[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
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[00:00:15] hello everybody. Yeah, if you don't know, I'm not like a slacker or anything, but I just don't appear to be around as much. A lot of that is because we're a multi site church now, aren't we? So we've got two sites, one in Dartford, one in Gravesend, and I have the privilege of, of leading the one in Gravesend. So this afternoon the church will gather again at 4 o' clock at Shears Green. And again we'll preach the gospel. We'll reach out to the community. It'd be good stuff, but I get the. Hey, bless you, man.
[00:00:46] So, yeah, I get the joy of being here again. You know, it's twice in three weeks. That's a lot of fun for me. I enjoy it, I enjoy it. And thank you for always asking about my family. It's really kind. I'm glad you care. Keep praying for us. You know, it's peaks and troughs, isn't it, this Christian walk. We're gonna get into that in just a minute, but keep praying for us, keep praying for leaders, keep praying for one another. Would be my stir to you.
[00:01:12] Right, Pete Gregg, who's heard of Pete Gregg? Give me a wave.
[00:01:17] Quite a few people.
[00:01:19] Well, Pete Gregg, he is the founder of the 247 Prayer Movement.
[00:01:25] And, well, he's the sort of guy that I think will be quoted in about 100 years time. Do you know what I mean? He seems very pithy things.
[00:01:34] And right at the beginning of the 247 prayer movement, he was asked by a guy, he said, look, Pete, look, what's the big vision?
[00:01:45] What's the big idea with this whole 24:7 prayer? And if we could pop it up, there's a quote from Pete and it says, he said this, this, he said, the vision.
[00:01:59] The vision is Jesus, dangerously, obsessively, undeniably Jesus.
[00:02:10] How's that for a vision?
[00:02:12] Pretty sweet, isn't it? Wish I'd said it, wish I'd said it.
[00:02:16] But since then he admits, right, a few things have maybe changed a bit.
[00:02:22] His faith is mellowed, maybe a bit like a nice wine or something, right? All the things that seemed crazy important at the beginning started to maybe settle with time. His hope in humanity definitely changed in order that they themselves can sort out their own problems through politics and economics. That's not going to happen. But he also said, looking at the church, his faith in charismatic leaders to show us a way out also waned massively.
[00:02:55] But he said, and I quote, he says, the gentle allure of Jesus, the beauty of his character, and the startling defiance of his way remains my vision, my glorious obsession, perhaps more now than ever before.
[00:03:15] Jesus really is the hope of the world.
[00:03:18] Amen.
[00:03:20] Amen.
[00:03:21] That's what it's all about.
[00:03:23] This is why we're here today. This is why the church even exists for Jesus, right?
[00:03:28] Yes. And Pete is not on his own. He's echoing words that are thousands of years old. Just one example from Paul in Philippians, this is what he says. He says, look, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of nothing. Knowing Christ, Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake, I've lost all things, not a little bit, everything. Bit like these guys are saying about our brothers and sisters in Africa, I've lost all things, but I consider them garbage that I may gain Christ and be found in him.
[00:04:07] I want to know Christ.
[00:04:11] I want to know Christ. Do you want to know Christ?
[00:04:16] See, Jesus is infatuated with his church.
[00:04:20] He loves his church so much that he would die for them. Which means as we listen to these guys sharing their hearts, we think, well, do you know what? Knowing Jesus, shouldn't we want that? And being obsessed with Jesus is a bit of a strange word, but shouldn't we be obsessed with Jesus if he's even more obsessed with God? Kind of us?
[00:04:43] It seems like a reasonable response.
[00:04:46] I would say it's even the goal of being a Christian, because we want to be with Jesus so that we can become like Jesus, so that we can then do the things that Jesus did.
[00:04:57] And if you have said yes to Jesus, you kind of know what I mean. You would have experienced things in your life where, hey, it feels like, man, this is amazing.
[00:05:09] But have you had times where it feels hard being a Christian?
[00:05:15] Times where you feel you're not growing in the way that you should or could, where you're not making much progress?
[00:05:24] Well, I've definitely felt like that I've been a Christian well over 20 years. And my story is not that it's been this upwards trajectory towards Christlikeness. I think that's fairly obvious. Standing here today.
[00:05:37] My experience has been a little bit more like probably the heart rate of a Crystal palace fan yesterday. It's just up and down, up and down, up and down. In the end, they finished up, well done, Crystal palace, right? As a Man United fan, I was happy that city didn't Win, Right, but this is it, right? It's up and down. God is good, but I don't always make progress.
[00:06:04] So how can we become more like Jesus if he is our vision?
[00:06:11] John Mark Comer, another great author, church leader, he looked at this sort of problem and said, right, this is what I think.
[00:06:22] He says it's not that people don't want to become like Jesus or that people aren't trying to become like Jesus, they just don't know how to become like Jesus.
[00:06:34] Don't know what you think of that.
[00:06:37] But I think you would admit there is at least a challenge here in being a Christian.
[00:06:43] But I would say the challenge is much wider than Christianity.
[00:06:47] I would actually say this is a human problem because no matter what you believe, we don't always become the person that we are trying to become.
[00:06:59] And the even scarier thing is the fact that a lot of who you're trying to become is out of your hands. I don't know if you know that, because even now you are being formed, you have been formed and you are being formed and you will be formed into a person.
[00:07:21] Doesn't matter what you believe.
[00:07:23] Everyone is being shaped and nearly all of it is unintentional if you think about it. What really shapes you in your life?
[00:07:34] Every day, loads of very, very intelligent people have got together and they've looked at what people believe in different cultures and religions and they kind of concluded there is actually a bunch of stuff that forms us as people. And it's similar almost right across the world. And I just want to show you a picture of what they came up with.
[00:07:59] This, what they're saying is that fundamentally the person that we are becoming is formed by our habits, our relationships, the truths we believe and the environment that we live in. And all of that happens over time and through experiences.
[00:08:20] These are the big things that shape you.
[00:08:24] And if you don't believe me, they are all quite unintentional.
[00:08:28] Did you choose the family that you grew up in and did you choose their values that they were going to feed into you? I don't think so.
[00:08:38] You can't stage manage every experience of your life, can you?
[00:08:42] And what about your habits?
[00:08:46] Honestly, the first thing you do or the last thing you do in your day, what you do when you want to rest? I mean, how intentional is some of those things?
[00:08:57] Do you know the average person maybe under the age of 20, picks up their smartphone 600 times a day? Do you know that?
[00:09:06] Yeah. And if you think you're a light user, it's at least 80 times a day.
[00:09:12] How many of those times is intentional?
[00:09:16] See, we're shaped all the time by habits that we get into, which means habits are basically either things that are a necessity or when we feel despair, habits start to rise in our life.
[00:09:30] And here's the thing. Even if you are a follower of Jesus, even if your vision is Jesus for your life, all of this is true of you.
[00:09:39] So how can we, given these truths, actually become more like Jesus?
[00:09:48] Well, there are some stuff that we can do to counteract the unintentional by getting a little bit more intentional.
[00:09:58] I'm about to use a scary word, so buckle in.
[00:10:02] Discipline.
[00:10:04] Discipline.
[00:10:06] Okay.
[00:10:08] Another word to use is training.
[00:10:12] Because discipline isn't always bad.
[00:10:16] Discipline is kind of any activity that you can do which gets you prepared for the thing that you can't do directly. Does that make sense?
[00:10:28] Yeah. Let me give you a couple of examples.
[00:10:30] You can't choose to just run fast, Right? You can't make that happen directly. Right. Instead, what have you got to do?
[00:10:39] Got to commit yourself to training, to eating well, to sleeping well, and then maybe, and only maybe, if you do all the things right, would you be able to run fast?
[00:10:49] What about students?
[00:10:50] Can you just choose to absolutely smash your exams with AI? You could, but you're not allowed.
[00:10:58] So instead, what have you got to do? You've got to train yourself and be disciplined, to revise so you can answer the questions, right? Even AI is trained. Yeah.
[00:11:14] And as a Christian, same thing.
[00:11:18] You can't just decide to be like Jesus. I've tried it, and it doesn't work.
[00:11:23] So instead, we need some disciplines. In fact, they're called spiritual disciplines.
[00:11:30] These are kind of practices or habits that we can put into the mixture of unintentional stuff in our lives and start getting intentional. Because what these things do is they create time and space for the presence and the power of God to change us from the inside out.
[00:11:50] So here's a list of the classic spiritual disciplines, right?
[00:11:56] Some of you have just seen your to do list go up a little bit.
[00:12:00] Don't panic.
[00:12:01] These are not things we must do.
[00:12:04] These are things that we're invited to do to become more like Jesus.
[00:12:10] Let me quickly fly through them. Solitude. This is about intentional. Time and quiet to be alone with God.
[00:12:17] Sabbath, setting aside time. An entire day to stop and rest and delight and worship.
[00:12:24] Fasting, simply going without food in order to give yourself fully to Jesus.
[00:12:31] Generosity, giving of our money and resources. Service, meeting the practical needs of others.
[00:12:37] Community, doing life with other followers of Jesus. In deep relationship confession. And I know confession you can define in two different ways, but what I mean here isn't confessing what you believe, but it's confessing your sin, witness, practicing hospitality and preaching the gospel scripture, immersing yourself in the library of the Bible, and then prayer, intentional time to commune with God.
[00:13:07] And as you look down this list, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, at all nations, depending on how you grew up, where you grew up, the church tradition you were in, you're going to look at this list and go, oh, I've got some of those absolutely bossed in my life.
[00:13:19] And other things are going to look massively like a discipline you would rather avoid because they're just not in your life yet.
[00:13:29] Now, in a minute, you guys are going to chat about what you think about this list, but I just wanted to call out three things before you do, because sometimes we can approach this and as I say, it can look at something else to add into my very busy life.
[00:13:45] So instead I want to say, look, these are not a measure of spiritual maturity.
[00:13:53] Just because either loads of them or not many of them are in your life, that doesn't necessarily mean if you do more of them, you're going to be more mature.
[00:14:02] Instead, a far better gauge of how you're getting on is, well, are you becoming a more loving person?
[00:14:10] What's coming out of you, not just what's going in.
[00:14:15] Secondly, therefore, they are not a form of spiritual merit. You don't earn credit by doing more. Doesn't work like that. We live by what and what alone?
[00:14:26] Yeah, grace, grace, grace.
[00:14:31] And the last one, I think is the important one to get about how these work.
[00:14:36] They are a means to an end.
[00:14:40] The goal is not to practice the disciplines.
[00:14:44] Instead, they are to become like Jesus.
[00:14:49] And these are like pathways that we can take to allow the grace of God to change us.
[00:14:56] This is what I kind of mean.
[00:14:58] So think about how much you worry. I'm not going to get you to put your hand up, you know, if you're a big worrier or not.
[00:15:06] Can you stand in front of the mirror in the morning and say, stop worrying, just stop it?
[00:15:12] Yeah, it doesn't work. Does.
[00:15:15] Doesn't work to be so direct about it. But what I can say is when you start to Sabbath and rest well, when you start to connect with God, maybe in silence and solitude, what happens is something inside starts to shift and you end up starting to trust God.
[00:15:36] You start to rest in his goodness, you start to sense how much favor God has got. Over you and how much he wants to help. And then what happens is your anxiety starts to get.
[00:15:48] So it's more of an indirect thing, but maybe worry isn't your issue.
[00:15:54] Maybe it's something like self control.
[00:15:57] Yeah. So maybe there's some stuff we shouldn't watch or shouldn't do or shouldn't touch or shouldn't listen to things we desire that we shouldn't and we can't stop. So what are we going to do? We try harder.
[00:16:11] We say, holy Spirit, give me some self control. And we pray.
[00:16:17] And they're really good places to start.
[00:16:21] But again, we can't just become more self controlled because we've decided to.
[00:16:27] Did you know one of the best things that you could do in order to grow in self control is to fast from food?
[00:16:36] Do you know that?
[00:16:40] See, when you look back in church history, there were these great influencers.
[00:16:45] They were around long before social media were right. And these influencers, they totally understood kind of how we're wired.
[00:16:55] And what they realized is really without fasting, it's impossible, they felt, to grow in holiness.
[00:17:04] So they practiced fasting intensively. But there's still more.
[00:17:09] So seven deadly sins. You've heard of those?
[00:17:13] There's loads of different orders. But traditionally the first of the seven deadly sins that was listed was gluttony.
[00:17:22] And that was intentional.
[00:17:24] You see, gluttony was mentioned first because these original Christian thinkers, many centuries ago, they recognized this connection that actually if you have an undisciplined appetite for food, gluttony, greed, that has a domino effect right through the others. And it's like, we'll get that one and all the rest start tipping over.
[00:17:50] So their thinking was, if you get some discipline in the area of food, what goes into your body, then actually your appetite, not just for natural things like food, but natural desires for sex, start to be disciplined as well. Because they're saying your appetites rise and fall together, which is a really interesting connection.
[00:18:15] Now we're going to get into this in a bit more detail over the coming weeks. We're going to take each one of these and look at more of these reasons as to why we should do them. Because they're not just a good idea, they actually change us.
[00:18:31] But I'd love to know what you think as well.
[00:18:35] So I've got some questions for you, and it really is just sort of 90 seconds on each one.
[00:18:40] You ready to chat with your neighbors in groups?
[00:18:43] Okay. I want you to look at this list and I'm going to ask you Two questions. The first one is, which ones do you think are most emphasized in the Bible?
[00:18:53] Go.
[00:18:57] Okay, you getting somewhere?
[00:19:00] I'm going to change the question now.
[00:19:03] So that was what is emphasized in the Bible?
[00:19:07] The second question is, when you look at the modern Western 21st century church, let's call it River Church, what ones have been emphasized when it comes to following Jesus and are they different?
[00:19:20] Go.
[00:19:24] Right.
[00:19:25] Okay.
[00:19:27] Just a really quick wave of the hand. Whose list was slightly different between those two questions?
[00:19:33] Yeah. Oh dear. We're not doing a good job as a church, are we? That's not great.
[00:19:37] Well, this one we haven't got time for, but I want you to slip it in your pocket for later.
[00:19:44] What's in your life prominently and what's not?
[00:19:48] Because this really is a question that we're going to carry throughout the rest of this series.
[00:19:54] But I want to show you what we as a preaching team pull together because I asked these very bright theologians the same question and they came up with this. Now it's completely subjective because the thing is we split into two groups and they came up with completely different lists. So. But this is kind of an amalgamation. But you can see they absolutely felt prayer was at the top of the list. And also prayer is connected to solitude. Right. And Sabbath. Really high. Confession, really high. A lot of the Old Testament referenced and then you come down and sort of witness and generosity was at the bottom. I know the other team had generosity a lot.
[00:20:30] You know, oh goodness, that's not great. But where did we feel we were at as a church in terms of what we emphasized?
[00:20:39] And this is then the second list now, green line.
[00:20:45] That's where we're kind of overemphasizing something from the biblical priority order. And red is where we're under emphasizing. So you can see as a church who had scripture and prayer at the top for the church of what we emphasize.
[00:20:58] Yeah, and that's probably true of the Western church. But this list would be really different if you went to different parts of the world. If you went down into Americas, into Africa, the list would change. But here in the west, you know, we could just roll it off the tongue. Scripture, prayer, community, witness, serving generosity. That's the church, isn't it?
[00:21:19] What's happened with Sabbath?
[00:21:21] It's in the Ten Commandments, which we bin the rest of those off as well. You know, what about solitude and fasting?
[00:21:31] And look at what's bottom.
[00:21:33] Why is that one bottom confession?
[00:21:37] I want to ask us humbly, are we missing something in the church today?
[00:21:46] Have we landed somewhere unintentional because of our environment or our habits or our relationships.
[00:21:56] I want to take us back to that Peak Red quote.
[00:22:01] Our vision is Jesus, right? Dangerously, obsessively, undeniably Jesus.
[00:22:10] How can we therefore ensure that that vision remains our vision?
[00:22:18] Jesus answered that question.
[00:22:21] He said, the answer is remaining in me.
[00:22:25] You see, he encouraged his followers by giving this brilliant picture to them. And you can kind of tell they were probably wandering through the fields at the time. And he just thought, look, this is a great teaching opportunity.
[00:22:38] So he started to talk to them and said, look, I want you to remain in me as I also remain in you.
[00:22:48] And it's a bit like these branches, guys.
[00:22:51] No branch here can bear fruit by itself, can it? And they're sort of nodding along.
[00:22:56] What must you remain in the vine? They say.
[00:23:01] And Jesus is saying, yeah, absolutely neither, therefore, can you bear the sort of fruit that you're hoping to bear unless you remain in me.
[00:23:12] You see, I'm the vine and you're the branches.
[00:23:15] If you remain in me and I in you, you are going to bear much fruit. What a promise.
[00:23:22] And then he does the big lean in.
[00:23:26] Just remember, apart from me, you can do nothing.
[00:23:32] Nothing.
[00:23:33] Not a little bit nothing.
[00:23:37] You see, Jesus is the vine.
[00:23:40] We're just the branches we have to attach to Jesus if we're going to be like him.
[00:23:48] But without wishing to be heretical, I want to add something to what Jesus said.
[00:23:56] And actually, I think it would have been obvious walking through that vineyard as it is obvious if you walk through a vineyard today, and that's this simply by attaching isn't enough to grow in a healthy direction.
[00:24:15] When you go to a vineyard, you see stuff like this, there's always some kind of structure that allows the vines to grow in a healthy direction. Otherwise they're waving all over the place. And they will latch hold of anything to try and grow and be stable. And some of those things, if they weren't there, wouldn't be stable.
[00:24:34] But instead, what vinedressers do is create these incredible networks. Normally they are long cables and wires. In other parts of the world, they're trellis like this, made of wood.
[00:24:47] And it gives a kind of structure for the vines to grow up, because it matters what we put around us in our environment, our habits, what is keeping us growing healthy, growing in the right direction.
[00:25:04] And I want to say these things are basically the trellis of our lives if we're going to become more like Jesus.
[00:25:14] And that's because even Jesus had a trellis in his life, if you could rewind the clock back 2,000 years and just follow Jesus around yourself, what you would see is that he would live by some repeating patterns in his life on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You would see him preach the gospel, you would see him heal the sick and cast out demons.
[00:25:37] But how was that possible? Well, he was fully God. Q. Yeah, I understand.
[00:25:43] But he took time out to relate to God his Father, to get refreshed by the Spirit.
[00:25:50] So you would also see him doing things like resting on the Sabbath, going up a mountain to pray and be on his own a lot.
[00:25:58] He would fast at some times for 40 days.
[00:26:03] And you could say, but they're Jewish traditions. Why do we need to think about them now?
[00:26:09] But when you dig into these a little bit more, you realize they were Jewish traditions deeply embedded in their culture because they were pathways to grow in God and commune with God.
[00:26:24] Which is why, therefore, it's no surprise to see not just Jesus teaching them to his disciples and modeling them, but actually the early church picking up many of these and them being the bedrock of how the early church grew through history.
[00:26:41] But the interesting thing is in the last couple of centuries, many of these things, many of these pathways towards God have kind of gone away.
[00:26:52] Many of them have become overgrown, many of them have been forgotten.
[00:26:57] But we sense God saying, come on, don't get caught up in just the modern. The answers aren't always in front of you.
[00:27:05] Sometimes for the church to grow, we need to look back in the rear view mirror and see what the ancient roots of the church are.
[00:27:14] How can we truly live in the rhythms that Jesus lived in?
[00:27:20] Maybe the band could come back up, if that's all right.
[00:27:24] See, over the past year at River Church, we've kind of been exploring some of this stuff.
[00:27:29] Some of it has been in connect groups, some of it's touched into our preaching, and a lot of it's been based on this material. And I would say if you want to have a good read on this stuff, buy a copy of this book. It's called Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer.
[00:27:45] And it really is all about being with Jesus, becoming like him and doing as he did.
[00:27:50] And it kind of throws a spotlight on some of these areas we just know less about.
[00:27:58] And so brothers and sisters here who might be from a different culture, we've chatted and you're like, yeah, fasting. Where's fasting gone in the Western church? You know, we've got a lot to learn from one another, but this is a Great starting place if you just want that overview to start with.
[00:28:15] Because the church, not just River Church, but many churches were in partnership, are being awakened to these old forgotten ways of growing in Christ.
[00:28:29] Don't we need to grow in Christ?
[00:28:33] Don't we need to? Because as a church, God has called us to lots.
[00:28:37] But our vision is to bring Jesus light, hope and love to everyone around us.
[00:28:45] And that is going to not take a casual attitude.
[00:28:49] That's not going to happen unintentionally. We've got to be full of Jesus.
[00:28:54] We've got to be full of his values, because only his values are going to transform culture.
[00:29:00] He is the only hope of the world. Going back to what Pete Gregg says. And his plan has always been the same.
[00:29:08] His plan has always been to invite you to come and follow him and then for your transformation, just to start straight away.
[00:29:16] Because he wants to change you to be more like him.
[00:29:20] Because the more you become like him, the more you carry the presence of him into your workplaces, into your schools, into your neighborhoods, into your communities, into your families. And when you've got Jesus living in you, coming out, that's when things are transformed.
[00:29:39] This is why these pathways are so important, because they don't just help us be with Jesus or become more like him, but in fact they help us do the things he did.
[00:29:52] So I want to urge us lean in in this series now we're going to talk about what it would look like to be more generous, to prioritize prayer more, to serve others in our community, even when it's inconvenient, when we lean into genuine community with one another, even to the point where we might really be sharing what's going on in our lives in order that we would find grace and mercy and healing.
[00:30:23] And I think what we'll find is things don't just change in here, but this stuff is the fuel for the mission that Jesus has called us to.
[00:30:33] Why don't we stand?
[00:30:35] I'm just going to pray for us really quickly and then we're just going to worship to finish.
[00:30:43] Yeah, Holy Spirit, just pray.
[00:30:50] Today is a bit like the touch paper being lit in our lives again.
[00:30:57] You know, the vision in front of us is dangerously, obsessively, undeniably Jesus.
[00:31:06] But I think you've got some answers for us that maybe we're yet to uncover.
[00:31:12] So I pray, bless us as we try and do this. Give us a desire, I pray over us, a desire to know Jesus, to know him above anything else, a willingness to let go of some stuff I just felt even in worship, God is wanting to do some settling in many lives today and in this coming season by unsettling some stuff. And I just felt he'd say, I'm going to be going after idols and lies in your life.
[00:31:39] That's the most loving thing that he can do to you.
[00:31:43] So I just pray, Lord Jesus, help us with our heart posture, get to a place where you can do your work in us.
[00:31:50] And as we try and intentionally step into these things that you've said, look, this is a way to me. Lord, help us, I pray.
[00:31:58] Help us and empower us. I pray.
[00:32:01] Amen.
