Freedom is Family || Freedom Foundations Course Session 2 | Pastor Richy Clark

[Music] i have uh i'm friends with as we're passing this out for this session today i'm friends with many pastors in the region and it was like during 2020 a lot of the pastors believe it or were like why is the church why are people acting so insane right now and part of the questioning was are we making disciples is what we actually were asking are we really making disciples and it's possible to build churches that don't make disciples they have a lot of good programs but one of the best things we can do for you at freedom church is activate you to love somebody come on amen i want to tell you this i i'm somebody i'm just giving you some preamp preamp and we're passing this out this is our second session i'll explain it in a moment but uh sometimes if i'm even having a difficult week and and some of you that know our stories and i've been married 25 years we're going on 26 years i've got five children my oldest son is 21. he's 22 now i think yep my oldest son swearing with two he's he's special needs so he needs full care he walks and that's pretty much and he's he's got a lot going on under the hood but he needs full care and we've just had a lot of difficulty in the backdrop of our lives clean pain you call it pain we didn't pick but i've had times where i've wanted to feel very sorry for myself anybody ever just be honest have you ever wanted to feel a little self-pity and you know what i'll do when self-pity starts coming on me is i will call someone to encourage them i'll pick up the phone i'll call and i'll just encourage them or i'll look for ways to serve someone else and what's amazing is not only am i not thinking about myself in that moment which is so great but i also feel the grace of god and his love for that person like that's a that's a small example just to let you in on my world a bit of what it actually should be to follow jesus now often we think of oh harvest means i have to knock on doors and hand out tracks and i hate that that is not what we're talking about okay now god may give you a dream and say do that i guess but often we think of evangelism as well that's for the wild ones i mean that's that's that's people like pastor richie or or maybe the brooders over here you know they're ministering like that's for the evangelists but it's not for me well it's because of our parent our our cultural paradigm of church building instead of disciple making is we tend to relegate prayer to the wandas of the world and and evangelism to the brooders of the world and these are families in our church that are have clear gifts but the reality is that we're all called to minister amen we're all called in that sense to make disciples and so when we step into that it's like i'm coming alive like oh one i had to learn to pray personally i had to learn to commune with jesus personally as a new believer and then i had to learn this aspect of serving others as a means of even walking closer with jesus you know where jesus is he's in the harvest field amen so that's a little just where we're going as a church i'm going to pray over this today i do need a water i don't have my assistant here today my wife she's not my assistant but thank you tony for that water all right let's take a deep breath and we're going to dive into this i'll explain what it is who's glad to be here today if you're new too i would encourage you get to know somebody or if you're part of the church and you see somebody new get to know them people shouldn't have to pay for lunches around here we want to connect with one another so i'm going to pray over this what we're doing right now is uh four weeks and you can do this online if you're watching on the web stream and i know we've got a few hundred a week that are connecting that way but you can do this online and or you can do it in person but i'm offering the freedom foundations course which is basically an introduction to freedom church with teaching a little bit of teaching in there as a way of becoming a part of the church so last week we did session one and you can go back and watch it if you haven't got it already and to complete the session you fill out this card and you can use these space or the back or use this fancy qr code with your phone and it'll go straight to the website to the place where you can fill the same cart out with your phone and just type it in to get credit for that course you've got four courses i'm not going to do this publicly like this necessarily again there may be a neat reason also continually be working on it rewriting it as time goes on but for now i want you to get this and and do how many phil how many submitted your stuff from last week when they were here raise your hands okay we've got four members four or five church members this is we're going to have a great time together okay so if you haven't go back and do that and you can watch it it's online it's the same link here i'll put all four videos when we're done we'll edit them and you can get credit and and be recognized as a member and you can also do it and not be a member you can do it just for fun or to learn and grow because there's a lot of i think good information here amen we all lift your hands toward me and pray for me just for a moment father we just thank you for the anointing of the holy spirit i thank you for what you're doing in neighborhoods god these four lighthouses were starting this week god lord we thank you for the anointing of your spirit i ask for the anointing to highlight truth and i pray for the hunger to hear in jesus beautiful name amen amen so this is session two i'm gonna need this main camera here a lot i'll be looking at that quite a bit and then you can float around this is session two of freedom foundations and it's a four-week course that we're doing for a membership here at freedom church session one for session two freedom is family all right let's read this jesus's plan to reach the world has always been his church but what is his church is it the building is it the organization designed to meet spiritual needs of individuals and families or more if we look at the scriptures we learn that the church was never about buildings programs and organization alone but it is about the family of god can i hear an amen the bible calls the church the body of christ meaning in unity with one another and with the lord we are to be living a living embodiment of christ on the earth while buildings can certainly support the work of the kingdom it's not it's always been about the body not the building we are the church amen amen so i'll just talk for a moment on that it's this it's far more spiritual than some want to admit it's like like jesus actually prayed in john 17 that we would be one with him okay that would be one with him and the father and so this is actually the gospel the punchline is actually jesus like like he's the reward it's not the next car the next job the next whatever like those are like breadcrumbs to lead you to christ okay like he's the reward and so the goal of the gospel is us discovering and stepping into and functioning in our union with god christ reunited us to the father anybody know that isn't that cool he reunited like our spirits which were tainted or our lives which were a part of the fall and corruption he's brought us out of corruption into the bible calls the glorious liberty somebody of jesus okay so he's bringing us into relationships so this idea of the church being an organism we can't just have our our fancy uh this is what this should be and we're not we have to recognize that my union in the body begins with my union with the lord okay and so if my union with the lord if i'm it's like the more i'm living under the banner the father's love the more i behave like a spiritual family right the more i'm personally aware of god's unconditional love for me and the fact that he still loves me even in my brokenness and i'm living under that banner of acceptance and love the more capable i am to love my spiritual family and natural family amen so this idea that we're the body not the building it's a paradigm shift only because we have false paradigms in our culture but what i'm actually preaching is bible 101 okay i joke with some friends all the time it's like i keep having these epiphanies and it's like oh it's the church like that's what it's supposed to be like so we're the body not the building you're part of the organism now i had a scar this week on my arm because you all see my new injury that's my my new injury okay so i had a scar on my arm this week is healing up and my physical body took care of that scar okay i didn't actually you have to go to the doctor it wasn't that bad when one of those things didn't need extra help my body did its own thing and and healed it you know you can talk about platelets and blood clotting and all that heals scarring well the actual body of christ should function more like that than the way we look to programs okay so our culture says i'm i'm giving money for a good goods and services and i want the best youth pastor that money can buy for my kids right i want the best children's ministry that money can buy for my kids or whatever that is and that thinking is actually far more american than it is bible okay it's far more consumer mentality and so you can build churches on consumer supply and demand and the pastors and leaders have the same thing going on it's like supply and demand but are we making disciples so how does the body actually heal itself anybody i'll do a 200 people classroom own immune system so the body actually heals itself once when one of you suffers does the pastor suffer more phone calls hope not if one of you suffers the scripture says we all suffer like we should all feel that somebody's in the hospital we should all feel that not just our well we've created this hospitality team over here and when that they're supposed to call this person and then we fill out this form and then maybe you'll get a pastor if you're real lucky you'll get a good pastor and we'll send our best pastor to the hospital and he knows how to pray the last rites and all that you know wait we're going to pray for healing i'm not dying so the the scriptural response to pain in the body is the body isn't that cool that doesn't take the responsibility off of me because i have different you have to leadership has different responsibilities than we think okay there is responsibilities we'll talk about that but the body should minister to the body but how can that happen if we've set up church like we have right now we've got a platform here got some great drums piano i like the nord three i like the stage better the nord stage but you know we've got some good good drums good uh sound system we got everything facing this way got our speakers come out and guess what we've also got we've got seats set up for you to watch right and you and you watch and you get to well the sound was a little loud today or i didn't like that girl's pants they had rips on their jeans or or that wasn't my favorite song that song had too many words to it you know maybe i'll i'll send a suggestion into the church we need songs with less words because i'm slow reader you know or whatever like we've already we've already kind of am i right somebody we've already bought into something that's a little more like spectator and then presenter right and then i give my money for the presentation okay so it makes sense that i'm sick well this is where i think who's going to help we need we need a pastor over three times divorced males in their 60s that are suffering that's my title you know i have a very specific ministry you've had to have been divorced three times and be in your 60s right that's what we're doing but if we're the body not the building then then we should turn our chairs toward one another am i right like we should know one another well i visited that church four times no one ever said hi to me well it's still the wrong paradigm though it's still this thing and now we've got to like let's raise up pastors of section okay guess what michelle you're the pastor of this section here all right sherry you're the pastor of the like that's what has to happen if you if you keep building this way why not michelle you're the pastor of your condo apartments over there okay so it's the body not the building it's a paradigm shift but it's actually a return to what god called so there's purpose for us being together but just one more time for me just say we're the body not the building that that has to sink in okay has to sink in and there's a lot to what i just said but there's a bit of that so here's some things if we're the body the body share spiritual gifts with one another we each have a part share and give this shouldn't be met simply from the platform okay the body takes care of one another needs are not always to be met from the organization itself now that can happen there's an offering called alms to the poor there's there's ways that the the church together does serve the community like especially when harvey hit i don't know if you know but this church did way more than the size of the church and even i had i had pastor mike bickle from international house of prayer give this house i think 18 thousand dollars to distribute because he knew i was a person of integrity and so they took up offer people harvey was a great opportunity so it can happen oregon there can be times where the organization kicks in like that but for the most part we see it's the body taking care of each other needs are not always met from the organization so the excuse me the first responder needs to be to the body it needs to be the body the body is connected to the head jesus it's not just the minister that hears from god for the people each person needs to know god through christ intimately so in cultures like this we can create an environment that requires codependent faith and i believe there are times to be a bit codependent like when you're a baby okay when you're a baby you still need mom okay you there trust me i've had lots of them there's a whole thing but we can't create codependent churches where everything is surrounded by the teaching ministry of the pastor and and then growth is just making that pipe into more places okay that's not doesn't necessarily make disciples of jesus now there's a wholesale discipleship and there is teaching gifts and those things in themselves are not bad but again we're talking about what's the church right anybody tracking with me are you you're attracted enough for me to keep going okay this should get you excited because the nation is actually crying out for jesus like the real jesus okay the lost are actually would be ripe for the real jesus they're not necessarily ripe for the pharisaical whatever jesus thing and religious condom of all that stuff whatever you want to call it but they're ripe for jesus and so i've got to go i got to get out of that and i got to get to jesus i can't just pendulum swing i got to know him in a way that attracts the loss to him amen so that's this idea that i've got to be connected to the head jesus you know something that has no head that's called frankenstein before he was healed or that was you know what's the guy ichabod crane right okay that's the church that doesn't have personal relationship with jesus okay if your relationship with jesus was a flow diagram and it goes from you to the pastor to god you may not be saved yet okay because somebody that gets saved okay has a diagram and it goes sherry to god amen that's so so so so good and exciting for me so the role for the church and for the body is actually to equip you to have that relationship with god i'm not afraid of you having a relationship with god or hearing from god you know because our role isn't to make members necessarily it's like great disciples and so if you're in this environment for five years and you got a burning fire and you went through our ministry school and now god is saying you're to go to north africa and minister we're not like no don't go we need you here to keep running the youth group no we're here to raise you up and send you out amen it's okay to have a relationship with jesus right that's what we want so that's a little bit about the body i'll make one more point and then we'll skip a page or two and you can read this on your own our connection to the father is what makes us a spiritual family let's just read this christ's mission was always to reveal and reconcile us to the father the more we as individuals live under the banner of the father's love the more we behave and function like a healthy spiritual family amen his love for us allows us to love others wholeheartedly the same way he loves us i'm i'm still i'm only 28 years into this jesus thing okay so sometimes i run into things that like every week that i'm like i haven't thought of that before that should be true of all of us by the way anybody ever get a revelation then all of a sudden you're like i know nothing i learned something so big that now i know nothing like i've had those before well i i've i've been privileged to be a part of a lot of counseling sessions and seeing i've seen some marriages restored in the last few years and some relationships reconciled but often those reconciliations have to do with people learning to treat others the way god treats them right so it's like like one one example and this happens i've got three examples of the same one so it's not a specific person that i'm saying but i've seen this idea like a father is is is separated from his son now the father knows god and what's happened with the son is the father decided that his love for the son was conditional okay you you you don't pay me back for this or whatever we're done and they cut off the sun until the sun is ready to get their stuff back in order and then approach the father and make things right okay anybody glad god's not like that okay so often the reconciliation of relationship happens when in this example the father realized well does god do that to you does god make sure you get your act in order before you come to him no so why do we think we shouldn't we should treat others differently like if it works for you why would it work for your other relationships it's like it actually has i actually have to be connected to the father and i'm talking about unconditional love which is upside down it's not punishment driven okay anybody hear anything i just said and in all those stories i'm thinking of i think two out of three there was reconciliation but the father had to realize god loves me this way i should love others the same way so that means the more i'm living under the banner of the father's love the greater my capacity to unconditionally live because now my relationship with bob archerbeck over here isn't based on how bob treats me it's based on bob's value and because i'm valued i can value him no matter how he treats me i guess that's what that means if bob you know i'm walking in the hallway and i go to bob to give him a hug and he kind of snuffs me or he's busy i'm not offended bob how dare you not love me perfectly i deserve to be hugged i'm offended i'm leaving this church because clearly they're not like christ right no i'm not even offended because i live from love not for it amen that's the idea of living under the banner of the father's love listen offense is not just a church problem anymore in other words for pastors they're like man people just get offended and it gets swirled like that's true there's more to it but that's true offense is now everywhere have anybody heard of cancel culture okay you started it by the way if you're in the church it's your fault because we were cancelling people long before they were cancelling people because nobody was self-righteous now everybody's self-righteous right we was cancelling target way before y'all was canceling whatever next comedian like that's the truth okay it's and it's actually called self-righteousness and there's more to it obviously i mean i can't i can't go into that because this is not a conservative talk show this is the church okay which is a different kingdom altogether by the way very different it's beautiful some things fit here some things fit there but god's kingdom is beautiful but i'll tell you this we're less likely to be offended when we live under the father's love amen who wants that kind of love in their lives okay i'm trying to turn this into preaching because i might go back and teach this later but that that's the deal is is when i'm living under that banner i can love more freely it's the same even in your marriage guess what we got a marriage conference coming up what are the dates for that december do you know 10th december 10th it's a friday and saturday dane and paul hall are going to lead us in a marriage conference and i would encourage husbands you should go to okay because it's usually it's a marriage conference but i will tell you as somebody that has a little bit of experience being married 25 years that my wife doesn't meet all my needs and it's funny because in culture we say love is love right and so we think that means that and that love is love is actually a mutual exchange of goods it's like i'll love you as long as you meet my demands of love well i'll i'll love you as long as you meet my demands of love and oh we fell out of love or we stop meeting each other's demands of love right so none of that's biblical love okay it's very worldly but it's in the church as well i'll relate to you as long as you relate properly to me no i can love freely because i live under the banner of the father's love so my love is a little risky you know what i find myself doing in prayer i say things like david enlarge my capacity to love because fear keeps my heart small but faith makes my heart expand and when my heart expands suddenly there's room for more people in my life there's room for more opportunity i'm more willing to be inconvenienced by love right that's what he's called us to so we need a revelation of the father's love i spent longer on that for somebody here was that for anybody here today you can be honest thank you for the seven people i love that all right let's switch pages we're going to blaze through the rest of this you can read page six what spiritual family means in part we defer others over ourselves so this is very upside down to the world we resolve conflicts quickly i say keep short accounts you know i've had i've had as a pastor and this hasn't happened to me in years but and i'll just say as a leader i this because i've always been leading in ministry where and you might have had this experience too somebody comes to you and they confront you about something that happened two years ago that you don't even remember right that's called keeping a long account and not only keeping a long account with this person it's giving all this time for the devil to add to it now you've got this story and what happened is they took your parking spot right but two years go by and it's this massive ugly gnarled of offense i'm like what i took your spot i'm sorry you know keeping short accounts means i'm willing to have those conversations quicker and also that i'm willing to be gracious with others like love believes all things so a fearful person or someone that's not yet growing in their maturing and love will tend to think the worst about everyone in that in the sense that they think are thinking that about them for example like somebody that's walking as an orphaned heart will tend to perceive rejection everywhere they go everybody's rejecting me i can never lead a lighthouse because everybody's always rejecting me it's just my cross to bear in life is i'm going to be alone but it's a lonely robot praise god jesus is with me in my loneliness of rejection and the more i follow him the more people reject me they'll never understand me but you lord you understand me oh god but i can't love anybody but man well how's your relationship with jesus oh me and jesus are amazing well how's your relationship with his body i don't know anyone that's in the body but i'm doing great with jesus now as long as i'm not around people okay that's just called deceived okay that your personal savior doesn't mean isolated devotion like as long as i'm by myself my spiritual walk is amazing it means your spiritual walk isn't amazing okay it means you're just deceived so my my love for god is the litmus of my love for god is my love for others i only i can't say i love god more like that's the truth right great commandment love god with all your heart minds all your strength and the second is this love your neighbor as yourself okay if i if i'm only good at one i'm not really good at either like like i'm good at loving people but i can't love god i don't i don't think that's true either which is very rare to hear we resolve conflicts quickly we seek unity of the spirit this is number four we're not competitive about positions but celebrate one another i always find that weird when people compete over like the keyboard or something it's like man you're fighting over who gets to serve more no i think that's about something else right that's when my identity is coming from what i'm doing not who i am again living under the banner the father's love means i'm already accepted i'm already loved i'm already valued i don't need people to clap and celebrate me because i'm already celebrated i wake up in the morning and the angels are shouting and dancing he's awake they all celebrate that i'm this child of god i love he got redeemed yes they've been they're still celebrating so i don't need to be celebrated and fight over things i need to defer i need to hope that others go further faster than us amen we honor i guess number five we're not quick to judge one another's motives or heart but choose to let love believe all things so we see the best in others so even in leadership training like traditional leadership which isn't always the same thing as biblical leadership training because it has pretense connected to it but other reasons but in traditional leadership training there's a saying that it's good i believe that's from john maxwell he says he says put a 10 on everybody's head and treat him like a 10. in other words if you have a scale of one you're not a great person and two you're amazing and you have he says put a 10 on everyone's head talk to them treat them like a 10 and they become a tent well there's biblical ideas in there of course john maxwell was a pastor for many years i got to play worship at his church a long time ago with jim garlington in los angeles but john maxwell he actually was touching in a biblical principle so when i'm talking to my sister or brother in christ they might behave like a three but i know there are ten so i can respond to them as a ten amen when you prophesy over somebody which prophetic stuff's gotten willy-nilly in the church before too where people are prophesying out of anger or fear just the flesh basically but to prophesy out of the spirit would mean i see you know you're on if you're under the front row you're going to get your name called out probably although it's thin enough in here for me to see everybody today i might call you but if i'm prophesying over michelle and and let's say um i can discern that she's struggling with something in particular i most likely if it's public especially i'm not going to call out well you're struggling with like i'm not going to speak life to the what's bringing death to her anybody i'm not going to speak life to what's bringing death to her i'm going to speak the truth over her i just felt like the lord let's say it was insecurity i just feel like the lord is filling you with confidence and boldness and i'm speaking the ten i'm speaking the ten amen that's the way we should see one another a lot there's genuine you know a saying that i've heard recently and again i'm kind of living in a holy laboratory of what works jesus oh god but at what i've seen oh god help um i've seen in in church cultures this word we've called church hurt anybody ever been church heart okay so some church heart is literal spiritual abuse now spiritual abuse is when a pastor leader or whoever they are in authority ultimately they violate your will in some way okay so now no you or this this and they're they manipulate or violate your will i think some of it happens accidentally but some of it happens deliberately by people of fear if i'm offending people as i'm talking i just i'm sorry no i'm just kidding people are getting up and leaving i know you're not offended so there's genuine spiritual abuse but i would say a lot of what gets called church hurt is just people hurt right so if i'm a part of the the parents club over here and there's like 30 other parents and i'm building a relationship and i get offended at one of them because they didn't treat me lovingly i don't call that you know parent pta hurt okay that's just those that group of people were mean and now i'm whatever so it happens in spiritual in community a lot we call it church but often it's our love is not perfected or that our love is weak and so we weren't able to see somebody through the lens as a ten as they truly are or we made our relationship with them about our needs from them not about leading them to christ because as soon as they reject me and if i'm offended that that's that might be real and it's okay to in the right way to address but ultimately my my responsibility as a discipler is to help them come to the lord amen and so i need to be that voice of the father is this okay that i went this deep are we willing to go all in with jesus and we want this is it this is the body we're you know we look around it's people like us that turn the world upside down it's like this is i feel that some way in prayer god i'm all you got like this is what you're gonna have to work with jesus and it's me good old me you know i feel that but you get me god anyway i said take your calling very seriously yourself not as much please thank you um we don't engage oh we honor one another verse or number six verse richard clarke bible verse six we honor each other as spiritual brothers sisters children fathers and mothers in the kingdom and seven we don't engage in those things gossip slander suspicion or divisions very common but it's not just that's not just in the church that's everywhere but it's really got a demonic fire on it when it's coming against the work of the spirit all right discipleship in a family culture you can read that on your own i'll read this in bold print while there's value in wholesale discipleship and teaching the scriptures give us a clear pattern of how we're to go about making followers of jesus which is often referred to as discipleship i'll read this quote and then i'm going to skip a big section because of time if but is very important and we'll cover some of this in a much more thorough detailed way in the discipleship training if you make disciples you always get the church but if you make a church you rarely get disciples amen now keep in mind you're you're whether you signed up or not you're in a new newcomers membership class right now that is the the zone of conversation so what i just read here is if you make a church you rarely get disciples but if you make disciples you always get the church well how can you make a church and rarely get disciples anybody it's program based okay so that's that's if we do things according to the culture which is consumer based we can build up high we can have a lot of activity but it's basically rooms of people saying teach me the scriptures or whatever right teach me this and then i'll go here to learn this okay and what the guy's saying is that when the goal is make disciples which means okay i've got me and jesus i've got my three i've got my 12 that i'm pouring into and i'm going to help their lives come into connection with jesus okay i'm going to help them reunite with the father if i live that way then i'm making the church then i'm seeing the church amen that's what that means you can read this more i there's so much i pour i put i wrote jessica said this was very long because she's my editor that was i was like how was it it was long thanks baby uh hopefully you're watching at home i love you um okay this page seven big is not always better okay you can dive into that but big is not always better when the goal is relationships right so like even in our lighthouses we're going to limit them to up to 20 people we're going to try to not that we're going to be sticklers like oh no you have a revival 50 people are coming shut it down you know we're not going to necessarily do that but we recognize that more happens in smaller numbers okay and so even for congregations like this room will limit around 200 to 300 people and then we'll either plant another congregation or have a whole other service that's almost a different congregation the reason that is being is because that's how discipleship happens amen and when you make a commitment to smaller numbers you're actually making a commitment to raise up more laborers did you catch that when you commit you're like no okay we're actually going to plant a hundred lighthouses let's just say 10 people go to each one how many people is that anybody basic math okay a thousand people well they cannot i can't say i'm discipling a thousand i might be influencing or wholesale discipling maybe through some teaching or something but i don't know a thousand people okay how does that happen because we kept it low to the ground and we focus on raising up laborers i have found as soon as i as a pastor have committed to harvest the gut cry is god where's the laborers when on prayer walk in that neighborhood we showed you that video i'm like there's all these people i said i guarantee i'm just thinking out loud i guarantee so many people would receive jesus like if they really knew him and then i'm like where's the laborers like that becomes the heart cry which was jesus's heart cry he heals the woman at the well or talks to her prays for and she goes and tells everybody what he did and there's this huge crowd coming in and he says lift your eyes and see the harvest is ripe i think a lot of the church in america is distracted by the political situation by different assignments that might be for a few intercessors and that a lot of people have taken on in a way that's actually caused us to not see the harvest right and to pick up swords and fight the harvest instead of pick up a sickle and reap the harvest right so we got to be people that are willing to have our eyes see and go you know what sinner's sin broken people have broken we all need jesus let me not be offended at their brokenness when i'm the one broken as well amen somebody thank you there was a there's there's a there's a soapbox right over here and i almost got on it and i said you know what jessica's isn't here to reel me back in but i feel her here saying reel it in don't get on that soapbox uh page seven you can see the memory verse ahead of there is a great commission love for you guys to do that it's optional of course jesus is a ministry model he had personal discipleship three to hit his three james peter john and then he had his 12 okay and then there was the 70 or 72 that he sent out one point he had multitudes apparently he ministered uh the thousands those two different times or one time four thousand and five thousand that he fed so there's these ideas of discipleship and it's christ's ministry model going to make disciples uh you can go to the next page verse eight or excuse me page eight everything's a verse today um just i'll read this top paragraph and then move on because of time discipleship in the broadest sense is the work of the church to mature saints into christ followers when we say discipleship in our culture mostly we mean personal discipleship corporate discipleship is the work of the church to mature believers so we're all called to make disciples but what about church like leadership like are they what's what's the deal with the church leadership well if you if you do the biblical model which is i believe ephesians 4 it says god's given pastors right and shepherds teachers prophets apostles and evangelists okay he's talking about the offices of ministry so like occupation not just doesn't have to be full-time occupational necessarily but the office exists that person is a shepherd that person is a pastor the first time we've done that in my short six years here was when we ordained tony and debbie on july 4th and what we're saying is for the first time we have an opportunity to wait and watch the gifts among us and affirm what we see and so me as the pastor slash apostolic voice in this environment i'm asking i asked a few other pastors to be a part i let my board no i've got doug stringer carrie kirkwood and a guy named randy bollinger in kansas city and we all affirmed the gift on tony debbie's life in the office of a shepherd we said there are shepherds in this house and so how many agree they're shepherds they're clearly that's on their lives and so we just simply affirmed what already is that's very different than me putting out on jobs.com i need some shepherds well i've got a full degree set of masters in shepherding well great you're hired how much you need i need 85 000 a year and you know all perks and benefits church we need to pray because i found us a shepherd and we're going to hire them and they're going to be great how many know that's common that's building the church not disciples well disciples means you have to slow way down and go i've watched tony and debbie i'm sorry to pick on you it's just a perfect example i've watched you guys minister for six years when they weren't asked to minister i've watched them love they did a divorce care thing they loved and they were lit up by seeing lives transformed in a very powerful practical way and over time their faithfulness to the lord qualified them to be ordained as shepherds in this environment amen that's very different than i put out hey guys we're going to build a church and we've got a board of people and none of them are spiritual they're all just bored guys or women and we're going we're going to build us a church well we got to get us the best worship let's get some money you know and that's this whole other thing right and i wonder why we make it we're not making deception so our church needs the fivefold you know i represent one at one or two or three of them are all in different ways but one or two stronger than the rest which is most people okay but that's going to take time to affirm what's among you so i'm not in a hurry in that way but when it comes to true church leadership again answering this question of making disciples the the ephesians 4 that talks about church leadership it's actually about equipping the body to do ministry okay so if i'm not capable of equipping i shouldn't be in a five-fold ministry okay so it's about equipping and others running so now you're in the church and you're going oh i'm not actually just supposed to sit here and watch the show i'm here to be equipped to go love somebody well skillfully love he who in souls is wise right that's the tr i just describe the church well where's the room for the pew sitters they're not in the bible sorry pew sitters don't exist in the bible anybody and i don't think there's necessarily any pew sitters in here because this is our church and our church is the best but i'm saying that there's a purpose so you do need biblical leadership it should be five-fold based i believe and i think a healthy church has a clear five-fold expression now there might be some churches that are like a little more leaning on the prophetic or a little more leaning on teaching that can happen but over time there should be healthy expression there of the five-fold ministry and that's how you kind of litmus check what's even happening that language a lot more can be said there if you want to look at page eight i'm almost done who's still tracking i hope you want to be a part of this because i'm talking about a church that i want to be a part of okay so i'm i'm kind of you know i'm all in i'm like this sounds great i wrote this okay so you can read here examples of church-wide discipleship and what i mean is truly everything a church should be doing should be discipleship so there's different levels and places for that so like in our case prayer meetings have a form of discipleship because you're learning to talk to god and you're learning to help people pray in agreement and for me something happens when i pray the scriptures i start to think like god anybody not like i'm god but i start to think like god's heart i spent i don't know if you know seven years at the international house of prayer on their staff in kansas city and part of my commitment the first few years as a intern was to sit in the prayer room for four hours a day that might sound crazy and it did feel crazy at first until i learned to actually pray okay so i'd sit and wait on god and then i learned to lead in prayer through praying the scriptures and what i found over time is that my heart that's why you hear me talk about harvest all the time i spent so much time praying for the harvest that my heart changed right so we pray the scriptures we're being discipled in that way uh generational services public exhortation teaching and then personal discipleship a lot of this keep it low to the ground is what we're trying to do so to get involved like on a team here at the church so like a worship team or leading the youth team some way to do that i would say the fastest way to get into a real discipleship relationship is to be a part of a small group or a lighthouse and when you're part of a lighthouse you're not only serving a neighborhood together but you're growing you're building relationships where you're being mentored for a season in some capacity that needs to happen and if we're going to be a church that that wins the lost then all of us have to have this paradigm shift in ministry and i believe the lord he says this is about family he says i set the lonely in families if we're not a family he's not going to give us the lonely okay uh serving on a ministry team okay one more page or two more page nine good jessica is right this is long it's all good stuff though i'll just maybe reorganize some of it um let's look at page nine i'll kind of i'll end with this a bit so our personal life should reflect christ's model of ministry that's this idea of everything flows so number one is jesus and the father everything flows from our relationship with god and so things get out of whack when my relationship with god's out of whack and i've got you know all these spheres of influence that are suffering because i'm not walking with christ right right the opposite is true if i'm living from the overflow of my relationship with god then things become instead of feeling like duty they become delight because everything's coming from this place of intimacy so the number one way we disciple in this environment is we be what we want to see do you know more people are going to emulate who you are than what you say to them right far more than we even realize so if you have a vision for your small group or a vision for this church or your vision for worship like let's say melody had a vision for what she wants to see the worship you have to be what you want to see you can't just preach idealizations or ideologies like this is what it should be i'm over here but this is what it should be or this whole idea don't look at me look at jesus no that doesn't always work that's sometimes called a cop-out okay but i'm gonna create who i am and to me that's true accountability like my accountability isn't my accountability board they are my accountability they're like we send them quarterly here's all our finances here's everything we're doing they write back looks good let's have questions about this that's accountability but my real accountability is tony got away just kidding my real accountability my real accountability is what i just said that i'm going to create what i am in other words my accountability is you my accountability is the ministry itself and so i'm not going to be able to create anything that i'm not going after in the lord myself and i love that kind of accountability anybody else so it's the same with your family and your your communities all right more more to dive into there i talked about spiritual leadership let's let's finish because of time see i didn't make you all go to a class you got the class but how many there was a nugget in here that was for you today okay that's good that's important last page page 10 freedom is family kingdom family is diverse and gifting and callings now if if we weren't uh if we gathered around people that are just like us then i don't think you have just a healthy expression when you gather around jesus and the presence of god you end up with a diverse amount of people that have different gifts around you so for example if i if i were not gathering around the presence and just drawing to myself you might just have kind of like musician apostolic types okay that's me well that's that's not a church okay that's like an aspect of the church but we also guess what we need teachers in this house right we need evangelists we need all the gifts uh and prophetic people you know we need all this in the body and you can look that on the right those are offices on the left and gifts on the right you can read that but i'm going to read this bull point at the bottom says for biblical diversity to function honor for one another and the roles and assignments god has given us must be deep in our culture amen we must honor and recognize it you know i think one of the the most significant signs of spiritual bigotry in the church is to presume that because something is unfamiliar it's false you know what it really is is that you don't know everything well that sounds strange false teaching now you've got this little pin needle eye view of the of the kingdom and you can't call anything that's not in your pin needle not the kingdom what does the bible say we all see in part we all know in part and so if i honor and respect what wanda sees and which is why i ask her because she's standing up we're standing by each other on the throne but she has a perspective my view of god grows because i honored her perspective okay that's what that actually looks like religion has you boxed in to well it's you know i've got it it's these four or five things and nothing else it's like no i need one another's perspective because i grow that's what it means partly in diversity and that good we all see in part i can put a bunch more scriptures on here uh we'll stand up our expression we celebrate that's this morning i hope that this service becomes a ridiculous celebration like i really i hope that this service is like like i might get up and do a 20-minute sermon or one of our leaders might do a tournament but i hope this service is full of baptisms because people got saved during the week at the lighthouses i hope we got a line of 10 people saying i got healed at the lighthouse this week or someone preached the gospel i mean that's what i say celebration service this is not your two pills cnx sunday service this is an overflow service of what god did monday through saturday amen that that has that's what we're doing and so when the worship team gets up here and starts celebrating it's like man we're thanking god for his goodness to us amen we're hearing testimonies we're like it's noisy a bit because not everybody looks the right you know already we don't look right so that's fine but you know everybody looks different because they're all coming in from wherever i want to celebrate and then then connect is the middle one that's the the small groups and lighthouses we're going to open up in january a thing called salt studies so these are small groups that may not be a lighthouse or not ready to be a lighthouse but you can do a bible study in your home or you can do a bible study at work or wherever so we're going to develop that more it wouldn't be that unfamiliar but lighthouses and salt studies and then here's my ending thing and i'm going to end with this in prayer okay it's possible to say that god does nothing but through prayer like that's a statement that you could you could pretty much flesh out or open up god does nothing but through prayer so if you came into the kingdom somebody prayed you into the kingdom god stirred on somebody's heart to pray you into the kingdom anybody glad somebody prayed for you there was what the scriptures call intercession now christ is the great intercessor and if you have christ in you guess who else is an intercessor you and an intercession is we stand in the gap for those that have yet to come to christ we're we're calling for their souls it's the way i felt when we prayer walked last saturday we're calling for new stories and new families come in i'm making a call to this house that it's one thing to commit to ideas but it's another to put your knees at the altar and pray it's another to give yourself to prayer and fasting for god to break forth in power in our community and if anything we have to take prayer seriously amen we've opened up wednesday nights now it's one aspect to pray i'd encourage you to come as much as you can if even if it's once a month but i would encourage you to come as much as you can and this is just making space for god we get here at 6 30 sometimes we do 30 minutes or more of soaking time although we've discovered last wednesday that the soaking time was the same time as game time for the youth downstairs so that was discordant a bit but this called a prayer do you hear me you hear the spirit of the lord today to pray tj got up and and and quoted you know second chronicles 7 14 if my people who humble themselves it comes to that right listen we're not going to get revival when we get things right in the government things have always been corrupt in all the governments guess who's not going to be a corrupt king it's jesus [Music] we get revival i believe when we humble ourselves and pray when we become the offering when we become the sacrifice you know what the the new covenant giving they gave everything guess what that is it's it's actually romans 12 it says this is your reasonable service to to give your lives as a living sacrifice that's why i want to start praying again god let my life be a covenant to the people [Music] i'm done recoiling and self-protecting i'm done living in a spiritual poverty mindset that says if i don't hang on to it it's going to be stolen from me i want to live generously i want to live at the altar amen but it begins with humbling ourselves that's what i'm gonna ask us to do today because we don't get it they don't get it at least they don't get it through us god they get it through someone else which is god can do that but i want to say here am i send me amen that's the prayer today you didn't know you came to a mission rally that's freedom church we're going to do it we're going to go for it we're going to say yes to jesus i'm going to end this in this prayer but i want to encourage you if you're in this session you can take that and go fill these questions out the two questions are at the bottom of the material here first one says how does understanding the father's love for us personally help us become a healthier spiritual family [Music] the second question is are you currently being discipled and making disciples if so how just fill those out but get credit no wrong answer except for mickey mouse that's the wrong answer there's a spirit of prayer in the room right now amen so let's just stand up if we can for a minute [Music] and for all of you that are comfortable physically doing this i would encourage you to to come to the altar and kneel down if the lord's stirring you today there's a real call to intercession i don't want to miss that there's a call to sacrifice harvest is plentiful but the laborers review the body be in the body come on this is it's time for us to say yes to the lord in a very personal way no eye has seen no ear has heard what god has prepared for those who love him there's a call to ministry this morning called a renewal called a refreshing anyone else just willing to romans 12 1 is the calling present yourself as a living i feel my heart saying yesterday like just places that i've i don't know i just said i'm gonna keep that for myself it's like no that's that's not the right thinking i want to be your story so i'm going to pray for us up here and we're going to take a moment lord we present ourselves this morning as a living sacrifice to you to your holy spirit

Channel: Freedom Church

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Length: 57min 46sec (3466 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021