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• Golden Circle Simon Sinek
• We think and communicate from what is clear and move to what is fuzzy.
• Unfortunately for most it is the outside ring that is clear and the core that is fuzzy. In order to be effective in setting direction, inspiring action, and fostering unity, and communicating vision effectively, you have to begin at the core level.
• This is what sets organizations apart from others. Those who understand their why the best. Whether or not the why is good is a different story. But in terms of function, motivation, and communication of direction change etc.
• Most organizations know their what, some know their how, few know their why?

So let’s have some fun with this:

Apple: Same technology, same level of expertise, same resources, etc. There just another computer company, but why do they stand out? While everybody communicate the what, Apple communicates from the why.

1. We make a great computer
2. Our computers are beautifully designed, easy to use, and user friendly.
3. Want to buy one? Maybe?

Instead:

1. We believe in thinking differently and challenging the status quo of our industry.
2. Our products will be beautiful (beauty and function can exist), easy to use (complex products don’t have to be hard to use), and user friendly (many functions doesn’t negate that which is intuitive)
3. By the way, one of the products we make like this: a computer. Want one?

Sell me on the first ideas, ipod, ipad, iphone, itoaster, itoothbrush, ilamp. It ‘s bound to be good. You believe and then act on what you believe.

Negative:

Tivo

Best technology

Best funding

Best hired team

Industry standard, innovative. How did they communicate it, and why have they failed mostly.

They began with what:

1. We have a device that can pause live TV, rewind live TV, record something that you can begin watching even before it is fully done recording, it can even remember your viewing habits and record those shows in case you’re not around.
2. Response: We don’t believe you. We’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t think I need or like it. It’s scaring me. We have VCRs you know.

If they had begun with why:

1. If you like to have complete control of your life and how you spend your time…
2. We make devices that can help, they even give you control over when and how you watch your TV.
3. This device gives you control by pausing…etc.

Church that starts with what:

(What?) We help people learn about and follow God.

( How?) We have services, classes, programs, and activities.

(Why?) Because we are a church?

Want to join us?

Church that starts with why:

Why? God, through the person and work of Jesus Christ is gathering a people unto HImself from every tribe, language, people and nation.

How? Through churches motivated by the grace of the gospel, guided by the truth of the Scriptures, unified by the love of Christ, and mobilized by the urgency of its misson.

What? Love God, love each other, and love the world.

WANT TO JOIN US?

Acts 2:41-47

Example from Acts 2

Believing the Gospel of Christ

Learning Scripture’s Transforming Power

Loving Fellowship with God & Others

Worshiping humbly with Delight and Reverence

Witnessing of God’s Worth to All People

Believing:

IS: To be a regenerate membership rooted in gospel truth and growing in gospel-permeated thinking and living.

IS NOT: If the good news is not the foundation of our body, then it is an empty organization.

Application: 

1. We can stand for a lot of things, but if Christ and his Gospel is not at the center, this can not be called a church that is fulfilling God’s mission, let alone be called a church at all.
2. We do gather around a political, social, or even religious cause. We gather as sinners who have believed in the saving work of Jehovah God through the redeeming work of His Son Jesus Christ. If this is not at the center AND what is biggest, then we have no foundation.
3. Anything other is a social club, political rally, or religious pageantry.
4. Simply believing in what we have been commissioned to proclaim and display.
 

Learning:

IS: To love, learn, and live God’s Word with confidence in its unique transforming power.

IS NOT: If God’s Word of God is not learned with a view toward transformation, then it is simply a religious book of rules and traditions.

Application:

1. This is the whole purpose of learning: to be transformed by the truth of the Bible’s message which is a message of the divinely orchestrated, unstoppable conspiracy of God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ to demonstrate unparalleled mercy and grace by providing salvation for undeserving sinners. We learn and are transformed.
2. If we emerge from our learning with factoids or interesting religious ideas, we have squandered the transforming Word of God and passed it off as an anthology of historic religious thought.
3. If we emerge with nothing but a code of right behavior, we read of behaviors that we cannot keep.
4. We don’t read to put a gummy star on a chart, we read to find God and have him transform our hearts so that we look more and more like the beauty of Christ revealed in its pages. 

Loving:

IS: To grow up together in Christlike character and conduct so that we are serving one another in love.

IS NOT: If this divinely-empowered hallmark of Christian discipleship is missing, then our proclamation of the good news is in vain.

Application:

1. A loving church is described in this passage. We find that being a friendly church is not the same as being a loving church.
2. Difference between glad handing and truly getting into a person’s life. A difference between saying hello to a person you hardly know and maintaining a caring spirit later when you get to know the person with all their faults. I find it very easy to have a kind spirit toward people I barely know. We tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, but when we get really close and see the imperfections and all doubts are removed from our mind and we confirm: this person has issues, they are imperfect, they don’t see things the way I do, they have a different background, maybe different standards. I don’t find them nearly as likeable as I once did because I found out they’re like…me. Face it, anyone who is a full member of the fallen human race isn’t that lovely when you get to see the marks of fallenness up close. But Jesus loved you. Jesus loves them. The marks of redemption are hopefully growing among us, and this is what we love.
3. Birds of a feather.
4. By this shall men know you are my disciples – love.
 

Worshiping:

IS: To encourage and engage in zealous, reverent, Word-driven, Christ-centered, God-exalting, life-permeating worship in large and small gatherings, public and private devotion.

IS NOT: If worship is relegated to mundane rituals with temporal and spatial boundaries, then it is empty and fraudulent.

Application:

1. John 4 – woman at the well. Particular place or time. It is a matter of the heart. We desire to ascribe the worth due his name in both private and public settings, on Sunday or even on a Thursday afternoon.   Space and time are not the issue.
2. Being overly concerned with space, time, and form reveals that we miss the point. Does God care about these things? Yes. A quick look at the OT reveals God was very specific with these kinds of things. Here’s the problem. God’s people in the OT became fixated on these rituals. What God intended as tools of worship, became the goal. The rituals were in end in and of themselves. Here’s the shocker, we come to the NT and God changed those specifics. Christians were meeting in homes and other locations other than the Synagogue, on Sundays instead of Saturday, hanging out with Gentiles. The Jewish nation had so revered the specifics of worship ritual that the missed the purpose of worship. So much so that even God himself was not allowed to change the specific expressions of worship.
3. Although we are committed to meeting together and engage in worship with particular forms and structures, God’s greatest desire for us is to be faithful to worship, not just participate in motions.
4. This transforms worship for two reasons:

•  
  • Expression of the heart, not the expression of a schedule (snow day)
  • Expression of being in the presence of God, not merely participating as an audience.
  • Assured that I am in the presence of God. Spirit and in truth.
  • Question: If I realized that I was standing in the very presence of my Savior who gave his life to save my wretched soul, would I be ashamed of the manner by which I gave him praise for his immeasurable work in my behalf. That is what we are doing.
  • I went to HP and they worshiped God like he was really there. May we worship him appropriately because he is here. 

Witnessing:

IS: For every member to be actively engaged in spreading the good news through regular contact with unsaved people.

IS NOT: Failure to take the good news into our communities and beyond is a failure to worship and a shirking of the church’s very mission to make God’s name famous.

Application:

1. This means it would look like something, something very similar to what we see in Acts. Witnessing is the outflow of this worship. If Worship isn’t relegated to a particular time and space that means I may end up worshiping God among the unsaved in this community; and that is what we call evangelism.
2. It will look like this – worship spills on to the front step across the streets, around in our communities workplaces, region, states, nation, and when the border can’t contain it across the oceans to foreign lands.
3. It’s a scary thing to us, not so much telling about Jesus. It’s the meeting part. We have walled our lives off as fortresses rather than serving as beacons of light in dark places. Being around unbelievers is difficult. We feel uncomfortable. But, do we understand what we are doing by resisting contact. When we wall ourselves in and have no willing contact with unbelievers, we are in essence saying that the glorious gospel that saved me and that my glorious purpose of spreading it isn’t worth the discomfort I may face. We can’t shirk our responsibility to proclaim and display the gospel.
4. We don’t need more Chrisitan coffee shops, Christian golf leagues, bowling leagues, little leagues, or soccer leagues. We don’t need more Christian book clubs, chess clubs, running clubs, or quilting clubs.
5. You like to bowl, then a get a few of your Christian brothers and unsaved co-workers or neighbors and bowl. Yeah, but my co-worker will probably drink beer, smoke, tell dirty jokes, swear, and talk about ungodly things. Yes. That should be a signal to you: your co-worker needs Jesus and you are now close enough to proclaim and display the gospel to him. A lot closer than bowling with only believers in your own little league.
6. Let me be clear – situation where you will be tempted to get drunk or engage in sin then please don’t. We don’t do this for our enjoyment or comfort, but because it is our mission.

Conclusion:

The fact is the whats will change. Our specific expression of these have, will, and will continue to change. Not because past expressions were faulty, or inferior. A change in what isn’t a repudiation of the past, but rather a fresh, application to the current setting in which we find ourselves. Anyone on a mission understands this – our military doesn’t fight a war today like it fought in WW1. Are we saying that the soldiers of WW1 weren’t brave and effective? Of course not.

Christ stated this himself. In Mark 2 we are familiar with the scene: Mark 2:23-28 One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24 And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” 25 And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: 26 how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” 27 And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

How warped and ineffective would it be if we lived for the whats of life? How ineffective HP would be if we were reduced to this. If our programs existed to be populated that would be strange and would lead us to do whatever, because what of attending three services a week would end up being our why.

We simply need to understand that the whats are adaptive expressions of our core activities: believing, learning, loving, worshiping witnessing. They exist to help us fulfill our mission. They are not the mission, and we do not exist for them.

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