Would you please open your Bibles to Luke chapter 6, and we're going to be looking at verses 39 through 49 today.
Luke 6, 39 through 49.
Never trust a skinny chef.
You've heard that before, right?
And it may not be 100% fair, but the idea is that the skinny chef has obviously not availed himself of the fruits of his trade enough to really know how to feed other people.
Now, in today's sermon, we are going to see a contrast between two types of teacher and the respective students that those teachers produce.
And one type is like the skinny chef.
They can talk the talk, they can even prepare meals that look absolutely amazing, but the food tastes like garbage.
And it's guaranteed to make everyone who eats it sick.
Now the other type of chef is like Auguste Gusteau.
You know who I'm talking about?
Somebody does.
Kids?
Thank you, Ratatouille.
The old guy in the front.
Auguste Gousteau.
But anyone can cook.
I mean, come on, that guy.
The chef from Ratatouille, right?
He knows his way.
This one.
He knows his way around the kitchen.
And if his students pay attention to him, if they sit at his table, if they're apprenticed by him, they will not only be fed the most delicious food anyone has ever imagined, they will be prepared to feed others the same.
So to put a word on it, the thing we're talking about today is discipleship.
We're talking about putting our trust in Jesus as our teacher and Lord, being trained up by Him and applying His truth to our own lives and the lives of our fellow classmates, so that when life comes at us, when it hits us, we can stand together for God's glory and for all our good.
So with that said, I invite you to rise as I read today's sermon passage, Luke 6, 39 through 49.
Jesus also told them a parable.
Can a blind man lead a blind man?
Will they not both fall into a pit?
A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone, when he is fully trained, will be like his teacher.
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye?
But do not notice the log that is in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother, or brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye?
You hypocrite.
First take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye.
For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit.
For each tree is known by its own fruit.
For figs are not gathered from throrn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.
The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil.
For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you?
Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like.
He is like a man building a house who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock.
And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.
But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation.
When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.
The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.
Father, send your Holy Spirit now, we pray, to help us to understand what you have revealed here and to apply it rightly to our lives.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
You may be seated.
So today we are in the third and final part of Jesus' sermon on the plane.
And like I said a minute ago, the focus is very much on discipleship.
Of course, the entire sermon has been about discipleship.
But in this last part, Jesus really presses in and challenges us to be the right kind of disciple, which means apprenticing ourselves to the right teacher.
What we're going to learn this morning is that genuine disciples build their life on Jesus and consistently apply his word to their own and to each other's hearts.
So we'll dive right in.
Verse 39, Luke transitions us from Jesus' teaching on judgmentalism to a parable.
And when we see that word parable, we often think of something like a fable or an allegory, which Jesus does, and he'll even do here, but the term can actually apply to a broad range of sayings.
And in verse 9, the parable is a proverb posed in the form of a question.
Can a blind man lead a blind man?
Will they both, will they not both fall into a pit?
In other words, if you need direction, if you're trying to get somewhere, ask someone who knows how to get you where you're going.
Otherwise, you'll end up every bit as lost as them, or even worse.
Now, that's a good general principle, but Jesus shares it intentionally, knowing that the specter of the Pharisees hangs over him.
Remember, the incident that precipitated this sermon on the plain was the Pharisees' rejection of Jesus.
And when they rejected Jesus, they rejected God and they forfeited their place as leaders of God's people.
And so Jesus is challenging, see, Jesus is presenting himself as the only viable alternative, right?
And he is challenging his people.
He's challenging his audience.
Who are you gonna follow?
Are you gonna follow the blind Pharisees over the cliff and into the bottomless pit?
Or are you gonna follow me?
And of course, that's the obvious right answer.
We need to follow Jesus.
In verse 40, Jesus shifts the concept ever so slightly from that of leadership to discipleship.
And he does it in order to make the same point.
He says, a disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.
And that might sound a little bit strange to us, right?
Because our idea of the student-teacher relationship is very much built on a model of technique and skills acquisition.
We generally look to our teachers to give us specialized knowledge about narrow sets of topics.
And so we have history teachers, we have English teachers, we have gym teachers, and so on.
But in Jesus' day, the teacher-student relationship was less like the kid sitting in the classroom and more like the apprentice sitting at his master's feet.
So the the purpose of education in Jesus' day was not merely to prepare you for a job, it was to prepare you for life.
And so an apprentice, or sorry, a disciple apprenticed himself to a teacher and quite literally followed that teacher around as he showed and told his student what to know and who to be.
And in that process, the student became like his teacher.
See, that's at its core, at its core, that is what discipleship is.
To be a disciple is to follow and to become like your teacher.
And in the church, we all play a part in that.
We all play a role in making disciples.
Some do it more directly, some more indirectly.
But that ultimate teacher, whatever we do in terms of disciple-making activity, we don't disciple people to ourselves.
Their ultimate teacher is Jesus.
He is the master.
He's the one that we're all trying to help each other become more like.
Now again, Jesus is speaking in the shadow of the Pharisees here.
So his words are an invitation for us to follow him, routed through a warning not to follow them.
If you make the wrong choice, he's saying, if you apprentice yourself to the Pharisees, then you will end up just like your teacher.
Spiritually cold, insensitive to the work of God, judgmental, and hypocritical.
And it's that last word, hypocrisy, that Jesus chooses to unpack in verses 41 through 42.
The image here is this very familiar one, even for people who haven't read much of the Bible in their lives.
Here's the gist uh the gist.
You notice a speck in your brother's eye, but you don't notice the log in your own.
And so you go and you try to remove the speck from your brother's eye, but you don't take care of your own.
You try to fix him without fixing yourself.
And not only does that make you a hypocrite, it makes you ineffective.
Because how can you get the speck out of someone's eyes if you're trying to look past the log in your own?
Notice something.
Uh Jesus doesn't have any problem here with us trying to get the speck out of our brother or sister's eye.
That's a perfectly fine thing to do.
In fact, it's a good thing to do.
If you see a brother or a sister with something in their eye, the right thing to do is to help them.
And of course, we know that Jesus here isn't talking about specks and laws.
He's talking about sin and vice.
That speck, whatever it might be, is some character flaw in our brother, some sin that needs to be dealt with, some vice that needs to be rooted out.
And the log is the even greater flaw in us that we can't see because it's our flaw.
It's in our blind spot.
So, in part here, Jesus is telling us to deal with the judgmentalism that we talked about last week.
But he's also talking about the hypocrisy, the lack of self-awareness that keeps us from serving the higher cause of truth.
And again, this is the Pharisees' problem.
They're coming after Jesus over all these fine points of their man-made law.
He's not hanging out with the right people.
He's healing people on the Sabbath, which they count as work.
He's not following their Pharisaical tradition.
He's breaking all the rules.
Now, of course, these aren't real specks in Jesus' eye because he's violating the laws of men.
He's not violating the law of God.
He's sinless.
He has no specks.
But even if we could call them specks, they are nothing compared to the full-on lumberyard that the Pharisees are trying to look through as they deal with Jesus.
They completely overlook their pride in themselves, their contempt for the weak and the wayward, their blindness to the word of God, their faithlessness to accept the fulfillment of God's promises.
So, really, are these the guys that we want trying to correct our vision?
Do we really want to take orders from these blind guys?
Do we want to apprentice ourselves to their teaching?
That's what Jesus is asking his audience here.
And the answer, of course, is no.
We don't want to follow them, we want to follow him.
And in saying these things, Jesus tells his audience, and he tells us too, not just who to follow, but how to follow.
Because just as he corrects our spiritual vision, he actually calls us to play a part in helping others to see more clearly as well.
As a pastor, right?
Part of my job, the majority of my job, I'm supposed to be something of a spiritual ophthalmologist.
Whether it's from up here, or it's in my office, or it's in your living room, or wherever it might be, I'm supposed to open the Bible and with God's help remove the specks from people's eyes.
And I cannot do that if my eyes are full of logs.
I can't help you deal with the sin in your life if I am walking in a secret darkness all my own.
Or if I am utterly unaware of some sin, some flaw, some vice that is clouding my own heart and mind.
I can't do it.
But Jesus' words here, they're not just for professional Christians like me.
They're actually for all of us, every single one of us, every disciple of Jesus is called to be a speck remover.
That's part of the gig when we sign up to follow Jesus.
And it's all over the New Testament.
Colossians 3.16, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom.
Hebrews 3.13, exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Galatians 6.1, brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.
And so, whatever shape it takes, whether it's admonition, exhortation, restoration, whatever, this is the duty that we owe our brothers and sisters to help each other see more clearly.
I've been using the word brother and sister a lot.
That's because the word brother shows up three times in this passage.
You know why it shows up.
It shows up because this is family business.
This is what healthy families do.
We help each other see.
I mean, could you just imagine if you had a blind child in your home and nobody ever helped that child?
You just let her bumble about the house crashing into things and knocking over furniture.
It'd be cruel.
That'd be ridiculous.
It wouldn't even enter into our minds to abandon a child to their own blindness.
A healthy family does not leave its members to stumble about in the dark.
No, a healthy family surrounds that member in love.
They take her by the arm, they help her get where she needs to go for her good and for the sake of the entire family.
See, this is the privilege, this is the responsibility of anyone who claims to be a disciple of Christ.
And Jesus doesn't call us to lay that responsibility down.
No, he calls us to lay down the hypocrisy that would keep us from serving one another in this way.
He calls us again and again and again to come before the throne of grace, to plead with him for mercy and grace to help us in our time of need, to remove the logs from our eyes, so that when we go to our brother, when we go to our sister, we can have the peace of mind, we can have the clarity of sight that we need in order to share what they need to hear in a way that can be received without judgment and with all love.
That's what discipleship looks like in a healthy church.
We each as individuals apprentice ourselves to Jesus.
And as a body of disciples, we come together to teach, to admonish, to exhort, to encourage one another to more fully reflect our master.
Now, there is a decidedly cultish way in which we might try to do that.
We could make lists, we can fill those lists with all kinds of rules.
Rules about what you can wear, what you can say, what kind of music you can live, listen to, who you can spend your time with, and so on.
We could do all that, and in the process, we would become just like the Pharisees.
Righteous on the outside.
We put on a heck of a show, but utterly wicked on the inside.
And so Jesus comes at us with another word picture in verses 43 through 45 that quite literally gets us to the heart of the matter when it comes to discipleship.
This is another familiar picture from Jesus' ministry.
And we could summarize it like this: in the same way that you can judge the type and quality of a tree by its fruit, you can judge the type and quality of a person by what comes out of their heart.
Now, of course, Jesus here isn't talking literally about the muscular blood pump that sits behind all of our sternums or sterna.
He's talking figuratively about the heart as the seat, as the sum, as the center of the human person.
In our modern age, we tend to think of the brain as the center of our being.
We tend to think of ourselves as brains on sticks who just walk rationally through the world, making rational decisions about everything we do.
But in Scripture, that honor belongs to the heart.
That actually is the right way of thinking about the human person.
We feel with our hearts, we think with our hearts, we speak from our hearts, we act of our hearts, we even believe from the heart.
These are all things that the Bible explicitly says.
Even when we think we're being rational, we're usually making an emotional decision and finding reasons to justify the decision we already made.
We are centered on the heart.
The heart is what makes us who we are.
That's why Proverbs 4.23 says, keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.
If the heart is poisoned, then you might be the smartest person in the world, but everything you think, everything you say, everything you do will be tainted.
If the heart is diseased, then its words and its works will be rotten.
But if the heart is good, if God has taken the old stony heart that animated us in our sin and rebellion, and he has replaced it with a heart of flesh that's eager to receive the Holy Spirit and to respond to him in love, then that new fleshy heart will overflow with the fruits of genuine faith.
Once again, the Pharisees, they are exhibit of the rotten tree and of the stony heart.
For all their outward religiosity, the bitter fruits of unbelief demonstrate themselves, they they show who they really are.
Jesus names it in Matthew 23, especially in verses 25 through 26.
He says, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.
For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.
You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.
And so again, Jesus does not want to follow them.
He wants us to follow him, whose pure heart is ever displayed through his abundantly fruitful words and works.
And as we bec as we follow him, we become like him.
Not because we followed some program of behavior modification, but because he changes us from the inside out.
See, we often get this backward.
We focus more on the fruit than we do the root.
We we try to change behavior without dealing with the matters of the heart.
I mean, parents, we do this all the time when we want our kids to behave and we don't have the time to actually talk to them.
Or at least we think we don't have the time.
And we simply tell them what to do or not to do, and we back it up with the threat of punishment, hoping that eventually the right behavior will stick and the wrong behavior will go away.
It kind of works.
Right?
Which is why we do it.
But it only deals with the fruit.
It doesn't deal with the root.
It teaches our kids how to play the game and how to stay out of trouble.
But it doesn't teach them to be the right kind of people.
So, kids, listen, not just my kids, but all the kids.
When your parents discipline you, it's not just because you got on our nerves.
I mean, you probably did, but it's not just because you got on our nerves, it's because we love you.
It's because we want you to look more like Jesus and not to become little Pharisees.
And of course, all these things, they don't just apply to parents.
We all tend to default to this kind of approach when we do spec removal.
Like when someone says to you, hey, I'm really struggling with pornography.
What do you tell them to do?
What do we tell them to do?
Get an accountability partner, install covenant eyes on your devices, make some rules, no screens in the bedrooms, no screens after nine, or whatever it might be.
We give them a bunch of things to do or not to do, which are wise things, which are helpful things.
Things which are things they probably need to do, but how often do we actually go after the heart?
Tell me what's going on in your life right now.
What's been on your mind?
What are you looking for when you open up your web browser?
What pain are you trying to numb?
What stress are you trying to relieve?
What desire are you looking to fulfill?
Where's Jesus in this?
What do your prayers sound like when that temptation comes?
See, these are all questions of the heart.
And they're questions that we have to ask when we're looking to remove the speck from our brother or sister's eyes.
But of course, because we need to get the logs out of our own eyes, they're actually questions that we need to ask ourselves first.
The Puritan John Owen, he wrote a lot of great books.
One of his most helpful and most important books is on the mortification of sin in believers.
Mortification is a big old archaic word.
We don't use it often.
It basically just means to put something to death.
And Owen says that if we really want to put our sin to death, we have to target the heart and not merely the behavior that flows from it.
Because if you modify external actions without dealing with internal desires, if you try to fix the fruit without healing the roots, then your sin will only tighten its grip on your heart, and the fruit will get that much more rotten.
You'll be that much more ensnared in it.
And so here's a simple sketch of how Owen says we can put our sin to death.
First, dissect your own heart.
Dissect your heart.
Become a student of your internal life.
Identify the sins that plague you specifically.
Look at your own temperament.
Look at your circumstances.
Look at your environmental triggers, the compliments that tempt you to pride, the aggravations that tempt you to anger, the images that tempt you to lust.
Understand your triggers so that you can either avoid them, or if that's not an option, you can pray yourself up and put yourself on guard before they get the drop on you.
Second, load your conscience with the guilt of sin.
Load your conscience.
Sin is a liar.
Sin makes promises it can't keep, and its end is never life.
Its end is death.
And so don't take sin lightly.
Don't make nice with it.
Don't brush it off, it's no big deal.
No, remind yourself of how dark it is, how deadly it is.
Remind yourself of the guilt that every sin incurs.
Remind yourself of the danger it poses, how it hardens the heart, how it destroys peace, how it invites discipline.
Remind yourself of how evil it is.
Load your conscience with the guilt of sin so that it becomes a stench in your nostrils.
Third, crush sin at its first motions.
Crush sin.
When sin rears its ugly head, hammer it down like a whack-a-mole.
Don't look at it.
Don't flirt with it.
Don't consider it.
Owen says that the moment we begin to entertain our sinful desires or even to negotiate with them, we've given sin the ground.
And so we have to be diligent to shut it down before it creeps in.
Fourth, cultivate a longing for deliverance.
Cultivate a longing.
We have to learn to hate our sin so much that we earnestly desire to be freed from it.
And this is more of a head-level acknowledgement that sin is bad.
This is a heart-level sense of how sin binds us up and keeps us from drawing near to God.
If we do not genuinely long to be freed from our lingering bondage to sin, then it doesn't matter what practical steps we will take, we will inevitably fall prey to our sinful desires.
And finally, number five, apply the cross of Christ to the heart by faith.
Apply the cross.
The heart cannot be purified by our own willpower.
We cannot legalistically strive our way toward purity.
Mortification, the putting to death of sin, is ultimately the work of God's Spirit.
And so the weapons of our warfare are not apps and accountability groups, as helpful as those things might be.
Our weapon is ultimately the cross of Christ.
We have to bring our sin-infected hearts to Jesus the moment sin encroaches.
We have to be reminded that we are forgiven and just how much that forgiveness cost in the blood of God's only Son.
We also need to remember that Jesus, He just as He canceled the record of rights and wrongs that stood against us, He's also shed abroad His Holy Spirit so that we can be freed, not just from the legal claim that sin holds against us, but from the power it it wields against our souls.
And as we do that, as we dissect our hearts, as we load our conscience with the guilt of sin, as we crush sin at its first motions, as we cultivate a longing to be delivered, as we apply the cross of Christ to our hearts, the Spirit will renew us from within.
The Spirit will cultivate in us a desire to say yes to the things that God loves and to say no to the things that God hates.
He will purify the root so that we can bear good fruit.
And we will become like our teacher.
Now, in order for that to happen, we cannot merely listen to the words of Jesus as if he were just some kind of lecturer with an interesting paper to present to us.
No, we have to hear his words and we have to do what he says.
That's the fundamental point of verses 46 through 49.
And again, Jesus makes that point by way of another very well-known parable.
To summarize again, the one who accepts Jesus as their Lord, who both hears and does what he says, is like the man who digs deep and builds his house on the rock.
When the flood comes, the house stands because it's been well built and built on the solid ground.
But the one who functionally denies Jesus' authority by hearing his words and not doing them, he's like the man who builds his house on the dirt.
And when the floodwaters come, that dirt washes away.
And he's left with nothing but a heap of ruins.
Like everything we've seen so far this morning, this is one of those parables that doesn't really need much explanation.
But I have to justify my existence.
So a kid.
Again and again and again.
What Jesus is saying here is that discipleship, following Jesus, applying his truth to our own and others' hearts, seeking to be transformed continually, doing the word that we've heard, discipleship is not a one-and-done kind of thing.
Discipleship is an ongoing process.
As Eugene Peterson would say, it is a long obedience in the same direction.
And so the genuine disciple is not one who says, I decided to follow Jesus that one time at camp when I was 16.
No, the genuine disciple is the one who says, I am following Jesus.
I am hearing his words.
I am doing what he says.
I am striving by all the means that God has provided me to be more like Jesus.
By God's grace, we are building our lives on him, brick by brick, so that when the floodwaters of life in a fallen world break against us, our foundation will not crumble.
When the job disappears, when the bills pile up, when the test results come back, when we get the call at three o'clock in the morning, when she tells you she doesn't love you anymore, when he tells you he's leaving, the storms will come in life.
The waters will rise and they will crash against our walls.
That is inevitable.
If it hasn't happened to you yet, it will just wait.
And the only way to stand in the midst of those rising waters is to build our lives on Jesus.
The only way to make it through this life alive is to apprentice ourselves to the teacher so that we can become like him by grace.
Placing your trust in Jesus.
This is the necessary first step to the kind of discipleship we're talking about.
You cannot claim to follow Jesus as your teacher without submitting your life to him as your Lord.
You just can't.
But that's only the first step.
By faith, we are called to put our trust in him again and again and again, to listen to his words in the reading and the preaching of Scripture, to do whatever he calls us to do, step by step by step.
And as we do that, the great blessing is that we don't walk that path alone.
We walk that path together in the context of the church.
In the Great Commission, Jesus entrusted the task of making disciples, not just to the particular people who happen to be good at meeting with people one-on-one.
No, Jesus gave the task of making disciples to the church.
So we, not just me up here in this pulpit, we are on a mission from God to make disciples.
And so when you volunteer in the nursery, when you speak up in Sunday school, when you take someone out to coffee, when you write someone an encouraging note or text message, when you show up for the small group Bible study, when you with grace, love, and humility reach for the speck in my eye, you participate in the great mission that Jesus has given us to make disciples.
And so I encourage you, be discipled by Jesus.
Spend time with him in Bible reading and prayer.
Avail yourself of the ordinary means of grace.
Drink deeply from the well of his truth and take advantage of every opportunity that we give you to do that in this church.
But don't just be discipled, make disciples.
Don't just take, give.
Don't just receive the gifts of a renewed and sanctified heart.
Let others partake in the abundance of what God is cultivating in and through you.
Don't just sit at Jesus' table and eat.
Feed one another.
That's what it looks like to be a genuine disciple.
And when we follow Jesus in that way, we will become like our teacher individually and as a body of believers.
People will know us by the one who has loved us and we have loved in return.
And people will know our church as the place where you could come to know Jesus.
Follow him, be apprenticed to him, and become like him.
There is no greater reward.
There is no higher goal for the church.
There is no other end toward which that is a means.
That's what we're doing here.
And if you don't want that, if you don't want to be like Jesus, I'm sorry, you're not going to be comfortable here.
Let's be like Jesus.
Let's help each other be like Jesus.
Everything else needs to be a means toward that end.
Let's pray.
Lord, you have given us a great commission.
You have given us a great task.
And we thank you, Father, for the deep and abiding reality that if it were up to us trying to make people look like Jesus, we would fail every time.
But you have given us everything we need for life and godliness.
You have given us your word, you have given us your spirit, you have shown us the way.
And Lord, you have given us a promise that you will work in us, you will work through us, you will work with us, you will work even in spite of us in order to accomplish your perfect will.
So, Lord, we long to see your will be done here.
And we long to be the instruments you use in order to form others in Christ's likeness.
We want to be the kind of place where we could grow to maturity together in Christ.
Not for the sake of being mature or for the sake of being the kind of Christian that other Christians uh hold up as exemplary, as good and right as that might be, but Lord, for the sake of knowing our Lord and making him known.
We need your spirit for this.
We need your grace because we are often so distracted.
Lord, fix our eyes on Jesus and help us together to correct each other's sight so that we might all fix our eyes on him as one.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
You guys can flip a coin real quick.
This table is the place where Jesus has invited us to come and sit with him.
Remember what I said about apprenticeship earlier about the teacher-student relationship.
It's not just that Jesus teaches us stuff from his word, it's that Jesus invites us to partake of and share in himself as the word.
And so, as Robert LeBruce, an old Scottish theologian, said, it's not that we get a better word in the supper, but we get the word better.
Jesus communicates himself to us in a way that isn't merely rational.
It's emotional, it's personal, it's tactile.
You come to the table, and these elements, we don't believe, like the Catholic Church, that they actually become the body and blood of Christ.
But we do believe that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God uses them in order to impress upon us the reality of our union with the crucified body and blood of Jesus.
So he may not be in the bread and the wine, but as we partake of these things, we are reminded that we are in him.
So if you have put your faith in Jesus, if you have been baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, if you have joined yourself to a body of believers where you can be discipled and you can disciple in return, then come to the table.
This is Jesus' table, it's not Hickory Grove's table.
But if you haven't done that yet, if you're not sure about Jesus, or if you're still kind of on the outskirts, or maybe there's some sin in your life that you're nursing and it's keeping Jesus at an arm's length.
Scripture says, hold on a second.
Deal with that, and then you can come to this table.
And so if you have something like that going on in your life, there's no shame.
Bring it.
Let's talk about it.
Let's work through it because we would love for you to be able to come to this table next week.
I'm gonna pray now.
I'm gonna ask the Lord to prepare all of our hearts for this meal.
After I pray, you'll come forward and receive the elements.
After everybody's been served, we'll partake together.
Father, thank you again for this meal.
Thank you for the great gift it is to us.
Thank you for the realities that it impresses deep within our bodies and our souls.
Lord, remind us of the communion that we have with Christ here.
That because we are in Him, we will become like Him.
And although we have all kinds of reasons to doubt, all sorts of obstacles that stand in our way, all sorts of storms that distract us and cause insecurity and anxiety to creep in.
Use these elements now to remind us that our hope is as sure as the bread and wine we hold in our hands.
For our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus and His righteousness.
It's in his name that we pray.
Amen.