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Eastside Church Sermons
These are the sermons of Eastside Church in Madison, WI. We live in a broken world - everyone feels it. We believe we were made to have lasting peace with ourselves, each other, and God. Because of who Jesus is and what he has done, we don’t have to experience the hardships (or joys) of this life alone. We exist to be a church made up of people who love, live like, and speak of Jesus, locally and globally, as the Spirit leads.
Eastside Church Sermons
Becoming People Of Love by Ben Hacker
Struggling with feelings of inadequacy and sleepless nights filled with self-doubt? It's a journey many of us know all too well. This episode peels back the layers of these struggles and uncovers the profound experience of transformational love through God. We explore the "God gap", the space between knowing God's love intellectually and truly feeling it in our hearts, as revealed in Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3:16-21. We discuss how embracing God's invitation to transformational love can overcome these barriers and help us build a community that fully embodies and shares His love.
Ever wondered why past relationships shape your perception of God's love? Through Ephesians 3:17-19, we delve into the importance of experiencing God's love beyond mere intellectual understanding. We draw from the wisdom of Dallas Willard and his concept of the "with God life," and reflect on how living in intimate relationship with God allows us to embrace His love, wisdom, and power in every aspect of our lives. This chapter is all about being rooted in loving relationships to find peace within ourselves and becoming vessels of His transformative love.
Ready to awaken to God's love in a deeper way? We introduce practical spiritual practices, including a six-day guide to engaging with disciplines like prayer, scripture, meditation, silence, and solitude. Discover the significance of Sabbath and the necessity of slowing down to align with God's rhythm. By sharing personal stories of creation, rebellion, redemption, and restoration, we highlight how these experiences can awaken others to God's love. We conclude with a powerful prayer for the Holy Spirit to reveal areas in our lives needing repentance, and to help us grow in grace and love, preparing us to radiate His love to our community.
Thank you, houston. Good morning Eastside. How are you? How are you this morning? Good, okay, you know, it's not so much the volume thing. I just want to check and make sure I can hear you know from all the voices. So well I it was quite the storm last night. I woke up at 1 am, full disclosure. I woke up at 1 am with all the ways that I have failed everyone in my life just like stampeding through my head. Do you guys ever experience anything like that? That's the worst, right, by the way, I feel way less lonely with all of the nods that I'm getting from people. And so I did. The only thing that I could do was I went out and I read through my sermon on God's love and it was really good and I'm really excited to preach this.
Speaker 1:I was originally going to preach the back half of Romans 12. Houston did the first couple of verses last week. If you've not been with us, we're in kind of our annual mission and vision series, and so we usually take the first few weeks after Labor Day just kind of re-up on. Well, who are we? What are we trying to do? So we had a worship and prayer service two weeks ago and then last week Houston preached our mission, which is to love Jesus, live like Jesus and speak of Jesus in our neighborhoods and around the world so that others might do the same, or some version of that, locally and globally. I think we changed it to now, and so this week I'm going to preach our vision, and our vision we state in the form of a dream. We dream of a day when everyone in Madison and Dane County would have a daily encounter with Jesus through his people and obviously that's more than just the folks here in this room and so we believe that God is on a mission and we want to join him in that. So we want our vision to be tied in to carry us there. And as I was preparing, I kind of hit a wall on Wednesday and God just really started awakening some things in my own heart about his love for me.
Speaker 1:Tim and I Tim Blankenship, who's our elder candidate here at Eastside last week or two weeks ago, I can't remember now right after Labor Day, we got to spend a few days in North Carolina on a retreat and we were there with the Eden Project and the theme of the retreat was the knowledge of God, and so a lot of what we talked about was just how we experience love from our Father. And so this morning, as we talk about what we're shooting for, our vision as a church, we're going to unpack some of that together. I love our vision, I think it's really compelling, but I think, if we're honest, a lot of us might struggle to experience kind of the transformation that we're hoping to see in Madison for ourselves, kind of the transformation that we're hoping to see in Madison for ourselves. And so just this idea of like encountering Christ and then put on that the burden that that is something that we have to bring to other people. And I just wonder this morning if, like me a lot of times, you don't experience the love of Christ, you don't experience that kind of a run-in with God, but you experience something else. Because I think, despite our best efforts, there can be a gap between what we know is true about God and his love for us, what we read in scripture, what we're told in sermons, what we're told in conversation with people and encouraged to, and what we actually experience when we relate to him, or what we actually experience when we relate to him, or what we feel, and no doubt there. We can all have the right theological mind to say we're the limiting factor, but just like it is when we relate with other people, what's real is real in interaction.
Speaker 1:And so this morning I want to talk about this idea of what's become known as the God gap. And so it's the idea of the difference between what we know to be true about God and what we experientially know to be true about God. And I love this passage Ephesians 3, because Paul is praying for this gap to be closed. And so we're going to walk through this together, because this gap does not just affect us individually. I want to put out there in front of us, eastside, that this gap between what we know about God and what we experience with God is a barrier to our dream that everybody in Madison and Dane County would have a daily encounter with Jesus through his people. The mission will stall if we cannot give what we have not received. This God gap becomes a barrier to others experiencing Jesus through us. So we're going to look at the barriers that keep us from his love, discover how embracing an invitation to transformational love will change us from the inside out.
Speaker 1:And so I just want to ask you here at the outset. Where are you at this morning? Just close your eyes. I just want to give you a second to locate yourself. What's present in your body? You feel tension. Is there gladness? We're all feeling a little bit moist. At least I'm going to loop you in with me. Are you longing for a deeper, more authentic experience of God's love this morning? Set aside for a moment whether or not you think you deserve it, but locate that longing. I would submit to you that it was built into the human heart.
Speaker 1:So we're going to start by exploring the problem of this God gap. Then we're going to dig into God's invitation to experience transformational love through a life with him, as highlighted in Paul's prayer at the end of Ephesians, chapter 3. We're going to dig into God's invitation to experience transformational love through a life with him. That's highlighted in Paul's prayer at the end of Ephesians, chapter 3. We're going to focus in on verses 16 through 21. And then, finally, we're going to just discuss some practical steps. What does it look like to cultivate a deeper relationship with God so that we can become a community that embodies his love as we seek to love, live like and speak of Jesus until everyone in Madison and Dane County has a daily encounter with Jesus through us, Well, through his people, more than us.
Speaker 1:But before we do anything else, would you join me? Let's pray, god, we come before you this morning. We're grateful for this place, grateful for the teachers that work so hard in this building to serve the community. God, I know that one teacher is here with his family this morning, right now. I pray that you would just be with them. Bless them, that they might have just a good day being with their dad here at the school. No doubt he's preparing for this coming week. And, god, I just think of all of the other churches that are gathering all around Madison, the ones that we know about, the ones that we don't know about. God, I pray that, as you receive glory from the church, that your people would be blessed by that, that they would feel your love in that this morning, and that God we gathered here would have an expanded heart, that this vision that we believe you have given us and called us to be real and something that we desire for ourselves first, so that we can pass it on to others In Jesus' name. And my brothers and sisters said with me amen, amen.
Speaker 1:Well, according to a Barna study, 77% of Americans view God as angry, critical or distant. And we see this a little bit in the story of Job, because, after hearing about God, finally experiencing him, job exclaims this is in 42, at the end of the book my ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Dallas Willard describes this kind of crisis of vision viewing God as angry, distant by saying we live at the mercy of our ideas, and if our ideas about God are wrong, then our whole life is wrong. And if our ideas about God are wrong, then our whole life is wrong. Family, if we have an incorrect, an incomplete vision of God, seeing him as distant, angry, indifferent, we won't seek him as he truly is. We won't trust him or draw near to him. We won't experience the fullness of his love that we were intended to, and that's the problem. If the God gap remains in our lives, our ability to be authentic witnesses is compromised. We can't introduce others to intimacy with God if we have not experienced it ourselves. Therefore, this God gap impacts our vision, the vision of everyone encountering Jesus daily, because it limits our capacity to be conduits of his love.
Speaker 1:Paul recognizes this gap. Look at verses 16 and the beginning of 17 in chapter 3. It's right there in your bulletin or if you have your Bibles open. Paul writes that according to the riches of his God's glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Paul knew that merely knowing about God's love wasn't enough. He longed for them to experience it, and God longs for that for us. Today the gospel declares that through Christ, god has come near, that he is Emmanuel, god with us, and the Holy Spirit makes this nearness real to us.
Speaker 1:Today we're about to kick off a sermon series in Romans 8. I cannot wait. It's going to be great. Romans 8, 16 reminds us. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children, and this is the regular invitation of God to us. Remember, you're my child. I've invited you into relationship with me. The spirit continually whispers the truth of God's love to us, bringing the reality of the cross and the resurrection into our hearts, turning the abstract into the experiential.
Speaker 1:Jesus came to embody the love of God perfectly, to show us what true humanity is supposed to look like. But he didn't just demonstrate it, he made it possible for us to experience perfect love ourselves. But what does this love look like in our daily lives? Author Steve Porter writes this. He says in many ways the idea of God's loving presence is what restores and transforms the human heart, and that should not surprise us. We know that when people seen most clearly in children are accepted, known, cared for, lovingly challenged, forgiven, held, listened to, noticed, understood and so on, they tend to flourish socially, emotionally, physically and spiritually. This is the kind of love that we're invited into, a love that sustains, transforms us even in the hardest circumstances.
Speaker 1:But let's be honest, the idea of being invited into a love that will never run out on us, no matter what, is difficult to believe, isn't it? David Benner writes the genuine transformation requires vulnerability. It's not the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life-changing. It's the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally, and we've all been hurt. We've risked putting weight on relational love and it's fallen out from under us. But the vulnerability that it requires to enter into life-changing relationship is right where the Holy Spirit under us. But the vulnerability that it requires to enter into life-changing relationship is right where the Holy Spirit meets us. It's not just about acknowledging our need for God's love. It's about experiencing it in a way that brings security and peace to our deepest fears, our deepest hurts.
Speaker 1:Paul continues in Ephesians 3, verse 17. Would you look there again with me? He says that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul assumes we need help to comprehend God's love. That's good news for us. In verse 19, he says that we need help to comprehend the love of God because it leads to us knowing the love of Christ.
Speaker 1:And Paul is doing a little bit of a word play here that doesn't show up real well in our English translation. He's using the word for knowledge, genonai, which carries the idea of experience with it. Think Genesis 3, adam knew his wife. That's that kind of word, that kind of experiential knowledge. But then he says that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge, using a different word, a word that is intended to convey this idea of head knowledge, something that you learn. We could almost say that Paul is speaking to both halves of our brain at the same time, in this verse no-transcript and that he's praying that this experience of the love of Christ, the realization that it's better than anything that we have learned about, about what God is like, that God's love would blow our minds. It's incredible. That's what we're invited into. I want to run that back. Just stay with me here.
Speaker 1:Paul is saying you have heard about the love of God, but I want you to know it. And when you know it, when you feel the height and length and breadth and depth, it's going to blow away anything that you have learned about what it's like. So I have to ask you when's the last time you had a mind-blowing experience with God, when he just blew you away with his love. What does that stir up in you, even just the idea of that? Maybe you're saying, man, I don't know if I've ever had a mind-blowing experience with God. What's wrong with me? Hey, you're in a good place. Recognizing that is a good thing. Does it make you uncomfortable to think about the idea that feelings are involved with your experience of God's love? Let me ask a more basic question. Do you believe that God loves you? Do you believe that he wants you to have mind-blowing experiences with his presence or his love becomes so real and present that it redefines your reality.
Speaker 1:The Holy Spirit invites us into this transforming, mind-blowing love as children, loved, cared for. The Spirit continually points us back to the cross, where Jesus demonstrated the ultimate act of love and made a way for us to be reconciled with our Father, as we were intended to be. I was talking with my missional community this week about a book called the Relational Soul by Rich Plass and Jim Cofield. Can't recommend it highly enough and in it they write the health of our souls depends on the quality of our relationships. To be rooted in a loving relationship with God and others is to be at peace with oneself.
Speaker 1:But family. Sadly, because of the brokenness of this world, because of the brokenness of humanity, the quality of most of our relationships has been subpar, hasn't it? Unfulfilling, hurtful, especially when it comes to being loved unconditionally by those closest to us. And this is how the God gap forms. Our families of origin shape the way that we view how God relates to us, and it's not just our families of origin, but it's those formative years. Oftentimes it can be the church family we were a part of, or even the school environment that we were in when we were wounded. In relationship with humans, it colors how we view our relationship with God.
Speaker 1:To say it another way, our ability to experience the love of God and to live in that love is shaped by the way that we have been loved. And if we, as his followers, hold distorted views or lack a genuine experience of God's love, we cannot effectively reflect him to others. I know that some of this feels on the nose, but we have to confront it, we have to look at it. Our mission will stall because we cannot give what we have not received. The God gap becomes this barrier to others experiencing Christ. But there's hope. We didn't go around looking for God. God has reached out to us. He has called us into a life of being with Him, an ongoing and intimate journey where he is committed committed to helping us understand what it is like to feel his love. It's an ongoing, intimate journey and it's in this closeness that we can truly experience his unconditional love and become conduits of that love to others. So if the problem is this way, that we have been broken to view God as distant, and if the invitation is into this ongoing relationship where he is going to help us repair, then the context, for that is what we're calling the with God life.
Speaker 1:Dallas Willard coined this phrase. He describes it as the true aim of the gospel. He writes the aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with God himself at the center, as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. What a view. It's the gospel invitation to live with God, to experience his love fully and to let that love fill us completely. Being filled with all the fullness of God means that his love, his wisdom, his power become integral to who we are. Our life, our shape is built off of it and throughout scripture we see God inviting his people into this relationship of deep intimacy.
Speaker 1:And in Paul's prayer, in the midst of his prayer, for us to know the shape and dimension of God's love experientially. Look at the second half of verse 19. He doesn't want us just to know the head knowledge. He wants us to know and he's declaring the profound reason behind his prayer is that you, that we, might be filled with all the fullness of God, what the reason that Paul is praying this is that the end result would be that we're filled with the fullness of God. But what does that mean? I'd submit to us that it means allowing God's character, love, power influence everything that we are and everything that we do. It's an invitation to turn away from self-reliance. To turn away from self-reliance to admit our need to experience God's presence in such a way that we are transformed from the inside out. And this fullness isn't something that we can achieve through our own efforts. It's a gift received as we deepen our relationship with God.
Speaker 1:Jesus emphasized this intimate relationship in John 14, where he promised his disciples I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I am in you. That's the with God life. And here Jesus speaks of this mutual indwelling he in us, we in him. This promise of constant, unbroken fellowship. But how do we align ourselves with that relationship?
Speaker 1:Well, for the last 2,000 years, the church has been calling things that help us to align with the character and the heart of God, the spiritual disciplines. These are practical ways to be in God's presence, allowing him to mold us, to shape us. They're the habits of Jesus that help us to slow down, be present with God in a world that is moving at a relentless pace. Do you feel it in a world that is moving at a relentless pace? Do you feel it? And by engaging in practices like prayer, solitude and silence, sabbath rest, meditation on scripture, we open our hearts little by little, with God's help, to experience more of his love deeply. Spiritual disciplines are pathways that position us under the waterfall of God's grace. John Mark Homer would say, where God's love can wash over us, heal us and transform us from the inside out. Think of it like your closest relationship. Just close your eyes with me. Picture that close relationship. Maybe they're in this room, maybe they're not, maybe they're far away.
Speaker 1:You don't spend time with that person just to check a box, fulfill a duty. You spend time together to deepen your knowledge of them, your experience of them, to know and be known, to love and be loved. And so you do activities with them. You sit, you talk, you write letters or texts or, if you're a teenager, maybe you send emojis or gifts or nothing. Sometimes that was a joke. We don't have a lot of teenagers in here, yet I know y'all are. Or gifts or nothing sometimes that was a joke, we don't have a lot of teenagers in here, yet I know y'all are. We have an almost teenager Dad. Why are you texting me Anyway? Enough about that, god, I lost my place.
Speaker 1:In the same way, spiritual disciplines are about creating space to be with god, to let his love fill our hearts, to let him heal our distorted image of who he is, transforming us into the image of christ. Rich plass and jim cofield put it this way spiritual disciplines are not about earning god's favor, but about placing ourselves in his path of transforming grace. They are the means through which God's love penetrates our wounded hearts, heals our distorted images of him and roots us in his unconditional love. Once again, family, when we experience God's love deeply, it changes us, it fills us up, it overflows from us into the lives of everyone around us, and this is what it means to be a witness. It's not about trying harder to be good, saying the right thing. It's not about getting your pitch of the gospel or the true story down, even if you have it tattooed on your arm. It's not about those things.
Speaker 1:1 John 4.12 says this no one has ever seen God, but If we love one another, god lives in us and his love is made complete in us. The people around us may not see God directly, but they can see him through us. Our lives, transformed by his love, become a testament to his goodness. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, chapter 5, verse 5, god's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. The Spirit communicates God's love to us, heals our distorted images of who he is and empowers us to live in that love daily. When we experience the Holy Spirit, we are experiencing the very presence and ministry of God's love. This is how we will fulfill our dream in Madison, dane County and beyond by waking up to the love of God, present and active, experiencing it deeply and letting it overflow into every interaction.
Speaker 1:Plass and Cofield remind us this way, underscoring this immense importance of our experiencing the love of God. They say we are made to walk with God, not just agree with facts about God. Isn't that good news? I would so much rather be with Nikki sitting in our living room drinking coffee than just reciting things that I like about her to you guys or having you tell me things you like about her and me agreeing with her. It's so much better to be with her and this kind of walking with God, this withness, is what the Holy Spirit facilitates in our lives. He invites us to experience God's love in tangible ways that we would, as Paul prays for us, be able to explore its height and breadth and depth and length.
Speaker 1:Eugene Peterson puts it to mine the depths of the treasure trove of God's love. But again, I think this is a struggle point for us. It is for me. I mean, it took me a solid, probably one and a half times through my sermon to start hearing the words that I had previously written down this morning about God's love for me before I finally started listening to the Spirit. We struggle with this idea of withness because we have a distorted lens of who God is. We see him as a taskmaster rather than a loving father, as distant rather than present. This distorted image needs healing, family, and the Holy Spirit performs this work. He reveals to us the nature of the true nature of God's love, bringing us into a deeper and more intimate relationship with him, and he does this in very specific ways, and so we're going to look at some of those practical and specific ways now as we begin to wrap up.
Speaker 1:You might be saying to yourself, ben, this all sounds really great and I get it. I want to spend time with God. I don't want to just know things about him. I'm hungry for that. But how do we do it? How do we embrace this call to be with Jesus, to make him known? Well, we're going to focus on two things this morning. The first is the daily practice, we call it.
Speaker 1:The daily practice is a tool that we developed at the start of this year when we kind of put in front of the church a three-year desire to slowly work through the spiritual disciplines, to not just learn about them but to see what it would be like to inhabit them together. So we spent the first four months of this year looking at prayer. And the daily practice is a six-day guide just designed to stir our hearts. It can range from five to 20 minutes. It's adjustable if you have more time, if you have less time. It's where we get in touch with our own stories. We see how God is shaping us by his love to become people of love. And then over the summer we looked at silence and solitude and man, I don't know about you, but that was really sweet, just learning how to be quiet before the Lord, learning how to listen for him talking. I'm so loud and noisy, and that's on the outside. Inside it can be way worse.
Speaker 1:And so our hope as pastors is that through this daily engagement with spiritual disciplines like prayer, scripture, meditation, silence, solitude, that we would create space, that we would learn these rhythms of resistance that help us encounter the God who is love, personally and regularly. And so our hope is that, as we spend time in the daily practice, that we become more aware of God's work in our lives, how he's healing us, teaching us, transforming us, that we begin to slow down so we can catch up with God. This personal time with God helps us internalize his love, understanding our own stories in light of his grace, preparing us to share these experiences with others, just to even radiate this love to others, just to even radiate this love to others. So, as we begin to engage with the daily practice, our stories, our own stories, our own experience starts to kind of take a place in the larger story that God is telling. And so, to help us articulate our experiences, I want to put a simple framework that mirrors the biblical narrative for how we can retell the story that God is telling in our lives as we encounter Him, as we experience His love, and the four steps of this kind of retelling of the story are creation, fall, redemption and restoration, and I'm going to send this out on slack later on today so you can have it this week, but we don't have any daily practice until september 30th.
Speaker 1:So next, next Monday, a week from tomorrow, we're going to resume the daily practice and we are going to focus this fall through the end of the year, on Sabbath, as I've already said, we live in a world that is off the chain, crazy busy, and we need to encounter how it's shaping us. We need to encounter why God would rest, and it's a part of us releasing self-sufficiency and embracing a life that's dependent on God. And so we stop Shabbat, sabbath, that's what that word means. Stop, and some of us are going to need to learn how to do that, just a little bit at a time, and we're going to go slow. We're not going to just start with 24 hours, but the goal is to work up to 24 hours of rest each week it doesn't have to be the same day and you could argue 16 waking hours of rest.
Speaker 1:However you want to slice it, there's all kinds of ways and, by God's grace, we live on this side of the new covenant and so we can figure out how some of this stuff works. But the goal is to set aside time to be with God, to experience his love, to stop doing and in that, be reminded that that is the basis for our acceptance. We do nothing. God has done it all. All right, so I want to conclude this morning. All right, so I want to conclude this morning.
Speaker 1:The dream we have for our city begins with us waking up to the love of God in our own lives, eastside Church and as you examine and think about your story this week through the lens of creation and rebellion, and redemption and restoration, it's for the purpose of sharing those experiences with others creation and rebellion, and redemption and restoration. It's for the purpose of sharing those experiences with others. Waking up to how God's love has transformed you in Christ, is transforming you in Christ, and then, by reengaging in the daily practice, my hope is that we would become more aware of how God is working in us, shaping us by his love to be people of love. Remember, you cannot give what you don't have, but when you experience God's love deeply, you have a story, to tell, a story that can awaken others to his love as well. So let's be people who are deeply rooted in the love of God, who experience his presence daily and who share those experiences openly in our communities, family.
Speaker 1:Let's not settle for knowing about God from a distance, and I think this is going to take some careful examination of your life, which means you're going to need to go slow. My prayer for you has and will continue to be that the Holy Spirit makes known to you the ways in which you have turned from following Jesus and need to repent and believe the gospel. That you have been saved by grace for relationship with a God who is love. That you might experience that grace and become, little by little, a person of love yourself. Oh, that we would wake up to the love of God and invite Madison to do the same, one story at a time. Would you pray with me, god? I thank you for these realities.