We're Sinners. And We Need Jesus.

We're Sinners. And We Need Jesus.

Chet Phillips

Transcript

Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors. We're in our sixth week of our Extraordinary Series. We've just been kind of walking through talking about the concept that God has ordained. He's kind of set up in the way he created the world for our normal lives, our everyday going to work, cutting our grass, buying groceries, eating, going to sleep, tying our shoes, teaching our kids how to tie their shoes, like the normal everyday stuff of life.

He's set it up so that he intends to use that for his glory and for the good of others, that he intends to use the normal everyday stuff of life to change the eternity of those around us as we get to interact with them in a way that points them towards Jesus. So that's what we've been talking about for the past five weeks. This is our sixth week and it's the last week in this series. And let me just kind of tell you a little bit about how we do stuff as a church. We're pretty simple, straightforward. On Sundays we gather, we're going to sing some songs because the Bible commands us to, calls us to.

There's something about singing that helps things become real to us, become true to us. You know how you can get a song stuck in your head and it will not leave? Okay, God designed that and he designed us to use that as a way to remind ourselves of his truth. Nobody ever just had a really good sentence stuck in their head and they couldn't get it out. That's not how it works, but you do get songs stuck in your head. And so God, we're going to gather together.

We're going to sing to God. We're going to remind ourselves of his truth, his word. And then throughout the weeks we gather in community groups. And our community groups have group leaders, male and female group leaders in our community groups, are considered deacons in our church and they're kind of the front line of pastoral care and training and discipleship. We ask a lot of our group leaders. And they actually will go through training, leaders in training, so that we can launch more community groups because we believe that healthy groups multiply and that healthy disciples raise up more disciples and train more people.

And that's pretty much it. That's what we do. We're going to preach on Sundays. We'll pick, we do series, which instead of just doing one random thing every week, we kind of pick a topic and focus on it for a little while. A lot of times we just study straight through a book. So this is our last week in this series.

Next week we'll kind of go into studying some Christology, which is just the theology of Christ. We'll study that for a while. I'm pretty excited about that. Then we're going to go spend the rest of the summer in the Psalms, just learning how to worship personally from the Psalms. And as we do that, we usually, we have a groups team that writes content that pairs well. So for our community groups, group leaders are given some, hey, here's some questions, here's a way to lead a Bible study.

Group leaders have a lot of leeway in how groups are led. But we try to write group content that means if you're in a community group and you're not here on Sundays, you still understand what's going on. That's why we say it pairs well. Like a good red wine and a nice steak. Or for our more Baptiste people here, pizza and Mountain Dew. Like it just goes well together.

And so that's what we're doing. We're finishing up this series today. And so I just want to kind of start us off by asking this, kind of thinking through this. Let's say you've been here. You've caught most of this, the weeks you miss, maybe you listen to them online. And you've started to actually apply this.

You're in community groups and you started to say, okay, I'm going to do, actually have this filter into my life, this extraordinary series as we begin walking through this. And so maybe you started looking at your schedule a little bit differently. Maybe you started kind of praying over your schedule. Maybe you started questioning what was taking up your time. Maybe when you went to work, you were more prayerful in the fact that you're now going to get to be around people who don't know Jesus. And so how can I serve them?

How can I love them? How can I relate to them? Maybe you started looking at your schedule a little bit differently. Maybe you started making some invitations. One of the things we've said throughout the series is that if we'll be intentional about inviting people into our lives, not just inviting them to hang out on a Sunday or hang out with a group, but actually just into our lives that we'll begin to see people come to know Jesus, because that's the way God designed this to work, that we would be joining him in mission and normal everyday life. And so maybe you started making invitations into your life.

Maybe you started listening a little bit differently to the people around you, trying to hear ways that their story interacts with the gospel as we had spent the time talking through creation, fall, redemption, restoration. So maybe you started doing that. Maybe you invited someone into your home, your sanctuary, your refuge that you intentionally built with brick walls so that no one could get in unless you let them. Maybe you actually invited someone to come eat around your table or to just hang out and have some coffee or to eat some watermelon in your backyard. Like maybe you actually began to make some invitations and invite people into your house.

Maybe your group's been intentional about throwing parties or hanging out with people. And so the question we're looking at today as we finish up this series is, why on earth would we do that? Why? Why? I'm talking to some of you. It's like, why would you invite someone into your home?

And some of you are like Raz, who actually talked about that that Sunday, and you love having people in your house. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to my wife. Who he describes, who gets to press a button and ride into a shelter where a wall lifts up and press another button and the wall closes and no one can get to her and she's safe. Why would we have people come sit around our table? Why would you do that?

Why would you go out of your way to make yourself uncomfortable? Why would you? Why? That's all we're looking at today. Why on earth would we intentionally look at our schedules differently, begin to pray before we go to work, begin to invite people to be around us that maybe we don't even like? Why would you go sit with them at the break room?

Why would you invite them to get dinner after work? I'm going to pray, and we're going to try to answer this question this morning. God, we ask that your word would change us, that you would help us more clearly than we can on our own see the truth of what we're looking at this morning, that your Holy Spirit would be at work in us. We love you. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Grab your Bibles. Go to 1 Timothy chapter 1. If you have one of the white Bibles on the road, it's going to be on page 576. We're going to be in 1 Timothy chapter 1. This was written by the Apostle Paul. Paul was a Jewish leader, and we meet him in the book of Acts.

He's not one of the original apostles, one of the 12 apostles that followed Jesus around. We actually, when we first meet him, he's overseeing an execution of a Christian. He holds the coats of everyone who stoned Stephen, one of the first deacons. They stoned him to death, and Paul oversees this. And then it says Paul was very zealous for the persecution of the church. So he was a Jewish leader who thought that Christianity was subverting the good Jewish rule that was causing problems.

And so he was going around and rounding up Christians and arresting them and having some put to death and some put in prison. And while he's in the process of doing this, he's actually riding to a new city to do this. And Jesus shows up, who did live in Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee. He died. He was buried. He rose again.

And Jesus shows up and basically knocks Paul down, makes him blind, and says, why are you trying to start something with me? That's the South Carolina version. That's not exactly what he says in the Bible. But he says, why are you persecuting me? And then he basically says, okay, I'm actually going to take you and use you for my kingdom and my glory. And so Paul becomes a Christian and a missionary and begins to travel around planting churches, starting new churches.

All the churches were new at this point because the church was new at this point. Christians were new at this point. The gospel was new at this point. And so he begins to travel around and plant churches. And this letter we have is a letter written to a new church and a young pastor. And he's writing to him, talking to him about how to pastor, how to lead.

And we're going to just look at this one small section at the very beginning of this to help us answer this question today as to why we would spend money and energy and time going out of our way to be around people who don't know Jesus. Pick up in verse 15. The saying is trustworthy trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. So he's talking about, there's a saying, there's a common saying, and it's trustworthy and it deserves full acceptance. So you should believe this.

You should memorize it. You should write it down. You should cross stitch it on a pillow. Put it on your coffee mug. This is a good one. That's what Paul's saying.

Saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. So let's read that again. This is the saying, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. So let's, we're going to spend the majority of our time just breaking that sentence down. It's pretty dense, so let's just kind of walk through. He starts off with Christ Jesus.

Okay. Christ is a title. It's like king or president. It's not Jesus' last name. So you hear Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ.

It means the same thing. Christ, the word Christ means Messiah, promised one. And so what he's saying here is that Jesus, the Jewish guy that lived and trained the apostles that died on a cross that rose from the grave, that Jesus was the promised Christ from the Old Testament. That all the promises God had been making through his prophets and through his law and everything that we have in the Old Testament, all of those promises that someone was going to come fix this problem of sin, all of those promises are met, fulfilled in Christ, in Jesus. He is the promised Christ. So here's how the Old Testament kind of plays out.

God makes the world and it's good and beautiful. And then he makes humans and they're good and beautiful. And it's amazing. For about two chapters. And then humans botch it up. Adam and Eve, our first parents, rebel against God and sin enters the world.

And at that moment, God begins to step in and throughout the rest of time begins to promise that he's going to fix this. He's going to fix the problem of sin. That this sin that's wreaking havoc and causing problems and breaking down relationships and tearing everything apart, that he's going to fix it. That there's going to be someone who comes and sets up our kingdom. There's going to be someone who comes and atones for sin. There's going to be someone who comes.

Like he keeps promising that. And when he says Christ, that's what he's talking about. The fulfillment of these promises. That Christ Jesus is the deliverer, the promised redeemer. So Christ Jesus came into the world.

Okay, so what he means by that is if you refer to your birth as the moment that you came into the world. Like it sounds a little bit braggy. Like if I was like, yes, I came into the world in the late 80s. You'd be like, okay, that's weird. Like that's a weird way to describe that. There were, some of you would be like, there were the 40s, the 50s, and in the 60s, I came into the world.

Like it just, when he says that, he's pointing to something beyond just a normal birth. What he's saying is that Jesus existed eternally and then he came into the world. That it was actually God entering the world. That when Jesus came, he came into the world. He was born of a virgin. God was his father and he came into the world as a fully human, fully divine, fully God, fully human, and he actually entered the world for a purpose.

Now, the next word in this sentence is two. So it says, Christ Jesus came into the world too. So now we're about to find out what he's here for, what his purpose is. And we should all kind of hold our breath. If this is the first time ever reading this, ever understanding that God became a human, there should be a little bit of tension here because we're not doing great. so if God joins us, there's an assumption that that may be bad. Like I was, some pastor friends that I know where they were at a church plant and they were meeting in another church's building and that church put on their marquee, their little sign, the little church sign out by the road.

They put, don't make me come down there in quotations and then they put dash God. Don't make me come down there, God. And one of the pastors went to the pastors of that church that they were renting from and they were like, you need to take that sign down because he did come down here and that wasn't his attitude. But there's something so easily connected with in that statement that we would believe. Like if you say, don't make me come down there and God said it, we do immediately think, yeah, if he comes down, this isn't to give out high fives. Like we're not doing great.

Y'all realize that, right? Like humans are the biggest problem. Like we're the ones causing the issues here. I've told this story before. When we would go to my grandparents' house, we lived in West Virginia. They had a three-story house.

Their basement is where all the grandkids had to stay and they would put us in there and they would tell us to go to sleep and there was like a thousand sleeping bags on the ground. And then, we would not go to sleep. And so, there would be these moments where we're laughing and having fun and staying up way later than we should and I was little so I don't know if it was two in the morning or like 10.30. I just used to go to bed at eight. I have no clue. It just was really late, you guys.

And the door would open and as soon as the door opened, it was like that door sucked all the air out of the room and everybody was like, I'm feeling like you sleep. Lights are on. We all just fall down like. And you would look to try to see whose feet were coming down the stairs because there was this little wall and all you could see was feet first. And your hope was that it wasn't your parents' feet because your parents can only hit you. They don't just get to beat your cousins.

If it was my granddad's feet, that's equal opportunity beatings. Like he can hit anybody he wants. Complete immunity. But you would just kind of look real quick. There was never a moment when that door opened and feet began to descend that I thought, maybe they're bringing treats. Never happened.

There's never a moment where I was like, maybe they wanted to play with us. No. There was this immediate knowledge of this is not going to be good and there's that tension here when it says that Christ Jesus came into the world. We should all hold our breath a little bit. We're the problem here. Why is he coming?

But it says he came to save sinners. Okay. I think most of us still have a good handle on what the term sinner means. But the Bible's teaching on it is that everyone is a sinner. All humans are sinners, have fallen short, have missed the Mark, have not lived the way we ought to. You may want to debate with whether or not that's actually real, whether or not there is actually a God and whether or not sin actually matters.

But at least most of us I think still understand the concept. The Bible will say that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That there is none righteous, no not one. We're described as dead in our sin, enemies of God, that all of us have joined in the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Here's what I know and it's enough about Adam and Eve to know that you could swap them out with any one of us. Any couple in our church could swap out for Adam and Eve and this story would look very, very similar.

You can put any couple you want there. It could be Matt and Katie Freeman. It'd work out the same. Chet and Anna Phillips. It'd play out the same. Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Oprah and Stedman. Barack and Michelle. It doesn't matter. Put whoever you want there. It's going to play out the same. We're all bent and twisted towards our own pride, our own esteem, our own sin.

And all of us have fallen short. All of us have joined the rebellion. One of the ways I can most clearly see this in my own life. Most days, I think pretty highly about myself. I think I mostly have it together. The Bible tells me that's sin.

So that's a problem. But one of the ways I see this really clearly is if I look at the relationships with the people around me that I love most and that mean the most to me. So you take my parents, you take my brothers, you take my wife, you take my son. And I can point to active times and places and instances where I have personally gone to work to harm them, to tear that relationship down. And these are the people I'm most committed to, should most care about, be most selfless towards, love the most. I'm not talking about me in traffic.

I'm talking about me at my house. I'm not talking about people who don't like me. I'm talking about people who care about me and I care about that I can point to instances where I've actively chosen to tear that apart so that when the Bible looks at me and says, you are a sinner, I'm forced to nod along. Now, there's this idea that if Jesus came, because we're all sinners, how's he going to solve this problem? I got to thinking about this as I was working on this. I think if God came to me and said, I need you to figure out what are my options.

Now that I made a good creation and it rebelled, I need you to tell me what my options are. I need you to lay out for me what I can do to fix this problem. Now, I'm not, that smart. So I came up with three. There may be more. You might come up with more.

I came up with three that I think I would come back to God and present him with. Like if I got in on this plan, I think I'd come back and say, okay, I've come up with really kind of three basic options. Option number one, you cannot care. So you can just kind of stop being the way you are. You can let them do this and not care that they're harming each other, that they're tearing your world apart, that they're hurting each other. Like, because mostly the issue is humans.

I mean, yes, we have some natural disasters and yes, you may have a dog bite you, but I go to bed at night, I lock my doors to my house. That's not because I'm afraid of bears. I don't think a bear, like, I think human might try to get in my house because we're the ones causing problems. So I basically come back and say, you cannot care. You can just kind of turn a blind eye to them hurting each other. And I think, pretty quickly, that one would be ruled out.

It'd be like, okay, I kind of knew that was you weren't going to change and you were going to still be good. So let's move to option number two. Option number two is you can just control all their brains and perfectly control all of them and make them not do this. You can, like, Stepford-wise them, you can robot them, make them not do this. This is one of the things people will say periodically is like, if God's so good, why couldn't he have made us better? Like, why did, if we're all going to naturally sin, why couldn't God have made us better?

Y'all know that would be worse, right? The more good stuff God puts in you, the more capability you have. As long as you have a choice, the more capability you have for good or evil. Let me explain this. Y'all ever met a hamster? Hamsters don't have a whole lot going on.

Not a whole lot poured into the hamster. A hamster, a really good hamster, does what? Like, I don't know, lets you hold it? A really bad hamster bites you? Runs away? Like, there's never a hamster that saved a family from a fire.

There's never a hamster that massacred an entire town. Like, hamsters don't do that because they don't have that much in them. But you take a dog, they have more capacity for good things or bad things because more has been poured into them. You take an eight-year-old, more capacity for good things or bad things because more has been given to them. You take an adult, healthy adult human, because God has put more into them, there's more capacity either for good or for evil. The only way to fix that is to take away choice, not to make us better.

The most dangerous creature in creation was one of the creatures that God poured His most beauty and power into. That's why we believe that there are spiritual beings that cause havoc on earth and that are at work. That's what the Bible, Satan, is a being that God poured a lot into. But because He didn't take away choice, it has the ability to go better or worse. This is like every plot of every science fiction movie. Scientists make a thing and it's amazing and then they look at each other and go, could you imagine if this ever fell into the wrong hands?

Because it's so good, it's so big, it's so powerful, obviously it can cause more problems and that's how it works. So I would say option two, take away choice. Just robot them. Because just saying make them better with a choice would still mean they had a lot of capacity for really heinous things. You know that, like even just humans that are more intelligent can cause more problems, more charismatic can cause more problems than like less intelligent, less charismatic humans. They can still do stuff but it's just not on the same scale.

Option three, you can get rid of all the humans. I think sometimes we like to think that God could just get rid of the bad humans but where do you draw that line? Bottom 50%? You do realize as soon as you do that the top 50% are still going to cause problems, they're still having issues, they're still harming each other, they're still selfish, they're still mean. You could just get rid of the humans. I think those are the three options I would come up with.

Maybe you're more intelligent, maybe you could come up with four or five. I don't think any of us would have come up with the option that God came up with. You see, when he promises to save sinners, what he's got to do is take care of sin without getting rid of us. But sin is in us. So Jesus became one of us.

God said, how about I become a human, live perfectly, righteously on their behalf. I do what all the humans were supposed to do but were never capable of. None of them ever accomplished. What if I live perfectly, righteously on their behalf and then die a gruesome, painful death that they deserve. What if I, God, swap places with them? That's the option he came up with.

To get rid of sin, to pay for sin without having to get rid of all of us. Without taking away choice, without changing his nature, it perfectly blends these together where God says, I'm going to stay holy where I hate sin. I'm going to stay loving where I love humans. I'm not taking away choice. I'm actually going to join them and accomplish for them what they could never accomplish. That was his plan, to save sinners without destroying them.

You see, our sin deserves punishment. We've rebelled against God. Our sin has torn apart his good, harmonious world. And he can't just let us off and act as if we haven't. We aren't guilty. People at times will say, well, why couldn't God just forgive us?

Why does there have to be a system for this? And the answer to that is I don't know. I don't fully know why it has to work this way. I do know he did more than what you're asking of him. When people say that at times, they're saying, why couldn't he just wipe it all away? It's like he did.

It just cost him more. And in some ways, that just makes me love him more than if he just magicked it. He actually, no, sin had to be paid for, but he chose to take it on his own back. So Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, to give forgiveness of sin. That only through faith in Christ can you be saved. Can you be a sinner, which all of us are, and be forgiven?

So why does this matter? Why would we do all the things we've been talking about this whole series? Why would you go out of your way to meet your neighbors, to invite them into your house, to get to know your coworkers? The reason why we would do this is that everyone is a sinner deserving of punishment, but Jesus came to save sinners. That our world is so insanely hopeless, and the gospel is hopeful. That we have all been marked and broken by sin, but there's hope in Christ.

That's why this matters. Because we, as Christians, believe this. That this was us. Just to tell you a little bit about our church family, we've held really closely to this the whole time we've been around. This is one of the main things that we fight for. We believe, and we'll tell you, you are a sinner.

So when you hang out with our community groups, and we do confession in our community groups, which means we just talk about how messed up we are. When you confess something, first of all, it's kind of, confession, and this is even just to help the Christians in the room, it's kind of like when you're sick, and you know you're going to throw up, and you try to fight it, and it's the worst thing ever. This is kind of a gross analogy, but this is how this works. And then after you throw up, you feel amazing. That's the way confession works. It is the worst thing ever.

And then you confess. You talk about what you did. You talk about how you've been treating each other. You talk about stuff that no one would ever know unless you told them, and then immediately you're like, especially in a group of people that believe this, that you're a sinner that needs Jesus. Here's what happens. We confess sin, and the people in our community groups go, yeah.

Because we gather together because we all believe we're sinners who need Jesus. And then we say to each other, isn't Jesus good? Isn't it beautiful that he saves sinners? Let me tell you something. When you confess sin in our church, we're just finding out which brand. We knew you were a sinner.

The only people we give a hard time around here are the people who act like they got it together. It's hard on y'all around here. I'm sorry. We're going to give you a hard time. Every time you hang out with your community group and you go, well, I almost thought a bad word, and then I stopped myself. We're like, oh my goodness.

You are the worst sinner here. And because we're sinners, we want to choke you. Like there's just this level of we're going to fight for you're a sinner. But it's not just that. It's that Jesus saves sinners. That's what qualified us for a savior.

That's why he came. That's why he's good. That's why we gather. That's why we worship. One of the things that happens periodically, and this answer for me has not changed, that in pastoral care, pastoral counseling, there are times where I've sat across a table from somebody. I've sat in a little circle of chairs in a community group, or I've been on the phone with somebody, and you can see tears in their eyes, or you can hear it in their voice, or they're just talking about something, sin that has wrecked their life.

They're telling somebody something they've never said before. They're talking about things that have been going on that they've been hiding. And after that moment of just laying it out there, I usually end up just saying the same thing because it hasn't stopped being true. If Jesus didn't save sinners, we wouldn't be doing this. This church would never have gotten started. If this wasn't a safe place to be messed up, this wasn't a safe place to have baggage and pain, I'd go do something else.

Because Jesus saves sinners, sinners, we all have hope. That's what this is about. There's a story in the book of Numbers, chapter 21, where Moses is leading the Israelites out of Egypt. They're in the wilderness, and they come to a place where they've been grumbling against God, and then all these snakes start biting everybody. The Bible calls them fiery snakes. I don't know if that meant like venomous, or if they actually were on fire, which would be terrifying.

But these snakes start biting people, and people start dying. And so Moses comes to God and says, can we do something about the snakes? And God says, I want you to make a fiery snake. They make one out of bronze. They put it on a stick, and they post it up. And if you get bit by a snake, and you're going to die, a venomous snake, you look at the fiery bronze snake on a stick, and you don't die.

That's a crazy story. Jesus is talking in John chapter 3 to a religious leader who would have memorized most of the Old Testament, and he says, the Son of Man, like Moses raised the snake for the Israelites, the Son of Man is going to be raised up as well. You see, they had to look at a fiery snake to have their venom taken away, and Jesus says, I'm going to become sin so that sin can be taken away. He says, I'm going to be that snake. I'm going to be raised up on a cross when people look at me, their sin will be taken away. And here's what's beautiful about that.

I would have loved to have been a doctor in Israel at that time. I'd just take all the snake cases. When they came to Israel's ER, I'd be like, broken leg? I don't do that. Snake bite, come here. Have you looked at the bronze snake yet?

They'd be like, no. I'd be like, I got this. I'd hand them a prescription. They would just say, look at the bronze snake, stupid. That's it. I could solve all of them because there was one thing that saved them.

It wasn't anything special or magical that they did. It was that they, there was something that was there to save them. Jesus says, that's him. There's a pastor called Dr. Martin Laurie Jones. He was a pastor all through kind of the 1900s in England.

He used to be a doctor and I heard him talking one time and he said, one of the biggest differences between being a doctor and being a preacher is this. He said, when he was a doctor and you came to him with an ailment, he had to ask you all kinds of questions. Tell me your family history. Tell me your symptoms. Tell me everything that you think is inconsequential but I need to know it all. He said he would have to sit and ask people tons and tons of questions just to try to be able to then say, here's what you ought to do.

He said he loved being a preacher. He said, because when he walked up and opened the Bible, he already knew what everybody's problem was. He already knew the disease everybody had and he already knew the cure. He said, it didn't matter whether they were wealthy. He said, I didn't care if you were wealthy or poor, whether you're getting drunk on beer or wine, it doesn't matter. Sin's still your problem.

It didn't matter if you were intelligent or non-intelligent, cultured or not cultured. He said, everybody had the same disease. And this is why we, why this matters, why what we've been talking about for the past five weeks matters. Everybody we know has been bitten by a snake. Everybody we know has sin pumping through their veins. And everybody we know is hopeless without Christ, but Jesus Christ came to save sinners.

I cannot see through the walls of my neighbor's house. I cannot read the thoughts of the people I have the chance to work with, but I can tell you that sin is tearing their lives apart every way it possibly can. And I know that Jesus Christ saves sinners, so it's absolutely worth it that we would go out of our way to see whomever we can come to know Jesus. Verse 16. But I received mercy.

So remember, this is Paul talking. Oh, sorry. Back into verse 15. I skipped something. That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom, of all the sinners, I am the foremost. That means some Bible verses will say chief.

Paul says, I'm the worst. The worst of all the sinners. But I received mercy, meaning that I did not get what I deserved, but that Christ offered mercy to me, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. See, we believe that sin kills us. That there's an eternal death that we will face because of our sin, but that Jesus Christ died in our place for our sin, atoned for our sin, and that there's an eternal life offered in him. And what Paul says is, I'm the worst one.

Some of you in here today maybe came in thinking, I'm a terrible person. How could God ever love me? Maybe you came in because you're trying to fix your life right now. Maybe that's why you've started hanging out with our church families because you're trying to get it together. You think stuff's going poorly in your life and you think, well, I need some Jesus. I gotta start behaving.

I gotta start acting right. I gotta quit talking like this. I gotta quit acting like this. And here's what Paul says. You're not worse than me. I tried to fight Jesus.

You may have done some messed up stuff. Paul says, I tried to fight Jesus. I was killing Christians. I was rounding them up. I was actively fighting against the church. And Jesus Christ gave mercy to me, saved me, redeemed me, so that I could be an example to everyone.

Jesus Christ saves sinners and not based off of anything they do. Paul was not headed to Damascus to get his life together. He was headed to Damascus to snatch the lives of Christians. And Jesus saved him. And what Paul says is, I'm an example to everyone that Jesus Christ saves sinners. You don't have to have it together.

You don't have to be moral. That's not the point. It's that Jesus was good in our place. Some of you are thinking, well, I don't deserve this and I'm not worthy. Right. That's the point.

You don't deserve this. You're not worthy. Jesus Christ saves sinners. It doesn't say Jesus Christ saves the moral. It doesn't say Jesus Christ saves the smart. It doesn't say Jesus Christ saves the well-behaved.

It says he saves sinners. And then it says this, verse 17. To the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, the honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. When Jesus saves sinners, he gets all the glory. You see, if you come to Jesus and you present to him your good life, your good behavior, your nice attitude, your good digestion that makes you easy to get along with, if you come to Jesus and you present to him all of the good things that you have, do you know who gets glory?

You do. Look at all your gold stars. You're so precious. Jesus Christ doesn't save good, moral, well-behaved people. He saves the busted, the broken, the sick, the sinner. He saves the person who's been bitten by a snake and knows it.

And then you know who gets all the glory? Jesus. There was not a person walking around the Israelite camp that was like, yeah, I defeated snake bite venom. And they were like, how? I looked at the stick. It's like, okay, well, the stick did it, weirdo.

That's the gospel. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. And there's something about being a Christian that helps us all line up with Paul and say, yeah, I'm the worst. I'm the foremost. And we all believe as Christians that he's going to keep doing it. That's what he does.

And that there's hope for our neighbors and our friends and our coworkers and our family members. Because there's hope for us. You know who's sitting in these chairs right now that's a part of our church family? A whole bunch of people who never thought they would be sitting in these chairs and be a part of a church family. It's one of my favorite things about our church. There's a whole bunch of people that were like, yeah, I thought this was stupid.

Just being real. A whole bunch of people that were like, yeah, I was mad at the church. I didn't like Jesus. I thought this was weird. Some of y'all grew up in the church. I'm not saying anything bad about y'all, but I'm just saying a whole lot of our church family is a bunch of people that thought they'd never be here.

But you know what? Jesus Christ saved sinners. And they don't show up. We don't show up as a church family to keep doing our good deeds. We show up as a church family to continue to remember that I'm a sinner who needs Jesus and he's good and glorious and holy. And that's why it matters.

That's why you'd invite somebody in your home. That's why you'd start praying over your schedule. That's why you'd try to get to know your neighbors. you'd rather be coming to know their story. Okay, come on.

Few to Many

Few to Many

Spencer Cary

Transcript

Good morning. My name is Spencer Carey. I am a church planting resident here at Mill City. It has almost been a year. This June will be a year since we've been down here starting the work of planting Antioch Church on the other side of Lexington. It's been a good year.

It's been a year that has been a joy to be serving alongside you guys, to be learning from you guys. We've felt a lot of love, and it's been great. We're excited for where God has ahead for us. And this morning, we are continuing our Extraordinary Series, and we're going to be talking about community groups and how they can be used for mission. Conventional wisdom says that if you want to accomplish a goal or win a game or whatever, you choose the best and the brightest to field your team. And that's practically true in sports.

In sports, in professional sports, the most important position that you hire for as an owner is a general manager, the GM. The GM chooses the head coach, which is hugely important. He also chooses the players. He's the head of scouting. So I'm a huge Indianapolis Colts fan, which means the last five years has been somewhat painful because we have one of the best quarterback prospects since Peyton Manning, and it's been terrible to watch because we had a bad GM who chose really bad players and a not-so-great coach.

I think of other sports. I think of Major League Baseball. Probably the best GM in sports is Theo Epstein. He helped build the Red Sox and ended that curse, and then he went to the Chicago Cubs where he just ended that curse. So he's really good at what he does.

If you want to win ballgames, you feel the best team. The same is also true in advertising. If you want your product to sell, you choose the best and the brightest. In our culture, that seems to be celebrities. Celebrity endorsements is where it's at. One of my favorite celebrities who endorses products is Shaq.

Shaquille O'Neal, he's just hilarious. He was one of the most dominant power forwards in the history of the NBA, and then he comes out, and he's just been selling products ever since. One of my favorite products he sells are Buicks. He is seven. You don't know who Shaq is. He's seven foot one.

He's massive, and they show him inside of a Buick, and you're like, there's no way Shaq fits in a Buick. He has business selling tanks, but not Buicks. That's not how that works. One of the worst celebrity endorsements that I've seen is the Sarah McLachlan abused animal commercials. You know what I'm talking about. If you've watched TV past 11 o'clock, you have seen these.

The first time you watch it, her song, In the Arms of an Angel, comes on, which is an extremely sad song. And then they show a picture of an abused puppy, and you're immediately like, this is really sad. And then they show a hurt cat. And you may not be a cat person. That doesn't do anything for you. But then they show you more pictures of dogs.

And you're like, oh my goodness, this is terrible. The first time you watch it, I mean, it moves you a little bit. The hundredth time you've seen it, it infuriates you. You want it off the TV. You change the channel as fast as you can. But that's what companies, that's what nonprofits, that's what teams.

If you want the best way to sell your product, the best way to win ballgames, you choose the best and the brightest. That's conventional wisdom. Jesus defies that. He defies conventional wisdom by choosing a bunch of scrubs and equipping them to do ministry. If you don't know what a scrub is, a scrub is one definition. It's a guy who thinks he's fine who's also known as a buster.

That is one definition of a scrub. An alternate definition of a scrub is just someone who generally lacks talent. Not very special, not an all-star at all. And this is who Jesus chose. So we're going to look today, we're going to walk through this.

We're going to walk through who Jesus chose and why he chose them to change the world, the 12 apostles. Then we're going to look at how he equipped them to do ministry. And we're going to see how God still wants to use us today. So before we dive into that, let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. God, I pray that you would use it this morning to show us what mission looks like and how our community groups can be used to reach this city.

We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so we'll start at who he chose. Matthew 10, 2 and following. The names of the 12 apostles are these. First, Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew, his brother.

James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother. Philip and Bartholomew. Thomas and Matthew, the tax collector. James, the son of Alphaeus. And Thaddeus. Simon, the zealot.

And Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. All right, so Jesus chooses 12 ordinary men that represent kind of a common cross-section of that culture at that time. You look at Peter, James, John, Andrew. We know they were fishermen. All right, so blue-collar, probably uneducated, fishermen.

Then you get Bartholomew, James, Philip, and Jude Thaddeus. Thaddeus being a name that exhibits both testosterone and biblical value, which is why our son who is coming this summer will have the middle name Thaddeus. These four, we don't really know who they were. They could have been farmers. They could have been shepherds. They could have been fishermen.

They don't have name recognition. We don't really know who they were. They were just common people. Then you get to Thomas. Thomas is probably a common trade, too, but we do know something about Thomas. He's a bit of a skeptic.

So he kind of represents the skeptic part of their society. Then we get to Matthew and Simon. Matthew, we'll start with him. Matthew is a tax collector. He's a Jewish tax collector. Which means he's one of the most hated people in his culture.

He was a Jew who worked for the Roman government who was oppressing the Jews, collecting taxes on behalf of them, and taking more than his fair share. Like, we hate the IRS. This is the IRS and steroids. This is like China oppressing our country and having to pay taxes to an American who takes more than his fair share. So he's hated.

And then on the other extreme, we have Simon the Zealot. He is a part of a group of revolutionaries called the Zealots. They actively sought to overthrow the Roman government, rebellion after rebellion, until finally about 70 AD, the Romans were done with it, and they went and destroyed all of Jerusalem. They destroyed the temple, which is why there's only one part of the temple called the Western Wall that is still in existence. The Zealots hated the Romans. They hated tax collectors who were sellout Jews who worked for the Romans.

So Jesus chooses two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. And then we get to Judas. We know Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus. He could have been an accountant. We don't really know. He handled the money.

But he's just a common person that ends up betraying Jesus. And that's the team. That's the all-star team that he chose to change the world. Defying conventional wisdom, Jesus chose ordinary people to do something extraordinary. And even worse, he chose people who were more likely to tear each other apart than actually unify under a common cause. So why did Jesus choose this group of people to change the world?

For a few reasons. Because God looks glorious when he chooses the broken, when he chooses common, uneducated people to accomplish his purposes. Like the sovereignty of God, which is his rule and his reign, looks more glorious when he uses jacked-up people to advance his kingdom. We see that from Old Testament to New Testament. God gets to flex when he takes a zealot and a tax collector and unifies them under a common cause to see the world changed. It is clear who's in control of the mission when he chooses a common group of people to advance his kingdom.

And they're all so different. And I see that on a practical level now. Even being at this church the last year, thinking of two pastors that came to plant this church, Chet and Matt. They are so different. Like we knew each other in college. But I've gotten to know them more since I've been down here.

And they're so different. You take Chet, for instance. Chet kind of has a stoic, kind of hard face that doesn't look as friendly. He's not very touchy-feely. He's more likely to punch you if you hug him unannounced. That's just Chet.

He's not very touchy-friendly. But you get to know him. He's actually very friendly. He cares a lot. And then as you get to know him more, you see he has a soft spot for musicals and broadways and a little bit of folk music. Then you get to Matt Freeman, who looks happy all the time.

He has got a very kind of light-hearted, very happy spirit about him. He's more likely to hug you unannounced. Hug you and pick you up unannounced. And behind all that, when he gets into competition, he gets gritty. He gets nasty. It's fun.

Especially when you beat him in ping-pong and you get to see it. But God uses both. They're so different. You can go on down the line and show their differences. God uses their differences to bless this church and to make the mission here better. And the same is true if you're honest in your community group.

I mean, be real. Think of the people in your community group right now. Would you have ever connected if it wasn't for Christ? If it wasn't for the reason why you're here is because of Jesus. Would you have ever connected as a community group? Would you still connect?

For some of you, maybe. But for many of you, probably not. Every one of your community group is very different. I think of the community group that we started when we launched community groups off the ground for Antioch in the fall. I've got a little bit of intense personality. I love the Gamecocks.

I love going out to restaurants and eating good foods. I love good coffee. I like weirder music and weirder movies. And then you get to Jeremy Powell, who moved down here last summer. And Jeremy is way different. He's a personal trainer and he loves working out.

I hate working out. I hate it. He likes five different types of food. Unseasoned chicken. Rice. Oatmeal.

Broccoli. And if it's crazy, sweet potatoes. And that's it. Like, that's all he eats. And we're so different. I think of the Pruitts who moved down here.

We're different. They're Clemson fans. We're way different on that. I think of the Garcias who moved down here. They're New Yorkers. We're all so...

When I think about the people who helped launch our community group, we're just... We're all so very different. But what comes out of those differences is a diverse group of people united by the gospel. What comes out of that is a beautiful display of empathy with others. It is a patience with personalities that might clash with you. And it grows you.

And it shapes you in ways that would never happen if you got to choose the people that you want to journey through life with in a community group. And in being different, we all bring something different to the table. We bring different spiritual giftings to the table. Romans 12 is a passage that is one of a few passages in the New Testament that talks about spiritual giftings. Spiritual giftings are just giftings and talents that the Holy Spirit has given us to serve one another in the church and serve those outside the church. Romans 12 gives a few of them.

In verses 5 and 4, we'll read them. It says, So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. All right, hear this. We are one body with individual members with individual different spiritual giftings. I mean, some of you are unreal gifted at serving in hospitality. I serve on host team week in, week out, and I get to see it firsthand.

You make this church better by being such great hosts that bring people in here to hear the gospel. Some of you are just very good at exhorting and encouraging other people. Like, it's just good to be in your presence, to hear your words of encouragement. You're good at that. Some of you are able to teach. That doesn't always look like what happens up here.

Sometimes that's in community group leading a discussion. Sometimes that's walking somebody at a coffee shop through a Bible study. Some of you can teach. Some of you are good at making money, and you have generous hearts. And we can meet here on a Sunday. We can gather together because of that.

It costs money to use this place, and we get to see more ministry happen because of it. We all bring something different to the table in how God uses us to impact one another and others. And what we see from how Jesus chose his apostles is that our diversity is a means of grace that God uses to impact many. Our diversity is a means of grace that God uses to change the world, which is why Jesus chooses the people he did. And it makes God look good. So that's who he chose.

That's why he chose. I want to take a look at how he prepared them for ministry. The primary focus of the four Gospels is Jesus spending time with his apostles, preparing them for ministry. That's it. He had a large-scale ministry, absolutely, but the primary focus is him pouring into the twelve over and over again. You read how Jesus was doing ministry with his disciples, and he was modeling how to do this.

Because the plan wasn't that he was going to stay here forever. So he spent three years modeling this. He spent three years praying with them, teaching them how to pray. He spent three years showing them the importance of the word. There are over 66 different references to the Old Testament in Jesus' dialogues with the disciples. He showed the word is central to what you are going to do.

He modeled solitude and the importance of that. He did large-scale ministry. He did get away with the twelve. Sometimes he did get away with the three. And then he would also get away by himself to spend time with his heavenly father, showing that all of us need time alone with God. Even if you're an extrovert like me, even if you're even more of an extrovert, you need time alone with your father.

He modeled mercy ministry by having compassion on the crowds. He modeled how to have a good time. One of his first miracles is changing water to wine at a wedding party. And I mean, it's so much so that the Pharisees accused Jesus of being a drunkard and a glutton. Now we know that's not true because getting drunk is sin and Jesus is sinless.

We know that never happened. We know that he wasn't a glutton. But he must have been having such a good time with his disciples on a regular basis that they can make those accusations. So he did all this and more. He spent three years showing them how to do this so that they would know how to do it when he left. And just being around him, they soaked up a ton of stuff.

And that makes sense on a practical level. I think on a practical level with my relationship with my daughter, she is almost two years old. And she absorbs a lot. She absorbs some of the good stuff that we do. So we teach her how to pray, what that looks like.

Every night we try to read the storybook Bible so that she can get a rhythm of hearing the gospel, hearing the stories of the Bible come to life. We try some good patterns and then some bad patterns she eventually picks up from us. One of the bad patterns that she picked up a couple months ago, she looked at our dog. We have two dogs. We have one dog who is a sweet puppy who we know she's going to be awesome. Like we can see the long run.

This is going to be a great dog. And we have another dog who's objectively terrible. And she looks at that dog and she goes, shut up, Rolo. And my wife looks at me and I look at her and I look at Ellie. I'm like, no, you shut up. That's not how that went down.

Immediately, I'm like, I'm a little mortified because I know it's me. I know it's my fault because this dog, he's just bad. He's bitten us. He's disobedient. And one of the things that he does that drives us crazy is when she's napping and you have a toddler that's trying to nap and you don't want that interrupted. He barks at everything.

He barks at noises outside and he wakes her up. And I want to take him and put him in front of the TV and watch Sarah McLachlan commercials and say, this could be your life. And my go-to response is, shut up. And she heard it. And so we had to correct that. We had to slowly teach her that, no, say shush, don't say shut up.

But she picks up a lot. You pick up a lot from people around, especially people that you might be influenced by. And for three years, the apostles got to spend three years with the God of the universe. And they picked up a ton. They got to see the heart of God on display for three years. And it impacted 11 of them in profound ways that changed and shaped the future of their ministries until each of them died.

So after spending three years modeling this, Jesus goes to the cross. He goes to the cross where he pays. His blood is spilt. It pays for their sins so that they can have a right standing before God. He goes to the tomb where he conquers death at the resurrection, loosening the grip of death and its power over his followers, giving them a chance to have a new life in Christ through belief in him. And then he sends them out.

He commissions them in the Great Commission. He says, go make disciples. You have one Job. Go make disciples. Do what I have done with you the past three years and change the world. And then the event of Pentecost happens.

They go to Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit descends upon the church at Pentecost. Peter stands up, gives a sermon. Three thousand plus people are changed in a moment. Changed by his grace. They are baptized.

And as you're reading Acts, you might be thinking, this must be the pattern of ministry that's going forward. They're going to travel around and they're going to preach. And there's going to be thousands of people that come to Christ. That is why the church exists today, right? No. This is a special, specific, just beautiful event.

That is not what happens going forward. What happens going forward is directly what follows that in Acts 2, verses 42 through 47. It says, And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And all came upon every soul. And many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common.

And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And hear this. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. That's the pattern that follows for the rest of the book of Acts and the early church. After spending three years with Jesus, the disciples simply modeled his ministry.

They prayed together. They studied the word together. They ministered to those who had need together. They broke bread and ate in their homes together. They kept it simple, making everyday disciples an everyday life. And that's the vision of why Chet and Matt moved down here to plant Mill City.

That is why we moved down here to plant Antioch Church. That simple vision of ministry that we would gather together on Sundays where we'd worship, we'd hear the word preach, and we'd be sent out and we'd scatter into our homes and community groups throughout the week. That's why we preach community groups so much. That's why you hear about it every Sunday. Because we see that God wants to use community groups to change the world, to change this city. And part of us talking about it a lot is a little bit of a reaction to the fact that for most people in this culture, down south, church is a building.

Church is an event that happens on Sunday. It's a social function of sorts. And that's not the biblical definition. The church is the people of God. We gather together for worship and we scatter into community groups. That's the model.

So that's why we have preached this so much. We believe God wants to use you and me to make disciples who will make disciples. God wants to use us to plant groups across this city. We believe that he wants to use us, the few, to impact the many. That's why he chooses everyday scrubs like us to change the world. So in order for us to do that, there's got to be a little bit of a mindset change.

We've got to change our mind on how we look at this a little bit. So we have to see community groups as a missional vehicle, as a place for mission, as a people for mission. We have to see it as that. For many of us, community groups has become a place of refuge, a place of safety. And some of that's for good reasons. Some of that is because community group is a place and it's a people we can gather together and we can be honest with one another.

We can love one another. We can be around our community group members and just be real. And inviting new people into that kind of breaks that up sometimes. It kind of makes it difficult at times. So we have to have a mindset change that says, yeah, community group is a place where we can be fully loved and fully known and fully loved.

But it's also a place where we can see lives changed by the gospel. And in doing that, we're going to grow. And that's going to have to cause us to plant new groups. We have nine community groups represented in this room. And we'd love to see in a year's time that double. We'd love to see 18 community groups happen.

Which means we've got to plant and launch more groups. And when we do that, the cycle of starting new groups is painful and beautiful and good all at the same time. It's a little bit painful because the people that you've journeyed with over the last year or so, you're going to launch some of them out into a new group. Now you're going to see them on Sundays and you're going to hang out from time to time. That's going to happen. But the weekly rhythm of gathering together as a community group, that's going to shift a little bit.

That's going to change completely. They're going to be in a new group. But what happens, what comes out of that is it allows more space for new people to come and experience the gospel. So we're going to have to plant more groups. And the other mindset change that has to happen is we have to see that everything counts. Every aspect of our life counts for the mission of the gospel going forward.

The church that sent us out down here, the language they used was location, vocation, recreation. You'd be missional in your location where you live, your vocation where you work, your recreation where you play, where you live life. So for many of us, we have to do some mindset changes and seeing that we have to be missional in all of those areas. So where we live, your neighborhood, your location. Get to know your neighbors. The neighbor across the street whose yard is a wreck, maybe the yard is a wreck because they have poor health and they can't take care of their yard.

And we get to go and serve them and cut their grass and get to know them and invite them into our community groups. For some of you, many of you work, you work eight to ten hours a day at a job where you're around people, some of whom don't believe the gospel. You get the opportunity to get to engage them, to get to know them, to go out and get lunch with them, to spend time with them, building a relationship so that you can talk about the gospel. You can invite them into groups. Many of you have hobbies. Some of you have like ten hobbies.

You probably should reduce that a little bit. Some of you have just a few hobbies, which is good for your soul. You should use those hobbies as a means for mission. If you love going to workout groups, there are people in that workout group who do not know Jesus. Get to know them, engage them. Whether it's hunting or fishing or bowling leagues or whatever, see where you enjoy life as a place for mission.

So if we make those adjustments in our mind, if we see a community group as a primary vehicle for mission in the church, if we see the call to plant more groups and how that is advancing the kingdom here in Columbia, if we can make the adjustments to see that everything counts in every aspect of our life, we can start to get practical about how to make our community groups more missional. So I'm going to run through a list real quick of ways we can make our community groups more missional, and then we'll close out. The first one is to really love one another. Now I know when I say that, you're like, yeah, we get that.

I mean really love one another in a way that looks way different than the outside world. I mean our culture, our culture is so fake. It's so fake. People put their best faces on Facebook. There's not real relationships. They're not honest about their brokenness.

The world is fake, and everyone is so tired spending plates in that world trying to get by. And in our community groups, when we gather together for our meeting times, when we gather together outside of it, we get to be honest. We get to be real. We understand we're not all stars. We're scrubbed saved by grace. Like we get it, that Jesus is good.

So we can confess our sin. We can be honest about our brokenness. And when people from the outside world come and see that kind of love, they see something way different and way better. And we have to love one another. Even the people in our groups, and they clash with our personalities, we have to love one another in spite of our differences and model the gospel. If we don't have love, our community groups will not be missional.

Secondly, you are a community group. Therefore, you can do things outside of your normal community group meeting time. The difference there is sometimes we see community group as an event that happens on a Tuesday night or Wednesday night. The community groups are not the event. It's the people. You are a community group.

So you can do things outside of your normal meeting time. So go bowling. Go to the zoo. Go do things. Hang out. Live life together.

Some of you, you can go to lunch with your coworkers and invite somebody from your community group who can join you. And you go get lunch together. And they get to see your dynamics of how you love one another and how you care for one another. And they get to see the gospel lived out in a piece of your community group. So you are a group.

Do stuff outside of your normal group meeting time. Thirdly, use your strengths. Use the strengths that are in your group. Some of your groups are kid-friendly. And by kid-friendly, I mean there's like eight kids in it. We're about to have seven kids in our community group.

And it's messy. And in community group meeting time, you might be thinking, who wants to be a part of this? We've got one kid that is now naked. We don't know how he got naked, but he's naked now. Then we've got another kid that has blown out their diaper.

And then two kids collide. And there's crying. And there's screaming. And you're thinking, who wants to be a part of this chaos? People with kids. People with kids want to be a part of that.

People who have not had an adult conversation in three months with anyone other than their spouse want to be a part of that. They want to bring their kids to be a part of that. You have kids. Use your kids as a missional opportunity to invite people in to experience the gospel. Go to the splash park and invite other families from your neighborhood. Your kids can be a great missional tool.

That's a biblical good thing. They're awesome. And they can be used for mission. All right? So use, if you're kid, if y'all are kid friendly, use it.

If you have someone in your group that is like a relational Jedi, and they maintain 30 friendships with unbelievers on a regular basis, And you might be an introvert, and you might be thinking, how is that possible? I have two close friends, and that's all I have time for. That's okay. Be stretched a little bit. That's okay. But what you could do is you could see your relational friend.

You could see someone like Jordan Surratt as a person to come alongside, to spend time with some of their friends, get to know them, and invite them in to life together with us. Some of you are admin gifted. You are gifted in administration. And we need you badly. If we don't, this is what taco night looks like. Seven people bring lettuce.

One person brings cheese. And one person brings tortillas. That's not a taco. There's no such thing as a vegetarian taco. It does not exist. So we need you to be the admin person that makes group run smoother, that makes our time together run smoother, so that everyone's bringing stuff that's good, and that we can be hospitable to those who might visit.

Some of you are coffee snobs. Who else loves coffee? I'm a coffee snob. I embrace it. People will throw that label at you, and you can shut it down. Okay?

Because it's good to love coffee. I love roasting an Ethiopian Yerga Chop bean in my garage and bringing it to community group. You may think that's weird. I say that's good service. All right?

Some of you love serving good food. Right? Some of you might love throwing steaks on the grill and have the money to bring steaks to the grill. Do it. Invite your neighbors. Some of you, like Rask said, only got money for hot dogs.

You make a hot dog, you make a friend. Use your Memorial Day to grill out to get to know people and to invite them in. Some of you are awkward and small talk. You should grow in that. All right?

But while community group is kind of, our meeting time is kind of winding down and dishes need getting done and people are still talking, go wash the dishes. Some of you are great at small talk. And when somebody new comes, you actually go and talk to them and invite them and make them feel welcomed. I could go on and on about the different giftings that we have, the different strengths we have. We all have different strengths, but the reality is we're all a group of scrubs. When we gather together, we see our strengths come together and we see that we are better together.

Fourthly, be persistent and play the long game. Be persistent and play the long game. What I mean by that is, is that this takes time. In our culture, it just takes time. What we do in community groups, I don't know if you know this, is not normal. It's not normal for us to gather on a regular basis, to be honest about our brokenness, to talk about the gospel, to read the Bible.

That's not normal in our culture. Even in a southern churchy culture, that's not normal. So when you invite somebody and they say no, don't be shocked. Like this takes time. It takes time to get to know people. You may invite them and they may say no.

And you may invite them three months later and they may say no again. But eventually, if you're persistent, not annoying, don't be the person that invites every single moment you can. Be persistent, not annoying. But the more time you spend with them, the more time, more lunches you get with them, they might actually come. And then if they come, they might not come back for another six months. But if you're persistent, hopefully by God's grace, one day they're going to see their brokenness and their need.

And they're going to see the world that they're in is fake. And they're going to remember the time when I came around a group of people who actually loved one another. And they'll say, I need that. And they'll come back and they'll experience the gospel and they'll be changed by his grace. So be persistent and play the long game.

All right, here's the final two. Know that this is hard. This is difficult. You will get hurt in doing this. Jesus spent three years pouring in a 12 and one of them betrayed him and had him handed over to die one of the most gruesome deaths imaginable. If you do this, you will get hurt.

My wife went out in a community group in Louisville. We spent a year and a half pouring into a woman who we helped pay for rent. We helped keep the lights on. We babysat her kids. We got her jobs that she eventually got fired from. We helped with legal fees and a custody dispute.

We spent a year and a half pouring into her. And we received lie after lie. And we got used. And then she moved on. And that's painful. Like you invest a year and a half into something like that.

That hurts. And you might be tempted to think, is this really worth it? Is it worth it to open myself up to that kind of pain? And I'll close with this. It's absolutely worth it. Because this is where joy is found.

This is joyful. When I get to see stories like what's happened in our community group with the Garcias moving down here. I think of Jen Garcia got baptized here about a month ago. And I get to see her story of her searching for God. Doesn't really have handles for what that looks like. Has never really heard the gospel.

Comes down as a part of our community group. She gets to hear the gospel. She understands that she believes. And she's growing in the grace of our Lord. When I get to see that, when we get to baptize her and see that change, it's worth it. I've gotten to know the Pabones, and especially Josh, the past year.

When we first, one of the first meetings Josh Pabone and I ever had, we're talking with Chet and Matt. And all of a sudden Josh goes, listen, we're not friends yet. And then he's kind of moved on. I was like, oh, okay. We're not friends yet. We've grown to be friends.

And as I've gotten to hear his story, and he gave me permission to share this. When I got to hear his story of how him and Aideen are on the brink of divorce. And their life is in shambles. And someone invites them to a community group. And they come, and they experience the gospel, and they see a place where they can belong. A place where they can be loved.

And their marriage is changed. And now they're community group leaders. And they're opening their home up, being hospitable, seeing other lives be changed. When I hear stories like that, when I think of this church that sent us, and the stories that happened there of lives being changed, of marriages being restored. When I think of the stories that are happening here, and I see them, I'm like, this is absolutely worth it. I'm sold.

I want to be a ragtag group of scrubs being used by Jesus to see this city be changed. Our hope is that each of us would see our community groups as a place to see lives be changed by the gospel. That we would plant more groups across this city where we see lives be changed, marriages be restored. That is the hope for community groups. That's the hope for us going forward as a church.

Weaponized Homes

Weaponized Homes

Raz Bradley

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Transcript

Good morning, what's up guys? My name is Raz. I'm one of the pastors here. We're in this series at the moment called Extraordinary. And in this series what we're doing is looking at all of the little, little, independent, ordinary aspects of life and seeing how they can be given significance in order to make those ordinary situations in life extraordinary. And we've seen a couple of different ways so far in which that happens.

And today, that's our goal for this series. But what we're talking about today specifically is going to be hospitality. We're going to talk about how Christians in their everyday, ordinary lives can give significance to hospitality and invite people into their homes and into their lives. and that those people will be able to see a little, itty-bitty glimpse of the gospel in each of those moments. And that's kind of our goal for today. We're going to see what the Bible says about hospitality. But I think we'll find very quickly that it's quite clear.

There's not a whole lot of wiggle room. It's not one of those situations where we have our guard up and we want to kind of fight with it. So because it's pretty clear, we're going to kind of power through that. We're going to get through it pretty quickly. And we're going to spend most of our time today talking, looking at examples, seeing some kind of applicable ways that we might put this into practice in our lives or see how the concept of hospitality can transform the church in such a way that Jesus is made known through us in our homes, that kind of thing. We looked earlier in this series about how we have one Job.

And this is one of the first sermons is we have one Job. And that one Job that we've been given is to make disciples. And I think that chances are we could be neglecting the best tool that we have to accomplish that. And that's our homes. And so I'm going to pray. And then we're going to talk a little bit about why hospitality, what God says about why we should be hospitable.

And then we're going to spend most of our time talking about how to actually accomplish that. So let's pray. God, I thank you for the opportunity to look to Jesus as the ultimate example of how we can be welcoming to others. And I pray that as we look today at what it would look like to open our homes, to see people know you through interactions with us in our everyday life, that you'll be empowering us to go out and actually do this. That we can see the value and the worth of opening up our homes so that people can see Jesus in our lives. It's in his name we pray.

Amen. Before we launch headfirst into this, I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page definitionally about what we're talking about. So there's a chance that you might think, oh, I am hospitable. I'm a very hospitable person. I'm super welcoming at work. I'm super welcoming at other people's house.

I'm super welcoming on Sunday mornings. I'm a really hospitable person. And that's good. Those are all noble. We want that for you. We want that for your friends.

We want that for your life. That's great stuff. But definitionally, we're going to be honing in a little bit on what that hospitality actually looks like. I was going to go to a Bible dictionary for this, but I thought I'd ask Siri first. And I actually like Siri's definition a lot. So I asked Siri.

I'm sorry if I trigger anyone's phone in your pocket right now. I just realized that might happen. Siri's definition of what hospitality means is the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. Now, that covers a lot. But we're going to roll with it because I like it because it highlights two important factors about hospitality that we might overlook.

And the first one of those is that it's about reception. It's about receiving people in. It's not about going to people where they're at. It's about having people to you where you're at. And specifically for us, we're going to be talking about what that looks like in your homes, bringing people from outside of your sphere inside of your sphere. It also talks about the second thing is that it focuses on.

Now, it doesn't only allow. Like, it's not an exception clause, but it focuses on. It pushes us towards. It leans towards strangers and outsiders. Now, it's perfectly reasonable for you to be hospitable to your community group, to your friends, to the people that you're already surrounded by, like normal people that you interact with on a daily basis. But this definition pushes us a little bit in the direction of what would it look like to be hospitable to people outside of that normal sphere?

What happens when you have to push a cultural or a racial or a socioeconomic barrier in order to have someone else that you wouldn't normally hang out with in your life? What would it look like for a 27-year-old person to have a 60-something-year-old person they didn't know over in their house? How could they see the gospel in that situation? So we're going to kind of be leaning into that a little bit and leaning into that aspect of this definition. Okay, so why hospitality? Let's take a look at what the Bible says about hospitality.

And I think we're going to see pretty clearly and pretty early on that we are commanded repeatedly throughout the Bible to be hospitable. Some people seem, I think this is normal for us, I think this is cultural for us, to think that hospitality is optional. That if you have the right house or the right age kids or the right amount of money or add any kind of qualifier onto that thing, as long as you check all those boxes then and only then, maybe, you could consider being hospitable. But I think we'll see that there's not that much wiggle room because according to the Bible, hospitality is a command, not a suggestion.

And we're first going to look at Romans 15, 1 through 3. Typically what we'll do around here is open up the Bibles in the chairs, sit in one passage for most of the day. But we're actually going to be bouncing around quite a lot. So if you're not super quick with searching around the Bible for passages, everything is going to be appearing on the screen today. That's not normal for us, but because we're bouncing a lot, you can just check it out on the screen if that suits you better. We're going to be in Romans 15, 1 through 3.

It says, We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me. We see in this that in Christian maturity, those who are strong have the obligation to lift up and benefit those who are weak. And looking to Christ, we see that he willingly took that burden onto himself. That was his goal as well.

He wasn't pleasing himself. He was sacrificing himself on behalf of others. He was sacrificing his comfort for the sake of other people. And when I look at that, and when I look to his example, I see this kind of glaring place in our lives where we kind of just don't really follow that. We don't sacrifice our comfort a whole lot, at least not in the way that Jesus does. And I think that way that we don't do it is in our homes, right?

In our homes, you get to... Homes are an interesting thing to think about. In your home, you get to control everything. Like, unlike anywhere else in the world. In your home, you are the boss and you control everything. Ish.

I mean, roommates, wives, like children, like you've got to compromise some, maybe on some of the things. But at least in the grand scheme of things, like you get to control the temperature. You don't get to do that everywhere. You get to control the sounds that the rooms make, like the music or the TV. You get to control the color of the walls. You get to control every little piece of what happens in our house.

And typically, I think, what we see that the purpose of home as is our refuge away from the world. Where we get to kind of ignore everything that happens outside and have our little space that's exactly how we want it. And if you think about it, like over time, as technology has increased, we've actually built homes specifically more and more to accomplish that goal. This may not be you, but this person exists. And you can definitely visualize this. You're driving home.

This may not be you, but somebody does this. You're driving home. And as you pull into your little driveway, you look up to your... I don't know what the thing's called here. We call it a visor. It's like the little flap thing that blocks the sun from your eyes.

Also a visor? Thank you. Good save. The visor thing. And you click the little thing on it and you push the button. And the button communicates with the robot inside your house.

And the robot inside your house opens the wall. And you drive your car through the wall inside your house. And you push the button and the shield comes down behind you. So that you get to block out everything on the other side of it. Like that is a real thing. And if someone's out on the street screaming your name, you can just like pretend that that never happened.

You can sit in the car until that shield goes right at the bottom. Then you get out and go into your house and pretend nothing ever happened. We recently bought a house and I was thinking of all the cool technology and stuff we could put on it. Put into the new house. And one of the new things that they've got is a doorbell that it senses movement. And so before someone even rings your doorbell, like if someone approaches your house, it'll text you a photo of that person.

So that you could be upstairs or at work or anywhere and you'll have a photo of the person who is approaching your house. And before they even ring the bell, you can decide to ignore them. And it's really easy if they're wearing like a Time Warner hat or something. But if it's just a stranger, you get to make that call. I'm too tired. I can't be bothered.

And the rest of us have to walk up to the little pokey hole thing where you look through. And then you decide. But they've heard you at floorboards creak by that point. They at least know your home. And we don't have the garage shield thing. So they can see my car as well.

So we always have to answer the door, at least sort of mostly. We've structured it. I mean, just as society, technology-wise, we've developed systems that mean we don't have to pay attention to the world. You can get your groceries delivered to your house. You'll get a notification on your phone with a photo of the guy delivering them telling you that it's there. And you can ignore it until you watch him walk away.

And then you can open the door and pull your groceries inside. And they're in a perfectly little refrigerated box thing. You don't even have to speak to cashiers anymore. Even if you go to Walmart, you prefer the line that you don't have to talk to anybody in. We've developed a cultural world, a technology world, where in our homes and in our lives, we don't have to relate to people. And I think at home, amongst all places, that's kind of where we focus on the most in keeping people out.

Because in your home, you're the boss, and you do what you want to do when you want to do it, right? That's the point. That's the point of being at home. Shut the door. Lock it. Deadbolt it.

Put the little chain thing on that doesn't look like it had stopped very much. Keep the world out. That's what home is. And yet in verse 2, it said, Let each of us please his neighbor for his own good to build him up. In following Christ's example, we ought to be taking that posture of sacrificing our refuge, sacrificing that safe zone that we have in order to be able to engage people and invite them in to build them up. And so it's not surprising when, if you kept reading in that section, you get down to verse 7.

And Paul says in verse 7, Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God. In light of the gospel, since Christ has welcomed you, your role now in the world is to be welcoming to other people. And that includes into your safe zone, into your refuge, into your home. And if we are a people who are welcomed by God, we will be a people who are welcoming to others. Because hospitality is rooted in the gospel. Here's the gospel.

All of humanity was sinful. All of humanity falls short of the glory of God. We deserve nothing but death. In fact, we're told that we have earned the wages of death. All that we've accomplished, all that we've done, we deserve death as a result of that. But since God loves us, he sent his son Jesus, who lives a perfect life, so that when we killed him, his death was able to pay the penalty for the sin that we deserved.

His death was able to take that on for us. God welcomes us in, even though we are estranged from him. And for that reason, we're able to welcome others in. Our hospitality, our kindness to others gets to be a tiny little picture of the gospel. A tiny little image of what God has done for us. When we welcome others in, we get to show them what it was like when we were welcomed in.

Our homes are not refuges for ourselves. Our homes are weapons for the gospel. Our homes are a platform for building others up, not keeping them out. Let's look through some more examples. The next one is Leviticus 19. It's an Old Testament example.

This is God talking to the people of Israel. It says, this is verse 33 through 34. It says, 1 Peter 4, verse 8 and 9. It says, Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. If you ask me, that doesn't sound very much like optional language.

And I think that's because the Bible treats hospitality like it's expected. It's demanded. It's a command, not a suggestion. Actually, in Titus 2, it's one of two places in the New Testament that gives like a really good, clear definition with a list of what's required of elders in the church. What a pastor has to be in order to be qualified to be a pastor. And one of those things in the list is hospitable.

If someone is not hospitable, if a pastor is not hospitable, they are unable to model the Christian life for the church. If a pastor is unable to be hospitable, they are unable to pastor. They should not be leading the church. So, why hospitality? I think because it's demanded by and rooted in the gospel. Because in Romans 15, 7, that we just read earlier, it says, Therefore, welcome one another in as God welcomed you, as Christ has welcomed you.

We're told, be hospitable because God was first hospitable to you. Be hospitable because in so doing, you give these tiny little images throughout your life of what the gospel looks like. You were welcomed, and so you welcome. Here's a fun fact that I learned this past week. It tends to happen with people who've studied languages. You develop an interest for words.

I never really had that before college. And you start to see similar words and wonder, how are they actually related? Like, why would they be so similar in that way? And so this week, while I was, I mean, I've said already this morning the word hospitable like 500 times, and it made me think of like, what is the connection between hospitable and hospital, right? Those are very similar words, and there's got to be something going on there. Now, as I say this, this doesn't, the connection doesn't date back all the way to Jesus' time.

I'm not trying to say he meant this when I talk about this, but this is just an observation that the English words hospital and hospitable share a Latin root word. And that Latin root word is hospice or hospitalia, depending on the age in Latin. And that word in Latin means room for strangers or guest chamber. And I think that's really interesting, that hospitals were named after a place where strangers are welcomed and helped. And it got me thinking, and this isn't straight out of the Bible, this is like a step removed, but this is just observation. What would it look like?

I mean, we know that people who need medical attention end up at the emergency room at the hospital to receive that medical attention. What would it look like if people who need or require emotional or spiritual attention felt that same welcomedness in our homes? If our ability to be hospitable for those who need spiritual attention equaled that of hospitals to cure medical things, what would that look like in our lives? And I think that the more we're able to see that inviting people into our lives gives them that little picture of the gospel, the more we're able to see that our lives declare the gospel the more willing we'll be to open up our homes so that people can see that in our lives.

So what then does it look like to be hospitable? How do we do this? What does that look like in everyday life? How would that affect me? If you've been terrified all this time so far, because hospitality is just like a word that invokes fear in your soul. I think this is where we start making it easier for the rest of the time, right?

Because chances are that if the word hospitality or the idea of having people in your safe zone scares you, chances are that you're viewing it through a very, very cultural lens that tells you there's a bunch of expectations that you have to perform. It can be all kinds of different things, but most people who feel that pressure are thinking party planning, cleaning, like being presentable, cooking really, really well, making sure that the children are well behaved. Like if all of those things are piling on your soul that make you think, oh, this hospitality thing sounds horrific, then that's okay. Well, that's not okay, but we're going to kind of start dismissing those things because actually we don't need to be worried about what the cultural expectations of hospitality are so much as what real authentic biblical hospitality looks like.

Because hospitality is not about image management. And I think the cultural way of thinking about it is all about how to present a good image. So if your goal in anything is to impress people, then chances are you won't point them to Jesus. You'll point them to how impressive you are. So when you try to impress people, you'll point them to how glorious your house is, how great your cooking is, how clean you can be, how well decorated your house is, how good your children are, how great your music playlist is.

Look at your garden with all the pretty flowers. And what you won't end up doing is pointing them a whole lot to Jesus. That is, if this is your sole purpose in doing that, like if you're doing this so that people will recognize your talent, your ability, then you're pointing them to yourselves. Now you could be a naturally clean person. That's a perfectly fine category of human. And if you're naturally clean and you're naturally tidying, you naturally have flowers and you naturally, you know, just enjoy that kind of thing, that's fine.

You can invite people into that. I'm just saying a lot of people aren't like that and feel that burden to perform when it comes to hospitality stuff. But I think we'll find that there's more power in sharing your actual real life with people than there is in faking it so that you can present a good image. So for some people out there, life is chaos. That's fine. Invite people into that.

I enjoy chaos. Like our community group can be chaotic at times. We have multiple small children. We have a dog. There can be like up to 25 people sitting in a very small room. Like it can get out of control and I kind of thrive on those things.

But other people hate it and I get that. That means you're a different personality type. You're good. You're allowed to exist. For some people, life is structure. Calendars.

Life spreadsheets. The smell of carpet cleaner and bleach in the morning. We've got some of those people over here. If that is you, if that is your life, if you enjoy that kind of thing and you're not actually doing it as some kind of performance to fake it so that people think you're a great host, then that's fine. Be that. Invite people into who you are.

Invite people into your life, into your safe zone and accommodate them as you normally would do in life. Because if you're faking it, you're going to point to them to someone that's not actually you and Jesus isn't going to be able to be seen in that. Let me give you a picture. Let me tell you how that happens in our house. We host a lot, but I don't think we put a whole lot of thought into it. I don't think we really match a whole lot of the things that you're supposed to do when you host.

My wife, Christina, she hates the feeling of dirt and sand on the bottom of her feet. So we have hardwood floors in our living room. Almost every single day, she will sweep the hardwood floors because she hates that feeling of sand on the bottom of her feet. I wear shoes. Easy solution for me. Or socks.

Whatever. And I feel like the guests that come to our house will probably arrive in shoes as well. If they arrive in bare feet, then they'll pick up the sand on the way in anyway, and they won't even know that there was sand in the living room floor. So I'm not super concerned about the whole sweeping the floor thing so that people don't get sand on their feet. I am kind of concerned because we have a dog, and the dog has about five billion toys. I'm not sure where they all came from, but they are spread all around our house, including little chunks of bone that have been destroyed and distributed so that they can always be found easily.

I don't like that because it's kind of like a tripping hazard. I'm not so fussy about people's feet getting dirty, but I don't want them to break an ankle because this is American. You get sued for that kind of stuff. So I'll at least kind of kick all of those things into corners, maybe shut a door. But even that doesn't work so well in our house because whoever designed it, look, I only have bad thoughts for that person.

But our ground floor has one bathroom in it, and it's the master bathroom, which means we can't shut our door because then no one has access to the bathroom on level one. So they literally have to walk through our bedroom to get to the toilet if that's something that they need while they're there, which means our bedroom is like fair game. Like people are going to see it. So we don't even have that option in our house. Here's what happens if you come and eat at our house. Our dining room table has four chairs, four chairs that match the table.

We've got more chairs, but they don't match the table. If you're the fifth person or the sixth or the seventh or whatever, like added people, only four people get matching chairs. And I'm not really concerned with matching styles so much as matching heights. If you're the fifth or the sixth person, you'll be in a camping chair. And even if you're tall, your chin will be at table height, which depending on how you eat can be, I mean, it can be a great thing. You can just kind of scoop.

But what happens is most people end up having to eat out of their lap because the height difference thing. The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't like you won't leave our house thinking, wow, everything was magical and perfect. Like there's some thing like we'll put a little bit of effort in here and there. Like, but for the most part, pretty. You're just coming in and seeing our life as it's lived. We've recently upsized from an apartment to a pretty decent sized house.

We don't have enough furniture to fill it. There is like deck chairs and stuff in our living room. You'll be sitting on plastic. You're welcome. But that's just kind of like how normal life is.

It's not the prettiest, but that's what our house looks like. And it doesn't stop us having from having people over. And we just because I think it's easy, we do food most often. Like that's that's a thing. We were not amazing at cooking. And actually, I think it's become easier for us since we moved into the house because with a house, we got a grill and with a grill is really good, cheap and nasty food.

Right. Since getting a grill, we feel we feed people like brats, burgers and hot dogs all the time. Like all the time. Like if you're coming to our house, expect one of those options. Hot dogs are like 20 cents, 30 cents a piece. If you go all the way like to the premium ones, you might pay 45 cents.

I don't know what's in a premium hot dog. That kind of scares me even more. But tell you what, average food. People, people still love that junk. Like I've learned very quickly, feed, feed Americans hot dogs. They will be your friend.

It's just not the same in Australia. It's like, what is this? Like, what are you? Seriously? Okay. But in America, you feed a man a hot dog.

You have made yourself a friend. The food can be average. And the point in that is the food's actually not the important thing. The connection that you make with a person over the food is more important than the quality of the food that you present. As long as it's edible, I think you're okay. It doesn't have to be meals, though.

I think meals are really easy. But hospitality can take many forms. It can be coffee. It can be inviting people over to just sit and talk. It can be movies. It can be TV.

It can be games. It can be sports. It can be a whole bunch of things. I just think that, for us at least, meals are really, really easy. But it doesn't have to be anything special.

It's not difficult. Hot dogs by the pool, not very difficult. It doesn't take a whole lot of planning. You can pick all of that stuff up on the way. Well, you can't pick a pool up on the way home. But you can pick up the ingredients on the way home.

You don't have to forward plan for that kind of stuff. It's not a big ordeal. It's just inviting people into the life that you already have and interrelating as you do it. It's seeing opportunities in the normal to show people what life actually looks like for Christians. I'm about to give another example from our church family. And there's a number of reasons that I'm hesitant to do that.

One of them is that they're not currently in the room this morning, and I only found that out this morning. And so your immediate reaction to the words that I'm going to say, I'm just going to give you a heads up. I'm going to be talking about the Pabone family. And your immediate reaction to a lot of the things that I say, you're going to think that I'm kind of throwing them under the bus, that I'm making fun of them, that I'm being mean. Like your reaction is like, wow, that was a really mean thing to say. But I think the immediate reaction is something along those lines is that the baseline that we compare things to in order to decide whether or not that's right, if they're doing it good or if that is a mean thing to say is this cultural image based like this is what a hospitable person is supposed to look like.

And so when I talk about the Pabones and they break a lot of those rules, you're going to think I'm throwing shade on them and being like really, really mean to them. But what I'm actually trying to do is hold them up as a really good example of how you can be hospitable in everyday life. So as I talk about them, you get to think initially, wow, that was a really mean thing to say. But it's not. I promise you, I'm trying to say this is actually a really good example. And you know what?

I went to the extra step. Right here on my sermon sheet. That's Josh Pabone's signature. I want you to know that he's up in Kid City right now and his wife's out of town. But Josh has read this and he completely approves of this message.

And I feel like that validates everything regardless of whether or not you actually think it's me. I don't know if you know the Pabone family. The Pabones are community group leaders in our church. Most Sundays you'll see Josh up here playing bass and Nadine is very involved with Kid City. If you ever go to their house, let me just give you some advice. If you ever go to their house, you will experience what most people call chaos.

That's not mean. That's what their life looks like. They have four kids. You kind of can't avoid that. This is just who they are and what's involved. Let me give you some advice.

Wear shoes. That's not like a medical tetanus advice piece of advice. That's like they have kids. There's Legos around. Wear shoes. Like just avoid that trap.

They have four kids. At least one of them throughout the night is likely to sneeze on you. This wasn't supposed to be audience participation. Take hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer is your friend. Not because their house is disgusting, but because they have kids and kids get sick.

And just do that. At dinner time, you're going to share the bench. You don't get your own seat. And this is probably genius. We could implement this in our house. But you share the bench at the Pabones house.

And you share the bench. The bench. You share the bench with at least two other children. Not other children. Two of their children. And you will have probably a child on either side or two children on that side.

And they know better. They're pretty well trained. But they just might anyway touch your food. And it'll be for something trivial. Like there's no reason for them to. They'll just be like, that's spaghetti.

Yes, it is. And you get to take your hand sanitizer and rub it on the spaghetti and go for it. That stuff's okay. You can eat that. I don't know if that's true. Don't do that.

The Pabones have the only cat in the world that I've ever seen do this. They might exist. But they have like Ninja Cat. His name is Lincoln. But it more takes after the vampire slayer version of Lincoln that you might know.

The one that knows karate. Their Lincoln will literally steal food out of your hand. Like, bam, gone. And you would think, when I say that, you would think maybe it's the food that you're like reaching down to feed him. No, it's the food that you're reaching up to eat. Bam, disappears real quick.

They have a dog, Miley. He's like little. He's like a little dog. Miley will bark at you for seven minutes when you arrive. And not like the cute little puppy dog bark. Like the, you're an intruder.

Get out of my house. Like that's their dog. And you'll sit down. And maybe ten minutes later, he'll jump up on your lap and start licking you. And then like, he's your best friend ever. And then a noise will happen.

And bam, straight off over to the noise. That's kind of, this is just what going to dinner at the Bones house is like. And it's not that they're doing anything wrong. They're not. That's just what life looks like in their house. They actually have some really cool mottos and sayings that they have to try and model this.

Just not only for their kids, but for their community group and the people around them. They do things like they address the mess. They'll say things like deliberately, like, sorry for the living room. It's kind of always like that. We didn't have an opportunity to clean up. They won't make too many excuses for it so much as just point to it and say, nah, that's how life is.

Just push it to the side. Take a seat. You'll be fine. That's kind of their attitude towards that. They actually have a scripted thing that they'll tell guests. They say, first time you come, you're a guest.

Second time you come, you're family. Oh, it's just like, it feels like a Hallmark card, right? It's just so warm and fuzzy. Second time, you're family. But what that actually comes with is privileges and responsibilities.

So your privileges are you don't have to ask to open the fridge or you don't have to, you know, like you get to, you treat the house as if it's your own house. But the responsibilities are you're now expected to help with cooking. If you don't cook, you'll probably be on dishes. Somebody has to maintain order in the house while the cooking happens so that nobody dies. You can have any of these responsibilities on top of like just being a guest in their house. Let me tell you, you probably won't go there and leave thinking, wow, that was peaceful and perfect and calm.

Their children were just amazing little butterfly angel faces. And the food was like three star Michelin hat, whatever the ratings are. And like it was just, oh, it was so picture perfect. It could have been a movie. It was magical. And if you do experience that, that was like the fake.

Like you experienced, like they upped their game to accommodate the social norms rather than actually introducing. You experienced the fake for bones. But in amongst all of this, let me tell you the really, really good part of how they do hospitality. I'm a pastor. I'm married. I'm going to have kids soon.

And I learned things about the gospel and about life from the Pabones when I'm at their house. When you leave the Pabones house, you leave having learned something about maintaining order in a house with four kids. You leave having learned how to make time for your friends in and amongst that kind of chaos. You learn for me or for other people. You learn for your future or current parenting what it looks like to talk to a child with patience and grace that is currently in complete meltdown mode. That's what hospitality actually looks like.

Because in each of those little moments, you get to see a picture of the gospel as a Christian interacts with someone, their children, their friends, their family, as a Christian interacts with someone in a way that shows Jesus. And when non-believers are invited into that kind of a mess, they get to see life, real life, not fake life. They get to see real life handled by a Christian. And they see an image bearer of God doing what they're supposed to do. They get to see that little picture of the gospel. And for non-believing friends that we have, they need to see Christians facing the same kind of challenges and obstacles that they do in everyday life, but doing it with Jesus involved.

That's how you give people those little snapshots of the gospel throughout life. Now, if you're normally clean, if you're normally not chaotic, if you're normally structured, be that way. Do those things. Apply all of what I just said about the Pabones to your normal everyday life context. But don't fake it.

If you're cluttered, be cluttered. If you're dirty, make sure people don't get diseases. But be you and have people over in your house to see what it's like to see you relate to others as a Christian. Our homes have to be places where real life happens and others are welcomed in. Because where else in the world will a non-believer get to see that if they're not invited to your house? How else will people see Jesus in your life if you set up your home in such a way that you're deliberately trying to keep them out?

How else will people see Jesus, that little snapshot, how else will they see Jesus in action in your life if you've set up your home in such a way that if they're invited in, you show them a fake version of you? At this point, I tend to realize that we make a lot of excuses. We come up with all kinds of different excuses as to why all of this doesn't have to apply to us. It can apply to other people and we can kind of help or whatever. All kinds of different excuses as to why we shouldn't be hospitable. And if we're honest, I think most of them are pretty lame.

I think there's a couple of categories. We'll talk about these kind of categorically. For our excuses, the first one is it might be something along the lines of my house is a disaster or my kids are crazy or I'm not a very good entertainer or I can't cook. Like it's bad if I cook. I think when you boil it down, most of these, like this category of excuse, the diagnosis behind it is that you've probably bought into this whole cultural image maintenance thing. That you can't be hospitable because you can't do it like culture tells you you have to.

Picture perfect, immaculate house, perfect children, everything's clean. You're afraid that if people see your actual life, they're going to think you're not good at that stuff. You're afraid that if people see your actual life, that's something to be ashamed of. But I think that this is the truth. You don't have to be anything you're not. And if you fake it, you'll be pointing them to something other than who you are and who Jesus is in your life.

And honestly, I think if you're faking it, you kind of just need to stop that. And instead, invite people into the life that you actually have without putting all of this emphasis on maintaining the image that culture tells you you're supposed to have. There's also a category for introverts. Statistically, 50% of the people in this room are introverts. And I'm sure there's a good chance that five minutes into this, you probably just the terrified meter in your brain switched off and you just potentially just haven't heard anything until I said the word introvert. If that's the case, welcome back.

There is hope for you. I'm sure it probably sounds, I don't know, something along the lines of impossible, condescending, something like that for an extrovert to stand up here on stage and say, this is simple, this is easy, everybody should do this. I get that. If you've got like a spectrum of like extroverts here, zeros like right in line with this guy, and introverts all the way over here, then I rank. I'm like king of the extroverts, 100%. People give me energy.

I love this kind of stuff. I always want people in my house. I always want people in my life. That's where I thrive. That's where I'm my best. I'm actually really sad and depressed if I have to spend too long by myself.

This is me over here. A lot of people find themselves somewhere in this category and the whole hosting and having people in my safe zone. That's kind of, it's just, it's scary and terrifying. If this is you, like you're at the extreme end of introvert, that whole example that I gave with the Pabones, I don't know if you guys know Josh Pabone, but if you look at this scale, like with me all the way at that end, then Josh is like, Josh is like over here. Josh reads Harry Potter and thinks, wow, I need to buy a house with a staircase and a little room underneath it. No one would think to find me there.

That's who Josh is. And those guys are kind of crushing this whole hospitality game where you invite people into the mess of where you are and how you do it. And so for introverts out there, it doesn't have to look like 20 people over at your house. That would crush you. But it does get to look like one person, two people, a couple, something like that.

Basic food, board games, TV, simple stuff. It doesn't have to be, like you don't have to get this kind of cultural thing where you become a party planner and a huge event thrower, holdery person. You get to do simple, small stuff that you would be doing anyway and you just invite someone in anyway. If you're going to be playing video games on the internet, make that friend come to your house, sit on your couch and play the video game on the same screen. Those kinds of things. That's not as terrifying as it sounds when I'm talking about like pool parties and hot dogs and throwing huge things.

It doesn't have to be a big step. But we come up with all these different excuses. And let me tell you who this affects. When you make excuses and decide, I'm not going to do these things. Let me tell you who that affects. The person who lives in the house across the street.

They've been there, I don't know, maybe a couple months, three months. They seem introverted. They do the thing where the robot lets them in and then they shut the world out. Like that's, they kind of seem grumpy. They never seem to have anyone over. You figure if I invited them over, they would just say no.

Like they sit by themselves. Like they don't want to do that kind of stuff. That's what you figure. But you don't know that they've only lived in Colombia that long. They've moved in from out of state. They literally have no friends.

They know nobody here except the five people that they work with. They sit at home and eat dinner in front of the TV. Pretty much every day. Incredibly lonely. Wishing they had more. If you could invite that person to eat dinner and sit in front of the TV at your house once a week, they just might do it.

And in that action, they would see a tiny glimpse of the gospel as they're welcomed in as a stranger. It might be like a co-worker, someone at work that you've never hung out with outside of work and so you've never bridged that kind of, there's a gap between co-worker and friend and there's like this imaginary thing where you've got to hang out outside of work to be considered friends. You've got this co-worker who you see at work, you talk in the lunchroom, you maybe talk when there's no one else around, that kind of thing. And you can tell that there's something weird going on at home, like you don't know what it is, but it's weird to talk about it right here where there's like customers around or whatever.

You can't just approach them on some heartfelt topics. But you know there's something going on at home, something to do with their family, something's a bit amiss. Maybe what that person needs, what that person needs most, is to see you in action with your family, to see how you react to your kids, to see how you react to your husband. What if the very thing that they're struggling with at home is something they get to witness in your own home? When we make excuses for not wanting to host people, for not wanting to have people in our house, for never reaching out to strangers, for never reaching out to guests, for only ever entertaining our own friends and the people who are already in our sphere and never bridging that gap, people who could be hearing the gospel, who could be seeing those little glimpses of the gospel, start missing out.

There are people all throughout our lives who are longing to connect, but we're so afraid. We're so afraid to be the first person to offer a hand. Culture's taught us that in order to do that, you have to present this image. You have to be clean. You have to be extroverted. You have to be a performer.

You have to be able to cook. You do not. You need to be genuine. You need to be real. And you need to be willing to have people see Jesus in your actual real life, not the fake one that you think you have to project. Let me take just a moment as we kind of land the plane to give a few suggestions of what I think will make beginning this process a whole lot easier.

The first thing is to budget for hospitality. With budgeting comes intentionality. And with intentionality, if you're intentional about something, you're much more likely to actually go and do it. And so if you set aside money each month, you're more likely to spend that money for that purpose. It doesn't have to be much. I know there's a lot of tight budgets in the room.

It can be five bucks. Five bucks buys a lot of hot dogs. We've covered hot dogs. You can make a budget that allows you to have people over. Budgets show intentionality. You won't regret it.

Second one, simplify. Simplify. You don't have to impress anyone with anything. You're not entertaining. You're connecting. Your food can be ordinary.

The food isn't the point. The conversation you have while you're eating the ordinary food is the point. Nobody has to leave impressed by the food. Keep it simple. It can be movies. It can be pool.

It can be coffee. It can be sports. It can be games. It can be anything. It doesn't have to be even food. Keep it simple.

Don't try specifically to be impressive in what you're doing. Number three is calendar. If you're not a calendaring type, I know that there's the chaotic type out there, come up with some kind of system. It can be Taco Tuesdays. It can be Neighbor Wednesdays. It can be every second Sunday of the month.

It can be anything. As long as you're showing specific intentionality, these are the days where we're going to deliberately have people over. So that kind of thing will make it more likely that you'll actually go and do it. And number four is my favorite one. I think that's because it's the most important. Number four is make it a team sport.

Like all good sports, like all good sports, hospitality is best played as a team. Ooh, shots fired. Golf isn't a team sport. Golf is boring. I'm sorry. I have a chip on my shoulder.

People beat me at golf. I'm hopeless at it. And any shot I can take, I'm gonna go for it. Hospitality. Play it as a team sport. You get to involve other Christians.

You get to involve people in your community group. And you get to do this together. There's a couple of reasons that I think that's really helpful, really beneficial. One is that you get to do the mission together. Another is that non-believing friends get to see how Christians interact with each other. When someone has a problem in their life, how a Christian will encourage that Christian with Jesus, not with advice.

How we'll give them the gospel instead of giving them some kind of good advice for their situation. They get to see that, and they get to see that little glimpse of the gospel. Another good thing about team sports is, with hospitality as a team sport, is that your non-believing friends might actually connect better with someone else. You would be a great starting point. That's planting the seed. But they might actually connect better with someone else in your community group or something like that.

You might be really socially awkward and just need to have somebody who's extroverted around at your house and be able to kind of bridge that gap. Guys, we are, we're serious about this as a church. We truly, truly believe that hospitable Christians, hospitable community groups can and will change this city. In fact, as a church, we're going to be putting those words into action, into practice a lot throughout the summer, like in the upcoming period of time. In our typical community group time, something that we coach and we train community group leaders, in our typical community group time, what we try to achieve is we try to catch up on life, we try to apply the sermon, we try to engage the heart, and we try to pursue slash review the mission.

Those are the things we try to achieve in a normal routine, week to week community group. Catch up on life, apply the sermon, engage the heart, and review slash pursue the mission. During the summer, we are going to be taking a deliberate step to remove the agenda, like the feeling that this is the list of things we have to accomplish throughout a community group. We're going to be deliberately removing the agenda from our groups so that they can be freed up to practice this hospitality stuff. We're going to be giving all of the community group leaders and the community groups a free pass on doing the apply the sermon stuff, a free pass on feeling this burden to be circling up in little groups and applying this thing and praying for that thing.

You can still do that, but the point we're going to be making is that for a good five-week stretch, your community group can be pursuing the mission the entire time. Grilling, chilling, going bowling, having a party at someone's house, doing the pool thing, whatever it is, for a good five-week stretch, we're serious about this, we want our community groups to be inviting in and enjoying time together, rather over and above doing the whole applying the sermon, engaging the heart kind of stuff. That's going to be different for us. We're used to the getting a big group and have a conversation about the sermon stuff.

This is going to be different for us. For a whole month, we're just going to be hanging out and inviting people in. But we're really excited that as a church, we're going to have the opportunity to grow in hospitality and to grow in our relationship that we have with non-believing friends. As the band makes their way back up, I really just want to... I want to encourage you to see past your fears. Because all of the fears have to do with a cultural expectation that doesn't actually have to exist.

And if we can see past our excuses, and if we can see past our fears, then we can look towards Jesus. He's the reason we do this. The gospel is the... The opportunity to give people that little glimpse of the gospel is the reason that we're doing this. And ultimately, we want to see people who are coming into relationship with him. We don't want to see hospitality be used as a tool where we get to glorify ourselves and how great we are at doing this whole hosting thing.

We want to take every opportunity to show that little glimpse of the gospel so that we can push people towards Jesus. We want to invest in real relationships, in our real lives, so that we can point other people to the love of our Savior. Let's pray. God, we thank you that you loved us first and that you modeled hospitality for us. I pray and thanks that you sent Jesus to die for us, to welcome us home. I pray that as we go about everyday life in the ordinary things that we're doing, that we can be striving to invite people in that they may see a glimpse of you in our life.

I pray that you empower us and our groups in the coming months to be a welcoming church that sees growth on account of people seeing gospel glimpses in our homes. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

The Explicit Gospel

The Explicit Gospel

Chet Phillips

Transcript

It's kind of mean, isn't it? That bumper video gets you all hungry, and now it's going to feel like two and a half hours before I get done preaching. Happy Mother's Day. We're excited this morning. We are just glad to be continuing our extraordinary series. Maybe some year we'll get it together and preach official Mother's Day sermons, but we haven't done that yet, and we're not starting this year.

So if you are all amped up to talk about moms, moms are great. All right, grab your Bibles, go to Psalm 103. We're in the third week of our extraordinary series, and we're going to keep walking through. What we've been talking about is that we are called and designed by God, that God has designed the world to work in such a way that the normal, ordinary parts of our lives are to be used for His eternal, glorious purposes, so that our normal going to work, our normal tending to our families, our normal parenting, our normal being a co-worker or tending to our yards, like just all the normal weight of life that is on us, God has intended to use for His extraordinary, eternal purposes to see people come to know Him.

And one of the things that we're talking about, what we'll be talking about today is the fact that as Christians, we said in our first week that we have one Job as the church, that we're to be disciples who make disciples, and that encompasses a lot, but what we're talking about today is the fact that as Christians, we're supposed to tell other people about Christ. That as Christians, we're supposed to, called to, commissioned to, sent to, tell other people about Jesus. There's a comedian named Jim Gaffigan, who in one of his stand-up specials, goes, you know, everybody having a good time tonight? You know, I really, it's really important to me that everybody's comfortable and having a good time, and that's why I'd like to talk with you about Jesus Christ.

And like, everyone starts laughing, because that's a good joke. Because as soon as he says that, no one in the room is comfortable anymore. Like, it immediately makes everyone uncomfortable, and that's one of the things he goes on to say, is that in some ways it makes religious people even more uncomfortable. Christians become even more uncomfortable. I'm that way. If I'm listening to a stand-up special, or I'm watching a TV show, and they start talking about Jesus, I immediately knot up inside.

And he said, there's nothing worse than having a stranger come up to you and say, I want to talk to you about Jesus. He's just like, no, how about we don't? It's kind of the point of his jokes here, and it's true. And for us who are Christians who are called to talk to other people about Jesus, there's this tension of like, I don't want to be weird. This is awkward. I don't know how to, how do I start this conversation?

This is difficult. There's, look, I'm a pastor. It's weird for me. It's weird for me to tell people I'm a pastor. I just try to dodge that in conversations. I met some of my neighbors.

We were having a great conversation. We were talking. And then he told me what he did for a living. He said, what do you do? And I was like, well, I'm a pastor. I really want to just say I run a firework store because I do do that twice a year.

But I said, I'm a pastor. And they went, oh. And they just froze. It was, I really felt like a lobster had just fallen out of my mouth. It would have been the same reaction. They just sat there, and it was almost like you can see every once in a while, I feel like people are thinking, did I say a cuss word?

Did I talk about beer too much? Like, I don't know. Like, it just feels like it makes, and to bring up Jesus, it's the same kind of thing. It's like, I don't know how to do that. It feels really difficult. And what we're talking about is that God has designed our ordinary lives to be used to see people come to know him, come to love him, worship him, follow him, to see others around us submit their life to Christ.

And to have their eternities impact through the normal things we do. So what we're looking at today is how do we share the gospel in a normal, helpful way? How do we share the gospel? How do we point people to Jesus? How do we tell people about the cross? How do we tell people about the resurrection?

How do we tell people about their sin and need for a savior in a way that fits into a normal, ordinary life where you're friends with people, you're intentionally being around your neighbors and your coworkers? How do we do that? Because we're supposed to. Recall just what we looked at last week that in Deuteronomy it says that God, I'm going to be your God. And it says to put this on your wrists and your forehead. And that's what we said as Christians.

We're supposed to not just wear Christianity on our sleeves, but on our face. Like it's supposed to be a normal part of who we are. And so what we're going to do is we're going to look at the starting place for us as Christians to point people to Christ. We're going to look at the starting place. Then we're going to go to Colossians after we look in Psalm.

And we'll spend a little bit of time looking at actually how. Like practically, how do we do this? So let me pray for us this morning before we begin to read the text. And then we'll dive in. God, we thank you this morning that the gospel is news worth sharing. That we are called to tell people about Christ.

But that it's good news that we get to tell them. I pray, Lord, that in this time we have this morning that you would help us to remember how good that news is. And then you would equip us to begin to share it with others. We love you. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Psalm 103. It's on page 288 if you have one of the white Bibles that's in the row with you. This is by David. And David is praising God in this Psalm. And I think it's a helpful just kind of a look at where's the starting place for us to want to tell people about Jesus. Where do we begin?

And so he starts this way. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. So he says, bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. Now we use the word bless differently than he's using it here most of the time.

Most of the time when we say bless, we mean to do something nice for. Or to endow. To give. To give a gift. Someone's blessed with. Like, that was such a blessing that you gave me ten dollars.

Oh, this pizza when I was hungry is such a blessing. We use it like God's really blessed that person. And we mean they have a boat. Or we'll say God's really blessed that person like with physical attributes. Like Shaquille O'Neal, basketball player. He was not blessed with acting ability, but he was blessed with athletic ability.

And Shaquille O'Neal can stand flat-footed and dunk a basketball. He does not have to jump. He can stand and dunk. So every time you watched him dunk a basketball and then dance around and flex on people, it wasn't that impressive. It was like me lowering the goal to six feet and then dunking on some neighborhood kids and being like, what? How do you like them apples?

That's what he was doing. And really it was just that he's blessed with the height that he had. He's blessed with the wingspan that he had. He's blessed by God. But that's how we usually use that word.

But that's not how David's using the word here. When he uses it here, what he means is praise. Worship. So when he says bless the Lord, O my soul, what he means is praise, honor, glorify, place value on, lift up. And what's beautiful about that word and all the times we're told to praise God is that you cannot truly praise something without enjoying it. Praise without enjoyment is not praise.

It's flattery. To praise something but actually not mean it is flattery. When you eat a meal and it does not taste good and you can see the person who made it staring at you and you're like, mmm, this, this is fine meal. You cook this. Of all the things I've eaten, this is most recent. Like what?

You're trying to dodge the, but if you just went out of the way, this is so wonderful. This tastes so good. Oh my goodness. Like it's like you're, it's, you don't mean it. It's not genuine praise. It's not real to you.

But, but actual enjoyment leads to genuine praise. Actual enjoyment leads to genuine praise. This is why people will talk about the things that they love. This is why people will talk about the people that they've fallen in love in a certain way. Like they, it just, it gets all gushy and it just floats. Like that's what he's saying.

He's saying soul, so enjoy God that it rolls over in praise, in song, in worship, lifting him up. So enjoy, so be satisfied, so be filled up by God that it's overwhelming and we have to say something. You ever just looked at a sunset and you just, you, it's natural for you to just hit the person next to you and go, look at that. And you just say things that you didn't need to say. It's so orange. But that's natural.

That's the overflow of enjoying something, being captivated by it. And that's what he's saying. Oh, my soul. And, and the Bible here, the soul is the most real part of you. The deepest, most true who you are soul. The part of you that was designed to exist for an eternity.

That's your soul. So he's saying at the deepest, darkest, most real part of me, bless the Lord. Bless the Lord. Oh, my soul and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. And then he says, bless the Lord.

Oh, my soul. And forget not all his benefits. This is the starting place for a Christian to share the gospel with others. Is that you would so enjoy God that it would overwhelm you and roll up in normal life for you to worship him and glorify him and that you would not forget all of his benefits. That's where it begins for us to share the gospel with someone else. That's where it begins for us to point someone else to Jesus.

That we remember the benefits of Christ. That we remember the benefits of God. He keeps going to list some of the benefits. Forget not all his benefits. Who forgives all your iniquity. It means that you're sinful.

You're busted. You're broken. You're dark. You're twisted. You've been actively participating in the rebellion of the world against God. And he forgives that through Christ.

Who heals all your diseases. Everything in you that's twisted and wrong. He fixes. He mends. Who redeems your life from the pit. That you were going to spend an eternity in hell separated from God.

And he redeems it. He buys you back. Who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. Meaning that he wraps love around you. He makes love the first thing people see about you. Because he's crowned you with it.

And mercy meaning that we don't get from God what we deserve. Who satisfies you with good. So that your youth is renewed like the eagles. That he makes us new. And that in him we're satisfied. He says don't forget his benefits.

That's the gospel. For us as Christians. We believe that the soul was designed to exist for an eternity. That we were made to exist for an eternity with God. And that humanity rebelled against God. And that now every person will physically die.

But our souls will exist for eternity. Either with the joys of heaven. And a relationship with Christ. Or in the despair pain and punishment of hell. There are no other options. Our souls will exist for eternity.

That was the way God originally designed them. But we believe that Jesus Christ came. That he loved us so much. That he died for us. To pay the penalty for our sin. To offer us forgiveness.

And that what he says here. Our benefits are genuine actual benefits of the gospel. That our sins are no longer held against us. That as a Christian because of Christ. You stand before God freely forgiven. That he heals what's broken in you.

That he satisfies you. That everything else that we would chase after in this life. And in this world will not fill us up. But he will. That he satisfies us with good. And that we are now wrapped in and covered by his love.

And his mercy for an eternity. That's the gospel. And that's the news we're called to share with people. That's why the gospel just is a word that we've brought over from another language. That just means good news. It's about an event that happened.

That Jesus Christ came. That he died on a cross. That he was placed in a grave. That he rose again. And that through his death. We can be free.

Forgiven. And offered grace. It's news. It's an event that happened. That we get to share with other people. That Christ forgives.

That he redeems. That he makes us new. And that he satisfies us. Some of you in the room. Some of us as Christians at times. Go through seasons where we don't tell anyone about Jesus.

And I think quite often it's because we've forgotten the benefits. We've forgotten how good the news is. We've ceased to enjoy him on such a soul level that it rolls up in praise naturally and fully in our lives. For those of you in the room who are not Christians. Let me say very clearly to you. We want Jesus for you.

And make no qualms about that. Because I believe fully that Christ is the best thing you will ever get. That he does fully satisfy your soul. That he does forgive of sin. That he does fix what's broken in us. That he does mend us and redeem us.

And that we are headed for an eternal hell without him. But he loved us so much that he didn't leave us there. And he didn't give us what we deserved. But he took what we deserved on himself on a cross to set us free. We want Christ for you. You're welcome to be around.

To keep checking that out. You're welcome to be around and say, I don't know if I buy that yet. I don't know if I see that yet. I don't know if I believe that yet. You're welcome here. To be a part of a community group.

To ask questions. To argue with people. You're not going to offend us. We'll forgive you if you do. We're Christians. We're supposed to.

You're welcome to be here. But I want to be clear. We want the gospel for you. Christians in the room. You kind of have two options. Either you don't actually believe this.

You don't actually enjoy, partake in, understand, have the benefits of the gospel overwhelming your soul. So that you have no real desire to share it with other people. You either don't believe it or you've forgotten it. Or you do believe it. But when we do not have any desire to intentionally see other people come to know Christ, we cannot claim to love them.

We cannot believe that the soul exists for an eternity in either heaven or hell. That we deserve wrath from God. But that Jesus took wrath on our behalf. That's what we read a second ago. That he was the propitiation. It just means that he took wrath on our behalf.

And if we believe this but have no desire to reach people with the gospel, we actually cannot claim to love them. Or to care about them. Penn and Teller, they do magic. One of them is kind of a staunch atheist. And one of the things he says from time to time is that he appreciates it when Christians tell him about Jesus. He doesn't believe it.

But he appreciates it. Because he knows that's hard for them. And he knows that if they don't, how much would they have to hate him to actually believe that and have no desire to tell him. But the starting place for us is that we would so enjoy Jesus and so remember his benefits that we couldn't keep it in. There's no way we could so see that he forgave us of our sins. That none of us are worthy.

Some of you are in here and you have no desire to share the gospel with people. It's because you believe the gospel was, hey, come be good. That's not good news. I've got good news for you. Behave for the rest of your life or God will crush you. Let's pray.

That's not the gospel. That's not good news. The good news is that you could not behave. You were not good enough. You are not smart enough. You have made a shipwreck and a train wreck of your life.

And Jesus comes and takes the full force of the shipwreck that you deserve, the train wreck that you deserve. He was crushed for our iniquities. He was broken for our sins so that we could not receive what we deserve. That's mercy. And we're crowned with it. This is a...

I love our community groups because they're just small collections of a bunch of train wrecks that get together and talk about how good Jesus is. Flip over to Colossians chapter 4. See, it begins with us being so overwhelmed by Christ, so overwhelmed with the goodness of the gospel that we can't help but share with others. That we want this for everyone. That it's so true to us, so real to us. We said last week that if that's not the case, you just need to spend more time with Jesus.

You need to go to work on your soul. You need to remember how good he is. It's a starting place. Now we're going to look at a process. So if I'm there, if I love Jesus, if I'm overwhelmed by the gospel, I'm just seeing this.

I'm remembering and knowing that he's so good. Now the question is how do I do this because it feels really difficult. We're going to look at Colossians. I love this section. Paul's just gotten done in Colossians chapter 3. He's writing a letter to the church.

He's just gotten done talking to parents and wives and husbands and basically what would be bosses and workers in our time. And he's just kind of saying live your life in a normal way that Christ is at work. And then he says, okay, as you're doing that, okay, here's how to kind of walk that out in a way to see more people come to know him. And so pick up in verse 2. Colossians chapter 4, verse 2. It's on page 573 if you have one of the white Bibles.

Paul's in prison at the time because he's been sharing the gospel with people. People may look at you weird. You're not going to get arrested right now. And he says that I may make it clear which is how I ought to speak. Okay. First step, pray.

He says continue steadfastly in prayer and pray for us that God would open a door for the word. So the first step to trying to see people come to know Jesus is to pray, which is just cheating. And it's wonderful. God loves your neighbors so much that he sent his son to die for them. Ask for his help. God loves your coworkers so much, your classmates so much, your best friend from high school so much that he sent his son to die for them.

That he might redeem them and bring them back to himself. That he might re-welcome them into the family. Begin to ask God. Make them yours. Open up a door. But that's what he says.

He says pray that a door might be opened for the word to declare the mystery of Christ on account of which I'm in prison. So what he says is pray, but don't just pray that they meet Jesus. One of the things people sometimes, it's like they're praying for their neighbors. God, you do something to save them. And it's like, I want, it feels like God at some point would just look at you and go, yeah, I made you their neighbor. Go talk to them.

Go be their friend. Like, I want to see this person who's my cousin come to know Jesus. Yeah, they're your cousin. Go start talking to them. So what you start praying for is not just that they would come to know Christ or they would, you know, you begin to pray.

Sure, pray that they have a vision and just show up to you. Pray that they watch a YouTube video and come and know Christ. That's great. But you also are going to be praying that God will open a door for you to share the gospel with them. So what he says is pray for a door for the word.

That's the Bible. That I might declare. That's with your mouth. Out loud. To their face. Specifically their ears.

That I might declare the mystery of Christ. So that you would use the Bible to point them to Jesus. That through scripture you would help them see the gospel. The mystery of Christ. Which is that God would use Christ to redeem us. That's what he's talking about.

So, second thing. You pray. And the second thing is you need to know some Bible. You don't have to have it memorized. Although having some sections memorized is very helpful. But at least know where to go.

Know where to take somebody. Know where to show them some stuff. And just depending on the situation, some of that makes more or less sense. And is easier or more difficult. One of the nice things is you can carry a Bible around in your phone or in your purse. In your phone.

You have a Bible in your phone that you can easily pull up. Look stuff up. Try to show somebody something. Rather than always having to carry a physical Bible with you. Although you'd look awesome. And I support that.

Romans Road. This is something people use periodically. And have taught periodically. As a way to help people see the gospel clearly. From the book of Romans. I'm just going to put these up on screen.

For someone who's saying, okay. I just want. I need to know a little more Bible. Before I can talk to people about Jesus. There you go. Write those down.

That's actually the order that they tell you to do Romans Road in. But it just basically says you're a sinner. Jesus is good. Here's how to be saved. Isn't that awesome? It's really awesome.

That's kind of how that works. That's kind of how that walks through in Romans. And it's very good. It's a helpful way. It's short verses to kind of show them. This is the gospel.

So this would be. You had a little more time. Someone says, all right. I want to hear this thing. You know, you talk about Jesus all the time. You said you want to.

Like, show me what you're talking about. And then you can go to Romans. It's one book. You can flip around. So for people who write down stuff.

You got about ten more seconds. To write those down. Okay. There's more like five. All right.

Ephesians 2. These are other ones. Ephesians 2. Eight through ten. It's a shorter section. These would be easier to memorize.

You can memorize. All of these are helpful. Colossians 1. 19 through 23. John 3. 16 through 19.

These are just ways to show somebody. Here's what the Bible says about this. So it's not just you. But you're actually trusting God to work through his word. So that you can declare the mystery.

You're going to show him the word. And you're going to say. Let me explain what that's saying about Jesus. So he says. Pray. That God would open a door for the word.

That there would be an opportunity for you to do this. That God would open a door. That you'd be looking for that door to be open. That means that you're building a relationship. You're around somebody. And then there's an opportunity.

There's a door open for it. That you'd be ready. That you'd have some of this prepared. You'd know. And this is kind of what I would show him in the word. This is what I would tell him about Christ.

I used to have a family friend. My mom told me one time. She said. Show me the young lady's name. And she said. That they had asked that.

I would be praying. That our family would be praying. That she would meet a good man. And I remember telling my mom. Not going to pray that. Because if she meets a good man right now.

That's not going to work out. She's a hot mess. And a good man's not going to mess with that. So I'll pray. She'll get some of her acting. She'll get together.

And that's rude. And that was mean to say. I know. I've repented some. Of things. But.

There's a little bit of that. That we would want to know a little scripture. We'd want to know. We'd want to be prepared. As we're praying that God would open a door. That we'd be prepared.

Now. That does not mean. Some of you say. Well I'm not ready. I'm not ready to share the gospel. You know who some of the best people.

At sharing the gospel. And bringing their friends around. And telling people about Jesus are. And our church family. It's the people who just became Christians. You know why?

They hadn't forgotten the benefits. And they hadn't taught themselves out of it. And you know what? People who just became Christians do. All the dadgum time. Oh I don't know.

They say that all the time. Someone says. What about this? Oh I don't know. We have people who are Christians show up. And go.

Hey. I was talking to my friend. And they brought up this whole point. About this thing. That I've never heard of. And it's just train wrecked me.

For about a week. And I'm like. What's up? And we talk. We study the scriptures together. They get to go back.

They get to bring stuff. They learn and grow through it. Some of the people who are the most. And least likely to share the gospel. Somebody's been a Christian for 45 years. And they keep saying.

Well I'm not really prepared. I'm not really ready. And it's like. That's nonsense. Go share the gospel. Go point people to Jesus.

Just don't forget the benefits. Of how good he is. It's good news. And it really is. Okay. Know the Bible.

Declare the mystery of Christ. That you would be able from scripture. To say. Here's how the gospel works. It's not just know the Bible. So that you can say.

Here's a rule from the Bible. But it's know the Bible. In a way that you can say. Here's how Jesus saves us. Here's how he redeems. Here's how he forgives.

So that's what he says. To declare the mystery of Christ. This is verse 3. On account of which. I am in prison. That I may make it clear.

Which is how I ought to speak. And he says. Walk in wisdom towards outsiders. Those are people who are not. In the church. Making the best use of the time.

Let your speech always be gracious. Seasoned with salt. So that you may know. How you ought to answer each person. Walking in wisdom towards outsiders. Is pretty much what we're talking about in this series.

Making the best use of the time. That we would. You're only here for a limited amount of time. You're only around people who don't know Jesus. For a limited amount of time. We're just saying.

Make the best use of it. Be intentional with it. If you have a 9 to 5 Job. If you work retail. If you go to class. Realize you're going to be in that class for so long.

You're only going to be at work so long. If it's retail. You're only going to have those co-workers for so long. Because they're only going to work for 3 months. Make the best use of the time. Get to know them.

Become friends with them. Ask them questions. Invite them to do stuff. It's only been summer so long. Invite people for cookouts. And to come swim.

And make a friend who has a pool. And then invite other people to their house. To go swim. Make the best use of it. Be intentional with your time. Make invitations.

Try to ask people to come hang out. To eat a watermelon. To do whatever. Be intentional with the time you're given. That's what he's saying. Walk in wisdom.

Means make wise decisions. One of the things we've been doing in our group. We've been hanging out. Inviting people to go do stuff. We were going to have a board game night. One of the guys in our group is a forester.

And he's trying to invite some of his people. To come hang out with our group some. And they're foresters. They walk around in the woods with trees all the time. And we just basically told him. Look.

Probably don't invite them to board game night. Because that might be weird for them. They might not like board games. Invite them when we do chili cook off night. Or you know. Like be wise.

Make good decisions with the people you're around. You're building with. You know. Like some people. The best thing to invite them to. Is a Sunday morning.

They grew up in the south. They're churchy. They think this is great. Some parts of it. Some people. Let's invite them to a community group.

Some people. Let's invite them to a cookout. Just hang out at your house. Play video games. Be wise. Make the best use of the time though.

I will tell you this. That a lot of people. Will say. Well. Everybody in the south. Is already a Christian.

Everybody's already a Christian. No. Because of statistics. And math. And the fact that that isn't true. It's just not.

Now there are a lot of people. Who tell you they're Christians. And that's just because. Christmas Vacation. Is their favorite movie. And they grew up in the south.

And they think. I'm a Christian. Because. Yeah. The south. And.

Sure. I had a friend in high school one time. I was talking with him. He played football with me. And I asked. One time.

I was like. Are you a Christian? He said. Yeah. I'm black. I was like.

I didn't know. That's how that worked. You have a different version of the Bible. Than I do. But people do that.

We just have this kind of. I'm a Christian because. My uncle was a deacon. I'm a Christian because. I used to be a part of a Lutheran church. Like I.

Just. There's a lot of people. Who just would say that. But actually aren't. Just keep. Being friends with them.

Keep inviting them. The other thing that people will say. Because we're in the south. Is look. If they wanted to meet Jesus. They'd be here.

They'd show up. There's a thousand churches. If they actually wanted to become Christians. They would show up. And here's what I want you to know. A lot of them.

Don't want to become Christians. Because you're right. They want to become Christians. They know where to go. They don't want to become Christians. They just need to.

And it's good news. So why do you care what they want? If it's ultimately good. I could. We could take a Sunday. And line up all the people.

Who've become Christians in our church. We've only been around for a little while. We have a lot of people. Who were far from Jesus. Not in a church. Had no desire to become Christians.

I got to talk to one a couple weeks ago. We mentioned him the other day. Where I asked him. What his thoughts were on. God or spirituality. Before he became a Christian.

And he said. Oh I just thought it was stupid. Didn't think God exists. Thought all that sounded dumb. But he'll walk up here.

And say I'm so glad. That people came and harassed me. And got and became friends with me. And told me about Jesus. And wouldn't let me get off with lame excuses. And kept inviting me to stuff.

And I had. I'm so glad I had to sit and think. I'm not sure I want to be this person's friend anymore. Or. Because they're annoying. And then eventually I met Jesus.

And it's actually good news. We can line up Christian after Christian. Who's new believer in our family. And we can line up people who've been Christians for years. Who could say the same thing. But.

Says. Walk in wisdom towards outsiders. Making the best use of the time. And let your speech. Always be gracious. Grace.

You know what grace means? Grace means that you don't get what you deserve. That God blesses us. Above and beyond. What we earned. But also to be gracious.

Just to be kind. Be friendly. Be forgiving. Be gospel in your speech. We could. We say we're a gospel centered community on mission.

We could just as easily say we're a grace. Centered community on mission. It's the same thing. That Jesus forgives. So it just says let your speech be gracious.

Be a forgiving person. Be kind. Seasoned with salt. So that you may know how you ought to answer each person. Okay. Seasoned with salt means that the gospel is a part of how you normally talk.

You're gracious in your speech. And your speech is seasoned with salt. Now. Your speech isn't just salt. You ever seen a street corner preacher? Maybe just in a movie.

Street corner preaching. If you don't know Jesus you're going to hell. If you know Jesus you don't have to. Repent and know Jesus. Basic good street corner preaching. All of that is true.

It's just all salt. So it's not very tasty. It's just all. It's just aggressive. It's just. Now sometimes that works because it's true.

Sometimes it's what people needed to hear. But primarily you just season yourself with salt. You just include the gospel and things. It's salt in everything. That's why he says season it with it. Salt in all of your food.

All the food that tastes good. Salt in it. It's in your butter. It's in your cake. Somebody when we were talking about this said it's not in LaCroix. Well LaCroix tastes terrible.

If you don't know what LaCroix is you have done well in life to dodge it. But how do we do that? How do we season our speech with salt? How do we include Jesus in normal conversations? Because that still feels really hard. Because that's what we're going to talk about now.

How do we do that? Because the truth is you're going okay. Have Jesus be a part of normal way. I talk to people as I'm walking in wisdom with outsiders. As I'm building relationships. I'm going to talk about Jesus some.

But how? Because it's not like you can be like. Yeah that's a really interesting point you made about the NBA final. You know who else is a slam dunk? Jesus. Yeah that's a really interesting piece of news about Comey.

But have you ever thought about getting fired up for Jesus? Like it just. It's like how do I do this in a normal conversation? Because it just feels like I'd be a weirdo. How do I do that? I'm glad you asked.

First thing. Be a real friend. Be real friends with people who don't know Jesus. Like an actual friend. Like these are the people you want to hang out with. You will call them.

You will do stuff with them. They will call you. If they have problems they'll pick up the phone and call you. You're an actual friend. Because then this becomes way easier to take. And you talk a lot more.

But step one is get to know people who don't know Jesus. And be a real friend. So we're talking about all the ordinary stuff of life. Hobby with people who don't know Jesus. Get to know your neighbors. Invite them for things.

Become real friends. The second one is have Christ actually impact your life. So that it's normal for you to talk about it. So that when you're talking with your friends about normal friend stuff. Like you might be mentioning your budget. Well if Christ doesn't affect your money.

Then it's going to be really hard for you to talk about it. But if he does. If you're actually submitting your money to Christ. Then it makes sense for you to bring it up. If Christ doesn't affect your marriage. Or your work.

Or how you pick a major. Then it's going to be harder to try to infiltrate. And put him in normal things. But if he does. If he's already at work in you. In all the normal ways of life.

It's easier to talk about him. I had a friend named Amir. I worked with at. This is just kind of a way to do this. But I had a friend named Amir.

Who I worked with at Sears in Lynchburg Virginia. And Amir was a Muslim. And we would talk a good bit. And one of the things I realized Amir did a lot in our conversations. We'd just be talking about normal stuff. And then he'd say.

Well I'm a Muslim. So. And then he would explain how Muslims think about that. Well I'm a Muslim. So. Here's how I would do that.

Well I'm a Muslim. So. Here's why I wouldn't be a part of that. I'm a Muslim. So. And just over and over.

And I got to learn so much about Islam. Just from him talking to me about. How he thinks about the world. And then I realized. I can do that. I can just say.

Well I'm a Christian. So. And you know what that does. It's just a small phrase. But it helps you.

In your normal talking with people. Bring up Christ in a way that's not. Aggressive or weird. Because here's what it is. What you're saying is. Can I share something about myself?

And I'm just talking about me. Someone's talking about marriage. Or they're talking about something with their kids. Or they're talking about. Something with school. Or how they're going to approach something.

And you just go. Well. I'm a Christian. Sometimes I would even just go. Well I'm a Christian. So I don't.

I think about that differently. And then just wait. Sometimes they go. Okay. They have no desire to talk about it. That's cool.

Sometimes they go. What do you mean? It's like. Well I'm glad you asked. But you have to have actual ways.

That Christ is at work in your life. For that stuff to make sense. But what it does. So here. Let me just. Let's.

We talk about how our culture works a lot. Let's just use culture against itself here. As we as Christians. Trying to point people back to Jesus. Our culture. U.S. culture.

Has pounded into your brain. That whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to be. Is right for you. That whoever you are. No one can step in and tell you.

You can't be you. That's been pounded into everyone. So as soon as you say. Well I'm a Christian. So. You've walked into a magical judgment free zone.

Sometimes. Doesn't always work with Christianity. But go for it. You've walked into a place. So now they're willing to listen to you.

Because you're just talking about yourself. Now. I say our culture has pounded that into our brains. The Bible doesn't. The Bible says. Some of the things you think are stupid.

And there are a lot of things you're wrong about. And you need Jesus. But. I'm a Christian. So I believe that.

But you may not. That's. You get to just talk about things that have. That are true to you. Real to you. In a way that isn't.

So if. If my friend Amir had constantly said. Well the Quran says this. So you need to change your behavior. Well the Quran says this. So you.

You're wrong about that. It'd have been harder to talk to him. But he would just say. I'm a Muslim so. The Quran says this. And then he would just apply it to himself.

In a way that I was willing to listen. And that's. Be real friends. Have Christ actually affect your life. So that it makes sense to bring him up.

And then the third one is just. Listen. And I'm going to give us a practical method for this. To try to help us out. But the third one is.

Listen. That we would actually just listen. I'm going to put this over here. It may mess me up. But. Everyone.

Has a story. A primary story. That. They use to define their life. And the world. Everybody does.

Everybody lives by a story. And here's what we're told about the. As Christians about the Bible. Is that there is a story. For the world. And that story falls along four plot lines.

Creation. Fall. Redemption. Restoration. That's the story of the world. That God created the world good.

In a relationship with himself. And that humanity rebelled from him. That we fell. In theology it's called the fall. That we rebelled and wallowed in sin. That's where racism.

And hatred. And murder. And murder. And greed. And lust. And infidelity.

And like everything comes out of. Us sinning. And rebelling against God. And in this place. God created the world good. And we broke it.

And that all of us as humans. Have joined in breaking the world. That it was harmonious. And beautiful. And every single one of us has partaken. In the fall.

That we've all joined the rebellion. Through lying. Through bitterness. Through talking about people behind their backs. Through stealing. Through pride.

You name it. Pick your poison. You're on this team. We deserve hell. We deserve to be punished for our rebellion. But it doesn't end with the fall.

The story of the Bible is the story of redemption. That God loved the world so much. That he came. And joined humanity. In the brokenness of the world. And took the brokenness of the world.

On himself. The most heinous thing. That has ever happened. In the history of humanity. Is not. When we rebelled against God.

It's when we killed him. But God was using that. To redeem. That he took the worst thing that's ever happened. And he turned it on its head. Because he's a God who's like that.

And he offers mercy and grace. To those who will place faith in Christ. And then there's restoration. That heaven is a return. To the garden. Heaven isn't a place where we float around.

In magical spirit bodies. That there's going to be a new earth. That he's recreating. What was broken. Creation. Fall.

Redemption. Restoration. And this story has been imprinted. On your soul. That there's something about this story. That you know is undeniably true.

That's why the best stories we tell. Follow this. The best stories we share with each other. Follow this. That's why when you watch a movie. And it's nice and happy.

And then it falls apart. And it stays fallen apart. Titted. Stays broken. And then it ends. And it goes black.

And it says fin. Because that's like a Parisian way to say. How you like that. Critics can tell you. Oh that's more like real life. But it hurts.

And there's something inside of you. That says no that's terrible. No no no no no. It doesn't just end terrible. Good. Good.

Good wins. There's something inside of us. That screams that. So let me give you some examples. There's a little boy. Who's born into a beautiful loving family.

But a mean wizard kills his parents. He has to learn magic. To defeat this wizard. Ultimately he has to die. In order to break the wizard's power. That sound like anything?

Then he rises from the grave. Death defeats the wizard in that act. And the sun shines again. And everything's magical. And then we go to the train station. And hug our children.

Like that's. Let's do another one. There's a guy. He loves his daughter. She gets taken. He has a particular set of skills.

He kills everyone. They hug and everything's great. Until she gets taken again. There's a ten year old boy. And he's a prince. And everything's wonderful.

And some old lady comes to his house. And says. Can I live with you? He answers the door. Even though he's a prince. And he's ten.

Can I stay with you for. In exchange for a rose. He's a capitalist. He says no. She turns into a wizard. Enchantress lady.

And then turns him into a monster. And says. You've got to learn how to fall in love. With someone. Otherwise you'll stay this forever. He does.

Boom. Sparkles. Tears. Magic. Hugs. Kisses.

And a remake. Creation. Fall. Redemption. Restoration. In West Philadelphia.

Born and raised. On a playground. Where I spent most of my days. Chilling out. Maxing. Relaxing.

Or cooling. Or shooting some people. Outside of the school. When a couple of guys. Who were up to no good. Started making trouble.

In my neighborhood. Got in one little fight. My mom got scared. She said. You're moving with your auntie. And your uncle.

To Bel Air. All the good stories. All the good stories. Follow this. And we begin to listen. Because the thing is.

For those around you. Their story follows this as well. Because it's imprinted. On our souls. That we all. Have this playing out.

In our lives. Because sin. Is the problem. That has wrecked. Everything. You were designed.

Good. And right. And sin. Wrecked it. That's everybody's story. And everyone is looking.

For a redeemer. Who will fix. The problem. Let me give you an example. I had a friend. I used to work with him.

Hadn't seen him in a while. His story played out like this. And I got to know this. As I listened to him. And talked to him. Over time.

He was married. When he was about 19. Divorced when he was 22. He was in his 40's. At this point. And what was broken.

With him. As he could define it. And as he would experience it. As he could explain it. Is that he was meant. For love.

And marriage. And relationship. And family. And that had been. Lost. He was on online dating sites.

This isn't a critique of those. But I'm just telling you a story. Every. Wink. Nudge. Click.

Smile. Swipe. Was a chance at a redeemer. That someone was going to come fix. What was broken. And when he had a lady in his life.

He was up here. And when she was gone. He was down here. Because what he needed. Was someone to ride in. And fix this problem.

So that he could be full. And loved. And complete. And that was his story. Now as I began to listen to this.

And as we begin to listen to those around us. We now have a way. To naturally begin to see. Where the gospel intersects. With this story. Was he designed for love.

Can we agree or disagree with that. One of the things we're going to do. As you listen to your friends. And your neighbors. Is where can I agree. And where do I have to disagree.

Absolutely agree. You were designed to be loved. In a way that you cannot even imagine. And that has been robbed from you. We believe that God existed in Trinity. He was God the Father.

God the Son. God the Holy Spirit. That when he created the world. He didn't create it. Because he needed beings to love. But he created it.

Because he is loving. And he's invited us into that love. We believe that. That lines up with the creation story. That we know and believe. And hold true and dear.

The story that's the story of our lives. Of those who have become Christians. That this is now the true gospel story for us. So we could agree with that. It's torn up by sin. That that love has been shattered because of sin.

Absolutely can agree. I have to disagree here. And this is the place where you will disagree with most everyone that you are walking with. A woman's not going to fix that. The biggest issue he had was that he needed to be heaven. An overwhelming love.

He needed to be crowned with it. He needed to be wrapped in it. He needed to have an eternity of comfort and joy and love. That comes only through Christ. That's the restoration he needed. And without that.

He was going to place so much pressure on any female that came in his life. She was going to buckle and crumble. And it was going to be another train wreck. Because she was never going to be Jesus. Take one of your friends. Maybe you don't know the whole story.

You just know they move from Job to Job and city to city. They're looking for that dream Job. And maybe you start to learn, okay, it's actually because they believed that they were meant to do something that fulfilled them. And gave them a purpose. Made them whole. And so they keep moving from Job to Job.

They keep looking for career to career. They keep trying to find the thing that will finally make them want to wake up in the morning. And once they find it. The magical Job. Where the boss is amazing. Then they'll be in heaven.

They'll be full. They'll be complete. They'll be whole. This will fix it. See, what you're listening for is who do I think I'm supposed to be? Who was I designed to be?

Who was I made to be? What broke it? What destroyed it? What's hell to me? Who's the savior? What's heaven?

And as we begin to listen to our friends. As we begin to see this play out. We begin to know how to share the gospel with them. I believe you were created for a purpose. And I know why you never found it. Because the job was never going to do it.

You needed Christ to come in to show you. You need the creator to tell you what you were created for. And only in Christ will you ever fully be. This plays out in anything. You can take a staunch militaristic atheist. We're rational, intelligent beings.

Who've created science and art and all these wonderful things. But if they're militant, maybe religion's the problem. It hymns people in. It promotes ignorance. It harms society. But through science and reason, we can reach utopia.

And everything will be wonderful. And we can intersect with that. We can say, yeah, we were. I agree with you. We have reason and logic. And people who are ignorant, we should teach them and train them and help them.

But I actually think that it's only through God's created purpose for us. Who invented reason and math and science and logic and all the things that are beautiful in the world. And the order that you so appreciate. It's only through Him that we'll actually reach fulfillment. And it just depends. It depends on what.

So a lot of times, just for example, you're listening with your friends. You may not get all four of them. You may just begin to pick up along the way. Here's what they think heaven is. It involves a boat. Expensive things.

Okay. So I've learned what heaven is. You begin to learn what messed it up. Or what's causing the problem. What's keeping them from that. But you can start realizing, okay, I can probably agree here some.

I can agree here some usually with what's messed up the world. Sometimes you might meet a Christian who they've put Jesus here. Husband. Well-behaved children. Peace and prosperity. And we have to say, yes, actually, maybe fringe benefits.

That's not the ultimate benefit of Christ. This may be some of your neighbors who you say are Christians. Jesus is a means to end that doesn't ultimately get them to the restoration they need for their soul. To save them from their sin. This is what we begin to listen. As you become real, genuine friends with people, you start listening to them.

What do they, creation, what do they assume the world should be like? What kind of person would they like to be? Who are their heroes? Fall. How do they describe their struggles and battles? What do they feel like is the biggest issue?

Where do they lack? What's hell to them? Redemption. Who's their savior? Who will deliver them from what's broken? Restoration.

What are their hopes? Long-term project they're working on? When will they finally be satisfied? And here's what drives me crazy and breaks my heart. Is when I hear Christians say things like, yeah, but they're happy. They already have something that they believe.

Christians say this to each other and to other people. Just do whatever makes you happy. You've got to do whatever you find in your heart, whatever fulfills you. That's not true. Because every one of us is plotting this out and picking a savior that only can short-term safe. At best.

Short-term safe. And then eventually, it's a train wreck. But we have a savior who redeems this story. You can play mine out on this. I'll do some confession here. Creation.

Born into a middle-class family. I did not hit a double. I was born on second base. Relatively intelligent. Relatively athletic. Highly attractive.

Just kidding. That was just for fun. All right. Stay focused. My whole life, I've just felt like I had potential. Like, if anything went wrong, I had no excuses.

So every ounce of any type of failure is on me. Anything that goes wrong in any situation I'm in, I have no excuse. I wasn't smart enough. I didn't try hard enough. I didn't think well enough. I didn't plan well enough.

So what saves me is hard work. Get up early. Go to bed late. White-knuckle it. Don't complain. Keep your head down.

Hard work. And ultimately, success. In any avenue I'm in. You can play that out over grades. You can play that out over sports. You can play that out over relationships.

You can play that out over my relationship with my wife. Or my children. Or my friends. Or this church. It's that story. Without Jesus.

And that's a terrible story. See, I believe. That when Jesus said it's finished, it was. That I don't have to be good enough. That I don't have something I have to prove. That I don't have to make right with all the stuff that I've been given.

That I can fail and that I have. And gee, this goes two ways really wrong for me. I fail and I end up feeling miserable and broken and depressed and worn out. But I don't let anybody know that. I just grind on. Because to quit is the ultimate failure.

Or I succeed. And I am arrogant and prideful. And a miserable human to be around. Without Jesus. But see, I believe.

That he interrupted my story. And it's a better story for it. And so I can with complete integrity. Try to force him into everybody's story I talk to. Because I think it will be a better story for it. With complete integrity.

I can argue with you. I can reason with you. I can say, hey, I'm a Christian. So can I tell you actually what I see going on here? And one of the beautiful things for us as Christians. Is that this is the story.

And this is everybody's story. And you begin to speak to something in someone's heart. That they didn't even realize was there. Can I tell you actually why you need a boyfriend so badly? What the Bible says about that? Can I tell you why you're so addicted to following your heart?

And what the Bible says about that? Can I just tell you as a Christian how I see this. And how I view this. And how we talk about this in my community group. And actually what I believe. If you actually got that job.

It might be the worst thing that ever happened to you. Because you'd watch your Savior die before your eyes. And then you'd have nothing to keep leaning into. And because I love you. I'm going to pray that that happens. And I get to be around.

So that I can point you to a better Savior. There's a quote from Tim Keller. He's a pastor in New York. He says, Jesus is the only Lord. Who if you receive him. Will fulfill you completely.

And if you fail him. Will forgive you eternally. And that's not true about anything else you put in that spot. And I don't know why on earth. We wouldn't begin praying. And walking with wisdom towards outsiders.

Making the best use of the time. And trying to as best we can. With all that we have. And every ounce of time and effort we have. To try to tell them. Your Savior is going to fail you.

But there's one that won't. Or you're going to fail your Savior. But there's one that will forgive you. Let's pray. God I want to thank you. I want to thank you that you fulfill us completely.

And that when we fail. You forgive eternally. And I thank you Lord. That for so many of us in this room. You interrupted our story. You dethroned our Savior.

Savior for a better one. A Savior that doesn't just sit on a throne. And command obedience. But a Savior that left the throne. And went to a cross. In obedience to his Father.

For the glory of God. And the salvation of souls. And God I pray. For all the false saviors in this room. That they would die. Never to rise again.

So that a Savior who comes from the grave. Can take their place. In Jesus name. Amen.

Everyday Life

Everyday Life

Chet Phillips

Transcript

All right, we are in the second week of our Extraordinary Series talking about a pretty simple concept. We're basically looking at the fact that God has designed and has purposed that our ordinary lives, all of the normal stuff we have to do, all the meals we have to eat, the work we have to do, the chores, the relationships, everything we have in our normal life, that he's designed to use that, to use our ordinary daily work, our ordinary daily tasks, the ordinary weight of existence for his extraordinary eternal purposes. That's what we're looking at. And I grew up in the church. I remember growing up in the church, and one of the things I began to kind of see was the church I grew up in, we had a Sunday morning.

We had an early service, which was for people who wanted to wake up early. So it was a handful of people, you know, 60 and above, I think, was pretty much who was there. I don't really know because I never was. Then we had Sunday school, and Sunday school happened after that. And then after that, we had the late service. The early service and the late service were the exact same thing.

And so we had early service, Sunday school, late service. Then we would go home. We would eat, maybe eat out, maybe go home and eat. We used to ride, my family would ride to Hardee's and get chicken a lot. That doesn't have much to do with this, just Hardee's used to have good chicken back in the day. And chocolate chip cookies is about that big.

And we used to get that, and then we would go home. We would eat. You would take a nap. Or, you know, sometimes we'd get like a pickup football game going. And then you had to be back at 6 if you were in choir, 7 if you were just going to be at the normal kind of gathering in the evening. And then we would do that.

And then we had Wednesday night stuff. There was some Tuesday night stuff. But overall, the gist I got growing up in church was that the goal was to be there. The overall goal of being a Christian was to be in that building. And that if you came on Sunday, the general thing was, cool, come back next Sunday. And if you came back the next Sunday and the next Sunday, eventually they might say, hey, you should get into the Sunday school class.

And you'd get into a Sunday school class, and that would kind of double the time you were there. And then it was, you should be at the Sunday night service. And then there should be, you should be at Wednesday night, prayer meeting or Bible study. And there's the ladies' meetings and the men's meetings. And overall, the goal was be here. And maybe they wouldn't have said that.

That was just the picture I picked up on was the people who were the most faithful, the most good, the most Christian-y were there the most times. And that was the goal. I know my dad growing up, his parents, his dad was a pastor. And he had to be there every time the doors were open for anything. And if he was sick, they would let him stay home. But he wasn't allowed to do anything.

And they would actually come home and check. The first thing they would do in walking the door after he had been home sick from a church meeting was they'd walk in and they would stick their hand behind the television to see if it was hot. And if it was hot, he got a whooping. That was how that worked. So he said when they would leave, as soon as he saw the car pull out, he would turn the television on and watch about 15 minutes and then turn it off and hope it had enough time to cool down.

He got it down to a silence. He could watch just the beginning of a show and then just kind of figure out later what happened in Lost in Space and ask his friends at school the next day or whatever. But the goal was to be there. You had to be there. We don't do a whole lot that involves you being here. We do this.

We gather on Sundays. That's it. That when we begin to read the Bible and begin to study it and we realize that the primary call for us is to not always be together, but to be Christians everywhere we are. To be sent out into the world, to be Christians everywhere we are. Now, we value gathering very highly. And we should gather.

It's normal and good and helpful and it builds into us holiness and it reminds us of God's goodness for us to gather every Sunday. We have people who show up here at 7 in the morning and begin to set all this up. We've got people that are going to stay to help us pack all of this up. We intentionally go out of our way to do things to be welcoming because we know we live in the South and people will show up to a church on Sundays and that we should. Some of us, our friendships, we should intentionally invite them to this first. That's the thing that makes the most sense for someone to come be around.

And hear the gospel proclaimed and study the Bible. But we also realize this is primarily for Christians. It's one of the reasons why we do it early in the morning. Wake up and then go spend the rest of your day getting to know your neighbors and getting to be around people. This matters, but it's not our primary main thing. It's not the overall goal for us.

We love this building. It's kind of a steal financially for us. It's not the prettiest building you've ever been in. But this isn't our main thing. If it were, I might be a little depressed sometimes. Like we talk about like we need to work on the lighting in this room to make it brighter.

And then usually in that conversation someone says, yes, but if we make it brighter, you'll be able to see the carpet better. And we're like, usually that just kind of ends it. We're like, good point. We'll just keep it the way it is. But we just, we want to gather.

But we want to gather to study the Bible, to be equipped and to be sent back out. We gather to go. We don't gather to gather. We gather to go. We don't gather just to gather. The point of this is not just let's get in a room and pat ourselves on the back and we're done.

No, we gather to remind ourselves about what matters and what's important and what's real and then to be sent out. It's that song we just sang. Who are we that Christ would save us? So we gather to celebrate that. And then it's who are we that Christ would send us? See, we gather to go.

This does matter. However, it is important that we're here and that we're here on a regular basis and that we remind ourselves consistently that we're not alone and that we are a family and that we are sent together. But it's important that we then go and live a life of ordinary things, intentionally seeing God work in extraordinary ways. And that's our goal. We started this last week. Grab your Bibles.

Go to Deuteronomy 6. You have one of these white Bibles. It'll be page 87. It's going to be pretty early on in everybody's Bible. It'll be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus to Deuteronomy. And we're going to spend time studying this morning.

We're going to look at this. And here's what we said last week, that God intends to use our ordinary, normal lives for his eternal, extraordinary purposes. And one of the stories we told last week was about Dawn, who happens to be in my community group. She has short hair. She gets her hair cut every five weeks. So she had to go to her hairstylist every five weeks.

And Kelly Weed is her hairstylist as part of our church. And she just consistently kept saying, you've just moved here. You need to come be around. Our church family is great. They're so loving. They're so gracious.

You should be here. You should come. You should come. And Dawn kept saying, no, no, no, thank you. Dawn's polite. So, no, thank you.

Sounds good. Maybe she lied some. I'll see if I can fit that in. And then didn't show up. Eventually, though, she came because she ran out of excuses and she didn't want to get a new hairstylist, I guess, is my assumption. And so she showed up.

And God used that very ordinary hair cutting to bring her around. Eventually, she met Christ. We have story after story like that in our church family. Some of you, that's your story. It's just normal. Some of you have felt like I don't have a good testimony because your story was my neighbor became my friend.

He was a Christian. She was a Christian. This person I went to school with was a Christian. My parents were Christians. The lamest version ever. I grew up in a Christian house.

My parents told me about Jesus. And eventually, I believe this extraordinary gospel that the God of the universe saves sinners and wants to have a relationship with him. I know that's so boring. No. All of that is normal, ordinary things that God uses for extraordinary, eternal purposes. And that's what we're looking at today.

And today, we're actually, over the rest of the series, we're just talking about how do we do this? How do we join in using our normal, using our ordinary, using our mundane for God's spectacular purposes? So, Deuteronomy 6. Where we're about to pick up is Moses. They've led the Israelites out of Egypt. And he's saying, here's where we're about to go.

We're going to go into the promised land that God has provided. So, they've come out of Egypt, headed into the promised land. He's saying, here's what we're going to do. Here's what God's going to accomplish for us. And the overall picture here was, they were enslaved. They were rescued by miraculous means from slavery to be a people that belong to God.

To be a family and a nation that belong to God. And that God's going to give them a place to be a beacon for him. That they're going to go drive some people out, take over some land. And then God is going to use that land to say, here's what it's like to follow me. Here's my people. And begin to show the rest of the nations what it's like to belong to him.

And the truth is, that's the church. This is a picture of what Christ does with the church. That we were enslaved to sin. That by miraculous means, Christ dying on a cross vicariously for us. Being our Passover lamb. That they would practice sacrifices.

Where they would place their sin on an animal. And the animal would be sacrificed to pay the debt of their sin. That Christ becomes that for us. That he sacrificed to pay the debt of our sin. And that he rises from the grave. To offer free forgiveness and hope and grace to everyone.

And then he makes us into a people. And a family. And a nation. To show the rest of the world, here's what God is like. And to begin to welcome others in. So we're picking up in Deuteronomy.

Where we're seeing a picture of what ultimately God's going to do with the church. So he's talking to the nation of Israel. The people of Israel. But it also helps us as Christians to know how do we live this out? How do we walk in this? How do we understand this?

Because we're in a very similar place. Verse 4. Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God. The Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.

With all your soul. With all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And shall talk of them when you sit in your house. And when you walk by the way.

And when you lie down. And when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. And they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house. And on your gates.

That first verse there. Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God. The Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. With all your soul.

With all your might. That's the Shema. The Jewish people would repeat this over and over again. At one point a rabbi asked. A Pharisee asked Jesus. What's the most important law in the Bible.

In the Old Testament. And Jesus says this one. To love the Lord your God with all your heart. With all your soul. With all your mind. With all your strength.

With everything you have. To love God. So as we talk about how do we do this. How do we join him in the ordinary mission of life. The first thing that has to happen. Is we have to love him.

As Christians. You have to love Christ. In order to join him in his mission. I've. I have met people before. That were a part of the church.

But they loved the church. Maybe they loved the music. Maybe they loved the preaching. Maybe they loved the friendships they had there. Maybe they loved that. That it made them an upstanding citizen.

In the area. But I don't think they loved Christ. I don't think they enjoyed him. Rested in him. Saw the greatness of him. That's the first command.

And I want to give you some freedom here. It's a command to action. Here. The Lord your God. The Lord is one. Now you will love him with everything you have.

With all your strength. With all of your soul. With all of your might. With everything you have. With all of your heart. This is a command.

It's the same as when the Bible says. That husbands should love their wives. It does not mean. Husbands should have a passive. Receptive feeling. Towards their wife.

Sometimes we think about love. As just an emotion. So you either love. Or you don't. You either feel it. Or you don't.

Like watching a movie. You either enjoy it. Or you don't. So that it's based on the movie. Whether it's good or not. And like how you respond to it.

Now this is a command to action. The first thing we ought to do. Is work. To love him. To know him. To see him.

And the place that that begins. Is the gospel. We cannot effectively join him in mission. Unless we actually love. The outcome. Of the mission.

You see. The reason I want people to meet Jesus. Is because I've already met him. And he's worth meeting. That's how that works. The reason you should want your friends and neighbors.

To come to Christ. Is because you've already come to Christ. And you know what that's like. You know what that accomplishes. Some of you don't want to share the gospel. Don't want to tell people about Jesus.

And the reason is. You don't really like it. You're not captivated by it. You're not overwhelmed by it. It's been a long time. Since you laid on your face.

Thinking about the gravity. Of your sin. And the holiness of our God. And the fact that he loved you so much. That he would redeem you. It's been a long time since that happened.

So you. You're not stirred up by it. You're not overcome by it. So why would you tell other people about it. Some of you believe that the gospel. That what we're supposed to do as Christians.

Is work really hard. And be really moral. Some of you maybe grew up in a church like that. The goal was don't drink. Don't smoke. Don't watch R-rated movies.

And God will love you. Why would you tell your friends about that? You're looking at them thinking. Smoking. Drinking. And R-rated movies seem so great.

Maybe you weren't. You were. There's something about like. If the. I have good news for you. Get to work.

That doesn't sound like good news. But that's not the gospel. The gospel is I have good news for you. Jesus did all the work. You're free. You're loved.

You're redeemed. He offers you grace. Your sin. Had built up. A debt. Before God.

That you deserve to be destroyed for. But Christ. Died for you. Because he cares about you. And he cares for you. And he wants you.

That's good news. That's freedom. That's purpose. That's enjoyment. That's rest. And some of us don't.

Don't share this with our friends. Because we haven't really gotten there yet. We haven't really believed it yet. If you have no desire to tell other people about Jesus. I don't think you've met the Jesus I have. I don't think you've really met and interacted with the Christ that we find in scripture.

Because he is lovely and lovable and good and gracious and welcoming and merciful and compassionate. And he fixes us. Mends us. We believe. If you read the Bible. We believe that sin has wrecked the world.

That there's isolation and loneliness. That the people around us are held down by guilt and shame and depression. That they're doing everything they can to just build some comforts around their life. Thinking that the best thing they could possibly do is just have a nice couch and a good show on Netflix. The most troubling thing to them is when that season ends. And they can't find something else good.

So they watch The Office again. Like that's the biggest issue in their life right now. They have no purpose. They have no meaning. They feel adrift. They feel lost.

There's some people that you know put on a really brave face. But they are wracked by anxiety and fear as if a shadow was following them. They don't know what. They don't know how. But they know one day it's going to catch them.

And we believe that Christ is the cure for all of that. That he gives us a family. That he redeems us. That he died for our guilt and our shame. That he sets us free from fear and anxiety. That he is our hope.

We want everyone to know that. There's a song by the teddy bears. That came out in 1958. And one of the set of lyrics is to know, know, know him is to love, love, love him. And I do and I do. Do you know what song I'm talking about?

It's kind of catchy. That's true about Christ. To know Christ is to love Christ. And the place that this begins is a command to love him with everything you have. Now, before we can move on, you have to be there. It has to be real.

It has to be genuine love. It has to be heartfelt. He says this will be on your heart. But before we can move on, some of you may be saying, okay, I don't feel that. What do I do? How do I respond?

I don't know if I'm there. It's like when there are times in marriage when you just don't feel gushy about your spouse. You just don't. They're there. You like them. They're okay.

But you're not like overwhelmed by it. It's just not happening. And the response is not to wait until that just shows back up magically. The response is, what do I do? How do I begin to foster this? How do I get back around them?

I know that when I get kind of like that with my wife, Anna, I just got to hang out with her. She's a delight to be around. I just got to make time for it. Sometimes it's really hard to like her when there's a two-year-old in between us that we both have to work with. So it's like the best thing we can do is be business partners to keep this thing alive and help it not hit us with sticks, which he does.

But, you know, I made the sticks for him in the shape of a sword, so that's kind of on me. But you have to figure out a way to make it work. And so here he gives us some clues in the text that I want to show us here. There are ways to stir up our affections for Christ. So I want us to just look at the words here.

First, he starts with here. Oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. So he starts off by saying, listen to what he is like. One of the ways to stir up your affections is to be here and listen to sermons. Some of you, look, there are a lot of really good Bible teachers that exist in the world and put their words and their Bible studies on the Internet. Some of you are most have your affections stirred for Christ through listening to someone explain and teach his word.

And you need to be listening to podcasts of sermons to and from work. Some of you work in a job where you can have that in your head. I one of the most enjoyable, soul stirring, Jesus loving thing for me is when I cut the grass at my house and listen to sermons while I do it. One of the cool things about that is periodically I will be in a spot in my yard. And because that's where I was when I heard that point, I will be reminded of something about Christ just because that's where I happened to be when I heard it while I was cutting my grass. But here, what he's like is one of the things we get to do to stir our affections.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. That means to get to work to do this, to pour everything you have into it, to put energy towards it. It's all your might. He says these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. So that means memorize them, roll them around in there, think about them, have them affect you.

You shall teach them diligently to your children. One of the ways that some of you are most stirred in your affections for Christ is getting to explain something to someone else. You need to be around Christians who don't know as much as you. You need to be around people that you can say, hey, let's walk, let's study the Bible together. Let me show you some stuff. There's times where you're explaining something to someone and it's like it clicks in your own heart and you suddenly are like, hold on.

I got to repent, too. Like I love doing premarital counseling for that exact reason. I'm telling people how to communicate to their wives. There's not hasn't been a time I've gotten to do premarital counseling where I did not go home during one or two or five of the sessions and say, hey, and I need to repent for some stuff because I had forgotten how to do this. But I remind remember that Christ is good and this is how I'm supposed to act.

But you're to teach. You shall teach them diligently to children. You should talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. Somebody's just to talk about God and his goodness and what he's done. You need to say it out loud. It says you shall bind them.

There's a sign on your hand. They should be frontlets between your eyes. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Whatever it is. Some of you, it's journaling.

Here's what I have found as a rule for me. Whatever I find that is the most soul-stirring way for me to love Jesus then becomes really difficult for me to do. And it has to take might. It takes energy and effort for me to do it. Some of you, it's journaling and you know that. You know that sitting when you read and pray and writing out all of your prayers and writing about how God is good and how he's answered you.

That's the most you get out of. Some of you, it's memorizing scripture. Some of you, it's singing. There are certain things the Bible tells us we have to do. We've got to read the Bible. We have to be intaking his word because that's how he works on us.

For some of you, that's like going to the gym. It's not enjoyable. It's work. But you don't see the benefits of that until you've, it's been a month or two months. And you usually don't see the benefits of the gym in the gym. You see the benefits of the gym outside of the gym.

Like when you walk upstairs and can still breathe. Like, do you know what I'm talking about? You do something for a day and you're not sore the next day. The gym isn't great. Nobody wakes. I mean, some people do wake up in the morning like the gym.

Let's do this. Most of us don't. Most of us are like, all right, let me do this so that I'll not die doing normal tasks. Some of you, that's the Bible reading. It just takes effort. But ultimately, it builds into you something good.

But we're told some things we're supposed to do. Read the Bible. Be around church family. Be in community. Pray. Fast.

But then we've got to find things together. You've got to find things for yourself. What stirs up your affections? What helps you love Him? For me, that's woodworking. Walking in the woods.

Now, if I told you, I don't need to read the Bible. I walk in the woods. You should hit me. But if I say one of the best ways that I can meditate on the goodness of God is to walk in the woods and that's infused with my knowledge of Him from Scripture, that's great. Some of you, it's singing. Some of you, it's listening to music.

Find whatever it is. Some of you, it's making music or writing poems or drawing pictures. All of that's been gifted by God. And whatever it is that stirs your affections for Christ, you should be doing, even if it takes work and effort and planning. Because we've got to love Him to truly be able to share Him and to point people to Him. It's got to be real to us.

And then it's genuine and it's much easier to take from other people. I love Egg Roll Station, which is a Chinese restaurant in town. I usually have cash in my pocket just for Egg Roll Station. And I have to have $7.07 and then I can eat at Egg Roll Station. I eat there once a week. If I don't, my whole system is messed up.

Like a finely tuned machine. I have to eat an Egg Roll and like two and a half pounds of fried rice in order to just keep going. I tell everybody about Egg Roll. If somebody asks about Chinese food, I will tell you about Egg Roll. If you say that you've been there and it's not good, I will argue with you. And it's genuine.

It's real. I believe it. And it makes it easier to take. It makes it more real to other people. It comes out naturally. It's something I'm going to talk about.

I've gotten tons of people to go eat there. I take people with me on a regular basis to eat at Egg Roll Station because I believe in it. And it has to come from that place. Some of you, you're that way with music or you're that way with art. You're like, I've learned if someone wants to talk to me about music. Like if you're the type of person who wants to talk about music, you are going to be disappointed if you talk to me.

If you're like, hey, have you ever heard of them? I'm just like, stop. Just don't. You're going to be mad. I haven't heard of them. I don't know their songs.

I don't know who that guy is. Just please quit. Like, but when we naturally love something, we talk about it. It's real to us. It means something. And that's the place we have to start with Christ.

You have to know him. You have to love him. You have to rest in him. And then the rest begins to come out in a normal way. I will also say this. We've got to move on, but I'll say this.

Some of you feel like I don't, I don't know. I'm a Christian or I believe this stuff, but I just feel no desire to put forth this energy. I feel no desire for this. I think some of that works like this. Have you ever been really hungry so that everything you heard, thought about, sounded like it would be delicious? There was this moment when you could have eaten a taco or a pizza or sushi or a ham sandwich.

Everything sounded amazing. If you smelled any kind of food, it was the most amazing food ever. You just had to eat something. And then you miss that window, and all of a sudden, you're not hungry at all anymore. And people are like, well, you want to go eat at a Mexican restaurant? And you're like, well, you just want to go get some pizza?

And you know cognitively I really should be hungry because two hours ago I was. I just had to keep working. And now nothing sounds good. You just have to know I still need to eat something. And once I start, I'll be reminded why I was hungry in the first place, and it'll be fine. Maybe I'm the only person to experience this.

I think most of us had. I took a short poll with a handful of people to try to see if anybody understood what I was talking about. Walking with Christ is like that sometimes. Sometimes you get to the place where you're like, I just don't feel the hunger anymore. It's like, right, because you've gone so long without it, you've kind of forgotten how to do it. Just pick up your Bible.

Start listening to music. Start praying. Start asking for the hunger again. And then just start eating. Start intaking. And it'll build it back up in you.

But this is why we have to come from here to see people come to know Christ. It's got to be genuine. It's got to be real to us. We've got to actually know him. We've got to understand his benefits, the goodness of him for our soul and the joy that's found in him. This is why we've talked about this past week.

We said if we would intentionally invite one person into our lives, we would get to potentially see our church family double. That we'd get to see more people here. And that's useless. That's absolutely useless if the point is our church is good. That's useless. That's useless.

That's useless. If the point is Jesus is good, that's valuable. If that's the point, if we talk about our church growing and the best you have. This is why I think a lot of times churches, especially in the south, grow by people coming from other churches to this church. Because the sales pitch is come listen to the music. The music is really good.

Come hear the preaching. The preaching is really good. Come hang out with our groups. Our groups are really good. But we've lost the ability to say, come meet Jesus.

Jesus is really good. And so the only person we know how to pitch to are people who already kind of believe that. But we don't know how to actually tell somebody, here's how Christ has wrecked my soul. And you need to know him. It's got to start there. It's got to start knowing the goodness of Christ and seeing his gospel and seeing our sin and seeing his holiness and his love for us.

It's got to start there. So let's keep going. First step, love Jesus. Then it says, verse 7, you shall teach. Oh, no. I jumped ahead of myself here.

I've got to read 6. And these words that I command you today should be on your heart. For us, the primary command is to know Jesus, to love Jesus, to know his gospel, to be changed by that as we obey. That we are changed by the gospel and then we obey. So that's where we come from here, that we would put that in our heart.

That it would be real to us. Then he says, you shall teach them diligently to your children. I shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. Don't miss this, parents. Primary first mission for you is your kids. First and primary mission for you is your kids.

I, I, I, it hurts my brain every time I hear a mom say, and this doesn't happen a lot in our church, but I've heard this before. Mom says, I want to be on mission, but I just got to stay home and watch my kids. And it's like, your kids need Jesus. We have to keep them in kid city. We can have people co-sign that. Your kids need Jesus.

They bite people. Do y'all know kids do that? Naturally. You don't have to teach them. They will bite another child. They need Jesus.

And we have to like, so parents don't miss that. The first mission you have, the first mission field you have is your children. And then he says this, teach them diligently the gospel. This should infuse. You should explain it to them. You should talk about Jesus.

You should sing and pray. And then he says, how? Talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise. That a love for Christ should saturate your day. Fill your day. That when you wake up, when you go to sleep, when you're walking, when you're eating, it's normal and natural for you to talk about Jesus.

What he does, who he is, what he's accomplished, how good he is, how he blesses, how he fixes, how he forgives. But you can't do that if you don't love him and know him. It'll feel forced. It'll feel weird. But if you love Christ and know Christ and it's already overwhelmed you how he forgives and how he loves and how he redeems, then it naturally will flow out.

It's natural for you to talk about it. It's natural for you to explain it. So this isn't just have a Bible study with your kids. It is that. Do that. But you know, your children are picking up everything, not just the stuff you want them to pick up.

I have a two-year-old. He's learning how to talk. And I feel like he is making fun of me with about half the things he says. He'll take some of his food, want me to eat it. I'll eat some. And he'll go, good, isn't it?

That's good, isn't it? Or he'll see something and go, that's pretty, isn't it? Because I say, isn't it? I didn't know I said, isn't it? Until I heard him start saying it. And I was like, what kind of word is that?

And then I realized I would give him a piece of food and go, it's good, isn't it? And he's mocking me. That's what it feels like. He got hurt this past week and he looked down at his own leg and went, oh, honey, hurt yourself. Because that's what his mom says to him every time he hurts himself. Oh, honey, you hurt yourself.

And so I was carrying him around in Lowe's. He was looking at his knee the entire time going, oh, honey, hurt yourself. He said it like 35 times. We had to keep my brother's dog. My brother and his wife bought a dog and then decided to travel so often that we get to share it. So we really appreciate it.

And so it was at our house. It was the first day it was dropped off. It was in our garage and it started barking. And my two-year-old was watching TV. The dog's name is Possum, by the way. That will make this story make more sense.

My two-year-old was watching TV and he goes, shut up, Possum. And we were like, we may have said that too much. And we don't say that to each other. We don't say that to him. We are willing to tell dogs to shut up. And now our son, my wife, one of the primary ways I fight with, fight, I play with my son is to fight him.

This makes more sense a little bit. Like we wrestle. Like it's one of the things we've been doing since he was little. We fight. I teach him how to throw punches. He hits me with sticks.

This is one of the primary ways that we play with each other. And that was fine at our house. But now he has to go up into Kid City. And I don't know if y'all know this. They can't come get me on Sundays. But we're pretty sure there are times where he's going to push someone and be like, shut up, Emmy.

And then like hit somebody. And it's going to be because we trained him poorly. Because he didn't just pick up the stuff we said to him. He picked up all the stuff we do. He picked up who we are. Some of you grew up in families where your parents made you go to church.

But you watched them the rest of the week. And it had no influence over their life. They told you you needed to love Jesus. But you never actually saw them love Jesus. And that messed with you. That's why he says this should so be real to you.

That the way you wake up when you go to sleep. The way you eat. The way you walk. That means walking the way. Means all the stuff you do. Looks like you know and belong to him.

And you love him. And he's changed you. Because I've heard this quote attributed to a bunch of people. Most recently to John Maxwell. But it says you can teach what you know.

But you'll reproduce who you are. You can teach what you know. But you'll reproduce who you are. And that's why he says love him. And then make sure that that plays out in every bit of your life. Parents don't miss the opportunity to disciple your children.

But I want you to see that he says. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And. So he says teach your children. Explain this to your children. Make this part of life.

And he explains kind of how you get to do that. But when he says and. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house. When you walk by the way. When you lie down. When you rise.

That not only affects your children. That means that it affects everyone you're around. He follows that up with this. Verse 8. You shall bind them. As a sign on your hand.

And they shall be as frontlets. Between your eyes. A frontlet. Is a decorative. Head. Dress.

Piece. Thing. And I know that. Because I've studied extensively. And have a computer. And I googled the word.

It's a decorative headpiece. They took this literally. Says that you'll bind them as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on your doorposts. And on your house. And on your gates.

The Jewish people took this literally. They took the little Torah scrolls. The law that he was giving. And the commandments that he gave. And they wore them on their wrists in a little box. And they wore them on their head in a little box.

Or at least the Shema. Which is here. Oh Israel. The Lord our God is one. And they put them on their doorposts. And on their gates.

I don't think that we have to take this literally. I think what he means is. For us as Christians. I think the call is. The way you work. Everything you do.

The way you see the world. That you can't look into the world. Without having to see past. The gospel. One of the things we talk about. Is so knowing the gospel.

That it's the lens by which we view the world. So that the way we handle money. And the way we interact with people. And the way we. And he says put it on your doorposts. Meaning that when you go in.

And when you go out. It's intentional. It's in obedience. On the gates. Which means this is how you interact with the world. This is the first thing they see about you.

You ever heard somebody say. Oh he really wears his faith on his sleeve. And what they mean is. It's just out there for everybody to see. It's just kind of out in the world there. For everybody to notice.

And they kind of say it negatively. And maybe you have thought like. God. Christianity is supposed to be private. And I'm supposed to enjoy it. And I'm supposed to love Christ.

But I don't want to bother people with it. And I don't want to be annoying. And we're not really supposed to talk about religion. It's kind of rude. I don't want to wear my Christianity on my sleeve. Moses says wear it on your face.

Put it on your forehead. That you are a Christian. That you know Christ. Love Christ. That you belong to him. Should be how you interact with the world.

Should be something people pick up from you quickly. And know that it is true and real about you. That's it. That's how to be a part of Jesus' mission in ordinary life. That's it. To so love Christ.

That it pours out. In every interaction. When you wake up. When you go to sleep. When you eat a meal. When you walk.

When you work. To have it be the way you interact with the world. So that if it's bound to your hand. It means that when you're interacting with the world. When you're doing stuff. There are things that you do intentionally.

Because you belong to him. Because you love him. So it affects how you work. It affects how you interact with others. To have it put on your face. Means it's how you see the world.

So that you can't just set a normal budget. Based off of what Dave Ramsey says. But the gospel affects your budget. That you can't just pick a major in school. Because of what your parents said. Or because of what field you want to go in.

But the gospel affects it. And your understanding of who he is. And what he's done. Your love for him. Empowers you to do what you're called to do. In the world.

That doesn't mean that everybody has to go be a missionary. It means that everybody already is a missionary. Wherever God sends them. Because it's how they interact with the world. That Christians wear the gospel on their face. And on their hands.

And it's in their heart. And it pours out everywhere. And it's on their doorposts. And their house is used for the gospel. It's on their gate. It's how they interact with the world.

That's the call. That's it. And that has to start with a love for Christ. And then. All we got to do. Is be around people who don't know Jesus.

Be a genuine Jesus loving. Real person. And intentionally. Go out of your way. To be around people who don't know Christ. And then.

When you. It's normal for you to talk about him. It's normal for you to. To point people to him. It's normal for you. And it makes sense.

Because you so love it. You so enjoy it. So. First. All we're going to do. For the rest of our time.

Is look at. Some practical ways. To be around people. Who don't know Christ. So. For you in the room.

If you're saying. Yeah. I love Jesus. I want to see people come to know him. This is the practical part. Where we just talk about.

How do we do that. For some of you in the room. You're going. I'm not sure. I actually love Jesus. The way you're talking about.

I'm not sure. I actually. Have him. In me. The way you're talking about. I want to tell you.

That you can. That we're called to faith. Which means that we. Say. Lord. I believe that the gospel is true.

That you died for my sin. And I want this. I want you to change me. I want you to infuse me. Some of you. You actually know.

No. I believe in him. I just don't feel it right now. I'm not empowered by him right now. And that's where it's. Yeah.

It's called for strength. For you to start. Putting some energy forth. To read. To study. To repent.

Some of you. Need to start. By taking a blank sheet of paper. And a pen. And saying. Lord.

Where do I need to repent? That's a dangerous question. But it is so good. Jesus loves to answer that one. And here's why. You repenting.

You turning from sin. You confessing. Is not punishment. It's a call into joy. You get more of Jesus. Obedience is not punishment.

It's a call to be free. From all the sin. That he's already set us free from. To walk in it. Okay. So here's what we got to do.

You need to take your schedule. You need to look at it. You actually lay out. How do I spend my time? What time do I get up? What do I do?

Where do I work? Who am I around? Where do I go to school? Who's there? When am I there? What time is that?

When does that happen? You just need to make your schedule. And then you get to ask a couple of questions about your schedule. There's really three primary questions. And then there's one follow-up that I want to show us. But the first one is where's a community opportunity?

It just means in my normal schedule, how can I invite church family to be around? Where can I invite someone from my community group? Where can another Christian come join me in this? This is one of the ways that we get to remind ourselves of what matters. So where can I bring somebody in?

This is one of the ways that we get to talk about God and teach each other and walk in that. And help other people know how to raise children and handle finances. So it's like what am I already doing? Where can someone else join me? The second one is where is there a mission opportunity? Which just means where am I around people who don't know Jesus yet?

Or where could I invite someone? What am I already doing that I could just invite someone in who doesn't know Jesus yet? So you've laid out your schedule. You ask where is there a community opportunity? Where is there a mission opportunity? The third question is where is there a gospel opportunity?

Where can I actually begin to show Christ? Where can I actually begin to share Christ? That's one of the things we're going to talk about in this coming week. Is how to explain the gospel. How to say it. Talk to people about it.

The fourth question. One. Which is kind of an underlying question. It's not one of the main ones. Is what needs to be cut? For some of you.

You say like in my evenings I watch some TV. And maybe there's a good community opportunity. You could invite some people to come watch The Walking Dead with you. Or Frasier reruns. Some of you it's. I could invite my neighbors.

I know that I found out that one of my neighbors is really into this show. So we're going to watch House of Cards together. I'm just saying popular shows. But something makes me think that one might have bad stuff in it. And I should have mentioned it. So I don't know.

That was not an endorsement. But maybe your neighbor really likes it. And you should watch it with him. I don't know. Some of you. It's.

I watch three hours of television every night. And therefore have no time to be around anyone else. And that needs to be cut. Some of you play video games like it's a part time Job. And with more intentionality than your part time Job. I have nothing against video games.

In and of themselves. Some of them aren't great. Some of that needs to be cut out. You need to invite a friend over. Play for a couple hours. And then go into the world and talk to humans.

Like you've got to look at your schedule and say. What do I need to cut? What doesn't work? Some of you treat your home like it's the escape from the world. So as soon as.

Introverts pay attention. As soon as you. Get off work. You run into your house. And the goal is to just have enough. Cushions around you.

That no one gets to talk to you. And that's fine. God designed you to be introverted. That's okay. One of the problems with the church. Is that extroverts stand up here.

And tell all the introverts. That they're wrong and sinful. And that's not true. But. You need to make friends. Like an introvert makes friends.

And you need to find ways to be around people. Because you can't just say. Oh I don't like that. Or it's hard. And never do it. And extroverted people.

Need to not say. I hung out with 30 people. That was mission. Did you have a real conversation with anybody? Do you remember their names? Did you just walk around and call everyone guy?

Maybe you need to build some real friendships. With people who don't know Jesus. And get around them. I've got a list of. Eight things I want to talk through quickly. Somebody.

This is just a list that was in the book. Everyday Church. It was written by pastors. Steve Timmis and Tim Chester. That Tim Chester guy sounds really smart. But.

Eight. A list of eight things. I want to. I want to just kind of share with us. As ways to intentionally be around people. Who don't know Jesus.

This is a list they give. That I think is helpful. First one is. Eat with non-Christians. Or eat with people who don't know Christ. You eat.

21 Meals a week. That's an average. Some of you. You're above average. I'm proud of you. You eat 28 meals a week.

That's well done. Some of you skip breakfast. You're at 14. You eat. You have to. God designed us to have to stop.

To eat food. To refuel. Eat with people who don't know Jesus. Invite them to lunch. Talk to your co-workers. Invite them to come eat with you.

Invite people in your neighborhood. To come over and eat. It's about to be summer. Go to your neighbors and say. Hey. After dinner this next week.

We're going to have a watermelon. But there's no way. The two of us. Are going to eat an entire watermelon. If we do. We will not feel good.

So we need you to come over. And help us eat this watermelon. We're going to be in our front yard. We just want to invite people to come. Find ways to get around people. Who don't know Jesus.

The second one they give is to walk. If you live in a walkable area. Of our city. Walk. For the majority of us. Because we live in Columbia.

And that doesn't really matter. We exist. Can't walk. In our city. Can't walk to the grocery store. Can't walk to.

So just walk around your neighborhood. Walk at the same time. Get to know the people. Who live in your neighborhood. One of the things. That we do intentionally.

Is we walk in our neighborhood. And we've gotten to meet. Our neighbors. Just walk around. Get to. Get to know people.

If you. Work at a place. Where you can walk. To get some food. Rather than ride in your car. Walk.

Be. Begin to care about the city. We live in. Begin to see people. Begin to. Start conversations that way.

To meet people. The third one they give. Is to be a regular. Go to the same place every week. Get coffee in the same place. Get breakfast in the same place.

Be around the same people. Go at the same time. This is for people who are saying. Look. I want to be a part of Jesus's mission. I just don't know anybody.

Who doesn't know Christ. And for Christians. That happens some. We become Christians. We start hanging out with the church. Eventually.

All of our friends are Christians. We have a lot in common with them. It's easy. We believe the same stuff. We're fighting for the same stuff. But he's called us.

To be out in the world. Using our ordinary lives. For extraordinary purposes. So be a regular. Get to know all of the wait staff. To have your community group.

Go eat at the same place. Every week. At the same time. And tip well. Even when the service is bad. Have the gospel affect your tipping.

You were terrible. Here's grace. Here's abundant grace. Above and beyond. Your. Worth.

At this. Today. Um. Hobby with people who don't know Christ. Is number four. Join a hunting club.

Join a gym. Join a local book club. Or start one in your neighborhood. Play tennis. Paint. Sew.

Join a local softball league. Little league. Parents. Little league. People will say. I can't.

I can't be part of the stuff. Our group's doing right now. Because our kids. Is playing t-ball. Some of you need to say. Parents.

We're not. We're not rotating off. I'm going to take this one. And I'm going to be there. At practice. And I'm going to get to know.

All the other parents. And I'm going to be a help coach. And we're going to hold a party. For the. For the kids. At the end of the season.

We're going to be the person. Who brings Gatorade. We're going to intentionally. Use t-ball. As an opportunity. To get to know people.

Love people. Serve people. And join Jesus. In his mission. Um. Number five.

They give us. To talk to your coworkers. I used to love it. When I worked. Uh. I used to work at Sears.

One of the things I loved. About working at Sears. Was my coworkers. Were stuck with me. My coworkers. Could not fire me.

Their only option. Was to quit. And I got to talk to them. I got to hang out with them. I got to share with them. I got to be their friend.

Go out of your way. To talk to your coworkers. Get to know the people. In the cubicles near you. Or that work on the same shift. Care about them.

Pray for them. Begin to pray for them. Before you go to work. When you leave. Get to know them. Be their friend.

A genuine. Actual friend. Number six. They give us. Volunteer with non-profits. Find a non-profit.

Serve once a month. Bring your family. Bring your group. Number seven. Participate in city events. Go to a fundraiser.

Or a clean up. Summer shows. Concerts. Talk to people. Get to know the city. Care about people.

Number eight. Serve your neighbors. Or get to know your neighbors. Some of you have lived in the same place for a while. You don't know your neighbors. Let me give you a couple of quick ways to do this.

We're going to talk more about how to use your house. And to be a good neighbor. But a couple of quick ways. If you move into a place. Go knock on everybody's door. And say.

Hey I just moved here. Here's one of the things that happens. Most people feel the obligation to be nice to the people they live around. They don't want to be rude. They will not naturally be rude to you. Go knock on their door.

And say. Hey I just moved here. I'm trying to meet people. And they will feel. Some sort of social pressure. To get to know you.

And talk to you. It's a great way to meet all your neighbors. To talk to them. To pray for them. If you see someone moving in. Go knock on their door.

Say. Hey Saul you just moved in. Wanted to get to know you. We live right down here. Talk to them. If you have a person.

If you have lived in the same place forever. And don't know any of your neighbors. You have a couple of options. You can. Make up. A neighborhood thing.

So that you have a reason to knock on their door. Hi. I'm a part of the neighborhood planning committee. Want to talk to you about the thing out front. Where we need to plant some plants. Hi.

Just talk to them. I'm a part of the neighborhood gathering group. It's a group you made. So you're part of it. You're not lying. Chairman.

Chairman. We're trying to do two cookouts a year. Would you be up for that? Maybe all of your neighbors say no. Maybe you find five that say yes. Have a cookout with them.

Some of you just need to knock on people's doors. And say. Hey. I've lived here for three years. And I've been a terrible neighbor. And I just wanted to get to know you.

Most of your neighbors will say. Yeah. Me too. Sorry. And you can talk to them. One of the things we do.

In our neighborhood. Is we walk. In the neighborhood. And. And. I will.

If I intentionally see my neighbors outside. Sometimes pretend to go get something from my mailbox. Or out of my toolbox. On my truck. So that I can say hey to them.

We walk. One of the things I do. When we're walking. And this. I break social norms. Just for the reason.

To be able to meet my neighbors. If I see a neighbor. And we make eye contact. But I can tell. That was it. They don't want to talk to me.

I will. While we're making eye contact. Do this. Hey. Way too early. But now they have to choose.

To not shake my hand. They have to be willing to break that. And most people aren't. So they. They'll go. And wait.

While I walk like 30 feet. So we can shake hands and talk. And I get to know my neighbors. And then the next time I see them. I can say hey. I already know them.

How's that thing? What's going on? Like. Just find ways to get to know your neighbors. Here's the thing. This isn't a trick.

We're called to be genuine Christians. Who really love Jesus. And then our goal. Is to be genuine friends. With people who don't. Let me explain something to you.

And if you're a Christian. This is true. And you believe this. We only have a certain amount of time here. This is temporary. There is an eternity to come.

And I believe 100%. That every person. Needs to meet Christ. Needs to hear the goodness of the gospel. Most of the people you live around. Think they know the gospel.

Think they know about Christianity. Think they know about Christ. And it's just that they've never really seen. Anybody truly living that out. In life. Christians.

True. True. Genuine gospel. Bible following believing Christians. Are the best people to be around. They should be gracious.

Generous. Forgiving. Loving. Serving. Sacrificial. Not condemning.

But joyous. And welcoming. And merciful. If your neighbors. Never come to know Christ. The best thing they'll ever get.

Is to live a life on earth. Around some Christians. Because it only gets worse from there. The goal is not. Just. See people meet Jesus.

That is the ultimate goal. Because if we truly believe what we say we believe. We want that for everybody. We just want to be friends with the people that are around us. Love them. Serve them.

Care for them. Pray for them. Fight for them. Be the person most likely to take them in. To give them some money. And to swap shifts with them.

Just to ease life a little bit. And show them somebody cares about them. Okay. Homework for this week. Look at your schedule. Pick a thing.

To do with intentionality. Some of you that means you need to cut something. You need to go for a walk. Some of that means you have. Coworkers that you've never really prayed for. Cared about.

Gotten to know. Some of that means you've got to go knock on the neighbor's door. But everybody. Who says they are Christian. Needs to do one thing this week. Everybody's in one of our community groups.

That's it. Just do one thing this week. To try to meet somebody. Get to know somebody. Begin to build a friendship with someone who does not yet know Christ. That's the goal.

Genuine friendship. With a genuine Christian. Let's pray. God my one prayer out of this. Is that we would all love you. With all our heart.

With all our soul. With all our mind. With all our strength. Because naturally. Out of that. We begin to love those around us.

I pray that we would be. Captivated by. The goodness of the gospel. And enamored. With your grace. So that we might begin to see the world as you see it.

And love those who are around us. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Ordinary

Ordinary

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

Alright, good morning. Grab your Bibles, go to John chapter 17. Today's going to be a little bit different. We're starting a new series. This whole series may feel a little different to us. John chapter 17 is on page 527, if you have one of these white Bibles.

We're going to get there eventually. We're not going to start there this morning. And the reason this series is going to feel a little different, most of the time, or I would say the majority of the time, which I guess that means the same thing, we just walk through larger sections of Scripture. We'll walk through a whole book of the Bible. We just got finished walking through three chapters in Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount. And even when we're doing a more, we're not actually going to walk through a whole book, we'll do like we're going to do in a couple of weeks or a couple of months when we're going to start in the summer going through Psalms.

And we're just going to park in one large section of text and just study it and talk about what it tells us, even as we're just kind of bouncing around because we're not going to walk through the whole book of Psalms because that would take a really long time for us. But today what we're going to do, we're actually starting a new series where we're going to look more at concepts that are found in the Bible, and we're going to be bouncing around a little more. So if you're used to us going to one place, staying there, walking through what it has to say, this series may be a little bit different, but we're still teaching biblical things. We're just going to have to look around a couple of different places to see it.

So I tell you that to tell you it's going to be a minute before we get to John. Don't start stressing out. You can say that, Dan. We're going to show some other Scriptures on the screen here in a minute. But as we get started with this series, I want to talk about a concept that I think will help us think through this.

There's memes on the Internet. For those of you who don't Internet very often, a meme is a picture with some words over it. There's memes about you had one Job, and when I used to spend more time on Twitter, I used to follow a Twitter account that was you had one Job. And basically it's just you take a picture of something where somebody messed up something that seemed pretty simple. You put you had one Job on it, and boom, you're a memest. You have made a meme.

But I want to show a few of them to us this morning as we get started. I like this one. And I can just imagine. I want to see the person who actually drove up and stopped at that gate because you can be sure it is the same person that would raise their hand at the end of class and say, you forgot to check our homework. That's who stops there. That gate is accomplishing nothing.

There's another one. I like this one. It pretty much sums it up itself there. The next one. Isn't that great? Like, I don't know which side was done first, but they had to be dodging something.

Or at some point he was like, look, I'm going to draw a picture and just started just driving around. And I don't know the rules there. Do you have to go around it? This one I like. You have to be trilingual to get this one. I guess technically he had two jobs.

Either way, didn't get him accomplished. This one, that's our second to last one here, came in first place. I think it makes you feel a little bit better because it rhymes with first. It's still third. And then this one, which is a little bit eerie. Unless you're going to culinary school, that's kind of scary.

But basically the concept with these, you had one Job, is it was a simple thing. There was just one thing you were supposed to do and you messed it up. And the truth is, that's kind of the church. Not that we've messed it up, but we have one Job. There's one thing that we're called to do as God's people. We have one Job.

Matthew 28 says it this way. This is Jesus. He's come. He's lived. He's walked with his disciples for three years. He's been training them.

They've been walking through life with him. He has been brutally murdered on a cross. He was wrapped up, buried in a tomb, dead. Three days later, he rises again, fulfilling all of the Old Testament promises, fulfilling the promises he had been making to his disciples and offering free grace and forgiveness to all those who would place faith in him. And then he takes his disciples and he says this. He tells them, go therefore and make disciples.

So he's talking to disciples and telling them to make disciples. So he's saying, go make people like you. A disciple is someone who knows Jesus and follows Jesus. So he says, you disciples, go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. That means that they would place their faith in Jesus and be baptized in his name, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, meaning teach them how to follow in normal life. Teach them how to walk with me.

And behold, I'm with you always to the end of the age. So this is called the Great Commission. And this is where Jesus takes his followers and says, here's your job. Be disciples who make disciples. Now, everything that we're called to do rolls up into this one command. Now, there's a lot, but we really have one Job.

Be disciples who make disciples. Know, love, follow Jesus and help other people do that. Believe and follow and help other people do that. Train them, teach them, share the gospel with them, tell them about the free forgiveness and grace offered through Christ and his vicarious death and resurrection on our behalf. That we would see and savor Christ and all of his goodness and all of his glory and that we would want others to know it. And in Acts chapter 1, Jesus says it, that he says you're going to be my witnesses, meaning that you're going to go proclaim this news of what I've accomplished to, and he says to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

That's his call to us. In 2 Corinthians, Paul says it this way, that all this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. So what he's saying is that God in Christ was re-inviting the world back into a relationship with him. That Jesus was overcoming our sin that had separated us from God. Some of you maybe in here in this room are saying, I don't know how to, like, what do I have to do to be close to God? The truth is there, your sin stands in the way of you being reconciled to him, but that God through Christ made a way.

He re-invited us into a relationship with God. He reconciled us. And then Paul says he gave us the ministry of reconciliation, meaning that the church has now been called to go tell people this, to be involved in bringing people back to God. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins, trespasses against them, and entrusting to us, the church, the message of reconciliation. In this passage it says, therefore we're ambassadors, meaning we represent God to the world. In Romans 1, Paul says it this way, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship.

So he's specifically talking about the apostles. That would be the disciples and Paul. He's saying we've received grace, meaning he doesn't hold our sins against us. And we've received apostleship, meaning we've been intentionally sent into the world. That's what an apostle is, is a sent one. So he's saying we've received grace, free forgiveness, Jesus' work on our behalf, and sentness through Jesus.

And the truth is you could say that about the whole church, that we've, all Christians have received grace, and been commissioned, been sent, into the world. And then he says why? To bring about the obedience of faith, so that people would believe and follow Jesus, that they would, they would be disciples who make disciples, that they would be baptized, that they would therefore obey everything he's commanded. That's what he's saying. The obedience of faith for the sake of his name, that's Jesus, among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. This is our job.

This is the call to the church, to be disciples who make disciples, for the sake of Jesus' name, and his glory, among all nations. That's all people groups. So Jesus says go therefore, baptizing them, and make disciples of all nations. That's what we're supposed to do. That's the church's Job. That's what we've been called, commissioned, and equipped for.

And it's revolutionary, and eternal, and spectacular, that people would come to know Christ, place faith in him, and have their eternities altered, through his work, and his salvation, and his name, for his glory, that he's accomplished for us on the cross, and offered us free forgiveness. This is what we're supposed to do. That we believe that sin has broken the world, that it's marty, that it's wrecked shop, but that Jesus did not sit far away from us, but joined us in order to rescue us. That God in Christ was reconciling, bringing the world back to himself. And now, we're called into that.

That if you belong to Jesus, you've got one Job. It can be complex at times, it can be difficult at times, it's going to be a lifelong adventure, but it is to be a disciple, who makes disciples. And we see in the book of Acts, there's something in us, that calls us to this. In the book of Acts, you read where they catch a few of the disciples, they tell them, don't proclaim the name of Jesus anymore. The disciples say, we're going to do what God tells us to. Which I love that response.

Later, they catch those same disciples and say, I thought we told you not to proclaim the name of Jesus. And then they beat them. And the disciples leave, excited. They rejoice. It's a celebration. They walk out of their beating, and I can just assume, if they weren't so sore, they would have chest bumped.

And they are excited, that they received the glory and the honor, to be beaten for the name of Christ. And they tell them at one point, we're going to do what God tells us to, because there's no other name under heaven, by which men can be saved. We're not, like there's nothing else for us to do. There's at one point, they catch some of the disciples, they drag them into a different part of the world, at this point. And they say, these are the men, who've turned the world upside down. And if you've been around the church for a while, our church, in Christianity, grew up in the church, maybe you've read books, like David Platt's Radical.

Maybe you've listened to sermons, that call this forth in you. Maybe there's, there have been times, where you've read your Bible, or you've been reading through the book of Acts, and there's something in you, that says, I want this. You hear about missionaries, and you think, is that what I'm supposed to do? Is that what I'm called to? There's something in you, there's a fire in you, and at times, it's like someone takes billows, and pumps it, and just, it swells up in you. And there are times, where you look at your job, and you look at your life, and you say, is this, is this what I'm supposed to be doing?

You get off of a two hour long conference call, you hang up the phone, and you think, is this how I'm going to spend my life? You, you spend a week in classes, a semester in classes, and then you think, is this what I'm going to do? Am I not called, built for, more? There's some sort of internal longing, because God has equipped his church, and commissioned his church for this. There's a quote, from the Bourne Identity, I think that's the first one, it's the first Bourne movie, that I think kind of resonates with me, in this picture. He's, he's sitting, he doesn't know who he is at this point, he's a, he's some sort of like, assassin guy, and so like, on a park bench at one point, some dude tries to touch him, and he just like, kills three people, and then he has to run away.

So there you go, you're pretty much caught up, with the movie at that point. But he doesn't know who he is, he's lost his memory, but he has all these skills, and he looks at somebody with him, and he says, I can tell you the plate Numbers, of six cars in the parking lot. I can tell you that our waitress, is left handed, and that the guy sitting at the counter, weighs 215 pounds, and knows how to handle himself. I can tell you, that the best place to find a gun, is in the gray pickup truck outside, and that at this altitude, I can run flat out for half a mile, before my hands start to shake. And then he says, I don't know how I know that.

And he says, how on earth can I know all of that, and not know who I am? And there's part of that, that resonates with me, because there are these moments in life, where it just feels like, aren't I supposed to be doing something else? Isn't there something I'm supposed to do more? Shouldn't there? You hear a sermon about, or you read in the Bible, where it says that, somebody found a treasure in a field, and they sold everything they had, because it was so valuable to them, and you just kind of sit before God, and say, God, I want that for me. I want to so love you, and your kingdom, that this makes sense to me, that I would sell everything, that I would give up everything, that I would join you in everything for this.

There's something in us, when it says, these are the men, who've turned the world upside down, that go, I want to turn the world upside down. I believe that's infused in us, in Christ, and maybe you go longer periods of time, before you have that feeling, maybe you've never really had that feeling, but I think, as Christians, it's something that happens naturally, and normally at times, where that gets stirred up in our soul. So my question, for us as the church, as those who have been commissioned by Jesus, and have one Job, how's it going? How are we doing? Do you feel, after this past week, like a world flip upside downer?

Do you feel like this past month, I'm a world changing agent, for the kingdom of God? I think for most of us, we have these moments, where we feel this tension, we feel this call, we feel like, is this all I'm supposed to be doing? Is this all that there is? And there are places where we're serving, and working, and trying, but there's, it just feels like, I feel like I'm supposed to be doing more, and I think a lot of times, we feel like, I really want that, but normal life has gotten in the way. So I want to be a missionary, I want to live my life for his kingdom, but I'm going to, I got to pay back student loans first.

Yes, Jesus and his mission, but it's going to have to be week after next, because I got finals. Well, then I'm going to be on vacation for two weeks. Three weeks, three, four weeks from now, that's when I'll be freed up to have time. Some of you are saying, if I could just get my child to sleep at night, all night, then I'll have the mental capacity to do this. Right now, I'm doing great, just to not shout at my spouse, every second of every day, because I have zero mental, maybe some of you are saying, once my kids get out of the house, once they're in elementary school, some of you are saying, no, no, no, once they quit playing sports, some of you are saying, no, no, no, it's once they move away, and I'll have to see them twice a year, then I'll have the freedom, then I'll have the capacity, then I'll have the room, to actually be a part of God's mission.

Some of you are saying, yeah, I really want that, I want to join him in this mission, I know this is what we're called to do, I've heard this a thousand times, but I'm working really hard right now, to pay my light bill, and my water bill. It feels so often, like ordinary life, has gotten in the way, of this extraordinary call, that God's placed on us. That we're supposed to be actively at work, to see people's eternity changed. You know, so often people, people go to work, they fight, they labor, for someone's future on earth, so they'll argue with you, about saving money, or they'll argue with you, about the goodness of an education, and we actually, have been commissioned by God, to go to work, and to fight, and to labor for eternity.

The ultimate destination, for people in a place, where this life is about this big, and eternity keeps going, and going, and going, and going, and there's something, that feels like, I know that matters, and I know it's important, but life gets in the way, if I'm honest with y'all, at my house right now, we have a two year old, a lot of days, it feels like the main goal was, did he eat something, that resembled food? Did we brush his teeth? Is he wearing pants? Like if we can do those things, it was a successful day. And by the time, we finally get that boy in bed, he's not asleep, he's just in there, and the door is closed.

It's just exhausting, and all I know is, I'm going to go to sleep, and do that the next day. And for a lot of us, it feels like that's life. Like we're just, I'm just fighting to get, get his teeth brushed, get his pants on him, there's a lot of screaming, and a lot of crying, and that's just me and his mom. And this is the best we can do right now. I want to tell you all two stories. Well, I want to tell you a story, and then a couple of stories to kind of follow that up as we think about that this morning.

There was a Scottish guy named John G. Patton. He was in the mid-1800s. He felt called to go be a missionary to the New Hebrides Islands off the coast near Australia, but he was in Scotland. He felt called to go do this. There's islands where cannibals were, and part of his story, and I'm kind of paraphrasing this, he's telling people he's raising money, he's trying to raise support to go be a missionary there, and he has one of the pastors, elders of his church say, there are cannibals.

You're going to be eaten by cannibals. Wrote that to him in a letter. And he responds in a letter, basically, sir, with the utmost respect I have for you. You are on up in age, here soon to pass away, be placed in a box, be placed in some dirt, and eaten by worms. And whether I shall be eaten by worms or cannibals, I tell you the truth, I really don't care, as long as I get to spend my life for Christ and his glory. That for me is when billows hit the flame in my soul that I'm like, yes.

That's so beautiful. I hope I one day get to say, I don't care if I'm eaten by worms or cannibals, I'm just going to slide it into conversations where it doesn't even make sense. Like, it's so good. He goes. In his first year, he buries his wife that went with him, his children that went with him because of sickness. Spends the time perfectly alone on an island where everybody hates him.

There's a time in his life where he has to hide in a tree because some cannibals were trying to catch him. Had they killed him, it was very likely he would have gotten eaten. I don't know if at that point if he cared still or didn't care still. It says that he prayed and in that moment he felt closer to God hugging that tree than he had felt anywhere else. Eventually, some people on the island began to become Christians. Eventually, through God's providence, grace, and work of His Holy Spirit, the entire island comes to Christ.

So there was a guy in Scotland halfway around the world who felt called to go do this, was unwilling to say no, travels to an island he knew very little about, and sees it ultimately come to Christ. If that doesn't light your fire, your wood may be wet. Like that is an exciting Jesus at work story. I want to tell you another one. There was a lady who's part of our church family who moved to South Carolina from Iowa. Her name is Dawn.

She went to get her hair cut. There's a lady in our church family named Kelly who is very nice and talkative and invited her to come hang out with our church. Said, you should come. Oh, you're new. You don't know anybody. You should come hang out with our church.

Our church is so welcoming and loving and our community groups are great. And she said it all in a very clear and compelling way. And Dawn thought, no, no thank you. First of all, I'm sure y'all seem nice. I'm willing to bet you're all terrible. She's pretty close on that one.

We are sinners, but Jesus is at work in us. But she, by God's grace, has short hair and so she has to get her hair cut every five weeks, which I had to ask, like how often do you get your hair cut? Because of my hair, I have to cut it like every two weeks so it starts looking really weird. But like my wife goes once a quarter or something like that. I can't really keep up with it. But by God's grace, she has short hair, has to get it cut every few weeks and Kelly Weed does not stop inviting her.

Dawn does not stop not accepting those invitations. Eventually, Dawn felt like, okay, maybe I should give this a shot and I'm pretty sure Kelly will never shut up and I don't want to have to get a new haircut or a person. Sorry, Kelly, I couldn't think of the name right then. Stylist. And so Dawn comes. Starts hanging out.

Eventually starts hanging out with a community group and places her faith in Christ and has her eternity changed because she moved to South Carolina and had to get a haircut. There's a guy in our community group named Mike who hung out at a video game store, met a girl who worked there. Eventually, he had some stuff going on in life and asked her, you know of any churches? And she said, yes, mine. So he started hanging out.

He placed his faith in Christ. I got to spend some time last week studying the book of Colossians with him and I asked him, what was your take on spiritual stuff before you became a Christian, before you started hanging around? And he said, oh, nothing. I was like, did you believe there's a God or anything? He's like, no, that always sounded kind of stupid. I think bogus may be the word he used.

Bogus. It sounded bogus. And I was like, okay. But then you started hanging out, started believing there was a God, started believing that he had joined us on earth as Christ, had died for our sins and that you could have forgiveness and salvation through him. And he said, yep. Now, neither of those stories, unfortunately, have the pop and sizzle of cannibals.

I don't know how often Kelly went to work in absolute danger for her life and had to learn how to use her scissors as a weapon. I'll be glad to share some of those stories later. Hanging out at a video game store sounds so nondescript. And God, in his act of grace and sovereignty, was using it to change the eternity of people who live right here in our city and are now part of our church family. I think we're tempted to say, well, John G. Patton led a whole island to Christ.

And I would argue, no, he probably didn't. He led some people to Christ and then a whole bunch of fishermen led other fishermen to Christ and a whole bunch of islanders who were building nets. And they began to, I don't know what happens on islands a whole lot, but I've watched Moana recently. So something with coconuts, coconut getters, began to lead other coconut getters to Christ and that the whole island became to Christ through a whole bunch of normal people being Christians in their normal lives and pursuing their families. Now God had to use John G.

Patton to maybe set the spark. But we would say, yeah, but my life's so normal, it's so ordinary. And my question to you is, how much did God's grace have to go to work to save Mike and Dawn just as much as it would have to save anybody on that island? And how much did Jesus have to spill his blood to affect how much of an eternity in all of those stories? And it's the same. And here's what we're going to look at as we walk through this series is that God intends to use our ordinary, everyday lives for his spectacular, extraordinary purposes.

That God intends to use our ordinary, everyday lives, cutting grass, having hobbies, going to work, hanging out at a playground. He intends to use all of our normal to see eternities changed in the lives of those around us because that's what he's always done. John chapter 17. Told you we'd get there. This is Jesus praying the night before he's going to go to the cross. He's praying for his disciples.

We're going to pick up in verse 15. I do not ask that you take them out of the world so that I there is Jesus. The you is God, the father, and them is the disciples. So he's saying, I, Jesus, don't ask that you, the father, take the disciples out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. So the intention for his disciples is not that they would escape the world, but that they would be protected in the midst of the world.

That you keep them from the evil one. It's the enemy that's actively at work to see people not come to faith. They are not of the world, meaning that they have tasted, believed, in Christ and his gospel and that they have been transformed into having eternal life so they belong to him just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them, that means change them, grow them, build them up in the truth. Your word is the truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. and for their sake, I consecrate myself, meaning I'm going to the cross, that they may be sanctified in truth.

I do not ask for these only, these men that were with him right then, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. If you are a Christian, Jesus just prayed for you. He's at work praying for you. That those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. Jesus takes his disciples and says, I'm sending you into the world just as I've been sent into the world. And I'm praying for you that y'all would be a team, that you would be one, that you would be in me as I'm in the Father so that the world will come to know that I've been sent, will come to believe the truth of the gospel.

But I'm sending you the same way I was sent. After this, Jesus leaves. He is crucified. He's buried in a tomb. He rises again victoriously and we're told in John chapter 20 that he shows up in a house where the disciples are which terrifies them. He shows them the holes in his hand and his side and then he says this, Peace be with you as the Father has sent me even so I am sending you.

That is what Jesus is doing. He's saying, as I was sent, you're sent. So I think it's fair for us to ask how was Jesus sent. Let's just make a few observations about the way in which he was sent. Most of Jesus' life was unspectacular. He lived in a rural town to poor parents.

Angel showed up at his birth. I'll give you that. But he was born in a barn so it's got to even out somehow. He lived his life working. He at one point goes back to his own hometown and he's doing miracles and teaching things and they're like, Isn't this the carpenter or the carpenter's son? Like, we know this guy.

So for most of his life he seemed like a normal kind of unspectacular, maybe gracious, maybe loving, maybe really good, obedient son, but he wasn't doing miraculous things. And then even in his three years of walking with his disciples, he performed miracles. He went actively at work to proclaim the gospel in so many beautiful ways and tangible ways, but a lot of his time was spent walking and talking and eating, sharing meals with people. One of the main issues that the religious leaders had against Jesus was that he partied too much. They accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton. Now he didn't party too much, but it sure looked like he almost did.

Because there was on a regular basis he was at somebody's house eating, spending time with them, celebrating, that he walked in the normal rhythms of life, that God, when he sent Jesus, sent him to be a human. The Son of God could have just cracked the sky open. He could have shown up like a lightning bolt. And instead he shows up like a baby and then lives his life in so many normal ways. It's surprising how much of Jesus' life was normal and ordinary given the fact that he was the Son of God. He had a surprising amount of a normal, ordinary life given the fact that he was the Son of God and we're sent in the same way which means move in, wear the clothes, speak the language, take part in the celebrations, be a normal person in normal life, actively, intentionally working that for God's glory and his name and his fame among the nations.

That's what we're called to do. Jesus did radically call us to allegiance to his name above all else that we would believe that every penny, every ounce of energy, every amount of money we spent for his name and his glory was worth it. And he does commission his disciples to go out into the world but as they go out into the world and people come to Christ they start up churches and say y'all stay right here and keep pursuing the city that's here. Some of you are meant to sell everything you have, to come up on stage one day like we're going to get to with Chris Romalia soon who is a friend of ours and talk about the place that you're going to be among the poor, to be among the hated, to be among those that hate you and we're going to pray for you and we're going to hand you dollars and we're going to send you out.

Some of you are meant to stay in the same job you have for the next 20 years being a disciple who makes disciples in the normal life where God's already placed you. See, I think we're called because we're sent as Jesus was sent into normal life. I think we're sent with a life apologetic. Apologetics is the field of argument where we give reasons to believe so that you'll have things like someone has a good reason why it's very likely that the world was created by a creator rather than just exploded out of nothing and there'll be arguments for these sort of things but we as the church are given a life apologetic meaning that as you live your normal life around the people around you your life bears testimony and gives a reason for faith. that the people around you begin to see you believe that this is real to you that the way you spend your money and your time and your effort and your energy and the way you neighbor and the way that you work and the way you raise your kid points to your love for Jesus and his gospel.

That's why so much of the New Testament is spent writing to household managers and household servants and moms and dads and husbands and wives and how to interact with the government and whether or not you should pay your taxes. If everyone was supposed to sell everything and go somewhere else the New Testament would read like why do you still have a job? Why are you still married? Run away! But it's written and so much of the bulk of the New Testament is taken up with here's how to have a marriage that points to Christ.

Here's how to spend your time and work in a way that points to Christ. Here's how to spend your money in a way that points to Christ. Here's how to actively live a life so that those around you see Jesus. The third way Jesus I think models this for us is that he lived a life of intentional invitation. He used to live the life of intentional invitation that he was constantly calling people to come be around him because ultimately his entire life was the intentional invitation of God to humanity for us to have a relationship with him again that we were designed to be God's children and we broke that and ran from that.

That's why whenever anybody says well we're all God's children the Bible says no that's actually not true. That was the intent but we've all run from the household. But that Jesus came so that God could adopt us again so that he could welcome us back in that we could become sons and daughters again. That Jesus' entire life was an intentional invitation. That God intends in our lives as we are sent as Jesus was sent into normal everyday stuff he intends to take your ordinary life and do extraordinary things with it. That's the point of the series title.

See what we did there? That's the intent. That your mundane that your simple and small would be used by God to change lives. And just think about your life if you're a Christian how did you become a Christian? Think about this for a second if you would say no I believe without a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ died for me and that that truth has altered my eternity. How many of you grew up on an island as a cannibal?

How did you become a Christian? Think about this for a second if you would say no I believe without a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ died for me and that that truth has altered my eternity. How many of you grew up on an island as a cannibal? How many of you just went to a normal middle school and had another student who was 13 years old who would not quit inviting you to a youth group because they had pizza and cute boys and eventually you heard the gospel

And it clicked. How many of you it was a co-worker who just you could tell that they loved you and that was weird for you at first until the day when your life hit the wall and they were the first person you thought of to call. How many of you it was a co-worker who invited you and invited you and invited you and invited you to the point that you thought I might just have to quit this job and you ran out

Of excuses so eventually you started hanging out and at some point it clicked and Jesus saved and rescued your soul and how many of you would look back if someone said tell me how you came to Christ you'd say nothing really to it nothing that special I just had a friend and you've just said my eternity was changed through some ordinary stuff that's what Jesus intends to do there's a story in Ezekiel 47 where Ezekiel the prophet

Is taken and he's getting to see a vision and there's an angel walking around with him and the angel's measuring everything and telling him showing him the temple and he's measuring everything and so a lot of this vision is taken up with Ezekiel being like and this is how big this room was and this is how big this room was and so when you're reading it it's hard sometimes to like keep staying focused on what we're looking at here but in Ezekiel 47 the angel takes Ezekiel out of the temple

And he's measuring the outside of the temple and they come to the side of the temple where a trickle of water is running out underneath one of the doors it's a trickle if you say that a lot it becomes where it doesn't mean anything but it's a fun word to say it trickles it's just a small amount of water like you kind of turned a faucet on like if you took a water bottle and you were out somewhere and you had to wash your hands so you couldn't do if you just turned it up that would be too much so you just trickle some on your hand

To get some of the dirt off maybe some of y'all have never had to do that but that's a thing it's a small amount of water coming out from under the door which is weird because it shouldn't be doing that but it's coming out of the temple and what we learn in this vision is this is a picture of what God's going to do so he's reset up his temple and there's a trickle of water coming out and then what we're told is that the angel says come on we aren't actually told that he says that but he somehow says let's go and water's trickling out

And they walk 500 yards this way and then the angel says stop and they walk across the water and when they walk across this water it's ankle deep now that is shocking and none of us are shocked so I'll explain why that's shocking trickles of water don't turn into ankle deep water without more water being added into it so a river becomes a river because of tributaries which is extra creek water runoff

Rain this is a trickle of water that has turned into ankle deep water this is shocking if you took your water hose and laid it at the top of a hill and just turned it on the amount of water would never get greater than the amount coming out of the water hose the ground's going to soak it up it would get wet but as long as it's a hill it's no point turning into a river and what we see is a trickle of water coming out and it's suddenly ankle deep

They walk 500 more yards they walk across and it's knee deep they walk 500 more yards they walk across it's waist deep they walk 500 more yards and they can't cross it and the angel looks at Ezekiel and says do you see this and then we're told that that river begins to wherever it goes it turns salt water into fresh water which means it brings life and that there are trees that begin to grow alongside of it and the tree of life grows alongside of it and the leaves are for the healing of the nations

And that those trees bear fruit that bring joy and life we're given this same picture at the end of the bible where there's a river running out of the city of God and the tree of life is there and the leaves are for the healing of the nations and what we're shown in that picture in Ezekiel is that what's going to start so small as a little Jewish man being nailed to a cross where trickles of blood run down and a little group of men who fell apart after that happened but he brings them back together and there's only about a hundred of them

Men and women that he sends out to be his church is going to become an unstoppable river because this was God's intent all along that something so mundane so simple so small so unnoticeable was going to miraculously spectacularly extraordinarily turn into something that's unstoppable and the truth is he's designed that to happen in our lives that we would join him in the normal parts of life and see eternities changed that God would take your ordinary

And do something spectacular and glorious and eternal with it that he would take the simple daily parts of your life and do something amazing see we believe if you're Christians that sin has messed up the world that there's brokenness and pain disease fear depression destruction loneliness and that we're commissioned by God to be his active agents to bring the gospel to bear

In all of those situations to see people freed and loved and welcomed and one of the ways we do that is we live normal ordinary lives of intentional invitation and so I just I want to put this out for us this morning as we think about this if all the Christians in our church all the people in community groups would intentionally build a relationship and invite one person into your life we would see the size of our church family double

If every Christian in our church family all of our members all the people who are in community groups would intentionally build a relationship with one person begin to invite them into our lives we would potentially see the size of our church family double we'd see people come to know Christ we'd see people welcomed in we'd see eternity changed through simple things like hey we're having a cookout you want to come

Through simple things like hey we're going bowling you want to come simple things like you want to go grab a cup of coffee helping someone cut their grass getting to know your neighbors there would be eternities changed now for some of you who've been around for a while you maybe just felt weird inside and here let me explain why when I said we'd see our church family double some of you went

Not because you don't want our church family to double but for some reason that sounds really church growthy and what's the point want to see just a whole bunch of people in this room there's some sort of skepticalness to you and that has to do with how we got started here's what I mean we started talking about this concept I started thinking about this concept I hated that sentence so some of that comes from me when we got started

As a church we intentionally started with eight people terrible church planning strategy by the way if you read any kind of church planning strategy stuff they see you need at least about 75 to be a church that exists and lives so if you get online and just google that they'll say don't start without 50 don't start without 75 your church won't make it we started with eight I was leading a community group I had never done that before

I've never been a pastor before I'm just winging it some of y'all think he's really bad at this I'm learning on the job you guys when we got started there was just eight of us and all we said was we wanted to be a family we wanted to love each other we wanted to know each other we wanted to pursue Christ in normal life and we were only willing to multiply groups and we weren't going to do anything on a Sunday where we invited anybody in until we had something real to ask them to join we did not want to

Open up put out signs have banners put out mailers get a bunch of people in a room and say Jesus is good we'll see you next week we wanted to say Jesus is good come see what that looks like in a bunch of people as they try to live a normal life changed by him we wanted to have something real to invite people into and the truth is we do you and your community group we have something real to invite people into now here's the other thing

That's real for me when I think about okay build a relationship with someone and invite them in and our church will grow we'll see more people become church family with us and some of that feels a little bit like we want a really big church like the point of it is a really big church but if I actually will think about my community group over the past couple of years and you would tell me that that means there's another Don you would tell me that there's another Mike

That there's another Russ that there's another Jack that there's another Ashley that there's another Quincy I'll sell out for that if you could look at your community group and know who wasn't there two years ago and say you mean to tell me if we hustle and grind and if I pray and if I'm intentional and if I open up my door and my house and my life to somebody we'll get another one of these we'll have another Tony yeah let's just do that and I know part of me and I've talked with my group about this before part of me knows

Things will have to change if we grow groups will have to multiply some of the people you've been walking through life with you won't get to see as much anymore and I've told my group the only thing that helps me with that because that hurts and that in some ways is so terrible to me to think that half of my group would have to be somewhere else as we invited people in and that by inviting people in and seeing people come to know Christ would mess up the great thing that we have and the family that we have right now but the truth is

I've got to love what we have so much to be willing to invite people in but the one thing that helps me get over that is that all the little tables we share right now are just a picture and a hint and a glimpse of the table we'll get to share in the kingdom you see the picture of this river it keeps going and we're told in Revelation that it's there in the kingdom and that there's going to be a wedding supper of the Lamb where Jesus takes his bride

To himself and I can't help but feel in that moment some of the people that I used to be in a community group with some of the people that I used to get to walk in life with that I don't get to see as much anymore that I'm going to get to see them as they sit at that table next to someone else who wouldn't have been there if our group hadn't have multiplied as I get to see them at that table as I sit with people who wouldn't have been there if we hadn't have been on our hustle there's going to be a moment where we make eye contact

And we're going to know without a shadow of a doubt every ounce was worth it every bit that we were willing to leverage our ordinary lives that we were willing to risk being made fun of that we were willing to put ourselves out on a ledge to make an invitation every time we made up a thing so that we could invite people into it all the money we spent bowling just so we could invite somebody the time we worked out a thing to go to Dave & Buster's

And invite people in and none of the people we invited came and we still had to spend all that money at Dave & Buster's that's a true story and it made me sad to tell it just then it's going to be worth it it's going to be absolutely worth it as we get to see people brought into his kingdom if every one of us would begin to pray intentionally and invite intentionally into our lives I'm not saying Sunday morning some we got people in our church

Who came the first time on a Sunday morning and became Christians so we're not anti that y'all know we every Sunday open the Bible and talk about Jesus you can invite anybody you want to here we're going to tell them about Jesus some of the people you're building with this room terrifies them and that wouldn't be the best invitation that wouldn't be intentional some people you're building with the first thing they need to be invited to is your community group we've had people who came first

To what they thought was just a Bible study it ended up being it's more than that and they eventually became Christians that's a great invite some people that's terrifying want to come to a house with some people who study the Bible that you don't know no some people your first invite is hey you want to sit at this table in the break room when we get our break today some of you it's hey

You want to walk down here and get a cup of coffee some of you it's hey a few of my friends and I get breakfast every week some of it's hey a few of us go get wings at 50 cent wing night at D's and that's the first invite but the goal is to see somebody walk in life with you so that maybe now maybe a year from now maybe five years from now as you built a genuine friendship and something happens

In their life where Jesus begins to pull on them by his grace he started something now so that an eternity is changed and there's one more voice gathered around the throne proclaiming the goodness of Jesus and his excellency forever the band's going to come back up if we begin to be intentional and invitational into our lives we'll get to see more people invited into the family Jesus' family that we get to be a part of all of the things that you love

About our church about your community group about how this gets to work are offered through the gospel to everyone in our city and most of them do not have this and do not know him here's what we're going to do for the next four weeks we're just going to talk about how do we do this next week we'll get to talk about normal everyday rhythms of life and how to use them intentionally for the kingdom the following week we're going to talk about how to use your house that every single one of us lives in a home and it's our most paid for asset and God has actually designed it

To be a weapon for his kingdom we're going to talk about the reasons why you don't want to do that and then why it'll actually be good the following week we're going to talk about how to share the gospel how to actually tell someone about Jesus clearly lovingly helpfully and then we're going to talk about how we get to do all of this together with our community groups I would encourage you not to miss if you do to catch up online so that you can walk through this in our groups with your community group

I would encourage you if you've just been hanging out a little while and you're a Christian and you want to be a part of Jesus' mission hang out for the next couple of weeks maybe join a community group just for the next four weeks so you can walk through this and see how we're going to try to apply this and be used by God in all of our normal and some of you God has been stirring in your soul to bite off way more than you can chew and I would encourage you to do that he's been stirring in your soul the billows have been blowing

For a while for you to sell everything and go on a mission somewhere for you to maybe lead a group maybe for you to say I think I'm called to lead a community group and I know that may not happen for another year and I'm terrified of that because from what I understand it's really difficult to walk with a bunch of sinners through life and to help them and pastor and shepherd them and I would tell you yes it is and it's beautiful and you'll get to see more of Jesus in it

And maybe some of you that's what you need to do but all of us are called to leverage what we have for God's kingdom and he'll take our normal our mundane our folding clothes our going to the park with our dog and use it for his spectacular purposes and I'm excited to see him do it among us as we get to love and know him more y'all pray with me God we ask that you'd use our ordinary and that we wouldn't waste it help us not to make excuses that keep us from taking all the things you've given us

And using them for your kingdom God I pray for the people in this room right now who've been postponing joining your mission that you would shatter their excuses that over the next few weeks you'd help us to see how we get to use our normal our ordinary for your kingdom I hope over the next few weeks you'd help us see the things we have to let go we have to give up we have to say no to in order to join you in your mission and God we praise you for all the ordinary that's happened to completely change our lives

For the better and for your glory in Jesus name Amen