As you collect the day’s mail from your mailbox and mindlessly thumb through the envelopes you notice something quite different among the anticipated bills and throw-away coupons: your name and address in brushed handwriting and a familiar name in the return address. Happy curiosity, a friend has thought of you and written to you personally. Further, you open the note to find an invitation to be together with that person. Joy and connection characterize an invitation. Such an exchange honors personhood and relationship. Additionally, invitations are meant to elicit a response. Through Luke 11:23-26, Steve teaches that Jesus is presenting himself as an invitation to each of us. And such a magnificent invitation necessitates a response. 

Steve’s Main Points

• Jesus Christ invites us to live in relationship with him.

• Jesus’ invitation includes participation in his work and mission; we are invited to a new life!
• Reformation without regeneration is hopeless; regeneration brings new creation.

Key Takeaways

• Jesus is tenderly and patiently beckoning us to life with him. 

• True fellowship with God brings Godliness and a loveliness to life beyond our imaginations! 

• There is no positional neutrality. Our spiritual indifference or apathy does not leave us in neutral but instead it pulls our gaze and hearts to idolatry.

• God’s disposition toward us is perfect love. 

• There are spiritual forces at work.

• There is no participatory neutrality. God himself, the Triune God, has extended himself through the Son and the Spirit and invited the church into his very mission to make himself known by his presence and to restore the whole world. (Luke 19:10)

• “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather (participate) with me scatters.” John 11:23 (Note and emphasis added.)

• We can repent of our apathy toward the mission of God and ask God to restore us to the joy of our salvation. (Psalm 51:12)

• The people in our lives can be encouragers in the mission of God.

• Love for people compels us to share our lives. In sharing our lives, we share the gospel. In sharing the gospel, we share God’s love in us. (1 Thessalonians 2:7-8)

• When nothing is put in the place of spiritual deadness or apathy, the devil is given room to tabernacle. The illustration in Luke 11 echoes the biblical metaphor of the temple or tabernacle. If the Holy Spirit is not dwelling within us, these evil spirits can make their home within us utterly destroying us as we house them.

• Any attempt to reform our lives apart from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is hopeless.

• There is no “back door” to abundant life through moral reform or self-righteousness. In other words, choosing Christ is not just self-improvement, knowing all the facts, serving your church, building your moral code (reforming), striving to be better, etc.; it is choosing a personal relationship. And rather than striving to be justified by our works, living in relationship with God sets us free.
• Simply, choosing Christ is repenting (turning away from one thing and toward another) and believing (by faith). 
• Life in relationship with God is regenerated by the Spirit’s indwelling who then offers the on-going work of conviction, renewal, and sanctification.
• Life with Jesus is personal. It is active and missional.

Questions for Personal Application:

• What do I really think about God? What do I believe about God’s love for me? Is God indifferent toward me? Write down your actual thoughts and pray through these and any other questions for God that follow. 
  
  
• Take time to reflect on the invitation from our triune God to come into relationship with him, to partner in God’s mission to reconcile and restore creation, and to make you a new creation. In which of these areas have you responded, and in which have you been neutral or against?
  
  

Discussion Questions for Community Groups:

• Discuss together the mission of God. What is God up to in the world and people around each of you? Praise him for his relational labor and love!

• Take time together to pray responsively to God’s character (patient, kind, LORD, Creator, tender, not-coercive, good) and invitation. Take time together to pray for those who have never heard the name of Jesus.
• Memorize Psalm 16:11 “You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”

Passages Referenced

Luke 11:23-26; Matthew 28:20; Luke 19:10; Proverbs 24:33-34; John 15:5; John 16:7-8; 2Corinthians 5:17-21; Galatians 2:20

Worship Set List

House of the Lord, Undivided Heart, His Mercy is More, Yet Not I But Through Christ in Me, Jesus is Better