Led By The Spirit - Luke Kennedy

Ps Luke Kennedy continues our Being Led series. Last week was Led by a Limp; this week is Led by the Spirit.

In this message, Ps Luke explores the Church’s role in calling people, what it looks like to be sent out by God, and how we overcome fear and say yes.

Scriptures: Acts 13:1–3, Luke 9:1–6, Luke 10:17. 

We pray you’re blessed by this message—and we’d love to see you in person. Join us every Sunday at 10am. See you there.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We're in a pretty exciting season, guys. I hope that you have a sense of that. Do you? I certainly have a sense of God is doing something, or as the great uh theological movie Narnia would say, Aslan is on the move. God is doing something in the church. I have a sense of that. Um, it's an exciting moment to be here. I want to talk to you today, continuing on the theme of being led by God, being led by the Spirit of God. Last week we talked about being led by a wrestle. Is that encouraging to you? Wrestling with God, wrestling with your calling and your place of frustration, being an invitation from God for you to wrestle with Him into your calling. And today I want to continue along how God leads us, and I would like to talk about how the role of the church in leading you into your call for your life. What is the role of the church in your direction that God is leading you into? Okay, so let's have a look at Acts chapter 13, verse 1 to 3. Acts chapter 13, this is the church in Antioch. It's basically one of the earliest resource churches in the world, a resource church meaning that it gives itself away consistently. It's always giving its best people and its best resources away for the sake of the mission. That's the church in Antioch. That's a church that we feel that we are called to be as well, is a resource church that gives away our best for the sake of the gospel. It's not all about 112 Norman Street, it's about the sake of the gospel in this city. Are you with me? Okay, so let's read it. Um it says, um, now there was a church in Antioch, uh, had prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, um, Lucius of Serene, um, I'm butchering some names here. If you're a Greek scholar, please help me out after. Um, Menaeon, a lifelong friend of Herod the uh Tetriac and Saul. While they were worshipping together and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work which I have called them. Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and they sent them off. I love, um, I love this church because it's sending away into the mission field their best leaders are getting sent out into the world. And it's very easy for a church. If you want your church to get older and more inward focused, all you need to do is nothing. It will naturally go up in age and in focus. Any community will. But it's actually a very uh strategic and intentional heart to keep on raising up a rising generation. Older people, you're not losing your place. Your place is actually getting more and more important, not less important, more important, as we raise up a rising generation and send out and get outward focused to the people around us. So, where is God sending your life? I would love to be able to sit with each and every single one of you and ask you, where is God sending your life? And I have the joy of doing that, that's one of the joys of being a pastor is to sit and with the scriptures and with people, which is my favorite time of the week. I do everything else so that I can do that. Um sit with people across the table with the scriptures and say, what is God saying to you? Where is he calling you to? What is God calling you to do in the world? Because newsflash friends, God is calling you to more than putting the chairs out on Sunday. That is not the call of your life. Serving is a blessing, but it's not the call of your life to put out chairs or do coffee. God is actually calling us outside of the walls of this church to go and make an impact in the world all week long. That's your call, and we are here together as a church to pray over you and to send you into the world to go and make a difference for the kingdom of God. We want you to go and do something. That's the big idea. God leads us through his spirit, but he often does it. Someone's baby's about to go outside. Um, God often, no, seriously, someone's baby's there. Okay, it's running away. Um, there's your dad. Okay, okay, all right, just checking. I didn't see you there. Sorry, Leonidas. Um, God sees people, often what happens is someone in the church will see the call of God on your life before you do. It often happens. I remember being uh 19 years of of age uh and playing tennis with my senior pastor, which we did every Friday morning, and then he would we'd make this just extremely uh strong coffee and like almost undrinkable. And we would sit and we would drink this coffee and we would discuss life. And I remember one time that where I thoroughly beat him in in tennis, and then we were sitting down, he disputes that, but we we were sitting down together with the coffee, and he said to me, Luke, I think that you could lead a church. I was 19 years old, and he said, I think you could lead a church. Would you like to go to another city, have a look at the city and see what God says? Can you imagine saying that to a teenager? That's the kind of environment that I grew up in. That's the kind of environment we're trying to create here. And what here's the danger is what happens is as we get older, what we naturally do is we lift the bar higher. I do this. I'm looking at people at 19 years old, and I'm putting on the standards that I have right now onto that same person, yet the people who believed in me saw it very differently. Is this making any sense? We actually have to create space for the next generation to dream and call them into something bigger. It's not just young people, it's the who's next. That's the question we need to be asking. Who's next? Who's God's called in our church? This was a worshiping church, a fasting and worshiping church. Um, God often speaks in the middle of fasting and worshiping. It happens. That's why we do worship every week, right? We do number one, because God is worthy of our worship, whether you feel like it or not, whether you've been sick this week or not, God is worthy of all of our worship all of the time. That is true, and when I worship him, I am living in the truth. And living in the truth does something good for my soul when I'm putting God in his rightful place in my life, a worshiping church. And if that comes awkward to you, if worship is awkward to you, and I know we have bright, it's like so light, bright in here. So should we turn the lights down a little bit? Everyone's looking at me. Um, you know, but I just want to encourage you. This is the kind of place and environment where you can express your love for God. Yeah, maybe your faith is getting challenged in your workplace, maybe your faith is getting challenged in the university, but here your faith is getting cheered on. Take the opportunity to practice being passionate for God because it won't get any easier than in this encouraging environment right here. This is practice for the rest of your week when we send you out. So they're they're praying, they're fasting. This, I love that this idea of sending these guys out didn't come from a whiteboard session in a board meeting, although I love that. It came from a prayer room. And so much of the best ideas that we've had have come from worship and prayer, and then God speaking. I remember being on the streets of um, I remember being in Osaka at 21 years old, new church planter, Tim was there, it was just a handful of us together, and we were just we were so frustrated that we we had millions of people around us and didn't didn't know how to reach them. And church wasn't really a thing that was like growing and in Japan, and it wasn't um we were expected to fail. Okay, and I remember praying together and just crying out to God and saying, God, what are we gonna do? I don't know what to do. And praying and praying and praying, how are we gonna meet people? And then in the middle of prayer, I remember someone had this idea of why don't we just take our band, because we're all musicians, and put it in the middle of the street where everyone is, where there's thousands and thousands of people on the bridge at Doton Body Bridge, if you've been to Osaka, which seems like everyone has in Australia recently. Um why don't we just put our band there and then we will see what happens? So that's a crazy idea. And so we did. We took the band onto the street. There's hundreds of thousands of people around you at a time, and to our amazement, hundreds of people started gathering around us watching these funny Australians playing music on the street, and then we would, in between songs, we would make friends and get people's phone numbers, and we would invite them to parties. That's basically how how we grew the how we started the church in Japan. It came out of this prayer time and an idea that later we ended up doing that in every major city in Japan and a whole bunch of cities all through Asia, and God just called it street bands. Thousands and thousands of people came to church through street bands all over Asia, and it happened because someone had an idea in a prayer meeting. Hello everyone, this is an encouraging story. Yeah? I wonder though, I I probably wouldn't do that in Brisbane, but I think God has things that He would love to put in our hands, keys that He would love to put in your hands, if we would get into a prayer room together and just pray and seek God and say, God, I don't know what to do, but you do. Please lead me. I'm here for it, I'm open. God wants to lead you more than you want to be led. That's true, and He cares about this city so much. And so um I just really want to encourage the our worship team. I really I'm so thankful for our worship team. You guys are doing more than just playing songs up here, you guys are bringing spiritual breakthrough to our community. Really, our worship leaders. I just want to encourage you from all of us, from all of us to you, I want to say to you, lead us, take us forwards, we will follow you. Are you with me? Lead us, have courage, take us to the presence of God, take us to a place of hearing the voice of God. So many times we'll be worshiping God, and then you'll have quiet moments after worship where we're just listening. That's not the time to just switch off. That's the time to really listen. God, what do you want to say? Because I'm here, it's quiet now. I've told you everything that is true about you, and now tell me what's true about me. And God will speak to you. He will. So, this is a worshiping church. They they um the spirit names them calling them by community. Like I said so many times, God calls people from the church before you even see it in yourself. That's why it's important to be in around people in church. Yeah, you'll see these really stupid movements on Instagram about being a Christian and not being a part of a church. To me, you are just slim pickings for the devil. You are just such an easy target for foolishness and just silly teaching, um, stuff that will get you so far off the rails. You need, you don't need to be pastored by your algorithm. You need a real person to sit in front of you who actually prays for you and actually cares about you and will say to you, Come on, we love you. Rise up, be strong in your moment of challenge. That's what you need, that's what I need. Amen. Amen. And then godly authority blesses what the Holy Spirit is doing in your life. It's not my job to control the call of God on your life. It's that's not my job. I'm here to help you follow the call of God on your life. And for some of you, you have such a huge call of God on your life. You are going to do extraordinary things that are beyond 112 Norman Street. And what I'm saying to that is amen. Amen. Go into all the world, change industries, make a difference, make trend transform society, go go do something huge for God, and don't forget Jesus. That's what I'm here to do. I'm here to cheer it on, to call it out of you. You're bigger than you're acting. Luke chapter 9, one of my favorite um stories in my favorite book. Luke chapter 9, verse. I haven't read Luke for a little bit. We're back, guys. We're back. Could I have some water? Has anyone got any water I could have? Um thank you. Uh now Jesus was calling the 12 and gave them authority and power to deal with the with the demons and to cure diseases. Very specific. He commissioned them to preach the good news of the kingdom to heal the sick, and he said, Don't load yourself up with equipment. Keep it simple. Thank you, sir. I love this. That's that's like the smallest little bit of water. Seriously, that's that's not water. I thought it was a joke. Thank you, that's amazing. She's punking me. This is my favorite bit of the verse. Okay, keep it simple. You are the equipment. You don't need lots of equipment. You are the equipment. This is the message, the message version. No luxury ends, get a modest play, modest place, and stay content until you leave. If you're not welcome, leave town, don't make a scene of it, shrug your shoulders and move on. Commission, they left. They traveled from town to town, telling the latest of the good news of God, the message, and curing people everywhere they went. What's stopping you today from oh, look at this. Oh, here we go. Thank you, sir. That was a test. You passed. Okay, no, just take. Um, what's stopping you today from being sent by God into the world to go and make a difference? What's stopping you? I'm not educated enough, I've not got enough money, I've got I don't have enough connections, I don't have enough equipment. You are the equipment. Your life is the preparation. You are called by God. Go into all the world, pray for everyone who's sick, see them recovered, kick the devil's butt everywhere you go. Do not be afraid. That's what Jesus would say to you today. So many people feel like an imposter in this kind of thing. I'm just not a good enough Christian. You need to throw off that label, it is unhelpful to you, and it's certainly not a blessing to anyone around you. Your fear is not a blessing to the people around you. It's time to shake off that fear and embrace who you are in Christ. You are a child of God. You are you are never going to be more called than you are right now. Say yes. To Jesus. That's what I meant. Say yes to Jesus. You could also say yes here if that helps. I was saying to our children, I was saying to our children last night at the dinner table, we did these Saturday night kind of devotions together. And I was saying, here's a distinctive of the Kennedy family is we have already decided, we decided many, many years ago that we were going to say a radical yes to God. That whatever he said, the answer was already yes. Before you even ask God, the answer is already yes. If you live like that, boy, you better sign up for an adventure. You will not get bored if you lead with yes with God. Because he will call you. So most of us are feeling um like we're waiting to get more equipped. And I would just say, I was talking to a young guy this week across the table reading the scripture, and I I just said to him, I feel like your comfort zone is so big. You live in a comfort zone, and it's like very comfortable. Everywhere you walk, it's just very comfortable around you. And the only way for you to grow is you've got to get out of your comfort zone. Well, I'm not very comfortable to pray in front of people. Get out of your comfort zone is the place of growth. I'm not very comfortable meeting new people. Get out of your comfort zone is the place of your growth. If you're an extrovert, I don't feel very comfortable being in silence and solitude. I get skittish. That is the place of your growth. The thing that you're not comfortable with is probably the place that where you're going to grow. I'm not comfortable sharing my faith with a friend. The only way you get good at sharing your faith with a friend is by sharing your faith with a friend. That's it. And on the other side of your fear is so much blessing. You want to read what happens when the guys come back in Luke 10, verse 17? It says the 70 came back triumphant. Master, even the even the demons dance to your tune. This is in the message. Basically saying, even the demons listen to us. Jesus said, I know I saw Satan fall a bolt of lightning out of the sky. See what I've given you? Safe passage as you walk on snakes and scorpions and protection from every assault of the enemy. No one can put a hand on you. All the same, the great triumph is not in the authority over evil, but it's God's authority over you and presence with you. Not what you do for God, but what God does for you. That's the agenda worth rejoicing about. What God has done for you. They come back, they're seeing miracles happening. And Jesus, Jesus acts like the miracles that they're seeing happen, it's just no big deal. It's no big deal. It's not even that exciting. If we saw like people getting blind eyes open and deaf people hearing, and uh if we saw like that kind of miracles happen in our church, I'd be fired up, man. Wouldn't you? I'd be fired. I'd be fired up about it. And Jesus is acting like it's not, it's good. That's good. It's not a huge deal. But what Jesus is saying is, he says, rejoice that God is with you and He's using your life. Rejoice at that. God is with you, He's using you. They come back with joy. I heard this story recently of a student in one of the big state high schools in Brisbane. Started running Alpha for their friends at one of the big state highs. It might be Brisbane State High. And ended up being 150 students coming every week to Alpha. So much so that the school tried to close it down and they had to get lawyers involved, and the students are so fired up that they're just not stopping. They're just leading it with all their friends. To me, that that's amazing. And most of those people are not Christians. It just was a handful of friends who are Christians who said, we are just going to go all in with God. God's going to use us in our high school. We're going to do something. And oh wow. Amazing. So I really believe one of the things that God is doing in our church right now that's very important for us is that we need to create a space for the rising generation in our church. Okay? This is so important for us. We've got an amazing children's ministry because we have so many children. And that's what a blessing that is. But we also have the biggest age group in our church is our eight plus age group. So eight to twelve year olds is the biggest age group in the kids' ministry, usually. Those people, and some many of you, they're your children, right? Those people are going to become teenagers really, really soon. That's going to be like that. Overnight, they're going to become teenagers. We need to create something for them in their most formative years to create strength for the future. And one of the key markers of resilience in faith, in the largest study ever done by Christians in the world, I think it's over half a million Christians, when they looked at who are the most resilient Christians that we have, one of the most important factors in them becoming resilient was having a person besides their parents who sowed Jesus into their lives consistently. That's what a youth ministry is. That's what a children's ministry is, guys. We're not trying to disciple them for you, we're partnering with you in your discipleship of your children, and we're right and we're coming alongside of it. Now, also, there will be many young people who come into this church who don't have Christian parents, who don't come from Christian families. They will come into this community and find Jesus in a real way. So here's my call out to you. Can you see a future where we have an incredible next generation in our church leading in the church? Empowering them, believing in them, relentlessly believing in them, and giving them a place to stand to stand strong in our church. Can you see that future with me? It's really important. Okay. I would ask you then who here wants to be part of that? Who here senses a call of like, I will help make that happen? Some people are putting up their hand. Amazing. Thank you. Um that was slightly rhetorical, but I'm so glad that you put up your hand. Maybe I should just say, put up your hand right now if you're gonna help. Um we need people who are gonna say, I will believe in the next generation first. Maybe you're not gonna be forever. You know, you know, sick, you know, the 60-year-old youth pastor. It's great. Thank you. We've got to keep, you know, we we need some young, we need some of our young adults to take ownership of the next generation. And we need some older people to really speak into them and believe in them. But we need it to happen. And so I'm just gonna put it out there and I'm gonna say in July, we're gonna start a youth ministry in this church. Ready or not, here we come. Who's gonna help? That's that's a real question. Who's gonna help? There's a couple ways you can help. Um, it's not you don't need to like be. We can talk about how you can be involved. Um, I'm gonna do a meeting. I'm gonna be here. I'm gonna be here right after this service. And if you're interested in being involved in this ministry, I want to just talk to you after, okay, about what commitment would look like. Just have a little discussion. Not not signing anything up, but let's have a talk about it. Could we just do that here? Right after this? Yes? Okay. Um, the other way you can do it is we need to raise some money to to just to launch this youth ministry. Okay, we just need to buy some materials. What eventually it will look like is we should we should put some resource behind someone who's gonna take the leadership role of that. We don't have that person yet, to be honest, but we will. God will call someone in this church. He may even be calling them right now. Um, we need to resource that. Is that you, Lord? Okay. So um, if God is speaking to you, please let's um let's make this happen. Sound good? Okay. The bullseye of this church has always been um sending our best to do big things for God. And one of the things that I'm most proud about about this church is the majority of the ministry happening in this church is not happening in this building, it's happening in the world. You guys are amazing, you guys are doing incredible things in the world, and I'm just so honored to be your pastor and pray for you. Uh, I thank God for you. Um, I want to encourage you to have courage. I got you back in prayer. We got you back in prayer. Your pastors are praying for you. We're training more pastors to pray for you. Um, they're coming, and um, God be with you. You're amazing. Could I just pray over you right now? Thank you, Lord. Come, Holy Spirit. Oh, we're listening. Gotta thank you for sending people into the world. Give us courage, Lord. Give us courage to say a radical yes to you. Take our lives and use them in a big way. God help us to overcome our fears. Some people hear you've got dreams in your heart, but God would like to multiply those dreams. To ask him for something bigger. This is not for ourselves, God. This is your kingdom, for your namesake. So that every person in this city has an opportunity to hear the good news in a good way. Use our lives, Lord. Give us courage. Send us into the world, God. We're saying yes. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.