Vision Sunday

Transcript

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

You know, in life, in life there is a tendency toward complexity. It begins simple enough, but time complicates. Time complicates. We'll take, for example, Facebook. Facebook started simple enough. It began as a way for people to connect on college campuses. I don't know if you knew that, but that's how Facebook started. Eventually they said, hey, let's let more people get on. What a great idea that would be. Then they wanted to do more. People that were on there wanted to do more. They wanted to share photos, videos, all these apps came on there. People started playing games through there. There was so much, and soon Facebook became such a thing, such a behemoth, such an ever sprawling creature that we were having Senate hearings on it in 2018. Facebook became complicated. It started simple enough, but it became complicated, and it takes strenuous effort to keep things

simple. It takes a lot of work to fight off the complexity and the complication that comes with time. Also in life, you will see a tendency toward disorder. And I think you can see this really well in a family's living room, okay? In a family's living room or in any office space, any kind of shared space. If left unattended, that room will grow messier and messier and messier and messier. My wife is a very calm woman, but if you want to see her get really upset, just make your lunch with a bagel and peanut butter and fruit and then leave all of it out. Just leave the peanut butter open, leave the bagels open and on the counter, leave all out on the counter and you will watch my wife turn a different shade. She will just grow angry inside. If there are toddlers present in that living room, the messiness will increase exponentially. So we see disorder happen in normal life all over the place. It takes a

a lot of intentionality to keep things in order and clean. And this is how everything works. Not just families, cities work this way. Cities are always moving toward either complexity or disorder or both. Cities are always working that way. Companies follow a similar path. So you see that it takes a lot of effort, a lot of intentionality to keep things simple. Even our own lives work this way. We tend toward complication and disorder. It is difficult to keep things simple. It is difficult to keep things clean and in order. In fact, there is an entire industry of books out there that you can read that will help you keep things in order, that will help you prioritize what is important in your life. And so I say all that to say, when you consider our current situation as a church, right? Southboro, St. Baptist Church in 2021, when you consider our position as a church family,

we need to understand that we have been given a gift, a huge gift. Because what we got to do at the beginning of 2020 was essentially a reset button in the life of our church. Yes, that our church has history and complexity, our church has had disorder, it is time has worn on with our church. But in the beginning of 2020, we were able to hit that reset button and we were able to simplify at minimal cost. I've had friends that, and I've heard stories of pastors going to other churches where there was a revitalization effort and that church had a lot, I mean just a bloated with programs and staff positions and a bunch of other things that they did not need. They were outdated, outmoded, they They quit working like 15 years ago, but they were just continuing to work. Whenever I got here, there was no such bloat. Whenever I got here, whenever we all got here,

we were able to simplify at minimal cost and we were able to put things in order and to chart a course relatively easily. I mean, it wasn't unicorns and rainbows, but it was great by any standard. It was great. We have been given a gift. 2020 to us, I realize we had a pandemic. I realize we're all still wearing masks. But 2020 was a gift for our church because it allowed us to just hit the reset button and say, okay, where are we going to go from here? Where does the Lord lead? Where's the Lord leading us? And so mark my words, in 2021, messy complexity is coming. disorder is coming. As more people come and join our church family, there will be, of course, we're going to rejoice with that, but there's also going to be a lot of difficulty that comes with that, a lot of complication that comes with that. The makeup of our church will change. It will. We're all going to get older,

wiser, maybe more tired. New people are going to come in. It's going to change our makeup, we will not be the same. At the end of 2021, the Lord willing and the creek don't rise. We will not be the same church that we are right now. Hopefully, yes, indeed. Amen to that. So what is our job then? Over that year, what is our job? Our job then is to stay true to the work that God has given us. With all the change, with all the things that are coming, with the messy complexity that's coming our way, our job then as a church body, not just my job as your pastor, not just our job as church leadership, but our job as the church is to stay true to the work that God has given us. And this is why we have a vision. This is why we have a picture of the future. This is why every year, in as much as I can help it, we will have Vision Sunday. every second Sunday of the year. Because we need to have vision in front of us to remember where

we're going, to see a picture of the preferred future. We need to continue to reorient ourselves to the work that God has given us because, again, we drift toward complexity. We drift toward disorder. If we're going to resist both of those things, we can't just say, well, we'll try really hard not to do it. No, you actually need to go for something else. You need to go for a vision. And so what I want to do then is I want to unpack for you our church vision. And I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you two different timetables. The first vision I want to give you is our long term vision. It's our 20 year vision. Now, it is an old tired adage to say, if you want to make God laugh, start making plans, right?

I've heard that a thousand times, and I like plans, but I also understand their limitations. What I also understand though is if we don't have a plan, then we won't accomplish anything. Life is just going to happen to us, and we're not gonna make progress on anything. And the Lord has called us to make progress. So where do we want to go 20 years from now? What is our long term vision?

Our long range vision, next 20 years, is to start four churches by planting gospel seeds and producing disciple making disciples. We are going to start over the next 20 years, we will start four churches to plant gospel seeds and produce to grow disciple making disciples. Now there's a couple of red flags that are going to immediately pop up for some of you, and they're all not going to be the same. So what I'm going to try to do is address a few of those, just so that we understand where we're going here. Why the number four? Why four churches and not five? Why not three? Why not ten? You know, how did you arrive at the number four? I will tell you, the number four is there simply to be specific. For example, if I would say, hey, our vision is to plant churches, is to make disciples. Well, okay, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that, I guess, but there's no urgency.

There's no implied time table. There's nothing. It's the equivalent of saying, I'm going to write a book one day. Well, if somebody would tell you, hey, hey, I'm going to write a book one day, which I've actually said to somebody before. Well, like, yeah, that's cute, Drew. Great. You know, I think I'm going to wear a red sweater tomorrow. I mean, what, you know, who cares? I mean, that's a great aspiration, but what's your timetable? But if I would say something like, it's my goal in the next four years to finish a book. I want to publish a book in the next four years. Well, that's a different kind of urgency, isn't it? That's a different kind of statement to make rather than just, oh, you know, I'm going to feel like I'm going to just write a book. What 4 does, when we say four churches in 20 years, here's what that does. It communicates that we are following a timeline.

It communicates the fact that we intend to make disciples, and for the disciples that we're making right now, for the disciples that Jesus is making right now, We intend for those people to be leaders in the churches that we start in the future. We intend for the people that we were making, for the disciples that we were making right now to become deacons in the churches that we will start in the next 20 years, for them to become service team leaders, connect group leaders, pastors, life group leaders. We intend for that to happen. That is in the timetable. In fact, our vision won't work unless we're doing that unless we are saying the people that we are discipling right now are going to be the leaders of the future. So please hear me, whenever I say four churches in the next 20 years, I didn't go up on a mountain and receive the number four. I didn't fall into

a trance and receive the number four. However, what I did receive, what we all received, It was a command to make disciples, Matthew 28. It was a command to make disciples. The Lord Jesus gave it to us. He says, you're gonna make disciples. And we believe that making disciples leads to starting churches. And vice versa, we believe that starting churches leads to making more disciples. It's a natural thing. It would be like your kids growing up and starting their own family. It's a natural thing. It is something that the Lord has put in us. So our long range vision then, starting four churches, producing disciple-making disciples, we want to see these disciples become mature. So if this is our long range vision for the next 20 years, if this is our picture of the future for way over there, then what about one year? Really, what about next week? What about tomorrow?

What's that vision look like? Where's that? Well, I want to start with next year, but what I want to say first, if we're going to accomplish this, if this is going to be something that we are going to see come to fruition in the next 20 years, there are going to be some things that we need to establish first. So Jesus in Luke 14 says, which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it. What Jesus is saying is, you want to build a tower? You want to do something long range because you can't build a tower in an afternoon. That's kind of a week's long process if you're going to build a tower. Which one of you is saying, okay, do I have enough money to do this? It would be like somebody saying to me, hey, you know, Drew, I'm going to go, I'm going I'm going to start my own business, I'm going to build a house, I'm going to...

Okay, that's cool. How much money do you have in the bank? Oh, I have like $15. Oh, okay. That's cute. My next question would be, what's your plan to secure that money to start that business? Who are your angel investors? Who's magically going to whip this money up out of nowhere for you to start your own business, build your own house? Starting churches is no easy work. Shoot, making disciples is no easy work. This is not simple work. This isn't something we kind of just, you know, doing an afternoon. This is like building a tower. It's hard work. It's long work. It necessitates months, years of our lives, and it takes counting the cost. So we're going to start churches, four churches in 20 years. Do we have the leadership for that? Do we have the money for that? Do we have the partnerships for that? Do we have the training systems in place for that? Do we even have the building space for that?

The answer to all those questions is no. A resounding no. We don't. We don't have it. It's true. We don't have it. This is why some of you think I'm crazy right now. I'm saying something and I don't have a lot in the bank. I get it. None of these things are present yet. In fact, if we tried to start a church right now, and I realize this Sunday morning is lower than normal, okay, but last Sunday, 50 people, something we had here, right? We have 50 people here. If we tried to start a church and we'd say, okay, 20 people go here, 30 people are gonna stay here, we're gonna try to start. That would end us both. We don't have the leadership for that. We don't have anything for that. We don't have the building space for that. We don't have the money for that. We don't have anything for that. It would end us both. So then what do we do? Well then, counting the cost then,

if you count the cost, a natural thing is for that to dissuade you, but a count of the cost doesn't need to dissuade us from the vision. Counting the cost can illuminate where to begin the work. Let me say that again. Counting the cost for starting four churches in 20 years should not dissuade us. It should only help us understand where we need to begin. What are our first steps? This is why the theme for 2021 is going to be focus. To see this, to really understand this, we need to wrap our minds around what we established in 2020. What we established these past 12 months as a church. And it's really two things. The first thing we established was life groups. The goal of a life group is to help people learn the way of Jesus. That's it. It's help people to learn how to live in the way of Jesus. We don't learn to walk with Jesus in isolation or by accident.

It takes people and a very simple structure to do this. And so life groups are two to four people that are focused on direction, confession, and mission. That's what life groups are. Currently there are 16 people in life groups. Over five groups, we have five different life groups going on, and again I'll say we have room for one more man, or one to, we have one to two more men and one more woman, sorry, I think I said that opposite. Opposite in the announcements. So we have a life groups. We've begun life groups in 2020. What else have we started in 2020? It's we started gospel course. The gospel course, the goal of gospel course is to reorient our church around making disciples. It is staggering. And look, I don't do this very often. I don't say this very often. I don't like to throw rocks at other churches. Everybody's trying to do the best they can with what they got. And so I'm not sitting here trying to judge, but when I speak to people,

when I'm talking with somebody that's a part of our church, it is staggering to me how most churches, the vast majority of churches, do not expect people to make disciples. They don't. They don't. The vast majority of churches expect people at the most to invite someone to a church service. That's it. And not that that's terrible, right? inviting somebody to your church service is a great first step again. But what we see in the New Testament is Jesus saying, okay, you're a disciple, then you're going to make disciples. This is what if you follow me, Jesus says, then you're going to that love that that thing that I'm doing inside of you is meant for you to share with other people. It's meant for you to pray for other people to come to know me, to follow me. It is staggering how most churches do not expect people to do this. I say it's staggering. It actually isn't that staggering because we live in America and we want to make

things as easy as possible. And if all Jesus asks you to do is to sit in a pew, write a check, and serve once a month, then sure, if we can make Christi... If we can boil Christianity down to just doing that, then sure, let's do it. Then more people will sign up. It'll be a big movement. We'll get thousands of people. Jesus is not interested in large worship services. Jesus is interested in disciples making disciples, full stop. What gospel course then does is it helps reorient our minds around this concept, around this really important thing of making disciples. It gives us a framework to see how people grow spiritually. We've had 28 people so far complete gospel course, and we've got a class coming up February 7th. We do a gospel course every month, so we do four weeks in February and then four weeks in March. It's the same class every month. So in 2020, we've got life groups and we've

at Gospel Course. In 2020 then, what we did as a church is we put tools in the church's hands to soak in and live out the idea of making disciples. That's what we did in 2020. Gospel Course helped wrap our minds around it. Life groups helped live that out. That's exactly what we did. And I hope this year, you have been challenged to find a way to realistically make disciples. Look, I know it's a long journey. I know it's not easy and I know you go through some sometimes, but I hope that you understand that making disciples has little to do with a megaphone and a street corner, and it has more to do with loving people where they are praying for people. I hope that you understand that making disciples isn't about winning arguments, but that making disciples is about displaying the gospel, demonstrating love and acceptance and what Jesus kind of calls us to do.

That we invite people, that Jesus really invites people and that Jesus challenges people and that we are along for the ride. I hope that you have seen a way to make disciples and a way that reflects how Jesus made disciples and a way that we see in Scripture. In 2021 then, this coming year, we do not need more tools. We don't need extra things to pile up on that. We don't need 50 more programs. We don't need, you know, an extra group here or there. Now, I'm not, you know, I'm not averse to small things starting out. That's fine. What I'm saying is, for our vision for 2021 is that we need to continue to bring clarity, cohesion, and conviction to life groups and to gospel course. because our vision for 2021 is that we want to see 45 people focus their lives on Jesus. We want to see people, we see 45 people. Now why 45? Again, it's for a timeline. It's to understand that there is urgency there, right?

We don't want to just see people generally. Of course, we want to see people generally. But by saying 45, it helps us understand where we are. If you think about a basketball game, because I like basketball, and it's basketball season. If you think about a basketball game, you understand that if you're watching the game in the first quarter, there was going to be less urgency than watching the game in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter, with a minute left, teams are gonna be hustling in a different way. They're gonna be running different plays than they would at the very beginning of the game. Because time is winding down, because there is a timeline in place, there is a clock. By saying 45, it gives us a clock. It helps us understand that there's urgency. We wanna see 45 people combined that are either currently in a life group or have gone through completed gospel course.

We want those two numbers to equal 45. So right now we are 16 people in to our 45 person goal. We wanna see 45 people focus their life on Jesus. And I wanna really drive this home. We don't need 10 steps to a happier life. We don't need six ways to tell if we really love Jesus. What we do need to do is focus our lives on Jesus. And to get this, I want to look at scripture. I want to look at scripture very quickly. Colossians chapter two verses six and seven.

It's just two verses today, so how long can I possibly preach on two verses? Colossians two, six, and seven, it says this. It says, therefore, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. In these two short verses, we find two glorious truths about focusing our lives on Jesus. And what we will find is this, just a two-part thing. We will find that focusing our lives on Jesus is comprehensively simple and it is also slowly transformative. It is comprehensively simple and it is slowly transformative. So let's take comprehensively simple first, focusing our life on Jesus. What does it mean to focus our lives on Him? Again, we're used to things being complex or cluttered, yet what we see here in Colossians 2, 6, and 7, it says, just as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk.

In other words, there is no more complicated truth that you graduate to. The same way, the same way that you receive Jesus, that's also the way that you follow Him. In other words, you don't receive Jesus by doing X, Y, and Z, but you have to follow Him by doing A, B, and Z. That's not how it works. What we see in Colossians is this very simple truth that the way, the exact same way that you start following Jesus is the same way that you continue. When you look at different religions, what you find is complication. You find complexity. You find truth that you need to graduate toward. Look at Mormons. Look at Jehovah's Witnesses. What is that all about? It's about secret knowledge that you graduate to. It's about somehow finding a higher plane of existence and then you're able to understand everything. That's not the teaching of Jesus. That's not how Scripture works.

I realize this is a really thick book. I get it. It's a lot of information. What you will not find is that there is this secret knowledge that you somehow can only attain if you've been walking with Jesus for a certain amount of time. Look at the other different worldview, the other different world religions. Look at Hinduism. Look at Islam. What you're going to find is that you're going to spend time trying to live up to something, but then after you die, it gets complicated. Are you going to go to heaven or not? Are you going to be reincarnated as something better or not? What's going to happen? Well, it's complicated. And what you see, what you see by contrast, is that in Christianity, the active ingredient, the active ingredient, if we can think about following Jesus this way, the active ingredient in a relationship with Jesus is Jesus. The active ingredient in a relationship with Jesus is Jesus.

In other words, you receive Jesus the same way that you follow Him because Jesus doesn't change. How do you do, how did you receive Him? How did you receive Jesus? Let me just tell you your life right now. It's all the same for all of us. How did we receive Jesus? We listened, we repented, and we obeyed. That's it. Nothing more complicated than that. You listened, you repented, and you obeyed. Look, life groups don't, they don't uncover some secret knowledge to following Jesus. That's not what life groups do. Life groups, you learn to simply walk with Jesus, how? By listening, repenting, and obeying. That's it. And we're talking about perfect obedience here. We're talking about a heart obedience, a heart that wants to follow Jesus. So it's not about perfection. When I say obeying, sometimes people think about being perfect, and that's not what I mean. That's not what Scripture means.

Think about gospel course. Gospel course is the same way. It's not some exclusive club. It's not, you know, we don't uncover the deep mysteries of faith. We understand what we do is understand how listening, repenting, and obeying, how that fits together in your spiritual journey, how it fits together in the life of our church. That's it. It's simple, listening, repenting, obeying. It's simple, and it's also comprehensive. You don't graduate to something else. Talk to, do yourself a favor. Talk to somebody that's been walking with the Lord for more than 40 years. And if you can't find anybody like that, read a book. I'll give you some authors. Read J.I. Packer, read Jonathan Edwards, read Tim Keller, read John Piper, read all these guys, right? And ladies, read them all and see what they say. Listen to what they say about following Jesus for decades. Here's what they'll tell you.

They'll tell you, following Jesus today is the same as following Jesus in day one. And that the difficulty that I have in following Jesus are the same kind of difficulties I had in following Jesus from day one. It's not any more complicated. It's not any more easy. Following Jesus is hard, but it's simple. It's comprehensively simple, listening, repenting, obeying. There's a great book on this, it's called The Way of the Dragon or The Way of the Lamb. And it's two guys, two young guys who just go around and interview really famous and some not very famous Christians that have been walking with Jesus for decades, the way of the dragon or the way of the lamb. If we're gonna focus our lives on Jesus, we need to understand that it is simple, it is straightforward and that is comprehensive. You need to listen, you need to repent and you need to obey. If somebody's coming to me and they're in marriage crisis,

I'm gonna tell them, hey, how can we listen, repent, and obey? I might not use those words, but that's it. I don't have a secret framework over here. I don't have, oh, you wanna get out of debt? Well, then it's a whole different deal. No, it's all some version of listening, repenting, and obeying. It is the process of reorienting ourselves in every area of life to what the Lord Jesus has said to the way of Jesus.

Comprehensibly simple. So doing everything for Jesus, comprehensively simple. If we're gonna focus our life on Jesus, we also need to understand that it is slowly transformative. I wanna look at the verses again, just focus on verse seven because verse seven is gonna describe how we walk. It's not techniques, it's not four steps, It's four descriptions of how we walk. It says rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught abounding in thanksgiving. So when describing how we walk, the same way that we receive, we're given four pictures. And they're really interesting. They all deal with this slow perseverance. The first picture we see is rooted. Rooted, and these words, if you look at them in the original language, They actually have these really strong callbacks to these images. I'm not just kind of picking this out of the air. This is something that a lot of commentators are going to talk about.

Rooted in him. Rooted like a tree. You ever seen a tree grow in a time-lapse camera? We've seen maybe like a flower grow, but a tree. When you watch a tree grow, it's pretty interesting. If you, for example, would bury an acorn and you'd water it and you'd place like like a really heavy object on top of that, what would happen is that eventually that tree would grow right underneath it and it would eventually begin to lift that very heavy object off the ground. And it would eventually push that very heavy object all the way up as high as the tree is going to grow. The force of a tree is slow, but it is determined. The force of a tree is slow, but it is determined. When we are rooted in Jesus, our growth becomes slow but sure. Slow but sure. When you are rooted in Jesus, that does not speak of overnight success. If you are trying to kick a habit, for example, and you say,

okay, I'm just gonna follow Jesus and magically I won't deal with that habit anymore, no, no. And if the Lord by some miracle does that in your life, praise God, right? I'm not throwing rocks at that. However, the vast majority of human experience helps us understand, and in Scripture we see pictures of this, helps us understand that it is a slow growth. It is a small victory at a time.

And we need to understand that we are rooted like a tree. What else are we? we are built up in Him like a house, built up like a house. When you are built from the ground up, which is kind of what that gives us the connotation of, you are built like a house, you are firmly situated on something else. You are firmly situated on a foundation that is either shakable or not, that is either immovable or not, but what are we built on? We're built up in Him. Our foundation is on Jesus. We are unshakable. When we are built up in him, we are unshakable because he is unshakable.

We don't need to sound the alarm at every little thing that comes around. We can be unshakable because we are built up and secure in him. Established in the faith, just as you were taught, established like a legal document. It's kind of a weird picture, but that's the picture that comes up. like when you look at this word in the Greek, the idea is that you are established, that you are confirmed, that it is a document that has been signed by the proper people to sign, to make it established like a covenant or an agreement or a promise. In other words, there is a binding agreement, if you will, in our walk with Jesus.

Our agreement with Jesus is secured. It cannot be canceled by anything coming from the outside. When my wife and I bought our house, the house that we're currently in right now, we did not understand that it was, that its title, its deed was in dispute. The title company that we bought them from, everybody said, oh, this title's clean, everything's cool. What we realized later was that the previous owner of the house had taken this weird mortgage out, this other company. So this other bank then is then claiming to own our house. So the first mention we got of this, the first warning shot we got of this, was a notice in the mail that our house would be auctioned off at the courthouse in Fort Worth in like 10 days, right? Kristi, something like that. It was shocking. It was shocking that our house was gonna be auctioned off. Because our claim was that, no, no, no, we are legally the owners of this house.

We are established. No one can come outside of our ownership, our agreement with this bank. No other person can come in and say, no, that's not right. In fact, we paid a company, the title company, to make sure that happened. And it was all resolved. We are the owners of our house, praise the Lord. That is a good, good thing. But whenever it says we are established, it means that nobody, no other person can come in from the outside and cancel that agreement that you have. It's a binding contract. It is secure, established in the faith, just as you were taught. Lastly, abounding in Thanksgiving. Abounding like a full cup, like a full cup, abounding more than that. It carries the idea of overflowing. Being filled to overflowing was one of Jesus's favorite metaphors that actually you see it all over in the New Testament. Even after the Gospels, you see Paul, you see Peter talking about

being abounding in thanksgiving, overflowing with joy. And Paul is who wrote Colossians. Filter overflowing, you see this, especially in the book of John, it's kind of all over. In John 4, Jesus is talking with a woman at the well and he says, I'm the living water and whenever I give anybody a drink of living water, what happens to that person? When I give them a drink of living water, they don't thirst anymore, but then what else happens? that person becomes a wellspring of living water. So follow that in John 4, Jesus is talking, He's saying, I'm giving somebody living water and it's not just that, oh, then they have living water. No, it's that they become a wellspring of living water. John 7 says, whoever believes in me, out of his heart will flow rivers. This is abundant, right? This is John 10, it says, it says the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy,

But I've come that they may have life and have it abundantly. Jesus didn't just come to save us from hell. He totally did. But He came to give us life abundantly, life overflowing. As we receive Jesus, as we continue to walk in Him, let's walk in Him like a tree rooted. Let's walk in Him like a house built up and unshakable. walk in him like we've been established, like a legal document. We are secure in that. And then finally, let's walk in him as we abound in Thanksgiving. Abounding in Thanksgiving, that is something that should knock all of us off of our feet to describe your own life as being abounding in Thanksgiving. Right? I know some of you, you know, you're on snow, you're on a street filled with snow. You're not abounding in Thanksgiving. There is some anxiety. There is some frustration. There's some other things, but abounding in Thanksgiving is not one of them.

Let me just encourage you, just as we look at this year, as we consider 2021 as the year of focus. I wanna just encourage you, focus your life on Jesus in whatever area you need to. And understand now, it's going to cost you something. It's gonna cost you time in another area. It's gonna cost you maybe, you know, whatever, your illusion of free time over here, or it's gonna cost you money, or it's gonna cost you something. It's gonna cost you, But whenever you listen to the Lord Jesus, listen to what He's saying to you. Whenever you repent and whenever you obey out of your heart, right? I wanna tell you, you will not be the same. You will be glad you did it. It will change your life forever. And so right now, what I wanna do is I wanna enter into a time of prayer. And I'm gonna pray over us and Dan's gonna play as we pray before we're dismissed. And we're just going to pray for focus this year.

Jesus, I pray that as we are gathered here as a church body, that you would help us to listen to you, that you would help us to hear all that you're saying to us. The way that you're trying to speak to us, speak to us through scripture, I pray you help us repent. I pray you help us obey, help us walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. Help us understand that this year is the year that you are calling us to focus on the basics, on the fundamentals. Help us do that together as church as we continue to grow, as we continue to change personally and corporately. That you would help us understand how to walk with you through it. It's in your precious name that we pray. Amen.