Conflict in the Culture - Ben Stuart

well let me begin by saying it has been a heavy week uh i was in atlanta all last week uh for some meetings with our church passion city atlanta and they were great meetings some hard meetings but it wasn't until later in the week that i decided one night to get online and just try to catch up on the news and so i sat alone in my hotel room and just faced a deluge of human pain and suffering you know passion city atlanta r515 location is a block from where uh multiple people were shot at a massage parlor in atlanta one month ago and since that incident a month ago i read an article that day that 45 mass shootings have happened in america since then two in dc two in baltimore one in bryan texas uh just streets away from where donna and i bought our first home and everywhere from beaumont to boulder in chicago and detroit and milwaukee and all across america so much pain and then reading about dante ryden adam toledo and seeing all the pain being experienced and then the parsing of all the detail and then i did what many people do you're trying to read a lot of different presentations of data trying to understand where's the truth and what's happening and then see already people kind of picking positions and fighting and defending and and it was exhausting to read and just deeply saddening for me to just encounter that pain and i called a friend uh recently he's uh dear brother he is black and a minister and i mention that because i i just wanted to ask him how are you feeling in a week like this seeing what's happening in the news and he said you know i have and he used an interesting phrase racial weariness he's because on one side i know that it's the constant barrage of this data through through the uh computer screen in the mail in social media that just makes it so anxiety driving for me it's like but then there's real tragedies being faced and real grieving to be done over the real loss of life of teenage child and he said so i'm feeling this grief but the instant onslaught and then people battling over details means something i got to defend a position or defend myself from some other position he's like man i'm just i'm tired and coming up here today you know it's interesting landing in the text we're in it talks about the the conflict and tension in the culture particularly as it breaks along racial and ethnic and cultural lines and coming in to talk about that i was like what am i meant to do as a pastor in this moment do i pull up the headlines and start parsing each different story and i realized i don't need to do that and it's not because they don't matter but what my friend said to me and which was so helpful he said man i need to hear from my pastor what all believers need to hear from each other that i have compassion for you co passion i suffer with you and that's what we're meant to do we're meant to grieve with each other suffer with each other hurt with each other so i don't have a message for america i don't have a message for the west but looking at passion city dc and saying man it's been a hard week and and even this week one of the last things i saw and it was one of our own church family took a heartbreaking photo of the family of officer evans as they were carrying his body away from being honored and after losing his life at the capitol and i'm like man there's just a lot of a lot of pain a lot of grieving in our house how do we carry each other and hurt together and i want you to know as your pastor i i care about you and i love being the pastor of a church that that is multi-ethnic so we're coming from a lot of different places and backgrounds and have different skin color and and i love that and i also know that that means when we hit difficult moments in society we're starting in different places and hearing each other and sometimes missing each other i want us to be a place that loves each other and hurts when each other hurt and figure out how to grieve together so i just wanted to start today by saying i love you and we as a staff love you all of you and we want to be a church that walks humbly and graciously together and then as i was thinking about today i was like i think what else i can do is try to help us answer the question as the people of jesus how do we navigate conflict in the culture and here's the fascinating thing this text which you know we stopped short last week ran out of time and then landing in this text paul is talking about how do we live as children of the king if jesus christ is the christ the anointed one the king who's building a new kingdom and he's setting out the rules that the ruler is giving us here's how the children of the king work within the culture paul's talking about how we do it and then paul brings up in this text he says hey within the kingdom of christ there's now no longer jew or greek circumcision uncircumcision slave free barbarian scythian he starts to bring up every fault line in the culture this is the bible paul's bringing this up he brings forward in the conversation hey there's going to be places of friction where there was a culture breaks and it's going to be along racial ethnic religious socio-economic lines the bible's not afraid to pull those forward and yet here's paul does it he begins to say but here let me show you how we as the people of jesus navigate these fault lines because here's the here's the reality they're the fault lines within the church where churches can break and communities can break and their fault lines within the church because they are fault lines within the culture and yet i think the question underneath this text for all of us is do we believe the resurrection of jesus christ gives us the resources to navigate conflict in the culture i think that's a question we all have to answer does the actual death burial and resurrection of jesus christ provide us any resources to navigate days of pain like this and hurt like this and in conflict like this does the reality of jesus's life and death and resurrection give us a resource that allows us to navigate conflict in the culture in a different way or are we stuck in the same boat as everybody else and i think you have to actually answer that question does jesus have any bearing on the difficulty we're facing today because if he doesn't i don't know why we're doing this and yet the reality is what i love about our gospel is it's not just a pie in the sky ethereal philosophy because there's a lot of philosophies in the world today that are ethereal let's all get along but they are powerless and brittle when they land on the streets and a lot of philosophies are shown to be insufficient when they hit the grit and difficulty of life and yet our story centers on a real man who really lived claimed to be god and claimed to be the lamb of god who takes away the sins of the world and he was really nailed into a piece of wood and real blood dripped down as splinters drove into his lacerated back and in the middle of that gritty dirty horrendous pain in real life he could still speak out to those who are mocking him father forgive them because they don't know what they're doing and at the center of our faith is a historical moment that does not bypass or gloss over the real gritty dirty bloody difficulties of life and yet in them you can still say something supernatural that the roman soldier sees and says clearly that's the son of god because no one else speaks with that kind of graciousness in the midst of this much pain do we have a resource the world doesn't have in the cross let me tell you something the world needs to see it the world needs to see it they need to see we have another way because here's the reality they the people who don't know jesus they will never take our philosophy of reconciliation with god who they can't see seriously if they don't see reconciliation among us that they can see if we tell the world jesus christ has unleashed a power that can reconcile rebel humanity with a holy god but that power is insufficient to reconcile people whose skin color is different and cultural background is different and socioeconomic background is different if this philosophy is powerless in what they can see they're not going to buy it that it's powerful enough to reconcile what they can't see they have to see it work if they're gonna believe so this is a gospel issue i i was part of a gym years ago that um was always pushing their personal trainers they had personal trainers on their staff and every time you showed up at the gym they're like would you like to work out with one of our personal trainers would you like to sign up with a course with one of our personal trainers but to be real with y'all all of their personal trainers were terribly out of shape every single one of them and i would look over at that guy and i was like no i think i'm good like why would i buy that man's philosophy if it's clearly not working out practically why would i buy that why would i literally spend any time and money on that and here's the reality though he might have had a good philosophy he might have had some real insight in and what vegetables to eat and when to eat them but the fact that it wasn't working out practically in his life meant that i dismissed his whole philosophy and if we're gonna tell people reconciliation with heaven is possible if we're gonna tell them the murder of a middle eastern carpenter several centuries ago radically reorients my relationship to the maker of the stars that's a big claim why would your co-workers take that seriously at all the only way they will is when they enter into the conflict that has been as old as humanity that the fault lines break racial ethnic socio-economic religious lines they see it happen all over the world and yet they see in us a different way to care about each other and love each other and hurt with each other when they see that they'll go surely the son of god is in their midst and they will take jesus seriously when they see the power of reconciliation in us that is exactly what jesus prayed this is not ben saying this or making this up jesus's only prayer sent directly at us john 17 at the end of his life looking at his disciples he said i do not pray for these only but for those who will believe in me through their word he prays through the centuries for us and this is our king's prayer that they may all be one just as you father are in me and i and you that they may be in us so that the world may believe you sent me the glory that you've given me i've given to them that they may be one even as we are one i and them and you and me may they become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me the world will believe that god sent jesus christ when the world sees us get along the gospel message will be legitimized reconciliation with heaven will be seen as possible if we can live out reconciliation among us but it's not going to be easy it's hard and paul in his mercy gives us ways to navigate it and we'll see how many of them we can get in here today but as we're in this passage remember we talked about this is the pivot point in the book paul's been presenting jesus christ as the king seated on the right hand of god and he's launched a kingdom he has radically renovated us that when i put my faith in christ i am changed from the inside out i'm something new and i am a part of something new what this passage calls the new self that word self is uh anthropos humanity i am part of the new humanity and so it's individual i made something new but it's corporate we are made something new that's why he says you're part of the new self in which there's neither greek or jew male or female is what he says to the galatians but uh barbarians cynthia that this new humanity is a gathering of people from every tribe tongue and nation knit together for the glory of god and then where we are in this passage is talking about now how do we conduct ourselves as the people of the king and last week we looked at when we have christ as a king it radically changes our sexual ethic that as we seek him it changes how we deal with our sexuality that it's not driven by self-gratification but guided by self-donation we don't participate in sexual immorality that's driven by covetousness is what it says that is the unrestrained impulse for more for me at the expense of you no we have a generous sexuality that wants to give to the other and take in all of them and that's why christianity has some hard barriers around sexuality that it's meant to be enjoyed within the confines of a covenant in marriage right and that looks like restriction but it's interesting in the early church that uh the roman sexual ethic was much more loose it looked like freedom but it ended up really hurting women and hurting kids and in doing so really devalues men as well and then they saw the christian sexual ethic which looked like bondage it was so restricted and yet women were happier children were safer men had more dignity and they looked and they were like what looks like restriction is actually freedom and what looks like freedom is actually bondage and so the new rules of the king are not stifling rules they're liberating rules and so as we approach the the desire that god's given us of sexuality we use it in a way that's commensurate with the the commands of the king that is i use it as a gift to someone i've covened that i want all of you mind body spirit forever not just a part of you i can use so it radically changes our sexual ethic and how we treat each other we as a church won't use each other we won't abuse each other and now he moves on from the sexual impulse he moves to how we talk to each other and look in verse 8 uh he says but now you must put them all away these are the activities commensurate with our old lifestyle and that word put them all away he's grabbing the imagery of clothing of taking off clothes the idea is he said you were part of an old self it says in the passage that all of who you were under adam are our first parents were beautiful in the image of god but broken because of sin and so we are beautiful and every human being has dignity but every single person is disturbed and depraved all of us and so we live out of a selfish place and we have conflicting desires and don't always do the best in the world and so the reality is when we come to christ there's ways of living what this passage calls practices that were consistent with that old humanity and we take those practices off those are clothes that don't fit us anymore and now we put on new clothes and that's where we are in this passage he's going to give us a list of things we take off that was associated with your old life take those off and then he's going to give us a list of things we put on we are closed in a new way as children of the king so it starts with the things to take off and he says but now you must put away anger wrath malice slander and obscene talk from your mouth it's interesting when you talk about sexuality he started with the act sexual immorality and then he moves down this list to the inward motivation of covetousness more for me and i don't care about you and this one he goes the other way and he starts with internal motivation and then moves to external activity if we're going to have some internal drivers in us that aren't healthy that are going to explode into some community unraveling ways of treating each other we don't need to do that and so last week was about we don't use each other this week is about we don't abuse each other and he says when we begin to talk to each other we put these away what do we put away well he says you put away anger and wrath anger is i'm upset about something you did something that bothers me and wrath is uh it's the word uh sumon it it's uh it's it's where you get like uh thermometers the idea of heat that someone does something to bother me and rather than forgive them or let it go i hold on to it and i let it mix with the chemicals inside of me and make a reaction to just kind of turn on the heat and i just get angry and angry or i preserve it someone slights me and i hold it right and so i let anger turn into wrath and then as it turns into wrath it turns into malice malice is a deliberate decision to do you harm that someone hurt me and as i think about it the matter i get and so i want to lash out back and the slander is it's the word blaspheme it's it's i take your name and i assault it i assault your character or vilify you to somebody else or obscene talk is i don't do it to somebody else it's abusive language rather than talk bad about you to somebody else i just talk bad to you i try to hurt you i use words like a weapon to hurt you and he says this is a normal way humanity acts you hurt me i get rad stew on it i talk about you bad and then someday i explode and anger at you he says that's a very common way of acting towards people if you don't believe me get on twitter and he says that's what the world does we don't do that anymore so if you get online and someone upsets you and you slash out back it's very natural but it's not supernatural and we don't do that anymore we don't use our words like weapons anymore we put a beat between anger and action you just gotta wait uh i gotta tell you a story uh this week i i um i watched the youtube video of emmanuel acho he led like a a q a discussion with police officers he has a youtube channel uncomfortable conversations with a black man and so he did this interview with him and police officers and i just thought it was this wonderful presentation of healthy dialogue he was asking them questions about their experience of being officers they were asking him questions as as his experience as a black man interacting with police officers and it was just this beautiful model of healthy dialogue i thought that's really cool that rather than separating separating and then becoming like angry distrustful they move towards each other proximity helps develop compassion and i just like the way he did it so i just posted online like hey i thought this was a model of healthy dialogue and i did something i never do i read the dms afterwards and just got assailed by uh several people one young man was like you are a great pastor but i am so disappointed in you these and he named one of the things the news this was not racially motivated and i'm so disappointed you know and i read this and you've had this experience ruined my day and i just walked around like why did i read that and i'm trying to move on to do something productive help you study the word of god and meanwhile i'm just like kevin [Music] and i wanted to lash out at him i was like how dare you man you don't know me and you ended your post with i'm disappointed like just trying to like yeah and then walk off and i was like and but i had learned in life when you get punched you don't punch back that's what paul told timothy don't engage in word wars because you both lose and everyone who watches that loses too so i just had to pray on it i had to sit on i had to think about it and then i did what by the grace of god i've been taught by other people i wrote back to him thank you for the encouragement brother because his first line was an encouragement and i really meant it i was like hey you said you think i'm an amazing pastor and i want to acknowledge you said that thank you for that encouragement and then i told him hey i think you need to reread what i posted i wasn't trying to make a statement about anyone's motive or intent i don't know any of that i i was trying to put out into the world a resource that models healthy dialogue because i think we need it and i sent that off and like an hour later he wrote back you're right i'm sorry he said i got caught up in the polarization of the culture today and just popped off and i apologize and i was like huh how about that a little bit of heaven in the dms who would have thought and i'm proud of me for not going off that sanctification at work and i'm proud of kevin because how many people have the maturity to do that and to admit when they did something wrong i'm proud of us and i look and say you know this way of acting i'm angry so i hold on to it stew on it pop off that is a society unraveling way to respond it's not wrong to be angry but what are you going to do with it is what you're going to do with it constructive or destructive and in this passage he says man we're not going to talk to each other this way and then verse 9 don't lie to one another seeing that you've put off the old self with this practice why not lie to each other lying is an inherently selfish act what am i doing when i'm lying to you why would i lie to you because i feel like if you had all the information it might disadvantage me in some way so i need to amend data to make myself look better and in doing that i'm denying you information for you to make an informed decision but i'm doing that because i care more about me than i do about you case in point with my children inevitably one of them will yell dad someone so hit me he hit me he just kicked me and i was like for no reason they're like i mean what was happening before that what did you do i may have punched him okay so y'all were fighting let's get let's get all the data points about what was happening here but we all tend to do that we tend to to gravitate to some facts and deny less convenient ones and all of us do that to try to manipulate each other and and that's a a selfish and a cruel thing to do it hurts people i remember when i was in high school uh i broke my femur so my football career ended early and i remember this girl uh was a reporter she came into where i was doing rehab work on my knee and she wanted to do an article on the football team that had lost three games in the last 30 seconds just brutal brutal for them because this was an awesome team and i loved him and wasn't able to participate with them so she came into this uh room with me and she was like hey i'm doing an article on the football team so what do you think about them losing all these games and i'm like man it's heartbreaking it's tragic i feel sick for them because i know how bad they want it and she was like what do you think about them just fumbling the ball and losing the game in these last 30 seconds and i'm like it's brutal it's heartbreaking i hate it for these guys and i love them and all this kind of stuff and so we did that for a few minutes and then she left and then she wrote this excoriating article about this loser football team and then she was like ben stewart says this team's brutal horrible and and just starts grabbing words i used to talk about this team and i walked down the hall and friends of mine wouldn't look me in the eye guys came up and yelled at me people were furious at me and i was like what is going on and then i read the article and i was like she took my words but she pulled out certain data put in other data to skew a message and she got the article she wanted to write but that was at the expense of me and the expense of several of my friends and at the expense of our relationships and that selfishness that led her to amend data hurt a lot of people and there's a propensity on all of us to do that to only want to read news that that fits our vision of life and not hear other people's perspectives and in doing that boy it can cause a lot of pain in the world and i gotta tell you um i don't think all media are liars or something like that i really don't i read a new york times article this week though about the findings of a professor in dartmouth that he compared thousands of news um articles on kovid this last year uh from mainstream media in the united states and international media and scientific journals and local news and he said it was fascinating he used social scientists to kind of rate languages positive and negative looked at all these different uh news outlets and he said that coveted coverage in the national media in the united states is almost 80 or 87 percent negative almost 90 of it's bad news he said what's interesting is how much of an outlier it is he said in the international media 50 percent of covet news is good 50 is bad in regional media 50 50 scientific journal 60 40. he said in us national news almost all of it is bad terrible awful terrible and uh this reporter that's reporting on this doing some soul searching he was like man in constantly telling the negative story we're we're not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality he said i realized i wasn't trying to be deceptive but but i'm not giving you a full picture of reality and he had to do some soul searching on that he said i think as a reporter you're looking for the problems in society but if all you presents the problems you're skewing society and he realized man i need to check how i treat people and teach them and i think in our culture today that's a real issue of of uh again i don't think he was sinister or anybody but but there's a propensity in all of us to stir up fear and anger and it's like we're living in monsters inc you know where it's like oh fear feeds the machine so let's keep feeding it fear and we're not stop to pause about how it's affecting the kids and we're putting so much fear and anger in the culture and we're getting it through the news and then we're lashing out on it through social media and we're creating a loop where we're not hearing each other and we're not hurting with each other we're just winging knives at each other and there's not much learning and there's not much growing there's not much community building and we need to stop and say maybe is there a better way and so anger and lashing out he says that's part of your old self with its old practices but we're meant to put on the new self the new humanity which is being renewed and the knowledge of the image of its creator i love that because you are in your identity a new creation it's done and yet you're still constitutionally a mess so you're being renewed in the image of your creator so i am made new as a child of god and yet there's this process of renewal that goes on that we're not perfect that we are brought into this new kingdom but we still carry so much of our old patterns and habits with us that god has to work on us so we have this new self and now we're meant to be renewed in knowledge i keep learning keep reading the bible keep looking at jesus that i'm transformed by the renewing of my mind that as i appear at christ i become more like him i'm renewed in knowledge in the image of my creator that he was a builder and i want to be a builder too so the way i use my mouth the way i use my body i want it to be constructive not deconstructive i wanted to be compassionate not harsh and angry and cruel that god is working on me and as he's working on me i want to be people that step into the culture with compassion and in constructive way not destructive right and then paul lands in our text i mentioned earlier in verse 11. here meaning in this new culture there's not greek and jew circumcised and uncircumcised barbarian sith and slave free but christ is all and in all here he's talking about these different categories where there was tension greek was it was kind of the model gentile the model non-jew was the greek the educated class and as as educated greeks they would look down on jews who were uneducated and then yet the jew here it says circumcised and uncircumcised the jew here had circumcision as a picture of we have a special covenant with god so they look down on the greeks you think you're smart but we know god and you don't and so greeks looked down upon jews and jews looked down upon greeks greeks looked down upon barbarians barbarian wasn't the name of a tribe it was the sophisticated greek looking down on the pagan the ethnos anyone from any other culture who didn't speak the greek language so barbarian was actually a slur because if you didn't speak greek it sounded like you were just saying and it was you're uneducated the scythian everyone looked down on they were compared to wild beasts and dogs and so here paul is looking saying hey on on ethnic lines and racial lines you're divided and there's hostility this is hey upon religious lines you're divided and there's hostility then he gets into slave and freed he's talking about economic and social status and cultural status hey you're divided and we'll get more into that in weeks ahead but it's profound that paul here says hey these classifications are unraveled in the name of jesus and yet here he's looking at all this and he says hey christ has knit together a body where there were all these cultural fault lines and he's not saying they disappear like they don't matter but he's saying our union with christ now makes our union across these lines critical that we don't divide each other in a hierarchical way that one class or one race or one ethnicity or or a certain socioeconomic bracket isn't better than the other but we are all now family we are all now brothers equal feeding equal floor equal footing at the face of the cross and yet it's interesting as he says this keep in mind he said this as people who are made new were put in this new body but being renewed in the image of our creator and what he's saying there is this is a process it's a process of learning and the bible shows us that you know jesus's inner circle we've talked about this that uh there was conflict there you had uh one that was uh zealot meaning he wanted to overthrow the government and you had one who was a tax collector meaning he worked for the government so within jewish classes they were in completely different political circles and yet jesus says in my inner 12 i want you to get along and jesus works with these guys jesus dies he's buried resurrected from the grave in power the holy spirit descends on the apostle peter do you remember and everyone thinks they're drunk because the church is partying and they're like what's going on with y'all and peter's like i'll tell you we're not drunk the holy spirit of god has landed on us because we've been reconciled with god to the finished work of jesus christ three thousand people come to faith to begin the book of acts peter's walking through the streets now leading in this massive movement of jesus he's walking into the synagogue and there's a paralyzed jewish man who's begging for some money and peter doesn't just say no sorry i don't have any money he says gold and silver i do not have but what i do i give you in the name of jesus christ rise up and walk and the guy rises up and walks and then a few chapters later a gentile man who is a soldier worked for the roman government which the jewish mind this is an oppressor of ours this man uh gets a vision of you want to really know god you need to know god's emissary and you need to send for this man to come tell you about him peter has a dream where god is laying out before him saying rise kill and eat all these different foods that used to be unclean and peter says i won't eat what's unclean and he says don't call anything unclean anymore of what i've done and then when peter rises up god tells peter i am sending you to the house of a gentile man a man who is not jewish and i want you to tell him about me and peter says something fascinating in that whole dialogue peter says no lord which again is an oxymoron if you call him lord you don't say to him no but yet here is peter filled with the holy spirit leading the church and god says bring my gospel across ethnic lines and peter says no lord i don't want to do that and god's like well you're going to do it so uh head over to cornelius's house and here peter walks into cornelius house peter who when this jewish man asked him for loose change peter's like i don't have it but what i do i give in jesus name rise he shows up at this guy's house with a direct command from god and he shows up and says you know it's unlawful for me to be here so what do you want and the guy tells him about the vision he had from god of tell me about the messiah the one who's been sent and sent to you who was in joppa which incidentally is mentioned only one other time in scripture and it's jonah who god called to go give the gospel to the ninevites and jonah didn't want to because he didn't want to cross ethnic lines because he had all this anger against the ninevites and so it's interesting how jabba plays into the story of god's like no my love breaks human boundaries i demand it for my people and so peter leaves joppa and goes to cornelia's house and says well you know what god's at work and maybe god's picture of humanity is bigger than mine and he tells this man about jesus the holy spirit falls and you see the gospel great break out of this little ethnic conclave of jews and suddenly the gospel is spreading to the gentiles then you get into acts chapter 13 and in acts 13 the gospel spread to antioch and in antioch it says in 1301 now they were in the church at antioch prophets and teachers barnabas simeon who was called niger lucius of cyrene menen possibly a lifelong friend of herod the tetrarch and saul that's a massive passage because here the entire church was located in jerusalem this jewish enclave and now the gospel is breaking out of the banks of this of this ethnic boundary and it's moving up into antioch and antioch you get this passage where you have barnabas who was a jewish man simeon who's called niger that that's uh the latin word for black or darkness probably talking about his skin lucious of cyrene sirens north africa and man and ian a lifelong friend of herod the tetrarch and saul that line would have blown people's minds because there's two herod's in the new testament there was herod the great you remember him that the romans put him in power over the jewish people he oppressed them when he heard rumblings of a messiah that might come he said well then kill every jewish baby under the age 2 in that town not popular among the christian or jewish people and when he died he divided his kingdom and one of them was to herod the tetrarch ran a fourth of his kingdom this herod if you recall uh cut the head off john the baptist to appease his wife and the hot young girl he got to dance for him not a great guy and here this guy man and ian is a lifelong friend of herod the tetrarch what that means is when you were a young prince and went off to be educated they would pick a friend and that term can be translated foster brother they would pick your little buddy and say you journey through life with him and so here man and ian the best friend through his entire life of herod the guy who cut john the baptist's head off this man in the end comes to christ and here in this text his name is next to saul saul who was a pharisee pharisees had ritual purity they couldn't stand the idea of jews working with the roman authorities and here was a guy who was best friends with herod the tetrarch and yet here you have him lucious simeon man and ian saul worshipping and praying together and in that moment they couldn't call him jews anymore that's what you used to call people who believe in jesus you just call them jews because they're all jewish and here in antioch they were like it's not jewish anymore it's it's christian they're the people of christ because jesus christ has the power to break these chains to to work through these boundaries and to be bring people together across political lines and across ethnic lines and racial lines and deep seated hostility that goes back for centuries jesus can knit them together and he does it here peter struggled when peter went to antioch he just hung out with the jews because it was easier and he separated the church you read about it in the book of galatians and when he does that it says paul stood up in front of everybody and called him out and said peter you are not acting in accordance with the gospel that's how he confronts peter what you're doing by dividing us like this across ethnic lines is inconsistent with the message of jesus because jesus bought a community that's from every tribe tongue and nation and yeah there's friction and animosity and misunderstanding but we work through it in compassion because he came to us we go to each other and he confronted peter and let me tell you something peter had to learn and yet by the end of his life peter dies ministering in rome this jewish man who didn't want to go to a gentile's house because he was a roman soldier now gives his life away to bring jesus to the romans he was made new at the beginning of acts but he was renewed over time and let me tell you there's so much more to say about this and again we got to about half of what i intended to but maybe this is god's timing not mine come on colossians you're off the rails now but the reality is the bible doesn't minimize pain at all and if i could get you to the next word then in verse 12 it says put on then as god's chosen ones holy and beloved what's going to give us the resources to love each other when you misunderstand me we remember that these titles that were jesus these are all titles that were given to him he gave to us he's the chosen one of god he's the holy one of god he's beloved of the father and he came to us and he said i choose you i'm making you holy and i love you and i love them too and so because i've done that with you put on then compassionate hearts that word hearts it's the word lower intestine it's guts compassion's co-passion passing pain suffering that in the deepest emotional part of me i hurt when you hurt i was on a call the other day after that shooting in atlanta there's there's a pastor call here in dc and i don't want to give a lot of details because it's it's a beautiful place for pastors to come and just talk about what's going on in their hearts and i love this group because it's it's so diverse ethnically if it leans anyway it's probably more black pastors but there's a mix of all of us and the pastor who leads it who's black brought us together after the shooting in atlanta and he started the meeting by saying hey one of my asian american brothers here after the death of george floyd he just called me and said i don't understand i don't know anything but i hurt with you hurt and i'm here for you and i love you he said so now after this shooting in atlanta he said i just wanted to give us a chance as pastors to to ask his brother if he would share with us and hurt where he hurts and and hear him and the asian-american pastor talked and he was like i have conflicting thoughts and i have conflicting feelings and what was so powerful for me to watch is all these black pastors are just encouraging him just say him man just say him he said i don't want to say the wrong thing they're like just say him and he just started pouring out his heart did he get all the words right probably not but these pastors just weren't intimidated by his pain didn't feel like correcting them well actually if you look at the data they weren't doing all that they're like just let's let's let's feel where each other are at because when i hurt when you hurt that we can just take the stinger out of so much of the pain we feel when the stinger comes out and the pain bleeds out and we weep together and cry together bleed together then when all that's pouring out then the next word is kindness that's compassionate action then we can link hands and say now how do we re-weave the fabric of society together now now that i've been humble and meek those are the next words that i've just stopped for a second to listen and say share with me no i don't understand someone else says i'll be humble enough to explain to you again as we don't give up on each other but forgive each other as the lord jesus christ forgive us as we stay in that then we'll weep a lot we'll cry a lot then we'll laugh a lot we'll have compassion for each other and grace for each other that's what i love the word forgiving there is not the normal word for forgiving it's built off charisma well grace we'll just keep gracing each other because he graced us when the grace of jesus that flows to us begins to flow through us then as it begins to flow through us we hear each other we understand each other we work towards solutions together we may not be able to solve every global or national problem but we can be a city on the hill we can be a house of healing we can be a place of understanding and as we do that the world gets to see truly the son of god is in your midst because this is not normal it's not normal for people to hurt with each other like this it's not normal for people to suffer together like this but if we could do it if we could live like that the power in it would be transformative john newton you know was um a pastor who had a horrific past and wrote about it in the song amazing grace amazing grace that saved a wretch like me he was talking to a young pastor one time who was watching someone in error and was just ready to excoriate this other guy and marshall all his resources to prove to that person that he's wrong and john newton wrote to this young man and we'll close with this the lord loves him speaking of his enemy and bears with him therefore you must not despise him or treat him harshly the lord bears with you likewise and expects you to show tenderness to others from a sense of the much forgiveness you need yourself in a little while you will meet in heaven and he will be dearer to you than the nearest friend you have upon earth is to you now anticipate that period in your thoughts and though you may find it necessary to oppose his errors view him personally as a kindred soul with whom you are to be happy in christ forever [Music] there's a lot of nuance we didn't touch on a lot of details but the heartbeat is their church if jesus christ could come to us while we were sinners while we were wrong while we were enemies and love us then we may get to a place where we are completely depleted confused hurt angry as a culture but we can come to the foot of the cross and find that resource of grace that supernatural compassion from christ towards us that can maybe flow through us to others i've seen it in my own life i've watched god build bridges where there were once walls and i believe he can do that in our church and i believe we can be a picture to the world of what it looks like when those who have been made new are renewed in the image of their creator

Channel: Passion City Church DC

Views: 7,486

Rating: 4.9337015 out of 5

Keywords: Passion, Passion City Church, Passion Sermons, Ben, Stuart, Washington D.C., Passion D.C., christian, sixsteps, (six), passion conference, passion, passion city church worship, passion church, passion music, worship, jesus, ben stuart, colossians, conflict, culture

Id: Hs3N19xPfQc

Length: 43min 52sec (2632 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021