Narrow Series Launch

Sermon by Lead Pastor, Nate Levering

Transcript

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Hello and thank you for joining us on the Sierra Bible Church Sermon of the Week. We hope you enjoy this message by Pastor Nate Leverett.

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I did notice some people run around in yellow shirts. Some of you have yellow shirts. That's the color of Vacation Bible School leadership. And so people are out running around already. We hope that this campus uh throughout the week becomes an incredible place to host uh around 500 little ones. We're gonna throw a little party. Uh we're thankful that it looks a little warmer than it did a few days ago when it was like forecast of snow. Uh so we watch the weather super close as we're gonna have kids playing and we hope in every corner of this place experiencing uh God's love through so many of you, through his word, through catching a vision for who they could be uh in Christ. And so super excited about that. Uh again, like like Matt said, if you're new, a special welcome. We've been teaching through uh these last uh number of weeks a series about the Holy Spirit and how God dwells in us by way of the Spirit in our uh salvation and what that looks like to be kind of guided by Him and to walk with Him. And in many ways, this is a continuation of that as we step into a kind of a new series that really I think will help us sort out what it looks like to walk with Him, to be led by Him, to live a life uh in Christ, from Christ, and for Christ in sort of the nuts and bolts of our lives. So start the series off, though I want to uh invite you to just take a look at this picture, and then I'm gonna ask you a question. Some of you guys have been there, right? If you haven't been there, that's like you know, you get off the chairlift, and it's like, all right, which path are you going to choose? How many of you choose the green one? There's Mario. He's a green skier right back there. Just kidding. He's not really. But how about blue? You're like, I like the blue paths, you know, it's kind of a metaphor for life, too. But like blue seems good. You know, we're gonna have some fun, but there's no big cliffs, nothing too dangerous. How many of you are like, I'm totally like a black diamond? Just bring on life, like let's go. Yeah, Kathy and I swam with sharks a few weeks ago. It's like, I'm like, black diamond, let's go double black diamond, you know, unless you leave California and then it gets really steep, I hear. Um, but all of us, right, we we can use this metaphor to think about the choices we make. Uh, and so I want to ask us this question. This is really a Jesus question, it comes from his word, as we'll look at in just a moment, but to ask ourselves throughout the summer together, as we look at God's word, what is the promise of this path? And when I say this path, your path, the one you're choosing, the one you're on, the one that the decisions you're making in life are putting you on. What is the promise? What do you hope to get out of it? What is what is the goal of the path that you are on? It's been fun to just kind of do graduation stuff, and whether it's eat people's food in their backyards and celebrate their kids or go to graduations. But graduations, right, is a time where you kind of ask this question what's the promise of this path? What decisions am I gonna make? Where am I gonna go? And what am I hoping? Or what have I been promised will come to fruition as a result of these choices? I was at a lunch this last week. It was a cool privilege. I had a conversation with a friend that I actually haven't had a real kind of conversation. We've lived in the same community since we went to grade school together, which was a little while ago. So we're sitting down, meeting shrimp tacos, and he asked me, he said, Hey, what is it that caused you, you would say, to get from where we were in junior high to where you are today. And in many ways, it was just this idea of the decisions that I made. I said, you know, hey, what I decided from a super early age was the promise was that life would be all in with Christ. And so if God put a door in front of me and it looked like best I could discern an invitation to follow him, man, I pushed on the door. Sometimes it was locked, it was like, all right, that other times it opened and it became, looking back now many years, the path of my life. All of our paths have some kind of promise to them. We think about even our culture, right? Living in the motherlode, right? I mean, 1850s, we were one of the three biggest cities in California. Why did people come here? Why did people sacrifice? Why would they make decisions that would put them in this place? Because of a promise, right? It's what gets us up out of bed, it's what moves us forward. It's part of the way all of us think. And Jesus wants to invite us in to that. One of the fascinating things I think, and I don't know if you've ever thought about this, it may be fascinating just to me, but indulge me for a moment. You ever thought about why there's such a thing as an American dream? You guys have probably heard that phrase, like, oh, it's the American dream, right? When I grew up in the 80s, the American dream was sort of this rugged individualism, materialism, if you will, kind of have the stuff. Now it's interesting. I mean, it is a fascinating study to me that the American dream changes. There's a lot there. But the American dream now is this sort of sense of sort of self-actualization, this freedom to express who I am and then to be accepted for who I am. Like that's the dream. The American dream is really just a consequence of culture saying this is the path to the promise we all know we want. We all know we need. And so jump on, join me. Some of us live from kind of a I don't want to dream, or my dream, if you will, is that I just don't screw it up. Oftentimes because life's happened around us. And we'll say, Man, if I can just live in kind of a protected place, that would be or bring the promise. Jesus talks a lot about this. If you have your Bibles, I want to invite you here. The one place he just kind of crystallizes this is in Matthew chapter seven. So if you have your Bibles, we're just gonna look at a couple verses in this section uh this morning, but Matthew chapter seven, verse 13. Uh, this is the the has in it the phrase that's gonna kind of uh link together our summer series together here at Sear Bible Church. And um so I'd love for you to kind of underline it, or maybe there's some things you want to circle, as Jesus invites us to consider that that life, in in some ways, at least from his perspective, could be thought about as a kind of choose your own adventure in which, according to Jesus, the consequences hold a pretty incredible amount of weight. So Jesus is gonna say, pay attention. Okay, let's do this. Uh, John, or excuse me, Matthew chapter seven. Matthew chapter seven, verse 13 comes right in the middle for some of us Bibley people, uh, of what section of Jesus teaching? Does anybody remember? Matthew chapter seven, the what somebody said this first service, the Bible. And I was like, Well, can't go wrong there. Does anybody know? Jesus' sermon on the mount, right? So thank you. Some of you guys were saying it. My hearing was not catching it. So this is Jesus teaching the sermon on the mount, and he's teaching people, hey, this is what it looks like to live out this life of faith, this life of following me. And so here's what Jesus is going to say about the path. First, he starts with a command. He says to us these words enter through the narrow gate. Real simple. Go that way. If you're confronted with a number of arrows, choose the narrow gate. For he invites us to consider this for a minute. For for wide is the gate, we can picture that. Broad is the road. He begins to talk about a road that leads to what? Destruction. Many are gonna go through it. You may be on that path, the other side of that gate. Then he says this in verse 14. But small is the gate, the one who's already invited us or commanded us to go through, and narrow the road. And maybe if you have a pen, you would just circle that. Narrow the road that leads to what? To life. Narrow the road. Jesus says that you know, in every way, in every way, life is going to be full of a number of decisions. And those decisions in some way could be kind of you know looked at through a lens that says, here's some broad path decisions or broad pathways to make this decision, and here's some narrow pathways to make this decision. For all of us, we are deciding in some way what path we will walk down. And he says, if you, this is the promise that's part of the path, if you decide, go through the narrow gate, make the narrow path decision. You will have what life. You're created for for this other kind of life. And we're gonna look at a bit this morning what he's inviting us into, because it's different sometimes than what we think or what we seek after as the promise to the path we find ourselves on. A number of years ago, we were coming back. I know it's summer, so we'll kind of do a couple of um, you know, vacation-y illustrations this morning. We were coming back from this amazing week that we were able to have out on Lake Powell, and we came back through a national park, one of the like 45 national parks that's between Lake Powell and Sonora. And uh we are at, does anybody know where this is? Zion National Park. So we're in Zion National Park, and uh, these were our kids back then. You can tell how small the boys are, they're like little munchkins. This one just graduated from eighth grade this week, so they're a little bit bigger now. And so we show up at Zion. We've been messing around, kind of sun-baked already. But here's what we do in our family: we wake them up before the sun comes up, we fill them up with water, and we say, we're gonna hike up there. All the kids were like, oh, this is miserable. But it was amazing. Uh, because we wanted to make this hike. Uh, and if you've ever been to Zion, you know that right in the middle of the valley, there is this like place that you can hike. It's sort of the main hike in the Valley of Zion. Has anybody been there? Anybody hiked to what's the name of it? Angel's Landing. Some of you remember. So there's this hike, it's about 1,500 feet up. So, what's interesting, I think, to some degree, back, is that we had hiked probably about a couple of hours at this point. I had to lie to my children multiple times, for which I've now sought forgiveness not only to my children, but my wife as well, telling them it's only a little bit further when it clearly wasn't a little bit further. But eventually you make it to the place where most people stop. It's this place. This actually isn't Angel's Landing. This is where most people hang out. They get to this place, and you can see the look on their face. This is probably good enough. Like, I see the chains, I see that narrow, like I see the narrow path, but this is pretty good. High five, we made it here. There were four people from our group of 12 that ventured out, one of whom was my buddy Justin. And what you can't really visualize from here because of the colors is that there are times where you're walking out this section to get to Angel's Landing that's literally like a 1,500-foot vertical drop if you step off to the side. So it's like people get nervous about me sometimes with my toes hang over. But like if you just like you're dead, right? So this is where we hike out. So we make our way out. You'll get to see the next picture. This is back where our family's hanging out with lots of other families. You can walk out this. You can see people hiking along here because it gets really narrow. And then you make your way up to the top, which is Angel's Landing, and you get to do something like that. Where your feet kind of hang off the edge, where you you you sort of made it past where a lot of people you you walk the and you begin to get to experience. This is the vision that Jesus is inviting us into in our own lives. He's saying there's a place a lot of us stop. But can I invite you to consider the narrow way? A whole different set of decisions that will take you to a whole different destination. He calls it life. That's the promise. The Bible uses three at least Greek words to talk about life, actually translates these three Greek words all with the same four English letters, L-I-F-E. This is what life is. The first of those is this word bios. When we read bios a number of places in the scriptures, that's the Greek word. Uh, it's translated as life. And this is actually our biological life. Another way this could be this is like our stuff. If you ever think about this, you might think that, you know, if you hear this said about uh a mom, sometimes it might be that, you know, her kids are her whole what? Her whole life. You know, you might hear this about a guy sometimes, you know, fishing is his whole life, right? It's what matters to him, it's what he has. Like it's kind of this idea of like, this is the stuff I have in the story of the prodigal son. When the younger son, the prodigal, went to his dad and he said, Hey, I'd really love it if you were dead. But since you're not dead yet, would you give me half of our BIOS, our life, our stuff? Because I want to take that bios and get out of here and go find life with it. The second way that the scriptures talk about life is from this Greek word psyche. It's a word we get psychology from, and it really is this idea of who I am. It's a word of identity, it's your will. It's it's like what I can do, it's who I am, it's my reputation. The scriptures actually, Jesus himself uses in this word psyche, and he puts it next to the word that he uses in John chapter 7. And here's what he says: gives us a picture of how these two can work together. He says, anyone who loves their life, this is that Greek word psyche, who loves like they clinch onto their like this is who I am. Anyone who loves their life will what? Will strangle it, will kill it, will never enjoy it the way they were created to enjoy. So you can hang on to it, you can make those kinds of broad road decisions, but you will lose your life, Jesus says. While anyone who hates their life, their psyche in this world, anyone who surrenders that, anyone who offers it back to the one who created it, will what? Well, keep it for eternal life. Well, receive, he's saying, this kind of zoe kind of life, a full life, a God-given life, a God-generated life. This is that word Zoe. This is the word that Jesus comes back to over and over and over again when the Bible teaches about life. It's translated in our Bibles, eternal life. It's it's God life. It's it's like a spring that wells up within us kind of life. When John the Apostle introduces Jesus, he uses this language and he's super clear. Some of us know this language at the beginning of John chapter 1. He says, In him, this is Jesus, he's saying, Jesus is on the scene. In him, so he's going to describe him was Zoe, was was life. And that Zoe, that life, eternal life, was the light of all mankind. Peter says it this way, and I I love this uh phrase as he teaches probably the second, at least it's the second recorded sermon in the Bible after Jesus has given his life for us and was raised again. Peter is speaking to uh a number of the sort of Jews in Jerusalem, who, according to what Peter's saying, were the ones standing outside when Pilate came out as a part of judging Jesus. And Pilate says, Hey, like I didn't find anything wrong with him. Like, what do you want me to do? And what did they say? Kill him, crucify him, crucify him. We know the story. Peter is now preaching to them about the invitation of life and the one they killed. He says, This, you killed the author. This is the Greek word archae, it's beginning. You killed the pioneer of life, you killed the one in whom life started. It's a fascinating kind of turn of phrases. You killed the author of life. But really, you can't kill the author of life. God raised him from the dead, and we are witnesses, Peter says, of this fact. It becomes the invitation of Peter to see where life is found. Jesus says, Small is the gate. Friends, narrow, narrows the path that leads to life, that leads to life. This life is described all throughout the scripture, like I said, or especially the New Testament. Uh, and so let's just kind of look at some of those ways. This Zoe life, what is it that Jesus promises? It's a life that's rooted in him. Jesus says in John 10, 10, he says, I came to give this life. People knew that, that walked with him. He said, and and this life isn't just kind of an average life. This is life to the full, it's abundant life. It's empowered by the Holy Spirit. It's marked by love, it's characterized by joy and peace. It's transformative in nature. It starts on changing us on the inside. And you know this passage in 2 Corinthians, actually, like this idea that it's an old, there's an old creation and there's new creation. This is life, zoe life in Christ. It's fruitful in character, it overflows to other. And Jesus uses this picture of a well or a spring that just continues to give life, and then ultimately it's victorious over death. It is eternal. As I mentioned, it wasn't that Jesus said, Hey, I came so that you could have life. And people were like, Oh, okay. But it was that they watched Jesus live and they said, He's got something we don't. He possesses something that we've been searching for. He he has. And if you track with him through the gospels, story after story after story of people coming up to Jesus, the author of life, and saying, How do I get what you have? How do I experience life as you seem to be living it? Nicodemus comes to him in John chapter 3. He comes at night because he's a Jewish leader, and so it's kind of a loaded thing just to hang out with Jesus. And if you remember the conversation in John chapter 3, Jesus eventually will kind of say, Hey, this life I have needs to be kind of birthed in you. It needs to come from some other place. And Nicodemus actually is kind of like, huh? Birth, like a new birth. And Jesus is like, Yeah, it's like, it's like you need to be born again. He doesn't understand this, of course, because he's kind of like, Am I supposed to go up my mind like my mind? I've been born already, Jesus. Like I and he says, No, the life I have is like new birth. It's why some of us maybe talk about our salvation that way. We say, I've been born again. And this is what Jesus is talking about. In fact, in this conversation with Nicodemus, he says, ultimately, that life will come by believing. When I, Jesus says, am, you know, hung up on a pole. He's talking about Moses, kind of confusing in this. And then John, the author, doesn't want us to miss what Jesus is talking about. And so John says, Let me be really clear here with where life comes from, with what born where born again starts. And he pins John 3.16. Maybe you've heard it. If not, let's read it together. For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him, whoever sees him and gets it, whoever sees him on the cross and understands that that is for them. Whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have what? Eternal Zoe shall have life in them. This is the message Jesus gives to Nicodemus. When Nicodemus comes and says, How in the world, the next chapter, do you find Jesus around a well? And he's there midday. His disciples have gone in to get food, and a woman comes out, she's got a story. And Jesus says, Hey, can you get me some water? And because he's Jewish and she's Samaritan, because he's a man and she's a woman, she's Says, how is it that you can ask me for a drink? Like you're breaking all the social. And do you remember what Jesus says? He says, if you actually knew, you think I'm just a Jewish man. If you actually knew who it was that asked you for a drink, if you actually saw clearly who I am and what I could do for you, you wouldn't have asked me for a glass of water. You wouldn't, you wouldn't wonder this. You, Jesus says, would ask me for, and then what does she say? Living zoa water, well like water, new life like water. If you saw me for who I am. Matthew 19 brings all of this together in a story where Jesus uh gets questioned by one that we call the rich young ruler because he was rich and he was young and he was a ruler. He comes to Jesus and he says, literally, as plain as day, he says, How can I get Zoe? How can I get this life? How can I get the promise? He asks. Remember what Jesus says? Jesus says, Well, do the law. He's like, check, I'm doing the law, but I still don't have what you seem to have. Jesus knows. He's inviting him into a conversation. And so Jesus says, Okay, you're doing the law. He says, Go, rich young ruler, and sell this part's key, what's possessing you, and then come and follow me. He says, There's something that's possessing you, something that's keeping you on the broad path. Go and get rid of it, Jesus says. Go and sacrifice it. Go and put it to death in his language and Paul's. Get rid of, sell the thing that's possessing you, and then you will be free to come and fall. It might be your BIOS, it might be all your stuff. In fact, for him it was. This is not the mark of every disciple, but the mark of every disciple is that we sell, get rid of, die to the thing that possesses our hearts, so that we can offer them to Jesus. And for all of us, this is the journey. Jesus then is confronted by a bunch of disciples who think this is impossible. You know, what we're told is this rich young ruler just leaves sad. He he, I can't, I have too much bios, too much stuff. And in their culture, not that different from ours, if you had a lot of bios life, you were close to who? God. Because clearly God was blessing you with a bunch of financial things. I mean, we kind of think this way too. And for them, if a rich person can't get this kind of life, or it's gonna be that difficult, what chance do any of us have? This is when Jesus says, Hey, guess what? Someone that has a lot of bios, it's actually gonna be harder for them to enter into the kingdom of God than do you remember his story? It's kind of funky. Then a what? A camel, Jesus says, to get through with the what? Eye of a needle. And the disciples are like, well, then it's impossible. None of us can experience life. Maybe this life he's talking about is for the next life after this one. And Jesus says, No, there's good news for every one of us: rich, poor, male, female, broken, don't yet know they're broken. There's good news, you're not stuck on your path. There's good news, Jesus says, with with God, all things, all things are possible. If you're willing to take that which is possessing you and sell it. Get rid of it. Here's the way we're gonna use this language throughout the summer uh together. The narrow way, what Jesus is in inviting us into, is Jesus' call to a life of intentional countercultural discipleship. We're gonna talk this summer about this kind of word disciple or discipleship. The word simply means an apprentice, it means a learner, someone that responds to Jesus' invitation to follow. They're just trying to follow Jesus. This is what a disciple is. The scriptures call us Christians about three times. Somewhere around 270 were invited to be disciples. Jesus is very clear in John 10. He says, I am the gate. So when he says the narrow gate, Jesus says, I'm the one you enter into life with. This is how salvation comes. When we in a few moments hold the bread and the cup. These are pictures of who Jesus is and what he's done for us. Pictures of the narrow gate, the way we come to salvation and forgiveness in him. Then Jesus says, I am the way. I don't have a way. I am the way. He says, Come to me, find life as my disciple, apprentice with me. One way we might say it is this: as a believer, I trust in the finished work of Jesus. I receive forgiveness. I receive the indwelling Holy Spirit and the promise of new life. As a disciple, an apprentice, a follower of Jesus, I learn to walk with Jesus, learning from him as his life is formed in me. John Mark Comer wrote a pretty popular book recently, and uh it's called, I forgot the name for some crazy reason. I've read it a few different times. Practicing the way. Sorry, some of you read it with me. It's called Practicing the Way. It's a book on discipleship or being a disciple. Here's the way he kind of breaks down uh what we're invited into. First, we set our sights on simply being with Jesus. Next, the disciple begins to become like Jesus. And then as a part of what it means to be a disciple, we do what Jesus did. So we be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. If you uh spend any time reading, thinking about, studying discipleship, you're going to run into an author by the name of Dallas Willard. In fact, many times he gets mentioned in this book. Dallas Willard uh wrote a number of books on discipleship and what it looks like to be a disciple. My favorite, although not his most popular, is this one called Renovation of the Heart. So if you're looking for a summary, if you're looking for something to jump into, my favorite Dallas Willard uh book and book on discipleship is called Renovation of the Heart. I would encourage you to grab it. What does Dallas Willard have to say about discipleship? He says, here's the deal. First, we've got to clarify in our minds what a disciple is. And again, in Jesus' language, this narrow path is the path of the disciple. They're two in the same. So we've got to decide what this definition is. He says, My definition: a disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do. That's what it looks like to be on the narrow path. To learn how to do what Jesus said to do. A disciple is not a person who has things all under control or knows a lot of things. Disciples are simply people, these are the decisions of the narrow path, who are constantly revising their affairs to carry through on their decision to follow Jesus. And so we're looking at our lives. And when need be, we revise our affairs to align with our decision to follow Jesus, to align with our decision to take the bread and the cup. That's why Randy, in a few moments, as he leads us through communion, will ask us to consider our relationships. And what he's saying is, are your relationships aligned with what you're claiming in Christ? This is what it looks like to be a disciple. He goes on, he says, in uh the Christian mind, he says, I'm learning from him. This is the life of a disciple. I'm not learning to lead his life. He's talking about Jesus. He did very well with that. And that's done and over with. And we don't do that again. What is at issue now is what? My life, your life, how I am going to lead my life. And then lastly, and turns to phrase a bit from what he's saying there. Jesus does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him. Have you noticed that a lot of the decisions you have to make can be made in one of two kinds of ways? This is Jesus' invitation to step into, to choose the way of Jesus, the way permeated with love. Willard then brings the church into these two questions. And we're going to do a little kind of church business here for just a minute as we kind of close up. Willard says this churches only have to ask two questions. Actually, he says, churches only have two questions to ask if I could read. What are those two questions? His first question is this What is your plan for making disciples? This is what churches do. This is what churches have been commanded to do. We're commanded to go and make disciples. Some of Jesus' last words. The second question is like it. Is that plan actually working? This is a question we ask all the time throughout this summer. We're going to put some language around that and put some categories for our thinking that I think will be that they've been super helpful for our team, and I trust they will be for us as well. But we want to ask these two questions. What is our plan for making disciples? And is that plan working? Now, part of putting language around this for us as a church doesn't mean we're making massive shifts because these are questions we ask all the time. But they are bringing clarity to what we do and why we do it. Why are we so excited to host 500 crazy children tomorrow? I mean, that seems like chaos, expensive. Why? Because we believe that every quarter of this campus can be a place of discipleship for these kids. We believe that no matter where they're at, if they're in here having a great time, if they're up here in the building next to us, Jenny's talking about world mission, what Jesus is doing around the world, if they're in story time, hearing about the gospel for the first time, this is all a part of their discipleship. They will see and feel and know the love of Jesus through you. This is what discipleship looks like. It's why we say, hey, let's go all in. Let's let's put all our chips, let's just go. Because this is clearly what discipleship looks like for our young people and for people that don't yet know Jesus. And so pray with us for that. What is your plan for making disciples? And is your plan working? Tomorrow afternoon, I will go to my doctor, and he's going to, as a part of my yearly checkup, put me on this big seat and lift me up into the sky. And he's going to say what he said for the last three years, I'm sure. What he's going to say is this Hey, I see here on your chart that you were planning to lose 10 pounds last year, and I can see here on the scale that you didn't lose 10 pounds last year. And then here's what he asked me. I love this question. He's like, Would you like me to scratch that off the record? Because it's been three years now and nothing's changing. So part of this process, I just say that because we understand, like, let's not keep going down the crate, let's change things as they need to be changed. Let's eliminate what needs to be changed. Because we are a place that has been given God's call to help each other be disciples. And so that looks like a lot of things. And so we're leaning into that. One of the simple ways you'll see this in a lot of different ways is this these silly little stickers that say SBC. Now, SBC stands for wrong. Okay, scratch that from the record. SBC around here never no longer stands for Seer Bible Church. Okay, so it was a great attempt. In fact, it's probably what you know first service said too, but they were equally wrong. SBC stands for the language we're going to put around what it looks like to be a disciple. And we're going to try and do it with our SBC, which obviously stands for Seer Bible Church, in this way. We believe a disciple, if we're to look into God's word and ask ourselves what it looks like to follow Jesus. The response to that, the decisions that put us on the narrow path, can all be summed up in one of three categories. And the first one, uh, and these are in your outline, I think too, is that we would be people that steward our lives with purpose. We believe that our lives before God are given to us, that our breath is given to us, that our energy is given to us, that even our hurts, our hangups, our pains, these are gifts for God's redemptive plan. And so what does it look like? The S, who are we as disciples? We are people that steward our lives with what? With purpose. The B, we believe the disciples, this is what it looks like to be a disciple, is one that belongs in community. Not one that sort of stays casually on the bluff and says, hey, the view's pretty good from here. But one that says, What does it look like for me to connect into this community? What does it look like to encourage this community, to use my gifts in this community, to take a risk and show up at a men's breakfast and maybe meet some guys and ask a question or a women's retreat or a what does it look like to belong in community? And there aren't simple answers, and we're going to walk through these things, but disciples belong in community. It's a community thing, it's relational. And so we stewardess our lives with purpose. We belong in community. And then lastly, see, and these are in no particular order, as you'll see in the diagram that we'll share with you in the coming weeks, but we cultivate our life with Christ. We seek to have hearts that are open when the seeds of the gospel come to us that grow, that multiply, that bless in a kind of zoe sort of way. Now, I thought about, you know, kind of going through these three, and I've been thinking a lot about it. You'll see in the coming weeks a lot of work that we've done on this if you're here with us and kind of going through some scripture and giving some pictures, but I thought, Lei, let's step back. And I just want to share three SBC people that for me capture what it looks like to steward their life with purpose, to belong in community, and to cultivate a life with Christ. I have a friend, his name is Derek. Some of you guys know Derek. Derek, for me, uh, amongst a lot of other names that came up, captures this idea of what it looks like to steward your life with purpose. Derek came to faith in a Christ, not a Christian home, but in a church and just love the church. Love the Lord, this amazing youth group in San Diego. Throughout Derek's life, there have been some, like all of us, some highs and some lows. Some of his lows had to do with church and church stuff. If you ran along enough, you're going to go through some stuff. What I love about Derek's story is he's taken some of those challenges, those hurts that could have become things that repulsed him, that pushed him away. Rather, he said, How do I take these challenges and invite Jesus to make them a part of my redemptive story? Derek didn't need to work until he was 75. And so when he was able to retire a number of years ago, he said, What am I gonna? How do I steward this life with purpose? He's gone back. He's right currently right now in the middle of a doctoral program, learning how to bless churches. He literally goes around and visits churches in our community and churches around us, small churches, and says, How do we do this better? How do we do a better job of making disciples? How do we do a better job of sharing this incredible news of the gospel? If you went to lots of other churches, and some of you may in our community, their pastors know Derek because Derek's just encouraging, he's praying, he's leading, he's gifting in ways that he could have stayed just kind of casually, but he said, I got one life, and I want to steward this thing with purpose. His story is not your story, but your story is has an invitation to steward what you have and who you are in a way that God's purposes have redemptive power. What does it look like then to belong in community? I I the character that came to mind was um a guy by the name of Steve. And I worked for Steve up at Silver Spur when I was going through some cancer stuff. And chances are, if you live in Tuolummy, you know Steve. He loves his community, he loves people there. He's just an absolute servant in every corner. He's like, I have been grafted into this community for its good. Steve will jump in and serve you, he'll help fix your car. If you don't know Jesus, Steve is the guy, more than any other, I think, that meets me out here in the comp and says, Nate, you've got to meet. Because the way Steve's gonna serve you, if you don't yet know Jesus, is try and help you get to know Jesus. And so he's constantly bringing people, constantly sharing, constantly saying, How do I serve my community? He's integrated into our community, but beyond that, he loves and serves our community. This is what it looks like to belong in community. It really looks like we're on mission together. And this is who Steve is. So we steward our life with purpose. We belong in community, and then we cultivate, we cultivate our lives with Christ. What came to mind for me was this guy by the name of Johnny. He'll actually be up here helping us lead worship uh next week. In Johnny's story, I know Johnny from when he was really young. He worked with us in student ministries. Johnny's claim to fame in student ministries when he was a kid. I mean, we were all kids back then in some ways, was this the Johnny Hart Fan Club. Because Johnny has a lot of charisma. If you know Johnny, he's like, everyone loves me. And people love being around him. He has that energy and he's fun to be around. And so he loved being a part of youth ministry because kids idolized him and thought he was great, and he is. But his life, like many of ours, has a story, and it's a tough and it's a challenging story. And throughout those years, to watch him pull back and to watch him bring his story, maybe the story that he grasped onto, and to let God have it. A number of weeks ago, we were talking about doing a video with Johnny and telling their bit of their family story. And he said, Nate, I love that God's using me to lead worship right now. But like, I can't be Johnny Hart fan club. I can't be up front. I can't be that guy. I know that guy. He squelched life. I'm not that guy. I'm learning to cultivate a heart where the spirit has room to breathe. And he breathes life, Nate. And I don't want to lose that. And as we talked, I just thought, man, what a beautiful picture of a life that is just cultivating the spirit's movement and walking with him. And so throughout this summer, we're going to do a number of uh sermons on each of these kind of topics and try and pull them apart and help us consider what it looks like to better steward our lives, to better sort of belong in community and what that looks like in all kinds of communities, from our homes to our local community. And then what it looks like to have hearts that are cultivating Christ's work and movement in them. And so we're excited about that. And one of those steps for us of cultivating our hearts is to share in what Jesus invited us to, and that's communion. And so welcome uh Randy as he's gonna lead us through a time of.

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