Finding Real Community in a Digital World

13:44 My name is Luke and I get to be the youth pastor at Life.Church Northwest Oklahoma City. And I just have one question for you as we get started. What would change about your life if you truly believed that you didn't have to do it alone? What would change? For some of you, your head immediately jumps to the day that you walk down the aisle ready to kiss singleness goodbye.

14:14 And others of you, maybe you're starting a new season of life and you crave this sense of belonging. Some of you, if you're being honest with yourself, you know that when things get difficult, you tend to isolate. you tend to withdraw maybe even from the people that care about you the most maybe others of you you're here today and you're trying to heal from a wound that feels impossible to heal from and i'm here to tell you that in god honoring community no one stands alone it was in 2020 that my wife and i we moved away from home about a couple hours away from home in In fact, here is a picture of our family. That's my wife in the middle. She is as beautiful as ever.

15:07 Our oldest, Halen, she's three now. And then our youngest is Hunter, who will turn one here shortly. Now, something you need to know, before we moved, or when we moved, it was before kids. It was before these kids were in the picture. And so we were a young married couple moving to a new city far away from home. And we left everything that was familiar to us. our community, our families, our rhythms and routines. And if you can imagine, for about a year and a half, we struggled to find community. Even as pastors at a church, we struggled to find community. So much to the point that we actually began to lose hope that it was even available for us. I wonder if any of you are here in that spot today. it reminded us of a powerful truth that god never intended for us to stand alone in fact he never intended for you and for me to live lives of loneliness and of isolation and yet here we are today in a world who struggles with that so much so digitally connected yet isolated more than ever before and it wasn't until about two years in that we decided to do something different and so we felt like god was calling us to start a life group in our home and so that's what we did we invited young married couples into our house for dinner week after week and we called it double dates at the Reynolds house and as cheesy as that sounds it was so much fun and what actually happened in that season was God brought us the people that he intended for us to do life with all along.

16:59 And it was in that season that we learned that godly community, it takes intentionality, it takes prayer, it takes time and seeking God in that. But when those people came into our life, everything changed. We experienced what God had intended for us all along with genuine in connection with other people and with him. We experienced what it meant to carry one another's burdens. And what Paul talks about in Galatians 6, 2, when he says this, he says to carry each other's burdens. And it is in this that you will fulfill the law of Christ. You see, he uses the word beros when talking about burdens. It's the Greek word for that. And it means an unbearable weight that is too heavy for one person to carry. If you put a barbell on this stage and told me to pick up a barbell loaded with 900 pounds, there is no way that I could do that by myself. No way at all. You invite Pastor Craig up here, maybe we could do it. You invite him and my friends, then yes, you better believe that we are getting that barbell off the ground. And it's just like when we try to carry something heavy that we weren't supposed to carry alone. And so we walk through the good times together, the bad times together. And I'll never forget when we walked through a really heartbreaking season with our friends, Cam and Emily, as they struggled through the heartbreak of infertility and unbearable weight.

18:35 and we got to pray with them. We got to sit with them and walk through that season with them. And I will never forget the moment that my wife, Anna, she sat next to me on the couch in our living room. And with our entire life group there, she opened up about how difficult day-to-day life was when battling chronic illness in her body. you see Anna's been struggling with this for about eight years now desperate for healing And it was in that moment, in that living room, that our community, they gathered around us, they walked with us, they prayed for us, and that burden started to become a little bit lighter.

19:28 Because of God honoring community in our life. And some of you, you need that in your life today. You need it right now. but what I also know to be true is that there's still so many of us that are stuck lonely isolated scrolling on our phones and distracted but there's so much more that God has for you. There's so much more that he has for all of us. In God honoring community. and some of you today is a day to take one step closer to that and to say i'm ready to bring people into my life others of you it may be starting something and god is calling you to step into that to bring people into your environment your home to create a space for genuine connection because we were all hard wired for that. We need that in our lives because in God honoring community, no one stands alone.

20:41 Now that we know this, I need you to help me welcome to the stage.