Christ Church at Grove Farm

Rev. Craig Gyergyo: Is anyone out there a child of God this morning? Are you a child of God? Yes, I am. Thank You, Lord, for that. What a grace. I say that with great humility because isn't it wonderful that God in His grace has called us His children. What a great day. That motivates me this morning to worship God with all my heart and I hope it does the same for you. My name is Craig Gyergyo and I serve here as a pastor at Christ Church at Grove Farm. So glad that you're all here. It is great to see all of you.

And I know there's some guests in the house. Always privileged to meet guests to those who are coming to us and visiting us. Our hope is that you will find a family to belong to. We consider ourselves to be a family of families. And you are here, and so you are welcome within the family of families. I want to go back to the song that Gideon captured earlier and I just want to pray this as we enter into this time of listening to God and hearing from His Word. Let's pray. I want to go back to that song, Open the Eyes of My Heart, based on the Apostle Paul's words in the New Testament epistle.

Oh Lord, would You pour out Your power and Your love. We're in desperate need of it this morning, Lord. Thank You, Lord, that we have the privilege of being called Your children. Pour out Your power and love now, Lord. Lord, we want to see You. And we proclaim in our hearts even now, Lord, You are holy, holy, holy. Father, we do not want to pretend. We don't want to play church. Forgive us, Lord, for even having any inclination like that. Father, we want to see You. This we pray in Jesus' powerful, powerful name and together we say, Amen.

There is a quote that my wife often repeats from time to time, especially when things get chaotic, as they do in any family. The quote is simply, "We were together, I forget the rest." I like that quote. "We were together, I forget the rest." We just got back from family vacation. I am freshly back from family vacation and I may or may not have reminded myself of that quote a few times during the past week. You know how that goes on vacation. When we actually live life together with real people, you get the whole package. You get the fun moments of course, but you also get the messy things and the stressful moments. It's all part of it.

The goodness of being together outweighs the rest. I think this is true for us as God's people. I was thinking about it this morning. I think also that that kind of messy proximity, being actually close with people, is increasingly rare. We live in a day and age where we have friends, so-called friends on social media. These friends, we wouldn't know them if they walked into this room right now with their name on a placard around their neck. We don't know these people. We call them friends or they're at least labeled as friends.

It is important to distinguish between a crowd and a community as we continue to look at life together because there's a difference. A crowd will applaud your highlights. They'll double-tap your vacation pictures. A crowd likes the curated image of you, that version of your life. But a community, that's something different. A community will absorb your lowlights, not just your highlights. A community will bring a meal when you lose a loved one. A community will sit with you in your lowest moments. That community will hold you accountable when your life starts to drift, when you start to lose your way.

I think one reason that we struggle to see the difference between a crowd and a community is that we've confused freedom and flourishing. In our culture, we celebrate freedom. And I love freedom and I know that you do too. Scripture celebrates freedom, but freedom by itself is not enough. Freedom doesn't automatically teach people how to live. Freedom can open a prison door, but freedom doesn't teach you how to walk through that door. And that's Israel's situation as we go to Exodus 19.

For generations, they'd been living under Pharaoh's role. You might remember this from the Book of Exodus. They knew slavery, they knew fear. They knew what it felt like to have every part of your life dictated by someone else's power. They knew that. But then, it's glorious. God acted. God moved. And through the Passover and through the parting of the Red Sea, through His mighty hand, He delivered them. And what happens? They're finally free. They are free. But freedom is not the final destination. That's one of the overarching points of this leg of the Life Together series.

Freedom is the beginning of something much greater because remember, God doesn't just rescue people from something, He rescues people for something. There's something God has for His people. So yes, Israel is free. But at this point, they're still a crowd. And that is what's going to happen here. We're going to see that to become a community, they need more than just an exit strategy from Pharaoh's hand. They need a covenant. And that is exactly what happens on Mount Sinai. So let's see how God's people are gathered, how God's people are formed, and then finally how God's people are fulfilled.

Let's go to the Word of God, Exodus 19. We are in the Old Testament, early pages of the Bible. I encourage you to have the word in front of you. You will see words on the screen and if you don't have a Bible then use that. But if you have either a hard copy of the Bible or even a digital version, lean into that. Make some notes, highlight some things. We believe the Word of God is alive and active. And God speaks to us through this word. We don't just want to play church, we don't just pretend. Lord, speak to us. Pour out Your power and love.

Exodus 19, I'm going to read verses one through six now. "On the first day of the third month after the Israelites left Egypt, on that very day, they came to the Desert of Sinai. After they had set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. And then Moses went up to God and the Lord called to him from the mountain and said, 'This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.'"

"'Now, if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words Moses, you are to speak to the Israelites," says the Lord. Let's talk about how God's people are gathered. Let's talk about moving beyond being a crowd but being a community. After a couple of months in the wilderness for the Israelites, they arrive at the foot of Mount Sinai. And this, of course, becomes one of the defining moments of the Old Testament because this is pre-Tabernacle, this is pre-promised land.

And here, what does God do? He gathers His redeemed people around Himself. This is a really important point. Look again at Exodus 19:4. "Because here the Word of God says, 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles' wings.' I love that phrase. 'And brought you where? To myself.' I brought you to myself. So the destination of the Exodus, it's not a place. The destination of the Exodus actually is the very presence of God Himself. That's the destination.

Everything else flows out of that. Grace is first. Obedience will follow, but grace is first. Grace is primary. Check out then the beautiful words in verses five and six. I'll read a portion of these words. "'Although the whole earth is mine,' God says, 'You will be for me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.'" He tells them who they are. He's gathering His people, He tells them who they are. And before He tells them what kind of people they should become, it's, "Hey, you are my treasured possession," God says.

God says, "You are a kingdom of priests." He says, "You are a holy nation." Identity comes before the commandments. It becomes before the instruction. Now, you live in a world, talking to this congregation here, those who are worshipping online, you live in a world that spends enormous energy trying to construct and cultivate an identity. That is something that we modern people spend a lot of time on. Here, God speaks in a single identity over His redeemed people. In essence, here's the identity: "You belong to me," He says. "You are mine, you belong to me." What comforting words, what beautiful words.

And then He says, "You are a kingdom of priests." What does a priest do? Well, aside from stand up and blabber on and on like I am right now in front of you, a priest represents God before people and people before God. Israel's calling was never meant to stop with Israel. Their calling's greater than that. Israel wasn't chosen because they're more deserving than the other nations. No, God is gracious. He set His love on them so that the nations might come to know Him.

The vision is that their community would become their witness. They are a nation of priests. The nations were meant to catch a glimpse of God's character through the life of His people gathered together. I wonder, have we forgotten that? Have we forgotten the power of being priests? In the New Testament, Peter says, "You are a royal priesthood." He echoes these words. Jesus went on to tell His disciples, "By this, everyone will know that you're my disciples, if you love one another." There's a witness embedded in God's people. And long before the church of Jesus was established on earth, God was already teaching that lesson here in Sinai.

There's a power in the gathering of God's people. The world pays attention to the way that God's people treat one another. I found myself thinking about this after our Vacation Bible School, which ended just a couple of weeks ago. It was a wonderful time, it was awesome. And here's something that stuck with me. There were hundreds of people gathered here, the children, the teens, adults of all ages and everyone serving one another out of genuine love. It is truly a beautiful week. We cut off our volunteer list. We had more volunteers than we needed because people experience this kind of love.

What you see are people joyfully serving together because they believe that God is at work. Five days straight of this. And here is what was happening. The kids weren't just hearing the gospel or singing about the gospel. They were seeing it. They were experiencing love through a community that was shaped by the Holy Spirit. I told people this makes the harvest inevitable when you're in that kind of greenhouse, that kind of love. And Israel was always called to be a people like that.

The Old Covenant, which we're talking about here today, could never produce that kind of life completely. That awaited the day when Christ would pour out His Spirit on the church and when the church actually lives the way we're talking about. People don't just hear the gospel. People begin to see its power. This is the power of God's people gathered. And all of this confronts the transactional nature of relationships in the world today, in our culture. The transactional relationship asks, "What's in it for me? What do I get?" Whereas a covenant relationship asks, "Who has God called me to love faithfully because I love Him?"

And so listen, God gathers His people around the mountain and He tells them they belong to Him. And because they belong to Him, they belong to one another and that belonging changes everything. Interest that people have, that'll gather people, but promises, God's promises are what keep people together. So next comes the question that naturally follows. If God gathers His people, if this is who God's people are, then how are God's people supposed to live together? That's exactly what chapter 20 gets into. Let's go to chapter 20 now of Exodus.

I'm going to read you just the first three verses. This is the passage where we see how God forms His people. How does He form His people? This is the chapter that contains the Ten Commandments. Let's just get the beginning of this right now, verses one through three. God spoke all these words: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me." And then the commandments continue.

Now, when you hear the words "Ten Commandments," I think we probably conjure up a lot of things. Films, a lot of ideas. We might think of a list of rules as if God pauses the story here to hand out an instruction manual. But there is something much deeper at work here. You've got to remember again, where's Israel standing? They are standing at the foot of a mountain, the mountain Sinai. And God has carried them on eagles' wings miraculously. And He has called them His treasured possession. This is what's happened.

Now He begins to shape the life of His people. But before even the first command comes in verse two, there's another reminder of grace. He says, "I am the God who rescued you." All of this is couched in this truth, that God in His grace He rescued them. Yahweh doesn't want them to forget the order. It's redemption, then formation. It's grace, then obedience. Don't forget the order. That's the way this works. God was teaching the people that He saved how to live together. That's what He does here.

When most people again hear Ten Commandments, you think rules. That's our tendency. God was creating a community. Again, much deeper. And the commandments are God's design for life together. Every one of these commandments is interesting. I was talking to Lisa about this yesterday. Every one of the commandments protects something that is worth loving. Now, why is that true? Because every healthy relationship is built on trust. So these commandments are not random. They're actually highly relational.

These commandments are God's way of saying, "This is what love looks like when it is lived out in community." That's what the commandments are at the heart of them. And that's why Jesus could summarize all 10 of the commandments with two. What did He say? He said, "Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself." He wasn't rewriting the commandments. He was revealing what had always been at the heart of the commandments.

Look what happens when these foundations begin to crack. If you were to go on and I encourage you to do this, read the passage. Go read the commandments this week and think about each one of them. When worship is lost, then identity is lost. When faithfulness disappears from marriages, the damage doesn't stay between two people. No, children carry that damage and families carry that damage and then even communities end up carrying that damage. When God no longer holds first place, everything else begins to drift.

Go through each of the commandments again and you will see that all have community implications when they are not upheld, when they are not honored. Their implications are not just for individuals, but for a collective, for people. Every command is guarding the kind of life that we all want, the kind of life that you aspire to: trust and faithfulness and truth and love. These commandments provide guardrails. And Israel couldn't sustain that kind of life.

The law showed them the beauty of covenant love, but the law could not give them the power to live it. And the problem was never God's law. The problem was sinful hearts. That's the problem. That's why Sinai, this passage leaves us longing for something more. Because God is not teaching His people how to keep a list. That's not the point. He's teaching His people how to learn to love, how to learn to be His reflection in the world. Think about your own life for a moment. You don't want a spouse that decides what faithfulness means from one week to the next. You don't want that kind of life.

That is an insecure life. That is a miserable life. You want someone because your heart already knows what the culture denies. Love doesn't survive when truth is negotiable and trust doesn't flourish when promises mean nothing. Your heart already knows this. The culture denies it. And this is why God speaks at Sinai because He loves His people and He wants them to experience the kind of life that they were created for. It's easy to nod our heads at what's wrong with the culture, but it's harder to ask, what's happening in us? What's going on inside of us?

So just to pause for a moment, I want to put a couple of questions for reflection on the board. These are three questions. You might take a snapshot of these, you might write them down and think about these as we think about what it means to be a covenant community. What does it mean to be people who gathered together by God's grace are formed by His grace? Where have I decided my preferences matter more than God's promises, God's truth? Where's that happening in your life? Where have you put your preference ahead of the promises of God?

Where have you treated commitment as something convenient instead of something that's sacred? In other words, it's dispensable. Where have you been treating commitment that way? And where have you expected grace from others while withholding it from them? Listen, a covenant community wrestles with questions like these. What God desires to do is not to build an audience. He's not building a crowd. What does God desire? He wants to build a family.

Families forgive and families stay. This is what covenant does. The commandments are not relics from an ancient mountain. They are an invitation into a different way of living, a different kind of community. Do you see the difference? The difference between thinking of them as rules when thinking of them instead about what God is forming in us and His best for us in terms of how we live as a community that reflects His glory in the world. So God gathers His people, He forms His people, but then He fulfills His people.

Look at verse 18. I'm going to jump down to Exodus 20:18. The Scripture says, "When the people saw the thunder and the lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear." And they stayed at a distance and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen, but do not have God speak to us or we'll die." The mountain shakes here, the people shake too. What happens is the people realize something. And what they realize is what we sang earlier, "Holy, holy, holy."

That God is holy, that He is perfectly holy. He is holy, holy, holy. They realize that His commandments aren't just carved in stone, that actually these commandments are like a mirror. Their response about saying, "I can't come close to God," is a mirror who shows us who God is and also who we are. If you look at the commandments and you find yourself saying, "I'm struggling here. I don't feel worthy." Well, that's the reality. The reality is they're a mirror in that way.

Every one of us have put something ahead of God and we've all broken trust and we've all wounded the relationships that God created us to enjoy. And so if God is this holy and we are this woeful, how could people like us ever come close? How can we not be like the Israelites who say, "Do not have God speak to us or we'll die"? Go to the New Testament because in the New Testament, in the Book of Hebrews, there is what I would consider to be a parallel passage in Hebrews 12.

I'll read a couple verses here for you. Hebrews 12:18-21. How can we ever come? How could people like us come close to God? Well, look at Hebrews 12:18 and 21. The Scripture says, "You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire, to darkness, gloom and storm, to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them. The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, 'I am trembling with fear.'"

The Scripture continues and says this in verses 22 and 24: "But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."

Do you hear what the Word of God is saying to us? At Sinai, the people stood at a distance, but at Jesus, Jesus did what Israel and every one of us could never do: He loved the Father perfectly. Jesus Christ loved His neighbor perfectly and He fulfilled every commandment, every one of them that you have broken, that I have broken. He took upon Himself the judgment. He took on the judgment of our broken covenant and everything it deserved.

Through His death, through His resurrection, He didn't simply save isolated sinners. No, what's He do? He creates a new humanity, a new covenant people, a church. He creates a church so that through Him, we can become the people that God always intended us to be. In fact, now, by His Spirit, He is forming us into the people that God has called us to be. Here is the miracle, the great miracle of the New Covenant. At Sinai, the people received God's law written on tablets of stone.

But now, God has given us His Holy Spirit and under the New Covenant, God writes on our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The law no longer stands before us; by the Spirit God is at work within us. He's writing on our hearts. Let me ask you a question. When people look at your life, when they look at your marriage, when they look at your family, when they look at your small group, when they look at Christ Church at Grove Farm, what do they see?

What do people see? What do they experience? Just another gathering of people or do they experience covenant community, the kind of people that God is forming and desires to form? That's His dream. A people who tell the truth, a people who keep promises, a people who forgive quickly. Who do you need to forgive today? Don't hold off, make the move. A people who bear one another's burdens, a people who love because they have first been loved through Jesus Christ.

Oh, that people when they experience you and your family and your small group and the church, that they would experience all of that and more. Listen, the world has plenty of crowds, lots and lots of crowds. You can name them. What it desperately needs are covenant communities. This is what the world needs. It's what God started, what He revealed at Sinai and it's what Jesus is now forming through His church.

Every time we yield to the Spirit and by God's grace choose faithfulness over convenience, forgiveness over resentment, commitment over preference. When we give the world a glimpse of what the kingdom of God looks like, something powerful is released. May we be these people because God has swung open wide the prison door and Jesus has opened the door to the Father's house and now, by His grace, we are learning to live there together. Life together.

I want to ask you to stand and let's do this today as we prepare to close this time of worship together. Let's ask God to make all of this true of us. Not that we would just attend this church. No, that we would become this kind of church, this kind of people. A people who love one another, a people who forgive quickly, a people who keep their promises, a people through through whom the world catches a glimpse of Jesus.

And so this song, let's sing this as a prayer. It's called The Church. It talks about the reality that we're brothers and we're sisters under the banner of God. This idea of life together is way bigger than any of us have wrapped our arms around. It goes all the way back to Sinai. You're a royal priesthood. You're a people gathered and formed by God and you are a people who through the Holy Spirit have the fulfillment of the promise in Jesus Christ. Let's sing this song as a prayer. Let's truly be the church. Lord, help us. Amen.