Matt Chandler - A Foundation of Fire

Second Chronicles 7 is where we’re going to be, and during our time together, it will take me a bit to get there, but we will get there. I was listening to a sermon—I think it was a sermon; maybe it was just a talk—this summer from a man named Mark Sayers. I don’t know if you know who Mark Sayers is; he pastors a church in Melbourne, Australia, or, if you’re from there, Melbourne. That’s where Guy Mason is from, the guy we’ve brought here a couple of times now, right in the heart of the city. What you need to know about Melbourne is that it is to the left of San Francisco, and I don’t mean geographically, all right? Are you with me? It is just a bastion of liberal thought and practice; it makes San Francisco look like it belongs in the South. Mark is a brilliant, brilliant man. His capacity to synthesize history and sociology to figure out how we arrived where we are is, I think, second to none. I was listening to this talk he was giving, and he talked about a crisis he had in the middle of one of his sermons. He said it was a Sunday night, and the room was filled with 20-somethings from Melbourne. He was in the middle of his sermon. I don’t know if you’ve ever done any public speaking, but there is actually a script going on in your head while you’re saying things, which is how accidents happen. He said he was preaching, and the crowd looked engaged; then he realized, in the middle of his sermon, that he could explain historically and sociologically how we arrived at this moment—this moment of a secular sense, the secular worldview of the importance of man and the non-importance of God for human flourishing. He said he could trace it back to German Romanticism, which your pastor cannot. That is not what is going through my head right now. So it hit Mark that although he knew how we got here, he didn’t know how to get us out, and there was nothing he could do in that moment but preach the gospel that had any shot at turning anything around, right? And so what he said in that talk was that if the church was going to be renewed, revitalized, or see revival, it would need fire and form. And so, man, that little phrase, «fire and form,» has stuck with me. I don’t know—you work—but it just got down into my crevices, and it has been this thing in my head all summer: «fire and form.» Before I left on sabbatical, we had this multi-day kind of future planning bonanza, the kind where you crawl into your house and just collapse from thinking about the future. And then, all summer long, the staff has been working, the elders have been working, the Strat-Up group has been working, and then, as I returned, I got to catch up on everything. Man, I am so excited about what God is doing at TBC and where He seems to be taking us. We are about a year and a half, Lord willing, from just being an autonomous community church with reach to the nations. That’s coming! Like I said in the welcome, we are the fastest shrinking church in America right now by design. We’re not lamenting that; we’re actually getting really kind of crazy excited about how God has blessed us in those ways. And so what I didn’t want to do was come back after a hundred days off and say, «Here’s strategy and structure and future.» I didn’t want to do it, although I think form is important and there is much to be excited about there. What I wanted to do was lay the foundation of fire upon which we can build that strategy and structure. All right, so here’s the plan: what I want to do this fall is work on the heart of the matter. I want us to believe some things together, and I’m going to set that vision today. Next week, we’re going to talk about how we do life with and for God—not just for God, not just with God, but with and for. If you get that wrong, things go back. And then from there, we’re going to cultivate all fall what it looks like to be with Jesus and then work for and live for Jesus, right? So that’s next week, and that’ll start with Sabbath, silence, and solitude in the Scriptures, and it kind of becomes this series back to the basics on just what it means to be a follower of Jesus, right? Then come January, we’re going to roll out: here’s what we’re going, here’s what we feel called to do, here are the lanes we want to invite you into—this is what our hope is. But for today, for this morning, I just need to get some things out of me. All right, so God help us all! Here’s my sentence: God can move in our day with such radical power that things many of us believe are lost can be renewed, revived, and reformed. Let me say it again: God can move in our day with such radical power that things many of us believed are lost can be renewed, revived, or reformed. Now, this is hard for many of us to believe; I know that because of how quiet you are when I said it. It’s just really hard to imagine. So we live…