The origin of New Culture! (Abbie Sawczak February 6).

We're going to start by reading the scripture in Matthew. It's actually where the name of our church, New Culture, came from. So if you're new around here, you might not know that. But even if you've been here since the beginning, we probably don't talk about it enough. So you might not know, like, where did that name come from? Well, it came from this passage.

We're going to read here today in Matthew 7:24-28.

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house. Yet it did not fall, because it had its foundations on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash. When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law.

Matthew 7:24-28

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this word that you have given us, this word that we get to read. We thank you today that we get to hear directly from you. And I just pray that during these next few moments that your Holy Spirit would speak through every word that comes out of my mouth. Lord, would it be your voice that is heard. And would you give us hearts ready to receive that and respond in the ways that you are inviting in us to. We ask this in your precious name. Amen.

The origin of New Culture

This verse, when we were all sitting around, it was probably three and a half years ago, there was a small group of us, and we're talking about what are we going to call this church? It started out with this idea, it started out with this prayer of saying, are we going to do this thing? And someone came in, and it wasn't me, but somebody else on the team was like, how about new culture? And when I say they said, how about the name, they also had a whole presentation of the logo already done, and everything was like, what about new culture?

And I was like, absolutely not. I was like, that's a weird name. It's way too trendy. It's not going to hold up. Like, no, we're not calling the church new culture. And also, it shortens to, like, new cult. And that gets a little on your feet. And so there's a couple of reasons, like, absolutely not.

And he's like, well, listen to these verses. And we started to read these verses and to meditate on this and to hear what Jesus is saying here. And these verses began to shape, then, the direction of our church and this name, New Culture. Because what we see is that with the life of Jesus, is that he came here in a time where people were religious, where people knew God, where people were praying, but in everything that he did, he created a new way of life. He created this whole new idea of what it looks like to follow God and our relationship with God, because he was the way, the truth, and the life.

And in culture, it's all about these patterns, these customs, beliefs, things that we pass down for generations to come. And so we look at saying, what would it look like if in our city and wherever we go after this, we learn to model our lives based off of the patterns of Jesus, the life that Jesus lived? And then we too were able to walk into spaces knowing that we have built our lives on him as a firm foundation. And we're going to put those things into practice.

Because what this scripture is talking about here in Matthew 7, it's talking about that everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And there's a couple things in this passage. The first is acknowledging that there's going to be a lot of people that hear about Jesus. And there is a lot of people that have heard about Jesus. But what does it look like for us to be people that not only hear that and acknowledge that God might exist and he might be there somewhere, but people that put his words, the words, the life of Jesus into practice.

And so from day one until today, our vision for the church has been to create the culture of Christ. And we since then started to use language of saying we're going to do that one person, one place at a time. And we want in everything we do to continue to build our church on Jesus, our firm foundation.

The other thing that you see here is when it acknowledges the sand, which we've talked about in the past. We talk about how the thing about sand is that it's like broken up pieces, right, of cement or of glass, or things that maybe at one point were a firm foundation. And how often in our lives we find ourselves and face it where we too are just building our lives and our foundation on just pieces of truth. So maybe it's not completely false. It's not completely the wrong thing, but it's just this broken little piece. It's not the whole thing.

And we don't want to do that with our lives. We don't want to build our lives on just pieces of who Jesus is. We want all of him. We want to build our lives on all of him as our firm foundation.

Being with Jesus first

But before we get there, I want to just kind of mention this. Because I think sometimes when we talk about this idea of us doing things and being like Jesus, we can often forget about the starting point of just being with Jesus first. And we have kind of said the next stage for us is how do we create the culture of Christ? We do that for being with Jesus, becoming like Jesus, so that we can do what he did. That's always going to start from this place of just being with Jesus.

I remember being different people in my life were like, who have I seen do this really well? And there was one man that came to mind, and he actually just a few weeks ago, I saw on Facebook that he passed away, and his wife and people were posting all of these stories of him. And I knew that he was a man that I grew up with in church, and I remember being really little, he would be the first one up. I grew up in a church where they did a lot of altar calls, so they would end with every service. People would be running down with a friend on their knees, and he would always be, like, the first one down and the loudest one down. Like, you would hear him scream and hallelujah from, like, the other side of the building. And it wasn't a matter of what the altar call was about. Like, he was on his knees there.

And then when I was 16, I got the opportunity to go on a missions trip with him to Haiti. And it was kind of a funny trip because for whatever reason, I had decided that I really wanted to go to Haiti at like 12 years old. And I was laughing all over the place. I was like, I want to go to Haiti. I want to go to Haiti.

And so I got to go on this construction trip with our church. So I was 16. It was all men doing construction work. And then me and my mom. So we get dropped off the orphanage downstairs. And all the men would go upstairs to build. They were building this classroom.

And I remember him every day. I would just hear him singing like in the heat. And they're dripping sweat. And he would just be singing and worshiping all day long. And then the other thing that I saw when I was with him in that week, and I don't know if you've ever traveled with a group of people before in any context, whether it's a missions trip or a work trip or anything, but you can see people in one setting, but then you see a whole other side of them when you are waking up or see them in the morning. Like, do they drink coffee? Do they need coffee? And you don't want to see them before they're coffee? Like, who are these kinds of people?

And what I saw, and I'll never forget, on our way to breakfast, it was every morning, he would beat everybody up, and he would be on the ocean praying. It was like 4 a.m., 4:30 a.m., every single day, this man woke up and spent time with Jesus. Every single day. And he could tell you how many days he had been doing it. And at that point I remember it had been like hundreds and hundreds where he like this is how many days that I have woken up at this time every single day to spend time with Jesus.

And so I witnessed that up close with him. But then later as I moved away and I went off to Bible college and then after graduating, he's here. I saw that for him he showed me a lot of books of that. Maybe mortgages don't have to be the worst thing. Maybe they could be a beautiful thing, a beautiful time to get up and spend with Jesus. But then I saw him not only fall in love with being with Jesus, but also just so naturally live a life that looked like Jesus.

There were times in my family's life right now that I can remember us being in need and having financial need, and there would be a knock at the door from this man saying, I know God just told me to give your family some money today. He was that kind of person that was like so into what the Holy Spirit was doing and ready to respond, even if he didn't know or understand fully what he was responding to. He was one of the first people that financially gave to me when I moved here and started raising support to do college ministry and to start this church. He was one of the first people to give.

And I've seen that life. And now when you see these moments that other people are talking about of how they thought you live and how they saw him draw people to Jesus, I think that that's the kind of life I want to live. Where I didn't know this man super well, but even at a young age I watched him and I saw Jesus in him. I saw something in him that made me want to spend time with Jesus. And so to this day, I'm going to be honest, I don't have a desire to wake up at 4 a.m. and just spend hours with Jesus. I want to spend hours in bed.

And I'm like, I want to get to that point where 4 a.m. is the most exciting point of my day because I just love Jesus that much. The culture is all about patterns, customs, and beliefs that are going to be passed down. We have to constantly be thinking, are we creating the culture of Christ with the way we speak, with the things we do? Are the people watching us being drawn into that? So we're creating the culture of Christ. It is going to be an active thing.

The nature of God's love

I was thinking a lot because, you know, we have a couple babies in our church. And the thing that I love about babies is when you have a baby and a newborn stage, there's kind of like maybe a couple days where it's like, oh, this is so great. This is so awesome. And I'm like, you're just sleeping. And the next thing you know, like, they're fussy and they're crying and they're not sleeping for the night.

And then maybe you've done a week where you're like, okay, this isn't so bad. This isn't so bad. And then next thing you know, it's like right at the top of it where you're starting to maybe do some cool things. And you're like, wow, my kid's kind of cool. Like, this is fun. And then it might be another bad day. You're like, what are they getting themselves into? And it's this ebb and flow of like all these different moments.

But hopefully if you're a parent in the room and somebody were to ask you, you probably don't love your kid any less, whether they're sleeping in your arms, or they're crying through the night, or they're saying something really cute, or they had another meltdown when it makes no sense why they had a meltdown. You just love your kid. And that's the kind of way that our Heavenly Father loves us. Is when we are doing absolutely nothing, but just sitting still, he loves us. When we're saying really cool stuff and doing really cool things, he loves us. When we're having a meltdown, he might be saying, okay, what are you doing right now with your life? Give back up. And he loves us. And that doesn't change whether we're being or we're doing. That love that the Father has for us. It's the same.

A shared rule of life

And so as we're kind of going into this next season, what we felt as a church staff and team and praying about God, like, what are you inviting us into? We feel like the now what, our next step, is to create a shared rule of life as a church. A shared rule of life.

So this might be familiar language for some of you. This is not an uncommon thing for church traditions. But a rule of life is simply just a set of rhythms and practices that help us create space to be with Jesus so we can become more like him and just naturally do what he did. And so all throughout scripture you see Jesus, he has moments where he goes and he prays. He has moments where he's teaching his disciples to pray. We see that Jesus fasts in all of these different things in these spiritual practices. These spiritual disciplines are another way that it's put. Where he is constantly spending time with the Father.

So Jesus, we see that he was constantly in this process of doing all these practices, inviting people into that. That was the culture that we see. And so this idea of a rule of life, at first it might sound like, okay, that's something that's going to be super legalistic, super rigid, super all of that. We're going to walk through it together.

Because every church tradition, at some point, they do have some sort of rule of life, some sort of set practices or rhythms that you do. Maybe for us, up until this point, it's on Sunday we gather together. During the week we're in small groups and we pray together. We have these things that we do. So this word rule, though, at first, it might strike you as this strict or this kind of binding thing. But the last word for rule translates back to the word trellis, like used in a vineyard. So in the same way that a vine needs a trellis to help it grow upwards, we too need a rule of life, something that is going to be stable, that we continue to fall back on so that when we're planting seeds and when we're doing these spiritual practices, we are growing closer to Jesus and in the right direction.

This trellis is also something that protects the seeds that are planted. And this really comes from this idea in John 15. So I'm going to read in John 15:5-8.

I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

John 15:5-8

So we see the end of this. The goal is to give God glory, to show ourselves that we are disciples of him. We are people that are being transformed into his likeness and his image. And so again, a rule of life is not so much the strict list of rules that we have together, but it's more so like this trellis, something that we are setting aside and even that firm foundation we're building on. So like the verses we read earlier, saying when the storm comes, right, when the wind blows, we have something that we are standing firm upon. It's something that's going to help everything that's planted grow in the right direction.

There's a book by Rich Blotus that he wrote called The Deeply Formed Life. And he talks about a rule of life in this book as well. And in this, I recently heard him speak to a cohort of pastors that I've been, and he walked us through even this verse. And the word there for remain is translated back to the word meno, M-E-N-O. And here's some different definitions for this word that I think has really, really helped us get an understanding through this scripture.

This word can be translated to mean to dwell, to abide, to remain, to stay, to continue to be present, to continue in relationship, to tolerate, to endure, to wait, to accept, to suffer for, to submit to, to act in accord with, to be faithful to.

Okay, so to start with to dwell, to abide, to remain, to stay, to continue to be present, and continue to be in relationship. So you see that one word. If you just read it in those translations, it's like okay, like if you think of like this abiding. Think of this abiding and staying present with someone. You think a lot of it is going to be more of those practices of praying, those practices of meditating on scripture, those practices of silence and solitude.

But then you see on the flip side that it goes in that it can also mean to endure, to wait, to suffer for, to submit to, to act in accordance with, to be faithful to. Those things bring a little bit of a different meaning to the word, which shows us that maybe some of the ways that we have to remain is going to be doing things like we did with fasting, where we're starving our flesh and we're filling our spirit. Maybe it's going to be things like giving generously, like we even have small opportunities that we try to do to practice that gift of just dying to our flesh and dying to control of our earthly possessions.

And it shows us that this idea of remaining and being with Jesus, it might not always be the most peaceful thing in the world. When you think of suffering, it doesn't quite seem the same as just being present with or being present to. So this word has a whole lot of meanings where we're saying we're going to remain with Jesus, we're going to abide with Jesus, we're going to be faithful to Jesus.

Implementing a shared rule of life

So as we break down what is this going to look like for us to kind of submit to this shared rule of life, these sets of practices, I again want to emphasize what a rule of life is not. It should not be legalistic. It should not be rigid. It shouldn't be selfish. It shouldn't be the avoidance of struggle.

I think you even see Jesus at times when he was praying and his disciples would interrupt him. Or sometimes he was on his journey where he had a purpose and he was interrupted. And that's a great example of us of saying we might come up with an incredible role of life and this is how we're going to live. But there might still be interruptions. And Jesus even modeled that really well of how are we not rigid with the things that we set in place.

And also again I can point you to in the gospel that we read in Luke 4 where Jesus is fasting and he's being tempted. So he's practicing spiritual discipline, spiritual practice, something that's supposed to draw him close to God. While being tempted. So we know like it did draw him close to God, but there was also struggle in there. So it's not the avoidance of struggle either.

Colossians 3:12-16 says:

Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you have grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you are all called to peace, and be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

Colossians 3:12-16

We did a series of Colossians in the fall, and we taught on this passage, but I was kind of bringing it back to my mind as I was preparing for today. Of this kind of scripture where you see it just like kind of called the action of saying, put on all of these things, right? Clothe yourself in humility and kindness and gentleness. So there's a call to action. But then in verse 15 it says, and then let the peace of Christ rule over him, which is almost like this idea of you have to then allow Christ to do his thing, right?

We then have to surrender the control and realize it's all him. And I think that's a great way for us to think about spiritual practices and disciplines. It's realizing that it's not an A plus B equals, you know, fill in the blank. It's not, oh, because I pray every day, then all of this is going to happen in my life. But it's saying, okay, we're going to do our part, and we're going to pray, and we're going to seek the Lord, and we're going to follow these different rhythms and practices. At the end of the day, fully surrender and say, Jesus, it's all about you and what you want to do on your timeline. And so this isn't us trying to control an outcome, but rather just surrendering to what he is going to do.

Why should we do this

But I want to talk about why should we do this? Why should we submit to this shared rule of life? So when we walk into this room on Sundays, we have all different places that we're coming from, all different backgrounds and life stories that we're representing. And even right now in this stage of a church of being three years in, we don't have like this membership class or what it looks like to be a member. But what we feel like the Lord is asking us to step into is saying that if we're here, and we're a part of this community, that we're going to continue to pursue being in small group communities.

We're going to continue to pursue contributing and serving and doing those things, but also have this shared rule of life so that when we are in our small group communities during the week, we know that we are all committed to doing these practices and doing these things so that we can have more shared conversation and knowing that we're a part of New Culture. If I'm a part of this church and creating a culture of Christ, I'm committed to trying my best to practice the way of Jesus every single day.

And so here's kind of our shared rule of life. And we have these printed out for everyone, so if you walk out today, we'll give them to you. We want to invite you to join us in the shared rule of life. And it's really simple.

It's saying, start your day in prayer and scripture. Would we be people that are committed to starting our day in prayer and scripture? To just make space to just be with God. This could be five minutes. It could be 50 minutes. We wrote that down there. Like just saying it's not about the time. It's about turning off the box. It's about having a moment that you're going to create in your schedule. That you're going to say, okay, I'm going to wake up. Preferably before you look at your phone. And you're just going to be with God.

Or now if you're like me, before you do Wordle. Because four days ago I started. I'm so busy when I am. I started. So before you get into it, whatever you do on your phone right away in the morning, then you're just going to say, God, here I am. This day is yours. An open thing to start with is the Lord's Prayer. You know, walking through there, saying, Lord, give us a day or a day with bread.

The next is to find ways to take breaks throughout the day. Some of the practical things that I've established in my life is I have certain drives. I'll look at my schedule and I'm saying, okay, I'm driving in silence. There's no music, no podcast. That's a drive where I'm just going to talk to Jesus. Or I'm just going to listen and say, God, you know, where are you in these moments? So to find ways to just pause throughout your day and check in with God.

Because I think sometimes it's easy for us to write, read something in the morning, just check something off the list, and then we don't even think about the Lord until the end of the day. But to start to say, hey, we're in a relationship with Jesus, and we're committed to this process of becoming like him, then we're going to be able to spend a whole amount of time with him. And so how do we incorporate him into every given moment of our lives?

So think about, do you have a lunch break? Think about, do you have a walk to class? Do you have a commute? What does that look like? And then to end the day, examine and gratitude. To just recap your time with God. And again, this could be five minutes or it could be 15 minutes, depending on your schedule, depending on your stage of life.

And then we have some weekly and monthly practices that we want to start to invite you into. And again, this is kind of like our big vision passing moment. So don't think like, I know I'm going to do this all tomorrow, right? This is going to be a process where we have been praying and planning for the next year as a church to walk through these and to continue to learn these.

So if you like you never heard of any of this and you freaking out, it's okay. We get there. But to keep the Sabbath, to aim for having a 24-hour period. And if you cannot do that, have just a chunk, a few-hour chunk in your week that you can just spend with God. Fasting, which we just did at the church, to find a weekly or a monthly time where you are saving from food in your start in your flesh so you can fill your spirit. To worship together on Sundays. You know, we talk a lot about how right now statistically committed people attend church once a month. And we want to break that mold. We want to say how do we continue to gather together and see value in gathering together in worship.

To devote yourself to community, to be devoted to a smaller group of people that you can really start to live as the body of Christ and how we're created to live together. And then to contribute, which we always talk about means to add value. So contribute to your community, one of spiritual practice of continuing to serve and to give. And then finally, to seek renewal for our city. That we will constantly be pursuing ways we can seek renewal for our city. Whether that's being committed to our prayer campaign, which is praying for every single neighborhood and through prayer walks in our city over every single neighborhood, or if it is continuing when we have the Leach and Thrive or volunteer opportunities, or in your own, outside of anything we do, ask the Lord or their organizations or places here in Madison that I can serve and I can get involved.

What are those things that God has put on your heart that maybe nobody else in this room is thinking about? There's a reason for that. We want to see renewal for our city.

How to develop and implement

So when it comes to how I develop it and where do I start, I do think I want to run through. And first is start small. Start small. Okay. Again, don't look at this and say, I'm going to do it tomorrow. But say, okay, where am I in this process? Do I have time set aside in my week where I'm spending time with God? How about in my days? Right?

So if you're someone who maybe you've never prayed every day or spent time reading the Bible every day, I would just start there. Start in creating space. I so, I believe, so passionately that God's presence is in the preparation and the planning. So you're not just, you might not ever wake up naturally just like longing to read your Bible. You might have to start by saying, okay, where is my day? Can I take 15 minutes? Can I take five minutes? Can I just play the Bible? The Bible app. You can play it. You can just listen to the Word of God. You don't even have to sit there and read. It just talks to you. But this starts small.

Where are you at in this process? Next is to be specific. So don't just say, okay, I want to do this. But again, look at your schedule. Where can this happen? Who are you to involve in this? So obviously if you're married, if you have a family, you probably can't just decide, well, this is my hour of silence and solitude. And when your husband walks in the room and you're like, this is my silent time, right? You should probably tell them that you're not going to, you know, when I'm going to talk to you.

So think who the after wall remains, whatever that looks like for you. Consider your season of life, right? The reason that we have kind of these like big shared rules of life is we realize it's going to look different for everyone. Do you realize that Jesus invited the 12 disciples to come and be a part of his life and to follow him, but they all looked so different? They were all so different. Like some of you, you might have no problem shutting your brain off and just like sitting with the Lord.

My brain never turns off, so that's a struggle. It's going to look different, right? If you have kids, it's going to look different. If you have a bunch of roommates, what is this going to look like for you in your season? We talk about keeping a healthy balance of upstream and downstream practices. So a healthy balance of looking at your life and saying, what are things that are going to be out stream? Where it's going to be a little harder? But we're going to do those downstream things where I can just sit back and I'm just going to like float down that river. And it's just easy. Like these practices are so easy for me. Have a balance of that.

And then remember above all else, like a healthy rule of life is going to be a working document. It's going to be a constantly going back and assessing and saying, okay, Lord, what's going well? Where do I need to rethink this and to go back?

Closing

So this is kind of a flat, and we're going to be talking about this in the next couple weeks. But this is a big vision piece that we feel like the Lord is inviting us into. Is to enter into this shared rule of life. So that when we meet in communities, we know that, hey, we're at least all trying to start our mornings with the Lord. So you can come up and eat at me. Like, how are those breaks when you're at your day with Jesus, right? How's ending the day for attitude? Have you seen changes? Like, have you seen your heart start to change in your mind, in your thoughts?

So with that, I'm just going to close in prayer today. And the response to today is looking over this and praying and saying, God, what is it that you're inviting me to start with? And we're going to have tomorrow up on the website some more resources. I think there's a resource slide. It's a way to say, if you guys want to take a picture of that or write some of that down. These are different things that have been resources. Again, a lot of churches have rules of life, and so we're not the first to do this, but practicingtheway.org is where a lot of this stuff came from. So you guys can look there. They have a really great framework, as well as some books that also talk about a rule of life, which is Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Sacred Rhythms, and the Deeply Formed Life. Those are some resources if you're like, I'm curious, I want to know more about this.

But I just encourage you, wherever you're at today, whether you're still exploring what relationships look like with Jesus, I'm going to tell you that it is going to be the best thing they could ever do following him. And we want to be people that continue to pass down these cultures, these patterns, these pastimes, these beliefs that just draw people closer to the heart of God, where they feel so loved by Him and so drawn to spend these moments with Him.

And so grab this on your way out, and I'm just going to pray for us today. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the way that you have been going before us every step of this way on this journey of planting this church. God, that you knew every single one of us that was going to be in the room today, hearing this message, hearing this invitation into this life of remaining with you. This life of remaining in you, Lord, can you tell us of your word that without vision that the people we perished? God, we need clarity. We need you to continue to reveal to us the next steps that we thank you for. For these next steps that you've given us. This Holy Spirit strategy. How are we just not going to think about creating the culture? How is it going to start with us? And we know, God, that it's going to start by us radically centering our lives around spending time with you.

About us radically centering our lives around doing the things that you did and practicing that. Lord, I thank you that you'll call us to life and perfection, that you invite us into practicing every single day what it looks like to remain in you, to be faithful to you, to be consistent to you, to show up and have a relationship with you. So God, I pray that you would speak to all of us throughout this week on what it is you are inviting us into so that we can continue together in this way, one person, one place at a time, starting with us, create your culture, Jesus. Yes, God, this in your name. Amen.