Jesus, Our Apostle

Transcript

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

We are continuing our series on Jesus is Higher. And what we are doing in this series, it's a six-week series, so we're a little over halfway through. And we are just covering the first four chapters of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter one through four talking about who Jesus is. We've learned a lot about Jesus' identity so far. We've learned that He's the Eternal Son. We've learned that He is the full and final word of God. And so today, as we start in Hebrews chapter 3, the scripture that Susie Tunnel read today, we're going to start in chapter 3, starting in verse 1. The very first word we see up there is therefore. And anytime you see therefore, you've got to ask yourself, what is it? Okay, good job, guys. Good job. That was a little lackluster. I wanted a little stronger next time. Anytime you see a therefore you have to ask yourself what it's Okay, good. Good. Now, you know so what we should do when we see the therefore in in Hebrews 3 1 we should then

Look backward we should then understand kind of kind of where we are that the therefore that it's talking about how Jesus is the Full and final word of God that it was fitting and we talked about this a little bit last week how it's fitting that Jesus lost everything to gain everything. That it is within his character. In other words, he wasn't blowing smoke when he said the last will be first. He wasn't blowing smoke, it's to say in dying you find life. Jesus put his money where his mouth was and actually died. Actually came last. Actually took the brunt and actually trusted God to then put him first, to exalt him. So therefore Jesus is the full and final word of God. It is consistent with his character. Not just... so for us what does that mean? Jesus doesn't want to just improve us. Jesus doesn't want to ask us to cope with how things are. Jesus works

in the renovation process. Jesus works to make things new. Jesus wants to strip it down to the foundation, lay a new foundation and begin to build on top of that. And because all of this, because all of this, and we can see in Hebrews 3:1, we can see that all of this is, it's making us consider Jesus. So in Hebrews 3:1, I'm going to read it out loud. It says, therefore, holy brothers, and it's going to be on the screen here for you. Holy Brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession. So because of all this, because of all that we've seen with Jesus in Hebrews 1 and Hebrews 2, therefore you need to consider Jesus. You need to keep looking intently at Jesus. And when you do that, when you can see more of Jesus, then your ability to see the things of God increases.

And really the best way to understand this is with an illustration, right? So let's imagine learning a new language, okay? If you wanna learn Spanish, for example, you go and you take a Spanish class, okay? And that is good, that Spanish class is good. You got the best Spanish teacher in the world. They're going to teach you nouns, verbs, adjectives, structure, all of this. How to speak a language, all that's going to be really helpful. But when you go to Mexico, right, when you're there and you have to use the bathroom, okay, you're going to get some kind of Spanish out. It might not be the most clear Spanish, but you are in desperation going to be communicating to people who do not understand English. You will be trying to communicate the best Spanish you know how. When you are enveloped in the culture of Mexico, when you spend it not just like a day there,

but when you spend weeks there, months there, you learn something entirely different than nouns and verbs and adjectives and structure. You learn cultural motivations. You learn world views. You learn perspectives of the people that are there. You learn more than Spanish. But you still learn Spanish, right? It's just the occasion of it. When you see Jesus, right? When you begin to see Jesus, you begin to see more of the things of God all around. So seeing Jesus allows us to see all these other things. You understand more of the purposes of Jesus the longer you look at him, The more you look at Jesus, the more you find him, the more you're going to see him at work around you. And so practically, resisting stress, bypassing distraction, cutting through drama, going through the grieving process. As you spend time with Jesus, you're going to be able to kind of see these things for

what they are, engage them as they are. You're not going to get lost in somebody's drama because you understand where it matters in perspective to Jesus. So the more you have your eyes on Jesus, really the things of this earth will grow strangely dim. The hymn is exactly right. The more you're looking at Jesus, the less it actually makes sense to worry about what you're going to wear today. And it's not like you're trying hard not to worry about what you're going to wear today. It's that your perspective is somewhere else, that you are considering Jesus, that you are looking to something else, someone else, to define your reality. And that's why when you get lost on Twitter, your perspective on reality begins to warp a little bit. When you spend too much time on Facebook, when you spend too much time on the news cycle, it can really warp not just what you think about, but how much you think of what is

going on. perspective on things. As you spend time with Jesus, though, he's like this, it's like this sobriety, right? This kind of reality check that comes over you, and you're able to see things for what they are, and you're not overwhelmed. And so it says, therefore, consider Jesus, consider Jesus gives us two things to consider, that he is our Apostle, and that he's also our High Priest, okay? And these are these are kind of these twin things and I want you to notice how Jesus's identity correlates with ours. So first Jesus is our high priest, we are holy brothers. You see that? That Jesus is the is the person that is making us holy and this is really what we what we've already covered in Hebrews 2:12 it says that he's not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters because he has made us holy. And Jesus is also our Apostle and so in Jesus we share a

heavenly calling. Those things are related, right? Apostle and the heavenly calling are related. And as we consider Jesus we're going to in particular consider how He is our Apostle and how we share that heavenly calling and we're going to learn something fundamental about the way that our lives are directed. As we look at the apostleship of Jesus, we're going to understand more about our lives. And we really are going to discuss both eventually the Apostle and the High Priest, but really the direction of the next few verses in Hebrews 3, 1 through 6 really focuses way more on the Apostle part. The High Priesthood of Jesus is covered in Hebrews 5 through 8. That's another sermon series for a little bit later on this year, okay, where that will be another the circus. In fact, that's going to be something that we cover after Easter, immediately after Easter. So that's going to be late spring into the summer.

We're going to start that Hebrews five through eight series. It is enough to say this about Jesus being our high priest and we're holy brothers because he's our high priest, because he's the source of our holiness. We see this in Hebrews two, that Jesus has made us holy, that he's purified us. And this is the basic message of the gospel, right? Let's not get this wrong. That the gospel does not ask us to become moral people.

The gospel says that we are made new. And in that newness, right, that a morality is given, is imputed to us, if we're gonna be theologically correct here. It is given to us, it is put upon us. It is a righteousness that we didn't earn and that we can't maintain. And it is put upon us, is thrust upon us. And in this way and in many others, Jesus is our high priest. And the rest, I will say for Hebrews 5 through 8, in after Easter. If we keep reading though, Jesus' identity is our apostle, really begins to shine through. And so let's read verse 2. We only went through one verse. I promise the other ones will not be this long. Okay, Hebrews 3, 2. So that we're Considering Jesus, Jesus who was faithful to him, who appointed him, just as Moses was also faithful in all God's house. So him who appointed him. We need to know this about the word apostle, okay? The word apostle means sent one or messenger

and the apostle on is, that's what it looks like in Greek. Now you know. It's helpful, normally I don't bust out the Greek words, right? But it's really helpful to understand that, that there's a difference between capital A apostle. So the apostles capital A were the people that, that saw Jesus that kind of had this, this authority in the early church. So we talk about the apostle Paul, the apostle Peter, the apostle John, all these disciples who then became apostles. And really, so that's a capital A, that's a title apostle. There's also all throughout the New Testament way more than the capital A apostle is the little a apostle Okay, and the word apostle or apostle on in Greek it means sent one So appostello the verb that is the cognate of this word it means to send Okay, so one who is sent is a is an apostle. Okay, and so in this way how Jesus was faithful to him who appointed him to illustrate how Jesus is our apostle,

he begins to compare Jesus' sentness, how Jesus is sent, with how Moses was sent. So we got a Jesus and Moses comparison that is happening right here. So Jesus is our apostle, right? In that, He is the forerunner to our heavenly calling. So Jesus goes before us. Jesus ran the track already. Jesus has already been sent, accomplished the mission, peace out, and now He's saying for us, okay, you're gonna be sent the same way. Jesus is our apostle, and we share in that heavenly calling, in the same way, right? We were called out of darkness, and we are sent, not just sent straight to heaven, we are sent into our world to live out, to declare the gospel. That's our heavenly calling. Jesus came first, and in the same way that Jesus ministers, that's the way we minister, the same way that Jesus loved, we love, the same way that Jesus made disciples, we make disciples.

And that's why, look, I really get onto this. And I think it's entirely appropriate and under discussed. We don't talk about this enough. What did Jesus physically actually do with this time whenever he was here on earth? What did the Son of God who had limitless power available to him, what did he do? He spent 90% of his time with a handful of people, with like 100 people total eventually, but really 12 guys, you know, really concentrated on those 12. He spent 90% of his time with disciples. He spent 10% of his time with crowds and he often resisted the crowds. Jesus had this 90-10 principle, right, of how he was going to do ministry. And a lot of times what you see is reversed, especially in church world, right, especially in the American South church world. You see a lot of public ministry going on. You see a lot of crowds doing lots of things. And I'm not trying to throw stones too hard here.

All I'm saying is if we're gonna do ministry like Jesus did ministry, we are gonna have the 90-10 rule, right? We're gonna spend the vast majority of our time making disciples personally with other people, right? We're not gonna, we're not going to just spend all of our energy and all of our money with all these big events that get a bunch of big crowds here, but they're not being transformed. That's not what Jesus did, and it's not what we're going to do. And if that really disappoints you, if that just hurts your church heart, I can recommend some other churches for you, gladly, and I'm not even mad, but that's not what we're going to do. We're going to make disciples, 90-10, like Jesus. Jesus is our apostle. So we do ministry like Jesus did ministry. And we see this develop further, but first we've got to get to Moses, right? So it talks about just as Moses, okay?

So consider him, Jesus was faithful to him who appointed him, which is very apostolic, right? God is appointing, God sent Jesus, right? Just the same way that Moses was faithful in all God's house. Now, Moses is a really interesting choice here. In the Old Testament, you could have chosen a few, right? Jonah, Joshua, Abraham, Melchizedek, Isaac, David, Solomon, the list goes on. Lots of people to emulate here. However, Moses, Moses really exceeded all of them. Moses was kind of the guy. Moses beheld God's glory to the fullest extent possible, because it says in scripture that Moses spoke to God face to face as one man speaks to another. It doesn't really say that about David. It doesn't say that about Solomon. It doesn't say that about Elijah or Elisha. It doesn't say about any of those guys, about Moses it says. It was to Moses in Exodus 3 that God first revealed his covenant name Yahweh.

That name was not revealed to anybody personally before that, but it was revealed to Moses to give to his people. Moses was the first and the iconic apostle. He was the first one that was sent by God to lead his people, to deliver his people from slavery. He says, Moses, I'm going to send you. I've got a mission. You're going to do it. It's going to be great. Just do what I say. I'm going to do some amazing things through you, but I'm going to send you. I'm going to apostello you. You will be my apostle to these people. I will speak through you. And it was, it was through Moses that God spoke to his people. Moses would go up to what is called the tent of meeting. Moses would go inside a tent and he'd talk to God face to face with one man talks to another. And then when he left the tent, the first couple of times he left the tent, his face was glowing so big,

they had to put a veil on the guy. And I'm not even making this up, this sounds wild and crazy, but it's true That this guy's face shone because he he had such intimate Conversation with the creator God of heaven and Moses Was not perfect okay, Moses was not perfect nobody was but But oftentimes the Old Testament describes Moses as quote faithful in all God's house And that's exactly when he says, just as Moses was faithful in all God's house, he's quoting numbers. He's quoting the Old Testament at that point. And he's saying, look, we know who Moses was. And Moses, although not perfect, was faithful in all God's house. And the point is, the point is that Jesus and Moses, the comparison that's happening is that they are both faithful apostles. They were both sent and they were both faithful to the one who sent them to do what they were sent to do. They delivered the message, they led the people,

they achieved freedom from slavery. They did it. They were successful apostles. They accomplished the mission. Jesus and Moses, their comparison continues in the next verse. But you begin to see a difference, Hebrews 3:3. It says, for Jesus had been counted worthy of more glory than Moses. As much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. So however great Moses was, and Moses was great. Okay. Uh, if you don't believe me, just, uh, talk to like an Orthodox Jew right now. And they're like, who was the greatest there? It's going to be a tie between Abraham and Moses. Okay. Moses was the guy, but however great, however much glory Moses had. Jesus has more. Jesus is better and it's not by an inch. Okay. Jesus is in a different stratosphere than Moses. However great Moses was that, you know, Jesus though, I mean infinitely better. I can't raise my hand high enough to talk about how much better Jesus is than

Moses. And the pastor in Hebrews uses the house metaphor, but let's use a different one because houses are built by contractors and that's weird, but let's a little bit more of a simple one. Let's use a different one. You cannot say, for example, you cannot say, listen, I'm talking about an author writing books, you cannot say, hey, that book was amazing. That book was life-changing, but that author has no talent. Can't do it. You can try, but you're going to sound dumb. Because the quality of the book is a direct reflection on the ability of the author. Now you can say the author didn't write that book. That's a different story. But if the author wrote the book and you love the book, you can't say that the author's talentless. They correlate. immediately tied to one another. An author, in other words, is only as good as the book he writes. An author is only as good as the book he writes. And in this illustration,

Moses is the book and Jesus is the author. Or to use the illustration from Hebrews 3, Moses is the house and Jesus is the builder. Jesus is on another level than Moses. as much more of a level than a builder and a house or an author and a book. Verses five through six, explain it further. We're going to skip four. It kind of built on this metaphor. We're just going to skip over it. Five and the first part of six. It says, now Moses was faithful in all God's house, again, quoting the Old Testament, as a servant. It's important, faithful in all God's house and servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later. That's really important. We're going to come back to that in just a second. But, and so we see the comparison here again, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. Again, you see this comparison and you notice that Moses is faithful in

and Christ is faithful over. Jesus is faithful over God's house, okay? And Moses then is a steward of God's house, a servant, that word is typically like a lead servant, Like a steward, like somebody who watches over the house in the stead of the master of the house. So they're like running into it. It's almost like a chief operational officer. They're not in charge, but they make sure stuff happens. So Moses was sent as such, sent as a steward in God's house. And he was faithful in that. But Jesus, Jesus is faithful over God's house as a son.

Jesus has rights that Moses cannot even sniff. Jesus interacts with God's house in a way that Moses never could. And here's where it comes back to our heavenly calling. That what Moses did, when he did what he was sent to do, what that ended up doing was testifying to things that would be spoken later. So Moses was faithful to testify to the things that were to be spoken later. We think of this as like prophecy, right? Tell in the future, which is kind of a really thin understanding of prophecy, but we'll kind of go with it right now. Moses, if you talk to any kind of Orthodox Jew right now or anybody in the Old Testament, they're gonna call Moses a prophet. Moses was the first and one of the greatest prophets. Okay, they're gonna call Moses a prophet. And we're really picking up on that theme here that what Moses did testified or exemplified or pushed out to the future something

that he didn't really understand in that moment. So let's look at what Moses did, right? So Moses listened to God and he faithfully relayed the words of God. So Moses goes in the tent of meeting, Moses has a conversation with God. And then Moses goes to the people and says, this is what the Lord God says. And he would do it verbatim and the people would be like, okay, we will, yes, we will, we will obey and all God's out. Okay. That's how it happened. Okay. So that's exactly what Moses did. Moses relayed the words of God to the people. through the words that God gave Moses, he implemented four really big things. First, he implemented a sacrifice for sin, animal sacrifice. He implemented the 10 commandments. This is God doing this through Moses. God implemented the priesthood and God implemented the temple or tabernacle. So much so, and let me just kind of give this

some perspective here. You know all those laws that you really don't wanna read through in the book of Leviticus. So the second half of Exodus, the whole book of Leviticus, and the first part of the book of Numbers, they're all laws, right? All those laws, almost all those laws, set these things up. So when I'm saying that that Moses did these, or God did these four things through Moses, I'm definitely using shorthand, okay? We're not walking through, it's not a not a sermon series on Leviticus, okay? But we're talking about setting up the sizes for the furniture in the tabernacle, in the temple. We're talking about what colors to put where. We're talking about how to assemble and disassemble that tabernacle when they need it to move. I'm talking about which tribe picks up which part of which tab, of which part of the tabernacle to then move, okay? They had the whole thing laid out.

It is all laid out. And that's just with the tabernacle. With the priest, they're talking about exactly what they're wearing. They wore something called an ephod, which is weird. It had to be put on a certain way. It had to be put on in a certain order. They had to put their hand in a certain part of blood and then do a wave offering. I mean, it gets complicated. I'm trying to help you understand that that is shorthand and that God cared a lot about the detail of that. So we have the Ten Commandments, but really the Ten Commandments, I mean, if you read them in Exodus 20, I mean, they're longer, they have explanations along with them. We just kind of bullet point them. It's, you know, we're American. And so we just bullet point those things, but it's really, there's a whole story kind of wrapped around that, right? There's this whole, like, this interaction that happens around Sinai between God and his people.

Moses kind of caught in the middle of it. Okay, a sacrifice for sin. Look, there are in the Old Testament there is example after example of like which sacrifice to make for this kind of sin and then no for this other kind of sin You got to do this kind of sacrifice and this sacrifice is like this is a bold sacrifice This is only a dove sacrifice and over here's a little this is a gold sacrifice and And there's even like, you know, levels of sacrifice. There was one big sacrifice that would happen once a year, right? Where the high priest would go in and he would like, you know, put the sins on the goat. I mean, it was a whole thing. Okay. It was a whole thing. I will let you know, I just riffed right there. None of what I said was inaccurate. I'm all I'm quoting entirely from the Old Testament. When I'm talking about we're putting sin on goats, I am quoting the Old Testament at that point.

Okay. I'm trying to tell you this is this is complicated people get lost in this stuff all the time We're not doing that today I'm just showing you how complicated this is. I'm showing you the detail I'm showing you the attention that the Lord God in heaven wanted to put on sacrifice Wanted to put on the Ten Commandments wanted to put on the priesthood wanted to put on the tabernacle The Lord God in heaven is measuring the tabernacle with Moses and he's saying make it this big exactly. We got cubits in the Bible to measure out the walls of the tabernacle. Okay, I wanted you to understand all that because, because Moses was faithful in his apostleship to repeat, to relay the words of God. But Jesus isn't relaying anything. Jesus is the Word of God, right? He's not relaying anything. He's not, there's nothing lost in translation. We're not having to, we're not having to

say like, well maybe he didn't hear right. No, nothing like that. Jesus is the Word of God. Jesus is the full and final Word of God. And that, and that every word that Moses relayed from God, every single bit of it, testifies to the things that are to come, the things that are to be spoken later, and all of them come true in Jesus. Let me say that one more time. Everything that Moses is relaying from God, all of that junk in Leviticus, I say junk, I mean that kind of as a, it's not pejorative, it's not junk, but all the stuff that you don't want to pay attention to, okay that's a better, all that stuff, right, all the stuff that makes your head spin, all the, you know, just all the laws, all of it, All that stuff points to something that was going to be revealed later, to be spoken later, and all of that comes true in Jesus. So in Jesus, what happens?

In Jesus, God personally enacts new things. So in Jesus, there is a sacrifice for sin, but that's Jesus. Jesus, the reason that we can understand that Jesus is the sacrifice for sin in such a comprehensive way is because we can look back at the Old Testament and go, man, that was super complicated to get all that stuff done. But Jesus cuts through all that noise and says, I'm going to be it. I'm the final sacrifice. It's me. All these things, all these rules, all these complications that you needed to worry about to make sure that you did the right sacrifice at the right time for the right sin, you know, for the right people and all that stuff. Jesus cuts through all of that. And he says, I'm the perfect sacrifice. I'm it. It's a new sacrificial system. The old is gone. The new has come. And Jesus didn't eradicate the 10 commandments, but he did set up a new commandment.

John 13, 34 and 35, says, a new commandment I give to you, love one another as I have loved you. What a mouthful. What a mouthful. Jesus issued a new commandment. And it wasn't meant to replace the 10 commandments, it was meant to envelop them though. It was meant to say, this is what they're for. He installed a new priesthood. And this priesthood we're gonna look at in a second, but in this priesthood, it's not select people that are priests, it's everybody. Everybody that follows Jesus is a priest. I bet you didn't know you were a priest or a priestess, but you are your priest. And that leads us with the last one, the temple. Where's the temple? And we see this in the latter half of verse six.

One of the greatest, one of the greatest parts of Hebrews three, in my humble opinion. Hebrews 3, the latter part of verse 6, and we are his house. If indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope, we are his house. We are the temple. Through Moses, God built the tabernacle very specifically. He put it together. Not every piece was the same. It all complimented one another. It was a place for people, sometimes even outsiders, to meet with God in a way that showed respect to God. But all of this, all of this pointed forward. It pointed forward to a new day when, as 2 Corinthians 6, 16 says, we are the church, we the church are the temple of the living God. Ephesians 2 22 it says we are built together as a temple for God. The New Testament is very specific. Ain't no more buildings that God lives in. Y'all hear me? Right? No more buildings.

God's not interested in brick and mortar. God with viral. God is among us. God chooses to dwell in a house that is spiritual, in a house that his body makes up. This building here, this building that we meet in is great, and it's a blessing, and I don't hate it one bit. However, this building is not our church. Our church is meeting together right now. Glory. Love that. But this building is not our church. And this here, this is the heavenly calling that we share in, that we are God's living temple, right? That when we assemble and we worship together, when Greg was up here and leading us and we were just singing full, I just stopped in the middle of it, right? I just stopped and listened to all you guys just wailing, just having a good old time, praising the Lord. That was such an encouragement to me, right? me, right? For us to be singing the same thing together. What a blessing to hear. We assemble,

we worship, we ask God to dwell among us. We love deeply. We sacrifice one another and we let that flow, we let that love flow out to love and good deeds to other people. On this point, 1 Peter 2 is extremely instructive and so I'm just going to import that. 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 4 and 5 and it's up here. You want to turn to it, you can, but it's right up here. And it's talking about the same idea and it uses a little bit more of a colorful expression or metaphor. It says, as you come to Him, Jesus, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious. So Jesus is the living stone and as we come to Him, verse 5, we are like living stones being built up as a spiritual house. As you come to Jesus, you become like Jesus, and then you become together formed with Jesus into a spiritual house. But then we switch metaphors to be a holy priesthood. How are

these things related? We'll see in a second. To offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Moses spoke of the things that were to come, and we are walking in that fulfillment. We are walking in in what Moses was pointing to and asked for sacrifices and asked for commandments. Jesus settled it. It's done. As for priesthood and as for temple, that's us. We're not on our own. That's not what I mean, but I do mean that Jesus is saying, look, I'm the high priest, but you're still priests. Jesus I'm the cornerstone, but you're still the temple. We're together on this. And not only, right, so you look at like the heavenly calling, not only are we a new temple, but we're also priests. Well, what do priests do? And I really want you to think hard about this for a minute. What do priests do? Priests, and I can even speak of it in a strictly Old Testament sense.

So I'm not talking about like the Catholic or the Anglican priest down the street. It's not what I mean. I'm talking about Old Testament priests, okay. What do priests do? Priests make sacrifices on behalf of other people to God in order to usher them into God's presence. Let me say that again. Priests make sacrifices to God on behalf of other people to usher those people into God's presence. I cannot think of a better identifier for us as priests.

Because what are we doing now? We are sent, Jesus is our lead apostle, we are sent as priests, and we are sent to make sacrifices. What do we sacrifice? We don't sacrifice animals anymore. Jesus has already been sacrificed. What do we sacrifice? We sacrifice time, we sacrifice energy, We sacrifice leisure, right? We make sacrifices to be with other people, on behalf of other people, praying for other people. Why? Why would we do such a thing? To usher them into the presence of God. We are priests.

We are priests. And I really wanna just spend this last moment on being a priest. So I wanna help you see a priest mentality and I want you to see priestly behavior, priestly mindset here. As priests, your spiritual life exists for other people. I know we live in America and I know we live in the American South and so there's a lot of people telling you that your spiritual life is for yourself. It is not. It's just not. Mine's not for me. Yours isn't for you. Your spiritual life is for other people. It exists for other people. Otherwise, Jesus would have just saved you and then called you to heaven like Elijah. But he didn't. He called you, he saved you and he sent you here, sent you to this world, to people. Your spiritual life exists for other people. Also, as priests, you have power in most situations to point people to Jesus. Sometimes all you've got to do is open

your mouth a little bit. Sometimes the situation's right and you can point to Jesus. But it's scary. You don't know, you kind of pull it up short. But you do have that power. I really want to, I want you to have that mindset, right? That your spiritual life exists for other people and that you have more power in most situations than you think to point people to Jesus. And I don't mean like make everything a Jesus juke, right? Like I don't mean, you know, if your neighbor's talking about fixing his fence, you know, you'd be like, well, you know, Jesus fixed my heart. That's not what I mean, okay? That's more painful than funny even. And that's not what I mean. I don't mean Jesus juking everybody. I just mean being able to say, like when, I mean I get it all the time, you know, like, oh, you know, you're so busy, you know, you have five teenagers, how do you do it? It's really

easy in that moment for me to go like, I don't know, right? Or just laugh it off or make a joke or whatever. No, no, no. I mean at that point I can say, man, you If I don't pray, if I'm not connected to Jesus, I really don't have the energy to do it. If I'm not listening to the Lord on a daily basis, I'm a pretty horrible father, actually. There's nothing wrong with that, right? And I'm not saying you gotta make everybody feel comfortable, but I am saying there's moments that you can take ownership of. Priests of behavior, so that's priests and mindsets of priests of behavior. As priests, like I said before, you're sacrificing time and money. They can be used for other people to come to Jesus. When you're sacrificing those things, you're taking all of your leisure time, right? My encouragement to you, if you've never done this before, it's eye-opening. I would like for you to start a diary and not about, you know, who's talking behind your back.

I mean, a diary of time. So you start a diary, and I want you to just allocate or see, write down how much time you spend doing different things. There's apps that do this. I mean, I can point you in that direction. But the reality, I just want to see how much time do you spend on things outside of work and sleep? What do you spend your leisure time doing? My encouragement to you, as you see that, as the sobering reality dawns upon you, My encouragement, take a quarter of that time and see what the Lord wants to do with it. Take a quarter of that time and spend it praying for people who don't know the Lord. Spend it involving yourself in the lives of other people who are far from Jesus. Take a quarter of it. So if you spend six hours a week on Netflix and another 10, I don't know, doing something else that I'm not going to make up right here in this moment,

that's 16 hours. My encouragement is spend four hours that week. You can break it up and pray for other people. Invest in other people. Open up your life to other people. It's a small sacrifice, but it's a sacrifice. It's a good place to start. And this makes sense with money for us, but it doesn't make sense with time for some reason, or priorities, but it should. I want to point you to something that we have. They're called stories of connecting cards. These cards are immediately out those doors and to your left at what we call the family table, which is the start table is immediately to your left, but the family table is a little bit further out as you leave. And it's still all in the fellowship hall. These red cards are here for you guys to write down about our stories of connecting that we're having. And we sent an email out on Thursday that kind of reviewed a few of those stories that we already know about.

Guys, we want to see loads more. We want to see a lot more. I would love to see, I'd love to see a hundred of these cards, right? And we're using these cards to pray continually afterward, right? So the stories, the cards that we have now, Oster, how many cards do you think we have? What, like five? Five, something like that. We got five now. We started in January, so give us a break. But in five, with those five, we're going to keep praying, right? Those five are connections. It always strikes me, it always strikes me.

As a believer and you, as somebody who follows Jesus, that God used a connection to bring you to Him. And it is foolish. And I say that with all love that I can, all compassion that I can, it is foolish to believe that people will become disciples a different way. It's foolish. I think God's going to like helicopter people drop, right? Like just drop them in our church. We're like, oh, you know, I've been, I've been looking for a church to belong somewhere and I don't even know the Lord. Can I find him here? Like that's not how it happens. It's not, that's not how we make disciples. Not how you became a disciple. That's not how it happens. You saw somebody, you were connected to somebody, even if it was somebody related to you, you still were connected to somebody. you out to somebody and invite them to do yard work with you. I got somebody in my life group.

That's how he's ministering to his neighbor. He's ministering to his neighbor by making him do yard work with him. Okay, he's younger, he's like older than this guy. It's great. The guy loves it. And it's a great fit for the guy in our life group. Invite him to play a board game. Invite him over for dinner. Invite him out to lunch. All these things are stories of connecting. All these things are ways that people get to know other people. You have a spiritual life. You have been reborn for a reason, but that reason is not your happiness. That reason is to usher other people into the presence of Jesus, to demonstrate the love of Jesus to them, to declare the truth and freedom of Jesus to them, to live it out in front of them. Today, as we have our time of invitation, and I'm going to ask Greg to come on up, As we have our time of invitation, I just want to encourage you, and I'm going to be

right up here just singing on the front row. If I'm singing too loud, it's okay. You can disturb me. It's fine. If you want prayer, if you want to make a decision for the Lord in any capacity, if you want to give your life to Him, if you want to start following Him, if you want to to be baptized, if you want to kind of do that in obedience to Jesus, then you can come and talk to me up here. But the reality is, there's a lot of steps that you probably need to take. We call this time our time of response. And so as you're responding, that could mean you're sitting where you are. But I want you to pray. As we sing, I want you to pray. I want you to consider and to do what the Lord is asking you to do. Let's stand and sing together.

You are good, good, oh, you are good, good. Oh, let the King of my heart be the wind inside my sails, the anchor in the waves. Oh, here's my song, let the King of my heart be the fire inside my veins. my veins, the echo of my days, oh here's my song You are good, good, like God, oh, sing your y'all good You are good, good, you're never gonna let me down Lord You're never gonna let, never gonna let me down You're never gonna let, never gonna let me down You're never gonna let, never gonna let me down You're never gonna let, never gonna let me You're the, you are the God, God Oh, God, God Okay, what a blessing. Thank you guys. It is really good to be here as God's house. house together.