Faithbase

I heard an excellent quote today that I'm absolutely astounded by and the quote was this, gangs exist because everyone needs community. We'll explore what that means a little bit more today. Hey everybody, Josh here. Today we're gonna be talking about community, what it is and why it's so important. So in reference to that quote earlier really boggled my mind when I first heard that because I thought about how 100% right on that is. All of my friends that I know, everybody that I have met, people who have I know who have joined gangs, people who are not in gangs, everybody wants to belong somewhere, right? People want to matter and I feel the same way. I want to matter. I want people to like me as I'm sure you do whoever you are watching this video right now. And so I began to think about this innate desire that we have as people to connect, to belong, to matter. And I thought about like this beautiful picture that we see in Scripture of God chasing after community, right? God is all about the pursuit of people for the sake of joining them together with Him. And so I was seeing kind of how that unfolded in the Old Testament or what's called the Hebrew Bible and then also how it unfolds in the New Testament. In the New Old Testament rather you see God pursuing Israel all the time and you see it on this macro level of God and the people of Israel as a whole and He brings them out of Egypt and He walks with them and He provides them judges and when they complain He gives them kings even though He didn't want to but He still loves them. And then all the way into the major prophets of Isaiah you see Him sad about what Israel has done by turning away from Him and He has described this picture of the brokenness of His heart as one who has had a divorce from his wife. And that's how much community mattered to God. And then in the Old Testament you see it go in on a micro level, right? On the person of like Jonah is a great example of this. Jonah tries to get away from God and God still pursues him. God gives him that big fish to keep him inside for three days and then even after he goes to Nineveh and is sad about everything that he does, God still shows that He cares about even people who are Ninevites, people that we, you or I may not like. God loves them and cares for them deeply. And then in the New Testament you see this manifested in its ultimate expression in the person of Jesus. And when I really started to put this together, this mattered a lot for me because Jesus was the person who spent all of His time with folks in the margins, right? Jesus is accused of being a drunkard because He hangs out with people who drink. He hangs out with prostitutes. He's willing to spend time with tax collectors who are pretty much like the worst people imaginable at this point in time in history. And so I began to think, what does this mean for me? It was such a conviction, and not in a bad way, but something that I saw as God inviting me into saying, I care about people in the margins, therefore I want you to care about folks in the margins. And so whoever are the most marginalized today in our society or even in your world, right, whatever your sphere of influence is, if you're a student in high school or junior high and you see somebody who kind of sits by themselves and eats lunch alone, that person is marginalized, right? Go and offer a friendship and hang out with them. Ask them if you can eat lunch. If you're in college and you have that one annoying student in your class who you can't stand, in your life maybe you've marginalized that individual. Go and try and strike up a conversation with them, right? In your workplace, the person who drives you nuts or is goody two-shoes or whatever it is, when we find out that the people who annoy us the most are the ones that God still deeply loves and cares about, it should ultimately cause us to kind of rethink and determine how we can more align ourselves with the person of Jesus Christ. And so my hope for you this week is that you will consider and look around your space and see who is a person who is in the margins, who is someone that you can help, who is someone that you can love on, and who is someone that you can treat in the same way that Jesus treated them. If you want to talk about this, if you have any questions, feel free to DM me. You can find me on Instagram at Joshua underscore Carmen. I would love to connect with you there. Thanks so much and have a great week.