A Place for Youth

Message Transcription

Well, good morning, everybody. Our students, our high school, junior high elementary kids head back to school this week. I could not be happier. Today is also promotion Sunday. There might have been a small tear in my eye. For those of you who know, we have a two year old. He's been two for about two weeks now. And I had a dreaded text message conversation I had to exchange with McKinsey last night. He doesn't go to the nursery anymore. He goes to the second floor in the twos classroom. And it was really weird to not send him to the nursery, but to know that his teachers there were taking good care of him and walked by just like 4 or 5 minutes later. And he was playing and being loved on by by lovely members of this church. And before I get going, Carl has taken the last few weeks to kind of shout some people out from the stage. So I'm going to take the opportunity to do that. We could leave this morning based on a welcome from Carly Babcock, a communion message from Reese Raines and scripture reading from Evelyn. So if we could, let's let's give some recognition to these three amazing students. It takes a lot of courage to do those things. For those of you who don't get up here and do that, that's perfectly fine. But it takes a lot out of you. These kids will be tired later on today.

This mentally draining energy, this emotionally draining energy to to bear part of your heart in doing that. But even more so than that, I want to shout out, Carl, for those of you who don't know, today is his 11 year anniversary of being the preacher here at Broadway. And so Carl is watching online, so let's make sure that we give him his. You guys are a part of a church body. You know that ministers come and go. So for somebody to stick with you for 11 years is a testament to their call on God's life for them and God's call. Whenever they ask them to leave a church and to go somewhere else. And so I'm so thankful for Carl's leadership of our staff and of our elders. Very thankful for that. And as we continue in this series this week, it's called All in the Family, I'm told it's an 80s TV reference, throw throw tomatoes at me now or whatever. I still don't really understand this part of it, but this all in the family. How do we get everybody who's inside of this building right now plugged into the life of this church? And so today you get to hear from me. Sorry. If you need to tune me out right now, go ahead and do that. But next week, you will get to hear from Jeremy, our campus minister. I help move a college kid into campus yesterday.

So they are already here. They are re-invading our restaurants. They are re-invading every part of this town and there will be many, many more of them to come. And we want to make sure that we welcome them extremely well next week. So please be here for Jeremy's message as well. And as we focus today on on youth students and I'm going to classify youth and I'm going to say youth group multiple times. For those of you who don't know what age ranges are, youth group encompasses that is seventh through 12th grade. So today four of our seniors that were here today walk down to the Transit 56 room. We did take the elevator, so sorry, but it was during the Bible class time, so no one else really needed it. Carly We took the elevator down. We walked to the end of the kids hallway and grabbed five new students. We have six in total. One of them wasn't here today, but we had five new students that we walked in to our youth ministry today, ate breakfast tacos, asked questions about each other. And then we ultimately talked about what the purpose of our youth ministry is. As I began thinking about when Carl told me probably six, six weeks ago, this is what we're doing, here's the theme. I want you to begin kind of crafting a message around that.

There was a word that came to my mind. And that was compassion. I'm going to let you just sit with that for a second. We're going to go to we're going to go to some places today about compassion. And compassion is an important because it's not only an interaction that we have with others, but it's an interaction that we have with God. When we show compassion to the world around us, it strengthens our relationship with people that we love, people that we work with inside of our own family unit. But more importantly, it draws us deeper into a connection with God. But there are barriers, just like there's a barrier to anything in life. So I came up with these four barriers to our to our compassion that these get in our way pretty frequently. So the first thing would be our assumptions. None of you have ever assumed anything about a single person, have you? You've never done that? I certainly haven't. You haven't. We're all very good church going people here. But this second one is the one that I most often default to. It allows me or it disables my ability to receive compassion and it disables my ability to give it to you guys as well. And that's my fear. I might be a youth minister who, like loves to go on the blog and do all these other really fun things. You would think sometimes that I'm really fearless.

But when it comes to making big decisions about my life, or even if I should act on something or not act on something in giving compassion, my fear normally cripples me pretty hard. And our opinions and our experiences. I imagine everybody in here has an experience that you're thinking about right now, something that somebody said to you, something that somebody did to you, a promise that they said that they were going to do something and then later broke it. And now you no longer want to give any kind of compassion to that person. Right. I'm sure that you're all kind of thinking of a story and I'm going to ask you to to think longer about one here in just a few minutes. And these are the barriers that help us or disable us from actually being able to give that compassion. So the first step in this in this compassion journey, there are four steps. So for those of you who are very bullet point oriented, I'm going to give you four steps, four compassion steps that I believe that we as a church can take inside the walls of this church for not only our youth students, but for our children as well. Remember, if you were here last week, you heard Carl talked about let all the little children, children come to me and talked about our need for volunteers and people to love on our children.

But that first compassion step is that compassion calls us to pay attention to the people around us. If you claim to follow Jesus and you're here in this room, I'm going to steal this from from Jeff at the at the men's breakfast yesterday. He said, if you can't go up to somebody and say about 2 or 3 things that are going on in their life, things that are going on in work personally or an activity that they like to do, like, did you play tennis today? We're in West Texas. None of you really play tennis except me and Lisa Mac probably. So that's probably about it. And Holly Robbins. But. The truth of it is, is that you have to be able to pay attention to the people around you. And if you don't know about 2 or 3 things about the people you're sitting around right now, do you really have a relationship with them? Could you look at other people in this room and say, Yeah, I know about the thing that's going on in their workplace. I know that. This is going on in their marriage. I know that they're doing this with their kids. If you could really answer that, you would know that you're probably living intentionally with the people around you. And Jesus did this in the same way with Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is a man who's blind and he begs for food and money, and Jesus takes the time just simply to listen to him, to be present and engage in in conversation.

And here's the thing that I love about Jesus. Jesus could do whatever he wanted. He was an all powerful person here on earth that spoke and people raised from the dead. He simply touched them and they were healed. I put no limit on the things that Jesus could do, but Bartimaeus a man who had been passed over his entire life, spoken over people saying, Yeah, this is what you need. That Jesus actually took the time to listen to him, to hear all of that. And Jesus didn't rely on his own assumption of how to best deal with the Bartimaeus situation. Instead, he just goes, What do you want? And that's a question that if we were asked today, what do you want? It might not be a really simple answer. It might take us some time to really figure that out. And when we reach out to others, instead of assuming or judging their situation, seeking to learn and grow and listen in that relationship, we're taking a compassionate step towards them. And also, not only are we taking a step towards them, I mentioned this just a few minutes ago, you're taking a step towards God as well. It's a blessing that works in many different ways. You find yourself getting closer to God whenever you take time to listen to the stories, people around you to understand, and it deepens your connection with them.

And the second compassion step that we can take is that compassion calls us to sit with people and to understand their pain. Now, this is what I'm going to dive a little bit harder with students on right here. And it's only because I love I love all of you in this room, but I'm going to I've got a little bit of things to say about this. Compassion calls us to sit with people and to understand their pain. Today, often times teenagers will tell you that they are going through something and we will tell them, well, when I was your age. It doesn't work anymore, my friends. It really doesn't. It's 2023. The world around them is significantly different than the world that you and I lived in. Someone asked me the other day when I graduated high school and they were a little shocked when I told them what year I graduated high school. I'm not going to tell you. I'm just going to leave you to believe that I'm older and stuff. But whenever I told them that some of the things that our teens are going through today, I didn't even go through when I graduated high school in the mid 20 tens. That's all I'll give you. I graduated in the mid 20 tens. Technology, social media, even the word of mouth and things that they say to each other that seem to be derogatory, that seem to tear them down, are completely different.

Over almost a decade later. Since I graduated high school, there's parts of my story that I don't know how to connect with our students, but rather if I sit and listen to understand their pain and not listen to respond. But I listen, to understand and say that stinks. How can I pray for you? Do you need me to be more intentionally involved in your life? Do you need me to meet you at Chick fil A for breakfast on Tuesday mornings so we can pray, be in God's Word and be in that relationship together. And I can bless and encourage you as you go out there to face that world. Because the truth of it is, is they're going to get to second period math and there's going to be that person that they've got friction with. We seek to understand their pain. And church, as you I kind of want everybody who's not a youth student to kind of look at our youth students right now, if you would. Some of you are still looking at me. So you're not doing what I asked you to do. I just want you to look at them. They're all getting red faced. They're like, Oh, crud. I was on my phone and Mom and Dad just saw me some.

Some of you were like that. And that's all right. These students are going through an incredible amount. They want nothing more than for you to sit and listen to them. If they ask for your advice, they would really want it. They'd say, What would you do in this situation? Or how would you fix that? But sometimes they really just want you to hear about the things that are going on in their life. If they're failing a class, if even there's some friction between them and their parents or people at school or on their teams and different things like that. And I think, Jesus again, we're going to go to him frequently. Jesus did pretty well with understanding people's pain. Some of you might have heard of a good friend of Jesus's name Lazarus, and he's got two sisters, and one of them is really sad and one of them is really angry. Did Jesus fix the situation immediately when he walked in the room? You kind of let them get after him a little bit. And he sat and he listened with tears and pain in their eyes. Jesus listened. He goes on to heal Lazarus later on, but he sits with them in their pain. And I want to thank you on behalf of our family. We've had some pain over the last six weeks, losses in our family and different things that are going on on many sides.

We want to thank you guys for sitting with us in our pain for for texting and calling and checking in on us and even giving us some space whenever that was needed. The next step that I want to talk about is that Compassion calls us to regularly check in with God and to check in with ourselves. Reese actually hit this on the head like, I don't even really need to say this. We have to do an inventory of our self to be still with God and ask, What are you trying to say to me in this moment? And Camille's not here. But one of the steps in CR is that you would take a self inventory every day about the things that are going on, the actions and people that you have acted on that day to take a self inventory, to reflect on where God is moving, where He's telling you to run from and in celebrate recovery. For those of you who have been in that room, having a self inventory is one of the highest points of confidence that one can bring. It's something that whenever you have that, you're actually able to sit with other people and their addiction and their struggle and in their pain and receive them better whenever you take that inventory of yourself. Church It's okay to show yourself compassion. It really and truthfully is. I want you to think about that for just a second.

It's okay to show yourself compassion. I'm looking around at some people in the room who I know have been really working really, really hard in their families, in their jobs, and they've apologized for it. And I had to tell some of those people, there's no need to apologize. You've got things that you've got to do. Other people are holding down the fort, doing all the things that they need to do, have a little bit of compassion on yourself. Check in with yourself and make sure that you're extending that to yourself. And sometimes we think of compassion as something we do or give for others. But the Bible has lots of comparisons about how this is an important part of that process. And one of the most famous sayings is that you can't pour from an empty cup. And I know lots of you, especially parents in the room, have had your cup completely empty and your kid asks you for something. There's nothing that you can give them and you might kind of give them a one off kind of snippety thing and it turns into a larger fight and you're like, I had no idea that that was going to come out that way, and I just made the situation significantly worse. None of us has said anything that we would take back in a heartbeat, right? Surely nobody in this room and that last moment that I want to talk about this compassion step is that it is a whole body experience.

And when we show compassion to people around us, when we live as a community and welcome others to that community, and as a result, our relationships are healthier and we make a difference in the world in the way that God calls us to. So I want to take us to that the verses today, so if you will, in your Bibles. Matthew 14, start in verse 13 right there. You can go ahead and get there in your phone. And I'm just going to whenever I was getting this all ready, I found a little excerpt online about this story. So I'm just going to read this from you guys. This is this is to set the scene in another way. So if you would, you can follow along in your Bibles with me here. Word about Jesus had been spreading like wildfire. If family and friends you had you trust had been telling you about somebody who was performing miracles, who was healing people everyone thought would never be well again, who treated people, ignored or oppressed by society with dignity and respect. If they told you such a person was on the move and coming your way, wouldn't you drop everything to see him too? Imagine what it felt like to be a member of the crowd. Perhaps you brought a friend or a little sister or brother who was desperately ill.

There are no hospitals and no amount of medicine or rest seems to be making a difference. But maybe. Just maybe this this miracle worker can. Or maybe you're someone people normally treat as an outcast because of the family you come from or your gender or your age. But you've heard this man. People are saying that he's the son of God. That he might speak to you and make you feel seen for the very first time in your life. People were walking around and you join a crowd and gets bigger and bigger by the minute and it doesn't come to a stop. Jesus was around yesterday, but he's not there in that moment. Right then, as the sun rises higher and higher and the day warms up, everybody around you continues to walk. And. And you do too. You don't want to feel left out in this crowd of over 5000 people. After all, you've come this far and the crowd that's now gathered behind you stretches back further than you can see. Anyway, the possibilities ahead seem so much more promising than the reality that you'll return to when you get back home. And we don't ever know this part in Lubbock that I'm about to say, sweat trickling down your backs, alert you that somehow it's the afternoon already and then it hits you. You weren't expecting to travel that far.

You didn't bring anything. You didn't bring a coat. You didn't bring a blanket or a pillow, no food. You're completely unprepared for the journey you're on. And that takes us right to where we're at here, where Jesus feeds the 5000. I want to read this just one more time for us. Now, when Jesus heard this and withdrew there from a boat to a desolate place by himself, when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd and he had compassion on them and he healed their sick. Now, when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, This is a desolate place and the day is now over. Send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves. But Jesus said, I don't need to go away. You'll give them something to eat. They said to him, We only have five loaves here and two fishes. And he said, Bring them here to me. Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass and taking the five loaves and the two fish. He looked up from heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to his disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds and they all ate and were satisfied. And when the 12 took up the baskets full of broken pieces left over and those who ate were about 5000 besides women and children.

I want to take us back to Jesus there for a second, because you heard that Jesus heard some news before, right, in that very first verse. And then Jesus heard this and he withdrew to a desolate place. If you're somebody who's looking in your Bible right now, you're like, well, it's important to know the context around me, right? You're going to flip right back over to chapter, the start of chapter 14. You're going to see that John the Baptist has died. He's been he's been murdered. His head's been cut off. And he hears this. The disciples of John the Baptist come and tell Jesus and Jesus says, I need a few minutes to be alone. And so he's withdrawn to this desolate place. Just trying to get away from being the Messiah for a few minutes to actually sit in his own grief. And he turns around and. And who's there? 5000 people besides men and women. And he looks out and what's that word again? Church. I've mentioned it a couple of times. He had. Could you imagine hearing the news about somebody who was the trailblazer of your entire ministry, the person who went before you and proclaimed. This man is the Messiah. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and I'm going to live the rest of my life to proclaim this one message that that person has passed away.

In a very tragic graphic manner. And Jesus just wants to sit and he ends up having compassion on him. There are people in this crowd, like I just said, who are sick and hurting. They've walked a long way to see him so long, in fact, that they didn't have time to stop for food. They needed so badly to be healed and to be taught by this man that every other need, physically, mentally, emotionally, that they had is completely gone out the window. What we do know is that Jesus experiences compassion on these people and one of his greatest moments of grief and he looks out and says, we've got to do something about this church. We've got to do something about the lack of compassion and light of Jesus Christ in our world. And in Matthew, this this word compassion. And I've got Brandon Friedenberg back there somewhere. Luckily, he was at the men's prayer breakfast yesterday. There was a really long Greek word and I got C's in Greek, so I made sure that he knew how to pronounce it. So it's here on this note card. He told me I had better things to do than keep up with my Greek. So I'm really happy that my Greek professor thinks that Splunk needs. Oh, my. All right. It's not on the screen. Trust me. You would get confused looking at it, too.

I'm sitting here looking pretty confused at it. But this word Splunk needs am I is defined as compassion so strong that your whole body feels it. The ancient Greeks believed compassion was something that you felt in your body, specifically in your heart. In your liver and your kidneys, your guts and your lungs. And because of the compassion Jesus experienced, felt was in his entire body. He feeds all of those people. Heals. Teaches. I can't imagine that he let them just leave on full bellies. I imagine there was a person or two healed and saved that day. There's nothing that says that in there. But my judgment is that Jesus wouldn't let those people go like that. And the truth is that compassion calls us to serve not only with our hearts and our hands, but our heads and our hearts as well. Guys, there are lots of great ministry opportunities across the street at Carpenter's Kitchen, across the open door. Many different places here in Lubbock that are hands and feet are needed to proclaim the mission of Jesus Christ. But we have to do it with our heads and our hearts as well. Jesus acts with compassion. People receiving his care are a part of this whole body compassion as well. Everybody's who's sick is healed. Jesus is anxious disciples. And remember, I told my students this all the time. The disciples are anxious. Like 98% of the time.

It happens frequently. The disciples are anxious, but then instead they're empowered and equipped to feed all the people, to take around the basket and to receive more than what they could have even imagined. And the entire crowd leaves fed. Our hope is every Sunday that whether you hear it from the pulpit or your class or somebody here that you leave here fed every single Sunday, I fed my students breakfast tacos. So I know for sure that they're leaving here somewhat fed when we allow compassion to get us moving. Both those who give it and receive it are changed. I just want to ask you about this, this whole body compassion that you might feel towards somebody. I just want you to. Can I ask you to close your eyes? I know I do this all the time. Whenever I preach, I want you to close your eyes. I want you to get into a moment here. Full body compassion. You might feel it. Have you ever seen somebody treated so unfairly that it took your breath away? You might have seen it in real life. You might have seen it in a movie or a TV show. There have been multiple times where somebody gets hit and it takes my breath away. Have you ever had a friend or a family member experience so much pain that it made your heart hurt? You watched them grieve the loss of somebody that they love.

You watched him go through something that should have broken most other people. Have you ever felt so compelled to help somebody that your mind just started buzzing with ideas or your hands and your feet tingled? Because you were so excited. To show compassion with your heart and your hands. Church. What you're feeling right now as you think back to that moment, that's compassion is a whole body experience. Following Jesus is something that we can't just do with our head or with our hands or our feet. It has to be a whole soul and heart change and you can open your eyes now. So you're probably asking yourself, Brian, how does how does this how does this translate to youth? Because truthfully, if they grew up like I did, maybe they wouldn't have these many problems and things like that. Debatable. Very debatable. But I want you to think. If your first move was always compassion to a hurting teenager, do you think that they would trust you? They absolutely would. Today has been one of the most fun days of my job that I've ever had. And there are some days I'm like you. I have bad days. The place that I work, it happens. I'm here to tell you I'm a minister at your church. I have some bad days in my office or in conversations that I have with people, and that's okay.

I'm going to extend a little bit of compassion to myself this morning as well. But. Trust is built whenever you get that baseline of trying to extend that compassion to our teens. And if that was always your first step instead of, well, this is what you ought to have done, or let's think about how your actions get to that. Well, trust has got to be established first. So up on the screen, we did this last week with McKinsey. This is my information. That's a beautiful picture taken by Susanna Lahari, by the way. Just shout her out real quick. She's going to do some more for us. I'm kind of washed out in that one. At least it looks that way from here. If you will pull out your phone. If you don't have my phone number, just everybody do it real quick. Pull out your phone. You can get down my cell number, my email. This might shock you. I too eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I stop for coffee breaks. And I know that you do too. So why don't we do those things together so we can talk about how to get you involved in the life of our teens and the life of our church. And truthfully, I can get you plugged in in lots of different areas if you're struggling to get involved in the men's ministry that's starting back up. I can point you to the right people.

I can get you on all the right communication. I just can't get you to show up and do the thing. My compassion is going to extend to you in that way. So please get down my information. I'll take you to lunch. I'll take you to breakfast. I'll take you to coffee. I do all of those things. It doesn't look like I eat very much, but I promise you, I eat lots. And don't forget, guys, this is. And I'm speaking to the teens here, so I want all the teens to, like, look up from your phones and stuff. You're not alone here in this church. There might be men who are older than you, who are our elders and ministers and everything like that. But this is not a church of us and y'all. This is all of us together trying to accomplish the mission of God. So that compassion that I'm trying to get our church to extend to you guys that same compassion has got to be extended back to them as well. It's a reciprocal relationship. What you put into a relationship, you will get out of it. If you don't put very much, you're going to yield very little return. And the truth of it is, is that we can learn from the wisdom and knowledge and experience of those who are sitting and listening with people struggling in need or pain. And as the school year starts, you think there's no way that there could be any kind of pain that's being felt? There will be when you wake up on Wednesday morning and realize, oh my gosh, I have math in an hour and then I have football practice after, it's going to hit you hard.

But this is a compassionate community that we are here at Broadway. We wouldn't have part of our mission statement be unleashed compassion if we weren't serious about it. So, Church, I encourage you this week, think about those compassion steps that you can take. How are you going to unleash compassion in your own home, in your conversations with your spouse and your conversation with your kids and your conversation with your grandparents, your coworkers, all of these different things, how are you going to unleash compassion in that area? Because whenever it starts in that one place, it starts like wildfire and spreads all over the world. Just like those people who heard about Jesus that day. There's no reason that that can't happen inside of our church and inside of our youth group. These are the people who could start it. I guarantee you, if you watched and listened to how passionate Carly was about that man, I got my heart racing. I could be done with what those kids did today. And the happiest day of my life was to hear that that something's going right in our youth ministry.

So thank you, Carly. Thank you. Reese Thank you, Evelyn, for doing what you do. Let's bow together for a word of prayer and then we'll continue in worship. So, Father, we are we are people in need of in need of you, especially in need of compassion in this world around us. Oftentimes we like to point the finger and blame so many other people for the things that are going on in our own lives and in the world around us. God. But I pray. That today our hearts as we leave this place would be filled with compassion, that there wouldn't be strife, that there wouldn't be anger, that there wouldn't be any kind of malice. As we leave this place, but rather our hearts are softened. Only to know that that we have something to learn from the people in this room and the people in our workplaces. God, would you soften our hearts to be compassionate that we might be able to take that first step towards living a life that more reflects that of your son Jesus? May it be a whole body experience this week. May we feel it from the tops of our head to the bottom of our toes, deep in our heart that pulses in our gut? God, would you make us? You know, the song is instruments of your peace, but would you make us instruments of your compassion to reconcile the world back to your son Jesus? And it's in his name that we pray? Amen.