What if you were summoned to be part of something so astonishing it was going to restore Earth–not just the planet–but people?
What if you knew this movement was not only a good movement, it was a God movement?
What if you knew accepting your engagement would not only change the next generation and generations to come, but would harvest eternal, irreversible impact?
What if you knew that your response would not only heal others, it would heal you?
What if you knew that in responding to the invitation you would encounter some of the most remarkable people alive, and that some of those people would become your most treasured friends?
What if you knew that accepting the invitation could cost you everything?
How would you respond?
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Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Buddy Hoffman
Series: One Story: Digging Deeper
April 7, 2013
Church: Shall I Join the Church?
Matthew 16:13-19; Acts 1-2
If you have your Bible open, open it to Matthew 16. We read this passage actually a couple of weeks ago, but I want to start here anyway. “When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi…” (Matthew 16:13) Now that is about 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee.
It was the center of Caesar worship, and they worshiped the god Pan there, which is where we get our word pandemonium. It was a very pagan, secular, powerful place that would be unbelievably intimidating. It’s where the mouth of the Jordan River is. Those who were superstitious actually thought it was there that symbolized the gates of hell.
In verse 13, he says, “‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ ‘Well,’ they replied, ‘some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.’ Then he asked them, ‘But who do you say I am?'” (Matthew 16:13-15) Now Jesus isn’t having an identity crisis here. Jesus isn’t going, “Who am I? What do people think of me?” He was saying, “Do you understand who I really am?”
“Simon Peter…” By the way, that word Simon, the Hebrew of that is like, “Hear, O Israel.” Can you hear God here? Simon Peter, the one who hears, “…answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ Jesus replied, ‘You are blessed, Simon son of John, because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you. You did not learn this from any human being.
Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means ‘rock’), and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell…” I’m reading out of the New Living, and it reads well sometimes, and I understand their intent, but they sometimes dynamically translate things. Literally, the gates of hell. That’s what is there. The gates of hell “…will not conquer it.” (Matthew 16:16-18) The gates of hell will not prevail.
That’s an actually a really important statement, because what it describes is that the church isn’t on the defensive. When you attack another city, you don’t take your gates down and go beat on their gates. When you’re going against the gates of a city, you’re not sitting back in a fortress mentality, saying, “Oh my goodness, they’re coming after us. What are we going to do? How are we going to survive?”
No. What he describes is that the church is on the offense and the gates of hell are really fearful of you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where you…this kind of weirds people out…a demonic situation, where somebody actually was possessed, and they had been involved in demonic things.
The only thing Satan really has going for him is fear. You do know that. He can’t really hurt you. The only thing he has going for him is fear. If you succumb to fear, then he wins. If you decide, “No, I’m not afraid of them…” As a matter of fact, they need to be afraid of us. You do understand that, don’t you? We’re the ones who have power. They are the ones who have already been defeated.
Now you need to recognize this. This is incredibly important. He says, “The gates of hell will not prevail.” Look what he says. “‘And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven.’ Then he sternly warned the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” (Matthew 16:19-20) Later on, he’s going to say, “That was not the time, but now is the time.”
Now on the bottom of your handout sheet, there’s a set of questions. What if you were summoned to be part of something so astonishing it was going to restore Earth, not just the planet, but the people? What if you knew this movement was not only a good movement, it was a God movement? What if you knew this undertaking was not only going to change your community, it was going to reverberate globally?
What if you knew accepting that engagement would not only change the next generation and generations to come, but would harvest an eternal irreversible impact? What if you knew that your response would not only heal others, it would heal you? What if you knew that in responding to the invitation you would not only encounter some of the most remarkable people alive, some of those people would become your most treasured friends? What if you knew that in accepting the invitation it would cost you everything?
That’s what’s going on here. Look over to verse 24. “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways…'” Okay, do you hear that? “‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways…'” (Matthew 16:24) That word, that description there, is repentance.
The church does not like to hear that word repent. Sometimes people come and they have problems, and they’ll tell me what their problems are, and I’ll say, “Well, here’s the answer. You need to repent,” and they go, “Well, can’t you give me five steps to make things better.” “No, I can give you one. Repent. Repent. Turn around. Change your mind.”
“‘…you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it.'” (Matthew 16:24-25) Let that settle in a little bit. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. It’s just like back when the children of Israel were wandering through the desert, and God was feeding them manna.
On the one day they weren’t supposed to pick up any manna, on the Sabbath, he says, “Make sure you pick up enough for the Sabbath day, and you won’t gather any manna on the Sabbath day, and the manna will stay sweet, and it will be preserved.” Some of the people thought, “On the other days, I’ll just kind of put some back in reserve.” Every time they tried to get more than they needed for that one day, except over the Sabbath, when they would come back and look at the manna, it was soured! It was gone.
When we try to hold our lives back from Christ, what we end up with is something that is not really what we want at all. “‘But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.'” (Matthew 16:25) Now isn’t that interesting? If you’ll just give up your life. Now that sounds like kind of an easy thing to do, but how many of you know by experience it’s hard? Yeah.
I mean, I remember this struggle I had, and I still have, of thinking, “I have a plan, and this is my plan. This is the way I want to work it. It’s my life, and I’m going to work it out my way.” It has taken years. It’s easier now to get to the place where I realize I’m pulling it back and knowing what we give to him, when we give him our lives, we’re not really giving up anything; we’re gaining God’s power, God’s creativity, God’s providence. This isn’t a sacrifice. It’s really silly.
Suppose Bill Gates came to you and said, “If you’ll just give me your bank account, I’ll give you mine,” and you said, “Well, Bill, I’ve worked real hard, and that money I put in there is kind of really precious to me.” He goes, “Listen, if you’ll just give me your bank account, I’ll give you mine.” “Bill, you don’t understand how many hours I’ve put into this thing.”
“By the way, if you’ll give me the deed to your house, I’ll give you the deed to my house.” “But Bill, I have a mortgage.” Bill goes, “Well, I don’t. I have some margin.” “No, Bill, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” Bill and God are not in the same categories. They’re not even in the same categories. Here’s what Jesus says: “If you will just give up your selfishness…”
I have a book in my library that says, “What about the hard sayings in the Bible?” This is not a hard saying. This is a generous, insanely gracious offer! “Give up your selfishness and give me your life, and I’ll give it back to you.” Wow. “O God, you’re really hard on us.” “If you try to hang onto your life, you’ll lose it, but if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”
Look at this. “‘And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in the glory of his Father and will judge all people according to their deeds. And I tell you the truth, some standing here right now will not die before they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.'” (Matthew 16:26-28)
Now if you’re looking at your handout sheet, probably particularly if you’re not a normal attender at Grace, and you walked in and said, “Man, I really need a sermon for my soul,” and you looked at the handout sheet, and the title was “Shall I Join the Church?” you probably just thought, “Oh no, they’re on a membership drive.”
Let me just tell you something. If you think that, you don’t know us well, because it’s actually rather hard to join here. I mean, we have classes. You have to go to those classes. You have to fill out your testimony. An elder has to read that testimony. Just trust me on this. This is not about an intention of getting more people to become official members.
Really my motivation here would be more likely that our official members gain a greater clarity on what we’re involved in. If you’re like church shopping, this message might be the push that sends you to another store, because you might not care to engage in what we’re selling. There are four questions there.
1. What am I joining when we talk about the church? This might come as a massive surprise to you, but there’s actually nothing in the Bible about joining the church. There’s nothing in the Bible really directly that commands you to go join a church. There’s nothing in the Bible that says…
Like when I grew up, you had church letters. Does anybody remember those days? You had a church letter. If you were going to move to another church, you would go forward and say, “My church letter is over at such and such church.” They would write the church, and they would write you a letter of endorsement, saying you were a member in good standing, and you would move your church letter to another church.
I’ve had people ask me, “Can I be members of two churches at the same time, because I live part of the time in Florida and I live part of the time here?” There is nothing in the Bible about that. That may come as an absolute huge surprise to you, but there’s nothing in the Bible about that. The only place that it comes some level of reference to that is the book of Romans is a church letter.
It might come as a surprise to you that the book of Romans was carried by a woman, and it was a letter of endorsement. So the churches had this practice of when somebody moved off to another place, they would give them a letter of endorsement so you would know the kind of people you were dealing with. So it’s an old tradition, but there’s nothing particularly hard and fast in a clarity of commandment.
When we talk about joining the church, we join the church because we are tossing in our lot with the King of Kings. We’re choosing sides. We’re declaring we’re with Jesus and the Jesus movement. We’re making clear our loyalties. What we’re going into, and Jesus is really clear on this, is we’re going into a spiritual war, but it is a war that we already know who wins.
In our staff, we filled out the brackets. Do any of you do the bracket thing? We ought to do a church-wide bracket next year. Wouldn’t that be kind of fun? I think Scott is going to win the bracket. I’m losing badly. I think the team I picked to win everything went out in the first round. It was gone already. One of the highest brackets we have is one who just picked which mascot they thought could beat up the other mascot, but since the Cardinals can’t beat up much, they’re going down too.
Here’s what he says. If we choose to play it safe, we lose the opportunity to (in the words of Jim Elliot) trade what we cannot keep for that which we cannot lose. If you’ve been engaged in church long enough, you know that in some ways the church is an expensive enterprise, and I don’t just mean in time and money. I’m going to be really direct here. If you really choose this Jesus movement that Jesus calls the church…listen to what I’m going to say…if you do it the way Jesus meant for it to be done, people die. People die.
There are places on the planet that it has never been more dangerous to be a follower of Jesus. There are people who I think about daily and pray for daily that it would not come as a surprise to me if I received a call in the night that they were dead. I have lost friends. I have friends who have lost partners. I’ve sat with them as they wept.
Mike and I, a number of years ago, were in Iraq. I’ll never forget it. We’d just come back from a water project, and we were staying with a couple. His name was Joseph and his wife’s name was Elzabeth. We walked in the door, and she was standing there washing the dishes, and tears were coming down her cheeks. She didn’t even look over. She just said to Joseph almost in a whisper, “They’ve killed our friends.”
Right up the River Euphrates, a group of good, decent, godly people… (As a matter of fact, that group of people was from Saddleback. My heart goes out to Saddleback Community this morning and Rick Warren.) They put an RPG in the car and some of those people were shot 87 times. I have friends who are in prison right now for the gospel.
When Jesus is calling the disciples, these disciples were being called to death. There are people in prisons all over this planet who are walking the path of Paul and Peter and Stephen and a host of others. If the church is safe, it is not the church. What we have done in America is domesticated the church. We’ve turned the church into a once-a-week meeting catering to the felt needs of a self-centered culture. If we live under the delusion the church is no longer persecuted, we are delusional.
You do understand that in Iraq today if you decide you are going to be a follower of Jesus, it’s criminal. They’ll cut your head off. I’m not talking about radical Muslims will cut your head off; I’m talking the government will cut your head off. If you decide you’re going to follow Jesus in Afghanistan today, and you say, “I’m going to follow Jesus. I believe the Bible.” I’m not trying to get political here, but the government we have set up, in their Constitution, does have religious liberty.
It’s a good question what we’re fighting for. If we’re not fighting for religious liberty, I don’t know what we’re fighting for. I know that bothers people when I say that, but if we’re going to fight, don’t you think we ought to fight for freedom? I’m really going to get it on that one, I know, but I don’t really care. There are some things that are more important than people liking you.
In Saudi Arabia, if you decide you’re going to be a believer, they will come to your town, they will take you out of your house, and on the city square they will cut your head off. Every year, people get their heads cut off for being followers of Jesus in Saudi Arabia. Do you know why we don’t say anything about it? Because we want their oil! We don’t want to go, “Oh guys, don’t you think you ought to take it a little easy there?”
In Iran, if you decide you’re going to be a believer, they will put you in jail. They will torture you. They will hang you up. They will kill your family. Now we sit very comfortably in a church where we get into a little trouble because somebody doesn’t like what we have to say, but I’m going to tell you something. When we take the church and domesticate it, we are not embracing the church Christ established.
2. Who am I joining? When you pick your paths, you pick your partners, and when you pick your partners, you pick your path. Look over to Mark, just the next book over. It’s the shortest of the Gospels. Look at verse 14. “Later on, after John was arrested…” (Mark 1:14) By the way, does anybody remember what John was arrested for? Anybody remember? What was John arrested for? It was a debate about a definition of marriage. I’ll let you think about that a minute.
Verse 15: “‘The time promised by God has come at last!'” Now if you’ve been going through the One Story, this is where the Messiah comes. This is part of this One Story. “…he announced. ‘The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the [euaggelion]!'” (Mark 1:15) This new kingdom. This kairos moment. This moment that is pregnant with possibilities.
“One day as Jesus was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew throwing a net into the water, for they fished for a living.” (Mark 1:16) If you read the older translations, literally it just says they were fishermen. It wasn’t like they fished for a living. No, their life was fishing.
“Jesus called out to them, ‘Come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people!’ And they left their nets at once and followed him. A little farther up the shore Jesus saw Zebedee’s sons, James and John, in a boat repairing their nets. He called them at once, and they also followed him, leaving their father, Zebedee, in the boat with the hired men.” (Mark 1:17-20)
I really wonder how many of us would feel if Jesus walked in to our youth group…because these guys were young guys; they were teenagers…and said, “I want you. I want you. I want you. I want you”? Your kid came home from youth group and said, “Jesus has called me.”
“What has he called you to do?”
“Follow him.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’s it going to end up?”
“He didn’t tell us.”
Do you know, right here, when Jesus calls these men they all end up dying? Do you understand that? They all end up dying. I hear this all the time. People are so concerned about, “Is it safe?” Now let me just tell you something. Following Jesus isn’t safe. It isn’t safe, but it’s amazing.
You as parents (and most of you who are sitting here this morning are parents) need to ask yourself, “If my child is called and he’s called away from me, am I okay with that?” Look over to Hebrews for a minute, because when we start talking about, “Who am I joining?” there’s a whole passage in Hebrews 11. It’s called the hall of faith, and if you go down through there, you see Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and David and Samuel and Rahab. They’re amazing stories.
But look down to verse 35. “Women received their loved ones back again from death.” Now I think about this passage a lot. Look what it says. “But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons.
Some died by stoning, some were sawed in half, and others were killed with the sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world…” Again, in the older translation it says, “Of whom this world was not worthy.” “…wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.
All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. For God had something better in mind for us, so that they would not reach perfection [or fulfillment] without us. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.” (Hebrews 11:35-12:1)
3. Where are we going? The answer to that is really simple. We’re going where people don’t know. We’re going where people don’t know the gospel. We’re going where people need Jesus. We’re going after a generation of kids who do not know. Mark 16:15 says, “And then he told them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone. Anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved. But anyone who refuses to believe will be condemned. These miraculous signs will accompany those who believe…'” (Mark 16:15-17)
4. Why should I join? This last one is where it ties in with the One Story. Look over to Luke 24. “Then he said, ‘When I was with you before, I told you that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:44-45)
Now do you understand what he did? He gave them the hermeneutic to understand all the Old Testament. How do we understand the temple? We understand the temple was a picture of Jesus. How do we understand the wilderness? How do we understand that? We view the entire Old Testament through the lens of Jesus.
Look at verse 46. “And he said, ‘Yes, it was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the dead on the third day.'” Now look at verse 47. “‘It was also written that this message would be proclaimed in the authority of his name to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem…'” (Luke 24:46-47)
Do you know what he’s saying? There is a new age that’s coming. Just as this age of the fulfillment of the Messiah, just as the Kingdom Foundations, and just as Kingdom Families, and just as Kingdom Freedom, each one of those chapters in this One Story, he says in this gospel you have just lived through King Messiah, and you’re now going to live into the kingdom expansion. This was prophesied. This is the time that you live.
Here’s what you’re going to do. Verse 47: “‘It was also written that this message would be proclaimed in the authority of his name to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem: “There is forgiveness of sins for all who repent.” You are witnesses of all these things. And now I will send the Holy Spirit, just as my Father promised.'” (Luke 24:47-49)
Look over to Acts 1. You know this passage. This is where Luke is like Volume One; Acts is Volume Two. In verse 8, he says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria…” (Acts 1:8)
Look over to chapter 2:14. After Pentecost, “Then Peter stepped forward with the eleven other apostles and shouted to the crowd, ‘Listen carefully, all of you, fellow Jews and residents of Jerusalem! Make no mistake about this. These people are not drunk, as some of you are assuming. Nine o’clock in the morning is much too early for that.'” I think that’s a funny part of that line. “‘No, what you see was predicted long ago by the prophet Joel:
“In the last days,” God says, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams. In those days I will pour out my Spirit even on my servants—men and women alike—and they will prophesy.
And I will cause wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below—blood and fire and clouds of smoke. The sun will become dark, and the moon will turn blood red before that great and glorious day of the Lord arrives. But everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”‘” (Acts 2:14-21)
Now if you remember, as we’ve been going through here… I’m holding the sign up so you won’t break my heart, because if I started asking you if you remember, you wouldn’t. Each one of these has a color. Each one of them has a symbol. The first 11 chapters of Genesis is what? Kingdom Foundations. Oh, you guys are such good learners.
Then the second chapter of this One Story, see, it has a symbol. It’s the stars. Remember what God told Abraham? “Go out and look at the stars.” That’s what? Kingdom Families. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. Those are our stories. Then there’s Kingdom Freedom. This is Exodus, and this is where they are delivered out of bondage.
Then we have Kingdom Fighting. Do you remember this? This is Joshua, and this is Judges. This is actually where they take the land. Then we looked through the Famous Kings. Remember this? This is the Famous Kings, and who are the famous kings? Saul, David, and Solomon. That’s 1 and 2 Samuel.
Then we have the Fractured Kingdom. There’s a bull, because the northern kingdom is where they started worshiping the bull. That’s 1 Kings 12 through 2 Kings 24. You can read through the entire Bible narrative that way. Then that fracture, when they fall completely in idolatry, God allows them to go into Exile. Do you remember what exile is? That’s where God allows you to go physically where you already are spiritually. That starts in 2 Kings 17. Daniel, Jeremiah. There are a lot of prophets we talked about there.
Then there’s Kingdom Return. There’s Ezra, Nehemiah. Esther is in that part. Then there’s this Expectation, that the King is coming. Isaiah 40-66 starts talking about all that. Now last week, we talked about Jesus. There’s King Jesus, and that is Jesus and the disciples and the death, the burial, and the resurrection. The episode, the chapter we live in today, is the church. It’s Kingdom Explosion.
Now why does that matter? Because this is what God is doing now. The Bible is not just a bunch of moral stories telling us how to live a good life. It does. It’s not just a bunch of good narratives teaching us how to lead better. It’s not psychobabble. It’s how the King of the cosmos, the Creator, gave us a world that was beautiful, good, and true, and we committed treason against God, and God set in place, even before the foundations of the world, a reclamation project, a restoration project, a redemption project and how he was going to redeem.
I like to think if I had been Abraham, and God said, “Hey Buddy Abraham, I want you to leave Ur, I want you to go over to this place you don’t know, and you’re not going to get it, but your kids are going to get it, and through your offspring I’m going to bless the entire world,” I like to think I would’ve been like Abraham. Wouldn’t you like to think you would be like Abraham? Wouldn’t you like to think, “I would’ve done that”?
Abraham isn’t perfect, and for all we know, God may have asked five people before Abraham said yes. Sometimes people say, “Why do you think God called you to preach?” I think the reason God called me to preach is because the person he asked who was so much better said no. I read the Bible, and I like to think I would’ve been like Joshua. When God said, “Go march around Jericho seven times, and then the walls are going to fall down,” I like to think I would’ve gone, “Yes! That’s a great plan, God.”
I like to think I would be like David when David goes down to the battle, and they’re all just terrified, and he goes, “Who is that?” He uses actually some interesting phraseology. He goes, “Who is that uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the living God?” I’d like to think I would be like David, and I would’ve reached down…
I remember standing in the valley where that battle was fought, and I said to Jody, “Hey, let’s grab a couple of rocks.” She reached down and she picked up these tiny, little rocks. I said, “Hey baby, that’s not big enough to kill a giant. You have to get a big rock to kill a giant.” I like to think I would be like that. I like to think if God was doing something and I was alive that I would hear his voice and I would say, “God, I want to be part of that.” But let me just say this to you. The best evidence of what you would do is what you do.
If you have this idea in your head that you read the Bible and you would’ve been there and you would’ve been a disciple, and you aren’t a disciple, and you don’t care about those who don’t know Jesus, and you don’t listen to Jesus now, and you don’t follow Jesus now, and you don’t let go of your life now, and you don’t hand your life over to God now, you wouldn’t have done it then either.
I often think about Noah. Noah, man! Building an ark. We’re going to put animals in it. A hundred years! We’ve tried to do building programs here and we’ve tried to raise money and tried to do this and tried to do that. Building a church is not the easiest thing in the world, but I can’t imagine building an ark, and I can’t imagine explaining that to Jody.
I had some chickens for awhile at my house that were a big enough problem. I can’t imagine saying, “We’re going to put two of every kind.” Can you imagine being on that ark and you’re just shoveling stuff every day? You go to visit Noah, and you go, “Noah, don’t you get tired of messing with all those animals all the time?” I think Noah would’ve looked up at you and said, “Yeah, I’m a little tired of some of these animals, but it’s still the best boat afloat.” Amen?
You like to think of Daniel and his friends. People want to experience God, but they don’t want to walk in the fiery furnace. They don’t want to look the king in the eye and say, “Whether God delivers us from your hand or not, God will deliver us. If God delivers us through martyrdom, well God will deliver us through martyrdom.”
We need to recognize when we look through the book of Acts, because this is our story… This is why it’s important. Timing. You can look through the rest of the Scripture, but the timing of where we are is we are Acts people. Acts is an unfinished book. The story of the church is yet to be finished.
I personally believe the greatest churches that are going to be maybe haven’t even begun yet! It would be absolutely amazing to me, and God, please let it be so, that among our kids you would walk by and you would go, “I want that one. Follow me. I want that one. We’re going to change a whole country. I want that one. We’re going to change a whole culture. I want that one. We’re going to change a whole campus.”
The church. If you think of the church as boring, you’re not doing it right. You don’t understand the church. The church isn’t just about this gathering and listening to someone talk and us singing some songs. This is about the kingdom of God exploding and expanding globally and locally. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the American culture. I will say this. Apart from another great spiritual awakening, the church is not going to just be marginalized; it’ll be criminalized.
If you dare stand and say you believe what this Book says, you’re going to find yourself in a situation where you’re going to lose jobs, homes. Churches are going to close down. I guarantee you. But do you know what? It wouldn’t be the first time. We get a chance to find out what we really believe, what we really value, what really matters.
But what I believe is going to happen is we’re going to see a great awakening, and where everybody sees this famine spiritually, I think it’s going to be a massive feast. I think the church is coming together like I have never seen. When I look at those kids, I look at our… You ought to come over here one night and watch middle school. How many of you have been over here with middle school? I’m going to tell you something. They’re going to embarrass you. You’re going to go, “Wait a minute. Those guys get this better than we do.”
Go downtown some Sunday night. You’ll walk around and you’ll go, “My goodness, these kids are serious about this.” I sat down with a kid the other day. He is getting his PhD in some kind of like astrophysical something or another that I can’t even pronounce. Do you know what he said? “I got this degree because I’m taking it to China, and I’m going to share the gospel in the universities in China.” Amen?
Do you know what? He’s not going, “Would your mission budget support me?” He’s figured out and prayed and found out how he can do this, and his wife is excited about it. Pray! Let’s ask God, “God, we want to be your church.” We’re not talking about budgets and buildings. Yeah, we need a building, but your family is not a house. Your family is your kids, your wife, your husband. Now you might need some more bedrooms or something. That’s a problem, but it’s a nice problem, amen?
Now we need to recognize what we are being called to. We’re called to the church. Let me tell you something. This walk, this journey, this engagement may feel sacrificial, but man, it is an amazing adventure. Let’s pray.
Lord, thank you for you. Thank you for how amazing you are. Thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your love. Thank you that you have called us into something we aren’t qualified, but you have promised to do miraculous things in our midst.
We’re going to take a moment. We’re going to receive the offering. I’m going to walk down front over here. If you’re here this morning during worship and you just need somebody to pray with you… It may be over work stuff. It may be over health stuff. It may be over marriage stuff.
If you’re here this morning and you’ve never received Christ as your Lord and Savior, and as we were talking about that, you were just saying, “I want that. I want to receive Jesus Christ as King and Lord of my life,” I’m going to meet you down front here in just a few moments. We want to share with you how you can come into God’s kingdom. Amen.