The Gospel At Home - Luke Kennedy

Ps Luke Kennedy brings a challenging yet encouraging message. “The Gospel at Home” will help us reflect on how we can be examples of Christ in every area of our lives.

Ps Luke shares from Matthew 7:9-11, Ephesians 5:25 & Ephesians 19:11-12

 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_01 0:33

Amazing. Hey, um, if we haven't met, my name's Luke. I'm one of the pastors here. It's great to have you with us. Uh, yeah, I just wanted to give a shout out to our teams of doing kids and youth last week. Can we just give them a big hand? Well done. Big push to get something off the ground, a new ministry. It's been in our heart for a long, long time to have a youth ministry. And so part of that is we're doing some programs outside, and part of that is we're doing some programs inside, which means our our our team, our teenagers and our young people are taking over some of the teams in our church. So uh if you see up the back there, if my son Hugo uh misses some of the screens, he may be playing chess at the back on the computer. Um so just just keep him accountable there for me, um Ben. That would be great. Um that's gonna be cool. So they're gonna be something in cafe and and and in kids and in what have you. So um part about that is just our heart for we believe young people can lead in the church, and we want to give them opportunity. I remember as a 14-year-old, uh, I was given an opportunity to preach in our church as a 14-year-old, and I think it was probably a very average message. Um, but I was I was excited and fired up, and that was how much people believed in young people in the church that I grew up in, and I we're trying to replicate that heart here to um to do that. So are you with me? Um is everyone feeling okay? You feel like you're a little bit quiet. This is Brisbane winter. Um and but how beautiful is it? Gosh, Australia, come on, let's go, Queensland. Um, I want to talk today, I think um a message that might be, I think have mixed reactions and mixed emotions attached to it, because I want to talk a little bit about family. Okay, and I've called this message the gospel at home. The gospel at home. And I want to talk about family, and I know I just want to recognize that in this room there's all different kinds of family situations going on, even some people who may have not the best experience of family yet. And I'm so glad that you've come into a spiritual family where you can experience the love of God and community. Um, our church is not trying to replace your family, we could never do that. Uh, but I believe that you will find great friends here and a spiritual family based around the love of Jesus in our lives. But family has such an outweighted um impact on our lives. Every single one of us, if we were to do a geneogram of your family, like a history of your family and the issues that were part of that family that have somehow crept into your bones, um, we would see some of the traits of, I even see some of the traits of it in me from my father and grandfather that some of the things that I even tried to run away from are still somewhat there. It's my family has had an impact on my life. Some of it's been for really good, and some of it has been challenging, and I'm sure you can relate to that as well in your family. If you were to describe the atmosphere of your family, the culture of your family, I wonder how you would explain the culture or the atmosphere of your family. Maybe you can just take a moment to think about that right now. Say three words about the atmosphere of the family that you grew up in. What was it, if you were to explain it? What would it be? Was it warm? Or maybe was there a lot of performance? Or strict? Violent would definitely be one of the ones that I use. Violent. Caring for the poor is definitely part of my family. Taking in people from the street constantly, often into my bed, and I would be on the couch as a child. A little bit out of whack, no boundaries. Forgiving? I think that was a big part of my family. Forgiving. What about you? If you think about these things, a lot of your family is influenced by the way that you view God. The way that we view God shapes the atmosphere of our home. So if you feel like God is gracious, chances are that grace is going to leak into your home. The way that you treat each other, the atmosphere of your home, it's gracious. If you feel that God is harsh, it will leak into your home. How you treat people. Um, in Matthew chapter 7, verse 9, Jesus put it like this Well, who is there among you? If a son asks him for bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will you give him a serpent? If you then, being evil in comparison to God, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your uh heavenly father give you good things to those who ask him? That's a picture of the Father. That's a picture of God, the Father, in our lives. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses this picture, this this parent-sibling relationship to describe God. He was really the first person to really describe God like that in history was Jesus. Um, even the Jews did not think about God as a father, they didn't think about it like that. Jesus came and he said, God is like a good father, the perfect father. So if you believe that God is irritated with you, I wonder how that's going to affect the way that you love the people around you. If you feel that God needs your performance for you to be loved, how will then that affect the way that you treat those in your home? And for those who are not living with your family, I think the same could be true with those who you do live with. I lived in a share house from 18 to when I got married at 23, those five years, they were really like almost like a second family. We spent so much time together, you could apply the same thing here. Jesus reveals that the Father is full of grace and full of truth. How much will that affect the way that you you do it? Okay. Um if you read Peter Pete Schizero's um book, uh The Emotional Healthy series, he has it and it's some incredible books. One of them is called The Emotional Healthy Relationships, and he talks a lot about understanding your family history and how that's affecting the way that you relate to people. So I'll give you an example. In my family, if we had conflict, the way that we dealt with conflict was putting on the boxing gloves and going out in the front yard. That's how we dealt with the the challenges of our home was through violence and often got out of control and people hurt each other, and it was really whoever was strongest won in those situations. It's not a healthy dynamic for a child to grow up in. So I grew up having this really, really dialed in, uh, very, very cued in to people's emotions around me. Because anytime it the emotions could get angry, it could get violent very quickly. So I was so cued in to people's emotions around me. That what that then does is it makes you a people pleaser. You can't say no. Um, you do things for people that you shouldn't do for them, you carry things you shouldn't carry. It affects things, and then you take that, you don't come into marriage with a clean slate, you come into a marriage with your with your family history. There's some of that, and you may not even know that you carried in, but you do. So I remember the first year of our marriage, I married this beautiful girl, so sweet, so genuine. What you see is what you get, no hidden things underneath, just so honest. Um, and I was on edge, and we spent the I didn't want to get into the fight zone, so I would get into the um backing away zone. Because either in my family, you were either gonna fight or you were gonna really back away and call it to make peace. Is this making sense? I'm just telling you a little bit of this is my therapy session, okay. And and maybe you're thinking about your own situation and you should, as I as I'm talking. You can see how that would affect. We had many, many silent days in the first year of our marriage because I didn't know how to do conflict. It was either going to be very bad or there was gonna be no conflict, and we're gonna run away from conflict. That is not a healthy situation, and Jesus has to come into my life and bring healing to my life for those things that I'm dragging into my home. He has to bring healing into my life so that I can learn how to do it better. And and and the reality is Jesus did do so much healing in my life through those early years of our marriage. It's almost like marriage became the microscope, um, microscope on top of all of my issues. Did you guys find that as well? If you've married here, that marriage brings to the surface all of your issues. It doesn't hide it, it brings them up. Because suddenly there's someone next to you who's who can actually see all of your junk, and you can't run away from it. That's reality. This is why marriage is such a beautiful part of your discipleship to Jesus, is because suddenly you are confronted with yourself. Are we all okay? It's a little quiet. Everyone's in thinking mode, that's okay. But what I found was as our marriage got better and stronger and we both became more healed, what happened was our marriage started becoming an example of the gospel to the people around us. Now I grew up in a culture, uh, when I say grew up, I I was I was a teenager, but I was kind of growing up in in Japan. In Japan, the normal for marriages was really loveless marriages. Normal. 90% of people unfaithful in marriage, only 10% faithful in marriage. Um, that's the ones who admit it. And then um mostly sexless marriages and also no warmth in marriage. Most people sleep in separate bedrooms, um, father in this room, mother in this room with the kids. Um, and so that's the kind of culture we grew up in. So when young people would come into the church, almost all of them had zero vision for marriage. Because why would you have a vision for marriage if that's what you've seen of marriage? So they come into marriage, come into the church, and then they would look at our lives and other people in the church who were married and actually loving each other, and they would think this can't be real. I remember there was this girl, her name was Ayaka, came from a very wealthy family, um, very kind of posh background. She came into the church, very high expectations on her life from her family. She saw a picture of marriage that was so lifeless and loveless, she had no vision for marriage, and she came in, and the first thing she noticed was Izumi and I were preaching together because we're doing bilingual church, and we're kind of making jokes together and and kind of you know being, I don't know, huggy and stuff on the stage. And she said, it must be fake. It must be fake. Surely these people do not love each other as much. We'd been married 10 years by this time, and that was certainly the death blow. Ten years was like you don't even look at each other after 10 years in Japan. So, and then she kept coming back trying to find out if that this was certainly going to be fake. These people surely did not, were not like this. I remember on her baptism, she her testimony at her baptism was I had never seen a happy marriage before. I came into the church and I saw all these people who loved each other, and I thought, surely something is different here. So she's getting baptized, and she said it was the marriages, the love between the marriages that opened my heart to Jesus, and now I'm giving my life to Jesus. Your marriage becomes an example to the world of how Jesus loves the church. That's the idea. It's not the government's idea, it's God's idea. Marriage is our thing, it's not the government's thing, it's God's idea. That's how he wants to display, it's one of the ways he wants to display his love for people. Ephesians chapter 5. This used to blow people's minds, young people's minds overseas. Ephesians chapter 5, 25. Husbands, love your wife, even as Christ loved the assembly, loved the church, and gave himself up for it. The idea that a husband, the way that a husband loves his wife is to lay down his life for his wife, that idea is crazy. It's just not normal. Leadership in marriage in a Christian marriage looks like here's my life, I'm giving up my ambitions, my desires, what I want for to for for your sake. Hello, boys, and all the guys saying amen, shouting me down. Yeah, yeah, louder. Someone said, Tell them, Luke. I'm gonna speak to the guys because I'm I'm a guy, I understand this. That's what it looks like, um, and it's so powerful. It's so powerful. Your marriage gives people a vision. I expected, I fully expected when I came back to Australia this to not be a thing. I thought people have seen great marriages in Australia, even people are not Christians. You've seen great marriages, everyone's, you know, they understand marriage here. It's a totally different thing. Okay, fast forward a couple of years. I am absolutely shocked that it's almost the same. We have the majority of young adults coming into our church have zero vision for marriage. They don't see marriage as a great thing, they haven't seen great marriages, they don't feel excited about marriage. It's almost the same as what I experienced in Japan. So I want to say to you here today: your marriage is not just about you, it's an example to the world, it's a vision for others to carry. When I got up and got married to my wife at 23 years old, just so young. Um, I look at my children now and I'm thinking that's 10 years from now. Gosh, I was so young. Um, I said these lines, because I believe, holding hands, pastor there. Because I believe that God has called us to be together, and because I love you, I take you to be my lawful wedded wife. We often recite these whole vows to each other just for fun, for laughs these days. Um, keeping the vows current, you know what I mean? Keeping them current. One of the things it says there is, because I believe that God has called us to be together. Why has God called you to be together? Ever thought about that? Why has God called you to be together? Not just for your personal fulfillment, surely. Surely there's more purpose to it than that. I but you know, f I I'm gonna speak a little bit about our family today, just as an example. But God has called us to be together for a purpose. There's a purpose to your marriage, it's not just about you, it's about displaying Jesus to the world in some significant way, not least of those to your children. And maybe your marriage could be part of the way that God brings healing to broken people who have no vision for marriage or have no picture of what a loving relationship could look like. I remember being in my pastor's home as a young person who I'd only seen violent marriages in my life. I remember coming into my pastor's home and watching them argue. You know, his wife was South American, right? So she was she had a little fire. And and he's Aussie. So I'm watching this kind of um international um relationship negotiation. I see some people here, okay. All right, I feel you. Um, and I'm watching this, and I'm thinking, I'm thinking, my personal background, you just heard my story, I'm thinking this is gonna go bad. And but it didn't. They were loving each other, and they were even laughing about it and working it out, and I was thinking, oh, okay, that's different. And what was happening was slowly, week after week after week, if I spent time in their home, the the understanding of what marriage could be was getting into my heart. It was changing me, changing the way I thought. The lady of the vows go on to say in sickness and health. Izumi signed up for that one because she had to nurse me through the hospital for nine months. I'm so glad we we signed up for that one. Keep that one in the vows if you ever think about getting married. Um, Matthew chapter 19, verse 11, it says this and the message. Oh I love this verse. This is so good. Jesus said, This is asking about marriage. This is the only time Jesus talks about marriage. Not everyone is mature enough to live the married life, it requires a certain aptitude and grace. Marriage, marriage isn't for everyone. Some from birth seemingly never give marriage a thought, others never get asked or accepted, and some decide not to get married for kingdom reasons. Maybe you're gonna be a missionary in some dangerous part of the world. Go for it. We're here for it. But if you're capable of growing into the largeness of marriage, do it. If you are capable of growing into the largeness of marriage, marriage is not a small thing, it's a big thing, and you've got to grow into it. I'm not ready. You probably never will be until you do it, until you're in it, and then you've got to grow into it. And that's a fact. You will sp you will spend the rest of your life growing into the bigness of marriage. It is a big thing. So let's get practical. Okay. Are we alright? I heard this quote from a monk who from a lady who was like complaining about um all the people not thanking her for her hard work in the home. And the monk said to her, Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to the love in my dreams. So let's get very practical, shall we? You enjoying my motivational talk? Um, some of the rhythms that have really helped our our family. Okay. I'm not saying that they are the right rhythms for you necessarily, but I hope that this may get some jog your um imagination about what could what could take place about intentionality. Okay, these things are what we use to form culture intentionally in our family because family values come from modeling and repeated tradition in our home. Think of it like a garden and a trellis. You've got the wild garden, but you need something for it to grow up onto. Okay, so for us in our home, our personality, this is just us, like we're not super structured. Like, this is not my personality. Um, some of you are looking at me like, yeah, I know. Um and we're both a little bit like that. So we've had to be not, we don't have heaps of structure, but we do have some really strong values in a home that kind of anchor things throughout our time together. One of those things is what we call family meeting. Family meeting is something that we do monthly. And when I was single in our chair house, we did the same thing in our chairhouse as well. But we did this with our children from very, very young age. Even before they could talk, we would do family meeting together once a month. Okay. We save our best food and the best desserts for family meeting. It's a special thing. It's the thing everyone looks forward to. And here's what happens at family meeting: everyone gets an encouragement from everyone. So we choose your person, and then everyone goes around and encourages the person. Okay? Encouragement dump on you. And then we go around, every person in the family gets an encouragement from every person in the family. Um, and then here's the fun part for them is everyone goes around the room and everyone gets a challenge. You could grow in that dot dot, okay, even for the parents. Okay, so this is the time when the kids get very excited because they get to give the parents the feedback on what we can grow in. They are very excited about this exercise, okay? And I think this is very important. Everyone gets a challenge, everyone gets it. Um and I think this is really important because I always had this impression in my mind: teenage years are coming. Teenage years are coming, teenage years are coming, and they need to be able to disagree in a respectful and healthy way. They need to be able to talk to me about what they're not happy about in a respectful and healthy way. They can't be shut down. So we taught them from a very young age how to talk to us about what they think needs to be happening in our family and maybe even in our leadership in a healthy and respectful way. One of the biggest values in our home is we just don't tolerate whinging. And that maybe that's part of our Asian heritage. Um, we don't tolerate whinging. We teach our children to negotiate not to whinge. If you want something, you come and you talk about it and you negotiate and you ask and you get a plan and you present it, but you don't winch. You don't complain and whine. That's that's not the path to getting what you want. The path to getting what you want is come and negotiate. Come and talk, come and sit at the table and explain why you want what you want. Then we have the calendar. Everyone talks about what's coming up in the calendar. Sometimes we don't get to that because sometimes it's a total meltdown at family time. Family meeting is often a total meltdown. Just as my encouragement to you. So don't quit on the first time because it could just be horrible, and you're thinking, why are we even doing this? Um, and okay, so this is doing a few things at once. One, it's helping children to challenge parents in a healthy way. Number two, it's teaching children that they have agency in our family, meaning they are part of creating the culture in our family. And number three, it's it's showing them that parents will listen. And this is really important that we are modeling listening to them because teenage years are coming, and in teenage years we have to fight to stay together. Okay, that's the first rhythm that's really helped us. The second rhythm that's really helped us is family devotions. Okay, this is kind of new for us. We've done this as our children have gotten a little bit older. I wish we did it sooner. Um, when we were when they were little, we did we did um uh bedtime stories. That was great, and we do that with Kaylee, yeah, Littlest one. Um and we were planting churches and we were very, very busy when our kids were little, but I would always try to come home for story time for bed. That was kind of like my end of um kind of my how do you say, like guardrails on my time was I have to be home for bedtime so I can read the Bible to my children because I can't go and read the Bible with everyone else except for my children. Note to all the preachers. Okay. Um we do it on Saturday nights, we do it together, we have family devotions together, and everyone gets a chance to lead. Next week is Kaylee's turn, so I'm not sure how that's gonna go because she's four. Um, but she does love Jesus and the donkey story, so that could go interesting. But everyone, they choose a story and then they ask three questions. It's the same questions I ask the young adults when we meet and read the Bible together. It's what does this story show you about who God is? What does this story show you about yourself, and what is your response? It's very simple, but they're leading the meeting, and sometimes it goes extraordinarily well, and sometimes it bombs and they need a little bit of help. But they're learning how to lead a conversation around God, and many conversations come up during this time, a lot of family values conversations. Like last night we were talking about um the nature of the kingdom of God, and we talked about in our youth ministry here being different than out in the world. We were talking about how here we have an opportunity to make heroes out of people that the world would put down. So the world would put you down, but you come into the youth ministry and you become a hero. That's the kingdom of God. Okay? We have an opportunity to do that here. So we're talking about these values coming out of the story that we're reading together. This is an anchor point. Scripture is an anchor point for our family. I am just baffled by the amount of Christians who their lives are not anchored in scripture. It's just anchored in such temporal things. The latest trend, what's happening on the latest influences saying, even what I'm saying to you, it's might it might be all good, but scripture is the thing that's been going for the last 2,000 years that the whole church has been anchored in. Don't anchor your life in other people's opinions. Anchor your life in the scripture. What did Jesus say? That's what the value that we're giving to our children as a spiritual inheritance that they can know God. Is this okay? Um, the third thing is that that's really helped us the rhythm is fast repentance and fast forgiveness. Modeled over and over and over and over. I have a wonderful wife who is really amazing in that she won't let things just slide. She's not going to let things slide, especially important things, especially when it comes to attitude, putting each other down, talking badly. She will be all over it. And she won't let them off the hook for um that kind of um destructive kind of behavior. On the other hand, forgiveness is really, really fast, and coming back to joy is really, really fast. So I now it's it's amazing. I spoke about this a couple of weeks ago about correcting our children and bringing them back to joy really quickly, and how that builds self-esteem and self-confidence, that they can overcome challenges quickly. Um now I'm seeing them do that not all the time, but sometimes I even see them doing that together, correcting each other, asking for forgiveness, and then forgiving all in within 10 seconds, and then they're back to play. And I'm seeing this self-kind of regulation in their relationship together, and that has been modeled to them for many years over and over and over and over, and it's a helpful, it's a helpful thing. So, com so forgiveness is not about conflict avoidance, it's about moving through the conflict to reconciliation. Okay. Um I'm talking a lot about my family. I don't talk about this all the time, so um, if you don't like it, come back next week. It'd be great. Um, here's the good news though, as I get I'm gonna finish, and Lisa's gonna help me. Is you can start being intentional now. No matter where you've come from, because you might be thinking, yeah, Luke, that's great for you, but here's my situation. There's no perfect time to start being intentional in your home in displaying the gospel. Not when I have a holiday, when school starts, when school finishes. There'll always be a reason why you can't start. And then you've just got to start somewhere, and it's probably going to be messy when you start. I don't know how many times I have prepared something of the scripture to share with my family in a discussion, and it's just blown up, and I've gotten so mad because I really wanted it to be good, and then I think, oh, now's a good time to just play the gospel. It will happen. But what the children notice over many, many years, it's not about the days that you miss, it's just about the rhythm. Constant, constant, constant, anchoring, anchoring, anchoring in the scripture. It builds confidence. So I wonder if you would just take a moment right now and think about maybe even if you're here with someone from your home, maybe you could ask them, what's something that you would like to start? Or what's something that you want to double down on? We should, we should, we should really be more intentional about this thing in our family right now. You want to just take a minute while the guys are going to prepare for communion? You want to come up and prepare for it now? Just take a moment, talk to your neighbor. What's something that you could start or double down on in your home to build an intentional culture around displaying the gospel? If you're an introvert, I'm sorry, but this is for you too. Communion, we got it. Is it happening? We're gonna need a table down here, guys. That table. So I'm gonna carry it down here and then put this stuff on it. We did plan this before. They're coming? Yeah, bring them on out. Gluten free? We got you. Amazing. I might be gluten-free today. That looks good. Are we doing okay? Okay. We're gonna respond by taking communion together. Communion is the gospel in physical form. It's Jesus' body, body broken for us, it's Jesus' blood shed for us. The sign of a new covenant between us and God. Not because of what we've done, but because of what he's done. It's him reaching into our lives. It's um quite scandalous that God would come and die for you. So that you don't have to die, but you could have everlasting life. The kind of life that is everlasting, both in scope but also in nature. The life of God flowing through you. And we're gonna take it with our family, okay? So they're gonna get everyone to just come out of your seats in a moment and grab your children, bring them down here, grab communion, take it together. Alright. Welcome, children. Lucy, come on, come on, you guys, come on up here. Don't sit back there. You're part of this. Amazing. We just take a moment to pray. And then I'm gonna invite you to come. Thank you, Jesus. Jesus, thank you for your blood poured out for us. That your presence is here. Thank you for your body broken for us. I thank you for those who need healing here today because even today's subject has been painful in their own hearts. I pray you bring healing to their lives. Restore to them your great love. Restore to them hope for the future. For those who need healing physically, I pray for healing through their bodies and their minds, God, as we take this bread and wine together, that we will receive again and again and again your life, the everlasting eternal life of God would flow into our lives and change us, God. We need you. In Jesus' name, amen.