Sunday message · RENEW series
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Message Summary
In the third message of the Renew series, Pastor Phillip Santillan begins with his own story. His parents came to faith when he was about five, at a time his life badly needed transformation, and he describes growing up in “a home becoming like Christ.” As a boy he told their pastor he wanted to be just like him. That desire to help people experience transformation later drew him to the book Transformational Church and its conviction that the power of the gospel changes lives, churches and communities.
In today’s post-Christian culture, God still changes lives through churches full of people being renewed day by day as they increasingly submit all of life to Christ. After last week’s focus on serving, Phil turns to the second tool he has seen God use most for lasting change: Romans 12:9–10, which calls believers to love without hypocrisy, love one another deeply as brothers and sisters, and outdo one another in showing honor.
Drawing on Douglas Moo’s commentary on Romans, Phil explains that Paul’s words for devotion and brotherly love describe family: the early church saw itself as an extended family bound by heartfelt, consistent concern. Tim Keller writes in Center Church that the church must be a counterculture whose communal life is a major part of its witness. That is why Clarity defines discipleship as reorienting your life to live it as family, together on mission with God, in keeping with Jesus’ new command to love one another as he loved us.
The problem, Phil says, is that our culture makes this inconvenient. Missiologist Alan Hirsch warns in The Forgotten Ways that middle-class values of safety, comfort and convenience can act as an enemy within, turning a community for the world into a community for me. Phil suggests most listeners are middle class, and the very life they have worked hard to build can become a stumbling block. David Fitch adds in The Great Giveaway that individualistic views of salvation reduce the church to a sideshow distributing information, goods and services.
Members share in short videos how their missional communities have become an extended family where they can share struggles and grow. In Phil’s experience, reorganizing life to live in community has shaped the direction and motivation toward a transformed life 100 percent of the time, while pulling away, even without turning from Jesus, lets suburban middle-class aspirations take over. So he asks everyone to take a step: try a community once, commit to one for a year, or consider hosting or co-leading. One bad experience, like one bad haircut, should not end our pursuit of community. He wants listeners to get “strategically inconvenient.”
Leading into a song about God as a good Father, Phil asks whether knowing God as Father has moved us to live as part of his family. He invites everyone to reorient their lives in what may feel like strategic inconvenience, not to earn God’s favor or salvation, but to align with the way God promised to renew and transform us.