Seeking Renewal For The City.

This is the last Sunday in our series walking through our rule of life. If you are unfamiliar with what the rule of life is, we have these little rule of life workbooks at the welcome table that will explain a bit more. Essentially, a rule, though that word can sound funny in church. We normally don't like rules. It comes from the Latin word trellis, which is something that helps seeds and plants grow in the right direction and stay rooted and planted. Our rule is a set of practices we are trying to learn and grow in together so that we too can be planted and rooted in who God has created us to be and live in the way of Jesus.

We talk about here at New Culture what it looks like for us to be people that are with Jesus. And as we do that, we become like him, which takes practice and discipline, so that then we can do the things that Jesus did when he was here on earth. And we can see his kingdom come right here in Madison. That's what we're after.

If you haven't already, go back and listen to our past sermons on the rule of life, and grab one of these workbooks.

Seeking the renewal of the city

Today we are talking about seeking the renewal of the city. What does it look like for us to say, God, would you come and can we see your kingdom come right here in Madison as it is in heaven?

When we talk about seeking renewal of our city in our rule of life, we say that seeking renewal of our city is praying for renewal, praying, and not only praying for renewal, but bringing renewal through contributing to our city, volunteering at local organizations, and participating in different service projects. We're also praying for our city with our Pray 297 campaign, which we have little cards for at our welcome table, where we have this vision to pray over every single neighborhood in Madison.

So our heart would be: what does it look like for each and every one of us to be people committed to praying for our neighborhoods that we are in? As a church, we're in one neighborhood, but each of you, you're somewhere else throughout the city. We want to be people that are constantly praying for that. When we're saying that part of our rhythm of life is to seek renewal, that's what we're talking about. That we would be praying for it, that we would then be bringing that renewal and continuing to pray and be obedient to what the Lord is asking us to do and what our role is in seeing kingdom come in our place.

But to get started today, we're going to play a game.

When I was in high school, we would play this on long road trips. I went to college in Minneapolis and grew up near Chicago. Depending on the weather, it would be either a seven-hour drive back home for Christmas break, or a twelve-hour drive back home for Christmas break. We would play different card games, and one of them was where one person says a word and on impulse you have to say the first word that comes to mind when you hear that word. Make sense? Pretty simple.

If I were to say red, what's the first thing that comes to mind? So turn to someone next to you. I'm going to give you a word. Ready? Your word is seek.

Wow, that was all I heard: find. Did anyone say something other than find? What would you say, Christina? Find and hide. That's incredible. Find and hide. See, find. Seek. Hide. That's where my mind goes.

When I hear the word seek, my impulse is hide, like hide and seek. That's what I think of. But the reality is for all of us there's different things we've heard, and we're going to have some sort of lens or thing that we filter that through, and that's going to lead us to thinking different things.

When I was thinking of this idea of seeking, I was thinking of hide and seek. And what is the greatest fear as a child when you're playing hide and seek? Never being found. That is the greatest fear. I grew up with three brothers and we often were friends with a lot of other families that had a lot of kids. Sometimes we'd be at church on Sunday afternoon, and we'd be at someone's house for dinner. I swear there'd be like twenty-something kids playing hide and seek, and I'm like, surely they're going to forget. It was always that balance of like, I want to be good at hiding, but not too good so that nobody ever finds me, because that is the scariest part of hide and seek.

Seeking and renewal

A basic definition: if you Google the word seek, what comes up is "the attempt to find something, to look for something." But I love the context they give right under it. They came here to seek shelter from abiding winter winds. That was the first thing that came up on Google when I was looking into this word. I was thinking of yesterday when we all got woken up to that biting winter wind. This idea of seeking. For some of us we think of hide and seek or we think of seeking something. We're looking for something. But the type of seeking we're talking about today is a type of seeking where you don't give up until you find it. And where you seek with this expectation that you are going to find it, which is hopefully what we all did when we were children playing hide and seek. We didn't leave our friends behind. We were like, we're seeking with the intention of we're going to find every last kid that's hiding in this house, in this yard. We're going to find them.

And the same way: if you're stuck out in the cold, you're not going to look around and after an hour be like, ah, we couldn't find any shelter. Okay, we're done. No, you're going to walk every single mile and you're going to keep going every single hour until you find shelter, until you find what it is that you're looking for.

We see this in scripture way back in Jeremiah in the Old Testament, which is going to be one of the key passages we're looking at today in Jeremiah 29:7. This is really the theme of our whole prayer campaign of praying for every single neighborhood, where it says to pray for the peace and pray for the prosperity of the city in which you've been brought.

Then we see that Jesus came. We read this in the Gospels. One of the times it's referenced is in Luke 10:19, where it says that Jesus was the Son of Man, and he came to seek and save that which was lost. Jesus came and he demonstrated what it looked like to seek and then to save that which was lost. He didn't just give up. He came and he did save us. He did find us. He did give us that invitation into relationship with him. He saved us from our sins.

So then we see seeking, according to scripture, is seeking with the intention and the reality that what we are seeking can be found.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the word renewal is renewing a library book. I will admit, I now don't really do the whole library thing. I really should because I just spend too much money on books. When I was younger, I would use library books all the time. And in college, I used library books all the time. When I think of renewing something I think of renewing that book. That book that I had two weeks to read and probably didn't, and then I'm going to renew it and pretend like in the next two weeks I'm going to read it. Or I'll renew it and pretend like it's not lost somewhere under my couch. When you renew it, you reset your loan, right? You reset the timeline.

We see this in scripture as well. When we invite Jesus to come in and renew us, it's him coming in and taking us back to who he created us to be in his image, pure, holy, blameless, worthy before him.

I want to read us a couple of different passages of scripture about renewal. There's going to be a lot of scripture today, so you might want to write down the references and go back and study this week.

The first one that we're going to read is Revelation 21:1-7. It's this vision, this beautiful picture. It says, starting in verse one:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared, and the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. I heard a loud shout from the throne saying, look, God's home is now among his people. He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever. And the one sitting on the throne said, Look, I am making everything new. And then he said to me, Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true. And he also said, It is finished. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To all who are thirsty, I will give freely from the springs of the water of life. All who are victorious will inherit all these blessings, and I will be their God, and they will be my children.

Revelation 21:1-7

We're seeing here this beautiful picture, this beautiful glimpse into what is to come, where there's no more tears, where there's no more pain, where the Lord has taken his place on the throne.

We see renewal in scripture as this process of being transformed into who God created us to be and then living how he intended us to live. The way I want to kind of define this too is that this process of renewal is both presence and peace. Our big so what is that renewal is both a future promise and a present reality.

So now what do we do with that? Well, then we can be present and we can bring that peace. This idea of this vision of what we're reading about in Revelation. Because Jesus did come and Jesus did die on the cross and he paid the price for our sins, he ushered in the new heavens and the new earth. So we're in this spot right now, this in-between of what has come and what is still yet to come. We live there in this place of realizing and recognizing that we don't have to wait to start living out the kingdom of heaven here on earth. That through Jesus, we can live like him and we can usher in his kingdom and be a part of restoring it right here on earth.

So seeking renewal for our city is praying for it and it's being present. It's his future promise and this present reality. We see in Revelation here, God is saying that he was going to come and make this place a dwelling place, that he was going to be present with no more pain. But this really was more than a future promise. It's a present reality that we can enter into.

We're going to spend the rest of our time in Jeremiah 29, because that is where this verse comes from, where we talk about praying for the peace and praying for the prosperity and different translations have all sorts of fun words there. This is also the chapter that everybody's graduation cards probably said: I know the plans that I have for you declares the Lord, plans for you to prosper and grow and whatever translation you had, right? We know Jeremiah 29:11. But there's a lot going on in this chapter that we're going to get into today.

What's happening in Jeremiah 29 is kind of like a preaching match. Jeremiah and these false prophets are kind of going back and forth, writing these letters and sermons to each other.

Here's a little outline of what's happening: He's talking about these different endeavors to reconcile the people in their captivity. These people are sent into exile. And so he's trying to tell them, okay, now that you're here and you're in captivity and you're in this place, make the best of it. Then he gives them cautions about the false prophets, about how they're going to continue to come and they're going to continue to say false things. Then he goes in and he starts to assure them that God is going to resolve and restore them in mercy. He starts to tell about the destruction that's going to come, that there's going to be persecution, and prophesies that if they continue to follow these false prophets, there's going to be even more destruction.

In the midst of this, we have the really hopeful things of like plans for you to prosper and grow.

So we're going to read a lot starting in verse 4 of Jeremiah 29:

This is what the Lord of heaven's armies, the God of Israel, says to all the captives he has exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem. Build homes and plan to stay. Plant gardens and eat the food they produce. Marry and have children. Then find spouses for them so that they may have many grandchildren. Multiply. Do not dwindle away. And work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare.

Jeremiah 29:4-7

The first thing that we're reading here is that they were brought to this place into exile. Some of you might feel that maybe about the place that you're in today. Maybe some of you love your jobs. Maybe some of you are like, yes, it feels like I've been taken captive to everything they put on my desk every morning. Some of you might love even this city. And some of you, it might feel like, okay, how long are we going to be here?

But no matter where you are in your place that God has you right now, Jeremiah is telling them, okay, this is how you should live. Wherever you are, no matter what the circumstances are, this is the invitation for you to live. That you can plant, that you can have homes, that you can multiply.

What this is telling us is that there is purpose in our place. I truly believe that today, that one of the greatest things that we could walk away from is with this hope and this confidence and this recognition that there is purpose for us in the places that God has us. That because we are followers of Jesus, we do get to usher in his kingdom, and we do get to usher in his presence. The Lord is going to place us in places where maybe nobody else is going to get to encounter the presence of God that day. But we get to be the ones that get to be those people in the place God has sent us.

So if we start to recognize that, and instead of just waiting to say, well, I don't want to make any establishments. I don't want to settle. I don't want to have a house. Like, I don't know if I really want to make this my home. What would it look like if we went into every place knowing that it was a place that God had purpose for us to be? That God had purpose for us to bring his presence and his peace and his shalom and we established those roots and we made home there with people and we helped them see Jesus through that. What could that change?

We're talking about seeking the peace, the shalom. In the Old Testament, this idea of shalom is the word that's used for peace in the Hebrew, and it's this idea of something that's whole, something that's complete. Almost as if there was a stone that was perfectly round and had no cracks or nothing broken within it. That's this idea of shalom, that it's this completeness.

So essentially, when anything is missing or broken or there's cracks, then it means that there's no shalom and that the shalom, the peace, needs to be restored. So God is saying to the people here in Jeremiah, he's looking at the city and he's saying, there's some things that are broken, there's some emptiness, there's some cracks. So we need somebody to come and you need to bring peace. Pray for peace. Work for peace there. Wholeness. Completeness.

But then we see in the New Testament there's this new word that is used for peace. And this peace in the New Testament is still this idea of wholeness and completeness. But Jesus in Isaiah was prophesied to be the Prince of Shalom. And then in the New Testament, he is announced in Luke and in the Gospels. He's announced as peace. He's announced as peace in John and in Luke in the Gospels there.

So we see that Jesus was the one that then came in the New Testament to fulfill the prophecy of being peace. Ephesians 2:14 says:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.

Ephesians 2:14

Jesus came to be our peace through his death and resurrection, to take the things that were broken and restore them, renew them, make them whole again. So in some ways, when we're seeking the peace and the shalom of the city that we've been placed in, we're also seeking wholeness, completeness. We're seeking Jesus to come and to make his way into the city to which we have been placed in.

Now, I want you to imagine with me a future where there really was no more pain and there was no more suffering, and recognizing that we can start to usher that in today. So when we're reading these scriptures, this isn't just a hopeful thought or a vision of the future, but it is instructions of how we can live. That we can be people that continue to work to be whole in Jesus so that we can make way for him to flow from within us.

But the reality is that peace takes work. Like, peace takes time and peace takes work. But for many of us, the fear of settling and making home stops us from even starting.

And so I hope today that by the end of this, we would have that courage to say, how do we start to bring peace?

So as we keep on reading, we're going to skip down to verse 11, where it says:

I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They're plans for good and not disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you, says the Lord. I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land.

Jeremiah 29:11-14

Not only is God saying here that he can be found, but he's saying he wants to be found. He wants us to seek him so that he can be found and we can find him.

This is not just a future hope, but this is a present reality that we can experience that wholeness, completeness in Jesus. He's saying in verse 14, where he's saying the captivity will end, like this evil will end. There will be a day where it will be no more.

But then comes some warnings as we keep reading. In verse 20, it says:

Therefore, listen to the message from the Lord, all you captives there in Babylon. This is what the Lord of heaven's armies, the God of Israel says about your prophets. Ahab, son of Kaliah and Zedekiah and the Mesa, who are telling you lies in my name, I will turn them over to Nebuchadnezzar for execution before your eyes. Their terrible fate will become profitable so that the Judean exiles will curse someone by saying, may the Lord make you like Zedekiah and Ahab from the king of Babylon burned alive for these men have done terrible things among my people. They have committed adultery with their neighbors, wives, and have lied in my name saying things I did not command. I am a witness to this. I, the Lord, have spoken.

Jeremiah 29:20-23

This is a pretty harsh warning of God saying that he is at some point going to bring justice. There will be evil no more. God wants us to recognize even here today that he wants nothing to do with evil.

Now, I don't have to go through the list and tell you guys about all the things that are broken in our world, right? We see it every single day. We encounter it when we hear about the pain that our friends and our coworkers and our neighbors are walking through. We see the reports on the news of the violence and the things that happen all around us. We know that there is not perfect peace and perfect shalom everywhere we go. We know that there are cracks, that there are things missing, that there is need.

And we know that Jesus is the one that can come and Jesus is the one that is justice and mercy and grace and renewal and peace. And that when Jesus was here and he was walking on earth, that he demonstrated seeking that peace and that prosperity. He demonstrated what it meant to bring wholeness and complete unity. He did this when he gathered his disciples. All these people from different backgrounds and ethnicities and in different cultures coming together in that type of way for a common mission.

He demonstrates this in the way that he fed the hungry, in the way that he clothed those without, in the way that he looked at the adulterous woman and said, hey, I want a relationship with you. I love that N.T. Wright in his book, On Earth As It Is in Heaven, which I highly recommend reading, it's beautiful writings. He says:

Jesus didn't see his healing simply as a kind of pre-modern traveling hospital. He wasn't healing the sick just for the sake of it. Important though, the healing itself was. Nor was it just a way of attracting people to listen to his message. Rather, the healing was a dramatic sign of the message itself. God, the world's creator, was at work through him to do what he had promised. To open blind eyes and deaf ears, to rescue people, to turn everything right side up. The people who had been at the bottom of the heap would find themselves to their own great surprise on top. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

And he went about making it happening. He went about making it happen.

I love that last part. You see, Jesus, he made it happen. He didn't just seek, he found. He didn't just do miracles, but his miracles were a display of that love and that wholeness of saying you were made to be whole and complete to have shalom to have peace.

Jesus he was present with people and he was that peace.

Our calling to seek renewal

We have that invitation today to seek renewal for our city to seek renewal for our neighbors for our co-workers for our friends and it starts with presence and making room to usher in peace.

Jesus invites us to follow his footsteps in being people of peace. He invites us to care about the suffering, all of the suffering, physical and emotional. He invites us to seek an end to hunger, homelessness, sexual exploitation, racism, all things that are unjust. He invites us into that mission of putting an end to it and saying, let's seek this until we find an end to this evil.

But here's the thing that I truly believe that we are all going to constantly be faced with: there's always going to be evil. There's always going to be injustices. That the enemy is going to try and trick us and tempt us into thinking that true peace is going to come from us just looking away. Because we can. There's a lot of things that we don't have to see right in the face. We can turn off the TV. We can choose not to follow those things. We can choose not to interact with those people, and we can continue to try and build our own kingdom right here on earth and just keep going on with these comfortable, complacent lifestyles, and we can turn away from the unjust.

But what Jesus invites us to do is to look at the evil, to look at the things that are unjust, and to say, I'm inviting you now to come. And I'm inviting you to make it right. I'm inviting you to continue to put in the work and to look at it, even if it's painful to see those things.

Think of the situations that Jesus had to run into, the hurt, the broken, the lost. I mean, Jesus' death on the cross of him bringing that shalom, that eternal shalom, that eternal peace, that was a painful process.

Seeking the renewal of our city is going to cost us something. It's going to cost us something.

But seeking the renewal of our city is what Jesus invites us to do, to partner with him in seeing his kingdom come right here in Madison.

What renewal looks like

Part of our rhythm as a church is saying what does it look like for us to have rhythms in our life where we are seeking renewal? What does it look like for us to have rhythms in our life where we are bringing peace and shalom to the people around us?

Some of the practical things that we have set up: one is to say, are you praying for people? Which is why we have these little cards that we want to have in your Bibles or on your fridges, and it has things to say, okay, pick a neighborhood, pray for your neighborhood. Ask God to reveal to you his heart for those people.

What could our city start to look like if once a week, once a month, all of us were doing this, where we were praying for our neighborhoods, where we were praying for people to be restored spiritually, which is why we do things like Alpha, and why we want you guys to pray about who are you inviting to come to this? Who are you inviting to come and to hear about relationship with Jesus? We want to pray for people to be physically healed, spiritually restored, all of those things.

But then also we have practical things, right? Where we're doing like once a month on Tuesdays now, we're helping pay for people's laundries if you want to be involved in that. Once a month on Wednesday mornings, we have a group that's volunteering at a food pantry that's available. We do different service events.

If you want to do more of that, we have opportunities to volunteer, to be present in our city and be present in our community.

But what I really want to focus on today is this idea that each and every one of you are in a place, and there's purpose in that place. And you have purpose to bring the presence of God and to usher in peace.

Imagine in our city what it looks like to see renewal. Here are some of the things that I was praying about. What does that look like? I think it's stories of us starting to have more and more stories of people's lives being changed. I think it's looking around Madison and the housing crisis that we have and seeing it no longer in existence. I think that it means no more food insecurity, that there's places where we can see that Jesus and his gospel are being clearly proclaimed. I think renewal in our city could look like more spiritual openness to the presence of God. I think it could look like us seeing miraculous physical healings where people are saying there's no way this happened but Jesus. Orphans having home, a sense that if this church and other churches in Madison disappeared, that it would be a great felt need. And that's going to take us having this holy conviction that there is purpose in us being here, in this city, in this place, to bring the peace and the presence of Jesus everywhere we go.

Now, this has to come from a place of presence with Jesus. For many of us, we try to do this on our own. There's a lot of good things that you can do for the sake of the kingdom, right? Like, you can go and you can feed the hungry, you can clothe people, you can do all of those things.

But the reality is people are going to keep being hungry and more hungry if we're not also spiritually feeding them as we're physically feeding them. Jesus did both. He had this beautiful display. If you think of feeding the five thousand, he's like, I care about your physical needs, but now let me demonstrate that and my love for you as I do this. He cared about their spiritual needs.

And so if we are going to be present with people, we first have to start from a place of being present with God. Because if Jesus himself is perfect peace, then we're going to need the peace of Jesus to wash over us so that we can usher that in and nothing else.

And so it starts with this of us praying, spending time with Jesus, being renewed by Jesus, receiving the peace that only he can give. And it's from that place that we can pray for renewal, that we can bring renewal and we can usher in his peace.

We're just going to take some time today in prayer, and I want to invite you to stand. In Lamentations 3:25 it says:

The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.

Lamentations 3:25

Jeremiah 31:25 says:

I will satisfy the weary ones and refresh everyone.

Jeremiah 31:25

You see, God wants to be found. His presence is near.

There are two things I felt like we needed to respond to today. If we're saying that we want to see God's peace and his kingdom of shalom be present in this city, we first need to make sure that we are continuing to come before him and ask the Holy Spirit to renew us and restore us. Some of us today, I just feel like we need to take a moment as we spend this time in worship and prayer, and we need to just invite Jesus to come and to restore us. Sometimes that is that repentance of saying, Lord, is there anything in me that has turned from you that I need to repent and I need to turn back towards you? Because if we are not filled with his peace, then we're not bringing peace. We're only bringing destruction into the places that we enter in.

So even right now, would you just begin to take a moment and say, Lord, is there anything within me that I need to repent of? Any sin that is there that I need to repent of? Lord would you come would you renew me would you restore me?

I also sense that there are some of us that it really is feeling like we're just tired and we're weary and we truly need to say Jesus I need your peace and maybe later that's establishing those rhythms of praying throughout the week and what that looks like but just even now to know that we come into his presence in this moment and we can encounter his peace. So to just ask the Lord, would you give me that peace? Would you fill me with that peace?

Then I want us to just take time and begin to pray. As we pray and say, God, renew us, give us peace. And we receive that peace that we would start to pray. Maybe some of you, this time is going to be you praying for your neighbors, praying for that shalom, praying for that completeness, praying for that wholeness, praying for his kingdom come.

And let's seek the Lord for these next few moments to receive that renewal and then pray for that renewal in the city around us.