Everyday Mission: Bless

All right. Hey, good morning, everybody. You guys are so chipper and sunny, and yet it is so junior-ary outside. I'm a transplant here, and I'm not used to this yet, but apparently Joel was saying there's going to be less fire, which I think he's lying to me, but I'll take it. I'll take it. This is good. It's good. I'm so glad to have everybody here this morning, and I'm excited. I'm excited about this time.

I was just sitting in the back and just looking around and seeing the youth and how cool is it? It's just like, we have like a nice little nice intergenerational church here. I really like that. I really like that we have people from all stages of life and that's exciting. So I'm just thankful for the Lord this morning. I wanted to just start with prayer, if that's okay. I know we've already prayed some, we've already prayed. So let's pray some more.

Lord God, thank you so much. Thank you that we can show up today day and we can be confident of your grace. And I even think about the weather outside, you know, it's, it's rainy and there's cloud cover, but above those clouds, the sun is shining brightly. We can't see it all the time, but we can know that that's true. God, I just think about who you are and your goodness and your love and the gospel that we come and we celebrate this morning.

The truth is that you are light. That's what the Bible says about your word and your presence, your light, your life, your peace, your joy to us. And so, Lord, we want to bask in that light this morning. Wherever we're at, whoever we are, we want to take in and enjoy your goodness and your kindness and your grace. And by faith, be assured of that. Lord, thank you. Thank you for your word. So speak to us this morning. Holy Spirit, we welcome you into this place.

We ask you, Lord, to build us up and to do your work among us in Jesus' name. Amen.

Great. So this is our final week in this Everyday Mission series. This is week seven. I did not plan on it going this long, but here we are. Week seven in our Everyday Mission series. And today, my goal as we kind of wrap up this series, is, this final one, is to just get really, really practical. So this is going to be a very practical message in just a minute.

Because we've been thinking about how we can be, throughout this series, we can be on mission as a church and individuals, and kind of been going back and forth between that, collectively as a church and then as individuals, and thinking about what is the framework for mission and what is mission. And what I've been encouraging all of you to do, and I'm going to do it again this morning, is to embrace the idea that you, in your normal life, can be a part of God's everyday mission.

In your normal life, where you work, where you worked yesterday and where you'll work tomorrow, you can be a part of God's mission in your workplace. You can be a part of God's mission in the places where you hang out with your friends, wherever that is. You can be a part of God's mission in your home or in your neighborhood. That life, your normal life, the life that you live can be the venue of mission.

You don't have to become, and this is the thing, this is what I really need to hear, you don't have to become someone else. You don't have to relocate your life. You don't actually need to, you actually need to learn to live the life that you have in the full context of the gospel. That is my challenge to you in the first, I think, the invitation for mission.

Because the context of the gospel is important because in the context of what the Bible says about the true and ultimate story of the world. That's where you're invited to live. Here's a really great example of how the Bible talks about the gospel. And gospel just means good news, like the good news. This book is a book about good news. It's presenting good news about Jesus Christ.

And this is from John 3, 14 through 17. You know, everybody knows John 3, 16. So it's before and after that and the middle part of this. Okay, so this is John 3, 14 through 17. It says, just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, referencing an Old Testament Bible story, so the son of man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. This is a great and wonderful articulation of the gospel. And it has all the characteristics of the gospel, which I think are just essentially two things.

A set of historical facts centered on Jesus Christ, right? So that's really the news part of good news. Like, remember when the news used to be just facts and not just opinions? It's like the old old school version of news set of facts about Jesus Christ. And the good part is, is their meaning. What does it mean that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, God taking on flesh, lived a perfect sinless life, died on a cross, rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven.

What does it mean that that set of historical facts, what does that mean? Because it's a great question, because that does not have to happen very often, and it is not immediately apparent to us what it should mean that God would come, live, die, and rise again, and then ascend into heaven. What does it mean? Well, the good news is that it means something good for us and for you and for me. It's a set of historical facts about Jesus Christ, and it means good things.

It is important for us to understand that actually the gospel is the proclamation that through Jesus something has drastically changed. It's changed the whole world. Everything about it is different because of what Jesus has done. And so what I'm saying is that if you want to live on, as a person who is in everyday mission, you don't have to change the life that you live, where you go, who you hang out with.

Maybe some people you shouldn't hang out with anymore. I don't know. That's up to you, right? You don't have to do that, but you do need to let the gospel in all of its goodness and all of its fullness and all of its meaning, you need to let that seep into your life and you need to respond. You need to live as if it were true. And actually, as you do that, then you're going to start to be a person who's on mission. I've given you a couple of quotes from Leslie Newbigin, who I really like,

a missionary theologian. And I'm going to give you two more today because that's how I roll.

So he says this, okay? I just love this. I think he brings out the fullness of what the gospel is and the meaning of this good news. He says this, if we take the Bible in its canonical wholeness, that is to say from Genesis to Revelation, everything that the Bible says, as we must, then it is best understood as history.

It's universal cosmic history. it interprets the entire story of all things from creation to consummation and the story of the human race within creation and within the human race the story of the people called by god to be the bearers of the meaning of the whole and at the very center the story of the one in whom god's purpose was decisively revealed by being decisively effective that is the story of jesus christ Christ.

Obviously a different story from the stories that the world tells about itself. So what I'm saying is that this book, the Bible, has good news, a set of historical events focused on Jesus that have a really big and serious meaning. And it is, as Nibigam put it, it's about cosmic history. Cosmic sounds like a woo-woo word or whatever, like it's kind of out there, but it's actually really a philosophical word.

It means just everything, everywhere, where, the whole universe, seen and unseen, everything created, that's cosmic. And so what we're saying is Jesus Christ coming 2,000 years ago in a little tiny backwoods part of Israel and living there, teaching there, dying there, being resurrected there and ascending to heaven, that very particular moment in time, the whole of history of the whole world hinges on that moment.

Moment what an audacious thing to claim we but we believe those things and so if if that moment in time was so significant then we have to ask ourselves well what does it mean for me now because because if there is something so so valuable and so important here then then what do we do with it and really that's the question that we need to constantly ask ourselves as people who are on mission because and we'll kind of end here i'm getting ahead of myself here's what i I need you to know.

You have, I hope that this morning you have an understanding of the gospel. I hope that you realize that the gospel is Jesus Christ coming into the world to die for the sake of sinners, to make it so that you could be forgiven and you have a relationship with him. That's like the immediately relevant to you. Can I just, I hope you know that. If you don't, now you do. And if you've believed that, then you know that and you probably like have a great confidence in that.

But let me say, because that's true, there's so many other implications of that. It means that you can trust God because he created the whole world and he's revealed to us that he's kind. He hasn't come to, like it says in John 3, 17, He hasn't come to condemn the world, but to save the world. So in the story, we see the character of God. And Jesus Christ didn't come in. He wasn't just like, you idiots, you got to get it together. He was like, oh, you're like sheep without a shepherd.

He came as a compassionate God. He had words for the arrogant and prideful. But for those who were just saying, I don't know what to do. What can I do? He was so kind and gracious. So we have in the facts of who Jesus is so much good news. And so our call is to live into and live as if it's true. And so what does it mean for my everyday life? It means that I can expect God to show up in my hardest moments.

And I can trust him. I can trust his love. I can trust his care for me. And I can rely upon him. And I'll tell you, I fail to do that all the time. I know so much about the gospel. It's all up in here. But do I live it out all the time? No, I don't. I fail. That's where I still have maturing to do. It's where we all have maturing to do. Welcome to the club. But I do want to learn it more. Okay, we're going to end there, so I'm not going to go too much further in that.

What I told you, we were going to get really practical this morning. And getting practical, living out this way, I think it's the sticky part because as we realize how good this good news is, and we become people who understand we have a message to proclaim, like we do, we have a message to proclaim, claim we're entrusted with this good news and we're sent out into the world to partner with God in spreading this good news about who he is and who Jesus is.

And so we start to understand that and we realize that we're supposed to tell people about this. And you are, I'm telling you, you as the church, we as the church are the bearers of this news. That's God's plan to get the news out into the whole world is to send the church proclaiming the message. But I think that when we realize I'm actually supposed to go and be a proclaimer, somebody who speaks these things, I think a lot of us just lose our confidence.

And I'm totally sympathetic because we have to, we come up against a difficulty. And here's one more quote by Leslie Newbigin that brings out the difficulty, I think, and then we're not going to quote him anymore. I promise. He says this, how is it possible that the gospel should be credible that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs, is represented by a man hanging on the cross.

And I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic, that is, interpretation, of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. Because what's happened is when I take up the call, and I've tried to do this in various points in my life, where I start to understand, oh, okay, I'm sent out with a message and I want to go tell people about that message. And then I immediately get to this point where I realized, well, I could just say, Jesus Christ is Lord.

And he's like king of cosmic history. And he's done all this crazy things. But people aren't going to believe me. Because you get into this place where it's like, well, I proclaim and then people would just say, well, I don't believe that. And then you're like left thinking, well, what next? What am I supposed to do next? How do you persuade people that the gospel is true and that Jesus really is everything he says he is and that he's totally changed the whole world and he's changed your life?

How do you do this? It becomes a very difficult thing. I, as a human being, I have this job where I talk to people on a stage, but I am actually very nervous about talking to people. I overthink it, let's say. I get myself into these quandaries where I'm like, well, how do I say what I want to say? And then I really start to get down on myself and then I get lost.

But what Newbigin says is like, yeah, it's a difficulty to just explain that this is true because it seems like to other people, like, how could it be really true? But what he says, and I think we touched on this a little bit here, is that the best defense sense of the gospel is the congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. So I'm not trying to say that to say, don't worry about talking about the gospel.

But what I am saying is that to the degree to which you do this thing of letting the gospel get into your life, really coming to believe it in all of its fullness, the words that you speak, and you should should speak some words about Jesus. That's the credibility. It's the life that you live in faith, plus the facts of who Jesus is, plus the work of the Holy Spirit among people. The fact that God is revealing himself and that he cares about the world.

So I totally believe that there are people in this room who have the gift of evangelism. That is to say that the Holy Spirit has particularly gifted you with a supernatural ability to proclaim the gospel and to get people's attention and to get them to consider the gospel. There are people like that in this room. But because I've also read the Bible, I know that not everyone has all the gifts.

So that means because there are people with that particular gift who can just go out cold old turkey, be like, let me tell you about Jesus, and people will listen. They'll be startled. They'll be like, wow, this is pretty intense. Because I know that that's true, I also know that not everybody gets gift, and so then there are people who don't have the gift of evangelism. Did you know that? So you say, good, I don't have the gift of evangelism, right? No, no, no, don't say that.

But you are still partaking in mission. And I'm going to tell you this. I pray that all of us would have the gift of evangelism, and I pray that we would aspire to have that gift. But I'm also saying this, you can still be a part of the mission of sharing Jesus with people by living deeply in the story of the gospel. And your life will begin to preach in a way that maybe your tongue won't.

And so, yes, be about sharing the gospel and what we're going to get, again, practically about how do we do that. But also, look at your life. If you really have it from the Lord, you go to the Lord, you pray, you say, I don't really have the gift of evangelism. That's okay. But you do have a part to play in the mission of God. Live your life in light of what he said. Swim deeply in the river of his transforming truth. Do the work of trusting in him and living according to faith.

So I want to get really practical, like I said. So here we go. I'm going to just actually present to you this middle part, just totally stole. But I'm telling you I stole it. So I didn't really steal it, right? So there's a pastor named Dave Ferguson, and he came up with this five-step kind of way to live missionally. And it's an acronym because I'm a pastor and we have to speak in acronyms. It's the law. They take away our pastor, pastor if we don't speak in acronyms.

The acronym is B-L-E-S-S, bless, right?

And so five steps for how you kind of live missionally, okay? And you'll notice, because if you come to church here, you know that we kind of have an acronym for discipleship, BECOME. And you'll notice that there's actually some overlap between this acronym for missional living and kind of our approach to it. And that's because, well, because this stuff makes sense. And this is a really good way to live your life missionally.

So you want to live your life, your normal context in such a way that you are on mission. Here's how you do it. You you bless. And the B, the first step is begin with prayer. Begin with prayer. You want to be a person on mission. You want to be a person who's sharing Jesus, even if you don't have the gift of evangelism. How do you do that? You begin with prayer.

What I'm telling you is that you need to, and I want to challenge you to do this this week, go sit with God and say, Lord, who and where, who and where, where and who, who and where, where and who, who are the people I'm called to and where is the place that I need to focus on? Where are you calling me to be like a missionary in the world?

And it could be everywhere in your life, but I want you to get, I want to challenge you to consider the possibility as you learn to live this way of focusing on one venue of your life, all right? So if you have a job, maybe it's in your workplace. But ask God, I'm not gonna tell you where it is, but maybe it's in your workplace. Maybe you have your kids in school, you know? So maybe it's among the families in your kid's school. Maybe that's the venue of mission that you could consider.

Maybe it's in your neighborhood. If you have the sort of neighborhood where there are relational connections connections that are possible, or you could maybe develop those. Maybe it's your neighborhood, but you need to sit before the Lord, pray, and say, God, I want to be sent out on mission. I'm willing to at least take this step. Ah, the compressor is on. It will go off in just a moment. Don't worry. Everything's fine.

Darn it. We haven't had it on Sunday ever, I think. That goes off all the time during the week. So thanks, Joel. And the Lord will speak to you as loudly as that. He'll tell you where and who you should go to. So again, I want you to ask very specifically, God, where is it that I should focus, and who are the individual people that are in my life or could be in my life? Maybe I don't know them yet, but I know of them, and so I want to start to develop a relationship with them.

And I want you to write it down. Again, we're talking about getting really practical and getting really actionable here.

So begin with prayer find out the place where you want to to focus and who are the individuals and then i want you to take time to just pray for those people by name take two weeks and just say okay these are the people that are in this sphere and just bring them before the lord say god i know that you died to save the whole world and i know all these people don't know about it how can you you use me to help these people to realize what

you're up to and just start to talk to God in that way and identify the people and just pray for them by name, knowing that you can't save them. You can't be the person who makes it happen, but you know that God cares for the world. God loved the world in this way. He died so that people would be reconciled with him, so that he could save sinners. So you just pray in that context, in light of the gospel. God, there are people all around me. You love them. You care for them.

How are you reaching them? And how will you use me to be a part of that? So get specific on the where and the who.

Next step is L, listen, which is just start conversations with these people. And again, you don't have to do it tomorrow. Maybe as the opportunities come up, being intentional about it, and then start, not by going and yapping, start by just listening to them. Listen to them. Hear them. There was in this book, this really little mathematical formula, unheard plus unknown equals unloved.

And I feel like we just live in a society like the Seattle freeze is real, where so many people are, they feel unloved because they're unknown and unheard. And you can do a simple thing of just starting to listen to people. There's a Dallas Willard quote, because because of course there is, that's again, the first act of love is always giving of attention.

You can start to serve people and you can start to live a missional life by just listening to people, talking to them, and this will result in them feeling known and feeling loved. In this book, Dave Ferguson actually gives a really helpful four H's of listening. Again, end. All this alliteration, so good. So maybe you're like, well, how does it look? Maybe you are awkward like me.

I am so awkward. You feel awkward in a conversation. Here is a simple way to have a conversation and get to know people and listen to them.

Four H's. First, history. So you just ask this question, hey, tell me your story. Ask questions.

Where did people grow up? you know where do they come from get to know people's life story you can do that and then you can just ask a simple question and then just listen and people love to talk about themselves they really do so if you are a listening ear and you start to ask these questions start start to ask someone's history then the heart so like what's your favorite whatever i don't like the favorite game personally

like but maybe i like what what really gets me excited about life you You know, what gets you excited about life? What do you love about your work? What do you love about your spouse? What do you love about your friends? What do you love about skiing or whatever the thing is that you feel passionate about, right? You just start to have these conversations. You ask a question and you listen. What are the habits? Yeah, what are the things you're into? What do you do with

your free time? You're probably mountain biking around here, right?

Like all you. Not all of you. I don't think Brooke mountain bikes, right? You know, yeah, me and you, Brooke, we're holding out. And what are your hurts? You know, you're going to get to this eventually. You're probably not going to start, hey, tell me about your deepest pain, right? But as you get to know somebody and as you get to be in a relationship and as they start to feel, oh, this person actually wants to know who I am.

This person actually cares about me enough. And I get a sense that this person just genuinely wants to love me. Then you'll have eventually an invitation to talk to people about their pain and your difficulty. And most people are really, they want somebody to talk to. about what's hurting them. And most people don't have anybody to talk to about what's hurting them.

Not most, a lot of people. And so we can just start to step out there. We can ask questions and then we could listen. The third one is eat. You know, this is a crossover from our kind of discipleship habits. You just share a meal and you share a meal in your own home. That's, I think, the best way. It doesn't always have to be that way.

But just get a calendar out, write down all the meals you have, two or three a day, and maybe choose one in a week where you're saying, I'm going to be intentional. I'm going to invite someone this week to share a meal with me, be it in my home, and it's one of these people that you've prayed about and you've been starting to develop a relationship with you and just have them over and talk.

It never ceases to amaze me how much confidence I and culture in general has about being intentional and how when we're intentional and when we do X, Y, Z and we get things done, we get them done efficiently and quickly, it's gonna result in good things. I think that a biblical worldview involves a lot more wasted time than we like. Sometimes we say, well, why have a meal when I could just have an email? Why? Because people don't feel known and loved and seen over email.

They actually feel quite the opposite. But if you bring someone into your home and you just say, we're just here till you go home and we're going to do these listening things and we're going to get to know one another, people are going to open up. They're going to feel appreciated. And I know that this is difficult for some people. To be, to have people in your home, like that's your safe space. And so I just want to say, yes, it is a sacrifice.

You don't have to do it every night, but I want to invite you to be intentional about it, to eat, to eat, share a meal with someone.

The fourth one is S, serve. And I was challenged to think about this because what we all naturally think of when we think about serving people is, I'm going to mow your lawn, or I'm going to drive you to the doctor, or I'm going to, I don't know, do whatever thing. But let me ask you this question. Say you go out and you're kind of getting to know people in your relational circle. How likely is it that they're going to want to let you serve them in this area?

Not very, very unlikely. So we get kind of, can get a little bit creative with serving. So there's that area, like you serving people, but there's two other important ways that we can serve people. And this is one. One, you can serve alongside them. So maybe there's a community service event going on, like a cleanup day or something like that. Just invite someone to do that with you and they'll feel appreciated and seen and involved. And then here's this, this is like ninja level serving.

Serving let them serve you and that will feel so uncomfortable to you to to to have these people that you're like i want to go out and love and care about these people and i'm going to invite them to help me move but you know what especially if you've developed this relationship that person, will feel honored. Who've done that. And I think so much of our lives, because we're kind of, you know, career-oriented, have-it-together kind of people, we are so self-contained and closed off.

And we project as if we don't have any needs, mostly because we don't want to feel like we have any needs. And so it keeps us from really, I think, connecting with people. And so, of course, when you ask people to serve them, they're going to be like, yeah, no, I'm good.

You can break through that by saying but would you serve me and that person actually will really appreciate that that will develop relationships right and so you have all these things these four things that are that are trying to just just develop relationships create relationships that don't already exist and then the last one this is when you need to share and it's story the last one is your story. I have a quote. I think I'm going to have you skip ahead one slide here.

A quote from a guy named John Carroll. John Carroll is an Australian sociologist, not a Christian. He says this. He says, the waning of Christianity as practiced in the West is easy to explain. He says, the Christian churches have completely failed in their one central task to retell their founding story in a way that might speak to the times. So that's a non-Christian and saying, well, I understand why churches are on decline in the West because people aren't sharing their story.

They're not explaining the gospel in light of culture in a way that people would understand. And that's an institutional problem for the church, but it's also just like a missional life thing. Like, you know, the gospel didn't go forward in the ancient Roman world because of the great social media presence that they had, right? It went forward because of the great social presence that they had.

They were out there in the world telling the story, telling the story of what Jesus had done for them as individuals, telling the story of what Jesus did for the whole world. They were proclaiming the story and suddenly the world was captivated by what Jesus was doing. So we, I think, really need to take up and understand that we need to tell our stories to people.

People want to know them. And that's telling your stories to people in a way that they understand is the best way of sharing the gospel that you have. And so there's a really simple way to tell your story that you are able to do right now if you know Jesus. And it's just a three-part story. It's part one, what was my life like before Jesus? Jesus. Part two, how I met Jesus. What happened? What was that day or that moment or that season like?

And part three, what has my life been like since I met Jesus? I think a lot of times we think, oh, I need like a degree in theology to share the gospel. You need to tell your story. And maybe you need to practice. Maybe you need to hone. Maybe you need Jesus to remind you of what it was like before what happened when you realized that he loves you and cares for you and has forgiven you. And that has just become like freedom and peace and joy.

And you receive the spirit and your life was changed. Maybe you need a reminder of that, or maybe you need to ask yourself what's changed in your life since then. You need to ask yourself that question again. And I need to absolutely, but you have everything you need. You are fully equipped to tell your story. No one is better equipped to tell your story than you are. But I would encourage you to think about what would you share? What would you say?

And then be willing to, the moment that it becomes an opportunity, be willing to share your story. And a lot of times this will happen in the context of relationship where people are going through something and you can say, oh, I remember what that was like. And so you can quite naturally, without being kind of a, you know, elbowing your way into it, you can say, look, I know the struggle. I know the pain. I know what you're going through right now.

And I'm just gonna share my story, what Jesus did and how he addressed those things in my own life. And it's a simple, natural way of talking about Jesus. And you can do that stuff. You are fully equipped. And where I'm gonna wrap up here, I'm almost, I'm not gonna have the worship team come up just yet, but I just wanna challenge you. You are called to share your story. It is the most powerful tool that you have. And it's not what you did. It's what Jesus did.

So you can talk about what Jesus has done in your life, but it is easy to get into a place where we come and we think, yeah, the gospel of Jesus Christ, this good news of what Jesus did at one time really was exciting and new and fresh. And it felt like it changed my whole life. But it can be easy as Christians, as they go along to say, yeah, before I met Jesus, I was this way. And then Jesus did this remarkable thing in my life and it was crazy.

But it's easy to get in this place where if I were to ask, if someone were to ask me, what has Jesus done in your life since that time where we would not have a lot to say? It's really easy to get in that place. Anyone else feel that? I've felt that a lot. Think, and this is what I've been touching on, Christian maturity is about continuing to live in the context of the gospel.

And it's about letting the magnitude of what has happened, what the Bible says has happened at the cross and through God working in the world, letting that settle in and shape our lives in deeper ways. Because so many of us come in and we meet Jesus and we realize how great it is that I don't have to bear the burden of my sin. I don't have to feel like so much shame about all the things I've done because Jesus says, oh, I've just taken those things away and like in the heavens, they're erased.

And so a God who created you doesn't hold those things against you. And how great news is that for you on a personal level? But it can be so simple to let the gospel just become this thing that felt psychologically good at one point.

But then because I haven't persisted in faith and I haven't done the work of maturing, letting the word take root and work in me that I don't really have much else to say about what Jesus has done except at that one moment, which doesn't make that one moment not real or invalidated, but it does, it is an indicator to me that God has yet more to do in my life.

I don't have to earn anything else, but if I were really to let the word wash over me and consider all that he's done, I have to admit and be honest that I have yet more to do, and I am called to live a gospeled life. To live in the context of the gospel in a way that I don't oftentimes live. And so as we step out here, you know, this practical thing, this way to do things, to share your story, I also want to invite you in to something further.

I'm just going to read from Ephesians 1 for a second, okay? This is probably the most, Paul's most like wild and cosmic presentation of the meaning of the gospel and what has happened because of what Jesus has done, okay? And I just want you to, I'm just going to slowly read it. And I want you to just kind of like, just sit with it because there's power in the word.

And so I just want you to just sit with it and think about your own life in the context of what Paul says is the meaning of what Jesus has done. Okay. Are we ready? Okay. All praise to God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. And so we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son, and he forgave us our sins, and he has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.

God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan. And this is the plan. At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ, everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance and he makes everything work out according to his plan.

God's purpose was that we Jews who were first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the good news that God saves you. And when you heard, and when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit whom he promised long ago. And the Spirit is God's guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people.

Did this so we would praise and glorify him. If you are in Christ, if you've done the simple thing of realizing what he's done, removed your sin from you and just said, yes, I want that. I'm going to trust in you, Jesus, that that's true, that I'm reconciled with God. I have this new kind of life because of what you've done. If you've done that, even if it was a long time ago, go, there is all these other realities that are playing out in your life.

And I think so much of my immaturity is that I fail to trust in what God has done. I fail to be filled with the Holy Spirit to let him lead my life, and I just manage my own life. So it's like I understand what God has done, but then I settle for my own plans and my own ways. That's just me. And so then when I come and I have to tell people, ask the question, what has God done in your life?

Well, since you've trusted in Jesus, then I'm like, well, so much of it has been my own failings and my own inability to see that God's plan is so much bigger than me. And really what I'm called to do is just find myself in that plan. And by faith just persist in what he's doing, what he's done and what he's doing in Christ. And I fail to live in the implications of the story and I fail to experience the vibrancy and magnitude of the gospel.

And if you feel like I feel sometimes, can I just say that you have an invitation to more? And that's the long work of Christian maturity is to say, okay, Jesus has bought these things for me. It means all these things. It means I can have the Holy Spirit within me. It means that I will live my life for his praise and for his glory.

It means that I will be confident of his grace, that I will be, that all this stuff about who he is, like it's going to settle into my life and it's going to be like, I am living in a close relationship with him where he cares about me and he trusts me. And if you just say, well, I just don't, I don't have that story. It's just an invitation to step back in, to live in the context of the gospel. And there's a lot of things that get in our way. There's a lot of things that

get in my own way. You know, I don't trust, I don't understand. I have sin in my life that gets in the way. And all these things are things that happen. It's very normal. But the call for Christians is to repent, which isn't just this serious, oh, I'm just going to feel really bad about myself. I don't need to feel bad about myself. Jesus Christ has taken away my sin. I actually have to let that sink in, not how bad I am sink in.

I have to understand how great and glorious and good is the gospel, that he's filled me with Christ and filled me with his spirit and embraced me and adopted me. And he loves me and he cares about me and he isn't going to abandon me and forsake me. I don't need to work on feeling worse about myself. I need to understand and love him more. And me feeling more shame about my sin, which he's already paid for, isn't going to do anything. Repentance is not this work of welling up shame.

It's the work of seeing how much better his plan is and how little I settle for and having a new mind about how I'm going to live my life. I'm going to live my life seeking the better things that are bought by Christ Jesus. So if you feel like you don't have much to say about your life since you've trusted in Jesus, great, me too. There's so much more. There's so much more. Go and get the things because they're already put out for you on a platter by Jesus.

Paul's word over and over again in his churches is grow up, be mature, grow into Christ. Like you already have this place, this place carved out, this place of belonging, this place of hope, this place of empowerment, this place of peace. It's already, it's a free gift, but you need to grow up into it. And as we grow up into it, we're going to be on mission.

We're going to be like, just beautiful, like God intends us to be because of his beauty, because of his grace, because of his work within us.

Okay, now the worship team is going to come up here. And we're going to take communion here, which I think is very appropriate. Because as we take communion, what we're doing is we are reminding ourselves of the gospel, the set of facts, the set of facts about what Jesus did.

He came, he took on flesh, he lived a perfect life I'm not going to do this right now this is just an illustration he lived a perfect life he offered his body up to be broken, die, so that it could be resurrected again by the power of the Spirit, and so that we could rise alongside of him, that we would have this new life, that we would have this new cosmic world-altering relationship with him. And so we're celebrating what he's done.

And the reason that Jesus told his disciples to do this in remembrance of him, it's because we forget. I forget what this stuff means. I forget how crazy it is that Jesus Christ died on a cross to save me from sin. I'm a very forgetful person, and you all know me, so you really know that's true. I forget. You forget. get. The best of us, my wife, who never forgets things, she forgets. She forgets this, right? So we're told to come back again, and we're not going to get to a point.

Jesus didn't say, do this in remembrance of me until you finally got yourself sorted out. He said, for 2,000 years, you people are going to need to constantly be remembering what this means, that I lived and died for your sake. You're never going to get to the point where you've got it. So, so good. So good that we can be reminded yet and yet again.

And actually the work that we have, if there is any kind of work in it, is just to remember constantly what he did and what that makes possible and to live in the light of his grace and his work and his sacrifice and his gifts Peace. As we come into communion, we are coming in with joy, receiving and remembering all that he's done.

And I just want to leave you with the prayer that Paul gives at the end of Ephesians, Ephesians 3, 15 through 19, and then we'll get into worship and we'll do communion together. He says this, I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with.

And I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width and height and depth of God's love and to know Christ's love that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. And so, Jesus, that is our prayer. We want to step into what you've already done, Lord. Lord, we want to step into your gospel and know that it's true. God, you have saved us. You've redeemed us, Lord.

Your love is so deep and so wide, Lord. We can't comprehend it. And so often we don't even try. We think, oh, I've got it. I'll move on. But God, we have yet more to learn. We need to be reminded of your love. So Lord, even in this moment, Holy Spirit, we invite you. Lord, we believe that you're present with us. You tell us in your word that you convict us of sin, righteousness, judgment. You are a God who does not abandon us. So God, would you be present in this place in this moment?

Lord, we just welcome you with open hands and with open arms. Lord, with expectancy, we welcome you. Lord Jesus, if there's shame in our hearts about the things that we've done, Lord, we just bring those things before you and remind ourselves of the significance that you've taken away our sin. Lord, if there's shame in our hearts about the way that we live, Lord, we just, again, we fall back on your grace and your mercy. There's no need for shame.

God, we only turn to you and we want to have this love. We want to have this love, this work of your spirit within us. We want to live in the gospel. Lord, teach us how to do that. Amen. So as we worship here, why don't you guys just come on up and then go back to your seats with the elements and we'll do take them together here in just a moment. Music.