Even in the areas of brokenness like it's because of the stuff that frankly at one time I hated God for and because he didn't just show up the way I wanted him to, he didn't, I couldn't just snap my fingers and pray the right way and then poof, you know, all these issues were gone the way that I wanted them to be. I just wanted the pill, and that wasn't what God had for me. But I now look back in such humility and repentance really at the way that I was so judgmental of God and angry with him for him not showing up. He was preparing and allowing the stuff. He didn't lead me into sin, he wasn't happy with my sin, and this is part of the mystery of God. I don't understand how all of this works, but he takes our brokenness, our junk, our most shameful experiences when we're willing to give them to him and he is able to turn those around for great good in the kingdom.
[00:03:37]
We have to stop being bashful and kind of shameful about, you know, the gospel doesn't really sound like good news for the LGBT community. It is great news for the LGBT community and everyone who hears it, and we have to become confident and joyful about this message that has the power to literally change and transform lives over time in this avenue of discipleship.
[00:05:08]
Most church environments, no one is actually walking in the light with one another. Almost all of us have things, lots of sexual stuff, but other areas of our lives that no one knows anything about because we refuse to obey James 5, 16, confess your sins to one another and pray for each other that you might be healed. The Bible is full of passages like that.
[00:06:02]
At the root of all of those is relational brokenness. And so we're addressing that. We're addressing the environment of the church. And that is really the essence of what we do as we travel and minister and speak and do online training events through our website and other video programming.
[00:06:30]
When I grew up in church, discipleship was this didactic experience of sitting across from the pastor with a couple of other kids that were sort of bored out of our minds, hearing this is purely what the Bible says. This is what you have to believe. And there's a form of discipleship in that, but it wasn't life-on-life discipleship. It wasn't the shepherding of the heart discipleship that we've already mentioned a little bit.
[00:07:18]
We are convinced that the church is bound up, pastors, men and women in general, we're bound up in shame, pride, and fear. And oftentimes, those three things work together to silence us in our particular ways of coping. And sexual sin is such a powerful counterfeit for authentic intimacy. And so it becomes really addictive, and we keep going back to that kind of microwave option to get our needs met.
[00:07:42]
We have to keep that idol up or we have to choose by the power of God to tear it down and rip it down and begin to invite some other people in our lives as a band of brothers, as a band of sisters to fully know us and we get to fully know them. And in that space, and we feel like this is a missing strata in the church, this is a missing foundational piece in the church that makes the church vulnerable to all of this double living and all of this hypocrisy which Jesus blasted the Pharisees for and could blast the American church for in Matthew 23 because he loves us and there is a narrow way and a better way forward for us if we would just embrace that together.
[00:09:00]
God is the source of all things good. And so it's not that community is separate from God or that God's saying, well, I'm doing nothing for you. You pick up your cross and follow after me. I mean, the scriptures teach that. If you're going to be my disciple, you have to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow after me. But he provides the source to do all of those, or he is the source to do all of those things.
[00:14:33]
Community functions as a conduit of his grace and his mercy and his empowerment in our lives. And when we cut ourselves off from community or we fake our lives in the presence of community, they don't really know us. That eliminates that conduit through which God wants to minister to us.
[00:14:54]
Just because he ministers to us in our personal lives, it doesn't make up for this fact that we have cut out the means of grace, the one prescription God's given us for healing by out of shame or pride or fear, cutting out community from our lives.
[00:15:10]
The tragedy is, is that many churches, most churches I think are that way when it comes to really broken people. And the truth is there are plenty of really broken people in the church, but we've just faked it so long and we put up such a great image, that good fault self, that we don't even know the people sitting next to us in many ways at those deep levels.
[00:17:58]
Rather than being the country club setting where we just all come together and we all say we're fine, we're asked how we're doing on a Sunday morning, which by the way, we refer to as the Christian F word, you know, oh, we're fine. But rather, we wanna be an emergency room. We wanna be a teaching hospital. We wanna be a place that we're expecting broken people to walk in the doors on Sundays and other times, and that we have become equipped and prepared to know what to do.
[00:18:18]
Really relevant churches in our age are going to be those kinds of churches that are prepared and ready to receive hurting broken people and to walk with them through a process of becoming healed up. And then they become, by the way, it's a teaching hospital. They become the next level of doctors and nurses that are helping others because they themselves have been helped.
[00:19:04]
The Christian F word is this idea that we're saying things that are not true about ourselves. And the problem is not that we're just saying that to the greeter at the door, we can't just pour out all of our problems on that person, but rather we're not letting anyone into that space.
[00:22:45]
I've often said that I do feel like there have been times that I've had better fellowships sitting beside somebody at the bar than I have had in churches and here's what I mean by that. It's not that that fellowship is good and authentic and building me up in my new man, of course not, but it's available practically 24/7 and also there's a relate, there's a way in which in most ways you're not really putting on airs the way you do as a Christian.
[00:23:03]
Rosaria Butterfield wrote, I mean anything written by Rosaria we think is pretty amazing, but one of her books is called The Gospel Comes with a House Key and I think every believer should be reading that book because she talks about in it that she uses the phrase radical ordinary hospitality and how we are hungry for those deep connected senses of belonging and the idea of opening up our homes, of having more proximity to each other, of being available more.
[00:23:43]
When Psalm 68:6 says that God takes the lonely and puts them in family, that is what the body of Christ is supposed to be about and yet so often the church is full as singles and even as marrieds full of deeply lonely people who are pretty disconnected and that's not God's intention for community.
[00:24:14]
It's a lot easier to say no to sin, sexual sin, other kinds of sin, it's a lot easier to say no when we have a relational fullness, but when we are relationally starved, which I think most Christians are, when we are just getting the crumbs off the table rather than sitting down at the full banquet, then and really taking that in, then we are much more susceptible to temptation because we're longing for something to fill up that void.
[00:24:36]
