South Fellowship Church

Sermon on the Mount | Salt & Light | Matthew 5:13-16 | Week 2

We're in week 2 of a series we're doing on the Sermon on the Mount.  If you have your Bible, open to Matthew 5.  This is a picture of a man by the name of Michael Carroll.  Michael Carroll, at the age of 19, won $14.4 million in the lottery.  He was a garbage man at the time, just happened to play, and happened to win.  Over the next decade of his life, from 2002 to 2012, he bought mansions, he bought cars, he bought drugs, he bought a number of different things.  In the course of those ten years, he mowed through $14.4 million and found himself living on government assistance, unemployed.  Now, today, he makes $511 per week working as a butcher.  Which begs the question:  When we find ourselves in the midst of blessing, what do we do with it?  When we find ourselves "at the top," how do we use our resources?  Most people would act similarly to Michael Carroll.  If we find ourselves in the midst of flourishing, it should be used for us.  We should drink every little piece of that down and it should go to serve to make our lives better, whether it's being popular in high school, or whether it's as a nation winning a war.  When we do find ourselves at the top, we tend to think it should be used for us.  Which is exactly what Jesus begins to address in the Sermon on the Mount.  
If you were here last week, you heard these eight blessings that Jesus gives.  These eight statements of wisdom, of grace, of mercy, of invitation to live a life different than anyone had ever seen on the face of the globe.  He made these declarations---sort of crazy-sounding statements like, when you're poor in spirit (which nobody then and nobody now wants to be) you're blessed.  When you find yourself meek---sort of at the bottom of the pile, that pile is actually flipped on its head in the kingdom of God and you're blessed.  When you're persecuted, there's blessing.  Regardless of what situation you find yourself in, if you're in the kingdom, you're blessed.  Jesus's words were dangerous, because you had people who had never heard blessing before.  You had people who were used to the social structures and the political structures and the relational structures, where there's certain people that were always on the bottom.  Jesus says to those people, you're blessed.  The reverberation of that would have gone off of this mountain---this Sermon on the Mount---and gone into culture and into society at large and the question is what happens when it does?  Jesus says in Matthew 5:11-12 that one of the things that happens is you're going to be persecuted.  You want to flip the social societal structures on their head?  It's not going to go well with you so just be ready for that, Jesus says...  

Sermon on the Mount | Blessed | Matthew 5:1-12 | Week 1

We are starting a new series that we'll be in all summer, where we're going to be exploring one of the most impactful, significant, beautiful messages ever given.  It's called the Sermon on the Mount, and you can open your Bibles to Matthew 5, where you'll find it.  
Over the last few weeks, throughout our nation, we've been in a season that we affectionately refer to as graduation season.  In graduations, you have a few pieces of pageantry, right, where it signifies that a person is moving from one season to another, from high school to beyond high school, and college to beyond college.  We had a preschooler that graduated and he's moving into kindergarten, which is a pretty huge accomplishment for him.  But along with the pageantry, there's also typically a speech.  There's some words said and it's intended to be motivational, sort of Chris Farley motivational, right?  Like, you can take the world and you can wrap it around your hand and put it in your pocket. . . . .that type of a speech.  I started to wonder, "Why can't I remember any of the speeches from the graduations I've been involved in?"  They were so magical and inspirational [at the time].  I can't remember any of the ones I've been involved in...  

Ethos | Roots | 2 Peter 1:12-21 | Week 7

If you haven't been with us, let me catch you up on where we've been the last six weeks. We started by talking about our mission as a church, which is to help people live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  We started exploring these values that we want to shape us over the coming months and years that we have together.  The value of presence of God---that we'd be people who pursue the presence of God, who experience the presence of God, who soak in the presence of God.  That we would be people who believe that Jesus has come, not just to save us so that we go to heaven some day, but to heal us and lead us to wholeness TODAY.  We believe that we are a people designed, and wired into our being is that we're people of habits and practice and disciplines that would help, by God's grace, shape us to be more and live more in the way of Jesus.  We believe that God has intended us to live together as family, as a community of faith.  We have different gifts, different passions, and different backgrounds, but God has planted us together in this body of faith, that we would be more together than we would be as individuals added up together.  Last week, we talked about the invitation that God's given us to join him in the world.  He is on mission.  The end of the story is not just that you and I are saved, but that his world is renewed.  He invites us to link arms with him as HE is on mission in this world.  Finally, on this Memorial Day weekend, it just so happens (it lined up perfectly) that we're going to talk about the fact that we want to be a rooted community.
Tomorrow we'll celebrate our history and Memorial Day.  In 1868, the United States started celebrating the people that have gone before us to give the ultimate sacrifice of their very lives to lay a foundation of freedom that we now stand on and are incredibly grateful for.  Amen?  If you're a student of the Scriptures, you will, as you read through the Scriptures, come to see that God constantly reminds his people to be intentional about remembering.  He brings them out of Egypt.  They pass through the Red Sea.  He passes over them and commands them to be a people who celebrate the Passover --- Do not forget what I did in passing over you and bringing you out of Egypt. (Exodus 12)  After their wandering in the desert for forty years, they pass through the Jordan River, and as the Jordan River is held at flood stage, people go back into the middle of a dry river bed and they pick up rocks and make an Ebenezer, a memorial.  God told them that every time you pass by that stone structure, you retell that story.   Because you'll forget... 

Ethos | Renewal | Jeremiah 29:1-14 | Week 6

If you're new with us, we're in a seven-week series called "Ethos."  We're looking at the values, dreams, and hopes we have together as a community of faith, as we seek to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  This week we're talking about renewal, next week we're going to be talking about roots, the last in our series.
A few weeks back, my wife took our two boys to a mother-son event, so I got the chance to take my daughter out for a little daddy-daughter date.  We went out to dinner together and came back to the house to watch a movie of her choice.  She picked the newer "Beauty and the Beast."  We were having a great time watching it together.  About three-quarters of the way through the movie, the boys and Kelly came back home so we stopped the movie and everybody went to bed.  We stopped it at this very tension-filled moment, where the Beast had told Belle that she was allowed to go and help her father.  He released her from the captivity she was in.  So, you have Belle, who's free, then the Beast, who it seems like, is going to keep on living as the Beast for the rest of his existence.  I thought, what a terrible story that would have been if that's where the movie ended.  If the movie ended with Belle being freed and she's happy to go and do what she gets to do and back to her normal life, and the Beast is still the beast.  There's something in us that wants the Beast to be redeemed, isn't there?  There's a reason the movie doesn't end in that place...

Ethos | Family | 2 Corinthians 13:11-14 | Week 5

I want to invite you to close your eyes and to pretend the year is 200.  You live around the Mediterranean; you've decided to follow the way of Jesus.  Against the advice of most of the people in your life, you've joined this sort of rogue, rag-tag band of the Jesus way followers.  It's Sunday morning and before you go to work, you head to church.  You get your family ready, you walk through the dusty streets, and you enter into the "sanctuary," which happens to be an apartment building.  You sit around with a number of other believers.  The Way is growing so the room is jammed packed.  You open with prayer and everybody starts to pray around you.  Then you move to the greeting time.  As you stand up, you look somebody else right in the eyes; they're following the way of Jesus too.  You plant a big kiss right on their lips!  {Okay, open your eyes.}  So that's pretty much the way that it went in the early church.  Can you believe this?  We might have an easier time recruiting greeters if we bring this back!  
The early church was known for what they called the "kiss of peace."  Tertullian, one of the early church fathers, wrote that everybody in the church participated in this custom.  Cyprian, another early church father, in 250, was exiled on an island, and here's what he writes:  "There is nothing which could give me greater pleasure or more noble delight than at this moment to be kissing the lips of those who have confessed Jesus as Lord."   The dude is probably starving, right? He hasn't seen his family, and what he's longing for is to kiss another follower of Jesus.  This is strange!  This is different!...  

Ethos | Practice | Matthew 7:24-27 & Luke 6:40-42 | Week 4

We're continuing our series called "Ethos."  Ethos is a word that means the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the values of a community of people.  Over the last few weeks, we've been exploring who we are as a church, as a community of faith.  When you walked in today, you got the 'subtle' message that the reason we exist is to help people live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  {I believe it's ten feet tall on our wall.}  We want to be all about Jesus and inviting people to Jesus and calling people to walk in his way.  
If you have your Bible, open to Luke 6.  We're going to continue that journey that we're on, this morning, and try to tease out, as a community, what are the things that we hold valuable, what are the things that motivate us, what are the things that drive us, and how do we plan on living this Jesus life out together?...  

The Church God Empowers | Acts 20:17-38

Ethos | Wholeness | Mark 1:21-28 | Week 3

How many of you like scary movies?  I love scary movies; I grew up watching scary movies.  My wife and I, on date night, many, many times have gone to the theater to see a scary movie.  I don't know, it's something really interesting.  One of the most well-known scary movies of all time is a movie that came out in 1973 with a little actress named Linda Blair.  The name of the film is called "The Exorcist."  The film cost $8 million to make, but since 1973, it's made over $1.2 billion, through box office, DVDs, all those sort of things.  Isn't that interesting?  It's pretty wild and scary.  Normally, when talking about a film as an illustration, I would show you a clip from the film...   I do want you to see what this girl looked like.  She's a little possessed girl who did some crazy stuff.  I didn't want to show you an actual still [shot], so I've hand drawn a representation of what she looked like.  {Shows stick figure with Ryan's head!}  Now THAT, friends, is scary!!  
Why do scary movies hold such intrigue with us?  Why do scary movies freak us out?  I think part of the reason is, psychologically, we watch a movie like this and our brain sort of imagines....     If the writers and actors do a great job, you can get sucked into the story and start imagining that you're there.  Or you take it one step further and you start saying, "What would it be like if this really happens?"...   

Ethos | Presence | Exodus 33:7-23 | Week 2

Ethos is the series we're in.  We started last week, and we're going to be talking more about who God has created us and shaped us to be uniquely, some of our values, and our mission.  Last week, we said the reason that we're here, the reason that we gather on a Sunday morning, is to help people live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  We want to help people become apprentices, or learners, or disciples of what it looks like to live more and more in the way of Jesus of Nazareth.
Today we're moving into our very first value.  I was watching my news feed this week and there was something that kept popping up over and over and over again.  It was the hearing Congress was having with Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook.  Did anybody see the highlights of this?  A few parts of it were a little bit comical.  Congressmen and women asking Mark Zuckerberg, "Let me get this straight.  Facebook is free?"  He's like, "Yeah, absolutely free."  "100% free?"   You could almost see them going, "Oh, we've got you backed into the corner now, buddy."  He's like, "Absolutely free."  They're like, "Well, how do you make money?"  {Gotcha!}  He's like, "Well, Congressmen, we run advertisements."  Their minds were like BOOM! this is a completely new, revenue-generating model!  Right?  What they really asked Mark Zuckerberg was how much is Facebook following people?  How much do you hear?  Mark, where are you guys?  When people sign up, do you get access to them at that point in time, or are you in more places than just that?... 

Ethos | Kingdom Apprenticeship | Matthew 4:12-23 | Week 1

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be talking about what type of community "that brand new world" starts to give birth to.  What type of community it starts to form.   We're calling this series "Ethos."  Ethos is a Greek word that means values, the character of something.  It also means things that we believe and things that we dream about, things that we hope for, things that we plead with God for.  Over the next eight weeks, we're going to take a step back and go, God, who are you shaping us to become, and what are you shaping us to do, and what are the things that we hold dear, and what are the dreams that we would say, collectively together, we have about the way that you would use this little community of faith to make a massive difference in your world?  That's where we're going over the next few weeks.
I thought we would start where Jesus starts.  That's never a bad idea, right?  To ask so, Jesus, where do you start?  Jesus, what are you up to?  Jesus, how are you at work?  We're starting with a pop quiz.  What did Jesus talk about most?  If we were to read through the gospels and take a note every time Jesus talked about a theme, what would he have talked about most?  A.  Love    B.  Heaven/Hell    C.  The Kingdom of God    D.  Money    Interesting.  We have a pretty wide-swath of answers.  Let me let Jesus answer that question for us.  If you have your Bible, open to Matthew 4:12-17.  In Matthew 4, Jesus is just coming on the scene.  If you know anything about the gospel of Matthew, Matthew wants to walk us through the birth narrative---tells us how Jesus was born and focuses primarily on Joseph and the courage Joseph had to have.  Chapter 3 is Jesus's baptism.  Chapter 4 is Jesus getting led out into the desert to be tempted by the enemy.  Half way through chapter 4, Jesus comes on the scene to publicly begin teaching and ministering to people, and listen to what he says:  When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee.  Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali----to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah: "Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordon, Galilee of the Gentiles----the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned."  From that time on Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near..."