If you have your Bibles, go and grab those; we’re going to be in John chapter 1. We’ll look at three quick verses, and we’re going to close out the fall series, which still doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t quite feel like we should be where we are in the year, but we’ll close out the fall series today. Next weekend, we will get ready for Thanksgiving, and the weekend after that, Advent kicks off. We’re going to do our first weekend of Advent a little bit differently since it will be 10 years since we had our first Sunday here, and 10 years since I was not here for that first Sunday because I’d had my right frontal lobe removed. I wanted to do a sermon out of Psalm 90 on lessons from the precipice and talk a little about what I felt the Lord showed me and what has changed since I was given a two to three-year span to live. Praise God for bad math! I want to talk a little about what the Lord revealed to me and how I feel I’ve changed since that diagnosis. Then that’ll lead us into three weeks of Advent, and it will be Christmas, and then it’ll be 2020. Apparently, we’re supposed to have flying cars or something by then, but they need to step up their game if the Jetsons' dream is going to become a reality.
For today, I want to quickly remind you of what we’ve been trying to do this fall and why. I want to tie everything together from the past seven or eight weeks. The Village Church is very much at a significant crossroads in the life of our church. We have moved from being a church of five campuses and about twelve to fifteen thousand people to purposefully shrinking down to a single campus here in Flower Mound with a global reach. I have said with a great joy in my heart that we are purposefully the fastest shrinking megachurch in the United States. In light of that, all we have done is rejoice, but it puts us in a weird place as a people. Now we find ourselves in a bit of an identity crisis: who are we? The elders and staff have been working on the answers to those questions for a long time.
When I came back from sabbatical, what I didn’t want to do was come back with all this change looming. In fact, we are about to purchase 40 acres right down the road; the option period is just about up, and we’ll purchase for cash 40 acres less than a mile from here, which, by the grace of God, will be our future home. But there is a lot of change looming, and I get a little anxious about that stuff. I don’t just get anxious about the change; I get a little anxious that you and I might get distracted in the midst of a ton of change. Are you tracking with me? So what I wanted to do is not come in and go, «Here’s the new strategy; here’s the new structure; here’s where we’re going,» even though we desperately need that as a local church. Instead, I wanted to say, «Hey, before we get to form, let’s talk about fire. Before we get to form, let’s talk about fire!»
Before we discuss how we’re going to look and what we believe the Spirit of God has shown us for our future, let’s stop for a second, let’s breathe in, and let’s remember that if the Spirit of God doesn’t go with us, we don’t want to go. We’ve said that for 17 years. In fact, that moment in the Word of God where Moses is on Sinai, and God says to him, «You know what? I’m going to make your dreams come true. I’m going to give you the land flowing with milk and honey. I’m going to conquer your enemies. All that you desire will be yours, but I’m not going.» I will send an angel before you to get you everything you want. In essence, Moses replies, «Yeah, no, I’m not going, then, ” which makes me wonder, can you do that? Are you allowed to just tell God no?
Moses' reasoning was this: „If you’re not going, I’m not going. I don’t want the land flowing with milk and honey; I want you. So if you’re not going, I’m not going. We’ll just stay here on this mountain.“ Then Moses pleads with God for the sake of the people and for the sake of His name. If you know the story, they head into the Promised Land, not with angels, but with the presence of God Himself. I wanted to spend the fall just talking about what Augustine called witness— the idea that you can’t do life for Jesus without doing life with Jesus— and the difference between a moral lens by which you can view Christianity and a redemptive lens by which you can live as a Christian. Then I wanted to spend time discussing these practices that God has given us, which awaken our spirit to realities that, by the grace of God, we’re already walking in. Historically, these have been called the church disciplines; we’ve called them practices. So what I want to do in our last kind…
