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Sun, Jun 23, 2024 10AM • 1:03:45SUMMARY KEYWORDSpeople, church, missions, Jesus, god, talking, read, ministry, heard, verses, Paul, holy spirit, work, fasting, pastor, missionaries, disciples, bible, short term mission, lord
Good morning, welcome if you're new here among us. My name is Gene. I serve here at C3 church as your pastor. And I heard a story. This story was about a deacon. Now, if you in church for a while, you'll get this joke immediately, but if you haven't, I'll explain what a deacon is a deacon is a title that you give to somebody in church. It comes from the Greek word servant. We see the first deacons picked acts six. They're picked so that they can serve tables. But it seems that as soon as you give someone the title Deacon, they almost immediately forget what it means. And so, you know, it's kind of a funny thing, and while you may not want to give the title Deacon to a whole lot of people in the church, right? So they forget that it's just kind of a function that you do. It's not who you are. So I heard a story about a deacon, and a deacon was seated next to a foreign missionary at a missions banquet, a church was having to host all these foreign missionaries and stuff. So the deacons kind of a little like confused, because the missionaries not saying anything through the whole dinner, like so no entry point for small talk, nothing like that. And he starts thinking a little and he's like, Well, he is from a foreign country. He doesn't look like me. He's not dressed like me, so maybe he doesn't speak English. So he finds his opening when they serve the food. He says, okay, non verbal signals, right? So universal stuff, like he's eating the food, it's good. So he's like, Hmm, good. A missionary responds, good, hey, I'm getting somewhere. This is good, alright, so each course, he's doing that, right? So get to the coffee, though, the coffee good. The foreign missionaries like, okay, so coffee drinkers here, right? So better in other countries, we get to the ice cream. Good, yes, very good, right? So he's getting somewhere. Well, he was getting somewhere until the foreign missionary, well, he gets up to speak and he gives a speech in perfect English. Well, embarrassing. So he gives a speech, he gets off the stage, and the missionary goes up to the deacon and goes, blah, blah, blah, good. He had a sense of humor. We find ourselves continuing in our twisted scripture series. So just to wrap it up, we doing this for a while now, so most of you get the premise. But if you're new, you know the Christians, we definitely suffer from what I call a verse of the day problem, right? We're not reading the Bible like we would read any other book for the most part, right? Most Christians, I say, because some of you guys do, I do to read it the right way, right? So read longer sections of it, but it's kind of like the fortune cookie thing, right? So you just get what's fed to you and your app, you open it up and you apply it to whatever it is you want it to mean, right? So that's really the way people are dealing with the Bible, for the most part. So we're kind of unraveling that. We're looking at the verses that have been twisted and kind of explaining them to you like, this is the context. This is what they really mean. Today's is going to be kind of a churchy thing, which is why I'm doing churchy jokes, because this is really not one you're going to hear like anybody who's secular use or borrow. Most nominal Christians are not really going to use this. This one you're going to hear in church a lot, but I'm going to somehow manage to make it apply to you, right? So we're going to draw an application from it, but first, we just kind of have to go into the verse and take a look at it, and I'll explain to you how people usually use it. Now, if you've been in church for a long time, you've definitely heard of these verses, but I'm going to go back a couple more verses so we can kind of get a running start. Sometimes we need to do that, like you ever like, do your ABCs, right? And you have to do all the ABCs from the beginning just to get what's before. And okay, so someone else has the same learning disorders I do. So anyway, it's like that, but we're going to get it, because we definitely have a biblical learning disorder in Christianity. So we're going to get there, right? So Matthew 2816 then the 11 disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain, where Jesus told them to go, okay, pause. What's happening? Jesus has risen from the dead. He's appeared to the women, like the guards of bribed, like all these different things. So this is after Jesus, after Easter, God's right, so after he rises from the dead. So this is what's going on. Tells disciples, is where you should go when they saw him, when they worshiped him. But some of them doubted. Jesus came and told the disciples, I've been given all authority in heaven and on earth, therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I've given you. And be sure of this, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Alright? So if you've been in church for a while, you know exactly like where I'm going. You know how these verses usually get applied, but we're going to fix. It today a little bit. Now you have kind of this strange, like internal, external problem going on. So there are two different groups of people who are going to put these verses up on the screen for you. They are the mission organizations that come into the church, right to tell you to give them money, right? So this is why you need to, because we're doing the Great Commission. We're doing what Jesus told us to do, right? So okay, if you're a missionary, then this is also when your church decides to do a church field trip to somewhere else, and they get the clipboard, and maybe that's up clipboard, or the pastor's encouraging you to go on the mission trip. So how this gets used typically, is that everybody needs to go on missions, right? That's the thing. We all need to go like, this is important. So that's usually how these verses get used. It's for all of us. Well, here's the thing. Now, not going to be fancy things. I don't like the exegesis and hermeneutics on this passage. We're just going to do the who, what, when, where, why? Because I think even the people use the funny terms forget, like how to do that when we learned that in like, the first or second grade. So when we look at the who, what, what did I tell you? Is going on? We have 11 the text told you already, we have 11 disciples. Alright, now, if we want to dig a little deeper, why are there 11? Well, they're called apostles. That's what they're called. Apostle. Judas has killed himself, right, and now we're left with 11 apostles, and Jesus is speaking specifically to the 11 apostles. That's what they are now, the Greek we talked about this like last week, gives you a clue as to who they are and what's going on here. Apostello means if I said that to a Greek person, they would say really bad accent. But that's okay, I send. It just means to send. It's the closest thing we have in the Bible to the word missionary. It's really, that's it. It's just, I send. So that's missionary. There are people who are sick, right? So we'll get into this a little bit later. But there's like, capital A apostles, and lowercase A apostles. These are the capital A apostles. So that's who they are right now. So there's a good reason that a lot of people will call this. Some people call this the apostolic commission, because they get it. They know that this is who Jesus has talked to. This is the who, what, when, where, why, after the resurrection on the mountain. Specific context. There's also another good clue, if we went back and we were reading the Gospel of Matthew, a lot of people don't understand, is that the Gospels are supposed to be read in like, one sitting. And now you're like, 28 chapters, and I'm like, you binge watch Netflix, right? So it shouldn't be a problem for you. It's going to take you two, three hours to get through that, right? One, three episodes, right? So there we go, alright, so, and you do that, so, but so for some reason that's a problem with the Bible, because if you did, you wouldn't make so many mistakes. You would remember Matthew 10, and we just talked about that recently, didn't we? When Jesus sent the apostles, right? So he's saying the apostles, and you kind of remember that, but you may remember, like, what he said, before he sent them, he said, Don't go to the Gentiles, right? Don't go to even the Samaritans, which, by Jewish stand, make this quick for you guys, like half breeds, right? So they're like, kind of half Jewish. Don't go to don't even go to them. Just only go to the lost sheep of Israel. So it says literally, but like, just go to the Jewish people, for our way of thinking of it. That's it. Nobody else. So here he's going to send them again. And don't you think there's going to be a little bit of clarification here? Yeah, all right. So if you're reading Greek, a word then pops off the page, if you're, like, familiar with the Greek and you're just reading it without churchy context, if you haven't had, like, a modern context overlaid over the verse, you're not seeing it like that. So when I was reading this in Greek, I'm like, oh, ethnic. The word ethnic comes up, and that's why I left it. If you put that on the screen, there you go. So you'll see I bracketed that word for you guys. Maybe it means nothing to you. Looks like Lord of the Rings writing. That's fine, but all nations, right, so the word ethnic can be translated, nations, peoples, Gentiles, that's what it gets. That's it. So it's up to the translator to decide, like, what's best here. Now, if you're reading something like an NLT, they'll give you a little bracket, but that's what the bracket will say, or peoples, it makes that note. And then I'll tell you peoples. Think of the word ethni, like ethnicity. Then think about the context of the Gospel of Matthew, the whole thing. What did he say when he sent them the first time? Don't go to all the nations. Don't go to the ethnics, the other ethnicities. What I'm talking about. But just go to the Israelites. That's it. Pardon, the Jewish people. Well, now he's going to clarify a little bit right now you go to everybody now think about the other thing. Think about the context of what he's saying. What is he saying? We say go and make disciples. Okay, well, what are your disciple? A person, not a place. Your disciple? If. Place you disciple a person. So a good way of thinking of this and nations isn't a bad translation, because you don't go out there. But a good way of thinking of this is, look, look, make disciples of people of all ethnicities Now, unlike before. So this is a discipleship verse, right? So this is what this is really important. It's not geographical. It's personal. Right now, real quick for the Bible nerds, I know acts one, he's talking about places Samaria, to the ends of the earth. I get it still talking to the apostles, though a little different. We're dealing with this text right now, like that. These aren't missional verses. So that's what you're dealing with here. He's telling them, Look, go out to everybody. It's not just for the Jewish people anymore. And we see it takes like 10 chapters of acts for them to figure that out. Like Peter has to get that vision three times. I'm like, Oh, I'm supposed to go out to the Gentiles now the other people not just there, because this is a Jewish face in the beginning. So this is what this is really all about.
Alright? So quick thing, we are all at a base level, regardless of the fact that this is being said to the apostles at a base level, called to a certain level of discipleship and evangelism. When we read the rest of the New Testament, that becomes kind of clear. We're not all like specific evangelists. But you know, if you're chipping away at that log in your eye, you know you're doing pretty well there, like, yeah, maybe alright, but we're all called to make disciples. So that that that's just very clear when we read the rest of it. But What's not clear is that we're all missionaries. That's where the question comes in here. Are we all called to missions? Alright? Well, you need to keep reading, right? So the other books of the Bible begin to tell you that first Corinthians is very interesting in particular, because there are questions going back and forth between the church of Corinth and Paul and so there's different things. So there's like a zero Corinthians we don't have, just don't have that because he's saying when I wrote to you in a letter before First Corinthians five. So there's something else going on, but he's answering questions. And so a bunch of things come up, like, Jesus didn't cover maybe everything, or the way things work in the church. So Paul's kind of going through, oh, and about this, you know, First Corinthians seven is a great example. Like, I don't necessarily have something exactly from the Lord, but I'm filled with the Holy Spirit. Here it is, right? So back and forth, and in this dialog, the big problem with the Corinthian church is they're puffed up with pride. So every in every situation he's going through, whether it be like, you know, Pastor worship, what he's doing they're doing in the first four chapters he covers, it's pridefulness, right? They're getting pride in these teachers. That's actually what comes up in First Corinthians five, five through seven is about sex, and that that's what comes up. They're being prideful. You're going to be puffed up like a little bit of leaven puffs up bread. So he gives that illustration. So here it is, two of the spiritual gifts and these titles, right? So you get all these people like, I'm a prophet, and that's great, or I do this, that's right. So they're, they're desiring these, like, you know, better gifts, and Paul's got to go through, that's the reason for the love chapter that you hear at weddings, because he ends the chapter before with chapter 12. Let me tell you about something that's greater than all of these gifts, love, love is patient, love is kind great. So that's the lead in to that. So that's context that. So within that first, Corinthians, 1227, all of you together are Christ's body, and each of you is a part of it. Here are some of the parts God has appointed for the church. First are apostles. Second, are prophets. Third are teachers. Then those who do miracles, those who have the gift of healing, those who help others, those who have the gift of leadership, those who speak in unknown languages or tongues. Are we all apostles? Are we all prophets? Are we all teachers? Do we all have the power to do miracles? Do we all have the gift of healing? Do we all have the ability to speak in tongues? Do we all have the ability to interpret those tongues or unknown languages, of course not. No, we don't. Alright. Here's our clarification in the Word of God, it's salient. Are all apostles? Are all sent ones? Of course not. No, right? So, good side note here too, right? So, so for if you're new, the church is called the body of Christ because we're made up of all these parts. Christ is in the good, healthy church. Christ is the head, and then we're all the parts of the body. And so Paul is giving this kind of illustration for us here, right? But here's the thing, we all have different gifts. We all don't have the same gifts. He's saying, we're not all apostles. We're not all prophets. So this is a good side note, too. In some denominations, they're going to insist you do some of these things in order to be saved, right? So you come up out of the water and you're speaking in tongues. But the word of God says that's not true. Do we all speak in tongues? No, some of us just speak it, right? So that happens in church. Or do we all have the gift of even healing? Did you see that here? See how these like new healing ministries or deliverance ministries and things like that? Well, I'll talk about how they should be tethered to the church. They're not, and so they're getting it wrong. Like not everyone has that gift, and here we even see it very clearly. Not everybody has the gift of healing, so they're all different gifts. So what's the big deal? Well, if you didn't see the problem there, I'm going to. Point out a few of them. I'll overview them for you, and then we'll get to personal application. But Quick disclaimer before I go any further, there's nothing wrong with missions. This is not an anti missional message or anything like that. In fact, I'll get there. We're going to look at how they should be done biblically. So the problem isn't whether churches are doing missions or not. The problem is how, how we're doing the missions today in the church. That's the real big problem. Alright, so makes me think of something funny. Have you? Have you ever had a job where you had absolutely no idea what you were doing? I don't know. Like, maybe it's just me, but, like, no idea, right? Like, absolutely it like, I'm and I'm not talking about, like, you know, I don't know you're working at a fast food place, and you can't tell the difference between the burger and the fries. Like, which button should you hit? That's not knowing what you're doing. That's just stupid. So we're not talking about that, right? Not that you don't know what you're doing, not because you're stupid, but just because no one told you what you were doing, right? So let me back up a little bit. So for me, it makes me think of one word, and if you have an older crowd, we're going to find out, like, how old our crowd is by how much laughter We get microfiche old people, all right, right? Doesn't exist. So to explain that to you, it's like, it's not as cool as microfilm, and you probably don't even know what that is, because, like, that's old James Bond stuff, right? Where Sean Connery was James Bond. But anyway, I was okay, that was better, I don't know, whatever. So anyway, I tried. So it's not like that, but it's close, right? So you take all this information and you put it on a little piece of, like, transparent plastic, or whatever it is, right? And then, in order to read it, right, you know, you put it in this machine. And it's kind of like an overhead projector, if you've seen one of those, but this way, right? So you see it, it blows it all up for you, and you can see what's on the microfiche. And this is how they used to store stuff, before floppy disks and things and the other things that young people should know about, right? So there we go. So you can store, like, one page of a newspaper on something this big, you know, like, so we've changed quite a bit. And so here's the thing, I got to give you the background. How I got there, so I don't really know. But anyway, I used to work for this place, so I was at, if you don't know me, I'm really sorry I was out of the house, like, way too early in my teens, way too early. Shouldn't have been on my own, but I was. And so the way you get by is like, you either beg or work 15 jobs. And so I worked 15 jobs, pride. So anyway, I worked this place called Caldor. It was like a Walmart. If you're from the northeast, you might know what that is, but just imagine, like Walmart, right? And I wasn't one of the smart people that they let out during the daytime. I was one of the people that they kept in the back, right? So I got up four in the morning and I unloaded trucks. And then when I behaved myself really well, I was allowed to go out onto the floor and put stuff out on the shelves. And sometimes that didn't last. But anyway, so it was really on in the morning. You put in your eight hours and then, well, you know, you can work, right? So there's more hours in the day. So I get another job, as I was looking for another job. But the thing is, like, I was in a band, and you don't really make any money in a band. You just work for food and beer like so that's what I was doing. And so, you know, we do our gigs at night. Sometimes we'd get done at four, and I just go to work, no sleep. And a normal person would decide, oh, that was a great time to sleep. But that wasn't me. I was like, I need more money because I'm poor. I want to eat ramen noodles. So, so my friend said, I'll get you a job at this place I work at. All you have to do is read microfiche. I was like, micro. Oh yeah, I had that in your grade school. We had the microfiche machines. Sure, I can do that, great. But I wasn't thinking of a couple of things. The first thing is, I'm really tired right now, and so I don't know if you ever done math like and you're when you're really, really tired. It's not a good idea, right? It's some looking at small numbers and things like that. And that's what this was. I shouldn't have been doing it right on that little sleep You haven't slept in five days. Like, no, right? So that was the first kind of problem. Second problem is, they didn't teach me how to do the job. Nobody interviewed me. Like, I just got the job. I think my friend was like, This guy's a genius, you know? And, like, just trust me, he's great. And I'm like, Okay, so I'm sitting there. The other problem is, it's for a bank. Now, if you know me, I'm really not good at math, like I could do like basic money math at the time, the Lord hadn't yet cleared my dyslexia up. So this is a highly true a very tired person, right? Just got done the early morning crew maybe still hung over trying to read numbers. Who has dyslexia, right? So, like, this is kind of not going to work, right? So I'm looking at these things. I have no idea. I'm just like, copying like, I feel like I'm in school again. I'm like, All right, you know, he puts it back in the folder. I'll follow him back and file this thing. I'm just staring at this thing, trying not to fall asleep. No idea what I'm doing. Now, maybe you've been in this position, or you've been on the other side of the desk, either way, it's either funny or annoying, like if you had employees, you ever go to fire someone and you're just really looking forward to the satisfaction of firing this individual. And right before you do, they say, I quit. And you're like, No, I was going to fire you. You knew that, which is why you quit before the Quit firing. Like, you can't win here. I'm firing you, right? So, but that's exactly what I did. I knew they called me in and I was like, Oh, here we go. I got like, four paychecks happening. That was good, good run, you know. So they're like, Hi Jim. Like, I quit. I quit. I'm done. Like, I'm done with this, you know. Like, they're really gracious, actually, they might have been Christian. Been Christian. They're like, Oh God, we're glad you see that. That's the only thing you see, right?
So maybe that stupid story, there was no consequence, except maybe I lost someone $1 million right? Because this was for a bank. Like, I don't know, but you can just imagine in certain roles how this is not a good thing. Like, it makes me think of the surgeon commercial. There's like, a couple variations of this commercial where, like, the guy's waiting to get operated on, the surgeon comes in. He goes, You nervous? The guy's like, yeah. And the surgeon goes, so am I? You know, you're like, that's not good, right? That's not what you want to hear. Like, I just graduated med school, something like that. You know, other places we talked about planes, right? You could be on a plane. Imagine if he leaves the intercom on right, like, what's this? It's the landing gear. Oh, you know, like, you don't want to hear that, right? Or like, you know, we're going to be flying at 35,000 feet today from LaGuardia to beautiful, sunny southwest Florida. That's how they all sound to me. Southwest Florida. They should be like radio DJs. I think they just switch professions southwest Florida. But here's the thing, it's my first time. So before we take off, let's pray. You know, you don't want to hear that on a plane. We could just good. There's a lot of good places we're praying, like the pineal you should not lead the prayer group. So here we run into something seemingly innocent with the missions, right? But it isn't, and I'll explain to you why, right? So it gets serious, because there are problems working outside your spiritual gifting for ourselves and others. So I'll just kind of like overview some of the basic problems. I'll get into some of the detail. If we're not equipped, right? And we don't know the language, right? So we're going Think, think about the purpose for missions. So just, just not what church has made missions. Missions are logically supposed to be right to propagate the gospel of Jesus Christ in places where it has not been propagated, meaning, like sown, where the seeds have not been sown, where people don't know the gospel, that's a point, right? We're going to go to some place they don't know the gospel, right? Because once they do, they're all set. They can start a church, good, right? Read your Bible, but they don't. And so that's what we're going to do. And so you'd assume, if we're going to go somewhere where I don't know they don't know the gospel, they speak another language. Well, you're going to know the language, or you have that gift of tongues in there somewhere. That's good, too, fine, right? You're going to know the gospel. You're going to know the Bible. You're going to know a little bit more, because they're probably going to have follow up questions, right? You know, like, just believe in Jesus. I said, so not good enough for most smart people, right? So we're not going to assume everybody's stupid, like you should know this really well. Then you need to have, like, a gift of teaching or conveying it. So what happens when we just let everyone go? Right? It's not good, and it sets us up for failure, right? They're not equipped to do the work. So there's the first thing God will tell you through the church what you should be doing, or just tell you personally, right? But when we all go, what does it say? The Bible said, we don't all have the gifts well, and I'm assuming a lot of people are going aren't equipped to do the work. So it's kind of like this air of prideful disobedience, right? Like I know what you told me, God, but this looks great, like I can get a free trip somewhere else and look like I'm awesome, right? So already starting off with a little bit of prideful disobey, because I don't know about you, but God told me to do a lot of things in church, and a lot of them were not things I wanted to do at all, right? But you just do them. But that truck overseas sounds much better than cleaning the bathrooms or serving tables like a deacon, right? So you got everybody wants to do that, and it really is. It's a feeding into this kind of sin. Again, not being equipped. It's a bigger problem than just being that good guy, right? Because you can misrepresent Jesus, you can go somewhere you are not supposed to be you don't know what you're talking about, and have someone walk away from the conversation going, wow. Christians are dumb, like I asked them all kinds of questions about the Bible they were holding and they didn't know anything. That's not good, right? So you're not putting Jesus's, so to speak, best foot forward for the person you set yourself. For me, it's just microfiche, and clearly I'm not over it, right? But, but anyway, you know, you set yourself up for failure, and that's never good. That's not good. It doesn't encourage you. We can weaken your faith. It's not a good thing because you weren't operating in faith in the first place, right? So it can be bad. There's also the kind of idea and just, just really quick. Yeah, just teamwork, right? So why is Paul hiding? We'll get back to that. Why Paul's highlighting, like, unity in the body, right? There's disunity. We want unity in the body. We want each part of the body doing its own work. And so, you know, this is analogous to, like, I don't know, like a military unit or teams and sports things like that, where everybody has to do their job. And, you know, the guys around you. Girls around you. They've got your back, like they're doing what they're supposed to be doing and not what you're supposed to be doing, right? So you have this sense of unity that the Bible calls for in the church. We're supposed to be working in unison as a unit together, and then we're not bumping into each other. We operate just better. Everything just works better, right? Well oiled machine, God's machine. And so there's that problem. Now on missions, if you don't know, there are really two different kinds. The kind of mission I'm really not talking about today are long term missions, right? So long term missions are missionaries. They're people, usually, just for lack of better way to put it, they have the money, but they're getting the support they're getting, because that's really what they're supposed to be doing, right? So they know the language, they know the culture. A lot of these are foreign missionary people, where they're going back and forth, sometimes coming here, telling us how to do it, which is a true thing, you know? So that's not what I'm talking about. Someone who goes, they devoted their life. They're good with making no money, you know? They just go to these places. They immerse themselves in the culture, not what I'm talking about. Clearly, that's the way you're supposed to do it. I'm talking about short term missions, and this is really what that whole clipboard kind of thing is. And here's usually what happens. So usually what happens is, right? You get the clipboard, everyone signs up. That's great, you know? And it sounds fine, but when you encourage these things, and this is aka going to the same places over and over again, because I've never heard of it yet, but like in the church, like, Hey, let's go to a mission trip to Iraq, you know, someplace like that. You know, like, no, it's to Costa Rica. You know, it's like, it's to Puerto Rico, right? It's someplace where they all know Jesus. Like, what are you doing? Like, I heard of a mission trip going to Rio. I don't know. Is anybody here? Can you visualize the landmark for real? It's Jesus. It's this giant statue. Just when they're like, or go into missions, I had to hold my tongue. It was doing a service. I was like, like, you know, I said it all with my face, right? So anyway, they all, I have tons of friends from Brazil. They all know Jesus. They're like, if they don't, they didn't look up, you know, the problem. So anyway, you know, this is real. This really happens. And so what happens is, it's an industry that's a tourist industry, that's really, it's a Christian tourist industry, and it's been said that we spend about as a church as a whole, spend about $2 billion a year on short term mission trips. Now, a lot of people like, what's the big deal? And I guess maybe they're in a mega church where the pastor has a private jet and money just grows on trees. But that isn't how it is for most of us. Like the money is valuable to us. We need it to continue doing the ministry. So it's it is a very big deal, right? The other thing is, it's a misuse of God's money. Once your people give it to you, it's not my money, like this is God's money. So the church, every organization that represents Jesus, needs to be very careful with the money. That's very important, you should know that we are very careful. Someone calls cheap, but I disagree with anyway, but you should be curious. Someone gives you money, that's God's money, and you're always, you know, very careful with it, right? It's his, not ours. And so really, what these are, they're visits or vacations, when you're going back to see someone again and again and again and again, the same place, or a group of people, their visits or vacations or field trips, they're not missions, right? But if you call it a mission, you're going to get a lot more money for that mission, aren't you? Right? Hey, we're going on a field trip. I feel like that's not exciting, you know what? I mean, we're going on a mission, you know? Oh, a mission. That sounds great. Now it's just selling it, right? So if you know the Bible well, you may already be going, Wait a minute. Paul visits a lot of places again and again. Yeah, he does. So let me share with you what he says about that. Though, Romans, 1520, Paul speaking, my ambition has always been to preach the Good News, the Gospel where the name of Christ has never been heard, rather than where church has already been started by someone else, missions, I've been following the plan spoken of in the scriptures. Oh, Paul's doing that where it says those who have never heard about him will see, and those who have never heard about him will understand, in fact, my visit to you has been delayed the word visit so long because I've been preaching in these places. So here we get a difficult definition of what missions is, right? What is he'll go on to say, like, Hey, I'm going to stop by when I'm on my way to Spain. He figures he's going to go to Spain, right? And people don't know Jesus there. Let's. Go there, and I'll visit you on the way there, he's delineating they're two different things. Here, he's separating the idea of going and visiting someone from the mission, and he defines what the Gospel Mission is to a place where Jesus is not. No, that's the point. The other things are just
field trips, they're both Okay, and Paul visits people, and that's great, right? But here's the thing, we need to change what we're saying. Because the church shouldn't be paying for anyone's vacations. It shouldn't be paying for anyone's visits. It should be paying for missions, yes, and we'll get there, but not these visits. We have to change what we're saying. The other common problem is a lot of churches are, if they're not following this biblical example, making sure the missionaries going on it, making sure we're very careful with the money praying a lot. The church really is not if it's being honest, doing this at the Holy Spirit's leading. That's a very big problem. Everything needs to be done. The Holy Spirit's leading in the church. Everything, right? And I want to show you something, right? So again, over and over, the same place, and I put up the clipboard. Anyone can sign up. It's like, let's look at how biblical missions are supposed to be. So we have the early church in Acts. That's context enough for this. Acts 13, one among the prophets and the teachers of the church at Antioch of Syria were Barnabas Simeon, called the black man, Lucius from Cyrene mana and the childhood companion of King Herod Antipas and Saul. One day, as these men were worshiping the Lord and fasting, you notice what they're doing, worshiping and fasting the Holy Spirit said. The Holy Spirit said, appoint Barnabas and Saul for the special work to which I have called them. So after more fasting and prayer, the men laid their hands on them and sent them on their way. So let's look what they did. Lots of people in the church. There could be 1000s of people in the church, tons of people in the church. Here, alright, and even list a bunch of the prophets say people have the gifts and things like that. They're there. But the Holy Spirit narrows it down to two. Who narrowed it down? The Holy Spirit, not the clipboard, not you. The Holy Spirit narrowed down to two. No questions asked. What were they doing to get this information from the Holy Spirit fasting, right? You are depriving. You're focusing on God. You're taking everything away so you can really hear what the Lord is saying, right now. Okay, does the church do those two things? Not going to talk about the Daniel diet, right? Anyway, so that's not enough. That's 10 days, right? So you can see a big difference here. And then what do they do after they get the answer? More fasting and prayer. Let's just really make sure we've got this right. That looks like being very careful to me, doesn't it? At least to me. No, you're wrong. So what do we do instead? Well, we have this thing that so now we have, like, modern church, right? And modern church is just diverged so much from biblical Christianity. It's not even funny, like, it's just it's so much more of the world. And what is the church say? Well, we need to look really good, right? We need to look glamorous, like to everybody, like we're doing hard work. So everyone's going to go on missions. Because what do pastors do you get? So pastors, if they have a conversation, it's so annoying. And they have a conversation, they're going to talk about a couple of things. First, the size of their church, right? How many people are at your churches? Seriously? How much money they have in their endowment fund? They'll brag about that, which is just sinful. And then also, like, do you do missions? Does your church do missions? And then, oh, yeah, we did. We built another bridge, and we painted a house for the 30th 1,000th time. And, you know, whatever, some third world country, we're amazing. So this is the conversation. It's pretty close to what happens between pastors, right? So nothing about the Bible theology, nothing like that, right? So the church, they don't really care about, like, there's no conversation, like, Where'd the Holy Spirit tell you to go? You know? Like, we've never had that conversation, sadly, right? I'll ask the questions. They'll be like, you can't say that in church if people fire you. I'm like, they're not allowed to do that in my church. Like, what do you thought? Right? So it's a weird conversation that you have, and so you end up in this church culture of codependency. Well, yeah, of course, I have to, I have to do them to my people. We have to check that box, right? It's got to look good on my pastor resume when I quit this church and go to another church, right? So what program? That's what it is. It's like being a teacher or a principal. And what programs did you install? What did you do? And so it becomes all about this program, about just making people happen. But here's the thing, the early church is not codependent. The biblical church is God dependent. And we really need to take a stop, or just like, take a look at this and just stop. We're doing this church. It's a whole. Of this, what we've done through the years, last few years. And here's the thing, too, for anyone who wants to kind of argue that point, it gets worse for the church of today, because they're actually told we are not to go as well. We get to Acts 16, we have Paul and Silas and Derby and Maestro Timothy's there. They pick up Timothy. So acts 16, six and next, Paul and Silas traveled through the area of Phrygia. Phrygia and Galatia, because the Holy Spirit had prevented them from preaching the word in the province of Asia at that time, stop, don't go there. Right then, coming to the borders of Mysia, they headed north for the province of Bithynia. But again, the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them to go there. God dependent. There's no question, right? Why? No. Paul's also been responding to a dream, a vision from a man, no, from Macedonia, right? So he's totally dependent on whatever God's telling him to do. They're just obeying the Lord and here, right? So in Act 16, you're going to seem to get beaten with rods and jailed. You know, it's like, it's not good for them, but that doesn't matter. What matters is they're obeying the Lord. They're not interested in checking off a box, they're not interested in talking to other pastors and impressing them. They're it's not there, see, Holy Spirit's like, don't go there. Okay? You know, like, don't go there. Fine. You know what I mean. But maybe we should fast and pray again. That's the response. That's the true biblical response, right? So instead of coming under the authority of God and letting the Holy Spirit lead, some people will pridefully go out of that, right? And so what I'm talking about, whether it's the program guide, the it's all pride, it's all sinful, it's none of it's very good, right? And so they go out of the biblical structure and into the typical western program, and that's kind of what happens here. And I won't even get too much on the side note of how we think we're superior to everybody else, which is not necessarily true. Alright? So the Bible teaches on the authority of the Church, right? So that's what we really have to understand. Everything is done. Did you notice through the church, through the authority of the Church, right? Everything's done through the church, no other way, right? And so a lot of times we begin to see this when people don't want to be obedient, right? And if you get a church that, you know, hey, look, this is the way we're going to do it. And we've, I won't talk about it too much, but we've had it happen here. This is what we're going to do. What we're going to do. We're going to do all our programs, whatever God says. We're just going to do, and we don't know why, but we're just going to do it. We're just going to do what he says, whoa. But I have a different idea, right? You know, I'm like, again, oh, we're the church, and we all prayed about it, and we did the fasting, the praying. Well, did you No, clearly not. You know, we're just going to do whatever we want to do. And I'm like, okay, and when people don't get the answers they want from God or the church, enter into the parachurch, that's what you end up with. And so the church has a parachurch problem. It's very hard to deal with right now. And basically what happens is it's an organization, a mission organization. It could be a ministry organization that is not, I would say rooted, not just going to say tethered, but rooted in a church, right? It's not rooted in church leadership. So in other words, it's an organization that doesn't have the pastors, the elders, the deacons, like, you know, a board is not operating like a true non profit, running on empty. You know, it's not doing those things. But then everybody's like, okay, somebody came. We have an idea. Can we all just pray about this? Come back together and operate in unity, right? So that's what happens in a good church. Wait, what does the Bible say about it, and what God said? We're going through this process, and we're looking for accountability. We're being very careful with the money, right? Everyone's watching where everybody is a lot of transparency. But these organizations don't want that. So that's what you're going to do when you don't want to do all those steps. And maybe you want a title, maybe you want some, and they didn't give you one, something like that. A lot of people will start para Turk now, am I saying all these organizations are like that? No, they're not all like that. Am I saying most of the ones I've dealt with are yep, that's what I'm saying. Most of the ones I've dealt with are exactly like that, and they become very difficult to deal with because at the root of it, there's a lot of pride going on. There's just like, no accountability. At the end of this thing, you don't know where they're really spending the money. And, like, if you know math real well, right? Like, hey, we're going to put this under this expenditure line. It's missions, you know? And then you find out that missions is, like, all kinds of stuff that you would never classify as missions, right? Very little accountability. And there's this problem of evading responsibility again, back to that, not wanting to be accountable with God's money. You're not recognizing that this is God's money. And furthermore, what gets a little more frustrating and annoying. A lot of times, these are people who have left a church or the church as a whole, and they come right back around and ask the church for money. Uh,
insult to injury, right? What are you doing? Right? So you get this confusion, you get this misdirection of money. You also get a misdirection of ministers and ministries, right? You're all equipped to do this, right? That's not what we said, and it's very, very confusing, because just think about it for a second. I'm telling you the way the church operates. We've all fasted, prayed, we've done what we got to do. God told us the mission said, Okay, this is what you're going to do. Then you have another organization come in and say, No, this is what your people should be doing. Even though you know them, you've prayed with them. They're your family. What you know, no like that. We already talked to God, and so they create confusion in the church, right? Everything needs to come through biblical church authority. That's the way it works. There's no other way to do it biblically, right, confusion and disunity. So a lot of these people, they have that issue we talked about in the past, of that selfish ambition, right, that pride. I want to be the mission leader. I want to go and be seen. I want to be a part of the group. And so again, it's kind of like the Corinthian problem, right? I want the title, I want the glamorous ministry. I want to be seen. I want to do this, that and the other thing, and often that's the common denominator that you're dealing with. But if we go back to Matthew Again, and we look at the Sermon on the Mount, remember, we learned sermon on the mount is one continuous flow of Jesus speaking Matthew, 567, there are those who like read maybe the whole chapter five, maybe a verse, right? And then they get up and they walk out on Jesus' sermon and never come back, so he can give you the actual conclusion. So just to review, a lot of these people will say, like, hey, we really need to, like, show everybody what we're doing, right? So you're the light of the world, the city on a hill that can't be hidden, and that sounds great, and they'll run out, and that's their life verse, right? For the missionaries, and that's what we got to do. But in Matthew six, he says, when you give to the poor, right? Don't, don't let anybody know what you're doing, right? Or you'll lose your reward in heaven. He says that, don't even let right your right hand, left hand know what your right hand is doing, or get that backward, right? Don't even. And then he goes into praying, when you pray, shut the door, right. Don't be like the pagans of Babylon and on for show like, don't do that, right? Don't you shouldn't be showing off. But what happens? I'm going to go on a mission and I'm going to let everybody know what my right hand is doing, right? That's what they do like in the old days. I mean, you could never have anybody go on a mission trip without having to sit through a disgusting PowerPoint the next Sunday. Like, I don't really want to see all these pictures of you showing off, right? It creates this terrible culture where we go there and we patronize people. Look at this third world person I'm going to spend five minutes with, then go back on my luxury plane, back to my luxury life, and never think about you again. But wait, I am just going to go show it off to everybody in the church, and so everybody who didn't go on the mission trip feels as bad as they should, and I look awesome. It's exactly what's going on. Right? Write the check and don't tell anyone. That would be a really difficult thing for most people to do. Do that, right? So a superiority complex for those who do, an inferiority complex for those who don't, and to those who say, we say we're helping. It just patronizes them. I talk to so many people. They go to these countries, and then when they finally get honest with them, they're like, don't come back. Just send us the money, right? Much better that way. But there's another problem with those doing this going places over and over again. We create, like a Christian vacation culture, and so if you ever been to a tourist area. What happens with the local population in the tourist area? What always happens? Well, they become dependent, they come into they develop a tourist economy. And so a lot of these places develop a tourist economy. And so, and then what are you doing? You're sending rounds of people to paint the buildings, fix the bridges, whatever they do, right? They're not doing that now. What are they doing? Begging for your money. They're happy to just look for they're like, this is great. These stupid Americans are coming here and giving us money, like they're smarter than you think. But here's the problem, right? So it's not good for the economy. It enables them. They're not doing we should be going there. Here's the gospel, here's your church. Buy. You know what I mean? You do your own thing to your culture. You represent your culture. Nope. So it's this terrible hamster wheel, and unfortunately, and you can, if you don't believe me, look up like, cancel your short term mission. Even some really big organizations are now saying that, because what happens is, hey, look, let's mar the kids. Let's scar the kid. All right, cut off a pinky and they'll give us more money. And if you don't think that happens, look it up. It does, right? So it's really not good for the local population there. It's a very unhealthy tourist economy that we create. Now, on the other side of things, all the way over here, if we're not going to go back to the parachurch problem. Guess what? It's way easier then to just throw them a little bit of money, right, and say we participated. Instead of praying, fasting, let the Holy Spirit do the work and finding the right people to send. That's hard, right? It's way easier just to go we support this, and we set a disgusting poster of all the ministries we support. They give you, like, 10 bucks a month to, you know, nothing, really not helping anybody. So it's a problems. But as a church, and here's where we come in, we should all be doing something as the body of Christ, that's the point. That's the point of church. It's not a building, it's you. It's you. You are the church, and so we want to be doing this right, right in our own respective ministries, and we don't want to be passing it off to anybody else. The church should be operative. The church should be doing this. So the question you may not be called to missions, but everyone's called to ministry at some level or another, in some place or another, right? So what is that part of God's plan for you? What is it? So if we go back to First Corinthians again, and we go towards the beginning, we see that now I encourage you to read this first Corinthians 12. Read this on your own. Read the whole thing on your own and just own, and just get what Paul's saying here. Now he encourages them, because he's trying to get to the other side of this prideful thing, just like I did, right? So if you're in Paul's shoes, I'm right there. Now I put myself right there, right? You know. Now you got to go, Okay, let's be encouraging, right? Let's, let's figure out, like, where do you fit in? So here's what he says. I'm just going to, we're not going to put it up on the screen. You go read. This, but this is the this, but this is the crux. I'm going to paraphrase. There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit is the source of them all. So think about that. This should be very encouraging. The Holy Spirit is working through you if you are baptized in Jesus Christ. So if you're baptizing, what do you say? Baptism in the Father Son, the Holy Spirit. If that's you, you have God now living in you, and he's going to give you certain abilities that you're blessed with, he decides, and he'll get to that, right? So he says, a spiritual gift is given to each person, right? Interestingly, to one Spirit gives a word of wisdom, right? So, in Greek, another spirit gives a word of knowledge, right? And then we go through it, the gift of healing. So just different things going through all the parts, but it's the one and only Holy Spirit who distributes these gifts. He decides which one we all get, great. Then he compares it. Remember I talked about the body of Christ, right? So the human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So that means each one of you is an important what part of your body do you want to lose? Just say nothing, right? That's the correct answer, right? So we don't, so it's all important. Doesn't matter, right? And Paul's going to get there. He goes to a multicultural thing. He's going to start to break down this disunity over culture. Some are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, some are free. But we're all baptized into one body and one Spirit. So what is Paul doing? Like, we would call it teamwork, right? We're all in really important members of the same team. So this is what's being stated here. Now, Paula kind of does a funny thing in Greek. It's called prosopopoeia, like, so it's this idea where you're having inanimate it's like a puppet show. Inanimate things talk to us. So
again, the foot can't say to the hand, I'm not important because I'm not a hand. Your hand's really important. The ear begins talking like the ear doesn't say, well, because I'm not an eye, I'm not a part of the body. And so it's kind of silly, but it should get your attention, right? So what he's saying is, in fact, some parts of the body that seem the weakest and least important are actually the most necessary. And he kind of makes his audience think he's like, some of the parts that look are kind of shameful. We cover like we make sure that we take really good care of them, you know? And it kind of alludes to something there to get your attention, right. So some of the parts that seem like the least important aren't. They're the most necessary. They're important. Everything we do here is important. Everything every one of you does is really important. And so I just want to take a moment before I close, just to kind of like, if you're new here, give you guys an idea of what we do if you're watching, give you guys an idea of what we do if you're not, it's good to hear it. It's good to kind of want. In a while, like, you know, just be encouraged here, what we're doing here, and how people fit in. So if you're not called to formation, the local stuff, we need to remember one thing. This is really in churches. Forget this. The church is a mission. There are a lot of people in our backyard who don't really know Jesus, the church is a mission. We as a church, we really have to stop looking over the heads that are here right to other things that will make us look good, right? The people here in this community are very important, and we love them very much. So we do a lot of things with the building to support this community and let this community know that we really love them, right? So that's important. So we preach the gospel here to this local community, but when we do like our ministries here, we don't do programs, we don't do patronizing, we don't do labels. There's just none of that in the Bible, right? What apologists do is no longer just sounds like Galatians three, and it should, right? You know, the Jew Gentile slave free. We're all one of Christ, Jesus. So we get the first thing we do is get rid of that, right? So you'll the cafe. We do a lot of work through the cafe, but just know we, like some people be like, Do you have a this ministry in order that ministry? I'm like, we don't like to label people and single them out, because that's exactly what it is, and that's what the church does, right? So we do. We have a homeless ministry, and once a year we get together and make sure we go feed the homeless people, you know, and then, you know, we make sure the whole internet knows we did it check, you know what I mean, and that's it. No, there's no the home like we don't identify ourselves like that here, like you may be experiencing. There's some among you. You know me. I know you where you are experiencing homelessness, but that's not where I lead like, Hey, how's the homeless thing going today? You know? Like, we don't do that, right? You're just my brother in Christ or my sister in Christ. That's it. And I'm helping you where I can. We're working together on this, right? And we're going to share a meal upstairs together, right? That's it. And so when you do a specific minute, it's called patronizing, right? It's called making you superior. That doesn't exist here. That's what people want. They know that's not the church for them. It's not a place where you should feel superior or inferior. They don't exist here at c3 right? And that's not popular, unfortunately, but we have ministries within that context that you can plug into. So the cafe, you'll be told how you can plug in and connect with us after I'm done speaking, but afterwards we break bread together. That's what the early church did. I understand. You may have lunch plans. It's awesome here. Food enables but, you know, come check it out if you haven't before. But we all just break bread and we're all equal. But making a cafe work like that takes a lot of work, right? So it takes people to help serve the food. Maybe like to make food and prepare it. Maybe somebody here makes really good Stromboli, but it's a great place to serve, right? And if you just love serving, you know, I just let totally one hand know what the other hand was doing, that's okay. Give me a pass on that one confess, right? So, you know, it's fun, and there's a lot of joy in it, like you see, if you go up there, just a lot of joy in the preparation of the food, the people making the food. It's awesome, but we need help, right? And could it be cleaning it could be setting up all those different things, and that's one way we let the community know that we love them. It's a biblical breaking of the bread. But it's also saying to the community, we love you. It doesn't matter where you come from, what your current issue is, doesn't matter. Just let's all eat together. That's cool, right? That's it. And then if someone actually needs a meal, hey, great. But we didn't go, let's do the food program for the hungry people. You know, I'm hungry, right? So maybe that's me every day, right? So we just all hang out and we just do that, and it's like, you know what? I mean, it's not a big deal. It's not about me being superior to you or checking off a box. Building needs. It's a big building. The community does use some of it. We do all different kinds of things. We've done movie Days, you know, we might bring that back, but a lot of times we don't do these things because there's a lack of volunteer support. And so some people will come up to me like, What happened to you know, I'm like, You're not helping. So I ask him, No, it's not you, but, but anyway, it takes a lot. So if we used to do like a parent side out thing, but it takes a lot of moving parts. It's an awful lot. You got to watch the kids. But there are things like that every Sunday kids ministry. You know, I give my notes to the people write. The kids lessons, they write. So if you're good at that, maybe you're a teacher, you can read my notes. No one's going to sign up for that. Some people prepare the kids lessons. Some people teach the kids lessons. So you can see us about that. If that's you, I get afraid to talk about singing, right? Because most people are great in the shower, right? So, but you know, the water comes from the shower head. That's a one way thing, right? So anyway, if you have experience singing, and you can sing harmonies well, and no one has chased you off a stage, then. Come see us sinking global and look, if the Lord is putting something on your heart you maybe you speak another language in a place in my country doesn't know Jesus talk to us about that I'd love to pray about, like maybe sending someone somewhere who should be going. That's cool, too. One thing that people don't think about, that we do, and it's clearly not a big deal to us, but it's, it's something that every once in a while needs to get explained, because, like, I call this a live studio audience, right? And when it's just experience, when you preach the Word of God, you'll never be a mega church. It's just, it's never going to happen. Jesus says the road is narrow. What happens with the parable of the sower, right? It's really a lot of rocks out there that you're preaching to. Very few, sadly, really want the Word of God. They did. They don't want to understand this. They're just, it's much easier, much easier, right? Sit down, get dressed up, leave your problem somewhere else. I don't want to talk to homeless people or drug addicts or anything like that, you know? I just, I want pretty church. I want to look good. Check the box. Hopefully that'll be good enough for God. Keep hoping. But biblical, it's just it's going to be smaller. And we know that. We know that, which is another reason why the money is very important to us. We know that. But what's not obvious to a lot of people that I call it a live studio audience, because it's going to go out to way more people. It's going to reach a lot more people than we'll ever hear it here in this community. That's very intentional. So we have just a wonderful media crew. Love you guys. Can't see you because you shine really bright lights in my face. But you know, I love you, right? We appreciate that because it goes out to a lot of people all over the world. There are people in India, watching, like my Instagram reels and different things like that. So it works, right? And it's really effective missions. And it's just worth noting very quickly that we understand something, Christianity is a shrinking religion. It is. It's not growing. There are more churches closing than opening. That's just a fact. And now we've discussed in the past the reasons for that, right? What do they think of us as, judgmental, hypocrites? And so go back and watch that message if you want to be depressed. But we don't necessarily make the best witnesses. But there's one religion that's growing faster than us, and that's Islam, a lot faster. I'll tell you one reason why they're very convincing witnesses, very they literally will lay their life down for it. And I'm not saying that's good thing the way they do it. It's true. The other thing is, they don't have short term missions. They don't have the way we would think of it, right? They don't have the club. And they get together and do the PowerPoint. No, they do most all of it on the internet, all of it because they're smart. Why? Why would I waste all this money to send all these people who are completely unconvincing and ineffective to a place where I can save that, you know, buy whatever they're buying, but support our local community? Maybe, you know, do something like that, and we can just reach 10s of 1000s of people on the internet, and we don't even have to knock on a door. We're in their phone.
That sounds smart, doesn't it, because that's really annoying. So I can, I can bypass the front door, get right in the phone and influence them. You ever heard of the term influencers? We could learn a lot from the world around us sometimes, right? That's what they do. And so this is missions that's much more cost effective. Much more cost effective. We get right inside the phone and believe me, there's open dialog. People will message me. We get dialog going with conversations. I delete the nasty comments, but I'm, I'm dialoguing with people that it would have cost, like, $3,000 to send blue eyed me there, right? It won't garnish any respect from the people that are kind of like here. But you know what I mean, it's not, I don't belong there, right? But now I'm dialoguing with people, and for nothing, like, it costs almost nothing to put that out there, right? So anyway, save us to say that that's just another way you can get plugged in here. If you are interested in media, there's like, sound involved, there's camera involved, there's slides involved, there's different computer stuff involved. The editing is more complicated, but you know, hey, maybe you did that as a profession, and you can help great, right? So these are other ways I say this to personalize it, where you can get plugged in. You can learn how to do new things. Maybe you can meet new people within each mint, it's not a click, but within each ministry, they talk, and you can make friends, right? Get out of your shell a little bit, edify and encourage one another if you haven't done that already. So just a few things that we do, just encouragement. The other thing I want to say quickly, and this doesn't get said enough, because we don't do plaques, we don't do that kind of stuff. It's just let the Lord reward you, right? But thank you. Thank you for those who participate in any way, whether. You support the church, whether you know it's monetarily, whether you're helping out. Thank you. Thank you for what you guys do. It's really important. It makes all this work. I don't have to sweat it when I get up on a Sunday morning. It's easy. Like, I'm a really blessed pastor, because I get up and I'm just focused on the message and you people I'm talking to, you guys, it's great. I don't have to, like, worry like, Oh no, is there going to be sound? We don't put those pressures on anybody. If something didn't go right or whatever. We're good, because it's a family, and we're more excited about seeing you as a family than we are putting on a show, quite frankly, right? So this is important. It's not a show. It has a function, though, more than just making people feel good. It's doing something. So you're all a part of that. If you're participating, thank you so much. If you're here, I appreciate the fact that you're just here listening to the Word of God. Okay, so I can be stressful as a pastor who's trying to preach it, because you're not getting, always the pat on the back that people are don't, right? You know. So lot of people get, they shoot the messenger, you know. So thank you for not doing that. I appreciate you guys. Just to encourage every single one of you, if you haven't heard it before, Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you. You are important to him. You are an important part of the body of Christ. And if you haven't plugged in, come on in, like you have a place here, you have a value here. And some of you, I know we're all going through something, maybe you've been told something different, like you don't have importance, you don't have value. I was told that my whole life, but not here, right? So it can really change everything for you, right? So if you want to discuss that, I'll tell you how it's changed everything for me. But you're important here. You're important to God. You're important to us here as a church. We love you. Thank you, and just let me pray for you, Lord. I thank you for everyone in the sound of my voice, whether it's here or far. I thank you for all the different means by which we can we can reach those people. And I just want everyone to be encouraged. Lord, just pour your love out on them. Let them surrender. Just lay down whatever it is they're carrying around that they don't need to carry around anymore, and just fill them by the power of your Holy Spirit. Let them experience that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, the goodness, Lord, and for us who have known you, just encourage us, build us up, Lord, so we can be better vehicles of Your grace, your mercy and your Love. I ask these things In Jesus's Name, Amen.
You
Good morning, welcome if you're new here among us. My name is Gene. I serve here at C3 church as your pastor. And I heard a story. This story was about a deacon. Now, if you in church for a while, you'll get this joke immediately, but if you haven't, I'll explain what a deacon is a deacon is a title that you give to somebody in church. It comes from the Greek word servant. We see the first deacons picked acts six. They're picked so that they can serve tables. But it seems that as soon as you give someone the title Deacon, they almost immediately forget what it means. And so, you know, it's kind of a funny thing, and while you may not want to give the title Deacon to a whole lot of people in the church, right? So they forget that it's just kind of a function that you do. It's not who you are. So I heard a story about a deacon, and a deacon was seated next to a foreign missionary at a missions banquet, a church was having to host all these foreign missionaries and stuff. So the deacons kind of a little like confused, because the missionaries not saying anything through the whole dinner, like so no entry point for small talk, nothing like that. And he starts thinking a little and he's like, Well, he is from a foreign country. He doesn't look like me. He's not dressed like me, so maybe he doesn't speak English. So he finds his opening when they serve the food. He says, okay, non verbal signals, right? So universal stuff, like he's eating the food, it's good. So he's like, Hmm, good. A missionary responds, good, hey, I'm getting somewhere. This is good, alright, so each course, he's doing that, right? So get to the coffee, though, the coffee good. The foreign missionaries like, okay, so coffee drinkers here, right? So better in other countries, we get to the ice cream. Good, yes, very good, right? So he's getting somewhere. Well, he was getting somewhere until the foreign missionary, well, he gets up to speak and he gives a speech in perfect English. Well, embarrassing. So he gives a speech, he gets off the stage, and the missionary goes up to the deacon and goes, blah, blah, blah, good. He had a sense of humor. We find ourselves continuing in our twisted scripture series. So just to wrap it up, we doing this for a while now, so most of you get the premise. But if you're new, you know the Christians, we definitely suffer from what I call a verse of the day problem, right? We're not reading the Bible like we would read any other book for the most part, right? Most Christians, I say, because some of you guys do, I do to read it the right way, right? So read longer sections of it, but it's kind of like the fortune cookie thing, right? So you just get what's fed to you and your app, you open it up and you apply it to whatever it is you want it to mean, right? So that's really the way people are dealing with the Bible, for the most part. So we're kind of unraveling that. We're looking at the verses that have been twisted and kind of explaining them to you like, this is the context. This is what they really mean. Today's is going to be kind of a churchy thing, which is why I'm doing churchy jokes, because this is really not one you're going to hear like anybody who's secular use or borrow. Most nominal Christians are not really going to use this. This one you're going to hear in church a lot, but I'm going to somehow manage to make it apply to you, right? So we're going to draw an application from it, but first, we just kind of have to go into the verse and take a look at it, and I'll explain to you how people usually use it. Now, if you've been in church for a long time, you've definitely heard of these verses, but I'm going to go back a couple more verses so we can kind of get a running start. Sometimes we need to do that, like you ever like, do your ABCs, right? And you have to do all the ABCs from the beginning just to get what's before. And okay, so someone else has the same learning disorders I do. So anyway, it's like that, but we're going to get it, because we definitely have a biblical learning disorder in Christianity. So we're going to get there, right? So Matthew 2816 then the 11 disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain, where Jesus told them to go, okay, pause. What's happening? Jesus has risen from the dead. He's appeared to the women, like the guards of bribed, like all these different things. So this is after Jesus, after Easter, God's right, so after he rises from the dead. So this is what's going on. Tells disciples, is where you should go when they saw him, when they worshiped him. But some of them doubted. Jesus came and told the disciples, I've been given all authority in heaven and on earth, therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I've given you. And be sure of this, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Alright? So if you've been in church for a while, you know exactly like where I'm going. You know how these verses usually get applied, but we're going to fix. It today a little bit. Now you have kind of this strange, like internal, external problem going on. So there are two different groups of people who are going to put these verses up on the screen for you. They are the mission organizations that come into the church, right to tell you to give them money, right? So this is why you need to, because we're doing the Great Commission. We're doing what Jesus told us to do, right? So okay, if you're a missionary, then this is also when your church decides to do a church field trip to somewhere else, and they get the clipboard, and maybe that's up clipboard, or the pastor's encouraging you to go on the mission trip. So how this gets used typically, is that everybody needs to go on missions, right? That's the thing. We all need to go like, this is important. So that's usually how these verses get used. It's for all of us. Well, here's the thing. Now, not going to be fancy things. I don't like the exegesis and hermeneutics on this passage. We're just going to do the who, what, when, where, why? Because I think even the people use the funny terms forget, like how to do that when we learned that in like, the first or second grade. So when we look at the who, what, what did I tell you? Is going on? We have 11 the text told you already, we have 11 disciples. Alright, now, if we want to dig a little deeper, why are there 11? Well, they're called apostles. That's what they're called. Apostle. Judas has killed himself, right, and now we're left with 11 apostles, and Jesus is speaking specifically to the 11 apostles. That's what they are now, the Greek we talked about this like last week, gives you a clue as to who they are and what's going on here. Apostello means if I said that to a Greek person, they would say really bad accent. But that's okay, I send. It just means to send. It's the closest thing we have in the Bible to the word missionary. It's really, that's it. It's just, I send. So that's missionary. There are people who are sick, right? So we'll get into this a little bit later. But there's like, capital A apostles, and lowercase A apostles. These are the capital A apostles. So that's who they are right now. So there's a good reason that a lot of people will call this. Some people call this the apostolic commission, because they get it. They know that this is who Jesus has talked to. This is the who, what, when, where, why, after the resurrection on the mountain. Specific context. There's also another good clue, if we went back and we were reading the Gospel of Matthew, a lot of people don't understand, is that the Gospels are supposed to be read in like, one sitting. And now you're like, 28 chapters, and I'm like, you binge watch Netflix, right? So it shouldn't be a problem for you. It's going to take you two, three hours to get through that, right? One, three episodes, right? So there we go, alright, so, and you do that, so, but so for some reason that's a problem with the Bible, because if you did, you wouldn't make so many mistakes. You would remember Matthew 10, and we just talked about that recently, didn't we? When Jesus sent the apostles, right? So he's saying the apostles, and you kind of remember that, but you may remember, like, what he said, before he sent them, he said, Don't go to the Gentiles, right? Don't go to even the Samaritans, which, by Jewish stand, make this quick for you guys, like half breeds, right? So they're like, kind of half Jewish. Don't go to don't even go to them. Just only go to the lost sheep of Israel. So it says literally, but like, just go to the Jewish people, for our way of thinking of it. That's it. Nobody else. So here he's going to send them again. And don't you think there's going to be a little bit of clarification here? Yeah, all right. So if you're reading Greek, a word then pops off the page, if you're, like, familiar with the Greek and you're just reading it without churchy context, if you haven't had, like, a modern context overlaid over the verse, you're not seeing it like that. So when I was reading this in Greek, I'm like, oh, ethnic. The word ethnic comes up, and that's why I left it. If you put that on the screen, there you go. So you'll see I bracketed that word for you guys. Maybe it means nothing to you. Looks like Lord of the Rings writing. That's fine, but all nations, right, so the word ethnic can be translated, nations, peoples, Gentiles, that's what it gets. That's it. So it's up to the translator to decide, like, what's best here. Now, if you're reading something like an NLT, they'll give you a little bracket, but that's what the bracket will say, or peoples, it makes that note. And then I'll tell you peoples. Think of the word ethni, like ethnicity. Then think about the context of the Gospel of Matthew, the whole thing. What did he say when he sent them the first time? Don't go to all the nations. Don't go to the ethnics, the other ethnicities. What I'm talking about. But just go to the Israelites. That's it. Pardon, the Jewish people. Well, now he's going to clarify a little bit right now you go to everybody now think about the other thing. Think about the context of what he's saying. What is he saying? We say go and make disciples. Okay, well, what are your disciple? A person, not a place. Your disciple? If. Place you disciple a person. So a good way of thinking of this and nations isn't a bad translation, because you don't go out there. But a good way of thinking of this is, look, look, make disciples of people of all ethnicities Now, unlike before. So this is a discipleship verse, right? So this is what this is really important. It's not geographical. It's personal. Right now, real quick for the Bible nerds, I know acts one, he's talking about places Samaria, to the ends of the earth. I get it still talking to the apostles, though a little different. We're dealing with this text right now, like that. These aren't missional verses. So that's what you're dealing with here. He's telling them, Look, go out to everybody. It's not just for the Jewish people anymore. And we see it takes like 10 chapters of acts for them to figure that out. Like Peter has to get that vision three times. I'm like, Oh, I'm supposed to go out to the Gentiles now the other people not just there, because this is a Jewish face in the beginning. So this is what this is really all about.
Alright? So quick thing, we are all at a base level, regardless of the fact that this is being said to the apostles at a base level, called to a certain level of discipleship and evangelism. When we read the rest of the New Testament, that becomes kind of clear. We're not all like specific evangelists. But you know, if you're chipping away at that log in your eye, you know you're doing pretty well there, like, yeah, maybe alright, but we're all called to make disciples. So that that that's just very clear when we read the rest of it. But What's not clear is that we're all missionaries. That's where the question comes in here. Are we all called to missions? Alright? Well, you need to keep reading, right? So the other books of the Bible begin to tell you that first Corinthians is very interesting in particular, because there are questions going back and forth between the church of Corinth and Paul and so there's different things. So there's like a zero Corinthians we don't have, just don't have that because he's saying when I wrote to you in a letter before First Corinthians five. So there's something else going on, but he's answering questions. And so a bunch of things come up, like, Jesus didn't cover maybe everything, or the way things work in the church. So Paul's kind of going through, oh, and about this, you know, First Corinthians seven is a great example. Like, I don't necessarily have something exactly from the Lord, but I'm filled with the Holy Spirit. Here it is, right? So back and forth, and in this dialog, the big problem with the Corinthian church is they're puffed up with pride. So every in every situation he's going through, whether it be like, you know, Pastor worship, what he's doing they're doing in the first four chapters he covers, it's pridefulness, right? They're getting pride in these teachers. That's actually what comes up in First Corinthians five, five through seven is about sex, and that that's what comes up. They're being prideful. You're going to be puffed up like a little bit of leaven puffs up bread. So he gives that illustration. So here it is, two of the spiritual gifts and these titles, right? So you get all these people like, I'm a prophet, and that's great, or I do this, that's right. So they're, they're desiring these, like, you know, better gifts, and Paul's got to go through, that's the reason for the love chapter that you hear at weddings, because he ends the chapter before with chapter 12. Let me tell you about something that's greater than all of these gifts, love, love is patient, love is kind great. So that's the lead in to that. So that's context that. So within that first, Corinthians, 1227, all of you together are Christ's body, and each of you is a part of it. Here are some of the parts God has appointed for the church. First are apostles. Second, are prophets. Third are teachers. Then those who do miracles, those who have the gift of healing, those who help others, those who have the gift of leadership, those who speak in unknown languages or tongues. Are we all apostles? Are we all prophets? Are we all teachers? Do we all have the power to do miracles? Do we all have the gift of healing? Do we all have the ability to speak in tongues? Do we all have the ability to interpret those tongues or unknown languages, of course not. No, we don't. Alright. Here's our clarification in the Word of God, it's salient. Are all apostles? Are all sent ones? Of course not. No, right? So, good side note here too, right? So, so for if you're new, the church is called the body of Christ because we're made up of all these parts. Christ is in the good, healthy church. Christ is the head, and then we're all the parts of the body. And so Paul is giving this kind of illustration for us here, right? But here's the thing, we all have different gifts. We all don't have the same gifts. He's saying, we're not all apostles. We're not all prophets. So this is a good side note, too. In some denominations, they're going to insist you do some of these things in order to be saved, right? So you come up out of the water and you're speaking in tongues. But the word of God says that's not true. Do we all speak in tongues? No, some of us just speak it, right? So that happens in church. Or do we all have the gift of even healing? Did you see that here? See how these like new healing ministries or deliverance ministries and things like that? Well, I'll talk about how they should be tethered to the church. They're not, and so they're getting it wrong. Like not everyone has that gift, and here we even see it very clearly. Not everybody has the gift of healing, so they're all different gifts. So what's the big deal? Well, if you didn't see the problem there, I'm going to. Point out a few of them. I'll overview them for you, and then we'll get to personal application. But Quick disclaimer before I go any further, there's nothing wrong with missions. This is not an anti missional message or anything like that. In fact, I'll get there. We're going to look at how they should be done biblically. So the problem isn't whether churches are doing missions or not. The problem is how, how we're doing the missions today in the church. That's the real big problem. Alright, so makes me think of something funny. Have you? Have you ever had a job where you had absolutely no idea what you were doing? I don't know. Like, maybe it's just me, but, like, no idea, right? Like, absolutely it like, I'm and I'm not talking about, like, you know, I don't know you're working at a fast food place, and you can't tell the difference between the burger and the fries. Like, which button should you hit? That's not knowing what you're doing. That's just stupid. So we're not talking about that, right? Not that you don't know what you're doing, not because you're stupid, but just because no one told you what you were doing, right? So let me back up a little bit. So for me, it makes me think of one word, and if you have an older crowd, we're going to find out, like, how old our crowd is by how much laughter We get microfiche old people, all right, right? Doesn't exist. So to explain that to you, it's like, it's not as cool as microfilm, and you probably don't even know what that is, because, like, that's old James Bond stuff, right? Where Sean Connery was James Bond. But anyway, I was okay, that was better, I don't know, whatever. So anyway, I tried. So it's not like that, but it's close, right? So you take all this information and you put it on a little piece of, like, transparent plastic, or whatever it is, right? And then, in order to read it, right, you know, you put it in this machine. And it's kind of like an overhead projector, if you've seen one of those, but this way, right? So you see it, it blows it all up for you, and you can see what's on the microfiche. And this is how they used to store stuff, before floppy disks and things and the other things that young people should know about, right? So there we go. So you can store, like, one page of a newspaper on something this big, you know, like, so we've changed quite a bit. And so here's the thing, I got to give you the background. How I got there, so I don't really know. But anyway, I used to work for this place, so I was at, if you don't know me, I'm really sorry I was out of the house, like, way too early in my teens, way too early. Shouldn't have been on my own, but I was. And so the way you get by is like, you either beg or work 15 jobs. And so I worked 15 jobs, pride. So anyway, I worked this place called Caldor. It was like a Walmart. If you're from the northeast, you might know what that is, but just imagine, like Walmart, right? And I wasn't one of the smart people that they let out during the daytime. I was one of the people that they kept in the back, right? So I got up four in the morning and I unloaded trucks. And then when I behaved myself really well, I was allowed to go out onto the floor and put stuff out on the shelves. And sometimes that didn't last. But anyway, so it was really on in the morning. You put in your eight hours and then, well, you know, you can work, right? So there's more hours in the day. So I get another job, as I was looking for another job. But the thing is, like, I was in a band, and you don't really make any money in a band. You just work for food and beer like so that's what I was doing. And so, you know, we do our gigs at night. Sometimes we'd get done at four, and I just go to work, no sleep. And a normal person would decide, oh, that was a great time to sleep. But that wasn't me. I was like, I need more money because I'm poor. I want to eat ramen noodles. So, so my friend said, I'll get you a job at this place I work at. All you have to do is read microfiche. I was like, micro. Oh yeah, I had that in your grade school. We had the microfiche machines. Sure, I can do that, great. But I wasn't thinking of a couple of things. The first thing is, I'm really tired right now, and so I don't know if you ever done math like and you're when you're really, really tired. It's not a good idea, right? It's some looking at small numbers and things like that. And that's what this was. I shouldn't have been doing it right on that little sleep You haven't slept in five days. Like, no, right? So that was the first kind of problem. Second problem is, they didn't teach me how to do the job. Nobody interviewed me. Like, I just got the job. I think my friend was like, This guy's a genius, you know? And, like, just trust me, he's great. And I'm like, Okay, so I'm sitting there. The other problem is, it's for a bank. Now, if you know me, I'm really not good at math, like I could do like basic money math at the time, the Lord hadn't yet cleared my dyslexia up. So this is a highly true a very tired person, right? Just got done the early morning crew maybe still hung over trying to read numbers. Who has dyslexia, right? So, like, this is kind of not going to work, right? So I'm looking at these things. I have no idea. I'm just like, copying like, I feel like I'm in school again. I'm like, All right, you know, he puts it back in the folder. I'll follow him back and file this thing. I'm just staring at this thing, trying not to fall asleep. No idea what I'm doing. Now, maybe you've been in this position, or you've been on the other side of the desk, either way, it's either funny or annoying, like if you had employees, you ever go to fire someone and you're just really looking forward to the satisfaction of firing this individual. And right before you do, they say, I quit. And you're like, No, I was going to fire you. You knew that, which is why you quit before the Quit firing. Like, you can't win here. I'm firing you, right? So, but that's exactly what I did. I knew they called me in and I was like, Oh, here we go. I got like, four paychecks happening. That was good, good run, you know. So they're like, Hi Jim. Like, I quit. I quit. I'm done. Like, I'm done with this, you know. Like, they're really gracious, actually, they might have been Christian. Been Christian. They're like, Oh God, we're glad you see that. That's the only thing you see, right?
So maybe that stupid story, there was no consequence, except maybe I lost someone $1 million right? Because this was for a bank. Like, I don't know, but you can just imagine in certain roles how this is not a good thing. Like, it makes me think of the surgeon commercial. There's like, a couple variations of this commercial where, like, the guy's waiting to get operated on, the surgeon comes in. He goes, You nervous? The guy's like, yeah. And the surgeon goes, so am I? You know, you're like, that's not good, right? That's not what you want to hear. Like, I just graduated med school, something like that. You know, other places we talked about planes, right? You could be on a plane. Imagine if he leaves the intercom on right, like, what's this? It's the landing gear. Oh, you know, like, you don't want to hear that, right? Or like, you know, we're going to be flying at 35,000 feet today from LaGuardia to beautiful, sunny southwest Florida. That's how they all sound to me. Southwest Florida. They should be like radio DJs. I think they just switch professions southwest Florida. But here's the thing, it's my first time. So before we take off, let's pray. You know, you don't want to hear that on a plane. We could just good. There's a lot of good places we're praying, like the pineal you should not lead the prayer group. So here we run into something seemingly innocent with the missions, right? But it isn't, and I'll explain to you why, right? So it gets serious, because there are problems working outside your spiritual gifting for ourselves and others. So I'll just kind of like overview some of the basic problems. I'll get into some of the detail. If we're not equipped, right? And we don't know the language, right? So we're going Think, think about the purpose for missions. So just, just not what church has made missions. Missions are logically supposed to be right to propagate the gospel of Jesus Christ in places where it has not been propagated, meaning, like sown, where the seeds have not been sown, where people don't know the gospel, that's a point, right? We're going to go to some place they don't know the gospel, right? Because once they do, they're all set. They can start a church, good, right? Read your Bible, but they don't. And so that's what we're going to do. And so you'd assume, if we're going to go somewhere where I don't know they don't know the gospel, they speak another language. Well, you're going to know the language, or you have that gift of tongues in there somewhere. That's good, too, fine, right? You're going to know the gospel. You're going to know the Bible. You're going to know a little bit more, because they're probably going to have follow up questions, right? You know, like, just believe in Jesus. I said, so not good enough for most smart people, right? So we're not going to assume everybody's stupid, like you should know this really well. Then you need to have, like, a gift of teaching or conveying it. So what happens when we just let everyone go? Right? It's not good, and it sets us up for failure, right? They're not equipped to do the work. So there's the first thing God will tell you through the church what you should be doing, or just tell you personally, right? But when we all go, what does it say? The Bible said, we don't all have the gifts well, and I'm assuming a lot of people are going aren't equipped to do the work. So it's kind of like this air of prideful disobedience, right? Like I know what you told me, God, but this looks great, like I can get a free trip somewhere else and look like I'm awesome, right? So already starting off with a little bit of prideful disobey, because I don't know about you, but God told me to do a lot of things in church, and a lot of them were not things I wanted to do at all, right? But you just do them. But that truck overseas sounds much better than cleaning the bathrooms or serving tables like a deacon, right? So you got everybody wants to do that, and it really is. It's a feeding into this kind of sin. Again, not being equipped. It's a bigger problem than just being that good guy, right? Because you can misrepresent Jesus, you can go somewhere you are not supposed to be you don't know what you're talking about, and have someone walk away from the conversation going, wow. Christians are dumb, like I asked them all kinds of questions about the Bible they were holding and they didn't know anything. That's not good, right? So you're not putting Jesus's, so to speak, best foot forward for the person you set yourself. For me, it's just microfiche, and clearly I'm not over it, right? But, but anyway, you know, you set yourself up for failure, and that's never good. That's not good. It doesn't encourage you. We can weaken your faith. It's not a good thing because you weren't operating in faith in the first place, right? So it can be bad. There's also the kind of idea and just, just really quick. Yeah, just teamwork, right? So why is Paul hiding? We'll get back to that. Why Paul's highlighting, like, unity in the body, right? There's disunity. We want unity in the body. We want each part of the body doing its own work. And so, you know, this is analogous to, like, I don't know, like a military unit or teams and sports things like that, where everybody has to do their job. And, you know, the guys around you. Girls around you. They've got your back, like they're doing what they're supposed to be doing and not what you're supposed to be doing, right? So you have this sense of unity that the Bible calls for in the church. We're supposed to be working in unison as a unit together, and then we're not bumping into each other. We operate just better. Everything just works better, right? Well oiled machine, God's machine. And so there's that problem. Now on missions, if you don't know, there are really two different kinds. The kind of mission I'm really not talking about today are long term missions, right? So long term missions are missionaries. They're people, usually, just for lack of better way to put it, they have the money, but they're getting the support they're getting, because that's really what they're supposed to be doing, right? So they know the language, they know the culture. A lot of these are foreign missionary people, where they're going back and forth, sometimes coming here, telling us how to do it, which is a true thing, you know? So that's not what I'm talking about. Someone who goes, they devoted their life. They're good with making no money, you know? They just go to these places. They immerse themselves in the culture, not what I'm talking about. Clearly, that's the way you're supposed to do it. I'm talking about short term missions, and this is really what that whole clipboard kind of thing is. And here's usually what happens. So usually what happens is, right? You get the clipboard, everyone signs up. That's great, you know? And it sounds fine, but when you encourage these things, and this is aka going to the same places over and over again, because I've never heard of it yet, but like in the church, like, Hey, let's go to a mission trip to Iraq, you know, someplace like that. You know, like, no, it's to Costa Rica. You know, it's like, it's to Puerto Rico, right? It's someplace where they all know Jesus. Like, what are you doing? Like, I heard of a mission trip going to Rio. I don't know. Is anybody here? Can you visualize the landmark for real? It's Jesus. It's this giant statue. Just when they're like, or go into missions, I had to hold my tongue. It was doing a service. I was like, like, you know, I said it all with my face, right? So anyway, they all, I have tons of friends from Brazil. They all know Jesus. They're like, if they don't, they didn't look up, you know, the problem. So anyway, you know, this is real. This really happens. And so what happens is, it's an industry that's a tourist industry, that's really, it's a Christian tourist industry, and it's been said that we spend about as a church as a whole, spend about $2 billion a year on short term mission trips. Now, a lot of people like, what's the big deal? And I guess maybe they're in a mega church where the pastor has a private jet and money just grows on trees. But that isn't how it is for most of us. Like the money is valuable to us. We need it to continue doing the ministry. So it's it is a very big deal, right? The other thing is, it's a misuse of God's money. Once your people give it to you, it's not my money, like this is God's money. So the church, every organization that represents Jesus, needs to be very careful with the money. That's very important, you should know that we are very careful. Someone calls cheap, but I disagree with anyway, but you should be curious. Someone gives you money, that's God's money, and you're always, you know, very careful with it, right? It's his, not ours. And so really, what these are, they're visits or vacations, when you're going back to see someone again and again and again and again, the same place, or a group of people, their visits or vacations or field trips, they're not missions, right? But if you call it a mission, you're going to get a lot more money for that mission, aren't you? Right? Hey, we're going on a field trip. I feel like that's not exciting, you know what? I mean, we're going on a mission, you know? Oh, a mission. That sounds great. Now it's just selling it, right? So if you know the Bible well, you may already be going, Wait a minute. Paul visits a lot of places again and again. Yeah, he does. So let me share with you what he says about that. Though, Romans, 1520, Paul speaking, my ambition has always been to preach the Good News, the Gospel where the name of Christ has never been heard, rather than where church has already been started by someone else, missions, I've been following the plan spoken of in the scriptures. Oh, Paul's doing that where it says those who have never heard about him will see, and those who have never heard about him will understand, in fact, my visit to you has been delayed the word visit so long because I've been preaching in these places. So here we get a difficult definition of what missions is, right? What is he'll go on to say, like, Hey, I'm going to stop by when I'm on my way to Spain. He figures he's going to go to Spain, right? And people don't know Jesus there. Let's. Go there, and I'll visit you on the way there, he's delineating they're two different things. Here, he's separating the idea of going and visiting someone from the mission, and he defines what the Gospel Mission is to a place where Jesus is not. No, that's the point. The other things are just
field trips, they're both Okay, and Paul visits people, and that's great, right? But here's the thing, we need to change what we're saying. Because the church shouldn't be paying for anyone's vacations. It shouldn't be paying for anyone's visits. It should be paying for missions, yes, and we'll get there, but not these visits. We have to change what we're saying. The other common problem is a lot of churches are, if they're not following this biblical example, making sure the missionaries going on it, making sure we're very careful with the money praying a lot. The church really is not if it's being honest, doing this at the Holy Spirit's leading. That's a very big problem. Everything needs to be done. The Holy Spirit's leading in the church. Everything, right? And I want to show you something, right? So again, over and over, the same place, and I put up the clipboard. Anyone can sign up. It's like, let's look at how biblical missions are supposed to be. So we have the early church in Acts. That's context enough for this. Acts 13, one among the prophets and the teachers of the church at Antioch of Syria were Barnabas Simeon, called the black man, Lucius from Cyrene mana and the childhood companion of King Herod Antipas and Saul. One day, as these men were worshiping the Lord and fasting, you notice what they're doing, worshiping and fasting the Holy Spirit said. The Holy Spirit said, appoint Barnabas and Saul for the special work to which I have called them. So after more fasting and prayer, the men laid their hands on them and sent them on their way. So let's look what they did. Lots of people in the church. There could be 1000s of people in the church, tons of people in the church. Here, alright, and even list a bunch of the prophets say people have the gifts and things like that. They're there. But the Holy Spirit narrows it down to two. Who narrowed it down? The Holy Spirit, not the clipboard, not you. The Holy Spirit narrowed down to two. No questions asked. What were they doing to get this information from the Holy Spirit fasting, right? You are depriving. You're focusing on God. You're taking everything away so you can really hear what the Lord is saying, right now. Okay, does the church do those two things? Not going to talk about the Daniel diet, right? Anyway, so that's not enough. That's 10 days, right? So you can see a big difference here. And then what do they do after they get the answer? More fasting and prayer. Let's just really make sure we've got this right. That looks like being very careful to me, doesn't it? At least to me. No, you're wrong. So what do we do instead? Well, we have this thing that so now we have, like, modern church, right? And modern church is just diverged so much from biblical Christianity. It's not even funny, like, it's just it's so much more of the world. And what is the church say? Well, we need to look really good, right? We need to look glamorous, like to everybody, like we're doing hard work. So everyone's going to go on missions. Because what do pastors do you get? So pastors, if they have a conversation, it's so annoying. And they have a conversation, they're going to talk about a couple of things. First, the size of their church, right? How many people are at your churches? Seriously? How much money they have in their endowment fund? They'll brag about that, which is just sinful. And then also, like, do you do missions? Does your church do missions? And then, oh, yeah, we did. We built another bridge, and we painted a house for the 30th 1,000th time. And, you know, whatever, some third world country, we're amazing. So this is the conversation. It's pretty close to what happens between pastors, right? So nothing about the Bible theology, nothing like that, right? So the church, they don't really care about, like, there's no conversation, like, Where'd the Holy Spirit tell you to go? You know? Like, we've never had that conversation, sadly, right? I'll ask the questions. They'll be like, you can't say that in church if people fire you. I'm like, they're not allowed to do that in my church. Like, what do you thought? Right? So it's a weird conversation that you have, and so you end up in this church culture of codependency. Well, yeah, of course, I have to, I have to do them to my people. We have to check that box, right? It's got to look good on my pastor resume when I quit this church and go to another church, right? So what program? That's what it is. It's like being a teacher or a principal. And what programs did you install? What did you do? And so it becomes all about this program, about just making people happen. But here's the thing, the early church is not codependent. The biblical church is God dependent. And we really need to take a stop, or just like, take a look at this and just stop. We're doing this church. It's a whole. Of this, what we've done through the years, last few years. And here's the thing, too, for anyone who wants to kind of argue that point, it gets worse for the church of today, because they're actually told we are not to go as well. We get to Acts 16, we have Paul and Silas and Derby and Maestro Timothy's there. They pick up Timothy. So acts 16, six and next, Paul and Silas traveled through the area of Phrygia. Phrygia and Galatia, because the Holy Spirit had prevented them from preaching the word in the province of Asia at that time, stop, don't go there. Right then, coming to the borders of Mysia, they headed north for the province of Bithynia. But again, the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them to go there. God dependent. There's no question, right? Why? No. Paul's also been responding to a dream, a vision from a man, no, from Macedonia, right? So he's totally dependent on whatever God's telling him to do. They're just obeying the Lord and here, right? So in Act 16, you're going to seem to get beaten with rods and jailed. You know, it's like, it's not good for them, but that doesn't matter. What matters is they're obeying the Lord. They're not interested in checking off a box, they're not interested in talking to other pastors and impressing them. They're it's not there, see, Holy Spirit's like, don't go there. Okay? You know, like, don't go there. Fine. You know what I mean. But maybe we should fast and pray again. That's the response. That's the true biblical response, right? So instead of coming under the authority of God and letting the Holy Spirit lead, some people will pridefully go out of that, right? And so what I'm talking about, whether it's the program guide, the it's all pride, it's all sinful, it's none of it's very good, right? And so they go out of the biblical structure and into the typical western program, and that's kind of what happens here. And I won't even get too much on the side note of how we think we're superior to everybody else, which is not necessarily true. Alright? So the Bible teaches on the authority of the Church, right? So that's what we really have to understand. Everything is done. Did you notice through the church, through the authority of the Church, right? Everything's done through the church, no other way, right? And so a lot of times we begin to see this when people don't want to be obedient, right? And if you get a church that, you know, hey, look, this is the way we're going to do it. And we've, I won't talk about it too much, but we've had it happen here. This is what we're going to do. What we're going to do. We're going to do all our programs, whatever God says. We're just going to do, and we don't know why, but we're just going to do it. We're just going to do what he says, whoa. But I have a different idea, right? You know, I'm like, again, oh, we're the church, and we all prayed about it, and we did the fasting, the praying. Well, did you No, clearly not. You know, we're just going to do whatever we want to do. And I'm like, okay, and when people don't get the answers they want from God or the church, enter into the parachurch, that's what you end up with. And so the church has a parachurch problem. It's very hard to deal with right now. And basically what happens is it's an organization, a mission organization. It could be a ministry organization that is not, I would say rooted, not just going to say tethered, but rooted in a church, right? It's not rooted in church leadership. So in other words, it's an organization that doesn't have the pastors, the elders, the deacons, like, you know, a board is not operating like a true non profit, running on empty. You know, it's not doing those things. But then everybody's like, okay, somebody came. We have an idea. Can we all just pray about this? Come back together and operate in unity, right? So that's what happens in a good church. Wait, what does the Bible say about it, and what God said? We're going through this process, and we're looking for accountability. We're being very careful with the money, right? Everyone's watching where everybody is a lot of transparency. But these organizations don't want that. So that's what you're going to do when you don't want to do all those steps. And maybe you want a title, maybe you want some, and they didn't give you one, something like that. A lot of people will start para Turk now, am I saying all these organizations are like that? No, they're not all like that. Am I saying most of the ones I've dealt with are yep, that's what I'm saying. Most of the ones I've dealt with are exactly like that, and they become very difficult to deal with because at the root of it, there's a lot of pride going on. There's just like, no accountability. At the end of this thing, you don't know where they're really spending the money. And, like, if you know math real well, right? Like, hey, we're going to put this under this expenditure line. It's missions, you know? And then you find out that missions is, like, all kinds of stuff that you would never classify as missions, right? Very little accountability. And there's this problem of evading responsibility again, back to that, not wanting to be accountable with God's money. You're not recognizing that this is God's money. And furthermore, what gets a little more frustrating and annoying. A lot of times, these are people who have left a church or the church as a whole, and they come right back around and ask the church for money. Uh,
insult to injury, right? What are you doing? Right? So you get this confusion, you get this misdirection of money. You also get a misdirection of ministers and ministries, right? You're all equipped to do this, right? That's not what we said, and it's very, very confusing, because just think about it for a second. I'm telling you the way the church operates. We've all fasted, prayed, we've done what we got to do. God told us the mission said, Okay, this is what you're going to do. Then you have another organization come in and say, No, this is what your people should be doing. Even though you know them, you've prayed with them. They're your family. What you know, no like that. We already talked to God, and so they create confusion in the church, right? Everything needs to come through biblical church authority. That's the way it works. There's no other way to do it biblically, right, confusion and disunity. So a lot of these people, they have that issue we talked about in the past, of that selfish ambition, right, that pride. I want to be the mission leader. I want to go and be seen. I want to be a part of the group. And so again, it's kind of like the Corinthian problem, right? I want the title, I want the glamorous ministry. I want to be seen. I want to do this, that and the other thing, and often that's the common denominator that you're dealing with. But if we go back to Matthew Again, and we look at the Sermon on the Mount, remember, we learned sermon on the mount is one continuous flow of Jesus speaking Matthew, 567, there are those who like read maybe the whole chapter five, maybe a verse, right? And then they get up and they walk out on Jesus' sermon and never come back, so he can give you the actual conclusion. So just to review, a lot of these people will say, like, hey, we really need to, like, show everybody what we're doing, right? So you're the light of the world, the city on a hill that can't be hidden, and that sounds great, and they'll run out, and that's their life verse, right? For the missionaries, and that's what we got to do. But in Matthew six, he says, when you give to the poor, right? Don't, don't let anybody know what you're doing, right? Or you'll lose your reward in heaven. He says that, don't even let right your right hand, left hand know what your right hand is doing, or get that backward, right? Don't even. And then he goes into praying, when you pray, shut the door, right. Don't be like the pagans of Babylon and on for show like, don't do that, right? Don't you shouldn't be showing off. But what happens? I'm going to go on a mission and I'm going to let everybody know what my right hand is doing, right? That's what they do like in the old days. I mean, you could never have anybody go on a mission trip without having to sit through a disgusting PowerPoint the next Sunday. Like, I don't really want to see all these pictures of you showing off, right? It creates this terrible culture where we go there and we patronize people. Look at this third world person I'm going to spend five minutes with, then go back on my luxury plane, back to my luxury life, and never think about you again. But wait, I am just going to go show it off to everybody in the church, and so everybody who didn't go on the mission trip feels as bad as they should, and I look awesome. It's exactly what's going on. Right? Write the check and don't tell anyone. That would be a really difficult thing for most people to do. Do that, right? So a superiority complex for those who do, an inferiority complex for those who don't, and to those who say, we say we're helping. It just patronizes them. I talk to so many people. They go to these countries, and then when they finally get honest with them, they're like, don't come back. Just send us the money, right? Much better that way. But there's another problem with those doing this going places over and over again. We create, like a Christian vacation culture, and so if you ever been to a tourist area. What happens with the local population in the tourist area? What always happens? Well, they become dependent, they come into they develop a tourist economy. And so a lot of these places develop a tourist economy. And so, and then what are you doing? You're sending rounds of people to paint the buildings, fix the bridges, whatever they do, right? They're not doing that now. What are they doing? Begging for your money. They're happy to just look for they're like, this is great. These stupid Americans are coming here and giving us money, like they're smarter than you think. But here's the problem, right? So it's not good for the economy. It enables them. They're not doing we should be going there. Here's the gospel, here's your church. Buy. You know what I mean? You do your own thing to your culture. You represent your culture. Nope. So it's this terrible hamster wheel, and unfortunately, and you can, if you don't believe me, look up like, cancel your short term mission. Even some really big organizations are now saying that, because what happens is, hey, look, let's mar the kids. Let's scar the kid. All right, cut off a pinky and they'll give us more money. And if you don't think that happens, look it up. It does, right? So it's really not good for the local population there. It's a very unhealthy tourist economy that we create. Now, on the other side of things, all the way over here, if we're not going to go back to the parachurch problem. Guess what? It's way easier then to just throw them a little bit of money, right, and say we participated. Instead of praying, fasting, let the Holy Spirit do the work and finding the right people to send. That's hard, right? It's way easier just to go we support this, and we set a disgusting poster of all the ministries we support. They give you, like, 10 bucks a month to, you know, nothing, really not helping anybody. So it's a problems. But as a church, and here's where we come in, we should all be doing something as the body of Christ, that's the point. That's the point of church. It's not a building, it's you. It's you. You are the church, and so we want to be doing this right, right in our own respective ministries, and we don't want to be passing it off to anybody else. The church should be operative. The church should be doing this. So the question you may not be called to missions, but everyone's called to ministry at some level or another, in some place or another, right? So what is that part of God's plan for you? What is it? So if we go back to First Corinthians again, and we go towards the beginning, we see that now I encourage you to read this first Corinthians 12. Read this on your own. Read the whole thing on your own and just own, and just get what Paul's saying here. Now he encourages them, because he's trying to get to the other side of this prideful thing, just like I did, right? So if you're in Paul's shoes, I'm right there. Now I put myself right there, right? You know. Now you got to go, Okay, let's be encouraging, right? Let's, let's figure out, like, where do you fit in? So here's what he says. I'm just going to, we're not going to put it up on the screen. You go read. This, but this is the this, but this is the crux. I'm going to paraphrase. There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit is the source of them all. So think about that. This should be very encouraging. The Holy Spirit is working through you if you are baptized in Jesus Christ. So if you're baptizing, what do you say? Baptism in the Father Son, the Holy Spirit. If that's you, you have God now living in you, and he's going to give you certain abilities that you're blessed with, he decides, and he'll get to that, right? So he says, a spiritual gift is given to each person, right? Interestingly, to one Spirit gives a word of wisdom, right? So, in Greek, another spirit gives a word of knowledge, right? And then we go through it, the gift of healing. So just different things going through all the parts, but it's the one and only Holy Spirit who distributes these gifts. He decides which one we all get, great. Then he compares it. Remember I talked about the body of Christ, right? So the human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So that means each one of you is an important what part of your body do you want to lose? Just say nothing, right? That's the correct answer, right? So we don't, so it's all important. Doesn't matter, right? And Paul's going to get there. He goes to a multicultural thing. He's going to start to break down this disunity over culture. Some are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, some are free. But we're all baptized into one body and one Spirit. So what is Paul doing? Like, we would call it teamwork, right? We're all in really important members of the same team. So this is what's being stated here. Now, Paula kind of does a funny thing in Greek. It's called prosopopoeia, like, so it's this idea where you're having inanimate it's like a puppet show. Inanimate things talk to us. So
again, the foot can't say to the hand, I'm not important because I'm not a hand. Your hand's really important. The ear begins talking like the ear doesn't say, well, because I'm not an eye, I'm not a part of the body. And so it's kind of silly, but it should get your attention, right? So what he's saying is, in fact, some parts of the body that seem the weakest and least important are actually the most necessary. And he kind of makes his audience think he's like, some of the parts that look are kind of shameful. We cover like we make sure that we take really good care of them, you know? And it kind of alludes to something there to get your attention, right. So some of the parts that seem like the least important aren't. They're the most necessary. They're important. Everything we do here is important. Everything every one of you does is really important. And so I just want to take a moment before I close, just to kind of like, if you're new here, give you guys an idea of what we do if you're watching, give you guys an idea of what we do if you're not, it's good to hear it. It's good to kind of want. In a while, like, you know, just be encouraged here, what we're doing here, and how people fit in. So if you're not called to formation, the local stuff, we need to remember one thing. This is really in churches. Forget this. The church is a mission. There are a lot of people in our backyard who don't really know Jesus, the church is a mission. We as a church, we really have to stop looking over the heads that are here right to other things that will make us look good, right? The people here in this community are very important, and we love them very much. So we do a lot of things with the building to support this community and let this community know that we really love them, right? So that's important. So we preach the gospel here to this local community, but when we do like our ministries here, we don't do programs, we don't do patronizing, we don't do labels. There's just none of that in the Bible, right? What apologists do is no longer just sounds like Galatians three, and it should, right? You know, the Jew Gentile slave free. We're all one of Christ, Jesus. So we get the first thing we do is get rid of that, right? So you'll the cafe. We do a lot of work through the cafe, but just know we, like some people be like, Do you have a this ministry in order that ministry? I'm like, we don't like to label people and single them out, because that's exactly what it is, and that's what the church does, right? So we do. We have a homeless ministry, and once a year we get together and make sure we go feed the homeless people, you know, and then, you know, we make sure the whole internet knows we did it check, you know what I mean, and that's it. No, there's no the home like we don't identify ourselves like that here, like you may be experiencing. There's some among you. You know me. I know you where you are experiencing homelessness, but that's not where I lead like, Hey, how's the homeless thing going today? You know? Like, we don't do that, right? You're just my brother in Christ or my sister in Christ. That's it. And I'm helping you where I can. We're working together on this, right? And we're going to share a meal upstairs together, right? That's it. And so when you do a specific minute, it's called patronizing, right? It's called making you superior. That doesn't exist here. That's what people want. They know that's not the church for them. It's not a place where you should feel superior or inferior. They don't exist here at c3 right? And that's not popular, unfortunately, but we have ministries within that context that you can plug into. So the cafe, you'll be told how you can plug in and connect with us after I'm done speaking, but afterwards we break bread together. That's what the early church did. I understand. You may have lunch plans. It's awesome here. Food enables but, you know, come check it out if you haven't before. But we all just break bread and we're all equal. But making a cafe work like that takes a lot of work, right? So it takes people to help serve the food. Maybe like to make food and prepare it. Maybe somebody here makes really good Stromboli, but it's a great place to serve, right? And if you just love serving, you know, I just let totally one hand know what the other hand was doing, that's okay. Give me a pass on that one confess, right? So, you know, it's fun, and there's a lot of joy in it, like you see, if you go up there, just a lot of joy in the preparation of the food, the people making the food. It's awesome, but we need help, right? And could it be cleaning it could be setting up all those different things, and that's one way we let the community know that we love them. It's a biblical breaking of the bread. But it's also saying to the community, we love you. It doesn't matter where you come from, what your current issue is, doesn't matter. Just let's all eat together. That's cool, right? That's it. And then if someone actually needs a meal, hey, great. But we didn't go, let's do the food program for the hungry people. You know, I'm hungry, right? So maybe that's me every day, right? So we just all hang out and we just do that, and it's like, you know what? I mean, it's not a big deal. It's not about me being superior to you or checking off a box. Building needs. It's a big building. The community does use some of it. We do all different kinds of things. We've done movie Days, you know, we might bring that back, but a lot of times we don't do these things because there's a lack of volunteer support. And so some people will come up to me like, What happened to you know, I'm like, You're not helping. So I ask him, No, it's not you, but, but anyway, it takes a lot. So if we used to do like a parent side out thing, but it takes a lot of moving parts. It's an awful lot. You got to watch the kids. But there are things like that every Sunday kids ministry. You know, I give my notes to the people write. The kids lessons, they write. So if you're good at that, maybe you're a teacher, you can read my notes. No one's going to sign up for that. Some people prepare the kids lessons. Some people teach the kids lessons. So you can see us about that. If that's you, I get afraid to talk about singing, right? Because most people are great in the shower, right? So, but you know, the water comes from the shower head. That's a one way thing, right? So anyway, if you have experience singing, and you can sing harmonies well, and no one has chased you off a stage, then. Come see us sinking global and look, if the Lord is putting something on your heart you maybe you speak another language in a place in my country doesn't know Jesus talk to us about that I'd love to pray about, like maybe sending someone somewhere who should be going. That's cool, too. One thing that people don't think about, that we do, and it's clearly not a big deal to us, but it's, it's something that every once in a while needs to get explained, because, like, I call this a live studio audience, right? And when it's just experience, when you preach the Word of God, you'll never be a mega church. It's just, it's never going to happen. Jesus says the road is narrow. What happens with the parable of the sower, right? It's really a lot of rocks out there that you're preaching to. Very few, sadly, really want the Word of God. They did. They don't want to understand this. They're just, it's much easier, much easier, right? Sit down, get dressed up, leave your problem somewhere else. I don't want to talk to homeless people or drug addicts or anything like that, you know? I just, I want pretty church. I want to look good. Check the box. Hopefully that'll be good enough for God. Keep hoping. But biblical, it's just it's going to be smaller. And we know that. We know that, which is another reason why the money is very important to us. We know that. But what's not obvious to a lot of people that I call it a live studio audience, because it's going to go out to way more people. It's going to reach a lot more people than we'll ever hear it here in this community. That's very intentional. So we have just a wonderful media crew. Love you guys. Can't see you because you shine really bright lights in my face. But you know, I love you, right? We appreciate that because it goes out to a lot of people all over the world. There are people in India, watching, like my Instagram reels and different things like that. So it works, right? And it's really effective missions. And it's just worth noting very quickly that we understand something, Christianity is a shrinking religion. It is. It's not growing. There are more churches closing than opening. That's just a fact. And now we've discussed in the past the reasons for that, right? What do they think of us as, judgmental, hypocrites? And so go back and watch that message if you want to be depressed. But we don't necessarily make the best witnesses. But there's one religion that's growing faster than us, and that's Islam, a lot faster. I'll tell you one reason why they're very convincing witnesses, very they literally will lay their life down for it. And I'm not saying that's good thing the way they do it. It's true. The other thing is, they don't have short term missions. They don't have the way we would think of it, right? They don't have the club. And they get together and do the PowerPoint. No, they do most all of it on the internet, all of it because they're smart. Why? Why would I waste all this money to send all these people who are completely unconvincing and ineffective to a place where I can save that, you know, buy whatever they're buying, but support our local community? Maybe, you know, do something like that, and we can just reach 10s of 1000s of people on the internet, and we don't even have to knock on a door. We're in their phone.
That sounds smart, doesn't it, because that's really annoying. So I can, I can bypass the front door, get right in the phone and influence them. You ever heard of the term influencers? We could learn a lot from the world around us sometimes, right? That's what they do. And so this is missions that's much more cost effective. Much more cost effective. We get right inside the phone and believe me, there's open dialog. People will message me. We get dialog going with conversations. I delete the nasty comments, but I'm, I'm dialoguing with people that it would have cost, like, $3,000 to send blue eyed me there, right? It won't garnish any respect from the people that are kind of like here. But you know what I mean, it's not, I don't belong there, right? But now I'm dialoguing with people, and for nothing, like, it costs almost nothing to put that out there, right? So anyway, save us to say that that's just another way you can get plugged in here. If you are interested in media, there's like, sound involved, there's camera involved, there's slides involved, there's different computer stuff involved. The editing is more complicated, but you know, hey, maybe you did that as a profession, and you can help great, right? So these are other ways I say this to personalize it, where you can get plugged in. You can learn how to do new things. Maybe you can meet new people within each mint, it's not a click, but within each ministry, they talk, and you can make friends, right? Get out of your shell a little bit, edify and encourage one another if you haven't done that already. So just a few things that we do, just encouragement. The other thing I want to say quickly, and this doesn't get said enough, because we don't do plaques, we don't do that kind of stuff. It's just let the Lord reward you, right? But thank you. Thank you for those who participate in any way, whether. You support the church, whether you know it's monetarily, whether you're helping out. Thank you. Thank you for what you guys do. It's really important. It makes all this work. I don't have to sweat it when I get up on a Sunday morning. It's easy. Like, I'm a really blessed pastor, because I get up and I'm just focused on the message and you people I'm talking to, you guys, it's great. I don't have to, like, worry like, Oh no, is there going to be sound? We don't put those pressures on anybody. If something didn't go right or whatever. We're good, because it's a family, and we're more excited about seeing you as a family than we are putting on a show, quite frankly, right? So this is important. It's not a show. It has a function, though, more than just making people feel good. It's doing something. So you're all a part of that. If you're participating, thank you so much. If you're here, I appreciate the fact that you're just here listening to the Word of God. Okay, so I can be stressful as a pastor who's trying to preach it, because you're not getting, always the pat on the back that people are don't, right? You know. So lot of people get, they shoot the messenger, you know. So thank you for not doing that. I appreciate you guys. Just to encourage every single one of you, if you haven't heard it before, Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you. You are important to him. You are an important part of the body of Christ. And if you haven't plugged in, come on in, like you have a place here, you have a value here. And some of you, I know we're all going through something, maybe you've been told something different, like you don't have importance, you don't have value. I was told that my whole life, but not here, right? So it can really change everything for you, right? So if you want to discuss that, I'll tell you how it's changed everything for me. But you're important here. You're important to God. You're important to us here as a church. We love you. Thank you, and just let me pray for you, Lord. I thank you for everyone in the sound of my voice, whether it's here or far. I thank you for all the different means by which we can we can reach those people. And I just want everyone to be encouraged. Lord, just pour your love out on them. Let them surrender. Just lay down whatever it is they're carrying around that they don't need to carry around anymore, and just fill them by the power of your Holy Spirit. Let them experience that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, the goodness, Lord, and for us who have known you, just encourage us, build us up, Lord, so we can be better vehicles of Your grace, your mercy and your Love. I ask these things In Jesus's Name, Amen.
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