Matt Chandler - One New Humanity

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one in the chair in front of you, unless someone in the nine grabbed that and took it. If you don’t own a Bible, that’s our gift to you; feel free to take that and run. Before we dive in today, I just want to highlight yet again that you’ve seen we have fenced off the West Side, so that will begin to come down this next week. We believe that, long-term, this will finally, by the grace of God, address the parking issue here at the Village. So, this next little season of life is going to require some patience with one another and in this space, as there will be some disruption. Here are some ideas about how you can make that better: you can, if you’d like, attend our Saturday at 4 service; it typically runs about 670-something people. Right now, this is around 1,400 people, so you can see it’s easier to get in and out. Alternatively, you can ride the shuttle over from our Highland Village campus, which will relieve a lot of pressure off the parking lot here at TVC. My appeal today is, as best as you can, let’s be gracious to one another during this season, where there will be some physical disruption to the corner. Anyway, I’m excited to get into week three with you; we’ve been in a series called «The Creator’s Heart,» which we’ve done every January for as long as I can remember. Here’s a brief recap of the series in about three minutes, by the grace of God: here is God’s heart for you. I don’t care what your background is; I don’t care how you’ve come in here today; I don’t care what you’re guilty of or not guilty of; the offer on the table to you and to me today, according to Jesus, is life—real life, deep life, fulfilling life. Jesus says it this way in John 10:10: «I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.» Instead of believing, as Christians, in some sort of self-help, self-actualization pathway that we think will give us the life we feel we’re missing, we reject that and agree with Jesus when He says, «I am the door, ” meaning if you want life, it’s found in me and me alone. We talked a little bit about this in week one: what are you with six-pack abs, but it’s still you? What are you with a little more money? Honestly, data tells us that you are a worse version of yourself with more money. So, the true path of transformation and real, meaningful life is found in Christ alone. What pulls against that offer of life, according to Jesus, is lies. He says, „I am the way, the truth, and the life, ” and in that passage from week one, we saw that a thief has come to kill, steal, and destroy. What you and I are navigating in this series and every day of our lives is the offer of life from the Creator God of the universe; that’s His desire—to bring you deep, meaningful life. The lies and deceit that pull against that life promise that it can be found elsewhere, ultimately leading to death, destruction, chaos, and loss. That’s the tension we feel in the world we are in today. We said those lies manifest in two different ways: inside the church, they present as what we call false gospels; outside the church, they manifest through demonic ideologies that promise life but deliver only death. We covered three of those predominant ideologies in our culture today, and I want to dive a little more deeply into one of those today because I see it everywhere and, in some ways, even leaking into the church itself. If we don’t understand this clearly, especially over the next twelve months, we’re going to be dragged into divisiveness and nastiness that Christ has come to rectify. He has given us a framework by which this can be made right, and I want to ensure we do not fall prey to it. I said there’s an idea because this is how demonic principalities and powers work: ideologies are ideas woven into institutions. It’s surprising to me that it shocked so many people that it’s not head-spinning, spinning around like in „The Exorcist, ” climbing up walls, or throwing a priest out a window. It’s ideas; it’s ideologies that lead to destruction, death, and mayhem. One of those is this notion that you can take the complexity of a human being— their backstory, their present reality, their ethnicity, their…