loved – we are already loved. We are instead training so that we might experience the love of God more and more as we go about our days. 

The gospel is not just how we begin the Christian life. The gospel is also how we grow in the Christian life. It's not just the ABCs of the Christian life, what we learn in the beginning before moving on to the advanced stuff. The gospel is the A-Z of the Christian life, what we always must come back to in order to grow. You never get beyond the cross – only deeper into it. No matter how much we've grown or how far we have progressed, we never get beyond our need to get our hearts happy in the gospel each new day. God's mercies are new every morning and our hearts need to be refreshed every morning because the gospel leaks out of us. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” It can be frustrating – This again! But it's a sign of maturing faith to realize, as one of the old fathers put it, “always we begin again.” Always going back to our secure acceptance achieved once and for all by Jesus – that is the advanced stuff.

Growth in Christ, growing in grace, growing in holiness – these are all different ways of saying the same thing. The New Testament writers expect that we will grow (Eph. 4:15, 2 Pet. 3:18), but we may be surprised to find that change is slow, gradual, painful and non-linear. There is no shortcut or mystery or hack. No matter how much we progress in the Christian life, we never get beyond the need to go deeper and deeper into God's unfathomable goodness and unfailing love. Confidence in God's goodness and His steadfast love are the foundation of the Christian life.     

In our discipleship vision, the center of the target we are aiming for is deep wholehearted discipleship – men and women who love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength. We aim to become mature and maturing disciples of Jesus who want to see every part of our lives conformed to Christ's life.  

Life on Life Leader Training from Sunday January 23, 2022. Overview of TopicsA.   Remembering the Vision of Life-on-Life (LOL) Groups: What's the Goal?B.    Learning from One Another: Some Shared Best PracticesC.    The Bigger Picture: Where LOL Groups Fit in our Larger Discipleship VisionD.   Looking Back at Unit 1: Gospel FoundatiosE.    Looking Ahead at Unit 2: Gospel FormationF.    A Few Helpful Conditions for Growing in Christ 

In the 21st century West, we are such a highly individualistic culture that it's almost impossible to grasp how communal and community based was the New Testament world. Today, we think of identity as largely an individual construct, something we choose or make for ourselves. Radical individualism, the individual's right to choose for himself or herself what's most important, is so much a part of the air we breathe that the Bible's emphasis on community and new family (cf. Mark 3.31-35, Luke 14.26) can strike our ears as archaic, foreign, impossible. And yet the Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. Even God, as the Trinity, is a community of persons in relationship, a community of friendship. And as we are created in His image, so we too were created to be in loving, self-giving community. 

The Bible makes the astounding claim that we ourselves are now temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3.16). We are God's dwelling place on earth (Eph. 2.22). The Spirit is how we experience God's presence and power in our lives today and if we don't have the Spirit then we don't belong to Christ (Rom. 8.9). And yet, for far too many of us, the Spirit remains an anonymous, faceless aspect of the Divine Being, if not forgotten, at least unknown and unappreciated.  And yet, the Holy Spirit is the real agent of change in our lives. 

In the Bible there is one word that captures what it means to have the spirit of your mind transformed, the eyes of your heart renewed. It was one of the first words Jesus used in his first sermon (Mark 1:15) and one of the last words he told his disciples to proclaim (Luke 24:47). The prophets used it (Isa. 30:15); the apostles used it (Acts 2:38, 17:30). When Martin Luther started the Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, he put this first: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ…willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”Repentance is a comprehensive process. It's not episodic: stop doing that. Nor is it only what someone does at the beginning of choosing to follow Jesus. It's a life orientation of learning to go with the grain of reality, with the flow of God's will, aligning with our Creator's intention. Repentance is not a heavy burden imposed on us; it's an invitation to become more human, to be more free, to have the image of God gradually restored in us. It feels like hard work (Luke 9:62), but it leads to rest for our souls (Isa. 30:15, Matt. 11:29). Repentance is an invitation to live into the way God sees things, which means to live into the way things really are. Repentance is Jesus' invitation to stop running, turn back, and live in the Father's embrace.

There was a popular book a few years back called Every Man's Battle, about pornography, its widespread use and debilitating effects. And the statistics are eye-popping, but I'd like to suggest that there is another, more pervasive, more pernicious struggle that is every human's battle. And this battle is robbing us of the grace and peace that could be ours. 

Today we turn to what has been called “the highest privilege of the Christian life.” If you want to know what it really means to become a Christian, here's how J.I. Packer answers that question in his classic book, Knowing God: “What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father…If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father…For everything that Christ taught…is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. ‘Father' is the Christian name for God...To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.” 

These big Bible-sounding words "justification" and "righteousness" are not archaic, religious concepts, but they speak to the enduring human need to justify our existence and prove that we have the record to stand approved and accepted. Justification by faith alone in Christ alone means you no longer have to self-justify. In fact, it means if we try and add to the gospel by our own works, then we lose the gospel altogether! We have no hope of justifying ourselves by what we do (or fail to do). Christ is our only hope, our only defense. You simply cannot enjoy God or rest in His presence unless and until you have grasped what justification by faith means. 

Though not often recognized as such, union with Christ is the heart of the gospel. Nothing is more central or more basic than Union with Christ. It is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation. To be saved means to be united to the Savior and unless we are united to Him all that He has done for us remains useless and of no value to us.