SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
SPEAKER_00: It's good to be with you.
SPEAKER_00: I'm here with my daughter Ginger, is here, and my wife Naomi will be here for the second service.
SPEAKER_00: Also, Clement Tendo is pastoral intern with us at One Voice Fellowship.
SPEAKER_00: He was helping lead the Praise team.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you get to meet him during fellowship time.
SPEAKER_00: I was on staff for 20 years at Alexandria Prez.
SPEAKER_00: If I haven't met some of you, I see a lot of new faces.
SPEAKER_00: But after serving in APC for 20 years, we launched out of APC to plant One Voice Fellowship two years ago.
SPEAKER_00: And if you take your second light, turn right at the second light here, and go four miles, you'll find us right there on Route 7.
SPEAKER_00: It's only four miles away, but if you visit One Voice, you feel like you have traveled very far away.
SPEAKER_00: 80% of our church are refugees or recent immigrants.
SPEAKER_00: And so we translate the sermon every week into 15 different languages.
SPEAKER_00: We sing and pray in all those different languages.
SPEAKER_00: We have dinner together every week at 5 p.m.
SPEAKER_00: with food from all around the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's a highlight for sure.
SPEAKER_00: And I hope you could stop by downstairs afterwards before you go into the fellowship hall.
SPEAKER_00: There's a countertop and there's some information about the church.
SPEAKER_00: There's a prayer list, ways that you can be praying for us.
SPEAKER_00: I've also put together every verse I can find in the Bible that mentions all language, all tribes, all people.
SPEAKER_00: And you might enjoy that for your devotional time, just reading through how from Genesis to Revelation it has been God's vision from the very beginning to make one nation of all people.
SPEAKER_00: There's also an article there that was published by the Gospel Coalition about APC and One Voice, about how One Voice became a church out of this church.
SPEAKER_00: And so we are grateful for the support, for the prayers, for the oversight that APC provides over us as we plant the church.
SPEAKER_00: There's a clipboard down there.
SPEAKER_00: You could sign up if you want more information, if you want to be on our prayer list.
SPEAKER_00: Also, if you want to donate a car.
SPEAKER_00: Donating a car has tax benefits, but it has enormous benefits for people in our congregation who are new in the U.S., who are taking buses to get to work and riding Uber, sometimes spending a third of their income to take Uber to work.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you have a car that you want to donate, we would love to hear about that.
SPEAKER_00: You can talk to me or Clement, you can put the info on the clipboard.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the missions update part of why I'm here.
SPEAKER_00: But my real role is to open God's word to us.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to be looking at the book of Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: Deuteronomy is a book that contains three long sermons by Moses.
SPEAKER_00: These sermons were given to the Jews while they were in the desert after they escaped from Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when God's people first arrived in Egypt, there were 70 of them.
SPEAKER_00: Same size as One Voice Fellowship, actually.
SPEAKER_00: And Joseph's family, they were refugees.
SPEAKER_00: They had escaped starvation to go to Egypt, and they received food and help when they were in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: They settled down as permanent residents, got their green cards printed on papyrus.
SPEAKER_00: But then the Egyptians enslaved them.
SPEAKER_00: And so after 400 years, God's people fled to escape persecution, and they became refugees once again, on the move.
SPEAKER_00: And it's there in the desert that Moses wrote Deuteronomy, telling his people that they're going to go to the promised land, but their residency there will be conditional.
SPEAKER_00: It will be dependent on them keeping God's law.
SPEAKER_00: So Deuteronomy is a covenant document, a contract, making clear what God expects of his people because of what he has done for them.
SPEAKER_00: So let's look at God's word beginning in Deuteronomy chapter 10, verse 11.
SPEAKER_00: And the Lord said to Moses, Arise, go on your journey at the head of the people, so that they may go in and possess the land, which I swore to their fathers to give them.
SPEAKER_00: And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you?
SPEAKER_00: But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I'm commanding you today, for your good.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers, and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are to this day.
SPEAKER_00: Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.
SPEAKER_00: For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of Lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial, and he takes no bribe.
SPEAKER_00: He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and he loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.
SPEAKER_00: Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, thank you that you have the kind of heart that would leave safety and security to seek out the lost and the hurting, but also the rebel and the one who wants to be far from God.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that other-centered, stranger-seeking kind of love.
SPEAKER_00: May it captivate our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: May we understand how you gave a proactive welcome to bring us into God's kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: And then may we, empowered by that love, show the same love to those around us.
SPEAKER_00: We ask in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so four points for today.
SPEAKER_00: God loves strangers, but strangers are strange.
SPEAKER_00: You were a stranger, so love as you have been loved.
SPEAKER_00: So, verse 18 of our text, God loves strangers.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 18 says, God executes justice for the fatherless and the widow.
SPEAKER_00: He loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.
SPEAKER_00: Moses is making sure the people understand that God has a special heart for three categories of people: the fatherless, the widow, and the sojourner.
SPEAKER_00: Why those three?
SPEAKER_00: Because none of them could own land in the promised land that they were headed towards.
SPEAKER_00: God is saying he cares about vulnerable people.
SPEAKER_00: He cares about those who do not have assets.
SPEAKER_00: He provided his people with this land flowing with milk and honey in the expectation that his people would share what he had given with those who were more vulnerable.
SPEAKER_00: Now the word sojourner can also be translated foreigner, alien, stranger, or immigrant.
SPEAKER_00: It's not tourist.
SPEAKER_00: A sojourner is someone who goes somewhere to stay for a period of time.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham was a sojourner in Hebron.
SPEAKER_00: Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.
SPEAKER_00: Moses left Egypt and went to Midian as a sojourner for 40 years.
SPEAKER_00: And as Moses points out in verse 19, the Israelites were sojourners in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is full of examples of sojourners, people who have been forcibly displaced.
SPEAKER_00: I want to just go through these slides quickly.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to read all the texts.
SPEAKER_00: But we see in the very beginning Adam and Eve, Cain and Israel, people who are displaced because of their own sinful choices and actions.
SPEAKER_00: We also see displaced by natural disaster.
SPEAKER_00: People like Noah, Abraham, Sarah, famine displacing Naomi.
SPEAKER_00: We also see people displaced because of conflict or human trafficking.
SPEAKER_00: Hagar because of how she was treated by her mistress.
SPEAKER_00: Joseph sold into slavery, human trafficking.
SPEAKER_00: We also see people displaced by war when Israel was conquered by Assyria, when Judah was conquered and people were taken off to Babylon, including Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.
SPEAKER_00: We also see in the Bible people displaced by religious, political, and ethnic persecution.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus himself fleeing to Egypt as a child, the early church being scattered.
SPEAKER_00: Achilla and Priscilla, leaders in the church.
SPEAKER_00: What I want you to see is that there are refugees today fleeing their homes for all of these exact same reasons that we just saw: famine, war, conflict, persecution.
SPEAKER_00: The world hasn't actually changed that much.
SPEAKER_00: Today we have the opportunity to help Afghan allies who fled their country after the Taliban took over.
SPEAKER_00: Girls like these who escaped to northern Afghanistan when the Taliban take over, and now more than 12,000 have relocated to the DC metro area.
SPEAKER_00: And God's people are stepping up and serving them.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of ways you can do that, but my task isn't to talk about that, not to talk about what you can do to help.
SPEAKER_00: The heart of this message is why we should care.
SPEAKER_00: And why we should do something for the refugee and the stranger.
SPEAKER_00: Deuteronomy 10 is all about God's heart.
SPEAKER_00: But it continues in the ministry of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Think about Jesus who came as a Jew to the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_00: But then he would hang around with Samaritans and with Gentiles.
SPEAKER_00: He exercised a demon from a Gentile girl.
SPEAKER_00: When he fed the 4,000, it was in a Gentile region called the Decapolis.
SPEAKER_00: And then later in Acts, Jesus tells his people that he wants them to take the gospel beyond Jerusalem to Samaria and to all the ends of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: But before the gospel could go to all these other people and cultures, God had to shake Peter out of his comfort zone.
SPEAKER_00: Peter had to be told three times in a vision, because he was kind of hard-headed like me, three times Peter had to be told, yes, I really want you to go to a Gentile's house and go inside and eat his Gentile food.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's how he's going to hear the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: But after Peter gets over his discomfort, the gospel spreads rapidly among the Gentiles until Gentile Christians outnumber the Jewish Christians who first received the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: That was Jesus' vision.
SPEAKER_00: We see it in his final command to the apostles in Matthew 28.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Go make disciples of all ethne.
SPEAKER_00: That's the Greek word there, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Ethne means a body of persons who are united by kinship, culture, and common traditions.
SPEAKER_00: This is the leadership development group.
SPEAKER_00: We were together with APC for the leadership retreat just a couple weeks ago.
SPEAKER_00: So these are the guys who are being trained to be leaders at one voice.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus gave the mission, gave the church.
SPEAKER_00: We have a mission, and it's to share the gospel with all ethne.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes we do that by going to them.
SPEAKER_00: We send missionaries around the world.
SPEAKER_00: But God also relocates people from around the world right here.
SPEAKER_00: And we have the opportunity, the responsibility to love in word and deed the strangers among us.
SPEAKER_00: And this mission is going to come to fulfillment one day in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: One day in heaven, we will worship with people from every part of humanity.
SPEAKER_00: This is our praise team at One Voice Fellowship, band members who are from Ethiopia and Puerto Rico and Pakistan and China and Korea and Congo.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's a little taste of heaven, a little taste of Revelation 7, when all nations are going to worship together, crying out with one voice, salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.
SPEAKER_00: So that's where we're headed.
SPEAKER_00: If you're going to heaven, that's how you will worship for eternity with all of humanity.
SPEAKER_00: But while we're on earth, language and culture tend to divide us.
SPEAKER_00: They tend to separate us.
SPEAKER_00: We're all more naturally drawn to people who are like us because we value our comfort.
SPEAKER_00: I value my comfort and security.
SPEAKER_00: So that brings us to point two.
SPEAKER_00: Strangers are strange.
SPEAKER_00: We like to be in our comfort zone.
SPEAKER_00: So even after Peter went to Cornelius' house and learned that the Gentiles could receive the gospel, we find out in Galatians chapter 2 that Paul had to confront Peter to his face.
SPEAKER_00: Peter was once hanging out with the Gentiles, he was eating with them, which is this sign of fellowship.
SPEAKER_00: He became comfortable with these strangers who became brothers.
SPEAKER_00: But then these guys from Jerusalem show up who were not on board yet with the whole Gentile thing.
SPEAKER_00: And Peter suddenly stopped hanging out with his Gentile brothers.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because he cared about what people thought of him, he cared about his reputation.
SPEAKER_00: And so he shunned his Christian brothers for his own selfish reasons.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Paul says in Galatians 2.14, he says Peter's conduct was not in step with the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: It's the gospel that's at stake.
SPEAKER_00: Peter was struggling still to understand that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, God arranged the parts in the body, each of them as he chose.
SPEAKER_00: Peter was struggling to understand that God was going to expand the church primarily through strangers, through people who did not share Peter's language and culture.
SPEAKER_00: And many of us are concerned today about the decline of Christian values and church attendance in the United States.
SPEAKER_00: The church is actually growing if you look globally.
SPEAKER_00: You see in this chart, 1910, 82% of the Christians in the world lived in North America, Europe, or Australia.
SPEAKER_00: So Caucasians.
SPEAKER_00: 100 years later, only 39% of Christians in the world lived in those parts.
SPEAKER_00: Now 61% of Christians are in Africa, South America, Middle East, and Asia.
SPEAKER_00: And this same demographic shift is happening in the United States.
SPEAKER_00: In the next 25 years, they project that the population of the United States will grow 100 million people.
SPEAKER_00: So 25 years from now, 100 million more people.
SPEAKER_00: 80 million of those will be first and second generation immigrants.
SPEAKER_00: 80 million first and second generation immigrants in the next 25 years.
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
SPEAKER_00: Tennant of Asbury Seminary says 86% of immigrants in North America are likely to either be Christians or become Christians.
SPEAKER_00: The immigrant population actually presents the greatest hope for Christian renewal in North America.
SPEAKER_00: And people who work with unreached people groups say that someone who comes from a closed country, a country like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or even Japan, where Christians are just in very small numbers, someone is 20 times more likely to become a follower of Jesus here than in their home country.
SPEAKER_00: And so maybe God is bringing some people here so that they can meet Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: People like this man who is a Muslim convert.
SPEAKER_00: He was a refugee who was tortured and persecuted in his home country, and he was the first adult baptism convert at our church.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, praise God.
SPEAKER_00: I believe one reason God is bringing people from around the world is because many of them are already followers of Jesus, who we can learn from and be encouraged by, and many of them are coming because this is the place where they will hear the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: But I want you to know this: even if Afghans and other new neighbors don't become our brothers and sisters in Christ, we still have a responsibility to love them in word and deed, because they were made in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: In Deuteronomy, Moses did not say, if the sojourner among you converts to Judaism, then you must help him.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what it said.
SPEAKER_00: But there's also a reason to help our new neighbors that is more for our benefit.
SPEAKER_00: We have so much to learn from our new neighbors.
SPEAKER_00: My brother DDA, um, in this picture in the red, right?
SPEAKER_00: DDA and CFA are from Congo, and when DDA and Sifa moved into their new home about 10 years ago, DDA called me and he said, Pastor, before we sleep in our new home, would you come and pray a blessing over the house?
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, I can come on Friday, and DDA said, okay, we'll stay with friends until you come pray a blessing.
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, I'm gonna have to talk to DDA about this superstition of his.
SPEAKER_00: But before I ever talked to him about his superstitions, I noticed that night that I didn't want my children to eat dinner until we prayed a blessing over the food.
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, if we don't eat before we pray, maybe DDA's not superstitious.
SPEAKER_00: This is a man who was dragged out of his home by soldiers who intended to execute him.
SPEAKER_00: This is a man who understands that home is not necessarily a safe place.
SPEAKER_00: This is a wise man who taught me to not take for granted my security or safety in any context.
SPEAKER_00: And I was grateful to learn that lesson because then when a Pakistani brother at One Voice Fellowship got his first car and called me and said, Pastor, would you come pray a blessing over my car?
SPEAKER_00: I said, sure.
SPEAKER_00: Because I had learned from DDA.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, we can all learn from our immigrant brothers and sisters because they have faced hardship and persecution and danger in ways that many of us have not and yet have learned to trust God's protecting hand every day.
SPEAKER_00: Professor Andrew Walls says this about the metaphor of the body that we find in Ephesians.
SPEAKER_00: The Ephesian metaphors of the temple and of the body show each culture as necessary to the body.
SPEAKER_00: But each is incomplete in itself.
SPEAKER_00: Only in Christ does completion and fullness dwell.
SPEAKER_00: Only together, friends, are we complete in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Our brothers and sisters help us see God through different lenses.
SPEAKER_00: You ever wonder why there's four different gospels in your Bible?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Matthew's pretty long, pretty complete.
SPEAKER_00: Why do we need four?
SPEAKER_00: Because each author had a little bit different perspective on the ministry and person of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: They're all true, but they give us that same truth from different perspectives.
SPEAKER_00: Through different lenses.
SPEAKER_00: We need the different lenses and perspectives because in my own selfish way of seeing things, strangers seem like danger.
SPEAKER_00: They're threatening rather than an opportunity.
SPEAKER_00: But a citizen of God's kingdom derives his or her safety from another place.
SPEAKER_00: Your safety and security come from the fact that you are a child of God.
SPEAKER_00: And when that's the source of your security, you form different circles.
SPEAKER_00: You don't necessarily wall yourself off from the difficult neighbor or coworker.
SPEAKER_00: That brings us to point three.
SPEAKER_00: You were a stranger.
SPEAKER_00: In our teenage years, we all try to figure out what tribe we belong to, right?
SPEAKER_00: Am I a jock?
SPEAKER_00: Am I the straight A student?
SPEAKER_00: Am I popular?
SPEAKER_00: Am I the rebel?
SPEAKER_00: Am I the band kid?
SPEAKER_00: Am I the student government kid?
SPEAKER_00: My family moved from Chicago to Buffalo in eighth grade, which is a terrible time to move.
SPEAKER_00: I did not know where I fit in.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't, I was sure I didn't like who I was, and I didn't think others would find me likable.
SPEAKER_00: Um I I got a perm in eighth grade.
SPEAKER_00: I got my hair, I thought maybe having curly hair would make me more attractive or something.
SPEAKER_00: It's a bad idea.
SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to be welcomed by a tribe.
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be welcomed.
SPEAKER_00: I want to ask you right now, can you think about a time in your life when you have been the outsider?
SPEAKER_00: When have you been scared about what people would think?
SPEAKER_00: When have you felt unwanted?
SPEAKER_00: I felt that way all through middle school and high school.
SPEAKER_00: In college, I found a tribe in a fraternity.
SPEAKER_00: So I discarded the Catholic faith of my childhood, decided I was an atheist, and sought comfort for my empty soul in beer and women and pornography.
SPEAKER_00: Where does your heart go when you feel unwanted?
SPEAKER_00: When you feel like the stranger.
SPEAKER_00: Where does your heart go?
SPEAKER_00: Augustine said, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
SPEAKER_00: We're all hungry to be welcomed.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said, Come, you are welcome.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, because only I can give you the rest your heart is seeking.
SPEAKER_00: So have you abandoned every other false idol?
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen the emptiness and the lies of anything else that's promising you?
SPEAKER_00: Comfort, joy, peace, a welcome?
SPEAKER_00: The welcome of Jesus is freely offered to anyone who will churn from those false idols and walk into his loving arms.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verses 14 and 15 again with me.
SPEAKER_00: To the Lord your God belong the heavens, the earth, and everything in it.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, or but this is great, this is grace.
SPEAKER_00: Yet the Lord set his affection on your fathers and loved them.
SPEAKER_00: And he chose you.
SPEAKER_00: He chose you.
SPEAKER_00: If you are a child of God, it is not because of anything you have done or could do.
SPEAKER_00: You were chosen.
SPEAKER_00: You were saved by grace alone.
SPEAKER_00: That's the only one anyone is saved.
SPEAKER_00: I remained an atheist for ten years.
SPEAKER_00: I was a stranger because I wanted to be.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus brought me in.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus came out of the sheepfold to bring me in.
SPEAKER_00: And that's how Jesus builds the family of God.
SPEAKER_00: To Jesus, it doesn't matter if you're a hard-partying fraternity boy, if you're a Samaritan, a tax collector, or a Roman soldier, or a hard-headed hypocrite like Peter.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says to everyone, if you will see the lies that your idols are telling you and believe that my death and resurrection can set you free from the addiction to self and the lies that the world offers you for security and comfort and peace, then my blood will cleanse your heart and I will make you a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: And then you will become one stone in this household of faith that I'm building.
SPEAKER_00: A household of faith of many different kinds of stones that are built into one household.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to what Paul reminds the Gentile believers.
SPEAKER_00: These are the Gentiles he writes to.
SPEAKER_00: You were at that time separated from Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: You were strangers to the covenant.
SPEAKER_00: You had no hope without God in the world, but, there's a grace word again, but Christ Jesus came and preached peace to you, so you are no longer strangers.
SPEAKER_00: You are fellow citizens, saints, members of the household.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, Jesus sought you when a stranger, wandering far from the fold of God.
SPEAKER_00: He to rescue you from danger interposed his precious blood.
SPEAKER_00: That's the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And the more we understand that the gospel brought us from being strangers into God's household by grace alone, the more we will love other strangers well.
SPEAKER_00: So point four, love as you have been loved.
SPEAKER_00: Philozenia is one of my current favorite words.
SPEAKER_00: It's the opposite of xenophobia.
SPEAKER_00: Philozenia means love of strangers.
SPEAKER_00: We find it twice in Scripture, Hebrews 13, 2 and Romans 12, 13.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
SPEAKER_00: So we often think of hospitality as having our best friends over for dinner.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what Paul meant.
SPEAKER_00: It's love of strangers.
SPEAKER_00: Next week is the Thanksgiving service for APC, right?
SPEAKER_00: Many years ago, at that same service, we were all praying and I was holding hands with a guy that used to be at APC.
SPEAKER_00: I'll call him Bill.
SPEAKER_00: And after we finished praying, I asked Bill, you know, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?
SPEAKER_00: Common small talk question the Sunday before Thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_00: And Bill said, you know, I'll get some takeout, watch a movie.
SPEAKER_00: Now, my hand was still kind of clammy and sweaty from holding Bill's hand.
SPEAKER_00: And Bill did not have very good hygiene.
SPEAKER_00: Bill was very socially awkward.
SPEAKER_00: Bill would not be my first choice for the Thanksgiving table.
SPEAKER_00: He wouldn't be number 40 on my list.
SPEAKER_00: But when my brother said he was gonna get takeout and watch a movie on Thanksgiving, I said, no, Bill.
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna come to our house.
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna be with us.
SPEAKER_00: What else could you say to your brother or sister in Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Because we were strangers.
SPEAKER_00: We are the ones who understand, right?
SPEAKER_00: I hope you can remember what it feels like to be unwanted, unwelcome.
SPEAKER_00: But to practice philosynia, we have to see ourselves as strangers who have been brought in.
SPEAKER_00: The good news of the gospel comes only to us through proactive, sacrificial love of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That kind of love motivated him to leave his safety and security in heaven, to come down into a world where he knew that he was going to be persecuted, beaten, tortured, and rejected.
SPEAKER_00: And he was attracted to you.
SPEAKER_00: He was drawn to you.
SPEAKER_00: We who were once far off have been brought near by Christ alone.
SPEAKER_00: We who are strangers have been welcomed into a family.
SPEAKER_00: And so at the heart of the gospel, we find an outward-looking, stranger-seeking kind of love.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is about an outward-looking, stranger-seeking kind of love.
SPEAKER_00: That's how you were loved by Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And so, friends, who is the stranger around you?
SPEAKER_00: Who's the person who's a little bit off on the margins around you?
SPEAKER_00: When you take your children to practice, is there another parent who's always alone?
SPEAKER_00: No one seems to interact with?
SPEAKER_00: You have a coworker who just seems discouraged?
SPEAKER_00: Who's kind of on the fringes, who nobody likes?
SPEAKER_00: How about at school, children?
SPEAKER_00: How about at school?
SPEAKER_00: Who's the unpopular kid?
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's you.
SPEAKER_00: It was me.
SPEAKER_00: But who's the one who's always sitting alone at lunch?
SPEAKER_00: Who's the reject?
SPEAKER_00: Who gets picked on?
SPEAKER_00: What would the heart of Jesus have you do for the stranger and the unwelcome person around you?
SPEAKER_00: Them or the new immigrant, the refugee?
SPEAKER_00: What I'm asking you to consider is what a proactive, stranger-seeking kind of love might look like in your life, in your family, and in our churches.
SPEAKER_00: Because God's word to all of us today is love the sojourner who is among you, because you were sojourners.
SPEAKER_00: Can we pray together?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, we thank you for your proactive love.
SPEAKER_00: You did not wait for us to clean ourselves up, to get our act together so that we could earn our way to heaven, because that's impossible.
SPEAKER_00: But you proactively moved into the world.
SPEAKER_00: You took on our sin and our death and our shame, and you have made us sons and daughters, children of the living God.
SPEAKER_00: May we never forget where we once were because of our own sin and where we have been brought by grace alone.
SPEAKER_00: And may we have the kind of hearts that welcome others as we have been welcomed by Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Pray in his name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.