Those Who Have Gone Before Us

Transcript

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

Thank you, Israel and Katie. You guys might know that Katie is three weeks pregnant, or three weeks, three weeks until delivery, not three. It's like negative, I don't know, until, she's count down on three weeks. So we've never had water break on stage, but today might be the Sunday. So you guys pray for Katie. I thought on that high note, I was like, it's baby's coming, it's gonna happen right now.

That did not happen. Heraclitus, let's start with the Heraclitus quote this morning. Heraclitus said, no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. No man ever steps in the same river twice, it's not the same river, it's not the same man. There is a basic human desire to want to go home again, to want to return to something familiar. We wanna return to a familiar job, a familiar relationship. We wanna go back to our hometown, we wanna remember things, we wanna visit our old high school, we wanna revisit little places we went as a kid. There's nothing wrong with that desire, but it can turn dangerous when it comes to people who claim Christ, who want to go back to their old life.

And it's usually a combination of maybe like peer pressure, temptation, the situations are always different, but there's this temptation that comes and just says, hey, wasn't it so much better before? Wasn't it so much simpler before? The problem is when you go back to your old life, things feel familiar at first, but soon that discomfort returns and you begin to remember that you actually didn't like who you used to be. You actually didn't like, can I have an amen? You actually didn't like who you used to be, that's right. You didn't like who you used to be. Old habits weren't great, they were ruts. Your old habits were ruts, your old memories are not as fond as you remember them. If you are an addict, you would call this relapse. You would say, this is what relapse feels like. That when you try to go back to your old life, you see firsthand that this ain't the same river

and you ain't the same person. And although it looks so good at first because it's familiar, you just remember all of a sudden it wasn't. This week we're gonna be looking in Ephesians four, we're gonna continue our series on Ephesians four. We're gonna start in verse 17 and what we see there is we see many in the Ephesian church that are dealing with relapse. They're dealing with people trying to return to their old life, trying to go back to the same river, think of the other same person. And this is what we open with in verse 17. Ephesians four, 17, it says, now I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. He's saying to this church, leave your old life behind. Don't walk as the Gentiles do, don't try to step back into your old life because you left it for a reason. Don't go back into your old life

because you left it for a reason and that reason, reason number one, it was full of futility. What is futility? Well, you know how fashions change all the time? You know how cars break? You know how your phone needs to get updated and then when you try to update your phone you don't realize you don't have enough memory in your phone, you gotta get a new phone. That's futility, okay? That's futility. You've got a lot of upgrades but you've got nothing to show for it, okay? That's futility. In your old life, you chased things. Outside of Christ, the only thing that you can chase outside of Christ are things that will evaporate, things that are not going to last and they're gonna leave you empty. So you left it for a reason. He continues, look at verse 18.

He's talking about Gentiles here, he says, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. Now look, I realize in verse 17, we talked about Gentiles and 18, we talked about they, okay? We're gonna see, by the time we get to verse 20, the they and the Gentiles, these aren't other people that Paul is talking about whenever he's writing to the Ephesian church. By verse 20, we're gonna find out. He's actually just talking straight to the church, okay? And so he's not talking about other people, he's not saying, okay, don't live like those people do or don't, you know, he's not trying to point fingers, that's not the point. He's saying, don't go back to your old life. And his point here in verse 18, he said, in your old life,

in your old life, you just did not get following Jesus. In your old life, you didn't wanna get following Jesus. And sometimes people grow up without experiencing the love of Jesus. Sometimes people grow up in a home where their parents don't love Jesus, their parents don't know the Lord. And look, if you grew up in a home where you had two parents who followed the Lord, that's a big plus, okay? That's a big help, that's a big step up. I'm not saying your parents are perfect, they probably weren't. But it's a big, when you have a, even if you don't have two parents at home, when you have a strong spiritual influence,

when you have a strong spiritual influence at home, it makes a huge difference. So some people, whenever he's talking about that old life, some people, they don't get following Jesus because they didn't see it. They didn't know it, they didn't understand it, they had nobody to look at. But all, all at some point, doesn't matter how many parents you had following the Lord, all at some point have resisted following Jesus Christ. We've all gone through that. I don't care if you grew up in church or didn't. We've all gone through that. We have resisted knowing Jesus. We all have sinful urges to resist the Holy Spirit's work in us, and that was in our old life. Our old life is full of kind of running from consequences. Our old life was full of not knowing why we are dealing with all of these troubles. We looked at it last week, we talked about being in the ocean, right,

and being kind of tossed by waves of things that we didn't understand, things that were kind of too complicated, too confusing, and we were like little children swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. That's the picture we get in Ephesians four, I think it was verse 13. That's the picture that we get, it's 4.14. And this old life, it's full of not even knowing if you're making progress because you're just kind of making it up as you go along. Like verse 18 says, darken in the understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. This is a full press resistance against what the Holy Spirit is doing. This was your old life. And he's saying you left that life behind you left that life of resisting your creator behind. He keeps going, verse 19. Verse 19, again we're with they, but it's us. They have become callous and have been given,

sorry, and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. In this old life that he's describing, he's saying that people had functionally given up on better living. They had functionally given up, given up trying for a better life. Instead they had given in to fantasies. They had given into escaping life. Maybe they invested heavily in like a TV show or a game or something. Maybe they watch or read pornography, right? They're just, they're just, they've given up on trying to do something better. And they have just given themselves over to something that will completely preoccupy their mind and will take it off of the fact that their life isn't going anywhere. And if you ask them about it, they'll say, like what's the use? What's the use of making your bed if you're gonna sleep in it the next night? What's the use of cleaning your room

if it's just gonna get dirty again? What's the use of making up with this person when we're just gonna fight again? You have functionally given up on trying to do something better. You have given up on saying, my life is gonna matter. It's gonna equal something in the kingdom of God. It's gonna be worth something. I'm gonna pursue things that are worth something. They had given up on that. In your old life, the reason why you left is because you chased things that were evaporating. You were going after all these things that just wouldn't fill you and it's because you had given up the most culturally acceptable way that we would do this. So like tomorrow if you wanted to go back to your old life. Here's step one. Man, invest your life being preoccupied with what other people think about you. Let your whole life be about virtue signaling. Let your whole life be about like what others see online

about you or things that you say and just spend your whole life managing that image. That's very culturally acceptable and if you do that, if you just waste your time on that, if you build this kind of this online persona and you just listen, everybody's gonna, they're just gonna cheer you on. Oh, good job. Way to be so brave. It's a waste of a life. And so he points to this old life of the church. First three verses 17, 18, 19 points to that old life. He says, you already found out. You already found out that you're not the same person, that this ain't the same river. You've already done that. You've already stopped chasing these things. You've already quit trying to make a life outside of Jesus. You've already done that, so don't run back to it. You left it for a reason, but he doesn't just say stop. He doesn't just wag the finger. He actually points to the church,

which is really interesting. He didn't just say, so don't do it. I mean it. That's not verse 20, okay? These last few weeks, we've been talking about how we are a church, how we are together, and that churches actually are people that are growing and working together to become one body. That God has a plan for you personally, but there's more. God has a plan for people generally, but there's more. God has a plan for us, corporately, as a church body. And that includes, that very much means that we are growing and working together. We are ministering together as one body. And this is where we've been. And the next verse points right at it. Look at Ephesians 4, 20 and 21. It says, but that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus.

That is not the way you learned Christ. From who? Assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him by who? The truth is in Jesus. He says, don't go back to your old life. But then he says this, and he says, remember where you first experienced following Jesus. And not the church building, not the house, not the camp, remember the people. Remember those who have gone before you. Remember those who have gone before you. And if we'll take a moment, I wanna remember those who have gone before me. Bobby Weldon went before me. Perry Sanders went before me. Kerry Beckwith went before me. Robert McManus, Chuck Windham taught me Sunday school. Roger Palmer was my youth minister. Daniel Souter went before me. Kristy Caperton went before me. Robert Cupp went before me. Gene Roberts went before me. He was the transition pastor here, but whenever I got here, Daniel Oster went before me.

L.J. Wright, Tim Keller, Landon Dees, John Piper, all these people went before me. All these people are people that I can look at and they're following Jesus and it's an inspiration to me. All these people have gone before me. It is tough when you lose one of these people. On my list would not be Charlie Kirk, but for many of you it would. I appreciated Charlie Kirk's ministry. And honestly, I was surprised. Personally, I was just caught off guard by the level of emotion that kind of just kind of poured out in the midst of his assassination. And so what I just wanna do is say, hey, this afternoon I'm gonna be at the roasted beanery just down the street. I'm just gonna be working on a laptop. I'd love for you to come talk about it. It's not the thing where, I mean, as a church we can't issue some statement that's gonna somehow deal with that or do anything well with it really.

But it is to say like, man, if you wanna talk about it, let's talk. I'll listen. Let's talk about it. Remembering those who have gone before you. It says assuming that you were taught in him, assuming, it doesn't mean that maybe you weren't, it means you were these people. Keep these names close to your heart. Keep these people in your life if they are still living. Keep these people on your phone.

Follow them on Facebook and Instagram. And the Bible doesn't stop with just remember them. Just remember these people. Think of them. Bible says, remember what they showed you. Ephesians 4 22. It says assuming that you were taught in him to put off your old self which belonged to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires. You saw others, you saw these people, these people that I listed, I saw them, you got your own list. And I want you to maybe be thinking about who that is for you. Who's on that list? Who's gone before you? Famous not, alive not. Who? You saw these people continually walk away from their old life. They put off the old self. They walked away from it the first time and they continued walking away from the old life and deceitful desires. You saw them maybe struggle and say, I wanna do this but I'm gonna walk away. I'm not gonna put on my old self.

I'm gonna walk away from that. Look at verses 23 and 24. It says assuming you were taught in him, 23, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. You saw others put themselves before God for renewal. You saw people crack a Bible and say, Lord, what do you have to say to me today? You saw people engage in prayer and not just prayer over the meal or not just some quick perfunctory prayer but you saw somebody hopefully, you saw somebody engage, wrestle in prayer over something.

You saw it. You see these people. They put themselves before God for renewal. They pray and they ask for wisdom and they mean it. You saw these people do it or you see them do it. And what scripture is saying, when you wanna return to your old life, remember these people. That is not how you learned Christ from these people that you can still talk to, that you can still see, you still know. And I'm not saying you hang your hat on whatever favorite preacher you have or whatever favorite author that you put everything on them because you don't know them. But what I will say is that there are people that you do know. There are people that you can follow assuming you were taught in him and you were. You saw them do this. It wasn't just religious duty. They weren't dour, lifeless believers. They had joy. I can still remember Bobby Weldon. And Bobby was like the first person

who ever I saw, who I saw was just effervescent in the faith. Bobby Weldon was like a 42 year old divorcee whose wife was keeping his son from him, his teenage son. Bobby Weldon was probably going through something I could never imagine, truly. But you know what Bobby was doing? Bobby was there every Wednesday night. Bobby was hanging out. Bobby was cracking the word with me. He was saying, look what Jesus says. Look, look, Drew, look what Jesus says here. Oh, and he just busts out in the hymn. He just like showers of blessing. Just bust out in the hymn. You're just like, okay, man, I'm here. Like, because I'm 13. And I'm mostly embarrassed, but totally in awe of this guy. And you know what? Like, man, sometimes I think we get real preoccupied with social status. And we just need to understand, man, spiritual maturity usually has very little to do with social status.

It just does. I've known people that had terrible credit history and couldn't hold the job down. And you know, just whatever. They kind of wrecked their life in some capacity, but they found the Lord and they were walking with them. And they'd been doing so for 25 years. And Bobby Weldon, still kicking. Still alive to this day in his probably 70s or 80s. Just doing good work. And man, I know that I was one of many. And he would just tell me, I would just see Bobby and Bobby would be like, I'm praying for you today. I'm like, and I remember, I don't remember this consciously, but I'm thinking back on like, why? Why were you praying for me? What did I do for you? Like, what did I have to give you? I didn't have anything to give that guy. But he loved me, man. Bobby Weldon loved me. I saw him pursue God.

Now is the exercise portion of the sermon. If you have thought of somebody, I want you to bust out your phone right now. Go ahead, you can bust your phone out in church. It's fine. It's okay. No police are coming. Well, the phone police, I don't know. We might have other officers here. Thank you for your service. What I want you to do is, I want you to text somebody right now. Now, if you're like, no, they're sleeping. It's the other side of the world, fine, don't. But if they're not sleeping right now, that's your only excuse. If they're not sleeping right now, I want you to just text them something like, man, thanks for teaching me what it is to be a Christian. Something like that. You could use your own voice. Thank you for teaching me what it is to be a Christian.

Jesus uses the church to do this. Like, the person you're texting might not have been somebody that you were in a church with. It's fine, okay? But what I'm saying and what these scriptures here are saying is that the church, the local church that you're in, is the place for you to find people that you can emulate. For you to find people that you can look up to. For you to find people that you look at them, they're cracking open the word and they love the Lord and you're like, yes, I can do that. If they can do it, I can do it. Jesus continually invites us all to become more like him

specifically through the one-body life. Then this is why we need to see others do it. Because when we are tempted to chase things that evaporate, we need reminders. We need living, breathing, walking reminders that the fruit of pursuing Christ long-term is possible and it's worth it. If you are sub-25 right now, if you are in here and you are under 25, roughly a third of you as I look around.

What I want you to understand is that the person that is uncool, the person that doesn't have a whole lot of social standing that isn't making YouTube videos, that isn't, right, they don't have a whole lot of influence. Man, I would just challenge you, ask them about their spiritual maturity and be surprised. Ask them about what they've been through spiritually and just listen to them talk and be surprised. There's a treasure trove there.

We need to see others do it because they have the fruit of pursuing Christ long-term. They're not perfect, but they do have that fruit. And for the times, the times, whatever, we wanna go back to our old life or maybe we just don't get what God's doing or we don't remember the truth, right? We need, need, need, need people who do. We need to see them. I have a trick in my back pocket. When I come to a Sunday morning and I am just not feeling it, okay? Some of you came this morning, you weren't feeling it. I was feeling it this morning. Some of y'all weren't, it's okay. What I'm telling you is here's my trick. I just watch somebody who is in it, who's just getting after it. They're gonna sing louder than you. They're not trying to sing louder than anybody, but they're gonna, and they're gonna mean it. And maybe they got their hands up. Maybe they're crying, maybe, it doesn't matter.

There's no checklist, but I look at it and I'm like, man, if Clay Rickard can get after it this morning, then I can get after it this morning. If Nicole Carruth is excited about it, I'm excited with her. If Oster is just, you know, there's like a little corner of a smile approaching on his face, I'm just like, yes, it's the Sunday. A little bit of smile, I'm here for it, yes. You gotta know how to read, gotta know how to read it. Okay, so it's just good. It's good to look at other people and to see them get in. Get it into it. And that's my trick. I'm not feeling it this morning, but you know what? You know, that person is. The church is that, right?

When we have fallen on our faces, so these all these kind of, you know, like when we're tempted to chase weird things, when we're tempted to, when we just don't remember what we need to remember, when we have failed, when we have fallen on our faces, and if that is not happening to you lately, it's going to, or it just happened, and you're kind of coming out, either one. When you have fallen on your face and you wanna give up, you wanna just, I'm out, I'm done, I'm a failure, I'm whatever. I'm gonna resign my post. The people, this is why we need to see other people do it, because those people give us perspective. And I don't mean they sit us down, put our hand on our shoulder, and give us a good talking to. I just mean their life, man. I just mean them loving people despite whatever they got going on is perspective for us. Sowing to the Spirit and reaping from the Spirit

is full of ups and downs, and I say this a lot. So if you haven't heard me say it, just get ready. When you sow to the Spirit, when you reap from the Spirit, we kind of lose this, because we're not an agricultural society. When you sow and reap, that's different seasons, okay? You sow in the spring and you reap in the fall, basically. I know there's exceptions to that, I'm not a farmer.

You sow in one season, you reap in another, okay? That's good enough. I don't have to know the seasons. Just make it up if I'm wrong. Okay, so what I'm saying is there's a gap, okay? There's a big gap, amen, big gap? Okay, all right, good, I got you now. You're not laughing at me anymore. There's a big gap between putting seed in the ground and then seeing the fruit of that seed, right? And sometimes, sometimes we go through life and we're in a season where we're putting a lot of seed in the ground and ain't nothing coming up, just nothing. Oh, it's just barren. It looks like we hadn't planted a darn thing, right? It's just terrible and frustrating and you're like, what is happening? And you feel like you're trying everything? I don't know if this sounds familiar. I've tried this, I've read this, I've prayed this, I've talked to these people, I've gotten counsel,

I've done, you know, I've even changed my morning routine. I've done everything I can do till I've stuck out my, you know, my right leg and my tongue to the left. Like I've done everything I need to do. I know how to do it. I'm desperate, nothing is happening. You've been in there, right? Because you're throwing a lot of seed on the ground, ain't nothing coming up, nothing at all. And then you have times in your life where you are reaping this huge harvest and spiritually, like your disciplines are flat line. Like they are nothing, like you're barely praying like once a month, but you're just receiving, like, I mean, you're just, all this stuff is coming to fruition because of seeds that you planted a couple years ago, right? So what happens is, here's what happens, here's what fools you. Either we get so desperate because we don't see the growth that's coming because we planted seed

in the ground, or we think that what we do doesn't matter because we're like reaping all this spiritual stuff, but we're living like hell anyway. Here's what we have to remember, that there's a gap and that sometimes your immediate action doesn't always contribute to your long-term success. Your long-term growth is not always, how you're feeling spiritually today doesn't mark your spiritual maturity long-term. Some of you might not be feeling close to Jesus today. I don't feel close to Jesus, I hear that a lot. I don't feel close to Jesus, but what's happening in your heart is this whole process of sowing and reaping. And maybe you've come out of reaping to the world, to reaping, excuse me, to sowing to the world, sowing to your flesh, right? Maybe you've been in that season and you're just, man, and then you're just reaping a ton of consequences, right? You're just reaping a ton of consequences,

people don't trust you, people dropping you as a friend, people, maybe you got fired, maybe, I don't know what happened, but you just reaped all those consequences, right? And in the middle of reaping those consequences, you might have changed your behavior between then and that point. And you're like, man, I don't understand, like I'm reading my Bible every day, I'm praying, I'm going to church, I'm involved, I feel like I'm learning and growing, but I'm just getting beat down by all of these consequences. Look, all you're going through, friend, is the law of sowing and reaping. And in Galatians 6 it says, God will not be mocked, a man reaps, what he sows.

It's an immutable process, it takes, sometimes in that process we lose perspective. And when you have somebody who's been following the Lord for 20 years plus, they have that perspective. And they'll say, honey, it's okay, it'll work out. Man, I hear you, that's so frustrating. Let's pray and be patient and not grow weary in doing good. You know why the Bible says to not grow weary in doing good? Because it's easy to get weary in doing good. Otherwise, it wouldn't need to say it, right? But that is the default human condition. We do good and we grow weary doing it because we don't see kind of the immediate effects.

I wanna just point out the obvious. These people that we're talking about, all these people are your church, or they should be your church. People with long-term pursuit of Jesus, they have fruit from that, people who get it and remember these deep truths, people who can give perspective. But I also wanna point out one more thing. Because the way I've been talking about this already, I've been talking about it as the church is this kind of place, this repository, this place you can go, these people that you can go to, that's what I mean, and receive all of this. But what I haven't said is that as the church, we are this. Some of you, I've looked you straight in the eyes and I've told you this and I need to tell it to you again, some of you are waiting for wisdom from older brothers and sisters, right? And that's good, but what you don't get is that you are an older brother or sister.

You don't get that. You're waiting, you're waiting to be told what to do, you're waiting for some spiritual kind of initiative to happen from somewhere else. And the whole time, the Lord is looking at you and going, no, that's you, that's you. And look, I'm not talking about title. You don't need to be Deacon Kenneth, okay? Although it helps. Look at that, look at that smile, look at it. You don't need to have title, is what I'm saying. You don't need to somehow have some official church platform or like I lead this ministry or anything like that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about school of hard knocks, living and learning, failing and remembering, Christian living. Just following the Lord Jesus day in, day out, when it's hard, when it's easy, in good times and bad, sowing and reaping, admitting your failure and taking a victory lap. All of it.

That the reason that the Lord is putting you through what you are going through right now is so that, in part, so that you can encourage somebody else later, amen? Yeah, that's right. Some of you are the older brother and sister and you don't realize yet, you're waiting for the older brother and sister, but that's you. And somebody is listening to you. You might not even know your older brother and sister and somebody's going, oh, okay, I see how this person's, okay, oh, I see how he handled that. Hmm, interesting. Okay. And we need to understand, not just that we're being watched, that's not, we need to understand that we had a spiritual mandate from the Lord in Ephesians chapter four, verses 17 through 23. And that spiritual mandate is, you are the church and you should be mutually encouraging and building each other. Older, younger. If you're younger, you have a vitality

that the older people don't have, trust me. I'm like right in there. Like I see 25 year olds and I'm like, I don't have that energy, you know. And then, you know, 75 year olds look at me and go, I don't have that energy. And so I understand, I'm kind of caught in between. What I want you to know is that you have a part to play on this, but if you're not playing it intentionally, it's just gonna pass you by. You're not gonna understand kind of what it is. This is why at South Burleson, we take a lot of time to, we have something called gospel course. In fact, we're gonna get an announcement about it a little bit later, but we have gospel course so that you can learn about who we are as a church and we can learn about who you are as a Christian, right? Everybody's coming in kind of some weird way, right? Like you're kind of coming out here. Nobody's like, I became a Christian yesterday

and I've started at this church. Like that's rare, okay? We're in Burleson, Texas, okay? It's super rare. Way more often is I got saved at VBS, camp, whatever, whatever thing, and then it's been a bit and now I'm trying to get back in church. I mean, that is the majority story. Or I was in a church, I was younger, grew up there, totally got hurt, quit going to church for a couple years and now I'm maybe just seeing if this is a death trap. Okay. That's, look, that's real. That's what people are going through, man. It's true. I've heard that story. I've heard it once, I've heard it. I've probably, I've probably personally heard it. I'm going to say over a hundred times in the last five and a half years of being in Burleson. I've probably heard that story over a hundred times. What I want you to know is that part of what we're doing here at South Burleson, and look, we're not, man,

we haven't like found the secret way to do church or anything like that, okay? Like no golden tablets anywhere, promise, okay? We're just trying to read scripture and we're just trying to do church that way, man. That's just it. That's just all we're doing. And in scripture, what you see is you see a church that takes membership seriously. You see a church that takes the fact that we're a spiritual family, we take that seriously. Okay. And we are never going to put anybody's arm behind their back and just say, do you want to go to church? Like that's never, that's not what we do because it's not who we are. We just offer classes. We offer gospel course. If you want to become a member, that's your first step. You can go to gospel course and not be a member. It's fine, not become a member. But the whole purpose of that is for you to understand like what this whole soup is.

Like how do I kind of sink my teeth into this? How do I, where's the handles? How do I start, right? How do I do that? Because for some of you, the Lord has a plan for you to be an older brother and older sister, but you're not there. Nobody knows you and you don't know anybody else. Man, change that. Grab that bull by the horns. We got home groups. Home groups are about to start this week. We got three home groups meeting on Wednesday night. We got a women's home group meeting on Sunday, Saturday morning. Sorry, Kimmy. Kimmy's like, I'm late. Sorry.

For jumping into a home group, man, that is a great way to get to know people. That's a great first step. And look, I'm not telling you first step like, ugh. Our goal as a church is not to be some huge church. Okay, that's not kind of what we're doing here. We're not trying to get like more slick as we go. Okay, we're not, right, this is not really our jam. We want to plant churches, okay? We want to get to like 400, 450 and just plant a church. And we just want to do that until we're dead, okay? That's just what I want to do. When I leave this place, okay, when I'm 150 and you guys have to bury me in the backyard, okay, when that happens, hopefully y'all not letting me preach at 150. When that happens, man, I hope this is a thriving family that is just training up people to plant churches, that this is not some coast church where people just come and sit and listen to a sermon

and go, that was a good one and then go on home. That's not, look, that's not what we're about. That's not why I came here. Some of y'all don't know this because we, this is like your second Sunday. I was an executive pastor at a church rolling with like four or 500, right? I was a made man, I could have stayed there forever, could have retired there, it had been great, okay? At 42 years old, I leave there, take a 60% pay cut and come here for a revitalization effort to a church with 20 people who desperately knew something was wrong and didn't know how to fix it. Not that I had all the answers, but I could really feel like the Lord's call, right? And it was just kind of a random, it's actually a really great story, I'm not gonna tell it now, but it's a random, it's a random series of events that even got us here in the first place. My wife found, okay, I'm just gonna say this,

my wife found, it's such a great story. I had just told my senior pastor that I was leaving, that I said, hey, I'm gonna go plant a church in Burleson and he was not happy with me about it. And I said, and he said to me, you should revitalize a church, you shouldn't plant one, you should revitalize one, I was like, okay. I'd heard that a few times before actually, Christie had told me that and then, so that was Friday, Sunday night, Christie's just praying through it and probably stressing beyond belief and she's on Google Maps and she's looking at churches in Burleson and she's clicking on each one and looking at their website, closing it out, clicking on another one, looking at their website and sure enough, she clicks on South Burleson Baptist Church and on the front of their website, it's a really ugly website, just front of it though, it said, hey, we're looking for a senior pastor,

resumes are due October 1st and it was September 29th and so she told me that when I got home I was like, you're crazy, stop it. She goes, no, no, I think it's good, I was like, okay. And man, I don't know, I don't know what happened but like, because I was just thinking to myself, like, am I crazy, going to Burleson, am I crazy? Burleson's crazy, y'all are nuts, I mean, bless you, you just are, but I'm here too, so now I'm nuts.

But man, the Lord brought, so I say all that to say this, the Lord didn't do all that so that we could have some sweet service with awesome transitions and you could be wowed and die distracted. That's just not what we're here for, it's just not. And if you love that, if you're like, man, I want like four hymns and a prayer and a 30 minute sermon to just go home and be left alone, that's great, I can make about four recommendations for churches for you that's not here. It's not here, it won't be here, we're not going to that, we're not trying to be that. We're trying to be a people that is working, ministering and growing together, we're discipling people, man. We wanna teach you how to disciple people. If that scares you, good, but if that makes you wanna turn around and run, just start now because that's what we're about. That's what the church, man, read Ephesians four.

How could the church in Ephesians four, how could this church be doing anything else? Why does it matter, why does it matter if people are just kind of running off the rails if they're not trying to disciple people? Why even get a letter to the Ephesians at all if this church is not trying to, to advance the kingdom of God in a way that is loving and serving and ministering and discipling people? It just doesn't make sense, man. You can't tell me the Ephesian church was worried about sweet transitions and getting a cool children's ministry facility. It's just not there, it's just not.

And so hopefully you did not hear me throw rocks at any other church in our area. That is not my hope. We are actually in league with several other churches and we love them, they're great. We're just not them and that's okay. That was a total tirade, but I wanna, I wanna just maybe just center it on this thing here. Man, as a church, we wanna follow Jesus and we wanna help other people do so and the only way that's gonna happen is life on life. The only way that's gonna happen is if you are talking and in relationship with somebody else. And I know you can't be like best friends after locking eyes with somebody for the very first time, but it starts with a handshake. It starts with a home group, right? It starts with some, just some place. I'm gonna pick on Hope and Hannah right now. Hope and Hannah, they're the blonde twins sitting right there about four rows back.

You can just stare at them all. They're twins, they're really hard to miss. So I'm at a coffee shop, I'm at Roasted Beanery where I'm gonna be this afternoon just down the street and I meet Hope and we're talking. Hope, there you go. And we're talking and we just kinda get to know each other. It's cool, I hear about their situation, it's cool. And we're just friends, right? Like it's just not a, we're not really, I'm not like saying, hey, you should come over to my church. I'll be your pastor, it'd be great. You know, like I'm not doing that, I'm not being weird about it or anything like that, but then they had kind of this thing where they needed to talk to a pastor about it and they called me and I'm like, well hey, look, if you're calling me about this, why don't you just be a part of our church, right? And they're like, sure, that makes sense, right? Listen, all I'm trying to say is the road

to becoming a part of our church is windy and sometimes it just doesn't take all these normal paths. But it starts with you sticking at your hand, it starts with you jumping into a home group, it starts with you attending gospel course. And so here's my encouragement. If you're not doing any of those things, I'm gonna strongly encourage you to do so. We have a sign up, a gospel course sign up immediately out those doors to the left, on your left at the start table. We have a sign up there. If you wanna sign up for a home group, we have little cards to sign up for a home group out there. Man, that's my encouragement to you. We don't get like bonus points from the mothership or something for having more people do this, okay? This is just how we help people grow as Christians. It's how we help people be disciples, right?

No kool-aid, no kool-aid and no goat sacrifices, we promise. These people are your church. And maybe the Lord's calling you to be one of those people. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for this morning and weird rants and your word, your faithfulness to us, your deep and abiding faithfulness to us. You're just so kind, so faithful. Lord, we know that you are, you're building your body, you're building your family, and you're doing that with each other, with us, one anothering together. Lord, give us strength for that, help us to be an encouragement to one another, help us to listen to one another, help us to suffer long for one another, to coordinate, to organize well, to love first.

Help us to do it. Help us to love like you loved us with that initiating love. It's your name that we pray, amen.