Two Points::Friday March 19

Point 1::The kingdom of God. What does that mean?

I want you to take a minute to read this and think hard and perhaps even pray and think about how God is pursuing you.

This is a question that I read in a book, "If Christianity was only about finding a group of people to live with, who shared openly their search for God and allowed anyone, regardless of behavior, to seek too, and who collectively lived by faith to make the world a little more like Heaven, would you be interested?"

The kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of is in that question. We live in a world of brokenness. Disease, broken relationships, divorce, pain, famine, earthquakes and tsunamis and so many other things are evidence of our broken world. We each contribute to that brokenness. Mine rubs up against yours and yours against mine. We are left more broken.

But Jesus came to bring this kingdom of God, to restore the brokenness, to redeem it. There is beauty in each of the things that are broken. The body that can be broken with disease is an beautiful thing; the brain, the form, its various systems, skin, the eye, these are all beautiful things. Relationships that can broken can be deeply meaningful. To look upon a wide ocean or a massive mountain can move the soul to poetry yet they can be broken and bring devastation. We are meant to live in th rhythm of that poetry, but our brokenness and the brokenness of the world breaks that rhythm.

Jesus came to restore that, to bring the kingdom of God. He invented gospel centered groups of people for the purpose of being the agents of change to bring about that kingdom.

Point 2:: Gospel Centered Community

If I were to use the term church, you might think of a building you knew as a kid or a place your grand mother took you on Easter. You might think of a place filled with judging people or a place that spends millions on a building or thousands promoting a political agenda while people around them go hungry.

The term church has been hijacked by religious people and by culture. What it really means is a group of people who come together around the fact that they are messed up and that Jesus offers them hope and love. This offer is not attached to any required behavior and is unearnable. It is just given.

People within a gospel centered community give room for other people to be messed up. They do this because Jesus gave them room to be messed up and still gave them relationship. They do this because they are messed up and will need to be given room to be messed up.

This is what Jesus is leading us to be at North Church. I want to be bold enough to ask you to come and give this community a chance, to give Jesus a chance.