Organization

Transcript

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

I did not plan on starting with this story, but I'm going to start with a story. It doesn't really relate to the sermon, but it's a really good story. I heard it this morning. One of our members, Bob Crabtree, who turned 93 yesterday. He just said he keeps going to the sermon. He said, He was just kind of starting out his day, he sat in his stool, and he said he was kind of leaning over and he felt a pressure kind of on the lower part of his back. And he'd been dealing with this kind of back trouble for a really long time. Is that right, Bob? A really long time. And he said he was just in the shower, just sitting down for a second. And he said it just, all that pain just kind of went up and out. And he said, pastor, I received a touch from the Lord. And that was a really good thing. So I just want to give glory to God today. Amen.

Glory to God, that is good. Man, it was just such an encouragement today. So thank you for telling me that story. Like I said, that didn't really hit much with where we're going today, but we're gonna be looking at scripture today. We have spent the last three weeks trying to grab hold of these ups and downs in ministry. We've been trying to understand what it is to grow, to learn spiritual maturity. And so we've used the metaphor of gardening that is present throughout the Bible. We've talked about how we learn in seasons. We learn spiritual maturity in seasons. And it's very important for us to kind of understand what season that we are in. So we started with loss.

With loss, it's always square one. Loss is always where we begin. And when we embrace that loss, when we embrace that transition, we begin to give way to revival. And when we embrace loss and we begin to encounter revival, we encounter Jesus just like the disciples did at the end of Luke. And Jesus begins to ignite in us a contagious urgency. And that revival, when we cooperate with that, that flows into increase. And we looked at that last week, all these new things emerging, these new relationships developing. We saw that at the beginning of Acts, chapters one through six. And this new season, it challenges us, it changes us. And when that increase finishes, when that increase, when that, you know, that that ebb or that flow turns to an ebb. We go into a season of organization. Organization is where we're going to be in today. And so to understand organization we need to go a little bit deeper into the gardening metaphor. And

I'm going to borrow an illustration from a couple of authors named Tony Payne and Colin Marshall. And they have a work called The Trellis and the Vine. It is It is a great book. I would recommend this book, Barnum, to everybody that I know in ministry that it is a great understanding. And not to bore you with it, but just to say if you're looking for a new read, it's a quick read. It's about 130 pages. Totally worth it. They talk about, in this book, they talk about how the spiritual life of the church is like a vine. So they get that from John 15, right? John 15, where Jesus says, I'm the vine, you were the branches. And the vine, in their illustration, it just kind of grows where it's going to grow. You don't really know how it's going to grow, where it's going to grow. But in order for that vine to thrive and to really grow, it needs a trellis. Now, if you're like me, you don't really

know what a trellis is, because I didn't grow up around a lot of trellises. That's a trellis. So it's like latticework, or sometimes it's actually like, It's just something a vine can climb on, really. And what the trellis does is it gives support to that vine. It gives organization to that vine. To grasp a season of organization, right? To really understand organization as a season of spiritual maturity, to really get that, we need to see how this season of organization supports the increase, right? In our own life, in our own church, we need to see it as a trellis for the spiritual vine that God is growing. If we're going to find organization in the Bible, we don't really need to look very far from where we were last week in Acts 6. So in Acts 6, really verses 1 through 6, but I I just want to focus on Acts 6, 2 and 3 right now.

This is still when things are blowing and going in the middle of Acts. Okay. People are still, you know, like the Lord is still adding exponentially to their number every day. And it says in verse 1, it talks about a problem they had about some widows getting more food than other widows. And the 12 disciples summoned the full number of the disciples and said, it is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. So what you begin to see here in Acts 6, 2, and 3, you continue to see throughout the New Testament where you begin, it changes from a spirit community, which is great, but it transitions into a church organized. It goes from a spirit community into a church organized, because even you have it even beginning here. But as you get further into the New Testament, you

see leadership roles develop, you see traditions, you see baptism in the Lord's Supper kind of kind of encased and this is how we should do it. You see orders of worship. You see membership. You see gender roles. You see all of that flowing out of this, right? All this stuff that's been happening in Acts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, really the rest of the New Testament is almost, it's like this attempt to organize all this increase that is happening. It's not that the increase has stopped, but it is, you do see this organization.

Oddly enough, when you're talking about organization, a season of organization, in our culture, that's actually something that is very kind of, I don't know, it's a big, they've got hang ups with it, right? So if you're talking about Jesus down on the cross, they're like, yes, let's do it. If you're talking about forgiveness and redemption and repentance, okay, all right, All right, we're still with you. You started talking about women's roles in church leadership. Oh, hang on. You started talking about traditional family roles. And they're like, oh, hey, stay back there, patriarch. I don't know what you're talking about. But what I'm talking about is the same thing that, it's the same place we see Jesus in the Gospels. It's the same place we see the original patriarchs. It's the same place. It's all in the same place. We see all this organization happen in Scripture in the same places that we're

seeing, you know, the gospel spread in Acts 1 through 6. And for these reasons, we tend to study the gospels more than 1 Corinthians. We tend to study revival, increase, and even loss way more than we study organization. Organization kind of gets left out in the cold. We don't really talk about that, but not today. Today we're gonna be talking about organization. It will get its place. And we're gonna be in 1 Corinthians 11 through 15. And what we're really gonna try to do is grab this, just a holistic understanding of what organization is, how it serves, what it's for. I just really wanna distill it down into three things. I wanna show you that a season of organization is valuable. I want to show you that seasonal organization can promote the gospel through gospel traditions. And then thirdly, I want to show you that investing in an organization is the only way to live an abundant Christian life. So they're valuable, they promote the

gospel through gospel traditions, and investing in an organization is the only way to live the abundant Christian life. Okay, set a mouthful. Now I got to back it up. Seasonal organization being valuable. We often don't think of something becoming organized as very valuable. There's a story that a very famous pastor tells about his very famous church, and this church was already in the thousands in attendance, but they had no building. Okay, so this church was kind of just moving around. They were in a lot of different buildings and they were setting up and tearing down every Sunday. Thousands of people, several services, still had no building. And this pastor was talking about how he resisted it for a really long time because he kind of feared what would happen after they got a building. But the people really wanted a building, the way he tells the story,

the people really wanted the building. They prayed for it, they saved money for it, And finally, it was move-in Sunday. And he said, everybody was so excited, but I was not. I felt the loss. Ever since we moved into that building, it felt like, he said, it felt like we lost part of our identity. That volunteers were down, morale was down, that it was just, there was so much vibrance, he said, in setting up and tearing down every Sunday. And so these are the kind of stories about organization and tradition that we hear. But what I would argue is that it's not necessarily a byproduct of organization. I think it's actually a common mistake within organization. To show you that, I really want to help you, I want to make it personal, okay? So let's just say you're going through a health crisis, okay? You have a health crisis and in that health crisis, man, you lost some things, right?

You lost your ability to do things. You lost maybe like your sense of security. You lost, right? It was not a fun thing. That health crisis was not fun. You lost out of that loss out of that season of loss. You begin to see some revival. You begin to see some some some contagious urgency toward the things of God and you begin to see some increase. Okay, maybe you start start reading your Bible. You start praying differently. You start memorizing Scripture. You start these new habits and out of that increase, you're beginning to disciple people. And as that went on, as you begin to disciple people, as you begin to influence people, that becomes more organized for you. Maybe it was a certain book that you read that you really loved, that you really wanted to communicate to somebody else, like the Charleston Divine. Maybe it was certain material. Maybe it was certain verses.

Maybe it was a certain person's teaching. Maybe a certain prayers that you pray, certain topics that you covered. However it boils down, it became a good method for you. You became good at making disciples with these particular methods, and those methods are valuable, they're good, they help you. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, right? So personally, you can see how organization is valuable. The common mistake we make though, the common mistake we make is thinking that our season of organization is the end. That it's the stop. It's where we don't need to grow anymore. It's where we figured it out. It's where we don't need to change anymore. We don't need to embrace anything new. Hey, we've made it. I don't need to learn anything different. I already know how to do it that way. I don't want to learn it a different way. I'm already doing it this way.

of organization help us tend to what God has given us, and that is good. That is valuable. They sharpen our skills. They sharpen our knowledge. They deepen our relationships. Methods help us do this, but methods change. Things change. The world changes. And it's like, I mean, it's just like a family tradition. There are things that my family did 10 years ago that if I would try to like muster that up again, they would all look at me like I had three heads. And I would deserve it, because like we don't, that's not something we're going to do right now, dad. We've outgrown that. And I'm like, no, no, it was so great. And they're like, dad, stop. With family traditions, you do keep some, but you outgrow a lot. You keep some, but you outgrow a lot of those traditions. So I want us to first understand that a seasonal organization is valuable for what it is. It's valuable as a season, and that is good.

But to continue to see this value, we need to understand how that season promotes the gospel. And to do that, we're really going to dive into 1 Corinthians 11 through 15. It might be obvious to say, but I'm going to say it, a season of organization does create organizations. What you see happening in Acts 1-6 is the beginnings of the church, of churches all around. What you see after that point is the establishment, the organization of those churches. It's those churches one by one having to figure a lot of things out. The Apostle Paul's helping them, the Apostle Peter's helping them, James is helping them, a lot of people helping them, but they're figuring it out and they're organizing, they're self-organizing during this time. What I want to see specifically though is again what I said before, how organizations, how a seasonal organization can promote the gospel through gospel traditions.

Now I bet you didn't know this was going to be such a rare day, but I'm usually not going to be up here talking about how great traditions are. Okay? Like just, hey, traditions, let's go grab them. Okay? Like that's not really, I'm not a very, I'm not really given to a lot of traditions. I understand them as important and good, but I'm not going to rah-rah for traditions a lot. What I will say is that even though some traditions can be like need to be thrown away or whatever What I want us to see here is that and this is why I'm calling them gospel traditions There are things that that organizations can do That help not just us but the generations to come learn the gospel they can promote the gospel Those are good things. So I'm not just talking about a tradition for tradition's sake I'm talking about a tradition that the the ones that we see in the New Testament in 1st Corinthians 11 through 15

That promote the gospel in specific ways. I want to look at four ways that they promote the gospel The first is that gospel traditions frame our history. They give us context as Christians, right? Our faith is handed down. We see this in 1st Corinthians chapter 11 2 and 23. So it says And I'm just cherry picking here, but it's a good way to kind of understand what's going on. It says, now I commend you, this is Paul talking to the church in Corinth, I commend you because you remember me and everything and maintain the traditions, even as I delivered them to you. So really, we should understand the only reason we have these gospel traditions because they were given to us by other people. 23, for I received from the Lord, what I also delivered to you that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread." Okay, he's about to go into the tradition of the Lord's Supper. But notice this, that he's

talking about how it is handed down. They frame our history. 1 Corinthians 15:3, it says, for I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in in accordance with the scriptures. You see what he's doing here? He's saying, look, I'm not making this up. I'm not bringing this, I didn't think this was a good idea, I didn't organize this story, I am giving to you what I received.

And the apostles are doing the same thing, they're giving to people what they have received from the Lord. The apostle Paul's doing the same thing. Gospel traditions can frame our history, they can help us understand, We're not making this up. Man, we didn't invent this idea of church. We are riding on the shoulders of many, many millions who have come before us. For millennia, they have come before us. And we can do what we do because they fought a fight that we barely even know about. But they did it. It gives us historical context. These gospel traditions help us understand our history, but they also teach us order. Gospel traditions also teach us order.

In 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, the Apostle Paul is detailing two different kinds of worship services. I realize this might sound like, why are we talking about worship services? I will tell you, the Apostle Paul gives great detail, gives great attention to these worship services. One in 1 Corinthians 11, the other in 14. The one in 11 is internal worship services. So this is in 11, 17 through 34. Lord's Supper services, basically. And these are churches, excuse me, these are services that are just for the church family. And when you look in verse 17, you can look at a lot of your headers in the Bible too. Verse 17, a lot of times the header above that is the Lord's Supper. And it's instructions on the Lord's Supper. It's instructions on how to gather when you gather. And it details, for example, how they should leave enough food for each other in verse 21. It details how they should think,

what they should think about before they eat. That's in verse 28. It details how they should wait for one another before they eat. That's verse 33. These are incredibly detailed instructions. Why does Paul care? Why does he care? Let's look at the next one first, then we'll talk about why he cares. Open worship services. You also have open worship services that are described in 1 Corinthians 14, 1 through 32. And these are different than the services he was describing in 1 Corinthians 11. These are services where really anybody can jump in. Right? We're not talking about Lord Supper. We're not talking about something, you know, kind of internal and private. We're talking about something open. In those services, he details which spiritual gifts are more beneficial to use. That's in verse 4. He details instructions on building up outsiders specifically in verse 17.

And also in verse 29, he details how many people should speak before they should stop and consider all that's been said. You realize how crazy detailed that is? And this is for a church in the first century in Corinth. Anybody been to Corinth? Me neither. Okay. Anybody familiar with first century Corinthian culture? Very few of us. Okay. Why are we getting all of this detail? Why does this matter? And we see, we see at the end of 1 Corinthians 14, verse 33 and in verse 40, it says, for God is not a God of confusion, but a peace. Verse 40, but all things should be done decently and in order. Why? Why should they be done in order? Because God is a God of order. God is a God of peace, not of confusion. Because of who God is, it should influence how we gather or to put it a different way. Our internal worship services, by the way, we are having one of those this Wednesday at six o'clock.

Childcare is available. Okay, our internal worship services, what we do and how we do it points to Jesus. If we come in here and we are flippant, for example, if we are flippant with the Lord's supper, if we're like, yeah, have some bread, have some juice, let's just kind of whatever. That's going to convey something about the Lord Jesus Christ. It's going to convey that we don't take him or his communion supper very seriously. That's not something that we want to communicate is the church. Am I right? Okay. Yeah, that's right. We have time, for example, in our Lord's Supper service, we have time for open testimony. We have time for open testimony because we want to hear and we believe that the Lord is doing something in our lives during the week whenever we're not here on a Sunday morning. We believe that. And so we're going to display it. We talk about

our connections that we're making within the community. We talk about how we are sharing burdens with people. Sometimes we come and we just share the burden. Sometimes we come together like we did this morning, we just share the joy. Like Bob Crabtree when he was sharing about what happened. All these things that we celebrate, all these things that we do in our worship services, they are meant to point to the life that we should be living in Jesus Christ. It doesn't mean we're perfect and it doesn't mean, you know, we're all living up to this ideal, but what it does is it teaches us order. It teaches us the way that God has lined things out. And we participate in that and we respond. So gospel traditions, they frame our history, they teach us order, but they also illustrate our commitment. They frame our history, they teach us order, they also illustrate our

commitment. In other words, they help us answer why and how together. Why and how together. And you see this in 1st Corinthians 12, 13, and the beginning of 14, where it talks about spiritual gifts. And it talks a lot about the how and why it says, says to each, to each person is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Okay, so that's so why do we have it, we have it for the common good. And then it goes on to list various gifts and how they should function. Right? It talks about each gift that says it should function this way. It should work together this way. And it also includes why, like here, but also in verses 24 through 26.

It says, but God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together. Look, this church in Corinth and this church here in Burleson, we need to be cognizant of the detail of the level of detail that we see in here. We need to be cognizant of that here because we are dealing with a church family that is different from one another. And the Lord God in heaven, saw fit to give us this level of detail on the organization within our church to understand both how we're different and to appreciate those gifts. Why? So that there's no division in the body. We've been given spiritual gifts and a variety so that we can learn unity. Now, Jesus said several

times, like I pray that they're one is I'm one like Jesus encourages his disciples various times. Like, you know, we're not going to be divisive. Like, we're not, we're not doing that. But when we have these spiritual gifts, when we have these admonitions in 1 Corinthians 12, it illustrates that commitment. It shows specifically on an individual level, how we are united. We understand I am gifted a certain way. Jeremy Beckwith is gifted a different way. Michelle Hay is gifted a different way. We're all gifted differently. And And because of that, we need to understand those differences, appreciate those differences, and it's going to take a little bit of work to come together as a body. It illustrates our commitment. We also see these spiritual gifts connected to love in 1 Corinthians 13:1. So I realize that 1 Corinthians 13:1 is recited at weddings all the time,

and that's great. But the actual context of 1 Corinthians 13 is in between two chapters on spiritual gifts. The reason it's there, and I'll just read it, it says, if I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. It goes on to describe love in extremely practical terms. And the reason it's doing that is because it's seeking to illustrate the commitment. It didn't just say love, it says here's what love looks like. It's patient, it's kind, it doesn't boast. As if to say, are you boasting? Then you're not loving. Are you being unkind? That is not what the Lord Jesus called us to do. It's different. And what we see through this gospel tradition, right, of these spiritual gifts being developed and understood within the body, we understand that it is for love. It's seeking to illustrate our commitment to Christ.

Ephesians 4:20, it's a great line. It says, it's an admonition. It's the Apostle Paul saying, like, hey, what are you doing? And what he says is, this is not how you learned Christ, which is a very illustrative statement for us. It should really help us understand, like, we aren't just being moral. We aren't just doing good. We aren't just kind of loving generally. We are learning Christ. We are loving as Christ loved. We are participating in the spirit of Christ, together united.

If we're just supposed to kind of make up how that looks without any kind of framework, it's gonna be a lot more difficult. What these gospel traditions do is they illustrate what that commitment is. They practically show us how to live like Jesus. So gospel traditions, they frame our history, they teach us order, they illustrate that commitment. And one last way, organization promotes the gospel through gospel traditions is that it cements gospel truth. It cements gospel truth. How many of you have ever learned the song about the fruit of the spirit? And the fruits are love and joy. Okay, yeah. It's a fun song. If you don't know it, man, grab somebody, ask them how to sing it. It's super great. What it does though is it teaches you through song gospel truth. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

Against such things there is no law. We can learn that through songs. What that song is doing, that's cementing in your mind the truth of what the fruit of the Spirit is. What I want to do, I just want to read for you. You can close your eyes on this, or you can just pay attention, but just listen to this gospel truth. I just want to read 1 Corinthians 15 again, starting with verse 3, but I'm going to keep going. And I just want you to just hear these stubborn gospel facts. Let's go. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the

apostles, last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God, but by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed." What a beautiful set of verses right there. And I love the way it ends. So we preach, and so you believe. In other words, look, let's not worry about who did what. Let's not worry about who came first or who preached to whom or listen we we preached it We were faithful to preach the gospel. We preached it and you believed it and This is what we preached and this is what you believed. This is the content of what you believe

These are the stubborn gospel facts. We should retain them. We should know them inside and out we should not be ignorant of of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the facts of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we should know them. We should be able to read 1 Corinthians 15 and not in agreement because we know those things. If you follow Jesus, we believe those things. In fact, near the end of 1 Corinthians 15, or kind of in the middle, it says, if none of this is true, then we should be pitied the most. If none of these gospel facts are true, then we're the suckers. We're sunk. There's no way out. In your season of organization, the Lord is teaching you. The Lord is tracing your hand over this ancient truth, just like you learned to write the letter A, right? Like somebody traced your hand over it, right? Just real, basic stuff. These gospel traditions in your season of organization can teach you.

The season of organization is valuable. The season of organization can promote the gospel through gospel traditions. Lastly, I want to look at what it is to invest in an organization. I said this before at the beginning. I want to say it again, that investing in a gospel organization, also known as a church. Investing in a gospel organization is the only way to live the abundant Christian life. It's the only way to live an abundant Christian life. I realize that sounds super exclusive. I realize I'm throwing rocks at people that say, well, I don't need a church. Yeah, I am.

The reason I say that is because of what I see in scripture. When you look at Jesus's calling, when you see that Jesus has called you to make disciples, all of your excuses tend to fade at the prospect of being invested in a gospel organization or invested in a church. When the Lord says, I want you to go make disciples, you might say, I don't know how. That's fine if you don't know how. invest in a gospel organization. You might say, I need encouragement to do that. I'm really bad. I started and then I stopped because I feel dumb or I feel like a failure. Okay, good. You need encouragement. You know, the best place to get that a gospel organization call the church. You might say, I need some healing. Like I'm, I'm totally just kind of broken and sprawled out before the Lord and I don't, I don't know if I can do anything. I don't even know if I can read the Bible.

I don't even know if I could pray right now. I'm just so hurting. I'm so torn up. Okay, invest in a gospel organization. We'd be glad to have you. In fact, just within our body right here, plenty, plenty of people that are either in the middle of a season just like that have just made it through or they're just about to get into it, okay? It happens, it happens. And you might even say like, well, look, I'm not even sure. I got questions about the gospel. I got some things that I'm not really sure about. Invest in a gospel organization.

You do not have a reason to not invest in a church. It is the only way to live the abundant Christian life. When you look not only at Christian history, but even when you look at Jesus' teaching, there's no such thing as a Christian all alone with no church. It just doesn't happen. It's not there. You can look, but it's not there. Jesus is not waiting for you to be perfect before you invest here or invest anywhere. Jesus is just waiting for you to invest. And as you do, as you invest, here's what I wanna guarantee. I wanna guarantee that as you continue to invest in a gospel organization called The Church, as you begin to invest in that, you will watch, watch your spiritual foundation begin to grow up underneath you. You will watch, as this church body becomes your family, you will watch your community begin to deepen. I'm not saying everything's gonna be perfect,

it's not all gonna be hunky-dory, but it is a way to belong to the family of God. God. We serve Jesus by investing in a gospel organization. Let me just, I'm just going to show you one verse to do that. There's plenty of ways I can do it, but I'm just going to do it this way. It's in 2 Corinthians, excuse me, 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17. It says, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Let me ask you, where does all this teaching, reproof, and correction and training come from? Think it's just passers by? Think you're reading your Bible and be like, hey look, somebody, you gotta correct, you know, like you get correction from people that happen to be next to you? No, that all happens within a church. All of it, all of it.

Teaching, reproof, correction, training, and righteousness. It all happens within a gospel organization. In fact, it kind of doesn't make sense without one. The entire New Testament is like this. Not just this verse, not just these two verses, the entire New Testament is like this. In a church, we are trained. And in a church, we train. In a church, we are taught, and in a church, we teach. In a church, we reprove, and we are reproved. We are given warning. We are told to be careful. We are admonished, and we do the same thing.

In a church, we train and we are trained. I wanna just encourage you, as we enter into our time of invitation, I just wanna encourage you, look, we all need a spiritual family. We all do. I need one just as bad as you do. We are created to thrive, to grow within a gospel organization called a church, in that spiritual family. And what I wanna do is, I just want to help you in that season of organization, as the Lord is beginning to kind of say, okay, let's kind of make some things kind of work here. Let's organize, let's start to put in order all this bountiful blessing that you have in your own life. If you have not gone through a season where you begin to put that in the right order and you begin to follow the Lord obediently in that, then my first question is gonna be, are you part of a gospel family? Are you part of a church family? I wanna encourage you during our time of invitation,

if you would like to join our church, if you wanna become a part of what we're doing here at South Burleson, that's great. We'd love to have you. And what you do is I'm gonna be up here, you come and see me. And it's part of it has to do with gospel course. There's kind of a little bit of a little bit of hope to jump through, not much. But it's because we want to know who you are and we want you to know who we are. So as you're considering joining our church, maybe you're just considering following the Lord for the first time. Maybe you're considering becoming baptized, which is another tradition. It's another good gospel tradition being baptized. If you're considering all of those things, I want you to come forward as we sing. So let me pray for us. Jesus, thank you so much for this morning. I pray that you would help us. Pray you help us to know and to see where you are calling us.

Pray that you would help us to be obedient in the midst of whatever trial we're in, in the midst of whatever we're going through that we would know that you're calling us into our next season. Pray that you would help us to understand that we need a family to do that. That's your name that we pray. Amen. Would you please stand. He should give his only son to make a righteous treasure. How great the pain of searing hearts! The Father turns his face away, Whose which mother chosen all, And gave his sons to glory, And upon his shoulder, I sit and I hear my mocking voice All out among the scoffers It was my sin that held him there It was a comfort his dying breath has brought me light I will not boast in it, no power, no wisdom But I will boast in Jesus Christ, in resurrection Why should I gain from His reward? I cannot give an answer to this I know with all support my rents

I will not boast, I'm boasting anything It's no power, no wisdom But I will boast in Jesus Christ Death and resurrection I said I gained from his reward I can't give a hand, I said But this I know with all my heart is wrong to pay my ransom, but with all is wrong to pay my... First Corinthians 15, 50 through 58, I tell you this brother's flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery, we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable and this moral body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable and the moral puts on immortality then shall come to pass the

saying that was written death is swallowed up in victory. O death where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord, your labor is not in vain. Amen.