Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, guys, this is Naim, and you've reached the Mosaic Church Podcast. So excited that you're part of our listening community and love for you to be even more connected. So check out our website. There's more content there and there's more opportunities for you get connected in our ministries and events as well. Also, love for you to share this content. If this is blessed to you. I know that God wants to use you to bless other people with it, so share this podcast you will. Lastly, would you consider supporting this ministry? This is made possible by other people's generosity, and I'd love for you to pay it forward. Join us to reclaim the message and the movement of Jesus together. So would you consider giving to this ministry? I know that God is able to do immeasurably more through us when we come together. Thank you so much. God bless you. Enjoy.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Good morning. Good morning. So glad that you guys are with us this morning. Thank you. Lucia. I'm gonna just have you come up before every time I speak. That's like, I'm gonna assign you now every week. Well, we're glad that you guys are with us. If you've been a part of us for this series called Creating Home. Yes. You know that we've been doing name tags, and I am gonna tell you right up front that I cheated because I picked two. Okay. I have two favorite animals on my name tag here of what animals I would choose for an exotic pet. And I truly believe that if I were able to bring these two animals into my home, like, have them live in my backyard with me, maybe on my sunroom during the winter, I really think they would get along and they would be good friends if only they could leave politics out of it. You know, my two favorite animals, and this is not a joke, are an elephant and a donkey.
An elephant and a donkey. This is real life. I could not pick one favorite one. I might be able to let you know which one is disappointing me more lately. I meant as a pet. Like, I don't know. What did you guys think I meant something different by that? I don't know. Okay. I meant as an exotic animal. It's a pet, you know, obviously. But we're glad that you guys are here and have been having a little bit of fun with us during the series. This is the last week, and we are gonna talk today about what it looks like to create a spiritual home. You all probably have ideas, right, of what a spiritual home looks like and what it entails, and often it starts with shared values. We probably Understand and agree that we have to have shared value as a starting place. And it is a very super important part. But you probably also know the difference between someone who will tell you what they believe and say they have a value of something versus seeing it actually lived out in their life. Sometimes those don't always align. And if we aren't intentional about creating the kind of home that we want, some kind of culture is going to be created. But it may not be the one that we hoped for or the one that we envisioned. And that might be where some of you are right now. You maybe have gotten to a place where you look around and you're like, this is not exactly what I wanted to create. Maybe the people in your home are not speaking to each other in a way that you would hope that you modeled for them to do. So maybe people are reactive instead of responsive, and the energy and the vibe and the feeling of your home is just not what you want it to be.
I think the real danger there is that our sense of home can be so connected to our sense of identity. And so if we get to that place where we look around and we're like, we don't like what we've got going on, that it will start to transform or align over into us also not liking our lives. And that can be a very uncomfortable and even scary place to live. So today we're gonna try to learn from another group of people who also were creating spiritual homes, people who intentionally said, I don't wanna live like this any, and then works to figure out a way to create something different.
So we're actually gonna be in the Book of Acts today. And you can follow along with the scriptures in the Mosaic app, like Lucia told you. But I wanna give you just a tiny bit of context here on the Book of Acts. So the Book of Acts comes in the Bible right after the Gospel of Luke. And many scholars agree that the person who wrote the Gospel of Luke also wrote Acts, and that these two books of the Bible were kind of intended to be one. They were never necessarily to be intended as two separate things. So if you think about it this way, like, if you were going to the movies, right, and you went to the movie and you watched the Gospel of Luke, that was the first movie that you saw. Then the next one, the Book of Acts, would be like the sequel. It would be like Luke 2, the spirit awakens. Okay, so that's where we're at today. We have the Gospel of Luke. We go into Acts, because this is where we're gonna see the resurrected Jesus who has been dead and buried and come back to life. He's hanging out with his disciples for about 40 days, and then he goes, all right, this time I gotta go for real. Like, I. For real. I'm gonna leave. I'm not coming back now for a long time. And so we're gonna pick it up with one of the very last things that he says to his followers. Read this first line with me together. He says, you will receive power. You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. Then you will tell people about me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria, and you will even tell other people about me from one end of the earth to the other. So Jesus commissions them with this really big job. He's like, I want you to go and tell the whole entire world what I've taught you. I want you to go and tell people what I have. Let you know was important. And then create new environments to live in based off of these values. And Jesus knew that shifting culture and creating a spiritual home was not going to be easy. So what he did was he promised to send his spirit to live within them so that they. This would be the thing that would enable them to not just talk about what it would look like to create a different kind of home, but to actually live it out. And this was a big deal because until this point, God's spirit had only lived in temples. God's spirit was only accessible in certain places at certain times to certain people. But now Jesus is saying, oh, no, no, no, no, no. You are going to be the new temple. You are going to be the home that I'm going to live in now. You are going to be the place that I am going to move in and move through as you tell people about me. And so it goes on to show us how they did it. In Acts 2:42, it says all of the believers devoted themselves to four things. To the apostles, teaching to. What's the second one?
Fellowship to sharing in meals, which is really about the Lord's Supper. And what's the last one? To prayer. To prayer. So they started with this list of the things that were most important to them and what it would look like to live those values out. And so we're gonna go through this list and kind of break down what exactly the values underlying these four things were. But as we go through, I want you to think, is this on my list? If I was to create a list of values? If you were to create a list of Values. Would these things be on your list? Because you get to decide what matters to you when you are creating your own spiritual home. But we're gonna use these examples as a way to kind of evaluate, is this a value in my life? And if so, is it apparent in how I live? So the first one that we see is the teaching of the apostles. Now, the disciples were people who had learned from Jesus. But the disciples, the students, have now become the teachers. They are the ones now going out to teach everyone out in the world. And sometimes I wonder. I like to pretend that I'm like, back in Jesus day. I blame the chosen for this cause. Now I just, like, live with Peter and all of them, you know? But sometimes I wonder if the disciples were ever with Jesus and they heard him repeat something, what they did or what they were thinking. Like, did the disciples ever go, oh, my gosh, this one again. Well, I guess we've heard it all. We've learned everything that he has had to say, because we've heard these before. So let's go. It's time for us to go on now. We've got it all figured out. We're gonna go do our own thing. We're gonna go start our churches. Jesus, we're gonna go tell everybody everything that you said. I can imagine Jesus would be like, could you not please, after hearing it only this one time? See, I think it sounds silly for us to picture the disciples doing that, but this is exactly what some of us do when we look at our Bibles.
We have accidentally made reading a scripture a to do list and a thing to accomplish. So we read a book in the Bible and then we flip to the back of it and we check it off and we're like, done, Never reading lamentations ever again.
Listen, there are some that I do not go to as often as others, but we've accidentally taken scripture to become a task. We've taken scripture to go, okay, I've done this thing. And what happens when we do that is that we miss that. The value is actually in learning.
It's not in saying, oh, I've read this so I can check it off. I've heard this before. And learning can only happen when we consistently go back to. To the words of Jesus again and again and again.
And there are a lot of people out there who want to tell you what Jesus said and what those words actually mean. Some of them are very close. They just missed the mark. Some of them are so twisted that the original meaning of Jesus is absolutely absent unless you Go back to the scriptures yourself and figure out what it was that he was saying. I encourage you this week to read, you know, Acts Part 1, also called the Gospel of Luke. And as you're reading through, take notes and study and look for patterns. Do you see Jesus protecting the rich, or do you see him providing for the poor? Do you see him condemning people, or do you see him forgiving them and showing them a new and different way to live? Do you see him upholding cultural and political laws, or do you see him challenging them to bring justice to the oppressed? When he casts out groups of people, is it the marginalized or is it the groups of people who refuse to see what it is that he's actually trying to say?
See, if we have a value of being people who revolve our lives around the teachings of Jesus and we want to grow to be more like Jesus, then we have to ask, what are we doing to bring those teachings into our spiritual home so that we can learn from them?
The second thing that they have here is fellowship. And this is a Christianese word sometimes that people just mean for, like, hanging out or doing life together. If you're from the Midwest, any Midwesterners, yes. Fellowship meant what, Guess what? Potluck. Somebody's bringing that jello salad, and you gotta figure out what kind of like, weird canned fruit is in it this week. That's what fellowship means to me. I'm always in a basketball gym.
But fellowship really, it really means more than that, right? It's more than just relationship. That's a big part of it. But we can find relationship in other places. You likely have relationships at the gym or at work or in your neighborhoods. But the value of fellowship specifically is walking with other people who are also walking with Jesus. And that is not something that you can find just anywhere.
See, the early Christians were facing persecution and pushback because while there were many people who wanted to join in and walk with Jesus, there were many other people who didn't and actually wanted this movement to stop.
And I obviously wasn't there. But my guess is that on hard days, the only way that they got through it was together was by relying on each other because they knew that they could trust these other people who were also walking with Jesus and trying to do the same things.
And this kind of community is so hard to have. It is very hard to have to find the right people and then to work to maintain those relationships through differences and disagreements. And as people change, sometimes it's just hard to get up off of your couch and put on hard pants and come into this room where those people actually are. Can I get an amen? Okay, I know, I know, but you're here right now because you know that what you experience in this room can only be experienced in this room. When we're together, I love the option of having our livestream campus. I love that we have people tuning in from different states and different countries, and I love that they get to be part of our community because we have this service.
But I also wonder if there are some of you who live in driving distance that being in the room just might be the thing that you're missing. It just might be that reason that you don't feel like you have a connection to other people who are walking with Jesus as you are trying to do the same thing.
It's only when we come together that we get to not only create these spiritual homes, but we actually get to experience them for ourselves.
If we find ourselves in a hopeless situation, it's here among other people where we can find the grace of Jesus that someone can offer us. When you find yourself in despair, it's people here who can remind you of what's true. When you feel so angry that you cannot find hope, there are people here that will let you borrow theirs.
I got to see one of the most beautiful examples of that. This week on Thursday night, we hosted something called our Night of Hope. Because you probably are aware that there are a lot of things going on in the United States right now with this changing of government. There are changes taking place. There are policies that are being revoked. There are other policies that are being put in place. And it is affecting people in very different ways. And so our heart in creating this Night of Hope on Thursday was to have a space where we could pastor our incredibly diverse church. And so we did exactly that. We came together and we shared a meal. And people from different ethnicities, but also different ages and backgrounds and political parties and perspectives came together. And they were able to process and speak honestly and learn from each other. They were able to have their eyes opened to the lived experience of someone else who is affected in a way that they might not be.
And what we heard over and over from this very diverse group of people that it was only in this room, it was only at this church, it was only with this group of people that they felt like they were safe enough to come and say the things that they've had to keep in and keep down around all of their families and friends. Otherwise, it was only in this space that they felt like there were people here who would encourage them that it is okay to walk with Jesus and also be a little bit messy.
I don't think we gave them any answers definitively by the end of the night, but I do know that we modeled what it looks like to walk with Jesus together, and we left them with a little bit of hope. If you have a value of being shaped by other people who are walking with Jesus, how often are you spending time with those people? You might need to commit to adjusting your schedule, to showing up here and being here a little bit more consistently. Even when it's cold or raining or you're tired, or it's more convenient to watch online or the Charlotte FC game is back starting at the exact same time as your service, hypothetically, so I'm told.
We would love to have you here in the room. This room is filled with very human, kinda messy people who walk so closely with Jesus. And I know that they would love nothing more than to invite you in and not just tolerate the complexity of your humanity and your thoughts and your emotions and your confusion and all of the things, but to be in it with you and walk together.
The third thing that we see is the breaking of bread, which is a symbol of communion. And for early Christians, they knew that everything that they were doing was possible because of Jesus sacrifice. One of the last things that we see him tell them was that they were to take communion to remember. I actually love how Paul talked to one of his churches in Corinth about why this matters. He said, when we ask the Lord's blessing upon our drinking from the cup of wine at the Lord's table, this mean, doesn't it, that all who drink it are sharing together the blessing of Christ's blood.
And when we break off pieces of the bread from the loaf to eat together, this shows that we are sharing together in the benefits of his body.
No matter how many of us there are, we all eat from the same loaf, showing that we are all parts of the what, the one body of Christ. Yes, when they took communion, they were remembering all of the things that Jesus sacrifice represents, but they were also reminded of who they were, this one unified body of Christ. It signified that their identity was no longer in their nationalities or the towns that they came from, or even the religion of their ancestors, but that they were called to put all of their differences and old religious beliefs aside, to come together and share in this new life. They valued unity of all believers as one.
At Mosaic, we have communion here on either side of the room. I actually call these instamunions.
You can, like, put it in your pocket if you want. I guess take it home if you need to. But we have these available for you every single week with open communion tables. You are welcome to go take communion at any point during service as you feel led. But I hope that the next time you grab one of these, that it changes the way you see this, that the next time you take communion, yes, you will remember all of the things that Jesus did for you and sacrificed for you to bring you in to this family. But I also hope it will help you remember that not only do you belong to Jesus, but we belong to each other. We belong to each other. It's why Jesus told us actually in Scripture to go reconcile with our brothers and sisters any arguments that we're having before we come to take of his table. This is a reminder that we are choosing to be unified in what we are for in a world that would tell us that it's easier to put our identity in what we are against.
Communion can do that. If we value unity, what is our intentional next step? Maybe for you, there are certain people that come to mind. And so your next step in unity is forgiveness or choosing to shift your mind frame so that you assume and believe the best about other people. Maybe it's making the choice to not be easily offended.
We can do the hard work of loving the people who are hard to love when we remember that we are unified even with them in this one body of Christ.
The fourth thing that we saw them do here was prayer. And there's a lot of good that we can do on our own, right? We hopefully at Night of Hope also gave you some practical steps of, hey, if you wanna be an advocate and you wanna use your voice and you wanna do good things for justice. We had resources and a list of things because there are things that we can do to help make our world a better place and look a little bit more like heaven. But there are certain things also that we can't do. We cannot create supernatural change without tuning in to God's spirit. And so sometimes we pray because there are places that we want God to intervene. There are people that we want to know God more, or there are people that we just wish for a little bit different. And so we pray like God. Would you open their eyes? God, would you bring compassion and curiosity into their hearts? And it's good to pray these things as long as we recognize that sometimes the hearts that we need to be praying for are actually our own.
Sometimes the prayer is actually to bring God into our own hearts before we work on trying to nudge him, to change the hearts of other people.
The value of prayer is it allows us to ask God, what are you saying to me? What are you saying to me? Where am I becoming what I criticize? Where am I saying that I am about and valuing this one thing, but actually living something else. Prayer is not just for things that we need or want or for help, but it's a way for us to listen. As you work to intentionally create a spiritual home. What is God saying to you?
Now, this passage goes on, but it takes a little bit of a turn in language. This becomes a little bit more descriptive rather than prescriptive. Like, what we're gonna see them do in these next couple of verses is what worked for these people in their culture and their context at their time. But it doesn't have to necessarily be a play by play of, like, how we do it now. Okay, so it keeps going. And I want you to help me read these first couple of words. What does it say at the beginning? A deep sense of awe. A deep sense of awe. Tuck that away in your brain for a minute. A deep sense of awe came over them all. And the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the temple each day, met in homes for the Lord's Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity, all the while praising God and enjoying, enjoying, enjoying the goodwill of all the people. This was a good time. They were having fun. They liked this. Okay. They were a sense of awe, and they were enjoying it.
We can see, though, if we dissect that some of the underlying values that led them to live in these specific ways. And here at Mosaic, we are a church that exists to reclaim the message and the movement of Jesus. Because we believe that there are some Christians and maybe even some churches that are kind of doing their own version of it, like teaching Jesus word and scripture through the lens of a certain agenda. We believe that there are people that are putting Jesus name on things that if we go to scripture and look, he wasn't actually about.
So we exist to try to reclaim the original message and movement of what Jesus wanted us to do. And we will never claim to be perfect at it, but what we have done is identify our own set of values that will guide us to help live out that mission as a Church, we also have four. And I'm going to share them with you really quickly. Our first one is kindness. You cannot be mean at Mosaic. Like, you just can't. It literally will not be tolerated. You can have bad theology, you can have no kind of faith, but you cannot be a jerk. You just will not last here. You won't. Okay. Because here's the thing Jesus did not say to us. They'll know you are Christians. I'm sorry? They'll know you are the right kind of Christian when you have the right Bible verse to use in an argument against another kind of Christian.
That's not actually what Jesus said. What he did say actually, in John. Why don't you guys help me read this? He said, by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. If you love one another, love one another. Remember, Jesus had told them to reach people from one end of the earth to the other. And I am pretty sure that that covers everyone.
I am pretty sure that covers all people. So here at Mosaic, we choose to honor the dignity, the human dignity, and the imago DEI of every single person. We choose to honor and affirm this unique reflection of God that every single person contains. So kindness at Mosaic is the lens. It's the lens in how we love, how we live, how we include, how we operate, how we talk about other people, whether they can hear us or not. Kindness is a value at Mosaic. The second one is excellence. And a value of excellence really just means that we are doing our best as a staff and volunteer staff. There are certain ways that we do things that we set up for a Sunday morning because we want everyone who comes into this space looking to hear from God to be able to have an experience where they can do just that.
But value of excellence is not so much just what we do. It's even more about how we live. It's not a value of perfection. It's not a value of being the best.
As a competitive person, I have to remind myself of that. But it is about doing our best. Excellence is about bringing our best. So when we come together to serve each other, we are doing the best that we can to love and live like Jesus. The third value at Mosaic is a spiritual expectancy. Expectancy just means God is at work here. Not, we hope God is at work here. We hope that he stops in on a Sunday morning. We hope that if he's at this other church, like, he can come over here for one of our services, maybe, you know. No, no. We expect that God is here. We expect that God is moving because we believe it and we see it happening. And as a unified community, we expect God to be working not just up here, but out here. We expect that God is working through each one of you when you show up here on a Sunday, that you would feel safe enough in this spiritual home to practice. When you feel a nudging from the Holy Spirit or something that you feel like God is prompting you to go do that, you would trust that you are in a safe enough place with other people also walking with Jesus that you would lean in and see what happens.
I'm gonna brag on Amy. Actually, Amy, a couple weeks ago, she's been with us for a while. And Amy, a couple weeks ago, we saw this happen. During 60 seconds, she had an interaction where she just felt led to get up and go across the aisle and hug a person that she did not know. And I wouldn't say that Amy's necessarily like a big hugger. Okay. But she felt led to do this. And let me tell you what happened. When Amy said yes to God and followed that nudging to go over and hug a stranger, God was able to work in that person's heart and change the way that she viewed church and church people just like that.
Because Amy trusted that nudge. She expected that God was gonna do something, even if she didn't know what it was going to be.
We expect that God is moving in and through all of you in the exact same way. If you show up on Sunday, maybe after service has already kind of started, and you sneak in and you get your teaching, and then you leave as soon as it's over.
Sometimes we have schedules we need to keep. Sometimes we gotta get to that Charlotte FC game.
But I wonder what could be missing if you hung out just a little bit longer. What could God want to do in and through you if you were able to just stay and be here and trust and expect that God had something he wanted to do with you, not just in this place, but everywhere you take his spirit.
The last value at Mosaic is a value of generosity. And generosity is not the idea that we want to get something from you, but we want to help you understand that sacrificial generosity is actually part of following Jesus. That when we give to those in need, because it's talked about all throughout Scripture, but sometimes I think we forget that giving to those in need also includes Mosaic as a church. A few weeks ago, I let you know about a need that we had for more volunteers, and 50 of you jumped in. It was incredible. It was amazing that 50 of you saw the need and said, I can help be generous with my time, and I'm gonna choose to meet that need. And the response was so good that then Pastor Naim started joking that the next time I got up here to ask you guys for something, it would be a tithing talk.
It would be a tidy talk. Here's the thing, though. It's not me, and it's not the ask. The reason that the response was so good in volunteering is because you guys are people who want to meet a need when you know that it's there.
Sometimes we're just not super great about telling you and helping you see the need, especially when it's something financial.
We get up here every single week right at the end of service, and one of us thanks the people who continue to give and who give financially to Mosaic because we want to honor the people who sacrificially give and provide. But it would be really weird if I got up here at the end of service today, and I was like, hey, thank you so much. To those of you who tithe, we do want to let you know that our THE is down 38% since the pandemic, which means that we have just a little over $400,000 in income loss that we haven't been able to make up over the past, what, six years?
That's true.
It's true. But it would be weird to come up here and tell you these things, right? And so sometimes we don't know how to say, here's the financial need that we have. Hey, Our staff has actually taken pay cuts. Our budget has shrunk every single year for the last five years because we are doing everything that we can to keep the ministry and the mission going, but it is actually going to take more of you committing to meet this financial need so that we can do all of the things that God is calling us to. We would love to hire more staff. We would love to be able to bring back some of the events and things that we used to be able to provide for some of you. We would love to do even more ministry. But that does all take finances.
If you consider Mosaic as your church, if that's what you would answer when people ask you, like, where do you go on a Sunday? No matter how often it is that we get to see you, are you sacrificially giving and bringing your part?
And if you are not tithing, I am going to encourage you to start. I am going to encourage you to start tithing. Is also a form of worship. Tithing is a way for you to say, I see value in what God is doing here at Mosaic, and I want to see more of it.
Tithing as worship is a way to say, I value being part of a community that cares for people, and so I want to help do that. Yes, some of our money stays here. And behind the scenes, it does go to families that can't pay for their rent that month. That goes to help pay for parents who cannot provide groceries for their kids. We also try to be the church out in the world when there's flooding and fires and all kinds of things. But tithing is worship, and it's why every single staff person at Mosaic also tithes, because we are doing the best that we can to honor God by stewarding well, what it is that he has given us.
The most beneficial thing that you can do if you want to help financially support Mosaic is to set up a recurring tithe through pushpay, even if it's not 10%. We can talk to you and work with you about that, but that gives us a consistent income that we know we can count on month after month so that we can use it to budget and to plan.
And I know it can be weird to talk about money in church, but I do encourage you to try it. Try it for six months, try it for one year, and see what happens. Be expectant that God is going to show up and sustain you when you're generous with what you've been given.
The thing is that we get to learn generosity from a generous, good God, we get to learn it from a good God. He is generously giving us the grace that we need to grow. And he generously gives us mercy when we fail and maybe don't do things exactly how we wanted to. So if you're in a place right now where you look around at all that you've created and it's not ideal, it's not what you hoped it would be. Maybe you look at specific relationships and you're like, I really actually want this to be different, but I don't know how.
Talk to God about it. Invite him in. Ask him to show you what is the most important in your life and how can you live it out. Ask him to show you what is missing and help you to know what your next step is.
See, those early Christians might have gotten God's spirit first, but that same power is available to us today, right here and right now. And God wants to build his spiritual homes, his kingdom, through us.
We get to bring light into the darkness. We get to bring hope to despair. We get to bring comfort to the isolated and peace to the chaos when we partner with God's spirit to tell the world about Jesus as we invite them in all the people from one end of the earth to the other to hear about his teachings and be part of his spiritual home here with us.
If you would stand with me, I would love to pray that over us this morning.
God, we thank you for who you are. God, we thank you that your supernatural power, God, is not diminished from what it was the very first time that it blew through that room like wind and fire. God, I pray that we would accept the same movement of your spirit, God, in this room today and next Sunday and the next Sunday and the next Sunday. God, would we be so expectant that, Lord, we would be looking and having our eyes open to seeing where you're moving, even in places that we don't expect to see you or maybe even have been told that you can't exist.
God, show us how we can find other people. Show us where our people are to walk with you. God, I pray for the people who long for that kind of fellowship or close relationship.
But God, fear or their past experiences tell them that people can't be trusted. God, I pray that you would give them the courage, Lord, to try again. God, I pray that we would be a church ready to receive all of those people and give them a different experience, a different version of you, a different experience of what church can be like.
God, we thank you for who you are and for your spirit. God, it's an honor. God, would it also be a joy, Lord, to get to build your church and to build these spiritual homes wherever we go?
God, would you bring back that sense of awe and help us to know what it is that's missing and what it is that we can do as a next step? Because, God, your wonder has not changed and your gospel has not changed and your power has not changed. And so, Lord, if we have, would you help us to put our eyes back on you and to have once again that sense of awe and joy as we build your church.
It's in your name we pray.
Amen.
Thanks for listening to this message from Mosaic church in Charlotte, North Carolina. For more audio and video content, visit us at MosaicChurch TV.
