Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships.

This week we're closing the series by looking at what I might be the most important earthly relationship of all. It’s our relationship with an institution. The institution Brad Edwards calls “the most counter-intuitive, universally cringe, and eagerly abandoned institution of the last 75 years: the local church.”

1 Peter is a letter written by Peter the disciple of Jesus, to early members of christians churches– local assemblies of Jesus-followers– from all different backgrounds scattered throughout modern day Turkey.  Peter wants his readers to understand how to faithfully navigate all the challenges of life in this world. And the answer he gives is: we can only live wisely in this world, to the degree that we live together as God’s people.

(*Thank you to Brad Edwards for his excellent book The Reason for Church which informed much of the content in this sermon! )

“Why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death … Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world ...Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines” -- Eugene Peterson

“The church is not simply another voluntary society, like the Boy Scouts or the Sierra Club. It’s an embassy of Christ’s Kingdom….unlike the rulers of this age, Jesus doesn’t ask us to shed our blood for his empire; he instead gave his own life for his realm. Then he was raised in glory as the beginning of the new creation, and now he is gathering coheirs into his kingdom who belong to each other because, together, they belong to him. The visible church is where you will find Christ’s kingdom on earth, and to disregard the kingdom is to disregard the king.” --Michael Horton

“The church is the church as a creature of God’s Word—a creature that finds its life outside of itself, that does not have faith in faith so much as faith in the God of covenant promise made known in Christ." -- J.Todd billings

• Read: Is Church Membership Required?

• How to Be a Christian Without Going to Church

• Watch: Is Church Membership Necessary?

• Watch: How Do I Choose a Good Church?

• Watch: Do You Have to Go to Church to Be a Christian?

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. This week we’re looking at singleness. What does the Bible say to the unmarried, divorced, widowed or simply unattached among us? We see in Scripture that for all those who belong to Christ, your relationship status is never an accident. God--who is sovereign over all and good to all he has made--has you where you on purpose, for a purpose.

*Thanks to Paige Brown, Marshall Segel, Dani Trewek and Rebecca McLaughlin for the articles, illustrations and research that informed this message!

Links: 

• Four Things God Says to Singles

• Marriage is Very Good. Singleness May Be Even Better

• Singled Out for Good

Quotes: 

“Am I a Christian single or am I a single Christian? The difference in mindset is profound. Which word is determinative and which is descriptive? . . . we singles are chronic amnesiacs-- we forget who we are, we forget whose we are. I am a single Christian. My identity is not found in my marital status but in my redemptive status. I am one of the 'haves,' not one of the 'have-nots.' "- Paige Brown

"Singleness has the potential to be a garden—or a gym, or a kitchen, or a school—for undistracted devotion to Jesus unlike any other season of our lives …  We have to stop believing the lie that everything we have here is all we have, and start thinking of everything we have here as something to invest in what’s to come.  We develop those spiritual muscles now by saying, with everything we have and do now, that Jesus is our greatest treasure. Life is short, and everything we have and see here is passing away. Everything but Jesus.”— Marshall Segel

“What is it like being single? I like it! I like starting each day with a sense of possibility. And I'm optimistic, because everyday I get a little more desperate. And desperate situations yield the quickest results.”- Michael Scott

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

As we wrap up this series we’re looking at the Song of Songs (also Song of Solomon)—a whole book of the Bible dedicated to love poetry. Tonight guest preacher Tim Inman from Christ Church in Dunn, NC talks about the biblical vision for covenant marriage. 

Links:

• Tim Keller on "The Meaning Of Marriage" Talks at Google

• Megan Hill- The Biggest Misconception About Marriage Among Dating Couples

Quotes:

"In this fallen world, there are no promises that marriage, for all its capacity to be beautiful and enriching, will be a lifelong series of increasing physical delights. In reality, a healthy marriage will probably lean more on the Sermon on the Mount than on the Song of Solomon.” -James Eglinton

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh' (Genesis 2:24). This radically upside-down statement would have shocked the original readers of Genesis and should shock us too. I don't know of any culture where men are depicted as clinging to their wives. Certainly within a patriarchal world, this is getting things backwards. There the wife leaves her parents and is absorbed into her husband's family.” ― Carolyn Custis James

"May all of your expectations be frustrated, may all of your plans be thwarted, may all of your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child, and can sing and dance in the love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.” --Larry Hine

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

As we wrap up this series we’re looking at the Song of Songs (also Song of Solomon)—a whole book of the Bible dedicated to love poetry. The Song speaks about the delight, duties, and dangers of sexual love in this life, and hints at the future satisfaction of all of our longings when we finally see God face to face. In this week’s sermon, we see how God’s loving commands serve to guard, direct and transform our experience of sexual desire. 

Thanks to Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III for their amazing work on this topic! 

Links: 

https://gospelinlife.com/manual-paper/the-gospel-and-sex/

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/consent-not-enough/

Quotes: 

“I am sure that unless we are confident that the Scriptures tell the truth about sexuality, about being bodies, about being full of sexual longings and desires, unless it does all this, it is hard to believe that they are true when they speak to the rest of life.” -Steve Garber

“Society tells us, simultaneously, that sex is no big deal and that it’s the most important thing in the universe. Sex is so meaningless that we can have random, casual sex with our next-door neighbor, yet sex is so hugely significant that we can’t possibly live without it.”—Lauren Winner

“To be holy is to be without flaw, stain, or blemish. Evil desires for us to be sexually used and then discarded. It also works to make us feel dirty, fouled, and ruined. God's gift of holiness is the promise that he will clothe us in his most beautiful righteousness so that we are dressed to be stunning and arrayed in his beauty. What God increases in us through the gift of holiness is the desire for our sexuality to be caught up in wonder and joy. We are meant to long for our experience of nakedness and pleasure, to be freed from shame and made holy, good, and innocent … No one is sexually perfect, and our stains, flaws, and failures are used by God to intensify our surprise and wonder and to increase our gratitude for how his perfect love cannot be thwarted by our imperfection.”- Dan Allender

“God loves sex. He conceived, created, and blessed the process by which our bodies know and are known through desire, arousal, foreplay, intercourse, orgasm, and rest.

Sex is meant by Gad to be one of the bridge experiences between earth and heaven. It awakens and intersects our deepest physical and spiritual desires. Sex, like music, fills us simultaneously with notes of an intense immanent bodily pleasure and with the sonorous reverberations of another world that is transcendent and holy.

It is no wonder that the enemy of God is relentlessly committed to fouling both immanent pleasure and transcendent joy. Evil hates sex and is ruthlessly committed to tearing down the bridge between desire and holiness.” - Dan Allender

“We need an embodied experience of grace. God knows we cannot experience reality in our mind, but it must be experienced in our flesh. That is why the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” - Chuck Askew.

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

Whether you are the one doing the breaking up, you are the one who is being broken up with, or you are somehow around in the crazy war zone of a breakup— ending a relationship causes pain and confusion. But the reality is that the Bible gives us incredible resources to deal with the emotional and relational fallout from breakups. It is possible to break up well, and even to break up in love.  This week we look at Romans 12 and Luke 6 to apply the Christian ethic of enemy love to our relational conflicts. 

(Thanks to Simon Stokes for his assistance with this message)

LINKS: 

• https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/tim-keller-forgive/
  
• 
  
• https://bibleproject.com/videos/character-of-god-grace/

QUOTES: 

“Forgiveness, then, is a form of voluntary suffering. In forgiving, rather than retaliating, you make a choice to bear the cost.”― Tim Keller

“Think of how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships… Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys ... The fact is… anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference.” – Rebecca Pippert

“All you are is mean/And a liar, and pathetic/And alone in life, and mean/And mean, and mean/ and mean.” - Taylor Swift

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. In both this week and last week's talks we looked at our modern practice of dating, and seek to find some Biblical wisdom that will us give help and hope.

(*this message contains material from several wise friends: Simon Stokes, Matt Howell and Mac Holt. It also contains an amazing poem by Wendell Berry called "Over the Edge." These wise men deserve any and all credit for the clear illustrations and insightful observations herein.)

Quotes:

“Most people, when they are looking for a spouse, are looking for a finished statue when they should be looking for a wonderful block of marble. Not so you can create the kind of person you want, but rather because you see what kind of person Jesus is making.”- Kathy Keller

“When we are in love with someone we often appear to attend to [them] when in fact we are doing the very opposite. Instead of being attentive we are acquisitive. We use the other for our own glorification, we bask in the presence of our beloved because we enjoy the image of ourselves that is reflected back . . . This is the opposite of Christian love . ”-- Lauren Winner

"The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie." -- Jonathan Franzen

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.”— C.S. Lewis

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. In both this week and next week's talks we look at our modern practice of dating, and seek to find some Biblical wisdom that will us give help and hope.

(*this message contains material from several wise friends: Simon Stokes, Ethan Brown, Stewart Swain and Mac Holt. They deserve any and all credit for the clear illustrations and insightful observations herein.)

Quotes:

“I think …  the way we find love is treating people like objects in a marketplace and then we're expected to commit to someone and handle that right … think it's kind of the system is set up against young people pursuing meaningful commitment because we're just not trained to do it. There's all this kind of age-old advice that you need to have experience and try out different people, but what if that just adds to your mindset of … treating people like they're replaceable and upgradable? Then when you do find someone meaningful you don't know how to commit to them properly." — Freya India

“I just want to be friends, plus a little extra. Also I love you.”- Dwight Schrute to Angela.

Further Reading on Modern Dating:

• https://bigthink.com/series/explain-it-like-im-smart/christine-emba-dating-apps/

• https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/10-things-young-singles-in-romantic-relationships-ought-to-know/

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're talking about how the gospel sets us free to live wisely and beautifully in God’s world, redeeming all of our relationships. In this week’s sermon, we talk about the foundation of all relationships— friendship. 

*Much of this material was drawn from the thoughts and writings of Tim Keller, Rebecca McLaughlin, Justin Early, C.S. Lewis and Matt Smethurst on this subject. I am grateful for their hard work. For more on friendship, I especially recommend Rebecca McLaughlin’s No Greater Love and Justin Early’s book Made for People. 

Quotes: 

“If we had to take all eighty-four years of [research] and boil it down to a single principle for living,... it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”- The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

“We were made by God for more than God. Our fullest spirituality is only possible with others. Our intended existence only works in a community. Our highest call is only realized when we pursue it alongside others. In other words, you need friends to be who God made you to be. Friends are the anatomy of your soul. They are at the core of your longings. This is why you feel the way you do.— Justin Whitmel Early 

“In modern Western culture, we are primed to think of friendship as a nice-to-have, while sexual and romantic love and parent-child love are vital to our thriving. But Jesus flips this script. Instead of telling His disciples that they must get married and have children, Jesus tells His followers that they must love each other, even to the point of death. When Jesus said there was no greater love than laying down one's life for one's friends, He wasn't being hyperbolic or naive. Instead, He was inscribing the good news of His unfathomable love for us onto Christian friendship with indelible ink.” -Rebecca McLaughlin 

“Erotic attraction and family relationships push themselves on you in various ways, but friendship will not. It must be carefully, intentionally cultivated through face-to-face time spent together. And in a busy culture like ours, it is one thing that is often squeezed out.” - Tim Keller

“People who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends ... Friendship must be about something … Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.” -C.S. Lewis

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're talking about how the gospel sets us free to live wisely and beautifully in God’s world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

In this week’s message, we examine our relationship to technology. Do digital tools and apps help or harm our ability to relate to each other? How are they forming and de-forming us? And what do we need to remember in order to learn to relate wisely in this digital world? We look at Proverbs 4 and Jesus’s teaching on the Great Commandment in Mark 12 to remind us that even though we are prone to distraction and deception, we are deeply loved by the God who made us. And resting fully in that love sets us free to love others wisely. 

Quotes:

“Christian wisdom is about living a life that responds correctly to reality.”-- Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies

“A person is a heart, soul, mind, strength, complex designed for love. And one of the really damaging things about our technology is very little of our technology develops all four of those qualities.” – Andy Crouch, author of The Life You're Looking For

“Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable. But I don’t just think it makes us miserable .... over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.” - Freya India, GIRLS

*Thanks to Samuel D. James, Andy Crouch, Freya India, Jonathan Haidt, Alan Noble, and Jean Twenge for their writing on this topic. If you’re curious to learn more, check them out!

Links: 

• https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/violence-and-technology
• https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/whats-become-of-us
• https://journal.praxis.co/we-dont-need-superpowers-we-need-instruments-860459cfc165
• https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're talking about God sets us free to live wisely and beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. 

This week we are looking at what the Bible says about our physical bodies. Modern people (even many Christians) tend to think the important, valuable part of us is tucked away and hidden on the inside, and our physical selves are just disposable and unimportant. That our bodies don't say anything important about who we really are. But the Bible says, no– every part of you is valuable to God. Every part of you is important to him. Body and soul. And He has a good plan for all of you-- body and soul.

The gospel story is good news for our bodies. And seeing this good news, seeing how valuable our body is to God, transforms our relationship with our body from one of pain and shame to love and hope.

*Correction: in the sermon I misquote a statistic about people reporting unhappiness with their bodies after using Instagram. I said it was 70% of women and 48% of men. The accurate statistic was 60% of women and 48% of men, and it was taken from this article on the After Babel Substack."-- Sam

QUOTES:

“In the Bible, our body is not an accessory to who we are; it is part of who we are. We can't properly understand who we are apart from our body. Your body is not other than you. It is not just a receptacle for you. It is you. In the Bible it's not just that you have a body; you are a body.- Sam Allberry

“Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body-which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy!”— CS Lewis

"I haven't been cheated out of being a complete person—I'm just going through a forty-year delay, and God is with me even through that. Being 'glorified'—I know the meaning of that now. It's the time, after my death here, when I'll be on my feet dancing. "-Joni Erickson tada 

“Christianity assigns the human body… much richer dignity and value. Humans do not need freedom from the body to discover their true authentic self. Rather we can celebrate our embodied existence as a good gift from God. Instead of escaping from the body, the goal is to live in harmony with it” -Nancy Pearcey