Today’s an exciting day. There are a lot of things going on. One of those things is love Extended. Good news is you can still sign up for Love Extended. And so if you are here and you say, well, I didn’t, I didn’t bring shorts or jeans, you got time to go home change, grab a T-shirt and go it’s also Faith in Blue Sunday. And so we’ve done this in the past. Today is National Faith in Blue Day. So all across the country you’ve got police organizations partnering with, with communities and churches of going out into the community and making a difference. And so after this service, we will have a free lunch. Even if you’re not serving in Love, extended free lunch, you can go out, get a hot dog, get a hamburger, and then out in our parking lot is an opportunity to have some conversations with some law enforcement that is serving in our area that we wanna love on them and encourage them and appreciate what they do.

So really cool day. It’s also the day that we are kicking off our Greater Things Campaign. That campaign mainly is around Manna. Now, missions Month, we wanna talk about a little bit about all the things that we’re doing in missions, but this missions month we specifically wanna talk about our Manna ministry. And Manna falls into three different categories. So there’s Manna Care, which is our food pantry. Probably most of you at some level are aware that we have a food pantry that we set up every single week. So tomorrow, Monday morning, we’ll have some volunteers that get here really early and they spend most of the day setting up a food pantry in our lobby. Then on Tuesday is when that food pantry actually is distributing food to our guests, and then it all gets taken down. We also have Manna Rescue. Manna Rescue is a handful of volunteers that get together every month and they call through a phone list that we get that are the phone lists of sex workers.

And their goal is to help get them out of that trade. We partner with an organization called Rescue America that has housing and has a whole program to help people exit that lifestyle. And so we have volunteers that are making those phone calls trying to engage with that community. But we also have a group that came out of MANA Care that our food pantry looked at the needs that they were meeting. They said, okay, what’s the next step? That we’re not just meeting these physical needs, but we’re actually meeting needs to help people climb out of poverty where there’s job training and there’s coaching and, and there’s a next level to this. And so out of that birth to our Manna Resource Center and Manna Resource Center does a whole lot of different things, but one of the big things that they do is they do career coaching.

So they have a program where you go into their program and they’ll help you get A-J-G-E-D if you don’t have one and help you with resume training and job interviewing. And they will identify potential employers and help connect those dots. And it’s a very successful program that Man Resource Center does. So we have a lot of things going on this month as we unpack this idea of greater things. That name came from Heather Hill, who’s a co-chair on that committee. She serves on the board for Manna Resource Center. She used to be on staff with Manna Care and she said, God’s doing such great things, great things with, with manna and great things with manna rescue and great things with, with the Manna Resource Center. And, and I believe that God can even do greater things. And that’s what we truly believe as a church, that there are greater things that we can continue to do.

One of the things that I fell in love with about our church, my wife and I came on May 24th, 2021 to come speak here. And I was preaching and my wife was just along to, to see Colorado and have conversations with the church. And it was a Saturday night. We used to have Saturday Night Church back then, and they always get the guest speaker to get here an hour and a half early because no one wants to be five minutes from go time and the speaker’s not here. So you’re, you’re just here. They do a two minute mic check. They say You’re good to go. And then you’re just, you’re killing time. And Nicole Forhe, who’s on staff and runs our Amanda ministry, she was doing the welcome and the announcements that week. And so she was, it was right down here. She was just, just trying to make awkward conversation for an hour and a half with these two random guests from outta town.

And she’s told us all about Manna and what she did, and we fell in love with Manna but also recognized that there’s some pretty big challenges that go hand in hand with Manna. That because we don’t have its own building, that there’s a lot of work that goes into setting it up and a lot of work that goes into tearing it down. And I think one of the challenges is if you’ve only come on a Sunday morning, you probably don’t have the perspective of what that looks like. So about a year ago, we had a team that put together a video that demonstrates for all of us what does a day in the life of manna look like? And this is that video.

It is eight 30 and we are all here on a Monday morning in prep for Manna Food Pantry.

We’re at King Soupers 1 0 8, picking up as agents for Food Bank of the Rockies for Cherry Hills Community Church. And we pick up dairy, produce, meat, and bakery.

You are right.

Okay, that’s the last one. Oh eight.

So we’ve received all these donations of salads and, and we’re date checking to make sure they’re within a period of time,

We get a huge variety of foods, which is so great. The first thing we do is we go through everything and make sure it’s nice and fresh. The rule of thumb is if we would take it home and eat it, then we keep it and we give it to our guests.

So it’s about two 30 on Monday. It’s a wrap for us as far as the setup crew goes. The food’s been stored or brought out front, put on the shelves.

We had a lot of guests lined up this morning waiting to come in bright and early. So glad you guys are here to serve them today. Last week we served 135, so probably 135 families coming through today. And so we’re gonna see what God brings,

Creating my turn for the next guest to take him through the market. And are you ready to go? Yes. This one.

Okay. Oh, I’m cutting hair for people who attend manna. I’m a licensed hairdresser and I thought I could do that. I, I could give back to the Lord in that way.

Manna, it means to me a blessing from God. Father God, we just, we come to you, father and we love

Forever. We look forward to forward coming over here and fellowshipping not just the, the people that are getting help, but also the people that are giving the help.

A is 11 weeks. So every Tuesday morning, nine 30, we’re gonna be right here. And it’s a place to come. Learn more. We pray that they find the same peace, the same comfort, the same joy in their relationship with Christ in their time together. If

We can help with one small portion of the bills, then hopefully all of the other money can be allocated to rent, to electricity. And for kids.

Manna means church to me,

Thankful to God that you, you’re here to help us.

We are blessed by having this program.

God bless. Thanks for coming

This Tuesday evening and we’re getting ready to start to take down. We’ve been serving all day and now we’re serving the evening serve so they’re not shopping anymore. So now we’re getting ready to tear down for the evening.

You guys are amazing as you know, just like always. Just thank you, thank you, thank you. Manna does not happen without you guys. And you guys are, you guys are the hands and feet. So if this doesn’t happen without you, great Tuesday. Thanks team.

Woo.

Hold for Tuesday. Way to go,

So when we got here three years ago got to serve in Manna, got to to see how it’s run. And I love everything about Manna. I love the the heart. I love why we do it. But there’s one thing about Manna that kind of drives me crazy. And that is, I love things that are efficient. I love things that make sense and are maximizing energy and human effort. And Manna does not because we have a set of volunteers that gets here really most of the time, about seven 30, and they work all day long to set up an entire grocery store in our lobby that then on Tuesday is open for two and a half hours and then they tear the whole thing down and put it back. And there’s a part of me that’s like that, that doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make sense in the least bit.

And so really three years ago we started having these conversations of what would it look like if we built a building on our property that was a manna building, that that manna Care, the food pantry portion is in that building and Manna Resource Center is in that building. And it is a building that, that if we took all that time, energy, and effort of volunteers setting up and tearing down and we didn’t have to set up and tear down, and it was a free standing building, there was always that then all that energy and effort, those resources could be poured into the most important thing. And what is that? That’s intentional relationship that we can invest into our guests. Now, it is a campaign and part of a campaign is to build a building, but the point of the campaign is not the building, it’s a result of the campaign.

But really, here’s the heart. And here’s the point, is that there’s a vision that started in 1986 as a part of our church, of how do we engage the world around us in a loving way that has carried forward that we continue to have. But we want to continue to hand that vision off from generation to generation. So for the next 40 years, we continue to have that vision of being a church that meets the needs of the people around us in a loving and an engaging way that we wanna be a church, that someone in our community that doesn’t love Jesus, doesn’t believe in Christianity, would look us us. And they say, well, I don’t like a lot of who you are and what you believe. And maybe they’ve had a bad experience with church, but they would look at us and say, okay, I don’t agree with them, but man, I can’t deny that they are a church that lives out love in a compelling way.

That to put it another way, if our church closed the doors tomorrow and cease to exist, we want to do life in such a way that the entire community around us would mourn that we were no longer here. Why? Why is it that we should be a church that is engaged and loving our neighbor well? And when Jesus comes forward in the New Testament, he brings with him this teaching that is radically different than the culture and the world around him. And really his teaching, everything about it was counterintuitive. That you think about the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Mount. We call it the upside down kingdom because he takes a lot of the natural feelings, the intuitive feelings that we would have about life, and he flips ’em upside down. And that concept of counterintuitive it, it means it’s contrary to intuition.

So that that part of me, the way that I’m wired, the way that I feel like life is supposed to go, that Jesus is asking me to live life in a way that is contrary to that. To put it another way, it’s contrary to our common sense expectations. And there’s a lot of things that happen in life that end up being contrary to how we expect or assume they will go. A great example of that is a thing they call Cobra economics. Cobra economics would be an economic program that someone institutes that they believe will be beneficial. They think it’s gonna help, but it actually ends up harming. And the name comes from India that in the 18 hundreds the, the British Empire India was a colony of Britain. And Britain had a problem specifically in Delhi, that they recognized that there were all kinds of venomous snakes specifically King cobras.

And Britain was saying, okay, with, with the people that are there, it’s dangerous. People are dying because of these king cobras. But additionally, trade is really hard because nobody wants to go to Delhi because of all the king cobras. And so they came up with an idea. They said, what if we start paying the locals in Delhi to kill cobras? And so that’s what they did. They said, well, okay, here’s a policy. You bring us a dead cobra and we will give you money for every dead cobra you bring us. And when they launched the program, it was very successful. Why? Because we are driven by incentive and people were incentivized to go kill cobras. And so they just turned round up cobras and killing ’em, bring ’em to the government saying, here you go. And they got paid for it, but they started running outta cobras.

And so if you lived in India and you had now made kind of a, a living off of killing cobras and there’s no cobras left, you’ve got a problem. You’re like, how? Where do I keep fighting cobras? And so what did they do? British Empire all of a sudden realized that, well, hey, there were cobras. We started paying people to kill ’em. Cobra population went down. And then all of a sudden the Cobra population started going up and up and up and up and they said, what? What’s happening? We thought we’re gonna outta control. And now they’re not. And it’s because people in India said, well, there’s not enough cobras. And so I guess I’m gonna have to breed cobras. And so people were taking cages at their houses and they were putting cobras inside and they were causing them to breed. And they were breeding hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of cobras.

And then they would take some of those cobras and they’ll go turn ’em in, say, here’s a dead cobra, please pay me. And then they go breed more and more cobras. Well, eventually British government figures it out. And so they say, okay, no more. We will no longer pay you to kill cobras. Now imagine that you are someone who’s been collecting cobras and you have a whole breed of cobras, maybe a thousand cobras at your house in a fence in a cage, and now they’re worthless. What do you do with those cobras? You just release ’em back out into the wild. And so the result of their economic policy of We will pay you to kill cobras, although temporarily successful in the long run study said there were exponentially more king cobras as a result of that policy than there were before in life. Sometimes things turn out different than we expect.

It seems easy. Well, okay, if I do this, then the results will naturally be that. But the results oftentimes are surprising. And what Jesus is teaching primarily is pointing to is this counterintuitive idea that my intuition would say that the best life for me and the most joy I could have in life is to elevate myself above everybody else. But Jesus’s calling is counterintuitive. His calling over and over and over again was that the last will be first and the first will be last. If you’ve got a Bible, turn with me to Mark chapter 10. I encourage you to bring a Bible flip open a Bible, Bible mark chapter 10. If you don’t have one, it’s in the mobile app. It’s also gonna be on the screens. Mark chapter 10, starting in verse 35. It says, in James and John, the sons of Zey came up to him, him being Jesus, and said to him, teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.

Now, here’s a little bit of context. So Jesus is in the middle of his ministry and he’s got crowds and crowds and crowds. And so there’s really these different tier of relationship that Jesus had. He had the multitudes. So it says that Jesus feeds the 5,000. So there’s this big group that is hovering around Jesus, but then it references the 144. So smaller than the multitude is this small group of 144 that we see Jesus intentionally teaching and point into, but smaller than the 144 is the 12, his 12 disciples that Jesus is discipling and having conversation with and living life with. But smaller than the 12 are the three. And the three are two brothers, James and John. And then Peter is the third. The Jesus continually was hanging out with the three in different ways, and he was hanging out with the 12 that these were his, his closest confidants, his best friends.

And so two of them to the brothers, they come to Jesus and and they say, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you, which is just an awkward question, isn’t it? Imagine if you went to someone that you have a friendship with and ask something similar. You go to your spouse and say, listen, I’m gonna ask you for something and I’m going to need the answer to be yes before I tell you what it is. Or imagine going to your boss and saying, I would like you to agree with whatever I’m about to ask you to do for me. Would that be okay? Like nobody asks that question ’cause it’s just weird. And so they ask Jesus, Hey, what whatever we ask of you, we want you to do for it, would that be okay? When Jesus says to them, what do you want me to do for you?

And they said to him, grant us to sit, want it your right hand and one at your left in your glory. So their idea of Jesus is that he was the Messiah. And in in their mind what that meant is that Jesus would become the king in their mind. That Jesus would overthrow the empire, that he would become the new Caesar, that all of Rome would bow down to Jesus. And in their mind they say, okay, when that happens, Jesus, we want to be your right hand in your left hand. We, we want to be right next to you so that when you step into your glory, we would step into that glory with you. That’s their request. Hey, hey, would you agree to this? Before we even ask, please, can we experience your glory with you? What does Jesus says? He says, you do not know what you are asking.

Are you able to drink the cup that I drink? Now, pause for a second because we lose the reference of what that means. That in their mind they would experience Jesus’ glory by sitting at his right hand and left hand. And Jesus says, wait, wait a second. You don’t understand what you’re asking for. Why did Jesus say that? Because he knows that he didn’t come to be an earthly king. Jesus knows that he didn’t come to overthrow empire. He was bringing a spiritual kingdom, the kingdom of heaven that would look radically different than what everybody expected. And he said, you don’t understand what you asked. Will you be able to drink the cup that I drink? The best way to understand the cup is the exchange that we see that Jesus has in prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus knows he’s gonna be crucified.

He knows he’s about to experience torture and pain for our sins. And his request, his cry out to God is God, if it’s your will, take this cup from me. In the Old Testament, the idea of the cup was the wrath of God. And Jesus knew that the wrath of God would be poured out on Jesus for our sins, your sins and my sins. And Jesus saying, if there’s any way for me not to drink of this cup, the cup of the wrath of God, let it pass for me, but ultimately your will be done. And so when Jesus is referencing that they wouldn’t be able to drink of his cup, I mean, he was referencing the wrath of God that he would experience on the cross. So he says, are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with a baptism with which I am baptized?

And they said to him, we are able, they’re thinking, well, it’s just some regular cup. I mean, yeah, whatever’s in it, I’ll drink of that cup if I get glory, sure, you put whatever you want in the cup, I’ll drink from it. And then Jesus said to them, the cup that I drink, you will drink. And with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized. But to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but is for those whom it has been prepared. And when the 10 heard it, they began to be indignant at James and John. Just imagine you’re James and jump I, I would just assume that they’re trying to have a private conversation apart from the 10, Hey, Jesus, hey, can we just, can we be your right hand and your left hand when you become king?

Would that be okay? And I don’t know how the other 10 hear it. I don’t know if Jesus intentionally makes it loud. What? You guys wanna be more important than those 10 over there? Is that what you’re asking? Is that what you’re saying right now? I don’t know how the other 10 here, but Jesus now has gathered everybody’s attention and he uses it to make a point. It says, Jesus called to them and said to them, you know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles Lord, it over them and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you, but whoever would be great among you must be your servant. And whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the son of man talking about himself came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many, for the son of man came not to be served but to serve.

You see, there’s this natural part of us that wants to be important and wants to elevate and wants other people to serve us. It’s just born into us. My youngest daughter, she is in kindergarten. She had her 6-year-old birthday party on Friday. Her birthday was yesterday. And at her birthday party you got 20 kindergartners running around. There’s a bounce house. It’s just crazy. And then there’s that moment where we’re gonna blow out candles and have the cake, and she goes to make the announcement to everybody outside in order to come inside. And this is how she makes the announcement. She goes to the door and she says, Hey everybody, it’s time for you all to sing to me. Come inside <laugh>.

And I heard it. I was like, well, yeah, I don’t, not sure that’s how I would phrase that exactly. And yet there’s a part of what she said is accurate. That is what we do. But, but there’s this, there’s this part of us that it’s we want that we’re drawn to that. I desire that. And so when the disciples are asking Jesus, Hey, can we be great? When you’re great, Jesus says, Hey, you, you’re comparing me to earthly kings and earthly kingdoms. Were were kings, Lord over the people that are underneath their authority. But he says, that’s not the way it works in my kingdom. He says, in my kingdom, the first will be last. The last shall be first in my kingdom. You have to serve others. In my kingdom, I have come to serve and not to be served. Paul in Philippians unpacks this in a different way.

In Philippians chapter two, verse three, Paul says, do nothing from selfish ambition or vain conce. But in humility, count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Now, notice that’s important. He doesn’t say ignore your own interests, but he’s saying, when you take care of your interests, instead of just hoarding for yourself, he’s saying, look to the interest of others as well. But he gives the explanation as to why. Why should we do that? He goes on to say, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. He’s saying, well, you’re supposed to have the mind of Christ. Why should we live in a way that’s humble? Why should we live in a way that puts other people first? Why should we live in a way that is serving the world around us?

He says, because we need to have the mind of Christ. We need to live like Christ lived. And in doing so, what does that look like? He explains it to us that Christ who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And now people in that passage sometimes confuse a few things. There’s a, there’s a whole theological topic called kenosis which is this Greek work for emptying himself. And it’s this, this discussion about, well, what was it that God emptied himself of? What what was it that Jesus emptied himself of? And and I wanna be clear, Jesus does not empty himself of his divinity.

Jesus was always God, always before he was born, always while he was alive, always into the future. So he didn’t empty himself of his divinity. That’s impossible. He was and is God. So what then is it that he emptied himself up? Imagine if you all of a sudden had all the power in the world like you were God alike. It’s funny, you read comic books and, and you have certain characters like a Spider-Man. And Spiderman has these amazing godlike powers and he’s poor. And I, I know that there’s no truth to that. Like that would never happen. Why? Because none of us, if we had godlike powers would be poor. We would be really rich. Like if I’m Superman, I’m not a newspaper reporter. I can tell you that if I’m Superman, I’m a trillionaire. I don’t know how, I don’t know whether I’m just just flying down to the center of the earth and bringing up all the gold, but in one way, shape or another, I’m rich.

And not only I would, I would abuse my powers in small ways. I would cheat at bowling if I had superpowers. Like I’m just, that’s how most of us would operate and exist. But is that who Jesus was? No. Jesus had not godlike powers. He had God powers. And yet he did not use that authority and that power to benefit his own human flesh. It didn’t make others serve him. He didn’t make others bow down. He didn’t benefit himself in any way, shape or form. And so when Paul is telling us to do nothing out of selfish ambition or ancy, he’s saying, we need to have the mind of Christ who although he was elevated and had every right, for everyone to bow down to him, chose to live a life that looked different than that. And he’s calling us to do the same thing.

And so often we, we think of our actions and we think, well, our my actions don’t really matter that much. I mean, I’m one of, there’s billions of people in the world around us, and there’s hundreds of millions of people that are here in the United States. And even in, in my city there, I mean, there’s just so many hundreds of thousands of people in my city, maybe even this room. You say, well, there’s thousands of people in this room. I’m just one person. I don’t really matter. But we see throughout all of scripture that our actions do affect the people around us. Sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad ways. Oftentimes a small action can have huge consequence, sometimes good, sometimes bad. There’s a guy named Thomas Austin, who’s famous in Australia, famous and not the good kinda way. Thomas Austin was from Britain.

He was really wealthy. He moved to Australia and bought a 30,000 acre ranch. He decided that he wanted to start importing animals from Britain from his home and put them on his ranch so that he could hunt ’em. And so he had all kinds of different exotic game but he wanted some type of animal that that could breed well, that it would just be an easy hunt and could eat it and, and just be, just numerous people could come and then just continually hunt this type of animal. And so he had someone bring him rabbits from Britain on Christmas Day, 18 59, 24 rabbits make the trip from Britain to Australia. He puts them on his ranch at the time that he released the rabbits here, a local newspaper reports exactly what he said. He said the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home.

It sounds so sweet and so great. Unfortunately, rabbits multiply really quickly. The rabbits that he brought from Britain, actually, there was two different types of rabbits that were on that ship on the way over. They, they bred together. And so there was a new type of rabbit that got introduced. Rabbits were not a part of Australia. Up until that time. There had been a few different times where people had released their rabbits. But this particular rabbit, in, in some interesting way, it was genetically perfect for Australia. There’s very few predators that could eat it. It could multiply greatly had the right environment. And so five years later, the bunny started multiplying so much that the government gets involved. And, and you’ll notice a theme to this. The government says, we will pay you to kill rabbits. And in 18 64, 20 5 million rabbits were killed.

And it didn’t stop the rabbit problem. By 1901, Australia starts trying to build fences to prevent the rabbits from taking over other parts of Australia. By the year 1920, it is estimated that there were 10 billion rabbits in Australia. Now, the way that they eventually solved the rabbit problem is some scientists developed a sickness, a disease that they intentionally inserted into the rabbit population, and it wiped out most of them. But there are still 200 million rabbits in Australia. And geneticists, not too long ago from the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found that every rabbit in Australia today, their DNA can be traced back to the 24 rabbits introduced by Thomas Austin. One decision, huge effect. You see, Jesus is trying to get us to under, oh, here’s a picture of the rabbits. That that’s from I think 1951. So there’s just rabbits everywhere apparently.

And I’ll shut. Jesus is trying to get us to understand that, that our life, it has a ripple effect. And, and it can have a ripple effect in negative ways. And sometimes it’s in the personal relationships of the people that we have around us. Sometimes it’s in the community of the people around us, but it also can have this potential positive effect. James, the brother of Jesus writes the way that he unpacks it. He writes in James chapter one, verse 22, he says that we should be doers of the word and not hearers only. If we’re hearers only. We deceive ourselves for if anyone is a hear of the word and not a doer. He’s like a man who looks intently at he is natural face in the mirror for he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and, and perseveres be no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed and is doing. He saying, when we engage with scripture and the Bible, that we, we shouldn’t pour into it and then walk away and ignore it. It it’s like, and in the first century, they didn’t have mirrors. They didn’t have glass away that we have it. They would take a bronze plate and they would polish it. And if they reflected the light the right way, they could see an image or reflection. He, he’s saying, don’t be like someone who looks at their image and then forgets what they look like the moment they walk away. So we should stare intently into the word of God, and it should change us. It should transform us. And then he, he compares these two things.

He says, if anyone thinks that he’s religious, this can be translated to a handful of different ways. It can be also translated as authentic worship. So if anyone thinks that they have authentic worship and does not bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart, this person’s authentic worship is worthless. He said, if we’re a gossip, if we’re talking negatively and meanly about people, if we’re speaking words of death, instead of words of life and love, he said, you, you don’t actually have authentic worship. You’re deceiving your own heart. And then he takes it a step further and he says, true, authentic worship that is pure and undefiled before God. The Father is this. Now imagine what he could fill in the blanks with. Typically, I think our idea of true authentic worship in church revolves around something that’s kind of churchy. Well true authentic worship is when you sing songs of worship together. True authentic worship is when you close your eyes or you raise your hands. Or true authentic worship is when you spend hours by yourself in prayer. True authentic worship is when you have the whole Bible memorized and you’re just constantly in God’s word. And those are all good things, and they’re all forms of worship. But the purest form of worship that James gives us is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

In the first century, an orphan had zero value. That a child had no zero value. That if you had a child that you didn’t want, you could leave them out to the elements, let them die. And that was perfectly legal. A widow had no value in the first century. A woman couldn’t own anything. And so if you were a woman and you were married to a wealthy man and that wealthy man passed away and you didn’t have an era, a son that would inherit it, then all the assets would go elsewhere and that woman would be left destitute. And so in a culture where the most marginalized, not because of anything that they have done, but because the culture in the society at that time just said, Hey, you, you don’t have any value. James says that the most pure form of worship that exists is loving that group well, saying unstained from the world around us. And yet that’s so hard.

Our natural desire is to elevate ourself. Our natural desire is to focus on ourself. And Jesus is saying, I’m calling you to live a life that is different than that. That looks different than that. Even when I do things that I think are selfless things, I oftentimes try and draw attention to myself. And maybe some husbands in the room can relate, but, but when I unload the dishwasher, I, I try and point out to my wife the fact that I’ve unloaded the dishwasher sometimes just casually. But like, if I do who the dish is and I clean up and nobody says anything, I mean, at some point I’m just like, Hey you don’t, you know, you know you can put that in the dishwasher ’cause it’s empty. ’cause You know, somebody, somebody did that earlier. Somebody who’s amazing <laugh> kinda awesome, somebody who would be awesome to be married to.

I don’t know who did it. You know, like, I want the attention for myself, even when I do something that is supposed to be a selfless act. And that’s just how we tend to operate. I love this quote from Richard Foster author. He says, nothing disciplines the inordinate desires of the flesh like service. And nothing transforms the desires of the flesh. Like serving in hiddenness. The flesh winds against service, but it screams against hidden service. Its strains and pulls for honor and recognition. It will devise subtle, religiously acceptable means to call attention to the service rendered. If we stoutly refuse to give into the lust of the flesh, we crucify it. Every time we crucify the flesh, we crucify our pride and arrogance. Normally the first Sunday of the month, we, we take communion together as a church family. And normally we do it early in service.

And today we’re doing it as the last thing in service. And here’s why. As we kick off missions month, the heart that we want to have is that it’s not about me. And how do we continually remind us that it is not about us? Well, the best way to do, it’s to look to the cross. ’cause What does the cross teach us? The cross teaches us that I am the one that deserved to be there. I’m the one because of my sin that deserved death and separation and destruction. But Jesus took my punishment for me. He atone for my sins. That’s what I deserve. That’s what he took. And if I can truly grasp that and understand that it should transform my perspective of the world around me, it should cause me to be selfless instead of selfish. Why? Because I can look to the cross and say, I am bought with a prize.

Jesus purchased my life on the cross. Everything I have is by his grace and mercy. And when I can live that way, it causes me to look at my possessions and my money and my time and say, well, this isn’t mine. This is his. And when I, I see somebody else around me that’s in need, I can say, if only they knew the Jesus that I know, if only they could hear the story of life change that he offers on the cross that we are incapable of offering ourselves. It changes everything. When Jesus looks to James and John and says, you will drink of the cup and you’ll experience the baptism. They, he wasn’t talking about his wrath that he would experience on the cross. He was talking about the covenant cove of the Lord’s supper, the Jesus gathering together his disciples. He says, Hey, this is the body of mind that’s gonna be broken for you.

This is the blood that’s poured out for you. He’s saying, remember, because if we truly remember, it should cause us to live different. If you’ve never taken communion with us before, at Cherry Hills, we do it a little bit different. So we have tables that are all across the room. There’s tables up front, there’s tables in the middle aisle, there’s tables in the back. If in the balcony they’re up the stairs at the top of the steps. And so in just a moment we will line up in lines at each table. You’ll, you’ll wait in the line, you’ll receive the elements from either an elder or a staff member or a volunteer. Once you collect those elements, go back to your seat and wait. And then I will come back up and we’ll all collectively participate in the Lord’s Supper together. If you’re a Christian, we invite you to participate. If you’re not a Christian, we, we ask you to not. And that’s because we really believe that this is holy. We really believe that this is sacred, that Jesus really did die in the cross for us. And if you don’t believe that, we’re so glad you’re here. But we would ask that you just sit it out and watch, watch and learn.

I would ask that none of us go to the table, just indifferent. It’s easy when you’ve done something over and over and over and over again to just say, okay, I’m just gonna get in the line and go through the motion. But instead, really examine your heart and your life. Confess any sin and brokenness and say, God, what does it look like to live in a way that realizes my life is bought with a price? And so go to the table in a worship. Full tone, receive the elements, go to your seats. I’ll come back up and we’ll take it together in a moment. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time. We pray that you are honored and you are glorified. Help us to, to live in a way that recognizes that our life is not our own. To the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.