Growing In Spiritual Maturity

Transcript

Welcome And Series Vision

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright, so welcome. We are starting, like Maxib starting our new series. I am coming off of a little bit losing my voice. So if you're wondering why I sound so weird, that's why. I also have some cough drops, so don't worry, I'm not like slipping some chewing tobacco in while we're standing up here. Um but I'll try not to cough too much. Um our new series is called Maturing in the Mess, uh, where we are talking about spiritual maturity in the mess of life and the mess of church, specifically studying through the book of First Corinthians. So today, kind of what we're gonna do, we're gonna do a few different things today. It's gonna be a I don't have like a passage from the book, so it'll be a little bit different than the rest of our sermons will be in this series. We're gonna talk a little bit about the book of First Corinthians, some of the stuff about Corinth that is just helpful to know, background stuff for those of you who love maps, you'll get a couple maps, so that's exciting. Some of you just rolled your eyes, but you'll be okay. Um, then we'll spend some time talking about how we think about and approach spiritual maturity. If we want to mature um in the mess of life and church over the next several months together, just kind of laying a foundation for what that looks like. Um we called this series Maturing in the mess, because if you were to read the book of 1 Corinthians, which I encourage you to do this week, the church in Corinth was a mess, okay? Lots of stuff going on, and yet God still wanted to work in them. And guess what? Our church is a mess as well. Hopefully not as messy as Corinth. There's some pretty jacked up stuff going on in there. Um, but in any sizable group of people, there is going to be mess and complications, and things are not going to go perfectly. Because life is messy, right? We're all broken people coming together, trying to follow Jesus, um, with different degrees of success, different amounts of baggage from our life, different kinds of ways we grew up, uh, different choices we made that affect us, different church experiences, and we all come together and try to like do life together, there is going to be some mess and some bumping into each other and some frustration and some unmet expectations through all of that. And I think what we've noticed, uh or I've noticed is that people respond to that fact differently that church is messy and life is messy. So if it was like kind of two extremes, the first extreme, this is more like where I fall, would be like um this little guy here, right? Just everything's fine, not a big deal. Let's not deal with this stuff. It's a little uncomfortable, it's a little challenging, I'm sure it'll all be okay. Some of you, though, maybe fall more on this side of things, right? Channeling your in Gordon Ramsay. Just like want to fix all the problems. You're really hard on yourself. Um, and where this can come out in our church life, we see this all the time. We even talk about it in our DNA class, is that people join a church expecting it to be perfect, usually because they left a church they were frustrated with, come and join a church and be like, okay, cool, this will be the place where everything will work out smoothly. And within a month to a few years, they go, oh, there's problems here too, right? And want to go somewhere else and just leave. And the reality is we want to kind of hold a little bit of the tension between these two extremes. We need to have a little more acceptance that life is messy, that doing life together as a church is going to be messy. It's not always gonna be perfect. Someone's gonna offend you, someone's gonna say something stupid in a small group that you disagree with, you're probably gonna say something stupid in a small group that other people disagree with. Like it's just going to happen. And we want to hold that tension of, and we want to be have some intentionality and responsibility for the fact that we can do it better than we do just in our flesh or what comes most natural to us. So instead of just trying to fix ourselves or the church or just ignoring problems, we want to be maturing and growing as God leads us. And I think Philippians chapter two captures this tension really well. It's a verse you've maybe heard before. Paul says, Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence, he says, continue to work out your salvation, like the good news at work in your life, with fear and trembling. Work it out. For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. So if you notice in that passage, there's this tension of like we have a responsibility to work it out and work out our salvation, and but it's ultimately God who's the one working in us. So it requires our effort, but it's ultimately God's work. And if there was kind of, if we're like setting a little bit of a foundation for our series, um, you know, we are going to hit on some heavy topics, some things that are pretty countercultural. And so one of the things I'd love to say kind of with that passage is it's for God's good purpose and spiritual maturity, like maturing in the mess, is actually for our good, right? It's not just a um checklist or a list of rules you have to follow. Um, you know, maybe you think of spiritual maturity as like an obligation, right? Especially if you have your little inner Gordon Ramsay on your shoulder, kind of telling you how you're screwing up all the time, like I just got to keep doing better. And so we we kind of internalize it as something negative because you know it goes against what feels natural to us. But actually, spiritual maturity is a gift from God. It's the life that Jesus promises us. He says, like, I've come to bring you life and life abundantly. That is a life rooted in Jesus, growing in him, doing what he's called us to do. It's the life that we were created to live. And so spiritual maturity is a gift, not an obligation. And that's our bottom line for today. It isn't an obligation, but a gift God wants to grow in us. And so, again, as we talk about a lot of really hard issues over the next several months, I want to encourage you that when you're feeling challenged, maybe when you're feeling like, ooh, I don't like this conviction, that God is growing something good in you, if you will just be open to it. Now, before we jump into kind of some more thoughts on um spiritual maturity and kind of what that means, like fleshing that out a little bit more, um, I want to do a little background on the book, because I think that'll in the city, because I think that'll help us with that conversation. So if you don't know, maybe you don't have a whole lot of experience with the Bible, that's awesome. The book of 1 Corinthians is a letter in the New Testament. So it was originally a letter sent around by a guy named Paul to this church in Corinth. If you were to open up your Bible, um, it's in the New Testament, so it's kind of after Jesus came in the flesh, um, and it's after the gospels where you have these different letters written to churches. So it takes place after Jesus rose from the dead, after the book of Acts, and like a bunch of churches were starting all over the world. Um it was some of the letters are more like, if you were to read all through all the letters of Paul, some of them are more like uh proactive, like teaching theology, some of them are more reactive. This is a more reactive letter, kind of addressing different issues that are happening in the church. So if you were to read um in Acts 18, um, Paul actually spent a lot of time with the church in Corinth, like over a year. So he knew these people well, he helped start the church, he was deeply connected to them. Um and then a few years later, he starts hearing reports about what's happening in the church after he's left, and he's like, hold on, we gotta get some parchment and write a letter here. There's some jacked-up stuff going on. Because of that, it kind of jumps around to a lot of different topics. Um, I was talking to one pastor this week, Mac and I read our district conference for the denomination we're a part of, and they did a series on 1 Corinthians, and he called it the book about everything, because it kind of has a lot of different topics in it, which is great. For those of you who don't like the long series, you won't get bored. It'll kind of switch up, switch it up a lot. Now, if you don't know where Corinth is, that's okay. I had to look it up too. Uh it's on a uh here's a map for you. So if you don't know where this is, this is I got the laser pointer this week. This is Spain, Africa, right? The Middle East. I'm sure we're all more familiar with this area now. Italy, Greece, over here, Turkey. So Corinth is kind of right over here in Greece. And it's a what we'll see is it's a really important city, or it was an important city for trade that was happening, coming from east to west, kind of going all through here. So you can zoom in a little bit more. You know, so things would come in Italy from all sorts of areas, the Middle East, Turkey, and trade would go through here. Zoom in a little more, enhance, right? All right, so uh here is where Corinth was. It's right on something called an isthmus, right? Which being uh from Oconwalk, we have an Isthmus if you're going on a lake walk. It's that little land bridge between the two lakes. So it was situated right here. Um, and because of that, it was a really important city for trade. Um, it was one of the major urban centers of the ancient like Mediterranean Sea area. So Rome and Alexandria were like the highest population areas. Uh Corinth, no one knows exactly how big these old cities were. Corinth was like in the race for third. Whether it was actually third or not, we don't know for sure. But it was one of those, one of the biggest cities in the whole area. Um, and one of the reasons why it was prosperous is because it, oh gosh, I figured out to use. Okay, because it was about six miles from one side to the other. And so ships could come through here and spend and like a day to unload their cargo and load it on another ship, or there was actually a road that you could put your boat on and it would like drive you know over to the other side, uh, so you could come out into the sea over here. And it would take like a day instead of six days of treacherous sailing to get around um some of these Greek islands over here. So a lot of people came through Corinth because it was like the place to go where you could uh kind of make sure your cargo was gonna be safe and do it faster. Um, it was about six miles. It was a very, because of this, it was a very culturally diverse city. So there was a lot of Greek culture, a lot of Roman culture, and then a lot of foreign culture, kind of other religions and stuff as as uh merchants came through. Um the city of Corinth was destroyed in 146 BC, so like 200 years before the letter was written. And then it just nothing happened for like a hundred years, and then about a hundred years after that, it came like Rome decided to refound the city. So at the time we're reading Paul's letter, the city's about a hundred years old after its refounding. The way Rome refounded it is interesting and actually applicable to what we're studying here, is they uh encouraged what's called freedmen to go start the city and go be a part of this. So a freedman was like someone who was like just above a slave, and Rome had kind of their reason for this was they didn't really like these people hanging around the city without a lot of work because there's probably gonna be some riots and revolts and things like that. So, like, hey, go check out this new place called Corinth, you'll really like it. Um, and they wanted to go because it was like the place where you could go, like, have a new start in life. So think about your American history. This is like the Oregon Trail, the Gold Rush, Manifest Destiny, like Corinth was the place you wanted to go in order to try to make it big, um, make a lot of money. And a lot of people did make a lot of money, so it was a very rich place. Uh, the people who succeeded were like these really rich kind of merchant business owner kind of people. But of course, not everyone succeeded, so there was a really large divide between the rich and then the poorest of the poor. At the time that Paul is writing this letter and the church is going, uh, Corinth was really rising in fame at this time. So this was like the hot place you wanted to be if you were socially ambitious. Whether you were a merchant, a banker, an artisan, whatever, like you wanted to be in Corinth if you wanted to be where the cool kids were. People had a growing sense of pride in their city and their accomplishments, which this was really weird to me as I was studying this and reading about it. They like, people got plaques inscribed all over the place saying how awesome they were and all the great things they did. So, out of all the ancient cities, this place has like more plaques than anywhere else of people basically puffing themselves up and saying, Hey, look how great I am, or look what I did. Um, one commentator said, Corinth was a city where public boasting and self-promotion had become an art form, right? Which they would have fit well in the age of social media, I think, here. Um, you know, and in an honor-shame kind of culture, these public recognition moments were like gold. It was like this is really boosts your standing. Um, the so the city was very diverse, there was a lot going on, and the church was a mirror of the city. They were a diverse church dealing with the challenges of being a divide, a diverse church. There were some Jewish believers, um, but little, like when you read through the letter, there's actually not a whole lot that points to a Jewish background. So there's a lot of, there were some Jews, but there's also a lot of Gentiles and people from kind of other traditions as well. And you know, that's challenging when you have people with different belief systems coming together. The main issue though with them is that they reflected the culture around them. Like the church in Corinth looked a lot like the the city of Corinth, right? And in some sense, this is very normal. Like we as a church reflect the West, we reflect being American, right? I'm sure coming to church here is different than going to church in Senegal or in China or in all sorts of other parts of the world. We reflect uh being Wisconsinites, we reflect being like lake country people, right? And sometimes that's good. Like sometimes there's good values that come with that. Sometimes it's just neutral, you know, it doesn't like go either way. Um, but sometimes that's bad when we let our culture inform how we do our faith or how we see God in a way that actually betrays the gospel or what Jesus has called us to do. The problem, though, of course, is we don't usually realize it's happening because it just feels like this is a normal part of culture. This is what everyone does. And so their worldview, their customs, their culture, everything got imported into their life together as a church and their relationship with God. Um, one commentator, uh Gordon Fee, says it this way um that uh although they were the Christian church in Corinth, an inordinate amount of Corinth was yet in them, emerging in a number of attitudes and behaviors that required radical surgery without killing the patient. Right? So this is kind of what Paul is doing is he's trying to like cut these things out that are detrimental to their faith and their walk with Jesus without totally destroying them. This affected things like their relationships with each other. We're gonna get to a section on communion, like the Lord's Supper, and we'll see that customs regarding kind of how you divide between economic class, like the rich and the poor, um, which would have been very normal in the city, get imported into the church, and a whole bunch of damage is done because of that. We're gonna see that um in a world that was dominated by puffing yourself up and increasing your social standing and recognition, Paul encourages them to be humble servants. In a city where the conflicting values of diverse groups of people and politics cause people to fight and divide, right? Which doesn't sound like America at all, or Wisconsin or the West. Uh, Paul calls for unity under Christ. That this is bigger than whatever social cause you're trying to champion in the city. In a culture where anything goes sexually, he's calling them to holiness and something different. In a religious climate that that really like lifted up like oracles and these like miraculous gifts of the Spirit, Paul is calling them to love. Paul is challenging cultural values and assumptions that they probably didn't even think to question because it's just like this is what everyone does. Here's another quote I found in my research. It's a little dense, but I really liked it. Um he says this, Lyle D. Vanderbroek. Each of the community problems Paul needed to address grew out of the Corinthians' inability to let the gospel message fully reshape their Gentile, Greco-Roman lives, whether because they misunderstood that message, they just didn't know, or because they rejected it outright. And there's another little section. They were Hellenists, so Greek, through and through. And this eschatological, it's a fancy word for like future-oriented, cross-centered, body-affirming Jewish sect called Christianity, demanded that they enter another theological and ethical world. So they had to like leave the world of Corinth in order to enter the kingdom of God. And I love this last line. The Corinthians were simply trying to be Christians with a minimal amount of social and theological disturbance. And man, does that sound familiar for today? Trying to follow Jesus without it really disrupting my life that much. Right? Trying to follow Jesus without it disrupting your political affiliations and values. Trying to follow Jesus without letting it slow down your career or your social ladder climbing. We try to follow Jesus without it upsetting our wealth accumulation and our plans for retirement. We try to follow Jesus without letting it upset the way the images we project to the world, or the way we scroll on our phone, or the way we buy stuff on Amazon instead of giving to the poor. We try to follow Jesus without letting it take up too much of our free time, right? Because I still want to have time to do my things and what I want to do. Right? We want to follow Jesus, if we're not careful, without it changing our priorities and values too much. We'll let it change, we'll let Jesus touch them a little bit, but we don't really want to like give them up in order to follow him. And Paul's strategy, as we'll see in the letter, is to deal with these issues head on. He's often even a little sassy and ironic as he does so. He talks about their behaviors and the things that they're doing wrong or the ways they're not living into the gospel, but he also corrects the theology underneath what they're doing, right? To help them enter into that world like that commentator was talking about, that theological world of the kingdom. And so we are gonna get over the next several months into a lot of specifics, okay? Lots of specific things. And so today, kind of as we're setting a foundation for a series, I want to just zoom out a little bit and talk on a more meta level about how do we approach spiritual maturity and how can we open ourselves up to what God wants to do in us over the next several months. Now, one problem. Sorry, I should have gone the other way without the microphone. Maybe next time. Um, I'll probably forget. Here's one thing when it comes to talking about spiritual maturity that I think is challenging is everyone thinks they're mature, right? Most people think they're spiritually mature, even if they might not be. But one of those as I was like reflecting on this, I realized spiritual maturity is not so much of a binary, like, yes or no, you either are or you aren't, like this black and white thing. It's a lifelong process. Um, and we all probably have some areas that we are more mature, and some areas that we're really struggling to live into maturity. Right? And so um as we lean into this, there are probably gonna be some things that are gonna be like, oh yeah, I got that, like that's good, and other things that are more of a challenge and feel convicting. Now, at its most like basic level, and some of this is review, you've probably heard us talk about this before. Spiritual maturity, most basic level, is basically knowing what God wants you to do, knowing who God is, knowing like the theology, the right things about God, and then doing the right things you're supposed to do, right? Knowing and doing, believing and acting. But I want to nuance it a little bit more to kind of because as I've done this, it's been helpful to recognize where do I get stuck? Where do I kind of feel weak in this, and where might God be inviting me to lean in more? So as we do this, as I kind of go through, there's like seven things I have here. It's not like an exhaustive list. I'm sure you could cut it down or come up with more, but it's just a list. Um, think about where you are. Where are you strong? Where is this like, hey, I'm like really leaning in. God wants to affirm this. Where am I struggling? Where is God inviting me to step in deeper? So I'm gonna present these a little bit linear, but they don't have to be linear. The first uh kind of piece of this is head knowledge. So things we know in our head about God, kind of understanding the right theology about God, knowing the facts about God, knowing things in the Bible, knowing what God says about things. This is so important, right? This is like an essential foundation for building your life on Jesus is knowing who God is and what God wants you to do in the world. You have to know this. The problem though is most people stop here, right? You know, you go to church for like 40 years of your life, you consume a bunch of sermons, maybe consume a bunch of small group stuff, fill your head with a bunch of knowledge and say, Oh, I must be mature because I've sat and I know a lot of facts about God. Right? The problem though is that this is like a mark of spiritual maturity, but it is not like the be-all end-all, the most important thing. And so we can trick ourselves into thinking we're further along than we actually are if we think this is what we need. Uh both like, hey, if I know a lot, I must be mature. But also I've noticed what happens a lot of times with people who feel distant from God or they're struggling. The default is to be like, I must need to like read another book or listen to another podcast. Like, let's get some more information, I'll be good to go, right? But that's not how spiritual maturity works. You can know all the right things and not actually live into any of them. One of my favorite verses the first time I read it is in the book of James, and it says this. You believe there's one God. Good. Even demons believe that. Like believing and kind of knowing the right facts about God. Yeah, the demons got that one covered. So try not to have the spiritual maturity of a demon, I'm just gonna say. Um, 1 Corinthians 8 says this knowledge puffs up while love builds up. So you can know the right things, but you might not, yeah, can kind of puff us up and make us prideful and arrogant. So another kind of layer of this, and this is a weird, weird phrase that I came up with uh that now I'm regretting as I'm gonna is bone knowledge, okay? What I mean is I love the phrase people say is like to know something deep in your bones, okay? So that's kind of what I'm getting at here. Is to know actually know facts about God, but so deeply that you believe them in the very core of your being. Like real like it's one thing to know that God loves you. It's a different thing to truly believe that as you go about your day and your week. And to trust that love. It's one thing to know in your head that you're forgiven and all the facts about the cross. It's another thing when you screw up to be rooted in that forgiveness and how God sees you in that moment. Right? It's one thing to believe in your head that the approval of other people doesn't really matter. It's another thing when people are judging you to actually like live as if that's true and not be anxiously worried about it. And so some people, some of us, we we think we just need more knowledge, but what we really need to do is let that knowledge that we already have just sink in more deeply into our spirit. And sometimes it's helpful to do the work of unpacking your first formation or your family of origin for this, right? Because a lot of times we're living out of scripts that are based off of whatever we grew up with, um, not like what the gospel actually says. All right, kind of a third a third section that's like on the knowing side still is knowing, like having a practical imagination um for how this truth about God, these facts about God, actually get worked out in life. Right? What does love look like in a situation? Like if you, you know, I might love my kids. I might, okay, I do love my kids. I love my kids, I know I'm supposed to love my kids and be a good parent. I deeply want to be a good parent, but sometimes things happen and I'm like, I have no idea what love looks like right now. Right? Or with a coworker or with a boss or with a spouse or whatever it might be, a teenager who's pushing the boundaries. Like you might want to love, but not know how. And so part of spiritual maturity is also knowing how do I discern what exactly it is God wants me to do in this situation. Right? Learning to listen to the Holy Spirit, learning how to seek wise counsel, how to figure out how does this love get worked out in real life. Now again, I've kind of alluded to this. Um, knowing what to do is not enough. Mac and I were on our this district conference thing for our denomination. Uh, we shared a hotel room, so we're kind of talking about like, hey, what time are you getting up? So we make sure we're not like stepping on each other's toes. Um and Mac was talking about setting his alarm to get up early to work out. And I was like, man, that's a great idea. So I set my alarm and I went downstairs and I made myself a giant waffle, right? And it was awesome. Um we're very different roommates with each other. Uh I knew what was probably the better thing to do, but I didn't do it, right? I just did what I wanted to do. And so the next step is action. Like we need to actually do the things that we know are the right things to do. James 122 says, do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves, right? If you've done a lot of listening to God's word, you might be deceiving yourselves into thinking you are further along in your faith than you actually are. You need to do what it says. It's often much easier to know what to do than it is to actually do it, right? That's it's hard. All right, then kind of another layer deeper is letting God form our desires. Because we can do the right thing, we can like respond out of obedience and still be really grumpy and grouchy about it, right? Again, kind of thinking of my kids. I can know I'm supposed to love my kids and be like, all right, here we go, like this is gonna be rough. Um, that's a very different posture than being like excited to show them the love that God has called me to show them. And don't get me wrong, if if your option is like pivot out of a grouchy obedience or do nothing, grouchy obedience is probably the better step. But the problem is we have some long-term responsibility and influence over how we allow God to shape our desires so that we can actually desire the things God wants us to desire. So living into God's kingdom isn't just a burden or a box to check, but something we're excited about. Right? This is one I kind of struggle with, I feel like, if I'm honest, is it's a lot, it's I know what God has called me to do, and a lot of times I just kind of have a bad attitude about it. Like, well, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna follow through because that's what you're supposed to do. It's like, man, I feel like the last like year or so, God's been challenging me to like that he wants to reshape my desire, so I'm excited about his kingdom and the things he's called me to. Um, like for a couple examples here. Um, like if you think about generosity, it's hard to be generous when you're looking at all the things you want to buy for yourself. Right? When we allow advertisement to shape our desires, it's a lot harder to be generous, right? But when you hear stories of like things that are happening in Senegal or like all over the world, things God is doing, it's a lot easier to want to be generous towards those things when we're letting our desires be captured by the Holy Spirit.

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Right?

Questions To Sit With

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If you think of marriage, it's it's hard to be loving and faithful if you're flirting with a coworker or thinking about other people in your love life, right? Like we have responsibility in how we shape our desires so that we start to desire the things God wants us to. Um, all right, number six here is the what we call the cumulative effect. This is something that the Jesuit retreat house that uh we've been to a few times for the silent retreat talks about is the longer you do something, something happens inside of us when we tr when we do something over and over and over again. Like God works with that momentum in our soul. This is another one I struggle with. I love trying new things, doing new things. So it's like, I'll try a spiritual practice, do it for a week or two, be like, well, that was great, and then kind of move on to the next one, right? Um, but there's I'm missing something in my walk with God when I don't ever sit in something long enough to allow him to shape me over a long period of time. Right? There's a difference between doing something for a week or a day and doing something for a year or a decade and allowing God to shape you in that. Um, here's another passage from our book that we're gonna be studying, 1 Corinthians. Paul says, Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the game goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Right? If we are going to mature into the life God has created us for, it is not gonna happen overnight. It's gonna take months and years and decades, and even at the end of our life, we still won't be where we'll ultimately be in heaven, right? Um, and so we need to dedicate ourselves to the long haul to allow God to continue to shape and mold us. Um, and then the last thing is that is super important, and I think this gets missed a lot in church, is investing in other people, right? I think this is where a lot of people get hung up. I hear people, especially those of us who've maybe followed Jesus for a long time, say something like, Man, I'm just not being fed anymore. Right? And there's something to that, like you want to continue to be like somewhere where you feel like you're you're growing and you're like hearing God's truth and responding to it. But I've also noticed in my own life there comes a point where you're like, you know, like, okay, so I went to uh Bible college, I've worked in a church now for a long time. Um I've kind of learned a lot of facts about God. I don't often get a whole lot of, oh, that's brand new, or oh, that's really cool. I've never heard that before. Like where it really like sparks that imagination, like I did when I was first starting to follow Jesus. Where I get the most depth in my life right now is pouring into other people, right? And thinking of how to invest in others and we're in discipling other people. Um, and so there's like a little bit of a mindset mindset shift that needs to happen. Had to think about that one for a minute. Like if you uh think you're spiritually mature and you're like, but I'm not getting fed, like, ah, what's going on? This this church is feeling dull and lifeless, and you're not serving anywhere, kind of like, well, there's your problem. Like, you need to be investing in other people. Like your maturity, your depth of knowledge of God is not just meant for yourself, it is meant for the sake of other people as well. Uh, here's what Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians, when there's like a lot of talk about tongues and these really like kind of crazy manifestations of gifts of the spirit and all sorts of stuff, is he says, hey, he's talking about like how this plays out in worship. He says, Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church. Right? Once you've been following Jesus for a while, the main meat of like your spiritual experience here at church is not just about like, what am I going to get out of this, but what can I give to others? How is this gonna help me invest in the lives of other people and pour into them? Now, of course, we still need our own experience with God. I don't want to like belittle that at all, but I've also noticed that when I don't look at things so selfishly, I actually get a whole lot more out of coming together in worship. When I'm just looking, how can I get my own needs met and be fed the way I want to? I'm like a little critical, judgmental, be like, oh, that doesn't, I don't really like that song, you know, like all these kind of different things. But when I'm pouring into others, like God fills me up in a deeper way than I can really understand or explain. So again, our gifts and our maturity are not for ourselves, but for the sake of other people. So as we kind of wrap up here, I want to remind you that spiritual maturity, following Jesus, it's a journey, it's a process, it's not gonna happen overnight. But we and we all have areas that we're gonna need to lean into and grow. And it's for our good. Not as like a bunch of rules to follow or a bunch of boxes to check, or because this is what we're supposed to do to be a good Christian, or whatever. It's because God has a beautiful life waiting for you if you will just turn your life over to him. He's gonna transform it into something amazing. Like he wants to go deeper with you, deeper than you've been before. And what I've found in my own life is through all the difficulties and the challenges of following Jesus, like I never look back and be like, well, that was a mistake. Like, it's like in the moment, I'm kind of grouchy, or like, I don't know if I want to do this or this is gonna be really hard. But anytime I say yes to God, even if I don't know like where it's leading or I can't see like where the path ends, I am so, so thankful that I allowed him more and deeper access to my life to grow in me, the person he wants me to be. So as we wrap up here, again, we don't want to just learn a bunch of stuff. Here's a couple questions you can sit with. Kind of where do you feel strong? Where do you feel weak? Where's God inviting you to grow? And if that you want to see that list, you can get online onto the sermon section and find it. And then just as a practice, read First Corinthians this week, especially if you haven't read it before or you've, you know, maybe it's been a long time. It's it's kind of a longer book, it's like 15 chapters. So you can read, um, you can read like a couple chapters a day. I like to sit down and try to read something all in one sitting. It's a lot, but you really get like a picture of like what the book is about in that case. But encourage you to start reading it as we start jumping into the text next week. So um let me pray for us and then we can go enjoy the day. Um, God, thank you so much for your love and your grace. God, that you are doing a work in us uh that we don't even see the end of. God, we thank you for that. God, I ask that you would help each and every one of us, wherever we're at on our journey, wherever we're struggling, wherever we're hung up, wherever we're feeling stuck, that we would just surrender to you and experience the good and beautiful life that you've created us for. So, God, give us courage and give us boldness to step into your love and step deeper into your kingdom. That's in your name we pray. Amen. Thanks, guys. Don't forget, check out joining a group. A bunch of those start this week.