Matt Chandler - Awake to the Gospel

Hey, good morning! A couple of things as I dive in: first of all, thank you. I know it’s not easy to get here right now, and you made it—congratulations! Suite 165 is full, and we have about 12 people still out there hoping for a seat near you. So, if there’s an open seat next to you, just raise your hand where you are; we will come fill that. Get that hand high; we’re not Baptists, and that’ll be great! While you keep that hand up until they find you, let me say this: Hey Joe, I wanted to come hug you before the service started, but I didn’t get a chance to do it. For someone with no voice, watching you worship Jesus as we sing is a pretty awesome sight. I love you, buddy! I’m sad I didn’t get over there to give you a hug.

It was 2007, and I was on a bit of a quest. Things here at the Village back in ’07— I see a couple of you shaking your heads—you were here. Man, it was grimy. We found a 20-something-year-old kid in the Martin Building bathroom with a needle in his arm, overdosed, who actually ended up becoming a believer in Christ and walking out of his life of addiction. The testimonies we were hearing were of the grimy sort—pulling people out of addiction, pulling them out of perversity, pulling them out of adultery. There was one weekend in particular where we had a couple that had been here for a long time share their story of adultery, divorce, and then remarriage. That week, about 15 people came forward and confessed that they had had an affair that they had kept secret. Needless to say, we learned that week that unless you’re prepared for that, let’s not do that. But it was really grimy.

I was on this quest to figure out what in the world was going on here. Although we had plenty of those stories, predominantly the story of conversion here at the Village was one of people who grew up in church. They had gone to Youth Camp; they had grown up with moms and dads who loved Jesus. Somewhere along the way, they bailed. Their testimony was what disoriented me; it was always that they had never heard the gospel. They had grown up in church and heard how they were meant to behave; they heard Christian morality, but they had never actually heard the gospel.

I was on a quest to find out whether that was true or not because it was hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that you could grow up in church your whole life and never actually hear about the loving relationship that Jesus wants with you, rather than just a list of moral decrees you’re meant to white-knuckle and fulfill with great discipline.

So I’m at Starbucks in 2007, on a quest, drinking a grande Americano. It’s not a great Americano; it’s a Starbucks Americano—fine. Starbucks wasn’t in our parking lot at the time; it was over where—I’m directionally challenged, but I think it’s this way—oh, my wife’s like, «Wow.» So I was at where Starbucks used to be, sitting across the table from a young man in his 30s. He’s not in tears; he’s not welling up; he’s the kind of crying that might make you embarrassed to be sitting across from him. With snot and tears, he’s trying to wrestle through whether his conversion and baptism as an eight-year-old were legitimate or something he did for his mom. He recounted quite a bit of heartbreak as he tried with all his might to live up to the expectations that his mom and church had for him. He shared openly and honestly about some epic failures in his life. Look at me—the kind of failures that fundamentalists would say would make you unwelcome in a place like this. As I listened through the heaving and the wiping, I began to understand what we were up against in the Bible Belt.

Yesterday, I did the funeral for Jane Thompson. If you didn’t know Jane Thompson, you missed out. She was 82 years old when she went home to be with the Lord. She was hosting a young adults gathering in her home at 82. She refused to become crusty as she got older; she refused to see the next generation as something to lament, but rather as an opportunity to herald the majesty of Jesus. What was wild was that Jane was so—“feisty» is probably not the right word, but it’s close. I was literally surprised yesterday that Jane’s daughter didn’t hand me my sermon from her mom to do her funeral; that’s the kind of woman she was. About a month ago, for a future series, we filmed Jane’s whole story—12 minutes. Anyway, I showed that yesterday, so she kind of did her own funeral, which would be just perfect.