TEACHING

MAY 07, 2023
10:30 AM (family sunday + potluck + book exchange)
FIVE SHIFTS OF TRUE REVIVAL + REFORMATION
A reformation is a period of recalibration and course-correction. Any community around for as long as the church will experience inevitable drift over time. Yet the Spirit has worked again and again throughout history to draw the church back toward its center. Key moments come when particular ideas and practices are rethought and core truths are rediscovered.
Rapid cultural and technological change, clergy scandals, church divisions, and political turmoil have resulted in a period where “deconstruction” is the buzzword. Many Christians find themselves rethinking their faith, and many outside the church dismiss Christianity as having nothing true or relevant left to say to the world.
​THIS SUNDAY: Shift 3.75: A New Relationship With Power 
Not so with you! - Jesus (Matthew 20:20-28)
“The way you think and feel and act about money, sex, and power, puts your heart’s treasure on display. Either God, or something he made. (MSP, J. Piper, 20).” We ask: With everyone clamoring to get their way at the expense of others, what would it look like for the church to model a radically different and altogether beautiful kind of power, and in the process, pointing people to a radically different and altogether beautiful God?

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Teaching Notes:

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“The ancient monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were a direct response to the issues of money, sex and power. Or think of the Puritans, who answered the question with their emphasis upon industry, faithfulness, and order (5).” -Richard Foster

​“The way you think and feel and act about money, sex, and power, puts your heart’s treasure on display. Either God, or something he made. (MSP, J. Piper, 20).”

C.S. Lewis — ‘Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.’

​REVIEW

• Five Shifts of New (Ancient) Reformation
  • Shift 1: A different way of reading scripture
    • God always looks like Jesus, and all scripture is properly read through him.
• Shift 2: A bigger gospel
  • To be saved includes belonging to a community under Jesus, called to live the life of the future now.
• Shift 3: A new relationship with power
  • Evil is overcome through the power of suffering love.
  • Matthew 5:3-12

· The blessed are those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are gentle, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (= right relatedness with God and others), those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, those who are peacemakers and those who are persecuted. Every one of these attributes is antithetical to using violence against others. Matthew 5:38-42
· Jesus here revokes the Old Testament permission to retaliate in proportion to an offense. Indeed, Kingdom people are to have the opposite mindset. We are not to “resist an evil person.” The Greek word here (anthisteimi) does not imply doing nothing. It rather forbids responding in kind to an offense. When an “evil person” uses violence against us or our loved ones, we may certainly do all we can to stop them, except use violence. Refusing to use violence when it’s deemed necessary is of course contrary to common sense. Yet this is what makes following Jesus radical, distinctive, beautiful — and profoundly difficult!

• Matthew 5:43-46

· Kingdom people are to love indiscriminately — like the rain that falls from heaven. We’re thus to love our enemies and do good to them. Note Jesus says we are to do this “so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven.” The condition to being a child of God, Jesus says, is that we’re willing to love like God loves.

• Shift 4: A clarified purpose and a fresh empowerment
  • The Holy Spirit empowers us to partner with God’s work of reconciling all things.
• Shift 5: A new approach to disagreement
  • The church is defined by our shared center, not by the lines we draw.
• 14 Triads in the Sermon on the Mount [SOTM] (Handout)
  • The Sermon On The Mount is central to Jesus’ teaching and gives us practices to be Jesus-centred in our ethics and life. We must ask of any posture, position, or stance, whether it fits with (and has seriously considered) the teaching and example of Jesus on these issues, including the SOTM.
• Slave→Master→Steward 
  • Enslaved by something - it “owns” you
  • Master - you “own” it through knowledge, skill, experience, boundaries
  • Steward - everything’s a gift, but not just for you, for the flourishing of all, and its source is God.
    • Servant of all (people) slave to no desire, but to Christ alone. Only one thing we are called to be a ‘slave’ to, and He lifts us to friendship...

Today’s Journey: Not so with you! - Jesus, Matt 20:26a
Idolatry

• “The mythic power of beauty, power, money, and success is still very much alive today.”
• The greater good something is, the easier it can slip into the place of God. It’s not bad things that make good idols, but the best things in life.
• Defining an idol: “[An idol] is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give (xix)...should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a control position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in Christian ministry. When your meaning in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “co-dependency” but it is really idolatry. An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.” ...this kind of relationship is worship (xx).”

The Main Thing: Make Up Your Mind Ahead of Time!

• The first shift that needs to occur: Will you be a master over these or will you be their servant?​

Money, Sex, and Power are the main areas that love as taught and lived by Jesus redefines and makes more meaningful.

• When opportunities to act arise, it’s often too late or extremely hard to make choices you want to live with long term.
  • If you haven’t taken time before to consider where you want your choices to lead you, you’re setting yourself up for unintended consequences.

The second shift that needs to occur:

• From Servant to Master to Steward...
  • Stewards - Understand how we see and use Money, Sex, and Power - which is also about the dignity of the other. 

Take Outs

Sources: God in My Everything, Ken Shigematsu; Kingdom Ethics, Glen Stassen, David Gushee; Called to be Saints, Gordon T. Smith; Boundaries, Henry Cloud, John Townsend; Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller; Money, Sex, Power, John Piper; Redeeming Sex, Debra Hirsch, http://www.northwestbible.org/am-site/media/counterfeit-gods.pdf;  Benefit of the Doubt, Greg Boyd; Jesus Collective: 5 Shifts of a New Reformation; Others.

For Discussion and Reflection

1. Ice breaker question
2. Reread Acts 7:55-60, Matthew 20:20-28. 
             a. Initial thoughts: What pops out? What is difficult to hear?
             b. Imagine you are the villain in the passages What drew you to that side?
3. We are investing a bit more Sunday “air time” on the need to embrace self-sacrificial love (yes, being aware of boundaries but not being “bounded” in our mindset). This changes our relationship with self and others particularly around the big three topics of money, sex, and power. Power interweaves with everything.
             a. How is power good? How is it corrupted and distorting?
​4. What are the problems of concentrated power? Think about blind spots and human limitations...discuss.
5. Money is tempting to love. Why are we tempted to love money?
6. A few years ago according to the Google Foundation, a typical person needs a base of at least $20 Million [USD] dollars before they feel they can comfortably give away the equivalent of just a half-tithe (5%) out of a place of security (155). What do you think about this?
7. As regards all good things that can become idols, does this concept of moving from slave to master to steward challenge you? In what ways?
8. Reread the Tim Keller quote defining an idol. Discuss what you think and apply relevant bible passages that come to mind.
9. What are your next steps? Discuss and pray in smaller huddles of men/women.