We are wrapping up our Family Matter series where we have talked about the family, the spiritual family that God has given us. We’ve talked about, , our immediate family. We’ve talked about marriage. We’ve talked about parenting. Last week, we talked about the community that exists in our church family and what that looks like. That today we’re gonna talk about how God has given us this vision as a church, as Christians, to be a family that is on the move. We are supposed to be going in the direction that God has called us. But, but I would argue that one of the biggest challenges to that is something that we wear as a badge of pride, and that is busyness. Like if you ask anybody, you just walk up to them and say, “Hey, how are you doing?” Probably the most common response is, “Man, I am busy.

I got so much stuff going on.” We, we say that because we, there’s something about that that feels good. Man, I, I’m, I got so many things because I’m important. I, I have things to do and places to be. , It’s so much a part of our culture that even when you talk to younger people, they will give the same answer. My middle school students will say, “I’m just so busy.” And I’m looking at them and I’m like, “Oh, oh, sweet child.” <laugh> Like this is literally the least busy you will be for the rest of your life. Like someday you will go to college and all college kids, they feel like they’re busy like, oh, I’m just so busy at tests and intramurals and video games at 2:00 in the morning. And you’re like, hey, you, you think you’re busy right now, but, but you’re gonna enter the workforce and you’re never gonna have summers off for the rest of your life unless you’re an educator.

And then you’re gonna feel busy and then you’re gonna get married and that’s gonna be more busy. Then you’re gonna start having kids and it’s gonna be more busy. And you end up in this stage in life where your calendar is exceedingly full. They have this thing called, called a skylight. It’s a family calendar. , This is a, a picture of one, if you’ve never seen one where you can basically identify everybody in your family and then everybody has their own color that it, it’s coordinated to and okay, this person’s got this activity. Now this is a fake one. This is the Parker family. They don’t exist. , I just made it up. So you could kind of see how that calendar works. , This is true story. We have this calendar as a family, but we’ve been so busy that we’ve never put our junk into the calendar.

<Laugh> Just, just haven’t had the time for it. But you can get to this point where you feel like your world revolves around so many things. And by the way, they’re good things. You got school and you got sports and you got activities and you’ve got parties and you’ve got church. And, and none of those are inherently bad things, but, but here is a spiritual truth that the Bible would back up over and over and over again, that we can have a full life and it can still be empty. So, so here’s what, what I wanna just start with posing this question, that if you took a stranger and you showed them your calendar, like if someone looked at you or your family’s calendar, they could probably tell what your family does, but could they tell what your family is living for? Could, could they tell your why?

Could they tell your purpose? Are we filling our calendar because we’re just supposed to? That’s what everybody does. Or are we filling our calendar because we say this is the objective, this is what we’re trying to accomplish. And because this is the value that we’re seeking to accomplish, we are filling our calendar with things that will ultimately help us accomplish that goal, that this is the vision. , Here’s the truth. We can know exactly where everyone needs to be this week and yet we can still struggle to explain where we’re going. Is there a direction? Is there a purpose? Is there a why? Because here’s the thing about God’s family, that when God brings us into his family, he gives us a purpose that is beyond just ourselves. It’s beyond just busyness. It’s an intentional direction that we’re meant to head with our life. If you’ve got a Bible, , turn with me, turn with me to one Peter chapter two.

One Peter chapter two, we’re gonna start in verse nine. And, and, and here’s the tension when you start talking about calendar. The tension creates this question of how do we live for something bigger when ordinary life already feels so full? Like maybe you already are like, “Yeah, our life’s too busy. We need to cut some stuff out. And now you’re about to tell me something that I need to add to my life and, and it’s gonna add some spiritual guilt to my life like, oh, I just, I’m not doing enough.” And that’s not the goal. The goal would be how do we take God’s word, apply it to our already existing calendar and live in a way that honors and glorifies God with the calendar that we already have. One Peter chapter two, starting in verse nine, it says this, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” Now, if you’re familiar with that verse, , the, the first part is one of the most famous phrases in the verse, that you’re a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. And when we think of that, i- in today’s culture, we naturally think of what Peter wrote in this letter. But in the first century, when they heard that, it would remind them of very similar language that exists in the Old Testament, very similar language that God gives to Moses to give to his people to tell them who they are. Don’t turn there, but listen to what it says in Exodus chapter 19, verses four through six. God says, “Tell the people of Israel, you yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples for all the earth is mine and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. These are the words that you shall peak, speak to the people of Israel.” So first there’s this idea that the nation of Israel, they were in captivity, they were slaves, they were in. And then God gives this really cool imagery. He said, “But I brought you out of that and bore you on wings like eagles.” So picture in your mind, freedom. An eagle soaring high, high above the earth is this picture of freedom. And God is saying that you were once enslaved, but now you are free. And then he tells them the destination, he says, “I, I want you to be my royal priesthood.” Now, now at that time, you, you had in, in a little bit in the book of Exodus, there’s going to become actual priests as, as a role.

So the brother of Moses becomes the high priest and then the Levites become priests and they have these specific things that they do in their office to try and connect the people of God to God. And so what he’s not saying is that the entire nation was going to go into that role, but what he was saying was that his desire, God’s desire for the nation of Israel is that they would help the outside world see them and because of them, it would help them to connect to God. But there’s a big if in the middle of that verse. He says, “If you will follow after me.” God tells the nation of Israel, “If you will listen to what I’ve told you to do, live according to the way that I’m asking you to live, then you will be my priest to everyone around you.” And so Peter’s picking up on that language.

And Peter’s saying that we as Christians, we are called to be a royal priesthood. What does that mean? That God is wanting to use us to connect a fallen and broken world back to God. And now one of the things that, that Exodus is really clear on is that the nation of Israel did not save themselves. God gives this imagery of, of this free eagle soaring and he says, “That is not because you were great.” God says, “That is because I am great. I rescued you.” And Peter does the exact same thing. He wants us to understand that God’s welcome comes before our usefulness, that God welcomes us into his family, not because of what we have done, but because of what God has done for us on the cross. And so verse 10 wants us to understand that, that it’s not we have accomplished something and therefore God is using us.

No, God has accomplished something in us and for us. And then through us, the overflow of that is what we’re doing for God. So there’s this picture that we were once outside and now we’re a people, that we were once without mercy and now we are recipients of mercy. I think one of the challenges that we struggle with is that we often think I do good things for God in order to make God love me. And that is not what this passage is saying. This passage is saying, God loved me even in my brokenness, God redeemed me and then because now I love God, because of what he has done for me, now is the overflow. That’s why in verse nine, it says that we’ve been made God’s people so that, that there’s a so that we may declare his excellencies, that there’s this picture that we were in darkness and now because of God, because of what he has done in our life, we get transformed into marvelous light.

And so God wants to, to, to redeem me back to him so that he can use my life as a priest to the world around me to help the world knows about how much God means to me and how much God can mean to them. And you see, Peter’s doing something profound and it’s true just in human nature that our belonging and our purpose, they go hand in hand. That if I belong to something, it helps give me a purpose for the direction of my life. And we see this play itself out, by the way, in just everyday life, that when we feel like we belong to something, it gives us this purpose, which is why people often become ambassadors for the things that they love. Like, like I’ll give you a few examples, pickleball. I, I mean, I’ve never seen a sport explode the way that pickleball has in the last five years.

We are putting pickleball courts everywhere. Like if there’s an open field that, that our, our city or our county’s like, “Hey, you know what would go gray? There’s some pickleball courts. That’s what we need.” And you can’t meet somebody that plays pickleball that will not tell you that they play pickleball. Like if you’re right now, you’re like, “I wonder if my, my friend plays pickleball.” I could give you a really easy answer. Have they ever told you that they play pickleball? Because people that play pickleball, they are ambassadors for pickleball. They are evangelists for pickleball. They say, “Hey, have you ever considered pickleball? Have you ever tried it? It changed my life.” And for some it really did change their life. It got them in shape. It gave them a community. And so before you know it, they’re inviting your spouse and your kids and your neighborhood to come play pickleball with them.

They love it. Therefore, that belonging gives them this purpose to try and invite other people. We do the same thing with Costco, which makes no sense to me. But, but you see somebody and you say, “Hey, that’s a really nice shirt.” And they are immediately like, “Yeah, I see this shirt, $12 at Costco. It should cost two, three, four, five times this amount, but not at Costco, baby.” And then they’ll go into their Costco spiel like, “Yeah, the gas at Costco.” I mean, you just can’t beat that anywhere in town, Costco Gas, which is why if you go to Costco, there’s like a three hour wait to get gasoline at Costco. They talk about the different stuff they’ve got like, “Hey, if you’re gonna buy meats, I’m just telling you the steak at Costco, supreme, superior to every other place.” Costco’s model does not make sense to me because you have to pay to go into the store.

Like they’re, they’re checking it like it’s a nightclub. They’re like somebody, “Hey, I need to see the ID. Show me, show me the past before you get in here. You want to experience $1.50 hotdog? Uh-Uh, you’re gonna pay for that.” And it creates this cold feeling of, “All right, I am a part of the club.” And so people become ambassadors for it. , Probably the most wild one to me is cold plunges. And I know some of you in the room that you are cold plunge people. And cold plunge people, they, they can’t just experience cold plunge. They have to convince other people to also experience cold plunge. And they feel like cold plunge is the answer to every problem that you have in your life. Like if you’re talking to someone and they cold plunge, you’re like, “Man, I just, I’ve had this crick in my neck.” They’re like, “I’ll tell you what could solve that for you.

Start cold plunging.” <laugh> You have some anxiety, some stress in your life, “Hey, I’ll tell you what. Cold plunge, that’ll fix it.” You know why cold plunge in their mind fixes all problems? Because it’s miserable. <Laugh> I mean, have you ever done a cold plunge? It’s 40 degree water. And their, their idea is if you do something so miserable in your morning, your, your, your day can’t get worse than that. It can only go up from there. You, you say, “Hey, my marriage is struggling.” You know what you should do? Couple therapy, cold plunge together at the same time. Because now the worst problem in your marriage is gonna be the fact that you’re in 40 degree water together and you’re gonna be trying to get out of it together. Like, like I, I don’t quite understand, but why do people, when they’ve experienced something that they love, why do they wanna share it?

Because that is human nature. What we do when we belong to something is it gives us this purpose that we feel like we wanna share with other people how important that thing is to us. And I think sometimes when, when we talk about mission inside the church, we get a little bit overwhelmed because naturally we start to think, okay, what you’re asking me to do is trying to convince somebody who’s not a Christian to be a Christian. And so you start automatically thinking, well, I’m under-equipped. I don’t know enough apologetics. I don’t know enough answers. But, but that’s not primarily what scripture teaches us is the primary tool for evangelism. The primary tool is that if I belong and I have passion and I have love for God, if I truly believe that he’s taken me from darkness into marvelous light, then the natural overflow of my life should be to share that with people.

And I don’t have to convince them of anything. I just have to share with them how amazing it is in my life and how much of a difference it has made. And, and I would bet that if you just think about your own spiritual story, that everybody’s spiritual story in here involves somebody else. Somebody has invited you into that. Like I think about, about my own life. I, I think of these spiritual mentors that I’ve had time and time again, that God has placed in my life and that they have helped guide and direct me into falling more deeply in love with Jesus. That, that if you stopped right now and tried to think back of what are the five most important sermons you’ve ever heard in your life, you probably struggled to come up with five. Like if you, if I asked you, hey, write down the main points of last week’s sermon, I would struggle with that.

I’m sure you would struggle with that because those are not the things that really we remember. They’re good, they’re important, they’re valuable, but what really matters is relationships. That, that’s why research would say, , Warren Bird is a Christian statistician, done tons of research. One of the researches that he points to is that in a church like ours, a larger church, that 82% of the people that end up in that church end up because of a connection or a personal invitation. That most people end up in a place like this, not because they just rummed in off the street, although that’s wonderful when it happens. Most of the time it’s because they had a personal connection. And then with that personal connection, somebody made an invitation, “Hey, I love what’s going on in this place. I think you would love it too. Please join me.” Now there’s something about that that makes us uncomfortable.

We’re not uncomfortable telling people that we love pickleball or that we love Costco or that we love cold plunges, but there’s some part of me that starts to get uncomfortable with my faith. And, and I would just question, why shouldn’t it be, if it means so much to me, a natural overflow of my life? I keep going in one Peter two, look at verse 11. He says, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” And then, now here’s what I wanna point out, that, that the audience of one Peter, when you’re talking about who he’s writing to, he wants us to understand that they live among people who need to see and hear the difference that Jesus makes.

I would also argue that we currently, right now where we are, live among people who need to see and hear the difference that Jesus makes. That, that he recognizes, that’s why he calls them sojourners and exiles. He, he’s saying that you are in this world but not out of this world. You live amongst a broken people. And he’s saying, as God’s people, living in darkness, you’re meant to be a light. That if I have an eternal perspective, I recognize that someday my eternal home is in the new heavens and new earth with God. And so I am just in temporary residence in this place right now. And God doesn’t do that on accident. No, God does that on purpose. And my purpose is to recognize that I am living in darkness and God has appointed me to live here in this moment for a divine purpose.

And then he goes on to say with that, that we should be doing good deeds. He, he’s saying live in a manner that they have nothing bad to speak about us, that we should do good things, but our motivation for good deeds is not ourselves. Instead, our motivation for good deeds is that they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. Now there’s something about that that we’re not very good at because I am wired in such a way that when I do good deeds, when I do good things, I want recognition for that. Like I want other people to notice and tell me how awesome I am. Like if I’m walking across a parking lot and I pick up a piece of trash, there is some part of me that is hoping that off in the distance someone is looking at me, pick up that trash and internally they’re like, “That guy’s awesome.” Like that, that is the way that we are wired.

When we give money, we like to give in a way that everybody knows that we’re giving in that way because we want accolades. But what Peter is saying is that when I get the accolades for doing good things, it removes the glory from God. But as a Christian, instead of doing it out of selfish reasons, if I do it because I’m trying to honor and glorify God, and instead of me giving the praise, I turn that price back to God that they see those good deeds and then there’s something that happens as a result of it, that they experience God. This idea of me being a royal priesthood, you being a royal priesthood, that if we live in such a way that the world takes note, that they see our actions, and instead of those actions pointing to us, those actions point to God and they say, “Wow, I don’t know what’s different about them.

I, I don’t know anything about the God that they love and they worship, but if this is a result of that, then I’m curious about that.” You see, the challenge in the family, and we talked about this almost every single week, the challenge of the family is selfishness. And if I think of marriage, if you have one person that is just always selfish inside the marriage, it will mess up the marriage. If you have two people that are always selfish inside the marriage, then it’s going to be disaster. Same is true with, with parenting. Same is true with your siblings. Sa- same is true in every relationship that you and I have. Hey, it’s also true inside the church that, that what causes most conflicts inside the church, it’s selfishness. It’s me putting my needs above your needs. It’s me focusing on my wants and my desires instead of yours.

And the same is true with the mission that God has given us. God has given us his purpose to be his ambassadors, to be priests to the world around us, to, to live in such a way that causes people to want to know about God. But if I do it in a selfish way, it doesn’t accomplish any of that. If you think about the history of Christianity, and I bring this up every few years because I just think it’s a profound truth then and it’s a profound truth now if we can live it out. It started with a very small group of people. You’re talking about a few hundred people in the early stages of Christianity. And then it grows just with exponential magnitude so radically, so quickly. And what’s unique about Christianity is that you’ve had other religions that have grown quickly, but most of them that grew quickly, they grew quickly because a conquering nation killed everybody and then looked at the survivors and they said, “Hey, you can kneel and, and believe what we believe or we can kill you.” And it turns out that’s a great evangelism strategy.

People say, “Okay, ideal. Let’s do it.” , but Christianity didn’t do that. Christianity had no money. It had no authority. It had no army. It just had a small group of ragtag people, but they lived out the gospel. , Rodney Stark wri- writes a book called The Growth of Christianity and, and he gives this estimate in that book where he guesses that in the year 250 AD, that there’s roughly 1.2 million Christians in Rome. Now Rome, the nation of Rome, only had about 60 million people. We, we tend to think back in history and because Rome was so big and so great, , the world, the world’s population was just relatively small. So 60 million people, that’s all that Rome was. And of those 60 million, in the year 250, it grown to be about 1.2 million, which is already some pretty extraordinary growth from a few hundred people.

It doesn’t die out with them that they continue to share their face, share their faith, share their faith. And then in the year 250, there’s 1.2 million. And then 100 years later, there’s 34 million. The majority of Rome is now following after Jesus. And so he goes back in history and just says, why? What is the reason that Christianity grows the way that it grows? And can I tell you what the answer is not? The answer was not they had amazing preachers and amazing communicators. , The answer is not that, well, they had this program or that program or that Bible study, and those are all good things, but that is not what caused the crazy growth the early church experienced. He pointed to something really simple, and that was Christians living out the gospel, taking the teachings of Jesus. What does it mean to truly love my neighbor as myself and living it out, taking the, the teachings of, of Peter, saying, live in such a way that they will glorify God because of, of your good works.

And so they say, okay, we’re going to actually do that. If you trace the origins of so many good things that we have in our culture today, the origins are in the early church. You think of orphanages. Why do we have orphanages? Because in the early church, , children could be just discarded or abandoned. And what the early church did is they started taking kids that were disbanded. Oftentimes they had special needs. , Oftentimes they had some type of an issue and they just start collecting them. And they said, what does it look like to live out the gospel? Well, these are the marginalized and so we’re gonna love them well. And so the origin of what we think of as an orphanage was the early church. Same is true for hospitals. At the early church, they started taking sick people, bringing them together and caring for them.

There was a pastor named Dianases of Alexandria in the year 260. He, he’s writing this letter and he’s writing this letter describing what’s happening in his church. And the year 260, to understand that the background is a, a critical moment in the history of Rome because the plague has had. And the plague was just absolutely devastating. Roughly a third of Rome dies because of the plague. And what the nation understood is that there was no cure for the plague. And so what they recommended, that this is the official government stance of Rome, is that if you had a family member that got the plague, that you should kick them out of your house so that they wouldn’t infect anybody else. That if the plague hit a small town, the very first people that would leave that town were the doctors because the doctors knew that this is something they couldn’t cure.

And if they stayed, they likely would get sick caring for the sick and it would cause them to die as well. And so in that moment, what then do Christians do? What does it look like to love your neighbor well? , Here’s a, a direct quote from Dianasius of Alexandria writing about his church congregation in the year 260AD. He says, “Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life supremely happy for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many in nursing and curing others transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.” The, the Christians said, “Okay, you’ve got these sick people that are being kicked out of their, their houses and they were not sick.” But what we can trace this to the origins of the idea of a hospital was them saying, “Hey, let’s gather up these sick people and let’s just care for them.” And something profound happened, that there was a percentage of people that did survive the plague.

There wasn’t a cure for it, but, but some people just for whatever reason, that they would survive. And can you imagine if you are one of those people that you get the plague and your family kicks you out and nobody wants to talk to you, and then all of a sudden this group of Christians, which at the time they were a marginalized group, they were seen as outsiders. It was illegal to be a Christian at that time, so, so they were persecuted, some of them were martyred. And this group of, of ragtag odd people are the only people that will accept you in. And now people that are sick and, and dying, they’re being cared for by these Christians, and some of them died because they were taking care of them. And then some of them that had the plague, they survived. Can you imagine how much their life would have been transformed?

Now, now their life wasn’t transformed probably because they had some amazing sermon they heard. It probably wasn’t because they heard some amazing apologetic answer to every question they had. Their life was transformed because they said, “They care for me deeply and whatever they’ve got, I want that too.” Even people that hated Christianity recognized what Christianity was doing. 100 years later in the year, , 362, there was an emperor named Julian, an emperor, they call him Julian the apostate because he actually grew up in a Christian home and then turns away from the faith and, and then tried to, he was the emperor of Rome. He, he tried to turn Rome in this direction. So Christian is growing and growing and growing and growing. He’s trying to turn it back the other direction. He’s trying to bring back false gods, bring, bring back, , pagan gods.

And he’s getting frustrated because all of his efforts are in vain. It’s not working. And in this letter, he writes why he thinks it’s not working. He starts by saying the Empius Galleons. Galleans was this, this mean term that he used for Christians. Galilee was kind of this, this, , small town, poor town. And so he’s, he’s mocking them and he’s saying the Empius Galleans support not only their own poor, but ours as well. As someone who hates Christianity, he’s writing this letter to, to the priests of his pagan religion, he’s saying, y’all gotta do better. He said, the reason that Christianity is growing is because they are taking care of our poor. We’re not even taking care of our own poor. You gotta do a better job. So why does Christianity grow the way that it grows? Because they took the words that Peter wrote here and they took them literally, that they may see your good deeds and glorify God.

Not good deeds to glorify themselves, but saw their good deeds and glorified God. What, what is the vision of Cherry Hills Community Church? It’s the vision for every church. What does it look like to see our region of the city one for the gospel? And how do we do that? And we do that by loving and caring for others well. And now here’s the moment in the sermon where you’re like, okay, now I just feel guilty because they were so much better than I am. I am just a terrible human being. And so my goal for you is not that, hey, you need to take your calendar and radically reorient everything, although maybe that’s a step. Maybe that is part of it. But I would suggest or encourage, hey, pull out your calendar this week. Pull out that skylight and say, okay, what are the things on here that are helping me accomplish that purpose?

And maybe there are some things that need to get added to the calendar or removed from the calendar, but primarily here would be the goal of your calendar. Use your already existing activities and say, how do I use that for the glory of God? So maybe you’re sitting at a kid’s practice or at a kid’s game and there’s another parent that’s on the same sports team. Maybe it’s making a personal connection with that person in the space that God has already given you. Maybe it’s that coworker that you spend hours with every single week and you’ve known for years and yet you hardly know anything about them. Maybe it’s starting to personally invest into that relationship. Maybe it’s trying to care for them well. That if I look at my calendar, you look at your calendar, here’s the question that we should be asking. Who could experience the love of Jesus through our family or through me this Week.

The, there’s so many things that we add to our kids’ calendar, but do they have a purpose? Do they have a why? Can I train up my kids and my family to understand that everything we have, we are doing our best to use it for the glory of God? And so what are the things on your schedule this week that you can use for the glory of God? Three practical, tangible steps. Number one would be this, name one person who needs the hope of Jesus that’s in your life. And who’s somebody right now that you can think of that needs Jesus in their life? And maybe you do as a family activity where you sit down and you write down those things. Number two, start to pray for that person. Pray with that person together with your family. Well, maybe it’s your household or your spouse or, or another believer.

Don’t just have a name by yourself, but, but share that name with somebody else and say, “Hey, hold me accountable. I’m gonna start praying for this person in my life.” And then number three is what is a tangible way that you can choose one loving step. Maybe it’s a meal, maybe it’s a conversation, maybe it’s giving them practical help. Maybe it’s a personal invitation to some activity that we’ve got going on at Cherry Hills, but it’s a tangible way that we can care for that person. And connected to that are, are two very tangible ways that we as a church can, can be used by God to show his love. One is next Sunday, love extended. One of the reasons that we as a family do love extended is because we want our kids to understand that as Christians, we’re not doing this so that we get the free church, t-shirt, although that’s cool.

And we’re not doing this so that people would say, oh, you’re awesome. We’re doing this because we love Jesus. And as Christians, we as a family want to do things that are showing that love to the world around us. And so I’d encourage you to sign up for love extended. We have a whole spectrum of things. Maybe you say, well, hey, I, I, I can’t do really hard physical labor. It’s okay. We got things that, that require almost no physical labor. And so sign up for love extended, participate as a family, the body of God doing things together to show God’s love. The other thing would be our, our mana building. That building’s gonna open on November 1st. We’ll do a big celebration and a ribbon cutting.

But, but here’s what I want you to understand about a, about a missions building is that it’s just a building. It’s a nice building, it’s a cool building, but it’s just a building. It’s what we do with that building that can be used for the glory of God. How do we meet the physical needs of the community around us? How do we meet the spiritual needs? It’s a food pantry. It also has a man a resource center. , We also have a food bank that will be out there. There’ll be lots of things that we can use that building for, for the kingdom of God. But it’s just a building unless we, the people of God say, okay, hey, we are gonna get involved and use it to show God’s love to people. What’s your tangible next step? How is God stirring in your life that we can live very full lives, but they can be empty unless they have a divine purpose behind them?

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, God, I thank you so much that you love us, God that you have saved us from darkness into marvelous light. And I pray that because of that, because of the reality of that in our life, that we would live different as a result, that we would become your ambassadors, your priests to the world around us, that our love for you, our affection for you, that we just couldn’t help but, but share that love with other people. And we become as passionate about our love for you as we are about any other thing in our life that we’re passionate about. God help us as a church to live out the gospel to the world around us, not for our own glory, but for your glory. We pray for this missions building where they would be used for your kingdom. God, we pray for love extended next week that it will be used for your kingdom, not for us, but for you.

We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.