Coming Home Pt. 3 // Family of God

Discover why every human heart carries a deep longing for family and belonging, and how this universal desire reveals God's eternal purpose for our lives. This message explores the biblical foundation of family relationships, spiritual adoption, and the church as God's household.Key topics covered:- Why we all crave belonging and family connection- The difference between community and family relationships- How to handle family brokenness and disappointment- God's master plan from creation to redemption through family- Abraham's calling and God's promise to bless all families- Spiritual adoption and our irrevocable inheritance as God's children- How the church functions as a healthy spiritual family- The dangers of trying to live without family support- Practical benefits of embracing God's family design- God's cosmic purpose displayed through the churchWhether you are struggling with family wounds, feeling isolated, or seeking deeper community connections, this message provides biblical insight into God's design for relationships and belonging. Learn how the church serves as God's eternal family where every member has unique gifts and functions that complement one another.Explore themes of spiritual family, biblical community, God's eternal purpose, adoption into God's family, church relationships, healing from family wounds, and finding your place in God's household. Understand how family is the main storyline of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation.Perfect for anyone seeking to understand their identity as part of God's family, those working through family relationship challenges, church members wanting to deepen community connections, or individuals exploring what it means to belong to something greater than themselves.This biblical teaching reveals how God's plan for family extends beyond biology and culture to encompass His eternal purpose of redemption and restoration for all people.

This sermon was recorded at a Sunday morning gathering at Church of the Lookout in Longmont, Colorado.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast. Church of the Lookout is in Boulder, Colorado, and our vision is Jesus, abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love. Visit us online at thelookout.church.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

Jesse, we just want to invite you to come on up. And I'm going to pray over him as he leads us into the word. Join me as we pray. Lord, thank you so much for our friend, for our brother Jesse. Thank you, God, for the deposit of truth that he not only carries for us this morning, but has lived into in all of his journey with you, Jesus. Thank you, God, that he doesn't teach from a place of just knowing in his mind, but Lord, he speaks from a place of having walked this out in relationship with you, Lord. He knows what he's talking about because he's had to live it. So, Lord, we thank you. Thank you, God, for the anointing on Jesse. Thank you for your word that always produces life and good fruit in us. And we just bless him because he brings this message this morning, Holy Spirit, have your way. In Jesus' name. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Thank you. Good morning. Yeah. One of the things that I really love about you guys is that you're a lot of different ages. We've got generations in this church, and you you can just look around. Go ahead. You don't have to look at me. Just turn around, just glance around, and just notice some of the different ages. Now keep in mind that all our little guys are in the theater and in their classrooms. There's a lot of children and babies and toddlers and middle schoolers in this church. And then Gary just took the whole entourage of youth. It really struck me last week at the end of service. I don't know if some of you guys who are here who noticed the youth in the back going from side to side, all standing there. I'm like, wow, we got a lot of youth here. And then we've got 20 somethings and 30 somethings and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. We have uh a couple four-generation families that sometimes all four generations are here. Uh today we've got some three-generation families sitting here in the church. That's unusual. A lot of churches cater to narrow decades. We've got uh we've got all of the decades represented pretty well. Like we should celebrate that. That's awesome. Okay. I love it. So I love that because I am a family man, as Piper mentioned, but uh you might not know. Well, you might know if you've met Stacy that uh I started looking for a wife in kindergarten. And it took forever to find her. I found her when I was 20, which felt like an eternity for me. I married her as fast as I could by 21. And now, yes, we have uh 10 children. I've got a bonus son, bonus daughter, I've got a future son, future daughter that are in the wings. We've got a grandson and a granddaughter cooking. Um it's so rich. It's so rich. So special is home. We're in a series right now called Coming Home. Uh Luke kicked this off a couple weeks ago, remembering the story of the prodigal son, and I have a couple quotes to refresh your memory from that. He said, the father's home is the place to meet our deepest needs. He also said, This this zinger, you were made to be at home with the father. Last week we kicked off a 21-day coming home fast. And many of you signed up and got this cool prayer guide. Um and many of you are also doing it but haven't signed up, which is fine. And then there's some of you who maybe aren't haven't heard about it until just this very second. It's not too late. Please jump in and uh join in on the fun. You can get this prayer guide by the QR code on the back of your seat. Um, but we're praying and fasting together into our vision. This first month of the year, we're we're really um diving into this vision. And I thought, like we often do, that we could read this together. You guys be down for that? All right, let's do it. Our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love. So last week Luke kicked off the series uh after the intro message he got into the first one about living in friendship with God and welcoming us into coming into the presence of God. This was an invitation to create habit and anchors and structure in our life, such as daily time in the word, uh, regular times of worship with the Lord, that can lead us back home wherever we are. Even if we're away from home, we can feel that sense of home because of the anchors in our life. The invitation was to abide. This week we're invited to come home because where else would home be except that's where family is, right? And the invitation to come home where family is, this is for everyone. And I know sometimes when I say the invitation is for everyone, some of you are thinking, well, but that doesn't apply to me. So I'm telling you, the invitation is for you. When I say everyone, I mean you. The invitation comes directly from our Father in heaven. This is not an invitation from a broken family or messed up parents or bad marriages. This isn't an invitation from a missing family or a family that's not yet. This is an invitation from the one who can deliver our prodigal father, our heavenly father. We we all carry the longing for family, right? It's both a desire, but it's also a gift that we give. Interestingly, though, we also carry some resistance to it, if we're being honest. Whether from past trauma or uh sometimes it just comes down to selfishness with our time and resources, maybe sinful patterns, maybe just not knowing how to proceed. But today we're entering into an invitation for even more. Whatever it is you've experienced, whatever level of family that you've experienced, good or bad, uh, I really want to invite you and and walk in the invitation myself into even more. Hope if family has been a letdown for you. Reassurance if you're already just killing it, challenge if you're underinvested, and ultimately an invitation for divine guidance to complex problems. I don't want to sugarcoat this. We're not gonna claim that we're gonna solve all the problems in one message, but we are asking God to join us and we're offering ourselves up to join in him on this very, very important topic, and we need his guidance for complex situations. It's very worth it. You guys ready? We ache for family because we were created by family for family. Uh, if you can open up your Bibles today and if you have them, get them out. It's gonna be worth it. We're not gonna do just one verse that's gonna show and then disappear before you have a chance to look it up. Get your Bible out. It's gonna be worth it. I got tons of verses. They're all good. Starting in Mark chapter 3, verse 20. Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying he is out of his mind. And then if we skip ahead to uh to verse 31, Jesus' mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent a message to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, Your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you. And he answered them, Who are my mother and brothers? And looking at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother. Interesting words. A little context here for you. Jesus was going place to place, he was going from Capernaum to Galilee and back and forth, and he was doing signs and wonders and miracles, and the crowds were gathering around him everywhere he went. He was he's gaining popularity for the things that he was doing. He withdraws to a beach, and then the crowd presses him in so greatly that he has to get on a boat just to avoid being crushed. He withdraws to a mountain for some sanity, and then as soon as he comes back down, the crowd presses into his home there too. And so his family's like, dude, you're you're crazy. This is over the top. What are you thinking? When you go all out for God, people sometimes try to save you from your fanaticism. And sadly, it's like it's oftentimes the people closest to you and your family sometimes that costs you the most. And they mean well. I mean, he was almost crushed to death. And now he's in his own home and it's so crowded he can't even eat. And the leaders from Jerusalem are outside coming to him, suggesting that he has a demon and he's doing all these things with demonic power instead of godly power. So they're rightfully concerned. They mean well, they know Jesus, they grew up with him and they're concerned with him. And they're outside trying to get his attention to talk some sense into him, and he asks this question: Who is my family? With respect to his family, he asks, Who's my family? And what really even is family? It causes us to wonder. If they're not your family, then who is your family? And it's confusing to me because I think, is Jesus undoing millennia of God's instructions to prioritize on the family? I mean, we've got lots of scripture on mothers and brothers and fathers and children throughout scripture, right? God cares about the natural family. Is Jesus undoing that? In wrestling with this question, who is my family? We are going to unpack a treasure trove of scriptures today. We're going to go back to the roots of creation, and we're extending all the way to today and God's eternal purposes. Jesus says, Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother. Those who hear the word of God and do it, these are my family. There's an invitation today for you to be a critical part of this master plan. Uh but before we get into the scriptures, I feel like we need to acknowledge first that that family's broken. And we we've all to some extent been touched by the brokenness of family. So while we have this universal God-given desire to belong, at the same time we feel this this lack, this gap between what should be and what is. We uh have or crave joy, but there's also tears. There's in relationships, there's ecstasy, but there's also agony. People can be tender, but but also very harsh. There's loyalty, and sadly there's also betrayal. There's longing and lacking, there's life and death. Sometimes it it feels like Eden, and other times it's it's downright apocalyptic. I mean, think about it. Adam and Eve, literally the ones who lived in the Garden of Eden, their son killed their other son. And then he escaped to live as a nomad and built a city far away from his family, and not only that, went and then took multiple wives. Talk about breaking a family. Thank you for celebrating that. It's it's truly wonderful. Um I'm gonna leave it at that, or we'll just run out of time in the sermon if I get to talking about how great my wife is. Uh and that's awesome, but we but that it wasn't always that way. We both came from broken homes. One broken by divorce and another broken by death. Sometimes you're marching along just fine, and then bam, cancer. Betrayal, conflict, out of the blue. Others of you today would would give anything to have some of that drama. You'd love to have some of that pain because it would be better than the relentless loneliness of not having family. Yet in all this mess, I think we can highlight that there is a universal desire to belong. Even when it's messy and it's painful, the pain, honestly, is because the belonging isn't happening. It's because of the unmet need. So just because there's a pain, it proves the fact that there is the need. Did you know that the uh fastest growing sector in the in the AI industry is is what? Do you guys know? What? Companions. You're right. Someone mentioned that to me, and I'm like, nah, I don't know about that. So I looked it up and it it's legit. And um Wade's in the industry. He knows what's up. Why is that? Why do you think? Well, I'll I'll give you some of the things that AI does because it's been modeled to do it. Emotional predictability. The responses are consistent, patient, and tailored. As I read these, think about how you might like to have some of these attributes in your human relationships. Privacy. The users can explore conversations without judgment. You can talk about whatever you want. Convenience, the companions are available at any time, fully available, fully present. It's personalized, so the companion gets to know you, gets to know your tone, your memory, your preferences. And there's continuity. Each interaction builds on the previous one. It's not like when you bring a conversation up with someone in your family that's very, very important to you, and it becomes really clear really quickly that they weren't paying attention the first time you brought this up. It's like the joke where the um wife says, Are you even listening to me? And the husband says, Well, that's an odd way to start a conversation. These modern systems can maintain stable personality traits, they provide emotional awareness, they can adjust emotional tone in real time, they recall important details from past conversations, build an ongoing sense of familiarity, and offer comforting dialogue and continuity. Always cracks me up when AI encourages me. When I'm having a conversation for work and we're doing something really, really technical. Nice job, Jesse. It feels really good. All that sounds pretty amazing, but we know it is not the real thing. And while it has taken it to a whole new level, that's true, it's really not new. Businesses have long appropriated family language for profit. Think of this. We can imagine your fitness family, your school family, your sport family, your uh reading club family, all kinds of family. In fact, as I was working on this message in the Ziggy's coffee shop, I glanced up after praying, and I saw on the wall this art, art display, whatever you call this, and it says, welcome, gather, belong. Those are family words. But of course, you've got to have your coffee first. But first, coffee, right? That's why we're here. See, businesses borrow the language of family because every human heart is hungry for it, but they cannot deliver the fullness. Corporate culture uses the language of family, but God alone offers the true substance of family. Our social spaces, gyms, clubs, teams, neighborhoods, they all use imagery of family to create belonging, but they can never offer the covenant love, the permanence or the purpose that only God's family provides. In fact, that permanence is the true difference between community and family. That's one of the things I asked myself in preparing this. Well, what's the difference between community and family? The difference is the permanence. Family has a special kind of tie that separates it from just regular community, and that is the tie that is permanent, the tie that binds is permanent. So up till now I've been using the word family, and I haven't really specified what it even is. So my guess is that most of you have defaulted to the traditional view of mom, dad, brother, child, husband, wife, grandchild. And it's true, natural families do have permanent bonds. DNA, right? That's permanent, pretty permanent, you'd think. Marriage covenants, adoption certificates, birth certificates, and that does define family as separate from community. But when Jesus says, points to his disciples and says, Here are my mother and brother, for whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother. He's defining a new level of family without undoing the former, by the way. It's a whole new level. So think about it. In the biological, in the natural realm, DNA is permanent, and then you die. It's not permanent. You lose a spouse, you lose a child, you lose a parent. Marriage, it's until death, do you part, right? Right? And yet in our dysfunction, it's sometimes broken. But you know, with DNA, while it can be broken, in Christ, we are made a new creation. We are given new DNA, we are given immortality in Christ, such that our spiritual DNA can never expire, can never be broken apart. And marriage in Christ, the seal of God on our lives is the Holy Spirit. It is his guarantee of the purchased possession, Scripture says. And furthermore, it's his own body that he becomes one with, just as it was intended with Adam, not really fulfilled until Christ. We've got adoption. Now, adoption, interestingly enough, is probably the strongest of these examples in terms of permanence, and yet it's still imperfect with humans. Not so with God. I'll talk a little more about that later. The way out of the brokenness in our families is coming home to his family. The goal of family, I'll mention, has always been fullness. The fullness of Christ, the one who fills all in all, the fullness of you in his family, and the fullness of the whole world as it joins in this goodness. You, church, were made for this. And the church is this, as we will see in scripture. Okay, we're getting into a lot of scripture now. So take your breath. Get your Bibles out. And I really need you to track with this because it gives meat and substance. You need to pick. You need to get your meat, chew, and teeth on and get ready to absorb some of absorb some of the living word of God because it gives us the why when I tell you that you need your family and your family needs you. Family isn't a side theme in scripture, it is the storyline. So a quick overview so that you know where we're going and to help you track. We've got Adam in the garden as an individual. He's in communion with God, but it's not good that he's alone, so God gives him a wife and a family with the blessing of fruitfulness and multiplication. Then nations result from that fruitfulness. God calls a special nation out of the nations, Israel, through which he gives the Messiah to all of the nations to bring them back into his oneness, to invite them into the family of God, and ultimately to nurture our individual self in communion with him. This is a chiastic structure. You guys can you can show the diagram if you want. I'm not going to get totally into this chiastic structure, but a chiasm is where you march into a central point and then you can march right back out of it. And so there's this in and out, this circular thing where you go from individual to family to nations to Christ to join nations to a spiritual family to an individual. And this progression is God leading us from the small to the big back to the small. And you need the whole ecosystem for it to work. If you want wholeness in your life, you've got to be part of a family. You've got to be on mission to reach the entire world so that the families can be blessed and you as an individual can be supported. This is powerful stuff, guys. Genesis chapter 1, verse 27. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created him. Thank you, Jesus. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on earth. Then he institutes marriage after saying, It is not good that man should be alone. Remember that. It is not good for you to be alone. I will make a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on the man, and while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman, and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woe man, because she was taken out of man. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. We are not built to be alone. We like being alone, particularly as Coloradans. Colorado has a pioneering spirit in our history. People came here for the gold rush and set out to make a new, lay down new routes. They left family to come on a mission. We are, as a culture, DI wires. We are individualists. We like hikes in the mountains by ourselves. There's some neighborhoods where every neighbor, every house has its own snowblower. Thank you for appreciating that. So there's a particular wound and a particular spirit that we've got to fight against, and that is the desire to nurture ourselves and take care of ourselves and be alone and be self-sufficient. And here's the wound: we don't want to be needy. Maybe being needy has cost you at some point, so you don't want to do that. So you buy the thing instead of borrow the thing. You uh journal and pray rather than sending a blast out saying that you need prayer. There's all kinds of examples of this. Um, but you are not meant to be alone. So important is that that God creates a rescue for Adam. That word helper, when it says God made a helper for Adam, um, that that word, if you do a word study on that, it refers in a sense of military aid. It's the same word that many passages refer, a lot of in the Psalms, to the Lord's rescue, such as Psalm 37, 40. The Lord helps them and delivers them. So God rescues Adam from what? From being alone. And he rescues all of humankind in this crazy creative way. He takes a rib out of Adam, and I don't know if God's just holding that rib there and then, like, oh, I'm gonna make a woman out of this. It's just very, it's very interesting. He takes a rib out of his flesh and then institutes marriage to make them one flesh again. Fascinating. And their blessing is to be fruitful and multiply, which they do. And life breeds life, and before you know it, you got a whole nation's nation's worth of kids. And the family blessing has spread throughout the world. And then we find ourselves in Genesis 12. Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred to your father's house, and to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. You know, God asks Abram to leave his family, and sometimes you have to leave family to find family, but even in doing that, God has family blessing in mind. His intent is that all of the families of the whole earth would be blessed. This is known as the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant of promise. It is an unconditional covenant. God will do it no matter what. Bless all the families of the earth. How does he do that? You guys might know or you might have heard this is a reference to the Messiah. That's how God from the nations extracts a nation through whom he's going to gift the Messiah to all of the nations so that all the families of the earth can be blessed. The promise of that is reiterated in 2 Samuel 7. To David, God says, When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. Out of David's natural body came an eternal king of an eternal kingdom. This is known as a Davidic covenant. It is also an unconditional promise. Notice that it's partly fulfilled in Solomon, David's offspring, but ultimately fulfilled in the spiritual incarnation of Christ. And this is a progression we keep on seeing today: the relationship of biological or natural to God's ultimate spiritual plan. Earthly kingdom to spiritual kingdom, genetic offspring to spiritual offspring, natural family to spiritual family. Now we're going to jump ahead to John. We're getting there, guys. John's describing the incarnation of the Son of God, the Messiah. He calls him the true light, which gives light to everyone which was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him and believed in his name, he gave, listen to this very carefully, the right to become children of God. Do not overlook the significance of what I just read. This the right to become a child of God, that's insane. And that wasn't just in John's time. This is right now. Today, this offer is still valid. This does not expire. Well, it does when you die. But today, you're not, you're alive. Today, this offer stands. If you're sitting here and you are not part of God's family, this is your calling. You're welcome to receive the rescue that God had in mind all the way back in Genesis. The help, the salvation that's offered by Jesus. The Son of God Himself offered up for you. We only need to believe and call on him as a Savior. Man, that's so profound. And it goes even deeper. This is a plan, guys, that predated all of creation. Ephesians 1 tells us that it was before the creation of the world that God chose us in him to be blameless. It was before the creation of the world that he chose us, he predestined us to be adopted as sons and daughters. Did you know that when that was written, when Paul penned that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and used the word adoption, there were laws in place in the Greek culture and the Roman culture. Those two cultures were overlapping at this time in the early church. And there were laws on the books in both domains, Greek and Roman, that reinforced the privilege of adoption. In fact, an adopted child had greater privilege than a biological child. Did you guys know that? Did you know there were laws in place? One had to do with the inheritance had to be passed to the adopted child. You could modify to the biological, but to the adopted you could not. And the other law specifically talked about not disowning an adopted child. It was very special to us when we adopted our Abby, who, by the way, January 18th, today, it's her birthday. She's 27 years old. Thank you, Lord, for Abby. When the judge struck his gavel, he said, It is as if she was born to you. Boom. Tear waterfall. We didn't know he was gonna say that. Just tears. The birth certificate is reissued. It's irrevocable. It cannot be undone. Ephesians 2 says, So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. How about that? In Ephesians three, we learn that this is an eternal purpose. This this is this is huge. So that through the church, the manifold or multi-layered wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord. To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. So be it. This last phrase throughout all generations, forever and ever, this literally says to all the generations of the age of the ages. I would love to take time to give you the technical breakdown of that translation, but suffice it to say, we are trying to highlight in this phrase not only the unending duration of this master plan, but the qualitative supremacy, the consummate status of this age in which you live, and all of the generations of this age of ages. It is showing the supreme climactic character of God's now revealed purpose in Christ. All of scripture comes down to this. All of it comes down to this. This is huge. Being members of the household of God, his church, is showing the entire unseen realm, all of the cosmos, all of history, what God had in mind. This is bigger than biology, this is bigger than culture, this is the very architecture of redemption. Come on. Every single thing that God is doing in the world flows through his family, and he's asking you to be a part of it. The point of this whole message is that family is integral to God's eternal purpose. And when we understand this cosmic plan, this design, and when we get in touch with our own human and spiritual needs for belonging, we realize we must participate in family. You need your family, and your family needs you. Yeah, we've all tasted some dysfunction. And we've contributed to it. But we've also all experienced feelings of home. We've tasted it, we've gotten appetizers, we've gotten those moments of ecstasy where we think, oh, this was so worth the pain. How does it work that God takes such jacked-up people and situations? If I can say it so crudely, how can he take such brokenness and yet through it all accomplish an eternal purpose? How? How? Well, it's through the church, it's through the body of Christ, it's through us, adopted by the Father, living in the fullness of Christ, united by the Spirit, where we all carry different functions just like a healthy family does. You see, guys, that's very critical. One person cannot do it all. I cannot do everything in my own house. I can't just keep the thing from falling apart. I tell Stacy, and I mean this in all seriousness, without her, I would just die. Probably within two days because I wouldn't have enough water. Because I don't drink unless she brings me water and then I drink. I would die without my wife. Not only from heartbreak, but also from real life practical things. One person doesn't do it all. You cannot have all of your needs met unless other people contribute to that. And this is how God takes the mess and does it, because one person brings a piece of brokenness, but they also bring a piece of life. And if another person brings a different kind of brokenness where this person's life lives, and then another person's life lives where that person's brokenness is, and every member does its part, kind of like scripture says, then we all grow together up into this spiritual family where every joint, every ligament is interwoven and supplies itself, and this causes the growth of the body up to the measure of the fullness of Christ. It has to be us all doing our part. My heart actually aches at the inadequacy of a sermon to give you what you need to experience this. I really struggled with this in the preparation of this. I'm struggling with it right now as I look out at you and feel like, are these just words? Is this going to go anywhere? Is this really God's eternal purpose in the cosmos? It is. In John 17, Travis, thank you so much for listening to the Lord. Where are you? When you were worshiping, you mentioned John and Jesus' prayer for unity, for oneness. I love that. Jesus in John 17 is pouring out his heart for his disciples. He is earnestly begging for a level of oneness that he had experienced with the Father, his family oneness that he had experienced with the Holy Spirit and with the Father and Him as Son. He pleaded with God to bring that to His disciples. And he pleaded with God to bring that to the rest of the world. In 1 John chapter 3, verse 1, we have this verse. How great is the love of the Father. The love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called the children of God. And that is what we are. The verse is going to come up. I know it's going to come up, and we'll let it sit there. Once it comes up, let it sit there. How great is the love of the Father that He has lavished on us. 1 John 3 1. You can look it up if we don't get to put it up. I want this so bad for you guys. I've tasted the riches of family. Natural family and spiritual family. I've been a part of some deep, rich communities. And you know what? Correction. I have it in my notes because I want to make sure I mention this. I have barely scratched the surface of the riches of family. But from what I've tasted and from what I've experienced, I can tell you with confidence, it is so worth it. Look, we can compare. What is life without family? What does it look like without family? You drift towards loneliness even when you stay busy. In isolation, you become vulnerable to lies about your worth. You carry burdens that you were never meant to carry alone. You miss the sharpening and strengthening that only comes through others. You live below the fullness that God has designed for you. We lose the joy of being known, needed, and celebrated, and we struggle to grow into maturity, never really healing. That's what life is like without family. Without family, you you might survive, but you're not really gonna thrive. It is worth the time. This is not a theory. I'm asking you today to consider a greater investment with the people around you who are part of God's family, who are like Jesus said, the ones who follow after God. Identify them, invest in them, pray for them if you don't know who they are. We're gonna have some ministry time here very, very shortly, where we're gonna be invited to hear God's heart for you about what you can actually do moving forward. But it is so worth the time. It is worth the money, it's worth the exposure, the vulnerability, it's worth the risk, the inconvenience, the discomfort. Why? Let's compare. What do you stand to gain? Belonging that doesn't break. People who know you deeply and love you anyway. A place where your gifts and your presence matter and they're needed because you might be carrying the part that the rest of the This entire room needs. And I actually believe that. That God has given each of us gifts that without you the world is missing something. It is imperative to the health of God's family that we all show up. Strength for battles you can't fight alone. Healing in places where you've been wounded. Joy that grows because it's shared. Voices that call you higher and arms that hold you up. So here's the deal. Here's the deal. And Piper's gonna come up. You don't have to come up yet. But this is really important. Especially in a sermon, because I know how it goes. Um hopefully you took some great notes. I love it if you did. I love it if there were some zingers and you're like, oh, that was good. That's great, that's all good. But guys, it is not enough to know things. It is not enough to know things. It's not enough to know things. You cannot find the things we just talked about on a hike alone. You're not gonna find it in your career, you're not gonna find it in a purchase. To experience life in its fullness, you need family, and we all need you. So the good news is no matter how messy it's been, you're in the right place and you're here at the right time. Because we're doing this. We are doing this. There's lots of layers to the subject, I get it. But I love that you're all here. You guys got up out of bed, you put your clothes on, you ate some food, and you showed up. Why? Because you want something. There's a desire, I sense, to be a part of it and part of each other. So, Piper, yeah, you can go ahead and come on up. You know, you have heard from me, and I'm one person, and I'm a dad. And dads kind of sometimes tend to explain the why and the what and the technicalities, but we have in the house a mother of the house. And when I was reviewing how the logistics were gonna work of the music and all that stuff, we got to talking, and she said some things, and she's like, you know, this and that. And I'm like, even if I wrote down all the things she said. Like, if I say those things, that's the that's a dad speaking. We need a mama to speak some stuff to us. So praise the Lord, He made us male and female. Take it away, Piper.

SPEAKER_02 46:40

Yeah, come on. Thank you, Jesse. Such a beautiful word, and thank you. You know, one of the gifts that we have in the body of Christ is that we do have teachers that can go away, they can read loads of scripture, digest it, and come back and bring it back for us to feed off of, right? Thank you, Jesse, for doing that, for being faithful to the word and for bringing being faithful to this family, bringing who you are to this family. So, in response to this, if we just want to recognize this is not an easy topic. For many people, even if you had a wonderful family growing up, there was still wounding. There were still moments when you felt unseen, when you felt driven, when you felt wounded, hurt, unheard. There were still moments where even in the most amazing, I had beautiful, amazing, spirit-filled, godly man and woman of God as my parents, and I still had places where I had to come back to the Father and to the Holy Father and say, Heavenly Father, I still am hurting because they weren't perfect. And can I first of all just tell you, it's okay to acknowledge that it wasn't perfect. That does not diminish the love of your family. It acknowledges the humanity of your family. And it's okay that they weren't perfect, and it's okay that you weren't perfect, but not everything you experienced was okay. And the Father knows that. And he doesn't just say, hey, come on into this family. You're just gonna have to get over it. Just get up and buck up. He says, Come in with me, I will lead you tenderly, I will call you out of the wilderness, and I will lead you tenderly, and I will minister to those broken and wounded places as I reincorporate you back in. Sometimes he draws us out to heal us and then draws us back in. And the family he draws us back into may not be the same family he drew us out of. It may be a new form of family for us, but it's his family. For some of you, you're saying, you know, when Jesse was talking about how, yeah, well, without family, you may you may survive, but you may not thrive. And you're going, listen, I am lucky I even survived my family. So asking me to come back in as though there's some kind of thriving to happen, that feels completely impossible to imagine. But I want to tell you, that's exactly what the Father's inviting you to do. Come and dare to imagine with me that I'm big enough to write a new story, a family for you, that will actually not only heal all of the wounded places of before, but it will allow you to thrive in this new family. He does not just want obedience, he wants your fullness. He's not just using you as a means to an end. You've been invited to this cosmic reality of his purposes because he loves you and all of those that you will play a part in loving to. But it's for you. And it's for us, and it's for you, and it's for us, and that is the love of a father, right? So we're gonna go through a couple of questions. You guys will have um, we've got some handouts to hand out, and I believe they have pens as well. So if you need a pen, just raise your hand. But we have some people handing out some um some questions, and I just want to give a little bit of time to go through these questions and to reflect. Sit with the father, reflect on these questions, listen to his heart, be honest and vulnerable and real with him. We're gonna take just a few minutes to go through these. And then we're gonna close out for this morning after we do one last thing. So I'm gonna read these quickly as they're handing them out. And if you want to answer all of them, go for it. If you want to answer one and just stay on that one for right this minute, that's okay too. Just read through them and wherever your heart is being tugged into, take some time on those questions. So the first question is, Father, what is your heart for me regarding family? This is especially in the places where you've not experienced the type of family that we're describing here today. What was his desire for you all along? And how does he feel at the places where that wasn't what you experienced with him? And if you're not accustomed to asking God these kinds of questions that are very pointed and very specific and listening for his response, I just want to debunk any expectation that you're gonna hear a booming sound of the Father's voice over your head. Listen, his voice often, in these moments especially, it sounds like your voice in your head. Because he knows you, he knows how to speak to you in your language and in your voice. So he's going to share with you. And when his responses come, they'll invite you to a deeper sense of love, okay? And you can trust that love. It is him, it's not just your best ideas, okay? So the first question, Father, what is your heart for me regarding family? Second, what obstacles or wounds keep me from entering family? Where am I resisting being loved by others or daring to love in that way? Third question, Holy Spirit, how do you want to meet me in this place right now? What do you want me to know? What do you want me to pay attention to? How do you want me to how do you want to meet me right here in regard to family, the family of God? And the fourth, fourth question is how can I move forward? Who, Lord, are you highlighting for me that I'm to embrace, that I'm to connect with, extend love to, and receive love from. So I'm just gonna give you a couple of minutes to go through those. And I encourage you to take this home with you and take it into some quiet space with the Lord and think a little bit deeper with it beyond today as well. Okay, we're gonna just go ahead and come into a land here. Again, I encourage you to take these take these questions home. Let them f let them initiate a conversation with you and the Lord. He has a lot to say on this subject. And this one service would never be enough to really unpack all of that. And we recognize that, but let this start up a conversation between you and the Father, okay? I'm gonna invite our prayer team to come up around the sides of the room. Um, right now, you can go ahead and come. The final thing that I felt like the Holy Spirit was putting in my heart as I was listening. Uh, this last summer, my husband and several of the other men of our community were able to take some young men, their sons, our sons, up into the mountains on a backpacking trip, and they did kind of a rites of passage kind of moment. And there was at one point, there was a moment where all of the men, all of the fathers stood at one fire, and all of the sons stood at another fire. And the fathers called out to the sons one by one. Each one had their own calling, and they would stop. And my oldest son, his name is Weston, and so my husband stood at the fire and he called out, Weston Capin, my son! Come join the men at the fire, come stand among the men. And he called Weston, and Weston left the fire he was at and came over and joined the men. And when he arrived, all of the men that were standing at that fire then greeted Weston and hugged him and encouraged him and said what they see about see is true about him. They called out truth over him and they invited him to come and stand with them, and then he stood at the end, and then the next young man came and my other son, his name is Declan, and Weston got to join in with Graham, my husband, and the other men and said, Declan, come in, come and join the men at the fire. And as Jesse was speaking, I had this sense welling up in me, this desire to look across the room and say your names and call out Christine, come, join the family you belong here. You are seen here. Wade, come, join the family you belong, and to call each person by name. And of course, I don't even know all of your names, but he does. The father does. And I felt the stirring in me, and I was like, God, how do we do that? And he's like, you don't have time to do that. But you can remind them that's always the posture of my heart. My father's heart wells up not only within myself, calling you to the fire, but just like Weston got to call out with the men to his brother, we get to call out to one another, come, you belong here. And I just had this sense that some of you have never heard someone call you by name and invite you to belong. I also had the sense there are some others in here that you have never heard the father say, It is as if you were born to me. You are mine. My everything I have is yours. My your full inheritance is found in my name. And I just want to invite you if you are either one of those people, if you are someone who feels lost and disconnected because you've never heard the Father say, You are mine, it is done. You've been adopted by the grace and the blood of Jesus into my family, and it is as if you were born to me. If you've never heard that, we want to invite you to come join with one of these prayer ministers around the room and allow them to speak that over you and pray with you so that you can receive that invitation from the Father today. And if you are someone who church life, family life, community life, friendships have been painful, and you can say, you know what? I don't know that I have ever felt as though someone looked at me and called me by name and said, Come join us, you belong here. If that's also you, please come to one of these around the room and let us pray over you and join with you and call you by name and invite you to belong here. Don't let the moment pass by. Don't allow isolation to hold you. Step out so that you can be known and seen and called in. If Weston hadn't responded to the call, he couldn't have joined. Don't miss out on your opportunity to respond as you're being called by name this morning by this community and by the Father. Okay? All right. I'm gonna pray over us as we go. Thank you. We went a little longer today than usual, but thank you for that. Thank you for being here and staying in it with us. Father, thank you. Thank you for your purposes that have spanned all generations and all time, Lord. Thank you that your heart has always been positioned toward us. You are benevolent, you posture yourself for our good. Lord, thank you. Thank you, Lord, that you have been calling us by name from the very beginning of time to yourself and to your family. And Lord, I pray that wherever this word family finds us, Lord, I pray, God, that every place that needs to be reimagined, every place that needs to be healed and restored, every place that gets to now move out, where we get to partner with you in calling one another to belong. Lord, I pray that all of those places that you would shine your light into that invitation for us today, God. Help us to perceive what you're calling us to as individuals and as a family as one. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness to us. Thank you for your love. Thank you for your goodness. Thank you that we are adopted, that all has been fulfilled for the full adoption of us into the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Thank you, Jesus. And I just bless each one of you to go today, knowing that you belong to a heavenly father who loves you deeply, to a community who wants to know you and who needs you and who you might need to. And I just bless you to go in the fullness and the love and the peace and the protection and the provision of Jesus today and throughout this week, and to come back so we can worship together again next Sunday. We love you guys. Have a great week.