Acts 1: Vision Sunday

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Although we did not announce it before, now would be our time for kindergarten through fifth grade. If you want to, I know they're all gone, I'm just making double sure. Kindergarten through fifth grade, if you want to go back with our K through 5 time, this is your moment. Okay, I think they all saw their moment. That was good. There was once an 18-year-old high school dropout from Orlando, Florida. He was somewhat directionless. And so, with nothing else that he knew to do, he enlisted in the Air Force, as you do. And so he enlisted in the Air Force, no offense to Air Force vets here. He just went there. It's what he did. I didn't do it. When he went to the Air Force, they sent him to Fairbanks, Alaska. Now, this kid was in Orlando, Florida, and they sent him to Fairbanks, Alaska. And it was there that he experienced mountains and snow for the first time. Now, he'd seen pictures of mountains and snow.

He'd know what they looked like, but he hadn't ever experienced them, and they captivated him. He couldn't even quit thinking about it. He was so enamored that he began to try to paint them. So enamored. And he began to paint all the time. And so he would take a small break at work, and he would paint. On his lunch hour, he would have a sandwich in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, and he was just going to town on all these mountain landscapes. And when he painted a mountain landscape scene on the inside of a gold panning tin, and he realized that that thing was going to sell like hotcakes, that every day on his lunch breaks, every day, every break at work, every day after work, he would go and paint as many of those gold panning tins as he could, and then he would bring them to the tourist shops, and they would always sell out. And 30,000 paintings later, we have the legacy of Bob Ross, a high school dropout from Orlando,

Florida. Bob Ross, if you're not familiar, he has the Brillo pad hair. He's got the big afro, and he paints happy little accidents on canvases. Bob Ross is long dead. He died in 96, I believe, but you can still find them all over YouTube. You can still find them all over everywhere. PBS station still play them on repeat, right? An origin story, like we just heard about with Bob Ross, an origin story tells us a lot about someone by describing what shaped them, right? We discover, as we look at Bob Ross's origin story, that he was enamored by these mountain scapes,

and by knowing their story, we can kind of live the events, live those events with them, through them, all their relationships, all their choices, all the circumstances that gave them their identity. For Acts, in this year, what we are doing is we are covering the entire book of Acts. If you've never read the book of Acts, it's super interesting. It's 28 chapters, and we are going to cover the entire book of Acts over this whole year in four different sermon series. And so, this first sermon series is going to be six weeks long, and we're going to look at the first five and a little bit of the first six, so the first six chapters of Acts over six weeks. And what we're doing is we are studying the church's origin story. So not just our churches, but every church, every group of people, every covenant community that follows Jesus Christ, they have their origin story in Acts 1 through 6. And it really begins to answer questions for us, like,

how do we go from a, you know, a sandal-wearing Jew in Israel to home-group Bible studies? How'd that translation take place? How'd we get here? How do we go from 12 disciples to Sunday morning worship? How do we get there? What's that like? What were the events that kind of led us to even where we are today? And the answers to that, at least the beginnings of them, are in the first six chapters of Acts. So it is with no further ado that we should open up to Acts chapter 1 verse 1. We should look at this stuff, okay? Acts chapter 1 verse 1, if you want to turn there, we're going to be just in the whole first chapter of Acts. And it says Acts 1, 1 and 2, we're going to have the verses up here also, just in case you want to follow along. If you want, there should be a Bible at least near you, maybe. You can also look a huge version on your phone and follow along on your phone. Okay, Acts 1, 1, it says, in the first book, O Theophilus,

don't worry, you don't need to know who the author is or who Theophilus is, but we're getting there. In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. Okay, this person writing the book of Acts is named Luke, same Luke who wrote the gospel of Luke, also sometimes called the book of Luke. Okay, all right, so same guy, and Luke and Acts are actually written as a companion set. It's like part one, part two, okay? My family and I just watched Mission Impossible, Dead Wrecking, and after three hours I realized it was just part one, and it killed me a little bit. And so if you can imagine reading all 20-something chapters of Luke and at the end you're like, part one, and you're going, oh, okay, that was a lot. Okay, now here

we are, Acts chapter one verse one, it's the beginning of part two, okay? To show you these parallels, right, and this is Luke writing to a friend of his named Theophilus, and Theophilus is probably a guy who can share this information with a lot of other people, but you can look in Luke chapter one verses three and four so that you can kind of see what happened. It says, this is Luke again writing to Theophilus, it said, it seemed good to me also, again this is Luke chapter one verses three and four, not in Acts, it seemed good to me also having followed all the things closely for some time passed to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, same guy, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. So Luke writes his gospel, the account of Jesus's life and death and burial and resurrection, all of that, to give certainty concerning the things that have been taught, and so Luke writes part two,

we call it Acts, he writes part two to connect the dots between Jesus and the Holy Spirit. How do we get from a sand-wearing Jew in Israel to an organized church by the middle of Acts? What is this story? How did it work? So we're going to keep going, so flip back to Acts one, okay, we're going to stay back in Acts one. So remember Luke is connecting the dots and says Acts one verses four and five, and while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, so this is Jesus talking to the disciples, but to wait for the promise of the Father which he said, you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but you'll be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. Okay, so today in Acts one, let's find ourselves in the disciples shoes just a little bit, and what we're going to see in these first eight verses, okay, Acts one one through one eight, and those eight verses we're going to see a lot of

preparation and what Jesus is going to do, he's going to give his disciples four defining pivots, right, in other words you thought it was going to work this way, but it's not, it's going to totally work a different way, okay, what I want to do is I want to look at those four pivots very quickly, the first pivot, Jesus preparing them for the pivots, the first pivot we just saw, it was from water to spirit, okay, says John baptized all of us with water, guys, you remember this, Jesus himself baptized with water, but you will be baptized in with the Holy Spirit, this is a new concept, now you might be saying, Drew, we just baptized Ronald with water, yes, why did we do that? We do this as a symbol, right, because what we're doing as we, by baptizing Ronald, what we are acknowledging, what Ronald is confessing, and what we are, what we are accepting as a church is that Ronald is saying, I have been baptized in the Holy

Spirit, I am showing you this as I'm being baptized by water, but I have been, the reality that Ronald has experienced is that he has been baptized into the Holy Spirit, just like Jesus is talking about here, okay, so first pivot is a new baptism, okay, and Jesus gives us this as a symbol, this water baptism as a symbol, okay, next two verses, Acts 1, 6, and 7, it says, so when they had come together, this is Jesus and all the disciples, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? And he said to them, it's not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. Now, like, if you don't know what's going on, this might be a little confusing, so let me just explain this just for a second, okay, when the disciples are asking him that question, and they're saying Jesus, Lord, are you going to at this time restore the kingdom to Israel, okay, that sounds pretty nebulous to us,

but for them, what it meant was Jesus, are you now going to raise up an army and take over Israel and take it away from the Roman occupation that we are under, okay, so remember, Israel at this time, the kingdom of Israel, a once proud nation, is now subdued by the Roman Empire, the Romans have taken over Israel, and what this question tells you is that the disciples, the whole time, probably, thought that Jesus was leading a military coup, an insurrection, a military one, where they were going to take over, literally take over Israel, physically, Jesus was going to be on the throne, the disciples were going to help him rule, and it was going to be awesome again, because Israel was going to be back on top, back in power, and so when they ask him this question, it's very telling,

they are thinking, they're like, okay, when's the army coming? Where are the tanks? Because it's time, it's time, right? Like you rose from the dead, it's time, we take this over, right? It's time, and Jesus says, it's not for you to know the times or the seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. What Jesus is doing ever so gently there, and does it more properly in different places, what he's doing is he's pivoting from coercion to renewal. He's pivoting from coercion to renewal. Political power is coercion. It is to force people to do things by threat, right? By threat of punishment, pain, or death, and Jesus is helping them understand, look, we're not talking about a physical throne here, we're not overthrowing Rome by military occupation, we are overthrowing the enemy by renewing people on the inside out. Now he doesn't say all that

here, we learned that later, but you're saying, look, we're not talking about coercion, we're not talking about twisting people's arms, making them do stuff, we're not talking about, you know, rubbing people's faces in the dirt or anything, we're talking about renewing people, we're not talking about coercion, we're talking about something completely different, okay? Coercion has no place with a Christian. Let me just say that. Coercion has no place, if you are in a position where you have to twist everybody's arm all the time to get what you want done, done, my, let me just, let me just submit to you, you might not be thinking that all the way through. You might need a little more creativity in your life, okay? It's not the way of Jesus to sit there and coerce everybody, okay? All right, so we're moving from water to spirit, we're moving from coercion to renewal, so all these things are pivoting. What else? Acts 1-8 has two pivots in

it. Acts 1-8 says, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. So our third pivot, in the first part of that, the first, that third one is from mine to yours, okay? So up to this point, Jesus, if you're reading the Gospels, if you're reading the Gospel, Luke, for example, Jesus is the center, the focal point, the locust, everything's coming from him, everything's coming out of him, everything's happening to him. He's the one ministering, okay? And he's demonstrated this to them previously, that they would minister, but now he is making it real, and he's saying, I'm going to give you Holy Spirit power, okay? That's what he's saying in Acts 1-8. It says, the power that has resided in me, I'm about to give that to you. You're about to have a Holy Spirit power, so it's going from mine, I say to yours,

it's from mine to ours, is what I meant to say, excuse me, from mine to ours. So Jesus is now including the disciples in on not just the plan, but the power, right? And we also see the last pivot is the plan, okay? The last pivot is from center to edge, okay? He's saying that this thing that's going to happen, when I give you this power, this thing, you thought this was just for you 12, or you 100, or you a couple of people that are here, but no, no, no, this is going to the ends of the earth, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, excuse me, and to the end of the earth. These are concentric circles that build outward, right? So he goes from the center to the edge. So look, Jesus is giving them all four of these pivots. I want you to look at them all. Look at all four pivots. You've got water to spirit, coercion to renewal, mine to ours, and center to edge. I want you to see something very important here. This is not just for the

disciples. This is for us. This is not just for the disciples. This is for us. When we come to Jesus, we wake up to new spiritual realities. When we come to Jesus, we realize that we have been given a new power for renewal, not just in us, but in other people, and then now we have a mission to help those people. Whoever those people are for you, that's where Jesus wants you to go, right? He's commissioning you to go to other people. Consider, I want you to just consider yourself in the disciple shoes in that moment. Jesus, in really in like 30 seconds, has completely rewritten what you thought was going to happen and is now giving you a whole new set of things. You thought it was water baptism, but now it's Holy Spirit baptism. You thought coercion, Jesus is saying renewal. You thought it was His and He's saying, no, it's all of ours. You're saying, oh, no, it's just going to be here. No, no, no, it's going to go out. That's a lot to process.

Consider how you might have responded. As you consider that, let's look at how the disciples responded. I want to take this seriously. I want to take their response seriously because that's not easy, man. What we just walked through was like a complete script flip for the disciples. So let's look at, let's skip down to Acts 1-12. What do the disciples do? So Jesus says, since the heaven and what do the disciples do? They return to Jerusalem from the Mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away. So I imagine on this walk, because it's not a short walk, I imagine this walk, they're a little stunned. They're processing at the very least all that Jesus has just told them. This is not simple news. Next verse, Acts 1-13, it says, when they had entered, they went up to the upper room where they were staying, Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew,

James son of Alphaeus, Simon the zealot, Judas son of James. We're naming everybody because everybody's there except Judas, who is not there, we find. Judas is not there, he's betrayed Jesus, but everybody else is there. Next verse, all these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers. Okay, so they're all together and what I want you to see, I want you to see a couple things first. I want you to see, they responded in two big ways. The first way they respond was with determination. Okay, they responded with determination because they are still all in one accord. They didn't run when it got hard, they didn't receive this news from Jesus and go, I don't know man, all bets are off, like I didn't expect this, I'm out. They're like, no, okay, well he's going to give us Holy Spirit power, it's going to take us to the ends of the earth, let's keep meeting together.

Man, that's a lot, that's a lot of determination they're showing there. They displayed a ton. And when you see that, you just let that sink in just a bit. I mean, there's times whenever we all get curveballs and it's hard to stay steady, it's hard to stay determined on what we were originally going to do. It's hard not to turn and run, the disciples didn't do that. To see how else they responded, the text starts to focus on Peter in verse 15, Acts 1-15, and those days, Peter stood up among the brothers, the company of persons was in all, about 120, and said, so we see Peter beginning to lead the group, next verse, is what Peter said, brothers, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus. Okay, I want you to just stop right here, let's notice

something that Peter is doing. Okay, Peter is talking about scripture having to be fulfilled. Okay, Peter then begins to quote a couple of Psalms, look at the next verse, Acts 1-20, it says, for it is written in the book of Psalms, still Peter talking, may his camp become desolate, talking about Judas, and let there be no one to dwell in it, and let another take his office. So he's quoting Psalm 69 and Psalm 109, and what I, the reason I bring all that up is because Peter sounds a lot like Jesus right there, and if you look all through the gospel of Luke, if you look through really any of the other gospels, you don't see Peter or any other disciple anywhere talking about Old Testament prophecy needing to be fulfilled. This is brand spanking new. Peter is, Peter at no point is saying, oh yeah, that's like that Psalmist said back here, and it completely fulfills the scripture. I see what Jesus is doing now. That might have happened, but we have

no record of it, none. The only record we have are really the disciples being complete idiots. It gives hope to the rest of us. Okay, you want to feel good about yourself? Read a gospel, put yourself in the shoes of a disciple, and go, okay, I'm not doing so bad. All right, because the disciples, man, are not, you know, they're not the heroes of the gospel accounts. Okay, Jesus is. The disciples definitely are not, but here we see Peter, and I swear if you didn't know that was Peter, it would sound just like Jesus, but sent out a psalm and saying, here's what happened. Here's, here's why we got to do it, and he's not just, he's not just playing around, right? He's not just saying, well, I think this psalm means that, and he's actually using it to make decisions. He's using it to lead these other disciples. So, so Peter in verses 21 through 25, he begins to lead them through the process of selecting another disciple, and he uses the psalms

to do it, and he uses some wisdom. He creates standards. They all say like, okay, it has to be somebody who was physically with us and physically with Jesus the whole time, and so they're thinking, okay, so they get two guys together, and they prayed for guidance, for, for which one the Lord wanted them to choose, and then in the very last verse of Acts 1, it says, it says, and they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias, and he was numbered with the 11 apostles. Okay, I don't know if you know what casting lots is, some of you may or may not know. When you want to cast lots, you take wooden sticks, and you cut one of them shorter than the rest, okay? Then you put your hand over them, and you hide which one is the short stick, okay? You ever heard the expression, you get the short end of the stick? That's what this comes from, casting lots. So then everybody picks one, okay, and then if you get the short stick, you're

not it, okay, or you are it, depends on how you set it up. So I want you to imagine, you got the 11 disciples, probably 100 other people, and they're just hanging out, and they're like, okay, we got two guys, somebody go get the lots. So they take two sticks, one shorter than the other. Maybe it's Peter, maybe it's Bartholomew, I don't know, puts them in his hand, and Matthias, and the unlucky one, okay, they're pulling out to see which one's going to be a disciple. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the equivalent of rolling dice, okay? I want you to just hear it, okay? Sometimes we, maybe we over-spiritualize some things. The disciples rolled dice

between two guys to see who was the chosen disciple, okay? Which is not, you want to tell me that's unbiblical? I present to you Acts 1:26, okay? It's not, they did, they cast lots in the Old Testament all the time. They cast lots to see that Jonah was the one who needed to be thrown overboard in Jonah. Go look it up, they cast lots, okay? The reason I say all that is because I want you to see what's happening. I want you to see how kind of clumsy it is, really. I mean, that it's just, in fact, it's kind of ordinary. In fact, it might be something that you and I would do, right? You're like, okay, well, we got to choose this other person. I don't know, what do you want to do? You want to roll dice? Sure, let's just roll dice, okay? Like, it almost sounds unspiritual, but here's kind of the emphasis that I want you to see, and here's what I think the text is trying to tell us. I think that the disciples, when they had that

earth-shattering news, when they realized, oh, okay, no, this isn't Jesus leading a military operation for us to overthrow Rome. This is Jesus going away and promising something that we now have to hang out for. They respond with determination, but then they also respond as clumsy as it looks to us. They respond with forward motion. They failed forward, right? They're trying, they're making heroic attempts at doing something about it. They don't just sit on their hands and go, oh, no, no, maybe we should, maybe, they didn't debate over what the Psalms were telling them. They weren't, they weren't trying to come up with different Old Testament prophecies that says, maybe we shouldn't elect the 12th. They didn't, they just, they went on forward motion. And that's really good. And that's, that's what verses, that's what the last half of Acts 1 is trying to tell us. And this is exactly what Jesus had prepared them for. It wasn't that they were

now doing things that were outside the bounds of what Jesus was doing. Jesus did that exact, those exact same things. I don't know if he ever rolled dice, but man, I mean, I wouldn't put it past him. Why not, man? Cast them lots, see what happens. Jesus told them that the change was coming so that they could adapt because they needed to pivot. And in reading Acts, we see them in real time. In the last half of Acts 1, we see them in real time saying, okay, let's just, let's do what Jesus did. Let's stay together. Jesus bounded us all together and we all hung out together. Let's stay together. Let's do this, do what Jesus did, let's stay connected. Let's use the scripture to, to seek direction, to organize ourselves. Let's, let's, let's do that. And again, again, like this is the first time. This is the first time, not just that we see Peter doing it.

It's the first time we see the disciples acting like Jesus without Jesus being there. And here's just, here's what I want to encourage you with today. Church, let's be disciples. Let's do what Jesus did. Let's respond by sticking together. Let's respond by going in forward motion. Let, let the pivots that we looked at in verses one through eight understand that we're in a very similar way. Jesus has given, Jesus has given his disciples holy spirit power to, to act on, to bring renewal. Let's do that. We're not, we're not different than Peter here. We're not different than Bartholomew or, or Matthias or, I mean, I know some of you feel like you came to the Lord on a dice roll. I know, I know you feel like you barely belong with the Lord and that's fine. That's okay. Okay, you're like Matthias. The disciples responded with forward motion using scripture. Let's do

that together. Let's be a body together. We call this Vision Sunday. We call this Vision Sunday. Part of the reason we do that is not because like I'm, I have some, some vision, you know, on two tablets that I'm gonna, you know, come out and, and demonstrate to you and, you know, it's perfect. It's not, it's, it's to, it's to re-engage the vision that Jesus has for our church. It's to remember why we are a church. We are a church because the Lord came to us and completely flipped our scripts. We are a church because, man, even since following the Lord, right, your life has probably gotten a lot more complicated and you've probably had to fight off a lot more distraction. I can, I think that everybody in here who follows the Lord can say that like when Jesus called you to become a disciple, you probably had something in your head about how that life was going to look and that is probably now what you're living right now, okay.

I know that whenever I first came to the Lord and when I first, I went through a big season of renewal. I was actually right before I met my wife, Kristie, in 1998, summer of 98, it was a sweet time. And, and when the Lord was really getting hold of my life, man, I had these dreams. I wanted to be in youth ministry forever. Bro, I'm a lifer, student ministry or death, right, just student ministry forever. And then I met Kristie and on the first, the first time my wife and I were talking, we talked for like two hours and, and she's, we just have a lot of real similar dreams and she's like, yeah, I, I loved my youth minister's wife and I thought about being a youth minister's wife and all, all of my bells are going off like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, yes, sister, you have found your mate. He is right here. Man, we wanted, Kristie and I wanted to open up a coffee shop together,

right. We wanted that, we wanted to do, man, we had all these things that we thought and all we were trying to do, right, it's not some, look, it's not some like long lost dream, we're going to open up a coffee shop together. All I'm trying to say is that like when you come to the Lord, there's things where you're like, you get excited about it and you're like, yeah, I want to do that. I want to go there. I want to make that happen. I want to, but all you're trying to do is just express the fact that you want to serve the Lord in a significant capacity and that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing, you know, like, you know, my wife and I don't need to like repent and like, you know, quit this job and go start a coffee, coffee house ministry. That's not the point. The point is to say that when we started, we had ideas about how that was going to look and we are not, we're living a completely different

life than that. We're still following the Lord, but it shouldn't look like that. We didn't have a plan for five kids. We didn't have, we didn't have a plan of being burleson, like I didn't know about burleson when I got saved, like it wasn't, but it doesn't matter because we're all like that, right? Like we all come to the Lord with maybe some preconceived notions about how things should be and then, and then here we are and we've, we've got to respond to that. We can't just sit there and go, well, I mean, you know, life's not like a, life's not like I thought it was going to be. Oh, I mean, okay, you know, but we can't sit in our hands all day just kind of just feeling bad that it didn't turn out like we wanted. And if you need counseling, man, like, look, I hope you get counseling. I'm not trying to minimize pain here. I'm just trying to help you understand that your response ultimately needs to be forward motion.

Your response ultimately needs to be resiliency. You need to stay together, you need to work forward, move forward. Here's our hope. As a church this year, what I want to do, what I would like us to do, is we want to help more people jump all the way in on our community. We want to help more people, want to see people jump all the way in, in our community. Well, we realized last year, just praying through kind of what the Lord was was kind of teaching us, showing us as a church, what we realized, man, is that there was a, there was just a lot of like unintentional barriers, just, just blocks for people to be able to step into our church community and feel like they're apart here. Okay? And so we've got a couple of responses to that, but that was really something where, man, we just sat on that for a while and we were just like, man, what, we didn't intend on this, right? We don't want people to not feel like they can jump all the way

in. We don't want to have people feeling like we got barriers or walls up. We don't want that. So how do we respond in a way that invites people into deeper community? And so we're going to do that in three big ways. Okay? The first way that we're going to do that, we're going to focus on home groups. We are starting on starting home groups this week. I've already talked to you about that. But what that does is that helps people jump in and serve quickly.

When you go over to somebody's house, even if it's your first time there and they say something like, hey, would you, you know, grab those plates over there and put them around the table? You're happy to do it. You don't feel like you need some main tag to do that. You don't feel like you need some proper role. You're like, I don't know, I'm not a deacon. I can't. Okay, no. I mean, you pick the plates up and you put them around the table, right? It's very simple, very ordinary, very easy way to jump in and serve. Home groups are going to allow for a lot of you guys to just serve in a way that's very normal. Not in a way where you're waiting for the plaque or the title or anything. You just, you put the plates around the table. You get the cups out. You put ice in things. Okay, you get somebody water. He serves somebody. You take prayer requests.

You just help. And so we want to do that. We want to focus on life groups for that. Another thing that we're doing is we are sharpening, and we're in the process on this, we're sharpening life groups to focus a little bit more on training. Okay, so a lot of you have been in life groups. That's good. Life groups are not going away. We are in that we've got a few still running. We are retooling that a little bit. They're still going to do what life groups do. Okay, so don't sweat it. Still going to do what life groups do, but we're going to be sharpening them to talk a little bit, to be a little bit more pointed toward training, toward helping people grow, kind of with some real, just some real hands-on tools. So we're going to give life group, life group leaders in particular, give them more of those tools and help them help people walk through some of those things. And so we're going to be focusing on hunger. We're going to be sharpening

life groups. And also, the third thing that we're going to do is we're going to be opening our big events. So we got four big events a year. Okay, we got four big events a year in chronological order. That would be Easter. Okay, Easter's a big deal. Doesn't matter where you are in the United States. It's usually a really big deal. We have VBS Rec Week in the summer.

We have National Night Out in October. National Night Out's a big deal, big party on the yard. And then we have Christmas Eve. And if you don't know when that is, you can look that up on Google. We got those happening. That is March 31st for Easter, June, October for National Night Out, and then Christmas Eve in December 24th, just to not leave you hanging. What we want to do with those four big events is we want to open that up to anybody who wants to help plan those things. Some of you are really gifted in planning those things. And just to let you understand, like we have a VBS Rec Week planning team meeting this afternoon at 3 o'clock. Don't worry, I'm not telling you you have to be at it. Because if you didn't know that, you're not supposed to be at the meeting, I promise. What I'm saying is we've already got people that are going to be rounding up together to meet and plan an event that's going to be happening in June.

What we want to do as a church, we want to open up more of those planning opportunities to more people quicker. And the only way that we can do that is to be early and to invite people into those kinds of planning opportunities. Now, some of you are not planners, and that's okay. We love you just where you are, okay? Don't feel like you need to plan just because I'll say this. And if you're not a planner, you know it. And if you don't know, ask somebody who really loves you, do I like to plan things? Am I good at planning things? And just listen. Just listen to them. So, like, I want to tell you, we're doing this in three big ways.

Home groups. If you're interested in a home group, my challenge right now, like, when we're done with this service, immediately out those doors, on your left and to your left, is the sign up for home groups. If you're saying, hey, man, this is my first Sunday and somebody says, it's my first Sunday, I don't even know if I want to do something. Okay, look, here's my pushback to that is, like, you never know unless you try. And it'll be everybody's first Sunday or everybody's first time at the home group. It's a brand new home group, man. So, like, if you're like, I don't know everybody, well, there's some other people that aren't going to know everybody there. It's the first week, okay? We got three different home groups. We'd love to have more in the future, but we're right now, we got three and we're doing great with them. There's information on each of those out there. And so, my encouragement, jump into a home group.

Don't wait. Jump into a home group. Start to serve. Start to get to know people. Put yourself out there. Yeah, it's scary, but look, it's worth it. And this church community, man, we are ready. We're ready for you to jump in and become a part. Look, I've worked at a few churches, okay? I've seen a few things. I may look young, but I've seen a few things. I hope I'll look young. Every church thinks they're friendly, and not all of them are right, okay? Not all of them are correct about their friendliness level. In my experience with this church here, we are pretty self-aware, and we try to do a good job of just being like head on a swivel, being aware, being friendly, welcoming people in a way that they want to be welcomed. It's actually a really big strength of ours, okay? Now, don't you make me a liar next week, okay? But our home groups are going to be an

extension of that. I'm really excited to see people jump into that, and I think it's going to be a really good moment for a lot of you. For life groups, what I want to say is just put that in the back of your mind. We're going to be talking a lot more about life groups later this year, okay? Into the summer, we're going to be talking about life groups a little bit more, and they're going to be, like again, I talked about, we're still going to do what life groups do, and life groups are smaller groups that meet every other week, and it's two to three people, same gender, they meet every other week, and they focus on kind of this, it's like a spiritual growth intensive, okay? And for big events, I want you to think about a big event. You're going to be hearing about it, we're going to be opening up, we're going to be having conversation about it, we're going to be talking about in our home group on Sunday morning, etc. And so if you are

interested in doing anything like that, man, just please let us know. So this is what I want to leave you with with the disciples, and I'm going to call our worship band back up. With the disciples, with these ragtag bunch of people who are just trying to figure it out, who are literally rolling dice to figure out what the Lord wants them to do, okay? Man, I just want that to be an inspiration to us. Like, yeah, let's giggle that they roll dice, let's laugh a little bit, that's funny, actually. But let it also inspire us to know that, like, man, it's not some, you don't have to be some perfect person, or have to do, like, know all of these spiritual moves, like, all in a row, okay? It's not jujitsu, it's following the Lord, and it's doing that rather clumsily, and doing it as you kind of fail forward. That's my encouragement to you, man. Just, even if it's a clumsy first step, take it, take it, you won't, you won't be,

you won't regret that you took the step. I'm not saying it'll be perfect, but you won't regret it. It'll be a great first step. Speaking of first steps, as we stand and sing our last song, before we do, I'm gonna be back there where there's some couches and chairs and lamps all over there. I'm just gonna be hanging out there during the last song, and then a little bit after the service. If you want to come talk about anything, if there's stuff that you've got questions, you didn't like what I said in the middle of a sermon, it's fine. Just, hey, just come talk to me about it. If you're interested in baptism, and you saw Ronald get baptized, then you're like, I need to be baptized. Then come see me. You got questions about baptism. I mean, that's how Ronald, after National