We are Family | Part 1 | Angela Colyer | Gateway Christian Centre

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Gateway's Weekly Service. We are so glad that you are here. We pray that this message inspires you, it encourages you, and that God speaks to you in new ways. Now, on with the message.

SPEAKER_03 0:22

Father God, we lift you up in this place. For you are worthy. You are the Alpha and the Omega. You are the beginning and the end. You are the first and you are the last. You see, love is a choice. And two thousand years ago, he chose you. And he went through the horrors that he went through. And he suffered the way he did. Because he chose you. But we have to keep remembering that. And we have to keep choosing him. We have to keep turning our eyes, our thoughts, our focus to him. And I just want to encourage you today. We talk about seasons as Christians where we seem to sense him, where we seem to feel him, where we seem to be being strangely moved by him, drawn by him, experiencing him in the day-to-day, in the moment by moment. But those moments were not because he was turning towards you. They were because you were turning towards him. So if he is seeming distant, turn, turn, turn. And if you are feeling weary in well doing, turn, turn, turn. Because there is nowhere you can go to escape his presence, to escape his love, to escape him. But you do have to pay attention. He is as close as the mention of his name. And some of us need to do more mentioning. And that would solve everything. Hallelujah. So Father, we lift you up in this place. We exalt you. We love you. We think of you in the morning. We meditate on you on the night watches. We love you. We need you. We can't do this without you. So we make mention of you and we turn to you and we choose you. Hallelujah. You can go ahead and take your seats. Thank you, team. Thank you very much. Thank you, Martin. We thank you for your presence in this place this morning. Lord God, I just ask that you would take these next moments and that you would speak the things that we need to hear. Use my words. Use my heart to minister to us, to direct us, to help us. And Holy Spirit, I thank you that you are our helper. And if you are, if you're sensing that, I'm just gonna ask you, just lift your hand to heaven. And Father God, we give you this service. Holy Spirit, whatever it is here, you whatever it is that you are here to achieve in our hearts, in our lives, we invite you to do. Reveal to us the wisdom of heaven. That we would know the way to walk in, the decisions to make. We would hear the voice of heaven saying, This is the way, my child. Father God, I lift up those in this room right now who are weary, who are confused. I lift up the hurting and the broken. And Holy Spirit, I ask that right now that you would anoint them with the balm of Gilead. Holy Spirit, let us breathe in the breath of God, and let it bring strength to our spirit, man. Strength to our soul. Let it bring peace to the chaos in our minds in the name of Jesus. And I pray for bodies right now. I lift up the bodies that are in pain. I lift up the bodies that have disease in them right now. I lift up the bodies that may have flu, virus, bacteria, infection. And in the name of Jesus, I speak to those things. And I say, go in the name of Jesus. You behole in the name of Jesus. I speak to pain and discomfort. And I tell you to leave bodies in the name of Jesus. You are not welcome here. Our king paid a high price so that his sons and daughters, so that our king's brothers and sisters could walk whole and free. And I speak that over the people in this room. In Jesus' name. Health, wholeness, sound minds, peace, wisdom, understanding in the name of Jesus. There's someone in here, and there are some decisions before you in this next season. And I want to encourage you to remember to involve him. You are setting the course and the trajectory of your life. And these are not light decisions to be made. But if you will listen to heaven, you will know which of the voices to follow. And you will find the courage to follow the right voices. And it's going to take courage. It's going to take courage. Because you don't like to disappoint. But do not set the trajectory of your life based on some other person's opinions, desires, choices. No matter how much you love them, it will not be enough. So I am encouraging you this morning to seek the face of God to find the confirmation and the courage to make the right decision going forward. It has looked wrong for a very long time. So hold fast to your profession. Hold fast to your hope. Hold fast to the hem of his garment and do not let go. Thank you for letting us take just a moment and listen to heaven. Amen. But we're going to turn to the word now. And uh today I have the privilege actually of starting a new series, just a short one that we're going to be doing, but we want to look into church a little bit. You know, I've been doing with some of this stuff going on around the world right now, and I've been doing some deep studies. Uh that just means I've been spending lots of time, not that I'm, but um, I've been trying to dig deeply into what the New Testament Church really looked like. Really trying to understand them better, trying to understand how the New Testament Church operated, how it fit into society, how it viewed various people groups, various situations. And uh I think this is relevant in light of some of the stuff going on in the global church right now. And so as I've been looking at this, um, I couldn't help but notice, and and we've say this, I've said it all my Christian life, the church is the family of God, the church is the family of God, and it is, but I feel like in some of this study of church in the early days of the New Testament church, I've really come to understand some of the whys of why it was a family, why church is a family, what was going on. And so we're gonna take some time today, just not a lot, don't worry. But we're gonna take a little bit of time just to kind of talk about church, about church family. And then over this month, we're gonna look at some of the individuals that make up church. Married people make up church, families, moms and dads, sons and daughters make up church, single people make up church. We all are really important, essential parts of the family of God, and we're gonna look at some of this a little bit. We are made up from the very youngest to the very oldest. That's us. We're church, we're family, whether or not we like it. We are family. You never know. You may just have a weird uncle in here today. And he's your family. Bless him. You see, Jesus redefined family in Mark chapter three, when he said, I'm reading verse thirty-three here, but he answered them saying, Who is my mother or my brothers? And he looked around in the circle at those who sat about him and said, Here are my brothers, my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my mother, my sorry, my brother and my sister and my mother. I better turn this around. Apparently, I can't read. Has to be bigger. Here we go, that's a bit better. We read this and we need to understand that Jesus wasn't degrading or disparaging his family, he wasn't getting rid of his family. That wasn't what that was about. He wasn't replacing his family. What he was doing was revealing that the kingdom that he had come to bring was going to replace the religious hierarchies of that day. And it was going to do it with this flat family structure. And so, just like so many of the things that Jesus said, this was another one of his counterculture. You saw you've heard this, but I say this. That's what he was doing. And he was pointing at a religious society that had this structure that was just so Hierarchical. And he was instead saying, We're going to do it like family, guys. And the people who do the will of my father, you're my brothers and sisters. We're family. Paul talked about this family structure also in Romans 8 and verse 15, when he said to them, You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, Abba, Father. So Paul was actually grabbing onto that Roman legal concept of adoption to explain what our new status was in the kingdom of God. And we hadn't come in as slaves. That wasn't how this worked. It wasn't like society, bottom of the ladder, going to work your way up somehow. He said, this is about adoption. And you see, in the in Roman culture, like ours, but in Roman culture, when you were adopted, and this did happen sometimes, where a householder who hadn't had children would choose to adopt one of their key servants, and they would do that. Yes, maybe they loved him, but they were doing that also because they were establishing legally who their heir was going to be. And they could even choose to put, they could have sons and daughters, and still choose to bring one of their servants into this adoption, and that servant would then have the same rights, the same inheritance that the children had. And so Paul was saying to the people, we haven't been brought into God's kingdom, and into church doesn't work like you come in like a slave and come up. You have been brought in as a joint heir with Jesus. We have become legal heirs to God's promises when we became church because we became sons and daughters, we became family. Now most of us are learning to live out this vertical connection. God is my father, and I have this amazing big brother who sits beside him at the right hand, and I am just learning my identity related to them. They're so awesome. And we're not noticing something that Jesus said that was very horizontal when they came to him and said, Teach us how to pray. And the first words out of his mouth were, Our Father. They wanted to know how to pray. Most of us, when we pray, we say, God, and we're just thinking about me and him, Heavenly Father. You we're thinking about this relationship, but Jesus was getting them to think, absolutely, he's your father, and he lives in heaven, but he is our father. So you didn't just get a dad and an amazing big brother, you got all of us too. And that's good news. You're looking at me like, yeah, no, it's not. It is, aren't you glad? Even the weird uncle. You got all of us. It's awesome. Brothers and sisters in a shared faith. And church is not just a place that you attend once a week, or maybe twice if you're really spiritual, or three times if you're super spiritual. Church is a place of shared identity, it is a place where Jesus taught us, our Father who art in heaven. It's a place of relationship. Romans 12 and verse 10 says, be devoted to one another in love. It's a place of mutual support. 1 Peter 4 and verse 10 says, as each of you has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace. So the concept of the church as family is very important to us, and we've got to break free from just seeing the vertical part of it and seeing the horizontal part as well. You see, this even this very concept of church as a family was a really radical response to the structure of the Roman Empire. The Roman society revolved around the absolute legal power of the oldest male household lead. And that was what society was built around. But Jesus, when he came and taught about leadership, when he came and taught about how we were how things were going to be moving forward, he said, guys, the church is not hierarchical. The church is about the greatest being the least. That was Jesus talking about himself. But he was also speaking to his disciples and saying, if you want to be great, serve. If you want to be top of the pops, then go wash some feet. And that was Jesus saying, This is how my church is going to operate, guys. This is what it's going to look like in my kingdom. I'm going to lead by getting on a cross and taking your sins on me so that you can be free. And then you are going to follow me, and you're going to live that way too. Servants. Roman culture also strictly separated people by wealth, by citizenship, status, gender, ethnicity. But the church didn't do it that way. The church taught that you mustn't prefer the wealthy, the titled, the citizen. So the early church was very disruptive to Roman culture. They met in homes where masters and slaves sat as equals. They pooled their money to act as a social security system for the widows, the orphans, and the poor. Those were the marginalized of society. The disowned converts who had lost their biological families became, well, their faith, because of their faith, they found a replacement family in the church. The church even ensured that the poorest slaves would receive a dignified family-style burial. They were doing it so differently. They were there for one another. And when I look around today, I think that one of the greatest crises in our modern society is not our politics, although that can get irritating. It's not economic instability. It's not even the moral decline. It's the breakdown of families. It's isolation. These are the things that are destroying us. We are living in a generation that is ridiculously connected by technology, but deeply disconnected relationally. Hundreds of people have access to you. They're coming through your phone, through your computer, through your social media, but there's nobody to call on when your life is falling apart. We loudly, can I say that word again? Loudly post our opinions, our activities, our dinner, and our holidays on social media. But we quietly battle anxiety, loneliness, depression, and insecurity. And one of the saddest realities in modern church culture is that we can sit together even for years, but we can remain and still live emotionally disconnected. But this is because attendance is not the same as belonging. We are supposed to be a family. So we need to learn, we need to dig into this concept a little bit more. So I'm hoping to have two things that I'm gonna try and get across today. And the first is God has saved you and me into a family, not just a personal experience. Psalm 66, or is it 68? Psalm 68, verse 6, I believe, says that God has set the solitary into families. You see, the church is not simply a gathering of individuals with similar faith, it is a spiritual household built around covenant relationship. One of the greatest weaknesses in Western Christianity is that salvation has become extremely individualistic. We emphasize my walk, my calling, my breakthrough, my destiny. But the kingdom is deeply irrelational. The language of the New Testament is family, father, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, household, inheritance, adoption, family. All of that needs to show us that your Christianity cannot be fully lived in isolation. You know, when I, as a teenager, began to truly pursue the things of God, in case you're wondering why I'm being weird, I have this thing going on in my eye. It's hay fever, it's nothing, just super irritating, and I can't see you. I almost brought a pirate's patch. But um, where is it? I was talking about teenager. So when I was a teenager and I really began to pursue the things of God, I it was a season in my family's life where uh we had recently moved and I was nearing the end of a particular school year, so I was finishing it out in kind of a homeschool setting rather than start a new school for just a couple months. And so it was a season in my life where actually there wasn't, I didn't know a lot of people. I didn't have a lot of people in my life at that time, and I was really pursuing God, and I have got to tell you, I was getting so good at being a Christian. I mean, there were days when I would go to bed at night and it was like, I literally can't think of anything I did wrong today. Oh my gosh, I am like so amazing. But I was being so amazing. It just if my parents and my little brother had not been there, I I tell you what, I would have been perfect, utterly perfect. Just nothing would have, I would have, I would have been amazing. But then I started back to school and and then eventually, you know, I went off to Bible college a year after that, and and I would have been perfect if I didn't have roommates. And then I graduated and went to work, and I would have been perfect if there weren't people to work with. And then I got married, and I would have been perfect if I didn't have a husband. And I'll tell you what, parenting, that's like next level revealing some really harsh stuff about yourself. You see, you cannot fully practice things like forgiveness or patience or honor or humility or serving or encouraging or being generous without relationships. Your spiritual maturity is going to be revealed to you through relationships, and you can think that you have reached incredible spiritual depths when you are a silo. But relationships will expose what's really in your heart. Family reveals things, relationship pressure reveals things, commitments reveal things, ugly things about yourself. Anybody can be spiritual for two hours on a Sunday morning, but healthy relationships will expose your selfishness, offense, pride, insecurity, impatience, control, fear, and emotional immaturity. And that is why many people love to be in a crowd, but struggle with covenant relationship. It's the difference, John talks about the difference between a hotel and a home. It's easy to visit a hotel, it's much harder to build a home. In a hotel, someone's gonna serve you, they clean up after you, they meet your needs, and if you dislike the environment, you find a new one. But family's different. Family requires patience and forgiveness, commitment and sacrifice, staying connected. And many modern believers have unintentionally developed a hotel mentality when it comes to church. Do I like the worship there? Do I like the preaching there? Do they take care of my needs? But biblical family will ask different questions. How am I contributing to the health of my home? You see, maturity is not about what I've received, it's not about what I've learned, it's about what I give. Maturity is becoming responsible for others. I'll never forget when the hospital just let me take Levi home. Are you sure I should take him? Are you gonna check anything? I remember getting to the car and we put him in the in the car seat, and his head's like going flopping, and I'm trying to, it's like, where is the person who approves what I've done before I drive off? Oh my gosh. But apparently, maturity meant I had to take care of him. And yes, make sure his head stayed connected to his body because he didn't seem interested in that. Maturity is taking care of others. Ecclesiastes 4, verse 9 and 10 in the New Living says, Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person fails, the other can reach out and help. Romans 12, verse 10 says, be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor, giving preference to one another. And Galatians 6, verse 2 says, bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. You see, a healthy church family should be a place where people are known, discipled, challenged, encouraged, loved, and spiritually covered. People shouldn't disappear into the crowd unnoticed. But can I say something right now? Are you listening to what I'm saying in terms of whether your needs are being met? Or are you thinking about whether or not you are helping to meet other people's needs? Making sure other people are ministered to. Because that's family. Family doesn't work well. Family breaks down where there are members who can only see themselves and their needs. The toddler. Philippians 2 and verse 1 says, Don't merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. We stop looking for someone to do these things for us, and we look for the one or the ones that we can be there for. It's really simple. It's family. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. So am I asking today, who loved on me? Who prayed for me? Who expressed kindness towards me? Or do I leave this place wondering who did I talk to, pray for, love on, express kindness towards? Don't go to church, be the church. I've got about 10 minutes, so I'm gonna shift into part two. And I want to speak to the singles in our church family. Christian singles are one of the largest and most diverse groups in the global church today. Current demographic research indicates that around 600 million Christians worldwide are single and have never married. This represents about 24% of all Christians. The age breakdown studied by the Pew Research Center shows us that nearly forty percent of Christians between the age of 30 and 49 are single. And the ethnic minority Christians make up a disproportionately large share, with them reaching forty-five to fifty-five percent are single. Yet in the UK and in the US, married individuals are heavily overrepresented in church culture compared to the general population, and this makes singles feel like a minority whose experiences, whose needs, and whose challenges can be overlooked in church life? So, why do many single Christians quietly battle feelings of inadequacy, delay, or being left behind? Are we communicating that? Why do so many feel lonely when they're supposed to be surrounded by family called church? And here's a question I hope you know the answer to the I say it, but can you live a full, meaningful, spiritually powerful life if you remain single? We need to answer these questions, don't we? Because people will spend years searching for fulfillment in places God never designed to satisfy. Couple points here. Number one, romance is not the answer to loneliness or feelings of void. Neither is parenthood. Many people are not actually seeking romance as much as they are searching for identity, belonging, affirmation, safety, purpose, and connection. Those are genuine needs we all have. But they can especially affect someone who is single. And it doesn't help when the rest of us seem to communicate things like real life starts when you get married. You are waiting, waiting for completeness, waiting for your other half. You are somehow behind everybody else, but once you get married, you'll catch up. When you have children, you'll be a real adult. Or what about when church communicates things like, well, let the single ones do that. They have more free time. Or what about, I need to be prioritized because I have a family to take care of. Jesus, the perfect revelation of humanity, was single. Paul, the greatest apostolic voice in the early church, was single. See, here's the thing: all those needs I mentioned identity, belonging, purpose, connection, none of them can be fulfilled horizontally. Though it can seem like it for a season. But those needs are only truly fulfilled through our relationship with heaven. Second point I want to say is that no human relationship can successfully carry the weight of being your source. Only Jesus can do that. This means that marriage cannot be the ultimate definition of maturity, fulfillment, significance, or usefulness. Christ is. Healing, flourishing, purpose, meaning. People begin to realize I'm not left behind in life. I'm not alone. I belong in the family of God. I have purpose in the kingdom of God. And my prayer today is that we can begin to move towards a place where single people feel significant, where lonely people are seen, where disconnected people find belonging, and where all of us can catch a fresh revelation that the church is supposed to function like heaven's family on earth. Because the gospel is about so much more than getting people into heaven, it's about restoring people back into the family of God. Ephesians 2 in verse 19 says this. One of the subtle idolatries of our modern culture is the idolization of romance. Romance is an idol in our culture. People are discipled from childhood to believe that when I meet the right person, my life will truly begin. Everything will be perfect. Movies preach it, music preaches it, social media is reinforcing it constantly. And sadly, sometimes church culture unintentionally echoes that. People can quietly begin to feel incomplete or behind or like they're missing something, but life doesn't begin when you meet a spouse, it begins when you encounter Jesus. Marriage is beautiful, it's holy, it's ordained by God, but it's not the source of your identity. I guarantee you I would have messed up my marriage royally if I thought that my identity came from that. And I can also tell you that I've watched many people do just that. If singleness were inherently inferior, then Jesus lived in an inferior condition. And that is impossible. Jesus was the full expression of perfect humanity, and he did it single. Paul speaks positively about singleness because of the unique opportunity that it creates for devotion and focus to God. He says in 1 Corinthians 7 and verse 7, I wish that all men were even as I myself, but each one has his own gift from God. In 1 Corinthians 7 and verse 32, reading in the New Living Translation, he says, I want you to be free from the concerns of this life. An unmarried man can spend his time doing the Lord's work. See, here's the reality check. Some of the biggest, some of the loneliest people in the world are married. Because marriage does not automatically solve or heal insecurity, emptiness, trauma, habitual sin, or identity struggles. Many people enter relationships believing this person completes me. No, they don't. Jesus does. This person will heal me. No, they won't. Jesus does. They'll fix my loneliness. No, they won't do that either. But Jesus will. And that is why two deeply broken people do not find health and wholeness because they get married. The deepest human need is not romance, it's reconciliation with God. And that is why even successful people, attractive people, wealthy people, and married people can still feel profoundly empty if they don't have Christ. Because eternity was placed in the human heart. Colossians 2, I'm gonna stop now, don't worry. Colossians 2 in verse 10 says, You are complete in him. Full stop. Isaiah 54 and verse 5 says, For your Maker is your husband. You see, the church needs to know these things. We need to be a place where single people are honored, where they are spiritually significant, and where they are connected relationally. Some of the most powerful leaders, servants, prayer warriors, disciplers, and revival carriers in the kingdom will be single people fully surrendered to Jesus. And this will take me to my fifth point. True fulfillment for all of us is found in Christ and in healthy spiritual belonging. So the church should strive to be the healthiest relational environment on earth. Because when people encounter true spiritual family, loneliness begins to lose its power. Not because the church becomes perfect, but because we can then experience belonging and purpose and discipleship and encouragement and accountability and spiritual brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in Christ. We have to resist shallow Christianity that only focuses on the vertical aspect. Real family requires intentionality. You cannot build meaningful relationships if you remain hidden. You cannot receive support or be one if you resist vulnerability. And you cannot experience deep belonging if you remain permanently guarded. At some point, you're going to need to move from attending to belonging, from consuming to contributing, and from isolation to covenant connection. And that is how we become the prophetic picture to the world of what the heavenly family looks like. And it's beautiful because the gospel does not just reconcile us to God, but it reconciles us to each other. And in Christ, we are family. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come before you today. And Lord, I want to thank you for the family that you have put us in. Father, whether we come from a spiritual, godly, earthly family or not, we live and abide in a spiritual family in church. Lord, help us to see one another. Help us to honor one another, to love one another. Help us to be there for one another and not exist only for ourselves. Lord, break us open from being silos. And Lord, I just pray for those that are single in our church. And Lord God, I bless them. I thank you for who they are. I thank you for what they carry, the blessings that they are to the kingdom of God, to the lives that they touch. Father, I thank you for purposes. I thank you for destinies. I thank you for anointings. I thank you for powerful people because they get their satisfaction, their fulfillment, their true meaning from Jesus. And Lord, I pray that over all of our church family. Help us to love one another, to honor one another, and to be there for one another. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 58:40

Thank you so much for joining us for this week's message at Gateway. We were so glad to be able to share it with you. If you would like to find out more about what is going on at Gateway or when our weekly services are, you can visit our website at www.igateway.org.uk. Thank you so much for joining us.