Life @ Grace Acts2:42-47 Dr. Matt Cassidy --- May 21, 2017 Good morning. Please have a seat. A couple of commercials, and then we ll get started. First, adult baptisms will be on June 4. It ll be a fun time for us to celebrate. We ll have pizza under the trees, good times. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ and have never taken the plunge, we d love you to join us. If you want to know more about what that entails, in your bulletin there s an opportunity to fill out some get-to-know-you, welcome to Grace info, and there s a box you can check for learning about baptism. We ll contact you and then maybe we ll have a conversation and figure out if that s right for you. Second, you might have noticed in the lobby there s some little boxes out there. If you re an official member of Grace, we re asking you to affirm what we believe are the future leaders of our church. It s called an elder. And this is an annual renewable thing. So if you ll take responsibility there, we d all be grateful. And finally, we do a thing called Summer Serve here at Grace Covenant Church. It s an opportunity for you not to just serve at Grace, but serve the people that serve at Grace, those children s workers who are working nine months of the year. We d love for you to take their place for twelve weeks. How about ten out of twelve weeks? You go on vacation, we got your back on that. We need you to do that. We re about 100 or so volunteers short and actually we re coming up to that deadline. We were approached by a guy who promised, who absolutely guaranteed, he could fill those spots for us. He was in between jobs and he said, I ll make this happen. He used to work security for United and he said he d come in here and pull you out of that seat and bring you across that parking lot. I m not saying we re going to do that I m just saying we re entertaining the idea. You can fill out a card and put it in the plate when it passes. If you look at the title of this week s sermon, it says, Life @ Grace. I ve been waiting months for today. Life @ Grace, that s what it s about, it s about life at Grace. I ve been waiting because I just want to say thank you. This is an awesome church. I love this church. I hope Life@Grace.Cassidy 1
you ve had an experience where this church got to love you. Weird things are happening here. It s awesome to be here. Did you know our church is celebrating its fiftieth birthday this fall? Fifty years old. Yeah, good stuff. Listen, if you re visiting today, excuse us. We re in between Bible books that we re going to be studying. We re going to be looking into Proverbs very soon and this is a stand-alone sermon and we haven t had a family talk in a while, so that s what we re going to do today. So if you re visiting, enjoy. We ll have communion together later and maybe, actually, this could be very helpful to you. You ll learn more about us in this thirty minutes than at any other time in three weeks. So here s the idea. There s a feeling of awe here at Grace and it s very difficult to describe or define and mostly I just want to stay out of the way. I don t want to be the brake pedal in what God is doing at this church and I mostly today --- here s the thing --- I just want to tell you stories about who we are and what makes us work. I guess that s the goal. Five years ago or so I started noticing people coming in and saying, You know there s something about Grace. What is the thing? And I didn t know what to say to answer them. So two years ago I said, You know what? I m going to start looking into this. I m going to try and put vocabulary words because I can t explain it and I can t understand it either. After a fair amount of research, I think this is a major factor. I m going to need help from a guy named Bill Walsh. This is the atmosphere, the vibe, kind of the feeling you get around here. It s a leadership style that we learned from Bill Walsh stylistically it s very similar. Life@Grace.Cassidy 2
In 1979, Bill Walsh took over the San Francisco 49ers. It s a football team. It was the worst team in the NFL. People said it was the worst team in professional sports. In three years, they won the Super Bowl --- in just three years. And when they asked him, Did you have a vision to win the Super Bowl? Did you have a vision for the timetable for the fastest turnaround in the history of professional sports? Do you know what he said? No. He had no vision to win. That wasn t part of what he did. When he took over the team, they were 2-14. That means they won two games and lost fourteen. His first year as coach, they lost fourteen games again that season. He tried to quit. They wouldn t let him. And the team was okay with losing. So what he did --- eighteen months after he tried to quit, he s in this picture being carried off the field and holding the Lombardi trophy. What he focused on was not the vision of winning or the vision for a timetable. He wasn t even focused that much per se on winning. What he focused on was what he called standards of performance. And the standards of performance were his vision, if you want to call it that, where the players played their best. He could control that. And so there was no more sitting during practice. Everybody had to work their hardest every single practice, the coaches had to wear ties, the linemen had thirty different drills, the routes that the receivers ran were worked out to the inch. Practices were litigated by the minute. Life@Grace.Cassidy 3
Now it wasn t about control. If you think this was about control, you re missing it. It was about the pursuit of excellence for every individual player, and he just figured, You know what? The score will take care of itself. He couldn t control that. The fact that he had the fastest turnaround in professional sports --- couldn t control that either. That wasn t up to him. There was no grand vision. So much so, that his assistant coach, that first year that he was coaching and they were losing a lot, his assistant coach complained to the owner that Bill Walsh didn t have a vision for winning. And so Bill Walsh fired that coach. And that coach missed out on three Super Bowl rings. Is it any wonder that the philosophy of leadership that Bill Walsh was talking about is written in his book, and it s entitled The Score Takes Care of Itself. Look how it s a paradigm. Look how it says My Philosophy of Leadership. The Score Takes Care of Itself. In what s called a coaching tree that became head coaches --- sixteen appearances in the Super Bowl, thirteen victories, because they didn t have a vision to win. The score takes care itself. They had a vision for the players playing their best. It s a paradigm. And if you could summarize styles of leadership simply, you d say there are two styles. Big vision out there and the people who serve it, or, the people are here and they have value and let the score take care of itself. Life@Grace.Cassidy 4
The vibe at this church is this Bill Walsh let s be the very best we can be and let the score take care of itself. We value the believer. Every believer is a minister. Watch how in this last book we looked at --- look how Paul kind of has this Bill Walsh school of leadership. Colossians 1:28 It is Christ whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. In Colossians 1:28 it says, It is Christ who we proclaim. Here s how he s doing all his work. He s warning everyone, he s teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that --- here s the purpose --- big vision? No --- So that we may present everyone mature in Christ. Everyone mature in Christ --- I guess that s the vision. This is where we re going to toil, this is where we ll do our work, everyone mature in Christ. Simply put, around here we say a lot, I m just the pastor, and you re the ministers. And we want you to do excellent ministry. And we ll just let the score take care of itself. You need a big vision for Grace Covenant Church? It s etched in glass behind the curtain. It says to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. It says to love your neighbor as yourself. And pursue that with excellence. That s what we do here. And we expect everyone to play their part and we expect everyone to do their best in playing that part. So that s one of the elements that makes Grace the way it is. Another one is that we try to follow the pattern of the early church when it s just getting started. We re going to look at a passage in Acts chapter 2. And this is the first church. Brand new, it was just born, and it has four standards of performance. These are the four standards of performance that they ll be continually working on. Acts 2:42 They continually devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Here it goes. On the screen it says, They continually devoted themselves to these performances, the apostles teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Life@Grace.Cassidy 5
They re continually devoted. This is what they re going to drill. These are the thirty drills of the linemen, these four things. 1. The Apostles Teaching The apostles teaching --- that s Bible study, right? That s what we do here. We believe in studying God s word here. And we want it to apply to our lives. How many of you guys were here for the Resolve series? Audience participation that was just in January. And we learned some profound truths that are part of a life of a Christian, and in their growth with Christ they re going to hit a wall. And we heard, tragically, that you can be at the wall for years and decades. But growth happens when you plow through that wall somehow. You have to trust God in whole new ways. We learned how to trust God in the way we ve been made and the way we ve been hurt. We learned that if you want to have fruit in your life, sweet, abundant fruit that looks like this, then there are seasons in your life where this has to change to this. And I remember the first time I showed these slides that part of being a fruitful Christian is being pruned drastically, and when we showed that last slide, at least from here, from an audio standpoint, I heard people groan. We learned that sorrow is part of growth. That s a good thing. We just finished a book called Colossians and we talked and learned about how we re committed to this, we re continually committed to learning about the majesty and the uniqueness Life@Grace.Cassidy 6
of Jesus Christ, the power of the gospel that He brings us, and then the power of that gospel changing our very identity. You guys know the chant: We died with Him ---- everything is with Him --- We died with Him, we were raised with Him, we are hidden with Him, He is our life. And we will be glorified with Him. And that changes the way we view all of reality. We are continually devoted to Bible study. 2. The Fellowship And the second thing it says here is continually devoted to the fellowship. The word fellowship there literally means what we have in common. What do we have in common? Saved by Jesus Christ, have a new identity in Jesus Christ. And so, while we all have kind of weird, different backgrounds and ethnicities and socioeconomic things, we get together in the busy season at this church, fifty times per week. We are continually devoted to the fellowship. In slow times it s like thirty-five. The word in Greek for fellowship also means to share in common. Generosity --- it means to give --- the word for generosity has the same root as the word koinónea. And the idea is that we share our lives, we share our souls with one another. Two weeks ago we had a leadership dinner for the people that are caring for our adult communities --- those are our adult Sunday School classes --- and friends, you need to join one of those if you don t. They are little churches within this bigger church. And they love and care for each other. Each class kind of had just a story of living deeply in each other s lives and helping someone grieve or helping someone cope with a difficult life situation, helping someone navigate through bashing through a wall. It was a beautiful night of expressing this continual commitment to fellowship. We do that here. Please, if you re not part of that, you should try to be part of that. 3. The Breaking of Bread: Communion Teaching, fellowship the third thing it says is the teaching or the breaking of the bread. And it s a definite article, it means that, it means the Lord s table. We ll do that in just a few moments, but it s talking about reminding us about our past with Jesus, with Him, and our future with His return to glory. Life@Grace.Cassidy 7
4. Prayer Teaching, fellowship, the table --- communion, and then this last one. It says prayer, continually devoted to prayer. Can I tell you a really creepy story? Do you like creepy stories. It s kind of scary, kind of creepy. If you don t go to church, this is going to be especially creepy. In January 1993 at Grace Covenant Church that pastor was teaching on the book of Ephesians. That s about the glory of the bride of Jesus Christ. It s about the church. And it was Right to Life or Sanctity of Life Sunday. On that Sunday, a woman came up on the stage with a gun to try and stop the service from continuing. It s a true story, it s part of our history. If you don t know that part of our history, that s a good thing not to know. It was not a good Sunday here. Twenty years later, 2013, Sanctity of Life Sunday, we re in this auditorium, the worship center, and we re learning from the book of Ephesians. And one of our missionaries is in from out of town and she saw people doing things in church that were way past disrespectful --- sacrilegious, just evil. And then she looked around and she kind of had what I would call a vision of God s word being taught from up here but somehow there was a spiritual kind of barricade keeping it from being heard in the seats. And so she could just see that there was power here that was keeping people from hearing and growing. Well, she s a friend of mine, and so she creeped me out with that story, and I thought, You know what? Misery loves company. So I had her come to the leadership, the elder board meeting, and she told those two stories on the same Sunday, twenty years later from that first story. And the leadership, the elder board, we grieved. We were very concerned because we grieved because we had a cavalier attitude about the spiritual battle that takes place in our lives. I mean, the Bible says this is not a war with flesh and blood, it is a war of principalities and powers, that there s a spiritual was going on, it happens all the time, but here on Sunday too. We grieved that we had a cavalier attitude about prayer. And as leaders, it s our responsibility to be in prayer continually devoted. Soon after that we started meeting every Sunday. So every Sunday the elders come and they meet in the bride s room before anybody gets here and they pray for us. They pray for our souls, they pray for protection for us, they pray spiritual prayers upon us. And do you know why? Because they are continually devoted to prayer. Life@Grace.Cassidy 8
Those are the practices of an effective church --- Bible teaching, fellowship, the table, and prayer. Just let the score take care of itself. Watch what happens. Sense of Awe Acts 2:43 Everyone kept a sense of awe and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. Next verse: Everyone kept a sense of awe as many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. I think that s what s happening here. I was roaming around the house the other day and I just shouted out to Melinda, There is something happening at our church! I don t understand it and I can t explain. And she said, Well, try to help me. Why are you freaking out so much? And I said, Because on any given Sunday --- it s a very strange thing --- on any given Sunday, there s such a diverse response to what happens here. We have a lot of people in our church who haven t opened a Bible or even had a Bible in their lives. And they come in and tell stories like, Okay, wait --- like everything is brand new, because everything is new to them. Okay, tell me that story again about that dad that has two sons and he runs off and then he comes to his senses and he comes back and receives all those gifts from his dad. I say, Yeah, it s called the prodigal son. Right, that story! I love that story! I m the prodigal son! And then, like on that same Sunday, I will hear from some thirty-five-year old church attender who s been going to church that long, with a book that thick with a bunch of bulletins in it and notes highlighted, and he ll say, You know the story of the prodigal son? I get it now. I was stuck at the wall of ingratitude and I m free. We had a lady here come a few weeks ago and she had some serious responsibilities back in Dallas where she lived, and she said, I m not going back to Dallas until I find out what s next in this Colossians. And so, I just wanted to tell you, I want to come to church here at Grace --- she lives in Dallas --- then I m going to get in my car and race home, because I love this book on Colossians that we re studying together. She said, I ve studied Colossians a lot, been to a lot of Bible studies --- she had a Bible that was that thick with a bunch of notes in it. And Life@Grace.Cassidy 9
friends, for that sort of thing to be happening regularly and often, it s very unusual. When we did the Resolve series in January, you know the most feedback we got, the most positive feedback we got, was from people that went to Unstuck in 2009. It was the second time they d heard it. So we have these brand new Christians or new followers of Jesus Christ with a new understanding, they re going [explosion sound]. And then we have these older believers that have been around and they re going [explosion sound]. You know how that happens? It s a God thing, that s how it happens. You can t make that happen. We are victims here. I do not know what s going on, but I m in awe and I don t want to get in the way. I m just here to tell you some really great stories. Share All Things Acts 2:44 All who believed were together and they had all things in common, sharing things, and they began selling their property and their possessions and were sharing them with all as everyone might have need. Next verse: All who believed were together and they had all things in common, sharing things, and they began selling their property and their possessions and were sharing them with all as everyone might have need. That first church --- that was a generous church. This church - this is a generous church. Just a family talk, but I want to tell you three amazing little stories about the generosity of this church. One, it s financed its math --- I m using round numbers to keep you from falling asleep, okay? So in the last five years our income has been over $30,600,000. That s a lot of money. For a church our size, that s mind-bending. Second story. We just put the bow on what is called the Capital Campaign, the fundraiser for our Live Oak Building down at the bottom of the parking lot. This might be new to some of you, where you have to raise money to do that within the congregation and you do that through Life@Grace.Cassidy 10
pledges. People pledge that. We had people pledge $7,000,000 towards that building. Now you can ask the experts --- bankers, or in the church business, and they ll tell you, if you can hit eighty percent of those pledges, you re ringing bells, you ought to write books and go on tour and tell everyone else how it s done. We didn t get eighty percent. We got ninety-one percent. Yeah. Wait there s more. Because some people didn t pledge --- they got here late or they didn t fill out the card or whatever it might be --- sure, we got ninety-one percent from the people that pledged, and we didn t get the $7,000,000 dollars that people pledged --- we raised $7.7 million, one hundred and nine percent of pledges. Wow is right! Give yourselves a hand, for goodness sake. Third story of generosity at Grace --- this year, our cash flow we approved --- this past year just ended --- was going to be $300,000 in the red because --- and we have cash reserves, we weren t going to be responsible. That s the way it was looking. But because of very thrifty living by our staff and because of very generous giving, we did not end up $300,000 in the red; we ended $200,000 in the black just this year. Those are good stories, great stories of generosity. I want to tell you about where our future is and how we can have that future. The future of where we re going and how we re going to get there. Family talk --- continued generosity. If we continue our generosity, we re going after three things. One, we re going to give our pastors a raise. The pastors have not had a raise in two years. Not uncommon when you do a building campaign and things are really tight and so they ve had to endure the responsibility of that. And you look at these men and women that are on our staff and you know they didn t go into this to get rich. No one goes into ministry to get rich --- no one. Okay, some people do. He s not on our staff. We have great pastors, they do great work, they work hard. We need to get them to market levels. We want to pay them the most we can at a market rate. We ve got to fix that. [Applause.] Good. The second thing we re going to attack is we need more pastors. The growth of our church attendance has been steeper than the growth of our hires. So to put it another way, hug a pastor today, because this pastor that hasn t had a raise in two years, he s working harder than he should be because some of the staff are overworked. We have to hire more because our growth pattern is requiring that. So we need to fix that. Life@Grace.Cassidy 11
We re going to pay our staff better --- we ve got to make up for lost time, we re going to hire more, and third, we re going to attack this debt. For each of the last three buildings that we ve been involved in, the office across the street, this beautiful worship center, and the Live Oak Building, we raised almost everything we needed and for each one we were about $2 million short. So two and then four and then six --- we re $6.6 million in debt right now. So for every dollar of interest that s going to the bank we could be sending that around the city of Austin or around the world. And so we want to attack the debt. And so this year, this month, because we had that big delta between NOT $300,000 in the red, but $200,000 in the black, we wrote a check for $300,000 going after that debt. We want to keep going after that debt. It d be great if we could get rid of it in five years. Okay? Those are the goals. That s what we want to do. 2 Corinthians 8:7 But just as you excel in everything --- in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in your love for us --- see that you also excel in this grace of giving. How does that happen? Standards of performance. Just have people do the best they can do. Listen for the vocabulary of standard of performance, again, Bill Walsh, when you listen to 2 Corinthians. See how he s just coaching with a philosophy like that? But just as you excel in everything --- like blocking and tackling --- in faith --- awesome --- in speech --- you re doing great --- in knowledge --- yep --- in complete earnestness and in your love for us ---- killin it --- could you see that you also excel in this grace of giving? Could you excel in this grace of giving? Let s talk about excelling in this grace of giving. And here s the application part. I d like everybody that calls Grace their home, I want everybody --- we re going to go through four ways that we can go into the future super strong, paying staff better, more staff, and killing this debt. Four ways. And as I describe them, just kind of take notes. And then at the end in your quiet time with the Lord sometime in the next couple of days, I want you to circle at least one of those where you re going to get in the game, okay? Here s how to attack the future, here s the practice of performance, we re going to try to get better at it. Life@Grace.Cassidy 12
1. Start Giving So for some people, it s one: start giving. Some of you are kind of new to church and whatever motivates you to start giving regularly, that would be awesome. It might be just raw self-interest. That s not ever mentioned in the Bible, but you might just kind of think in your head, Hey, I like the way the church is providing for me or my family. I love air conditioning. Those kind of things. Maybe I should just, in raw self-interest, try to keep the doors open here and become a regular giver. If you look at the Bible, that s never mentioned. The Bible always chains together generosity with gratitude towards God. When a person understands the holiness of God, the love of God, and the forgiveness of God, that always ends with generosity. And so maybe that s the one you could put in your notes and say, Start giving, and that s the one you write later on Start. Because of gratitude of what God has done in your life. Start giving. 2. Give More Some of the people here at Grace need to go to the next level and that is to give more. Start giving, give more. And that s that whole excel in this grace of giving. And I would really propose this, that you go what s called the tithe in the Bible. Now when we re talking about the Bible, giving at ten percent is the lowest percentage ever mentioned in the Bible. And it s a scary place to be giving regularly. And I remember the day we did it as a family, my wife and I, and we just said, This is it. We re going to have to get scared and trust God for this ten percent all the time. Now I was in a very expensive graduate school and Melinda, she was banking as a first-year social worker. And it took me a while to enjoy giving at this level, but it was so freeing and it was fun. It was freeing and it was fun because I was enslaved by money and needing it for safety. And then it got fun because I love a good fight. I really like fighting. And it s one of the reasons I moved to Austin. We weren t going to go to any city in the south because there was so much Bible already, but then we thought, But not Austin a bunch of hippies. And this has been a way for us to stay in shape spiritually because we just wanted to keep giving. So that might be a way to give more and excel. Life@Grace.Cassidy 13
Another way you can go to is what s called in the Bible free will giving. In the Old Testament, free will giving is when --- and it s in the New Testament too --- they would give all the different ways they could give, and then everyone once in a while people would say, But I want to give more! And that s how Melinda and I are living now. It s really a blast because in April when we do taxes, it s the time --- because I m not very good with finances, I never know how much we re giving. And so when we do the taxes, there s this coming out of the back room with all the paper and saying, Guess how much, we gave over ten this year? No, no, it s more than that. No, no And we get to celebrate that we are free. And it s just a blast. So some of you might write the word start on your sheet of paper and after that you might write the word excel and get in the game of tithing or free will giving. 3. Gifts of Unusual Size Here s a third thing I want everyone to pray for. It s easier to pray for than apply. The third thing is called gifts of unusual size. Remember rats of unusual size, anyone? No? Good grief. Okay, gifts of unusual size we ll call GOUS. In gifts of unusual size, you pray for your church, for some person in our church to give huge gifts of unusual size, because that sends us to places we couldn t go otherwise. The reason that there s a building at the bottom of the parking lot called the Live Oak Building is because a family had a huge financial thing happen in their life, and it wasn t like we asked for gifts of unusual size. They said, If we gave you this, we re going to trust that you be responsible for it. And that pushed that building plan two years ahead of schedule because a family said, You know what? Listen, they gave us a gift that was worth twice their house because they could. And look what happens with gifts of unusual size? We can get stuff done. We can get crazy stuff done. 4. Faith Promise So could you make a decision to start giving, to excel in giving, to pray for gifts of unusual size, and then this last option is kind of strange. It s called a faith promise. A faith promise --- and the reason you want to put the word percentage there in quotes, is because a faith promise is when you say, Look. If I have some kind of weird additional income or gift, I m Life@Grace.Cassidy 14
going to give this percentage. The promise is the percentage and the faith is that I m going to trust God that He s going to bring me money from some crazy source. And if He doesn t, I don t have to give anything. So my income stream is pretty steady, okay? You can count on it, I hope, month to month. And so I would say, Yeah, I m going to give fifty percent of any weird income, like I ve got a rich uncle that s going to give me money or some kind of kickback from the government (like that would happen), but if it happens, I m giving fifty percent. There s no obligation to you. The faith part is an obligation to God. If He brings that in, you ll give that amount. I want you to put down the percentage now because later it s harder to write the check. Listen, you write ninety percent on there, you re going to win the lottery. I mean, God s just going to throw it in your face. Right? And then we re going to all watch on TV where they say, What are you going to do with all this money? You mean the ten percent left? Because I m going to give ninety percent to the church. So that s what faith promise means. Maybe that s the thing you circle on there. You say, You know what? I ve got a weird thing going on in my life and I m going to do a faith promise. If I get this much, I m going to give that percentage. Okay? Start giving. If some of you guys start giving, if we excel in giving, if we have gifts of unusual size, if we have faith promise percentages come in big time --- friends, it will be insane, what God does in our church. Austin needs us to be a healthy, generous church. That s all there is to it. Acts 2:47 And they were praising God, having found favor with all people, and the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved. Let s go back to the story. It s kind of fun. And they were praising God --- we do that all the time --- having found favor with all the people, and the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved. This is what happens when you present everyone mature in Christ, complete, whole; and leave the score alone. Just let the score take care of itself. God brings the people, we feel like God brings people to our church. That s how we explain it. We ve been growing any week to week it s seven to fourteen percent on any given week from Life@Grace.Cassidy 15
the same week the year before. And we ve been doing that since 2010. So here s the thing. Honest to goodness, I ve been waiting months to come here and tell you these things about this church. I ve been waiting months to say thank you. You guys are amazing. I love this church. I hope this church has had a chance to love you. It is such a joy to be part of a church that promotes and encourages and drives towards holiness. It s fun to be part of a church where we thrive on telling people that they can have a great relationship with God only through the gift of Jesus Christ s death and resurrection. I love being part of a church that pushes people to understand that they grow in their life with Christ through the power of God s Spirit working miracles. Grace transforms. Austin needs us to be a great church, to continue to be a great church, where awe-some is part of the vibe here. I think it is. I think it will be. Will you seriously pray about one of those four ways that you might be able to maybe move? Would you do that? Let s do this. Let s share the table together. Let s end our time with sharing communion. Life@Grace.Cassidy 16