"Cultivating Kingdom Communities - part 2" by Bryant Martin

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Okay, good morning everyone. It is 6:02, I think we'll be starting here. So if everyone would turn off their microphones, just mute yourself. Brother Bryant will be sharing this morning part two of what he started one week ago, and that is Cultivating Kingdom Communities.

Bryant is from State College, Pennsylvania, part of a group there called Followers of Jesus. And I think everybody knows Bryant, right? All right, welcome Bryant, and the time is yours. Okay, well, good morning everyone. It's good to be with you.

Glenn, I was thinking that maybe this phone call should be called the Spartan call. It's for the ones who want to get up early. Okay, sure. Yeah, especially if you got to speak. I'll have respect for anybody from here on out who's got to speak at six o'clock in the morning.

Yeah, I didn't do well preparing much ahead, and I tend to kind of prepare right before I speak. And so that means getting up early in the morning. But that's okay. I do like mornings. They are a blessing. So good morning everybody. Good to be with you this morning.

And also, I've never spoken much where I've done a part one and then a part two. I've always kind of delivered everything that I prepared at one time. And so this is kind of a new experience for me right here doing this.

So you can pray for me. All right, well, let's have prayer. Let's pray. Father, thank you. We come to you in Jesus' name this morning. We come boldly to your throne. And Father, we are just touched this morning with your mercy.

You're allowing us another day to serve you, giving us that privilege, that opportunity. So Father, we ask that you would fill us with your Holy Spirit. Father, that you use us, be pleased to use us in the work of advancing your kingdom. And Father, we have so many needs. I have so many needs in my life. So much brokenness, so many areas to grow.

And Father, I want my love for you to grow. Father, we know that you first loved us, and that love brought you to this earth on this amazing rescue mission to bring humanity back into a relationship with you and to see this kingdom inaugurated on earth, the spiritual kingdom that the prophet writer says is going to be from sea to shining sea. It's a spiritual kingdom that you're calling all people into, a multi-ethnic, one of the most diverse nations on earth, and that is your kingdom. And we celebrate that this morning. And we ask, Lord, that your kingdom would come and that your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, so just a quick overview from last week as we thought about part one of Cultivating Kingdom Communities of Faithful Practice. And so we talked about the incredible brokenness in the world and just the reality that there's so much of this around us nationally, globally, from health to intellect. There's just incredible brokenness. And the question comes to us, what is the answer for our world today? And I believe this is so important that we really grapple with this because if someone has said there are lots of Christians who are giving the right answers to their questions, but sadly, their questions are wrong.

And that can happen to us so easily. We can get everything right, but yet we've totally missed the point. We've totally missed Jesus in this, in his heart, in his way, and his kingdom on earth. And also, I talked about too how God has given us this incredible opportunity to be participants with him in his work that his son has started on earth. And I talked about this quote, one of my favorite quotes, "A vision without a task is but a dream.

A task without a vision is drudgery. But a vision and a task is the hope of the world." And I believe that through our communities, through living together, our local churches, through following the way of Jesus and continuing participating in the work that he has started, is just an incredible vision, and it's an incredible task for our world today. I also talked about kind of the three different paradigms that have come at us, especially in the Christian world. The one was maybe the constricting right, and the other one is the maybe progressive left.

And their way of working, basically, at the end of the day, their emphasis is really the same. That's often in gentile rule. And we see that happening. In this last several months, get out and vote, go vote. And of course, both sides are advocating their person, but we know that the top down is not the way of Jesus. And then I also kind of laid out a vision statement for the kingdom churches or the Anabaptist churches of today, looking back through history. And I'm just going to quote that here. And these aren't all my thoughts. These have been thoughts that have been kind of pulled together from different places. So this isn't my ingenious vision statement, but really lots of thoughts have come together over the last couple of years that I've thought about following Christ, what that looks like.

And this was the vision statement through cultivating communities of faithful practice under the role of King Jesus, engaging and serving people through personal relationship or one-on-one interaction, calling them to come and participate in this living body of disciples, our local church. And through that, thereby being a proclamation of the kingdom of God on earth. And it's through this that God will change the world. And like I said, the emphasis here, and I think so much of our lives has to do with emphasis.

Maybe the left and the right, they maybe have their places that are right. Of course, they do. But it's their emphasis that are wrong. And so our emphasis in this is it being a witness. It's living. It's word. It's action. It's presence. It's community. And it's participation by all. No spectators we talked about. Everyone has a part to play in this.

And so then we jumped into five points that we need to reject. I won't go across that. Don't have time here this morning to get into that. I'm really hoping. So part two here is talking about areas that we would need to cultivate. So five points on areas that we need to cultivate to be communities of faithful practice. And I would like to, at the end of this, open it up and allow each one, all of you, whoever feels called to share about things that I've missed, push back, whatever, and also add, yeah, add to, share things, other areas that we need to grow in or that we can embrace to really be part of this cultivating communities of faithful practice.

So my number one point this morning in this idea of cultivating is we cultivate communities of faithful practice by pursuing an obedient love-faith relationship with Jesus Christ. And that starts with me. And as we know, and with my heart, and as we know, we see Jesus coming to take that tablet of stone from the past, from the old covenant, and he wants to see his law written deep on our hearts and to change us because he knows that without a change deep in our hearts, there will be no change. And so this focus may be in some ways in this number one point is on me. And that's right. But it's not the meism that I talked about earlier that we need to reject.

But it's really, it's a repentance. It's an absolute, it's a 180 change to follow the ways of Jesus and to get lost in the vision and the mission that he has for us. It's really my repentance, my salvation is just an entrance into this much bigger plan, this much bigger house. It's a doorway into the kingdom of God and the work that he's doing in the world. And so Jesus comes to tackle, to change our motor, the center of us, so that we have that power and the ability to really be his disciples on earth. Leo Tolstoy says, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing himself." And so we see Jesus doing that.

There's lots of positive thinking mantra in our world today about change. But we know that for true change to happen, true change to happen, the only way is through that life of Christ coming and being within us and giving us that power to overcome.

There's different verses here. I think of the verse in Matthew 9, actually two verses, 12 and 13, where Jesus was there with the publicans, with Matthew, the tax collector, and with other sinners dining with them. And the Pharisees are like, "Why?" asking his disciples, "Why does your prophet do this?" And he says this, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice.

For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." And as we think about following Christ, abiding in Christ, having that obedient love-faith relationship with Jesus Christ, I think of the chapters there in John at the Lord's Supper, there before his crucifixion, powerful chapters of Jesus calling his disciples to follow him. And he says this in John 15:4, "Abide in me and I in you.

And as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me." And I would love to park here and allow older brothers like Patrick and John D. and others and Glenn to talk about abiding in Christ. What does that look like? Because I believe this is at the foundation of really being a true disciple of Christ today. And I feel like it's one of the biggest areas in my life that I need to cultivate, the disciplines of prayer and fasting, or maybe as John was talking about before at the beginning of the call here, of turning away from that overeating and putting energy into exercise, disciplines of rest, of worship, all these things that have a way of going deep into our hearts and changing us from the inside out.

There's a book that has been a real blessing to me here in this area, Stephen Bursot's book, Secrets of the Kingdom Life. I was actually just read a little bit in it this morning. Was it challenged by it?

Brother David is getting at the heart of following Christ. "Let it not be said of us," as Gandhi said, "I like your Christ. I do not like you Christians. You Christians are so unlike your Christ."

Following, being cultivating communities of faithful practice, being communities that not only embrace and not only display, but that also proclaim the kingdom of God, we need to, first of all, drink at that fountain of living water. And we need to draw others into that fountain. We need to lead them to this well of living water, this water where we're never thirst again. And I believe we have a work cut out in this area. It's easy to perform. It's easy to change outward things. But seeing the deep things of the heart changed is a difficult thing. And I think of another quote. As you know, I like quotes that we actually recently put up in our cafe.

And it goes like this: "While a thousand men are slashing at the leaves of evil, there is one that is going to the root." And we know that Jesus coming in his work goes to the central, goes to the root cause of the issues in the world. And that is the cause of the heart.

So may God give us much wisdom as we not only lay our own hearts before him, but as we guide and direct and disciple others, our children, the ones around us in this great work. And also, I think maybe just one practical point here is we need to exemplify and teach this idea that Christ is at the center, that scripture is not about just scripture, but really this word of God is all about Jesus. It's a story that leads to Jesus. And as Brother Leo has taught me, the most intimate revelation of Jesus, of God, the most intimate revelation, what this book is all about is about Jesus, or as some people might say, a Christocentric understanding of scripture.

Or another way to look at it is that scripture is the outward word, is the outward word that leads to the inner word. And that is Jesus Christ. Looking at that as Jesus is the center, this is what this is all about, and pressing into it, rejecting oversimplified thoughts like the Bible is an acronym that stands for basic instructions before leaving earth. We need to get away from those things and call people into a vibrant, beautiful understanding of scripture as a written word that leads to the end is all about the living word, and that is Jesus Christ. So may God give us much wisdom here. Okay. Let's keep moving along here.

My second point is we cultivate communities of faithful practice by prioritizing our community. And again, this is an area that I've been convicted in, and so many times fall short in. But this is where this is the rubber meeting the road.

It's easy for us to maybe in some ways focus on a relationship with Jesus Christ, that vertical relationship with God, because it's maybe more personal, more individual. But yet we see Jesus, that all this means to an end. And that is that we could enter into a much greater work, and that is local communities who are doing the incredible work of proclaiming the kingdom of God to the world. It cannot be done in isolation. It's only done in community. And as somebody has said, "Jesus didn't come and write a book, but he came and he commissions a community to go into the world." And we just see that at the end of Matthew and in Acts 1 for the ascension, Jesus is just commissioning a community to go into the world.

And so that's what this is all about. And so how do we do that? How do we prioritize the church? Well, maybe it's by just love for each other. And we see that in John there at the Lord's Supper before his crucifixion, John 13:35, "By this, all men will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another." That sounds easy, but it's so hard. And like I talked about earlier, we love talking with the early church and how they went from house to house, fellowshipping together. It's a fun notion.

It is a beautiful thought. But yet when it comes to my community and the brokenness around me and in my own life, it becomes so hard. But I believe this is an area that we need to press into with all our energies. We need to prioritize our community. John 17:22-23, "The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one as we are one." This is Jesus talking to his heavenly Father, "I and them and you and me, that they may become perfectly one. Why? So that the world may know that you sent me and love them even as you." Of course, we see that all through the New Testament scripture again and again.

The apostles just again and again repeating this important understanding, that is our love for our brothers and sister. 1 Peter 4:8, "Above all, maintain an intense love for each other, since love covers a multitude of sins." Galatians 6:10, "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are the household of faith."

So we have lots of work in this area. I know that I sure do in loving our less local body. Strength to strength is a pretty easy call to be part of. It's brothers who I don't know that well. We have a common interest as a kingdom of God. That brings a lot of unity. And it's beautiful. And I believe it's an important thing, this call is. But yet so much more important than that is prioritizing our community, our brothers and our sisters that are right around us. John Nugent says this in his book, which I talked about last week, some The Endangered Gospel. He says this, "Since loving one another is God's plan, it must be our highest priority.

No more embarrassment, no more second-guessing, no more imitating worldly strategies for making this world a better place. They have failed and it will fail. The old order is passing away. Only God's kingdom will stand. New creation is everything.

Nothing is more arrogant and self-serving than assuming that we know better than God what is best for his world. If God's strategy requires a people whose life together reflects his kingdom, then any other strategy is apostasy and any doctrine that competes with it is heresy."

And so may we understand that the way to change the world is through these communities, these local bodies of people, displaying that, embracing it and proclaiming it to the world and bringing people into that. Just some practical areas here that I like to think about is how do we do this? How do we show this community to the world around us?

It's pretty hard to do that when your community exists just within four walls of a building once or twice a week. How can we proclaim? How can we show our communities to the world around us? Here a week or two ago well, I guess it's about three weeks now. My son, Tredon, cracked his finger really badly. We were splitting firewood, and he was running the hydraulic wood splitter, and he went from splitting firewood to splitting his finger and really messed it up badly. And it was pretty ugly. And so we had to get off to the ER right away. He was in lots of pain. And our community here jumped around us. On our street here, we have a family up the street from us, and we have a brother who lives below us here in our walkout apartment, basement apartment.

And different ones jumped in to help us. And it was interesting, though, a number of our neighbors that were outside it was a beautiful evening, and they soon realized what was going on and that our son, Tredon, was hurt badly and that parents were concerned. And they got to see our community jumping in, taking care of our children, even going with us. And it was beautiful. And I was reflecting on that later. And I was thankful that we could I'm hopeful that they could see the kingdom of God at work in that situation.

So how can we get our community outside the four walls so people can see it, that they can see that we care about, that we're prioritizing the community? I have more questions than answers in this area. But I'm excited to be part of a group of brothers here who care about this and who are thinking about this, who are doing it in many, many beautiful ways. And so maybe at the end of the call here, we can talk about ways that we can show the world around us, this community of God on earth. Okay. Let's keep moving along. Number three, we cultivate communities of faithful practice by beginning to dream again.

We need to allow the way of Jesus to stoke our imagination.

And as we, I think, well, as Dean Taylor has said it so well, quoting Joel 2:28, where it talks about old men dreaming dreams, young men having visions, he said, Dean said, "The young men today are fantasizing, and the old men are cynical." And I believe that's a sad reality in so many aspects of Christianity, especially here in the West, where the old men are cynical. They've been burnt.

And young men are fantasizing. There's so many things, so much sin that is so easily accessible that appeals to our flesh. And we've been pulled away from God, from his way. And so we need to press into having this love, faith, relationship with Jesus Christ. We need to press into prioritizing our communities. We need to start dreaming again. How can we show the world this better and new way? One of the verses that just inflames my imagination and is so beautiful is Matthew 20, where Jesus said, "He said, 'You know the role of the Gentiles. Lord, it over them. And those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you.

But whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave. Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.'" If we could just take those last three phrases, "So the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many." If we could just make that our calling in life, make that press into that spirit of serving others, could you imagine what would happen in our families, in our communities, and in our world? May God help us.

And I'm thankful, so thankful to be surrounded by men who are dreaming in our own congregation here and across the churches. Patrick Matthew, Brother John D. Martin, there's just so many people, older men, who are dreaming, who are working hard. I think about how reading Finney's book, King Jesus Claims His Church, how just a number of years ago, I think 2013, it just inflamed my imagination. I was hungry to have conversations and interactions around the kingdom of God and how we could actually live this out and actually talk about it and grapple with the hard things of what this would look like.

Recently, our family read the book by Christian Aid Ministry that just came out on the Waldensians. It's called Under a Silent Sky. Powerful book, incredible book. It's historical fiction. But from what I understand, the author did a ton of research and really tied in accounts of the Waldensians. And the Waldensians were the ones who were known as the Sermon on the Mount Christians. And they quoted the Sermon on the Mount. They memorized it. They just made that their center. And it changed the world. It said that in that time, I believe it was the 1400s, that there was hardly one person in Europe who could say that they had not been in one of their services.

They just proliferated Europe. Their house churches and just their way of suffering was a powerful testimony. And many people were drawn into it. But they were men and women who, under much oppression and persecution, were dreaming about the way of Jesus and allowing that to affect their lives. So let's begin reading the Gospels over and over again. Let's memorize the Sermon on the Mount.

Matt Landis said this, "Let's be as passionate about the Sermon on the Mount as some people are about the amendments." So let's make the Sermon on the Mount our way again, bringing heaven to earth. A beautiful story in Matthew 9 just stuck in there about this lady, Tabitha or Dorcus, and how she was somebody who was full of good works and charitable deeds. And what was it? It was just simply she was a seamtress for the poor people, for the women. So mundane, so simple, but yet so powerful. And we read about today. And actually, there's only one time that the Greek word for a female disciple is used in the New Testament. And that is here in this account there in Acts 9 about Dorcus.

Only one time. And so here was a faithful disciple doing just the simple thing of using her ability to sew articles of clothing. And we'll read about today. So beautiful. I believe that she was somebody who had allowed the ways of Jesus to inflame her heart and was reaching out to her world.

There's a quote that I love by N.T. Wright. And it goes like this, "Our primary task is not so much to give answers to impossible philosophical questions as to bring signs of God's new world to birth." And I find much hope in that quote because I'm not a person who's an apologist who's able to dig into the nuances of whatever it might be.

Yeah, whatever it might be. I have an atheist friend who comes in our cafe, and he's got an argument for every interaction or engagement around scripture and God. He's got an argument for it. But that doesn't discourage me because our primary task is not giving answers to philosophical questions. But our primary task is to bring signs of God's new world to birth. And any one of us can do that. Dorcus did it here by just stewarding the gifts that God had given her. And we can do that. I can know that I can't win him in an argument, but I can win him through love and interaction.

So let's press into this to dreaming again, allowing the ways of Jesus to stoke, to inflame our imagination. One of the ways that happens for me is outside of reading the Gospels about Jesus and the New Testament, but is reading books. I find that to be really helpful. Also, there's a YouTube channel called The Bible Project. We're actually a ministry. They do a lot more than just make videos.

And they have a series called The Luke Acts series. And it's looking at the Gospel of Luke and then the Acts of the Apostles. And it's powerful. And watching that has just been really a part of helping me think about how can I be Jesus to the world around me.

It takes a transformation of your imagination to see it and embrace Jesus' upside-down kingdom. Tim Matthew says that. So let's pray that God would transform our imagination so that we can see and embrace the ways of Jesus, which is the upside-down ways, opposite of the way that my flesh would want to respond and be. Okay. Number four, we cultivate communities of faithful practice by joyfully stewarding our daily occupations for kingdom advance.

And again, we just talked about what Dorcus was doing there. And we know that we just have so much in scripture. We see the Apostle Paul and a majority of the New Testament is by him. But how did he support himself? By being up at night and so intense. We talk about a brother who worked hard. That was the Apostle Paul. And I feel sometimes that as kingdom Christians or those of us today, we just don't work very hard. We have it pretty easy.

And we need to just follow in the steps of Paul and not only be teaching and engaging and advancing God's kingdom through word and writing, but also through our occupations. And in that time, handwork was at the bottom of the rung of the society. No one of class would do manual labor. But Paul, I think, was just joyful, excited to just destroy that dichotomy. He says, "No, we can bring this together, working with our hands and teaching and advancing the kingdom of God."

So whatever that might be, whether you're a mother, a father, that part of our lives, whether a carpenter, a writer, whatever it is for you, we can use that daily work to advance God's kingdom. Our businesses should be our fishing pond. It's a place that we can daily build relationships with people. And it should really be an area that we anticipate finding and seeking out those who are seekers.

Someone has said, "You cannot answer questions that people aren't asking." You can't answer questions people aren't asking. So how do you answer questions that people aren't asking to you? You got to make yourself accessible. You have to live in front of people in places where they can come to you and ask these questions. And that's one thing that has been one of my passions for seeing us as Anabaptist folks get back into areas around people to live among people, that kind of that glass house idea where people can observe us and watch us, where they can organically get to know us. And then at that point, they can feel safe to ask those questions. And I can think of numerous of those in my life where you realize that all of a sudden, this person has asked you a deep, vulnerable question.

And now you have this amazing opportunity to answer that. And actually, to be praying for that, praying for those people that you know on your street, that you know in your occupation, praying that God will bring together situations where you can naturally have these spiritual conversations. And especially where they bring it up to you, where they ask the question, it just gives you such an opportunity to bring signs of God's new world to birth.

I think there's so many examples here of people who are doing this so well, of using occupation to be an example of or using it as a way to advance God's kingdom. Leo Eby, Eby Sawmill is a beautiful example of that. My dad, he's a trucker. He's 73 years old and still putting on 2,000 miles a week.

But his vision for that is much broader than just 2,000 miles a week. He has many people along the way that he interacts with. He just builds these relationships. And he's always anticipating that next conversation, that next interaction with this forklift driver or whatever it might be, that restaurant worker.

He's been a huge inspiration in my life for somebody who's using their work for the Gospel. Many, many, like I said, many, many other things here that we'd talk about, but we don't have time. So let's keep moving along here. Let's move into our last one that I have, the fifth one. And we cultivate communities of faithful practice by serving strangers at our tables.

And I've actually had to preach this whole message just to talk about this part. This is something that I care so deeply about, is how can we serve strangers at our table? And it's the word hospitality that we use. Of course, hospitality applies to our community. We actually see that a lot in the New Testament, even more than maybe hospitality to strangers. But it's hospitality bringing our church, those ones who are walking with us in our communities, bringing those in around our table. That's very, very important. But we do know that Jesus cares about the stranger. And so, yeah, hospitality is a word that's used for that. The Greek word is philiozino. Philio is love.

Zino is strangers. So love of strangers. Very simple description, really. The opposite of philiozino is xenophobia. I'm sure a lot of you would have heard xenophobia. That's actually a term that's swung around quite a bit today, especially. Sadly, oftentimes, this is actually thrown at the Christians in America.

So many conservative Christians sadly have been classified as those who have xenophobia. They're fearful of strangers because they're worried about what might come in. And that's really, really sad because I believe that's the opposite of the way of Jesus, of the way of the kingdom. So let's not push back. Let's reject the spirit of xenophobia. And let's embrace the spirit of philiozino, love of strangers. And we see that in the life of Jesus. We see that he reached out to people, to those around him. And through doing that, oftentimes, he was really rejecting some of the ways of culture of his Jewish contemporaries at that time. I read earlier or talked earlier about Matthew 9 there, where Jesus, his response to the Pharisees when they were questioning out his disciples why he was eating with the publicans and the sinners.

And in that account there, he calls Matthew, who wrote the Gospel of Matthew, calls him and says, "Hey, come follow me." And Matthew is this tax collector, is this somebody who is exploiting the nation of Israel. He's working for the imposters. He's working for Rome, helping them collect tax on his own people. So he is hated by the Jewish people. And Jesus says, "Come, follow me." And he goes with Matthew, and he goes to his place. And it says there he dines with Matthew and with other tax collectors, with other publicans. And it says other sinners there with them. It's a beautiful picture of Jesus reaching out to the strangers around him. Of course, in that whole interaction there and that beautiful response of God desiring mercy and sacrifice.

Mark Glanville said, "We learn from Jesus' fellowship meals that our tables should be a place of radical welcome, especially for those who are lonely and on the outside. This is the shape of the kingdom of God." And of course, in that time, that Jewish culture, having someone come and dine with you, it was just an announcement.

The reality was that you're my friend. I'm with you. You're one of us. It's maybe not quite so much today, but I do believe that there is something so deep, so meaningful when we can bring people that we hardly know into our tables.

Rosara Butterfield from the book, The Gospel Comes to the Housekeeping, we read it from that here just a little bit, says this, a quote from her, "Jesus identifies with the stranger, the outsider, the needy. Daily hospitality hones a distinctive Christian culture from within as it embraces the evangelical optimism, knowing that if God wills, strangers will become neighbors, and neighbors will become part of the family of God. Who knows? This may happen at your kitchen table tonight."

And then, of course, we have the sobering teachings of Jesus in Matthew 25 about those who did not feed the hungry, and etc. We have Luke 14:12-14 that says this, "He said to the one he also said to the one who had invited him, 'When you give a lunch or a dinner, don't invite your friends, your brothers, your relatives, or your rich neighbors because they might invite you back, and you will be repaid. On the contrary, when you host a banquet, invite those who are poor, maimed, lame, or blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.'" And how many of us care about this teaching?

How many of us have taken this seriously? And I would love if all of us could just follow the feet of Jesus and ask him, "Confess." I feel like it's an area that I need to confess that we haven't done this the best. We need to do this more. And we need to invite those people into our places that we know will invite us back. We do a lot of the we do a lot of inviting those in who will invite us back at some point. And that's okay. That's a part of community. But we need to intentionally press into pulling the people in that are on the outside. Hebrews 13, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

So may God help us in this. I'm going to read a couple of sentences from Rosara's book here.

And this is very pointed at us as Christians. So Rosaria, actually, I'm pronouncing her name wrong. Rosaria, she was a lesbian in the '90s who really forwarded the LGBTQ work, that notion, those principles. She really forwarded that and was at the front edge of that, writing a lot, writing in newspapers. And she would get a ton of hate mail back from Christians, etc., who were really pushing back against her and her work. But one day, from one article she wrote where she was really critiquing Christians, she got a letter back from a Christian pastor in that area. And he said, "Hey, Rosaria, I would love to get to know you.

My wife and I would love to have you to our place for a meal." And she was somebody who took pride in allowing other thoughts to engage her, people who had other narratives and other ways of thinking. She wanted to be open-minded, and she was proud of that. And so she felt that she had to follow through with the invitation. So she went to this pastor's place. And there, she encountered a Christianity that she had never seen before. Sadly, she just witnessed from a distance just the hate, what maybe she felt as hate, but oftentimes was hate. And so here, she was able to experience this wholesome love and interaction with this Christian couple. And she ended up coming back to that.

She kind of hit a hard time in her life. And this couple ministered to her in so many beautiful ways. And through that, she became a Christian. And today, she has a family, and she's just passionate about Christian hospitality. Anyhow, she says this in her book, "Instead of feeling sidelined by the sucker punches of post-Christianity, Christians are called to practice radically ordinary hospitality to renew their resolve in Christ.

Too many of us are sidelined by fears. We fear that people will hurt us. We fear that people will negatively influence our children. We fear that we do not even understand the language of this new world order. Least of all, it's people. We long for days gone by. Our sentimentality makes us stupid.

We need to snap ourselves out of the self-pitying revere. The best days are ahead. Jesus advances from the front line." And I know that many of us live in places that are just the bastions of this post-Christianity, I know that we do here.

And it can bring fear into our hearts. But we know that God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of love and of power and of a sound mind. May we just reach out to those who were like this Rosaria lady, who was just the epitome of an anti-Christian spirit. Reach out to those. Invite them into our home and get to know them. And earlier this year, we did that. We have a couple down the street here, a lesbian couple who have several adopted children. And we've slowly gotten to know them. We felt called to reach out to them and get to know them more. And so we invited them to our place for a meal.

And it was an experience that I won't forget. Definitely took us way outside of our comfort zone. But I believe through that, we've now had a relationship with them that we wouldn't have had before. So may God give us wisdom to know how to steward this relationship for God's kingdom and to speak truth when that is needed.

So what does this look like? How do we reach out? And I just want to quickly share a short story of a time that I got to experience this hospitality. And it really helped me to understand how I need to express hospitality to strangers. And so this story takes us to Iraq. A year ago, I was there with All Nations Bible Translation. We were assessing a work there in Iraq for a possible translation need. And one morning, the expat that we were with said, or one day he said, "I want to take you tomorrow morning on a hike way back in the mountains." And he's 70 years old, dear brother. He goes out for a little longer than a two-and-a-half-hour walk, Brother John.

This brother, on Saturday, he goes way back in on this huge hike. He's 70 years old. And I thought, "Okay. I was warned. He's going to work you right out." And he sure did. We went way back in, and we were getting back there. And this brother said, "Hey, we're going to that mountain right over there. Up in that top corner, there's an old village there, remains of a village that Saddam Hussein blew up because they were dissenters. And we're going there. There's an old spring, ancient spring on the side of the mountain where we can get water, and we'll rest there and then come back." And we're on one range. I'm looking to the next range.

And I'm seeing these little, just literally little bodies, little people walking around on this ledge right close to where he's pointing. And I said, "Do you know there's people up there?" He goes, "No." I said, "Is it often that people are there?" He goes, "No, occasionally a shepherd."

But I can see this is I don't see any flocks of sheep. I'm just seeing numerous little figures walking. And he couldn't see them. His eyesight wasn't good enough. And I began to think about a warning that one of the men, one of his team, had told me. He said, "Someday, we're fearful this brother won't come back because you get way back in there, and there's these Iranian militias that kind of peruse these mountains. And we're a little nervous about that sometimes." And I began to get fearful. And so we went on. We climbed that mountain, and we popped around the ledge. And I'm tuned because I'm really concerned, really worried about this interaction with these people.

And we pop around the corner, and there's these five or six men. They're seated on the ground around a meal. And on the right, next to this or next to them was this stone wall. And they had a gun prop there and a little fire going. And I was on edge. I had no idea what their response was going to be. And almost instantly, one of these men jumped up and walked towards us saying, "Hi, welcome, welcome. And welcome here." And all the other men jumped up, and they stepped off to the side. He was the only one who knew English. And he's like, "Come, sit down. We want to serve you." And so we came and sat down there on the ground around this meal they had spread out there of naan and goat cheese.

And they had chai, chai tea, little fire with a pot, heating their water up. I mean, it was the most epic picnic I've ever experienced. You could turn and look out across the valley, out across the plains of Iraq.

There were old ancient olive trees, ancient walls. It was the most epic experience I've ever had and a delicious meal, but incredible hospitality. We were the strangers. We were the Americans. We were the outliers. We didn't know the language. I didn't know the culture. Didn't know what to expect. But the one who knew our language stepped up, welcomed us. It was no question, with a smile. The other men jumped up. They showed us by their body language. They wanted us there. And we just had a great time smiling and doing a little bit of visiting and got to experience an amazing meal. And so I want to do that with people, with the strangers around us.

Reach out to them. Try to overcome the cultural barriers, the language barriers. Try to overcome anything that might make them fearful. Think about your environment. There's so much that can be spoken about here. We just don't have the time to get into that.

There's a little Emmaus principle, that I call it, where the Emmaus account there in Luke 24 is just beautiful of Jesus coming and walking along with this couple. And they talk together. They walk together, and they dine together. And it's just beautiful. And so figuring out what are some ways in our lives that we can walk with people, that we can talk with people, and that we can dine with people, I believe that that's going to change that has a potential of changing the world. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I believe that is so true.

Tim Keller planted a church in the bastion of materialism and of intellectual thought. And that was in Manhattan, New York. I believe it was in the '90s, early 2000s. Currently, I think it's considered a megachurch, really, now. Many people attend it. But he said this. He said, "Bring people to the place they wish Christianity was true and then tell them it's true."

And I found it amazing because you would think that in an intellectual part of the world like that in Manhattan, New York, it would actually be convincing people through apologetics, etc., that Christianity is true, and then they'll believe it. But no, he said, "You need to appeal to their emotional sense before they'll be open to the before they'll be open to the logical sense." And so I believe that through our communities, through all these ways, all these different ways that we can create this beautiful picture of heaven on earth, and through hospitality, especially, inviting strangers in, overcoming those cultural barriers, those language barriers, those worldview barriers, just inviting them to come around the table and eat with us.

And they can see life. They can see us living life and realizing that we're people together in this life, that there's an incredible potential for us to change the world in this. So also one other point on hospitality, I think as a community, not only as families do we need to be doing this and as individuals inviting strangers in and walking with them, talking with them, dining with them. But I think as church communities, we need to prioritize eating together, dining together as a church, family, and inviting people into that as well, where they can see us visiting, fellowshipping, interacting. They can see us doing that hard work of another fellowship meal, their heart. And for some people, all that commotion and chaos, if you will, it's not easy.