Living Hope

Guest (Male): A whole world wants to divide everybody up by politics and race and class and economics and power and pit everybody against each other. But friends, in the church, in the family of God, we have resources the world does not have. And Christ has paid far too high a price for us to tear this thing apart.

Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy, and today, human tribalism, it's a danger for the church and the family of God. Yes?

Philip Miller: Yeah. Well, the reality is we all have tribes. We all have groups that we're a part of by nature and by socialization. We have groups and those groups tend to have a lot of pride about their own identity and they tend to look out at other groups with fear and animosity.

And what happens is when that mentality of that human tribalism, when that creeps into the church and we start to operate out of our old self, our old flesh, and think those tribal marks are what ultimately matter more than the gospel, more than the unity that we have in Jesus Christ, it is deadly.

It breaks down the very thing that Christ is trying to unify and bring together and reconcile in himself. So we are violating the very essence of the gospel and what Christ is doing. So it is super dangerous, and that's why we've got to lean into the resources of the gospel that Jesus has available for us.

Larry McCarthy: We're in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 11 through 22. So we go now to the pulpit of the Moody Church.

Guest (Male): The same grace that reconciles us to God also reconciles us one with another. And this reconciliation is far more than a ceasefire. It's far more than just a cessation of hostilities. It is the beginning of an interdependent and mutually loving multiethnic family in Jesus Christ. From alienation to reconciliation, now to incorporation. Incorporation, verse 19, "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God."

Just look at all the changes that have happened. You're no longer strangers. When was the last time you used the word stranger? It was back up in verse 12, right? Strangers of the covenants of promise. You're no longer strangers. You're now in the new covenant. You belong to Jesus Christ. You have access to God. He says you are no longer aliens. When was the last time you used the word alien? Back up in verse 12. You were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. You used to not be one of God's chosen people. You were estranged from his promises and blessings, but now in Jesus Christ, you are a chosen son or daughter of God. You are inheritor of the blessings of Jesus.

You are, he says, fellow citizens with the saints. You belong. You're not second-class citizens at all. You belong with the saints. You're holy and clean and pure. You have full access to the presence of God because of the atoning blood of Jesus Christ. He says you've been members, you are now members of the household of God. This is family language. Remember we're adopted as children of God, beloved members of his forever family. We have been welcomed to the family table. This is the picture.

Look at all these layers of imagery. From stranger to family, from alien to citizen, from sinner to saint, from outsider to member, from orphan to son and daughter in the household of faith. And he's got one more image he wants to finish with. Look at verse 20, "Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord." Now, I've been to Jerusalem and there's a tunnel you can walk along and you can actually see and touch the foundation stones of the temple complex.

There's one in there, they don't even know how they moved it. It's been moved and quarried. They have no idea technologically how they moved it. It's kind of like the pyramids. How did this happen? But it weighs between 250 and 300 tons. I mean, it's just massive. And that's the picture that Paul has in mind here. He goes, I want you to picture Jesus as a cornerstone, a massive block of stone, quarried perfectly, massive foundational and he's right in the corner with perfect right angles.

And going out on one side, you've got the apostles, the New Testament leaders, and they're coming in and feeding in right into the corner where Christ is. And then down the other side, you've got the prophets, the Old Testament leaders or the Jewish leaders who are coming in in the cornerstone that is Christ. So you've got this New Testament people and the Old Testament people and they're coming together into a perfect foundation built together as this temple. The Old Testament people of God, the New Testament people of God, united in Christ. It no longer matters, he says, in this building, it doesn't matter if you're a Jew or you're a Gentile. We are all in Christ. We belong to each other.

Verse 22, "In him you also, Gentiles, are being built together with us Jews into this dwelling place for God by the Spirit." This is amazing. Friends, think about it. The very people who had to look over the wall because they weren't allowed anywhere near the temple have now become the foundation stones of the glorious dwelling of God in the temple itself. We've become his temple. How on earth did that happen? The Gentiles, we were far too sinful to come in, weren't we? Far too sinful. We had to stay away on pain of death. But Jesus brought us near on pain of death.

He brought us near. Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. First Peter 3:18. Friends, Jesus has made full atonement in his blood. He has cleansed us of all unrighteousness so that God may now be pleased to dwell in us through his spirit. We are the temple of God. This is beautiful. And this multiethnic temple is being built up, it is being joined together. Jews and Gentiles incorporated together. You see the word corpus in there? Incorporated? Corpus, body, Latin. Incorporated. You have been brought together in one new body, one new man, one chosen people, one family, one covenant, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, one Holy Spirit, one temple to display the glory of God to the world.

God's glory is revealed through his multiethnic church. God's glory is revealed through his multiethnic church. One of my favorite passages in all the Bible is Revelation chapter 7, verse 9, where people from every nation, language, tribe, people are gathered together in heaven in worship of the Lamb who was slain. Friends, do you realize it takes the glory of the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Jesus Christ to bring all these people groups together? This heavenly vision, these people who would never have gotten along any other way, have now in Jesus Christ been made family. This is amazing.

And notice, friends, the oneness we have in Jesus does not erase our cultural distinctions. In heaven, you will still be recognizably a part of every nation, tribe, and tongue and people and language. Your culture will last for eternity. So the way Christ brings you in and makes you one in this body of Christ is not by erasing your culture, by giving you something bigger than your culture to come around and worship in. Does that make sense? This is massively important.

Jews are Jews forever in heaven. Gentiles are Gentiles forever in heaven. You will still be Sudanese and Iraqi and Chinese and Hispanic and Scottish and Polish and American. You will hold on to your ethnic identity, but something will outrank your tribal, national markers for all eternity. You will be, above all else, you will be in Christ as a son and daughter of God. You will be a part of his family. And Christ will get all the more glory for eternity because he has brought together this multiethnic bride that the world could never get along, but in glory for Jesus' sake have come together as one. Christ will reconcile in himself the things that can never get reconciled in this world. This is amazing.

And here's what's awesome. He's starting that reconciliation work right here, right now, in his church. Friends, the church of Jesus is called to be a place where people who would normally never get along become family in Jesus Christ. That's why Jesus' prayer for us in John 17:21 is, "I pray, Father, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us so that the world might believe that you have sent me." Friends, God's glory is revealed through his multiethnic church when we live like family. Friends, here's the takeaway, bottom line: God has adopted us, so now we must adopt one another. God has adopted us, so we must adopt one another.

Friends, listen to me on this. God's family is far bigger than our natural tribes. God's family is far bigger than our natural tribes. We all have tribes by nature. We have ethnicity, we have race, we have socioeconomic strata, we have nationality, we have neighborhoods, we have political allegiances. And there are people that we feel more comfortable with, we fit in with more. And there are other people that we feel like we don't fit in with. That's just how the world is. We tend to split apart. And we tend to get overly proud about our group, like we're the best, and we tend to be overly fearful about other groups that aren't like us. And so we're driven by fear and pride.

And friends, God is in the business of taking people who would never otherwise have gotten along and making them family in Jesus Christ. Because the gospel, think about it, the gospel strips away your pride, doesn't it? You can't be proudful in the gospel because you're the chief of sinners, right? You don't have a leg up on anyone else, right? We're all saved by grace. We all get in here because of Jesus. None of us have a leg up. So no pride.

And the gospel counters our fear. It teaches us to love people because Jesus loves them. We learn to love them too. And we learn to love people who are very, very different from us. Because that's what Jesus did to get this started. Do you realize Jesus crossed the greatest cultural barriers when he left heaven to come down to earth to love you and save you and make you his very own? He crossed to a different neighborhood. He crossed across the boundaries and the lines. He came all the way down from heaven and earth to rescue you. And when we were enemies, his enemies, Christ died for us. He said, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

With gospel resources like that, if you realize how much Christ has been willing to do to make you alive in him, you can't hold back on this kind of stuff with other people. If he did all that for us, Jesus paid an infinite price to make us family, and we cannot allow human tribalism to destroy the family that God has brought together. Amen? And friends, our world is trying to divide us. Our politicians are trying to divide us. Their whole strategy is they kind of get you to identify with a group and they say, "We'll be your hero," and they pitch you against other groups and that's how they get your vote and it's just a mess.

A whole world wants to divide everybody up by politics and race and class and economics and power and pit everybody against each other. But friends, in the church, in the family of God, we have resources the world does not have. And Christ has paid far too high a price for us to tear this thing apart. What God has joined together, let no one tear asunder, right? So God has adopted us, and now we get to adopt one another. We must learn to love the members of God's family who are beyond our natural tribal lines.

So how do you do that? This is where it gets really, really practical. How do you put this into action? Brilliant idea, right? Why don't you find somebody in God's family who doesn't look like you, talk like you, act like you, vote like you, and become friends with them? Just start there. And Moody Church is a great place to try that on because we've got people from 70 different birth countries here. We can become a beautiful family if we would just get out of our comfort zones. I believe that God wants to do in the church something that can never happen in this world. He wants to make us a beautiful family. Will it be easy? No. Do we bring baggage? Yes.

But you know what? You invite people to your home, you go spend time at their place, be curious, ask questions, listen, experience life through their lens, show empathy, pray with them, love them, advocate for them, defend them. When your tribe acts up toward other groups of people, apologize, make things right. Be family with each other. Some of the most beautiful glimpses of glory in Jesus Christ that I've ever seen have come from hanging out with people that are not at all like me. I have learned more about generosity and sacrifice and forgiveness and courageous faith and the all-sufficiency of Jesus by hanging out with people that have totally different lives than me, totally different backgrounds.

Friends, we need one another. We cannot see the glories of Christ by ourselves. We need the body, we need one another. And God has adopted us, so now we've got to adopt one another. After all, we are one in Christ. Amen? Amen.

Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy, and today, Pastor Miller, you're challenging us to get out of our comfort zone.

Philip Miller: That's right. Yeah, it's not easy. It takes initiative to reach out to people that are different from us, who may not see the world the same way, whose perspective will be stretching for us. But that is good. The body of Christ is wonderfully diverse. There's people from all kinds of backgrounds, and we are called to enter into those learning, curious relationships where we get to discover life through other people's eyes and through other people's experiences. And that stretch, that stretch that Christ is calling us to, is part of what it means to be in the body of Christ. It's part of the life that God has for us.

Larry McCarthy: Many of our listeners, though, are going to say in response to that, "I tried. I tried and I got hurt." So we have to acknowledge this church hurt.

Philip Miller: That's true. Yeah. Well, and that's one of the reasons I think we tend to stay in our comfort zone, right? Because it is easier. We're not as vulnerable. It doesn't cost us as much. And I think there's a distinction here that we need to make. Just because we're all called to take risks, we're all called to get out of our comfort zone, we're not called to put ourselves in harm's way. And I think it is true, some people are toxic and some people are not helpful and they're not healthy.

And so there are appropriate boundaries that we need to have. And some of those hurts you get into and you're like, "Yeah, that was not good. I shouldn't be in that relationship or in that place." But the counterpoint is I can't overreact and become so risk-averse that I stop getting out of my comfort zone completely because Christ calls us to serve. He calls us to give ourselves away. He calls us to a costly love, just like he loved us at great cost. We love each other at great cost.

So there's a sense in which I'm supposed to bear each other's burdens. I'm supposed to reach out with compassion and love. And it will be expensive, this love, as we get out of our comfort zone. So I don't want to pull back entirely just because I had a bad experience and I got hurt once. I don't want to get into a permanent place where I've just bound my heart up and I won't even open up again. That wouldn't be healthy. So always pushing out in love, always reaching out, always trying to bridge these gaps.

That's what we're called to do. Sometimes it's going to go really, really well. Sometimes it may be a little painful. Sometimes it might be toxic and then I have to pull back. But the movement of constantly pouring myself out in community for the sake of others, that's what Christ calls me to.

Larry McCarthy: So Pastor Philip, can you give me an example of when this has worked out well?

Philip Miller: Yeah. Well, here's a good example. So there was a guy in my life and we got sideways. The details don't matter, but we had kind of, you know, it's one of those things where you kind of stick it to someone and then they throw a small bomb at you and then you throw a missile back and it just escalated out of control. And so we just didn't talk to each other for a long time because of that.

And then there was a moment, I don't even remember how the ice started to thaw, but both the Lord was working in both of our hearts. We didn't have peace about it. It was this unresolved disconnection. We're both followers of Christ. We should be able to work through this. The Lord was convicting us. And so there was just this moment where we both, the Lord had been working in our lives and we both realized we need to do something about this. So we sat down over lunch.

And here's what's amazing: the gospel gave me two things. It gave me a freedom of defensiveness that I wasn't expecting. You know, when you feel wronged, you get defensive and you tend to be like, "Yeah, but you did this," and you tend to start litigating all the time for yourself and defending yourself. So you tend to be really defensive. But really at the end of the day, that's kind of self-righteousness. It's I'm trying to prove that I'm right and they're in the wrong.

And so what I felt is the Lord starting to erode some of that defensiveness in my own heart. And then there was a willingness to do the olive branch, to actually say, "I'm sorry for the things where I contributed." And the Lord had been working also on a willingness to actually forgive. And the reality is Christ has forgiven me for far more for what I did to him, to Christ, than what this guy did to me. So those things had been happening in my heart.

I think they were happening in his heart as well. And so when we sat down, we started by just owning our part of the problem and confessing that we actually do love each other bigger than that moment. And we said things that were hard to say, but they were good. Anyway, we became, we're not the closest friends ever, but the hostility is gone. The reconciliation is there. So my point is if we all humble ourselves and are willing to let the gospel work into our souls and let the oil of the gospel just soften our brittle leather of our hearts, start to work in there, I think there's a lot of potential here if we yield to the gospel.

Larry McCarthy: Wow. Thank you, Pastor Philip, certainly for being so transparent, but talking about the wonder of the gospel, it's amazing what God is doing through his people. In a world that constantly pulls us in different directions, how do we stand firm in our faith? Dr. George Sweeting wisely observed that the very word Christian has been seriously corrupted in our day. If you long for clarity and courage to live a distinct Christian life, then Dr. George Sweeting's excellent book, *How to Begin the Christian Life*, is precisely what you need.

This isn't about retreating from the world, but about engaging with it effectively. Now, whether you're a new believer navigating the world's pressure or a long-time Christian seeking to boldly live out your faith, this book is for you. And for a limited time, we're offering *How to Begin the Christian Life* for a donation of any amount. To request your copy, simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us at 1-800-215-5001. That's livinghopeoffer.com, 1-800-215-5001. Or you can write us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you'll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by The Moody Church.