Sermon Series Three Year Recap
I’ve now had the honor of serving as Senior Pastor at North Sub for three years. During that time, we’ve preached through about a dozen sermon series, and I think it can be helpful from time to time to look back and consider how they have all fit together.
Exiles: Flourishing on the Margins (1 Peter)
This first series was meant to set the tone for the main message I wanted to get across in the first five years: this world is not our home. We’re in this world, but not of it. We’re strangers here, aliens: elect exiles navigating how to live in a place where we’re only temporary residents longing for our True Home.
No Spectators: Body Life in the Local Church
In order to be a church that embraced the exile mindset while going after our Well-Word-World mission, we were convinced we needed to help people find “the right seats on the bus,” so to speak. Does everybody know what church is meant to be? What role they are meant to play in the mission? How the family is meant to work together? This was a “nuts and bolts” series aiming to cast a biblical vision for the next chapter of church life at North Sub.
All this work toward being exiles united on a mission to which God has called us: it could quickly be derailed by disunity within the body. So, during a contentious election season, we preached through Ephesians, showing the vision there of God’s intention to sum up or unify all things in Christ. We spoke frequently this semester about how important it was for us to display the unity that’s only possible through the Spirit.
Exiles who attempt to walk faithfully in this world will find themselves in many situations for which there is no immediately clear “script.” What does it look like to live as a disciple of Christ in this new situation, in my particular time and place? So we looked to Abraham, who in his wanderings was forced to try to navigate life faithfully in various places. And we zeroed in on our individual suburbs through the “My Suburb Project,” working together with North Sub members from our towns to pray for and reach our neighbors.
It’s possible that we think we’re living as people for whom this world is not home… while all along we remain blind to the fact that we’ve unknowingly embraced the ways of this world. Idols are so often “good things” that we make into “god things” without even realizing. So we named some common North Shore idols and challenged ourselves to subordinate these loves to our first love in Christ.
Last summer, we looked at a series of psalms written for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. As such, they fit our emphasis perfectly – since we exiles ourselves are people headed for our own heavenly Zion but who face troubles along the way.
The way of the exile is the way of Christ, who subjected himself to exile (in the form of death outside the camp) on our behalf. As such, following him requires taking up our own crosses to lay our own lives down. In this series, we emphasized the need we exiles have for discipleship along our journeys.
It seemed silly to some of us to do all this teaching and training on discipleship, the way of the exile, etc., but never to stop and take inventory: how are we doing with all this? To what degree are we living out our calling? Have we become too cozy with the world? Or have we removed ourselves from the world to an excessive degree? In this series (which included Revelation 1-5), we worked through several passages aimed to help us diagnose where we stand as individuals and as a church.
One of the hardest parts of living as exiles on the North Shore is that expressive individualism (i.e. “doing whatever’s right in my own eyes”) is part of the air we breathe. As such, it’s so easy to start feeling at home in such a world, embracing the “whatever seems right” mentality. Working through Judges was an opportunity for us to say, “Look, here’s why this path is so dangerous,” and it was also an opportunity for those of us seeking to live as exiles to challenge each other to “let unchurched folks in” on what it looks like to stop living for ourselves and to start living under the lordship of King Jesus.
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And so… here we are! As you can tell when you look back at the whole list, one theme has been pervasive throughout. From one angle and then another, we’ve been attempting to learn what it looks like to live faithfully in this in-between time, with one foot on this earth and the other foot in the heavens. How can we embrace an “exile” approach to our lives on earth?
Soon we’ll publish a preview of our Fall sermon series, but for now, we’re happy to announce that the Fall Growth Group curriculum will be an original series written by me (Tim) entitled “In the World, Not of the World.” If you’re on the fence about joining a Growth Group, I highly recommend getting in one, as these studies will provide ample opportunity to drill down into how we embrace Jesus’ prayer for us that we be “in the world” but “not of the world” (John 17). If any of these sermon series have spoken to you, the Growth Group discussions will help us put those lessons into practice.