Re:Member Core Practices I

Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.

Transcript

Good morning, My name is Spencer, I'm one of the pastors here. We're going to be mostly in Acts chapter two today. So you have a Bible. You can turn there now we're going to be in verses 36 through 42. We are in our series called Remember. This is an opportunity for our church to remember and rediscover our membership, commitment and the 14 statements that we commit to as a church. The first seven of those that we've walked through in the last month are the essential elements of the gospel. It's what we believe. Over the last month, as we walked through the seven commandments, we saw that because the triune God of the Bible saw humanity in sin and on a path to hell. God the Father sent Jesus Christ the Son to die on the cross and to rise from the grave to give us faith through grace, sealing us with the Holy Spirit to advance the kingdom until Christ comes to make all things new. So that's the summary of the seven statements and that's the summary of the gospel. That's our hope. And every commitment that we're going to walk through, we're going to take these week by week now, one by one. Every commitment that we're about to walk through, the things that we commit to doing as the church flow out of that hope, meaning that the gospel remains central to the works that God is called to walk in. And that's what we're gonna see over the next seven weeks as we walk through these.

So my son got a birthday gift. I want to grab it and show it to you. He got a birthday gift a couple about two months ago. It's a circuit board. You ever seen these? So he's 8 and he got a circuit board at 8. I was not getting stuff like this because I do not have the mind of my son. He has a mathematical mind in ways that I do not. So he's been taking this. It's got a power source here. And then basically it teaches electricity. So you do a bunch of different designs, a bunch of different circuits. It powers a bunch of different things. And he's been playing with this. And the other day he came downstairs and he was messing with it. He said, hey, it's not working. You can tell he'd spent a lot of time messing with the different circuits and the different designs, getting to do different things and just it's not working. And then he finally, he figured it out. He said, I think the batteries are dead. I was like, oh, but he's eight and he doesn't have the dexterity to pull these out. So I, being the hero father that I was, pried out the old batteries and put the new ones in and then, boom, flipped it on and it was working again. But it's neat. He's been playing with this, and it's been engaging his mind in a lot of different ways. But one of the things that I thought of as I was thinking through the remainder of this sermon series is that if you put all the coolest, neatest designs on this board, it's a fan that attaches to it. It has something that spins off the top. There's all types of neat designs. If you put all the different designs on here, but the batteries aren't working, this is pointless. This is powerless. And the reality is that as we walk through the rest of these commitments, we can have all the neatest and nicest language to talk about the church that we think we're called to be. But if the Gospel isn't central to what we're doing and what we're seeking to live out, it is as dead as a circuit board that doesn't work. It is pointless. It is powerless that all the things that we seek to be as a gospel center and community on mission, if they're not empowered by the Gospel, it is all meaningless and pointless. So what I want us to consider as we walk through each of these commitments is that though these are things that God has called us to be, the Gospel has to still be central. And God empowers us by the power of the Holy Spirit and belief in the Gospel to live out the implications of what it means to be a Christian belonging to a church.

So I'm going to read this 8th commitment with that in mind. And then each week as we read these, the hope is we will continue to remember this as we walk through it. Let me read this eighth commitment. Having placed faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord and been baptized as a believer, I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him, allowing the Gospel to saturate every aspect of my life. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that you would help us as we seek to understand what it means to live out the calling that you've called us as Christians and this church. God, I pray that you would help us as we seek to understand this from the understanding that all this is empowered by you and faith in you. So God help us understand this as we walk through your scriptures in Jesus name. Amen.

All right, so we're going to weave in and out of Acts 2 as we look at this commitment. I'm going to start off in verse 36, but before I do, let me give some context for we're jumping straight into the second chapter of Acts before this. The book of Acts is the early Acts of the Church. Jesus completes his work after the resurrection. He ascends to the right hand of God the Father. And then the Holy Spirit descends, the third member of the Trinity upon the church. And the church begins in Acts 2. And one of the first things that happens is that Peter preaches the Gospel. There's a crowd of thousands of people that he preaches to. I'm preaching from the book of Joel, connecting it to the work of Christ. And this is how he ends his sermon.

> Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:36, ESV)

Peter highlights the reality that though we and those people, some of them there, were not at the cross, they were not the ones shouting for Jesus to be crucified. We, because of our sin, are the ones who put Jesus on the cross. Someone had to pay the penalty for sin. Jesus Christ stands in the way for us. That's what he's highlighting here. And then he says in verse 37,

> Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?" (Acts 2:37, ESV)

So that's the work of the gospel. That message cut their heart. That's the work of belief. They heard the Gospel. They heard about Christ whom they had crucified, and it cut them to the heart. And they're responding in faith. This is what happens when you hear the gospel message, when the Holy Spirit works in our heart to remove the heart of stone and create a heart of flesh to bring us to new life in Christ to be born again. This is the work of what's happening here. Everything we walked through the last month as we looked at the seven commitments, the gospel at work in us changes us. And that's what happens to this crowd of people. And then they respond. Verse 38.

> And Peter said to them, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself." (Acts 2:38–39, ESV)

> And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, "Save yourselves from this crooked generation." (Acts 2:40, ESV)

> So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:41, ESV)

So what we see here is they hear the Gospel, God works in their heart, they believe. And then he says, repent and be baptized. And that right there is the clear pattern that is established in the New Testament. Believe the Gospel, repent and be baptized. So our commitment says, having placed faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord, and been baptized as a believer, we want to believe the Gospel and in response to that belief, enter into baptism. This is what we believe as believers.

Baptism. Baptism for us is a holy sign. Holy meaning set apart. Set apart in a unique way. It's a sign. It means it points to something else, a symbol that points to something else. The baptism is a holy sign that points to the inward change of belief when someone places their faith fully in Christ and they are changed by Him. It is the symbol that says that we are brought from death to life, from old to. Some of the language we use when we do baptisms regularly is it's an outward sign of an inward reality. The baptism doesn't save us. The act doesn't save us, but it declares we already are saved because of what Christ has done in our hearts, that we have trusted in him for our forgiveness of sins and he's covered us. And baptism gets to point to that. And the people hear this. And 3,000 plus people respond to faith in Jesus Christ and are baptized. And what happens here is really the installation. This is the installation of baptism as the ordained practice of just demonstrating that you believe in Jesus Christ. Sometimes we'll call it an ordinance. This is something God has commanded us to do as a holy sign that points to the Gospel and other traditions. It's also called a sacrament. And I'm actually fine with that language as long as we don't take it to the Roman Catholic understanding of sacrament that this is a holy symbol and sign that points to the inward change that has happened in our hearts. And that's the order of what happens in the rest of the Book of Acts. You believe the Gospel and then you respond in.

This goes back to the Great Commission. When Jesus commissions his disciples, he says,

> Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19–20, ESV)

So Peter does this. He preaches the gospel, he makes disciples, and then they enter into the waters and are baptized. And that is the process for the rest of the Book of Acts. Let me hit just a few passages in the rest of the Book of Acts. As you see the Acts of the early church In Acts chapter 8 it says,

> But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. (Acts 8:12, ESV)

Philip is evangelizing to the Ethiopian eunuch. It says,

> Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they went along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, "See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?" And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. (Acts 8:35–38, ESV)

He hears the gospel, he believes, and he enters into the waters and he's baptized. The apostle Paul, formerly known as Saul, when he trusts in Christ, after Christ blinds him on the road to Damascus. It says in Acts 9,

> And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized. (Acts 9:18, ESV)

Scales fell from Saul's eyes, which is his physical regaining sight. But also it points to the inward reality, what's happened in him, that he has eyes to see and believe. And it says he got up and was baptized. Belief, then baptism. This is what Paul inspired by the Holy Spirit in Romans chapter six is getting at when he says in verses three and four,

> Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:3–4, ESV)

That as we come to faith in Christ and we enter into the waters, it's this picture of we were once dead in sin. That's all we baptized literally just means. The Greek word baptizo just means washing immerse in water. And the picture is that you are dead in sin, you come alive in Christ, picturing what has happened in our lives when we trust in him. So that's what we do. We practice. We reference this Romans 6 passage. Even when we are doing baptisms. And it's fun and it's awesome, we love baptism. That's why it's a celebration when we do baptism. If you haven't been here for baptism Sunday, it's serious. We take it seriously. We don't make light of it, but it is not somber, it's celebratory. It isn't toned down. We celebrate what God has done and we clap and we sing and we celebrate. We listen to testimonies. We're moved to tears because baptism is a wonderful, beautiful declaration of how Jesus saves sinners. So that's how we practice baptism in our church. And if you've been a part of our, if you're a member of this church, we've talked about this as making this addition to our membership commitment to clarify our beliefs on this, that we believe in believer's baptism. Now that is different than infant baptism. And if you have questions about that, because we believe in believers baptism, that you place your faith in Christ and then are baptized. But if you have a background like I did, I was sprinkled as a child, you might have questions about what does that mean? How do Presbyterians and Lutherans and, and Episcopalians and other people understand this? We did a whole YouTube podcast called Overtime. It's on our YouTube page for stuff that we don't have time for in the sermon. We'll spend some time in our recording studio downstairs. So Chet and I this week spent some time talking about this and went deep into the subject of baptism. So if you want to know more about that and how that differs from infant baptism and our beliefs on this and really some of the history of how this came about, I would encourage you to listen to that. It will be posted today alongside the sermon.

But this is what we believe that having placed faith in Jesus Christ, we are baptized, declaring the work that Christ has done in us. And the next part of this commitment is I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him, allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of my life. Let me focus on this one part. I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him because Christ has saved us. We get to be in a personal relationship with him. We get to actually know our God, our God. Hear this. He is not a distant deity that from afar demands, works to appease him. Our God is imminent. He's near, he's with us. And he wants us to know him in relationship. And it's good to know someone in relationship and to have the intimacy that's bound up in that, to actually have depth in relationship with someone. Like if you've ever been, have you ever had a really good friendship with someone where all of a sudden you and your friend are in a situation and you both hear a Phrase, just a phrase. And both of you look at each other because that points back to like an inside joke from years ago. And then all of a sudden, like it's a serious situation, so you're trying to keep it together, but you're like both looking at each other. And then you can't look at each other because if you look at each other too long, you're both going to crack up laughing. Listen, those type of friendships are wonderful, but they come through depth. They come through time and investment. Like the type of depth that you see in a relationship between a child and their mother. Some children, they just know their parents so well, they know their mother so well that they know the right phrase they can use just to make them smile. That's depth and that's wonderful. You see it in marriages sometimes that there's. In marriage, sometimes you can have a whole conversation with your spouse without saying a word. I mean, I've been there where all of a sudden the kids are acting crazy and she sees my face and I'm getting stirred up, like I'm about to take one of these out back. I'm about to handle this right now. And then she looks at me and she's like, no, don't. And I'm like, mm, this is about to happen. And then it turns to like a pleading look, like, please don't. We're at my parents house, like they're tired. Like, just, we're about to leave. Can you just like wait until we get out of the house? Like you can have a whole conversation with just looks, but you don't get there without the depth that you've created within that relationship. And it takes time and that takes investment. That takes knowing the other person. If you decided to date someone tomorrow, and then as a part of, you know, the first couple weeks of dating, you just said, hey, look, I've only got about 15, 20 minutes a week for you. We can do that all in one day, like on a Friday, or I can space that out throughout the week. You know, five minutes here, five minutes here, five minutes here. But you kind of choose your own adventure in this. You will be single indefinitely. Because that's not how relationships work. But the reality is that we often will treat our relationship with God like that, where it's just, let me carve out some time. I give you five minutes here, five minutes there. And that's not how we create the depth that God wants from us. God desires us to be in relationship with him. And the more we get to know him, the More wonderful, we see how the goodness of his glory and his attributes and all types of things. Jesus Christ in his ministry in the Gospels makes this appeal over and over again. I'll just give you a few examples.

> Abide in me, and I in you. (John 15:4, ESV)

He looks at his followers and says, abide in me. Live in me and I will abide in you. I will live. I'll remain in you like a branch that flows out of the vine. He says, let's have this together. Then in the Gospel of Matthew, he looks at people who are struggling. He says,

> Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28, ESV)

Then In John chapter 10, he says,

> I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me. (John 10:14, ESV)

and that's a wonderful picture as a shepherd knows his sheep, and the sheep know the voice of their shepherd. We've been in stressful situations with your child and all of a sudden they're in a crowd and they can't find you and you can't find them. But you hear their cry and then your child hears your voice. It's distinct because you know each other. And that's what Christ is saying, like, I know my sheep, my sheep know me. And that's a wonderful invitation that Christ gives over and over again. Our God wants to know for us to know Him. Our God desires us to have an intimate knowledge of Him. But the reality is that we will fill our days with lesser things. When the invitation is there for us to know God, we will pour ourselves into things that do not matter. And the reality is that God wants to be the central moving force in our lives. He wants to be the power source for all the different circuits that flow out of Him. He wants us to know Him. And that's a wonderful invitation. And that's precisely why when the people who hear the sermon at Pentecost from Peter and they place their faith in him and they're baptized, the very next act that we see that they do picks up in verse 42. Here's the response.

> And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:42, ESV)

They sought to know their God. The word is devotion. Devotion. They devoted themselves. They wanted to know God. And there are a few different ways to get listed here. The apostles teaching. This would have been the teachings of Christ that eventually come to be the Gospels. So this is the scriptures that's being pictured here. The breaking of bread and fellowship. This is the fellowship meals they had together would have included the Lord's Supper and prayer. The humbling of ourselves to be dependent upon the Lord through constant communication for him, to him and with him, for every need in our lives. So next week we'll look more at the one anothering that kind of shows up in this breaking of bread and the community that's bound up in that. And that's a wonderful way to know God together. But I want to focus on two of devotion to the apostles teaching, that's devotion to the Word of God and devotion to prayer. Constant communication with God. I want to spend the most of our time left on those two things.

Listen, there are other ways to know God. There are other disciplines. The means of knowing God, worship and singing, fasting, evangelism, silence and solitude, serving the other means of knowing God. But the Word of God and prayer become foundational in the pursuit of actually knowing who our God is. So in fostering a personal relationship, let's focus on that first one, knowing him and His Word. J.I. packer, a theologian, he once wrote a book called Knowing God, which is an excellent book. And in this book he starts off by saying this. He says, for knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a person's heart. That the design of relationship with God is to thrill us to provide maximum enjoyment. He goes on to say, what happens is that the almighty Creator, the Lord of hosts, the great God before whom the nations are as a drop in the bucket, comes to you and begins to talk to you through the words and truths of Holy Scripture. Perhaps you've been acquainted with the Bible and Christian truth for many years and it has meant little to you. But one day you wake up to the fact that God is actually speaking to you you through the biblical message that many of us may be familiar with the Bible may have touch points with it here and there, but what he's pushing on is that God has designed the relationship with him to thrill our soul. And when you begin to understand that fully and how God has revealed Himself in His Word, that these don't just become verses or lessons or life stories or morals or anything. They just become. They're not just disconnected lessons to help us learn facts, but they're actually an opportunity, an opportunity and a medium to know him, to know the God who made all things out of nothing. It is an opportunity to know our God, which when we think about that, I want us to reflectively consider how we spend our days, how we spend each day in light of the opportunity to know God through His Word that many of us will wake up and in the early morning moments, we have the opportunity to look to the Lord, to spend time with him, to meet him in His Word, but how quickly we've trained ourselves to jump to our phones and jump to Instagram or sports scores or anything else. But we have this opportunity to meet with him in His Word. And that's one thing we teach in our church, is that you should set aside time daily to meet with God, to read His Scriptures, to think deeply upon the Scriptures in the morning. And there are some people that's literally just not possible. They cannot wake up early enough, they cannot carve out the time, and they make time in the day later on. But the overwhelming majority of us can make the time in the morning to meet with him, to know him in His Word. And then what we like to push on as well, is not just to take a few minutes in the morning and then we've segmented that off and we've moved on to the rest of our day. But what we teach is also meditation upon His Word. Christian meditation is thinking deeply upon God as He's revealed in His Word. And the invitation is not just to have 10 minutes in the morning, but to think deeply upon God throughout the day, to enjoy him as the day goes on. As Psalm 34 says,

> Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 34:8, ESV)

The Word of God is not meant to be. Hear this. It's not meant to be a granola bar that you quickly unwrap and that you devour and that you discard and you move on from. The Word of God is meant to be like one of those giant jawbreakers, remember those from childhood, like the size of a baseball. The Word of God is meant to be like one of those. Got one of those as a kid, and it was a good time for weeks. You could just sit and savor every layer of it slowly and slowly and slowly. And that's what the Word of God is supposed to be to us, something that we slowly savor throughout the day, all our days. Psalm 1 gives a picture of this. The very first Psalm begins,

> But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. (Psalm 1:2, ESV)

that we should consider the invitation that we have to delight in the law. The law is just another way of saying the word of God, to delight in His Word day and night, throughout the day, from morning to evening, to delight in God through thinking deeply about His Word. And we cannot do that if we apportion 15 minutes of segmented off, just different set aside. But it doesn't actually build depth in a way that builds throughout our days.

Now this means regularly coming to the Lord. What I fear is, and I felt this, I felt this, that the easy distractions of entertaining ourselves to death on things that do not matter, the empty, vapid, worthless pursuits of spending hours of our week on things that do not matter on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Netflix and podcasts and sports and all types of things, when we have the living God who wants us to know him, that we should take an accounting of this, we should consider what has become our primary hope, where our primary energy is gone. And then we should look at our God and how wonderful he is and then repent and to change and to turn back to him and recommit. Yes, I want to end this season, recommit to personal relationship with Christ. And as we take the Lord's Supper in a moment, you'll have the opportunity to be thankful that we have a Savior who continually calls us into that.

And we should be a people of word and a people of prayer as we seek to foster a personal relationship with him. Because God is wonderful and he's worthy of our time and our attention, and we just. We have to see these as means to knowing the God, the infinitely wonderful, amazing God. Like, if you could get 30 minutes with your favorite person in history, your favorite celebrity, how excited would you be? How thrilled would you be? Like, as a kid, if you told me I could have 30 minutes with Peyton Manning, I'd have been stoked, because I loved Peyton Manning. He was my hero. I watch him playing football games. I'm like, he's the best. And then he'd be in commercials. I'm like, he's the funniest. And then he'd be in the game again. He's the best. If I could just have 30 minutes to just hear about his greatness. What I've been thrilled and the reality is, is that we have that regular opportunity that is given to us to meet with God, who is infinitely better than Peyton Manning, who's infinitely better than any being we could meet with. May we be thrilled to meet with our God like this. This is what our God calls us into. I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him. Him allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of my life.

That's what I want to end with, allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of my life. One of the ways that we talk about this regularly is the language of gospel fluency. If you've been a part of our church for any given period of time, you've probably heard it. It's like the greatest hits of Mill City. We use gospel fluency a lot because it's wonderful. And the idea is like, my two youngest children are in a Spanish immersion program, which means that all their math and science is taught exclusively in Spanish. When I say exclusively in Spanish, I mean that's it. I go to parent teacher conferences and they don't speak English. And I'm like, uh huh, yeah, sure, sounds great. I've seen my son approach his teacher outside at the doctor's office and she did not break character. She knows English, she just spoke Spanish. Because they're trying to help them be fluent in Spanish. And the goal is by middle school they'll begin to start to think in Spanish, start to process in Spanish. In fact, I've heard that it's hard for them once they get to middle school to learn math from an English speaking teacher because they've just so thought of numbers in Spanish. And the idea of fluency is that you think in a language, you process in a language, you understand reality in that language, you can even dream in that language. And the picture of gospel fluency is that we be so fluent in the gospel, we so know it deeply in our soul. The way that we process our very days, the way we understand every given situation in life, is through the lens of the gospel. And the reason why it's important to be saturated every aspect of us by the good news of a Savior who came and rescued us. The reason why that's so unbelievably important is because it becomes so vital and necessary for every aspect of life, including all of the difficult ones. So that when you suffer, you're not caught off guard. That when you enter a time of suffering that you just are so fluid. In the Gospel, you know, I know that this isn't. This is painful and this stinks. But God is good. And he's purposed suffering in ways I can't fully understand. But I know that. That he has done this in a way that is for my good. That when you enter into temptation, when sin makes itself enticing and appealing to your flesh, that you have this personal relationship with Christ that's so saturated your soul that you just as soon as it begins, you're just like, I know that my flesh wants this, it desires this. But I also know that Christ is better. And I believe that Jesus is better. And not only did I believe Jesus is better than this sin, I also know that Jesus knows what this feels like because he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. And Hebrews 4 teaches me that he was tempted as I am, and he can sympathize with this. And I will choose him over my sin. That when death comes and hits us square in the face in ways we did not imagine, we're so fluent in the gospel that we just have this eternal mindset that says, I know this is painful, but I also know this is not the way it will be. That when we enter into conflict and we're dealing with conflict in life, that we're fluent in the Gospel in a way that knows that I am going to act like a Christian and I'm not going to just win to get my way here. I'm not just going to try to defeat the other person in the room. That I'm going to do the work of taking out the plank of my own eye so I can see the speck in theirs. And I'm going to reconcile with them. Because that's what Christ calls me to. That when we go through seasons where we experience betrayal, when we experience betrayal or get stabbed in the back or get abandoned or hurt by those we love, we're so fluent that we know that Christ knows what this feels like because he knows what it feels like to have one of his followers who be cared for for three years, sell him out for 20 pieces of silver. That he knows what it's like to have 10 of his friends abandon him and have only one of them stand at the cross. When we're fluent in the gospel and this becomes how we think and how we live, we can handle every aspect of life. We should consider this as individuals. Next Week, we'll spend more time on what it means to consider this as a community. Because it's not just a private journey, it's a corporate journey. It's together. The picture of all of us seeking to be gospel fluent, seeking us to know God individually, but collectively together, leaning on one another as the church as we leave lean on Christ, who is our rock.

But as we close out, let me make this final appeal. I want to talk to the members of our church as we do this remembering as we do our recommitment. I want us to look at this. I want us to consider what it means to place that having placed faith in Jesus, Savior and Lord, and been baptized as a believer, I will seek hear this commitment. I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him, allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of life, my life. To do that, to really consider and take an accounting of our own souls and consider, are we doing this? I felt this. I felt this. That the easy distractions of entertaining ourselves to death on things that do not matter, the empty, vapid, worthless pursuits of spending hours of our week on things that do not matter on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Netflix and podcasts and sports and all types of things, when we have the living God who wants us to know him, that we should take an accounting of this, we should consider what has become our primary hope, where our primary energy is gone. And then we should look at our God and how wonderful he is and then repent and to change and to turn back to him and recommit. Yes, I want to end this season, recommit to personal relationship with Christ. And as we take the Lord's Supper in a moment, you'll have the opportunity to be thankful that we have a Savior who continually calls us into that.

But if. Let me make this last appeal. If you do not have a personal relationship with Christ, if Christianity, if church, if Jesus has always been a mere part of your life, someone you can pick up at some point certain seasons and put away, pick up at certain parts of the week and put away. But you've never actually had this personal relationship I want you to hear so clearly this morning. You are missing out on what it means to have a personal relationship with the God of all joy and beauty and wonder and goodness and glory. And he desires you. He desires you to know Him. And as we take the Lord's Supper in a moment, do not come to the table, but come to start a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us remember what it means to have you in our lives in a way that would compel us back to seeing you as worthy of devotion, so that you might saturate every aspect of our being. For some in this room, that's going to come through faith for the first time. Faith and surrendering to you. For others of us, it's gonna be the joy of repentance, the joy of going to our groups this week and being honest about where we've spent our best energy, where we spend our best moments in the day and our best thoughts and returning to you. But God, we pray you go to work in our hearts in Jesus name. Amen.

We're gonna take the Lord's Supper. I wanna read from Mark 14:22, 25 to prepare our hearts to read receive the Lord's Supper.

> And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." (Mark 14:22–25, ESV)

If you're a Christian, you get to come to the table remembering this sign that points to the gospel that Jesus Christ's body was broken and his blood was shed so that we could have joy and delight and satisfaction through relationship with him. So as you remember your sin and you remember the ways we need to repent joyfully, come to the table remembering our Savior. But if you have not trusted in Christ right now where you sit, I want you to bow your head and I want you to pray and I want you to humble yourself before the Lord and ask to start a relationship with him by trusting that he died on the cross for your sins, by trusting that he conquered death for you at the resurrection and starting anew with him. But when you're ready, come to the table.

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