Community

Good morning, everyone.

- [Crowd] Good morning.

- Good to be with you today. Grateful to be able to be with you and open up God's word together, which is what we need. So if you have a copy, go to Colossians 3. And as you're going to Colossians 3, let me take you to the start. You go to Colossians 3, but let me take you to the start. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And as God made everything we see in Genesis 1, that he would make, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw that it was...

- [Crowd] Good.

- Good. And six times in Genesis 1 God saw that it was good. But then the pinnacle of God's creation, human beings, Adam, the first man. And this time, this time the scripture doesn't say, and it was good, but the seventh time says, and it was...

- [Crowd] Very good.

- Very good. Well done. God saw all that he had made and it was very good, because in Adam, he created a reflection, an image to bear. And Adam, this first image bearer, is created and God has said, "Let us make man in our image," so that's what he did. But in spite of those six times that God says it's good and the seventh time that he says it's very, very good, it doesn't take long for us to get into Genesis where we read that something was not, that something in this perfect utopia was not good. And in Genesis 2:18, it says this, this is God speaking. "It is not good for the man to be alone." How could this possibly be in the midst of this perfect Eden, right? Like literally Eden. There's no sin in the equation. Man exists in a perfect face-to-face relationship with God, with nothing to get in the way. Man, how we long for Eden. And so we look at this and say, it was not good for the man to be alone? Is there something wrong with the divine design? Is this a mistake? Or maybe even worse, does this indicate somehow a deficiency in God? Like, was God not enough for Adam? No, this is not a mistake, this is not a deficiency in God, instead, it reveals that by design, by design, on purpose, Adam cannot fully reflect God on his own, he can't fully do it. The reflection will be incomplete as long as Adam is in isolation because God does not exist in isolation. Because in the beginning, God, who is this God? Well, we learn in the unfolding revelation that it is Father, Son, and Spirit, eternally existing in this communion of holiness, lacking nothing, having everything, eternally joyful and full. God did not create mankind because he was lonely, he exists, he is self-sustaining. And so Father, Son, and Spirit in this perfect union, this perfect harmony, cannot possibly be reflected fully in isolation. "It is not good for the man to be alone." We're a long way from the Garden, but that truth remains. It is not good for the man, for the woman to be alone. And yet everything in us, or at least at times, stuff within us gets in the way of the community that God designed us for. There's stuff inside each of us that rails against the divine design. Our old life, our old self, our old ways, our old practices, all interrupt what God wants for us. He wants for us to exist in community, he wants for us to not be alone. It's not good for that to be the case. And so he calls us to something better, because we can't, just like Adam, we can't fully reflect God as we are called to in isolation. We can't. We can't, follower of Christ, we can't grow spiritually mature as lone rangers because we have blind spots and we are all on very excellent terms with ourselves. So we need people to call out the things that they can see, but that we can't. We can't be lone rangers. We also need community because we will be more easily deceived by the enemy in isolation than when we have the sounding board of brothers and sisters to call out the enemy's lies. "It's not good for the man to be alone." And we can't possibly, can we? We can't possibly testify to the beauty of the bride of Christ to a watching world if we're detached from the rest of the bride. So we need one another. And yet there's something inside each of us, there is, that resists, that prefers to be on our own. We resist intrusion into our lives naturally because we don't want people to mess with who we are. And so we even have little mantras for ourselves that we give ourselves permission to say. I just gotta do me. I just gotta make time for myself. I'm really just focusing on me right now. This is me, this is my me season. And the thing is this is not a new way of thinking or talking, the difference is just now it's authorized, now we have people saying this is a good way to think and talk. But can I just ask with the proliferation of this idea, and it is everywhere, is our world more united? Are we less divided as people? Is the world more peaceful with the proliferation of I just gotta do me? Is it working now? See, some might hear, "It is not good for the man to be alone." Yes, we need community, and that's why we need Sunday night service, Wednesday night Bible study, Saturday morning devotion and prayer time. Now listen, I'm not against the gathering, I'm actually for the gathering, here we are. I'm opposed to forsaking the gathering. Follow? But are we suggesting that logging more hours in a church gathering is the solution to the deepest, deepest darkness in our hearts on its own? I grew up in a church that some of you may have heard of, The Chapel. And as a child, The Chapel of the '90s, I spent more hours in a church building in a week than most people now do in a month or even half a year. And just my story that I'll start to tell you today, my story, it was far easier to look the part in a large gathering than to have to uncover and deal with the junk, and that is, this is a recent discovery. So we've got the mantras and we've got some proposed solutions, but I think the gospel offers us something even better. And that's why I want you to see our text today because what we're gonna discover is that what God calls us to in Christ-centered community falls well beyond the lines, the confines of a gathering, though it can and should include that, don't forsake it. But what God has intended and what God wants for us, man, what he wants for us, for you, for me, is far better than what can be contained in an hour and 15 minutes, and that's really, really good news. So let us look at our text in Colossians 3, beginning in verse one. It says this, "Since, then, you've been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." So this text that we're gonna look at and unpack today, just however briefly, will show us that what Jesus is going to do is he's going to make us fit for community. He's going to refashion us so that we can step into the fullness of what he wants, what he designed for us as his sons and daughters, that we would be able to embrace the fullness of his design in Christ-centered community. And we don't possess that on our own, so he's gonna do it for us, he's gonna do the work and we step in to enjoy it. Let me show you how Jesus is going to prepare us. He's preparing us for community first by giving us a new perspective. Jesus prepares us for community by giving us a new perspective. If you were following along in our text just now, you may have noticed that there was some death, resurrection, and ascension language in what Paul said. He said, "For you have died." He says, "Since you've been raised with Christ." And then he says, "So that you can set your minds on things above where Christ is." Well, where is Christ? Well, the record in Acts 1, he's ascended to the right hand of the Father. So we've got death of Jesus, resurrection of Jesus, ascension of Jesus' language. And what Paul's saying is, since you've taken this on as your own, since this is true of you, because you died, you took the substitutionary, sacrificial death of Jesus and asked the Father to apply its effects to you, you died with Christ. But it didn't end at the cross. He says, "For you've been raised with Christ, you get to walk in the newness of life with him." And all of that now prepares us for this new perspective. He said, "Set your minds, set your hearts above where Christ is." We need to relocate our thinking about our lives. We need a different perspective. We need a change of scenery from where we've been, where we are before Christ, and where he wants to bring us. We need ascension thinking. We need to set our minds where Christ is. You see, what we often do, what we often do, is we have our lives and then we look up to see Jesus, where do you wanna fit in on this schedule? I've got a pretty packed week. So, where do you think you can fit into my schedule this week? And we look up at him from our current life. What he wants to do, what Paul says we ought to do is set our minds in a different location, instead of saying, Jesus, where are you gonna, I mean, maybe we could squeeze in an hour on Sunday, but I don't know about much more than that. Instead of that, he invites us to come have a seat next to him, and instead of looking up, we now can look down, and he's got the whole view, by the way, we're just here. Recently, we took our kids to New York City, apparently because we wanted a challenge. Chasing them around here wasn't enough. We said, let's add 18 million people from all over the world and that'll be an easy thing and it'll be a fun time. So we were recently in New York, and my son, who's now six, he's about yay high, and we're walking in the crowds, in the packed, touristy spots like Times Square, 'cause they got all the good restaurants there, Red Lobster, Bubba Gump Shrimp. I mean, it's got everything, right? So we're there. And when you're 3'7" and you're in a crowd of people, you don't really have a good view. It's really not as exciting as your parents said it was. But when my son asked, "Dad, would you put me on your shoulders?" And I'm not a tall person, but even just being on my shoulders, now Marco was over the whole crowd and he could see all of Times Square and the lights and all the things that we had to explain on the car ride home. But he had a different perspective up here than he was down here. The Father invites us to come have a seat next to his Son to see what he can see, because we can be, can't we, we could be so consumed with the things that won't matter in eternity, let alone in 10 years. And we could be so busy with stuff that isn't gonna impact our forever. And it's almost like he just, hey, you've stepped into this death and resurrection, now come have a seat next to me for a moment. What can you see now? And maybe it doesn't change a whole lot of what you do, it probably will, but it will certainly change why you do it. So he gives us this, he gives us a new perspective. But secondly, Jesus prepares us for community by giving us a new self, and this is incredibly good news. Because the old self can't come into the new community on its own. He gives us a new self. Look at our text, it continues in verse five. Paul says, "Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature, sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways in the life you once lived, but now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these, anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you've taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator." So even there we're being hearkened back to Genesis, aren't we? That this image that's being renewed, that God intends to restore the image that he imprinted on mankind, it's being renewed day by day. So, what does God do? How does Jesus prepare us for community? He gives us a new self. Now, we saw in our previous section of verses, verse three, you died, you died. That old life is gone. Now he says, "Put to death." This is not a contradiction, he's not backtracking. Paul's saying, look, your old life is dead. Now bring everything in your life into alignment with that reality. Your old life is gone. Now bring everything into alignment, bring everything in concert with your new reality that that old life is dead and gone. And so then he says, "Put these things to death." He gives two lists, one that bears a sexual mark to it, one that brings an anger and rage mark to it. The first list works from the outward in. He starts with things like fornication, sexual immorality, but he moves all the way to the inward spot of the heart and he gets all the way down to greed, which he calls idolatry. This list is really like misplaced desire, because what the old self wants to do is to take even good, God-given desires and make them ultimate, make them supreme, which is why this is idolatry, because it takes the place where only God belongs. And so he says, put this to death. This is done, this is not you anymore. And then there's the second list. Well, this one moves from the reverse, it starts from the inside out. So it starts with this inner anger and malice and rage, this hatred, and it moves to the outward, the way that it leaves our lips when we feel this kind of way about a person. And this is a list defined by unmet expectations because the old self wants to assert itself over others. And Paul says, "This too must go." Instead, he says, "Since you have taken off your old self with its practices, since that is now gone and you have put on the new self." This language that Paul is employing here is the same language around the changing of clothes. The idea is taking off one garment, putting on another garment. In fact, the early church fathers, like Clement of Alexandria, would talk about when people were baptized, they would literally change their clothes around their baptism to symbolize this taking off and putting on. You ever spend a long day in your yard and you get real sweaty and gross working in the yard, or maybe like this past week, the 400, some of us, that were at Eight Days of Hope? And we, I mean, if you weren't sweaty and gross, you didn't really do what you're supposed to do, right? Okay, so if you're just there for the snacks, there's no sweat marks on the shirt, right? Well, Steve, I mean, as I came home on Tuesday, as grateful as I was for that Eight Days of Hope shirt, and it is pretty sweet, I was ready to change clothes to get out of that. And I found pieces of mulch inside my shirt, I don't even know how that happens. And I was ready to shed the old and put on some clean clothes because this was not gonna be presentable on date night. No offense, but my wife was not expecting me to come with pieces of mulch out at the dinner table as I emptied out my shirt, right? So I had to clean up. This is what Paul says, you've taken off the old, it's done, it's behind. Embrace the new. Put on the new self. The new self is what you need to be in community, what you need to function in this Christ-centered community that God designed you for. But there's a third thing that Jesus does in giving us and preparing us for community, and it's this, he gives us a new unity. Jesus gives us a new unity. Our text continues in verse 11. "Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity." Paul says that Jesus gives us a new unity with the other members of the body. Now, as I'm reading this, I'm picturing like the first time the Colossians heard this. I mean, imagine they get a letter, it's from Paul, and so they all gather around to read it. And they get to this part in verse 11, "Here there is no Gentile or Jew," and I imagine them all sitting around like this and they think, no Gentile, no Jew? I mean, Stephen Stephanopoulos, he's 1,000% Greek, okay? And Levi Maccabee, he's not Irish, all right? What do you mean there's no Gentile, there's no? What are you talking about? But then upon further discussion, they realized what Paul was saying. These old, these old lines of division don't apply here, they don't apply. He says, "But Christ is all and in all." These markers no longer define you. Can you just imagine how completely revolutionary this idea was, how completely counter-cultural this was in this whole list that this group of people would all be united around Jesus? Because old unity hinged on class or heritage or race or status or religion or fill in the blank, but now this new unity that Jesus provides is all about him, he's at the center of it. And because of this, we have this therefore statement in verse 12. "Therefore, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience." He goes on and on. In other words, what Paul's saying here, and if we looked at that list, if we had time to read the gospels with that list next to us, we would see that Paul essentially is giving a biographical sketch of Jesus. Every single thing that he names is embodied in the person of Christ. And so what he's essentially saying is not just go be a virtuous person, he's saying, put on Christ. In fact, that's a very thing that he told the church at Rome in Romans 13:14, Paul said this, "Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh." In other words, put on Christ, but be careful of making Jesus your inspirational model. He's not merely a good example, he is not only a good teacher, he came to refashion you and me into his image. The perfect reflection of God in man now brings his life into ours. Clothe yourselves with Christ. He's not just our inspo. Someone said, "He makes you what he teaches you to be." He makes us what he teaches us to be. And so the natural question is this, well, if this is who Jesus is, and this is clearly how he treats us, and he's now living inside of us, his life now living through us, what difference would that make to how we treat each other? I mean, what if, what if each of us was clothed with compassion for each other? I mean, each of us for all of us. What if each one was willing to bear with the other? What if each was forgiving as Christ has forgiven us? And as I look around this room and as I think about our other campuses, I can think of, specifically, people who embody this, and there are tons of them, I'm grateful for that. And I wanna be like you when I grow up. But what if each of us forgave as readily and as freely as the Father forgave us through Christ? What if we extended the same kind of forgiveness? Do you think that would matter to the unity if every person, just at The Chapel, just start here, if every person at The Chapel was clothed with Christ like we just read about? Would that make a difference in the unity of our church? Would that make a difference in the testimony we give to a watching world? What if? And then Paul says, "Over all of these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity." Now, he could be saying here, love keeps all of these other virtues in perfect balance and expression. That could be what he means. Or he could be saying, love is what holds you all together. And the word for love there is agape love, it's the love that comes from God, it's the divine love. In other words, God's love is what keeps you from pulling apart at the seams. God's love is what keeps this conglomerate, amalgamation of people from all kinds of backgrounds, his love is what keeps this whole group together and prevents it from fracturing. Because though the old self is dead, it keeps trying to rear its ugly head every so often, and it happens in community, it happens here. And his love is what keeps this from unraveling. His love holds you all together, it binds you, it's the bond of perfection. 

His love holds you all together, it binds you, it's the bond of perfection. So we have a new unity, but a fourth thing, we have a new way. Jesus prepares us for community by giving us a new way. As Paul concludes this section that we're gonna look at today. Look with me at verses 15 to 17. He says, "Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace, and be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." It may not jump out at us initially, but Paul is making some pretty serious cultural commentary, even political commentary here. He says, let the peace of Christ rule. Colossae, the city where these believers lived, was under the reach of the Roman Empire. And the Roman Empire liked to talk about peace as if they were the dispensers of it, and they called it the Pax Romana. Remember that from world civ that you tried to forget? Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. And in other words, the government claimed, we will ensure that there's peace. If you trust us, we'll ensure that there's peace. And now into that world, Paul says, "Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts." The Pax Christi if we match the Latin for Latin. Let the peace of Christ rule. In a world that's indoctrinated with Pax Romana, here's your higher doctrine, the peace of Christ. And then he moves to philosophy. Because the Hellenization of the world, the Greek philosophers obsessed over this mysterious knowledge that they called the logos, the word. And so into this world that was obsessed with a hot take, a mysterious key to life, a secret to unlock the meanings and mysteries to your best life now, he says, don't chase that logos, but let the word of Christ, the logos Christos, let that dwell among you abundantly, let it just pour out of you. Let the word of Christ dwell among you richly. You're defined by that logos, that word. And then he came for the individual, Paul did, in a world that the personal honor and name was to be prioritized over everything else, in a world that sought to preserve one's own name and honor above all else, own personal name. Paul says in verse 17, "Whatever you do in word or deed, do it for a different name, the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." You live for a different name now. You live for his honor now. And so Paul says all of this, and you can imagine like when I say, when I explain it like that, you realize, right? This is counter-cultural once again. Because dividing according to tribes makes sense, that makes sense to the rest of the world, but what doesn't make sense is that this group of people, specifically as he's talking to them in Colossae, but certainly for the body of Christ beyond just them, including us, that our togetherness tells a better story than our dividedness ever will. Our togetherness, theirs, tells a better story, a different story, than dividedness ever could. And so this is the community that God has in mind and this is how Jesus prepares us for community, this is how he fashions us. He gives us a new perspective, a new self, a new unity, and a new way. So, why would we ever resist the good design of God for our lives? Why would we ever wince at his invitation to step into the fullness of a Christ-centered community where we are known, loved, and accountable? You know, sometimes my kids will come and ask me for something and I'll think I know what they mean, but because they don't possess a full vocabulary, there's usually missing details. And so I sometimes do what I thought they were asking and then they say, "No, not like that. Dad, will you build us a fort?" Sure, come on, let's go. Here's how I picture a fort, with these blankets in this formation. "No dad, not like that." Well, I'm sorry I didn't see the schematic that you had drawn up. So we come to our Father, I'm lonely. He says, "Here's your family." No, not like that. That wasn't what I meant. Okay. God, I'm struggling with this sin and I wish you would rip it out of my life. Here are some brothers to hold you to the truth. Not like that. God, I'm praying that my lost friends would be so compelled by the beauty of the gospel that they'd come to embrace Jesus. Well, here, let me give you this diverse body of people that would have no other reason to come together, humanly speaking. Be among them, get to know them. Not like that. And here's our Father, the difference is he knows exactly what we need. He knows what we're asking too. His ways are always best. There's always something, though, within us that maybe resists his design, but he invites us in. And though our reasons are many sometimes for why we don't step into that Christ-centered community, I want you to know that we're not just on an island. And by that I mean it's not just the war that goes on within us, but there's an enemy who hates us. And where our list of reasons run out, he will provide 20 more for why we don't need the kind of community that we've been talking about today. He hates us. He wants to isolate us. He wants to distract us. And he will try to distract us with work, with travel sports, with our own interests, with our phones, with television. He will try to counterfeit even the divine design by offering replacement community to the point that we think we're known and we're really not. And so he dangles this carrot of alternate community for us to fool us into thinking that we've got what we need and we don't. And so we've got our work community and we've got our soccer community and we've got our neighborhood community. Thank God for all of those things, but it's a distraction. It can be a distraction if we're not wise to the enemy's schemes. Peter said in 1 Peter 5, "Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour." Because if he can't distract us, if he can't deviate our attention, he will tell us his most insidious lie of all, you don't really need anybody to know God, you don't really need anybody else. And that sounds so right, but your enemy is seeking to isolate you. We've all seen National Geographic, "Planet Earth", maybe even the "Wild Kratts" first. Different generation, all right? And you've all seen images like this one of a lion on a hunt. And we know how this is gonna go, don't we? We've seen enough of these. And you can see here's the herd. And what the lion has done is not attacked the herd, but found the one that was isolated from the herd. I probably could have just titled this message, stay with the herd. Stay with the herd. The enemy wants to isolate you, seeking someone he can devour, literally gulp down to the bottom. He wants that. The season of my personal deepest regret was me ignoring the community that God brought into my life. And he did, I just ignored them, I disregarded them, I didn't lean into it. The season of my deepest regret is marked by ignoring the warnings of loving friends, of people who cared about me, who didn't know what was wrong, but knew something was off. The season of my deepest regret was when I made those people think they were the problem, not me, that I gaslit them. You're crazy, you're making stuff up. I don't know what you think this is. The time of my deepest regret was not leaning into the Christ-centered community available. That's not a coincidence, to me at least. But the moment of my greatest need, years later. In that time, God had continued to send people, even though I kept telling him, not like that, he just did. People I'd never even heard of suddenly came into my life. And God fashioned this community around me. I didn't say it for that, but thank you. It's true, he continued to bring me people. I'm looking at them, many of them. And that includes you. I'll get there, I gotta get there, I will, I promise. It's too good not to get there, all right? In my time of greatest need, it was my community that carried me as I walked out repentance. "It is not good for the man to be alone." I'm really glad I'm not. I wished I had gotten there sooner. The Father knows what he's doing. So you could tell this is not a theory for me, this is not an ideal, this is a non-negotiable. And if I could tell you anything in love as a brother, as a brother, why would you be an exception? Why would you be an exception to the enemy who hates you and wants to isolate you and has given reasons for you to not lean into community, to not prioritize the Christ-centered family? I love you, you know that, that's the only reason I'm telling you this. So, may I encourage you? Take a step. Take a step. Ask God for wisdom for what that step is, but commit today to take a step. Maybe that's get into a group. Do it, you'll have a chance soon to do that. Maybe it's don't rush out as the last words are being spoken each Sunday and linger. Try that. You sit in the same seats every week, I know you do, you know you do. You might as well get to know these people, they're gonna be here for a while, all right? Talk to people. If you're in a group, lean in, embrace the accountability. As your brother, embrace the good gift that God has given you, however imperfect that community may be, because by the way, you're in it too. And my real last encouragement to all of us is that all of this, all that God is preparing us for is not just here and now. In fact, this, our small groups, our brothers and sisters in Christ, whether they're in our group or not, this is all preparation, because at the back of the book in Revelation 20, 21, excuse me, Revelation 21:2-3 says this, "I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God.'" Christ-centered community now is preparation for Christ-centered community forever. This is the dress rehearsal, that's the wedding day. This is the preparation. Why wouldn't you be prepared? Why wouldn't you want to? And single, unmarried person, be encouraged. Marriage is temporary, Christ-centered community is forever. This is what God is preparing us for. This is what he wants to do now. And if you're here and you don't know Jesus, if you don't know Christ, then may I start with first things first or rather end with first things. Jesus, God in the flesh, he was cut off so you could be brought in, he was deserted by his friends and everyone who knew him so that you could be found, he was abandoned so that you could be embraced. And on the cross as he died, he was alone, but that was so that you could be brought into his family forever. Let's bow together for a word of prayer. As your heads are bowed and your eyes are closed, just take a moment right now. Ask the Father, God, what are you saying to me through this text, through this truth? I'm listening.

- As our heads remain bowed for just a moment, my guess is, is that you know full well what the Lord may be saying to you. And I wanna encourage you, as Jonathan said a moment ago, take one step, whatever that is, step in the direction of obedience and do what the Lord has asked you to do. Maybe that's coming clean to some people in your world about some things going on in your life that you need them to help bear the burden, you need them to help walk with you. Whatever that looks like, I'm gonna ask you to do it 'cause you wanna live in freedom among God's people for God's glory. Or like Jonathan said, maybe you need to begin this relationship with Jesus Christ. And if that's your need, down front there'll be some men and women that'll be standing right down here, they're headed there now. And if you need to talk to somebody about what it means to receive Jesus and to know Christ, then please come take one of them by the hand, they would love to talk to you about what it means to know Jesus. Or maybe you just need somebody to pray with. You may not know them, that's okay, but you may just need somebody to pray with, pray among. Feel free to do that. Father, thank you for the word that you've given us this morning. I pray you'd continue to speak to our hearts and that you would give us the wisdom to step out in obedience to trust you in all that you have for us, and that you would make us a people fit for eternity, and that we would demonstrate that in the now as we love one another, carry one another's burdens, get honest with one another so that we can be iron sharpening iron for the glory of God. We ask you to do this among us in Jesus' name. Amen.