Dismissing Jesus (Part 6) - Making Disciples

We have uh been in a series that we've called dismissing Jesus.

And what we've basically been doing over these weeks is we've been looking at some things that Jesus said that are very easy for people in our culture to dismiss and even people inside the church to dismiss.

And sometimes it's dismissed uh because it is maybe just something where you say, I don't know if I really see it as that important.

Or a lot of times it isn't even an intentional thing.

We just get so consumed with our lives that we say, I'm just going to live what I live and not really prioritize what Jesus said.

And so today we're going to look at a familiar section of the New Testament.

You heard it read.

It's known as the Great Commission.

And in it, Jesus basically makes a command.

In fact, the only imperative verb in this section in the original language is to make disciples.

And so it's basically saying, as you go into the world, make disciples by baptizing them and teaching them to do all that I command you to do.

And Jesus, in no uncertain terms, says to his followers who are gathered there, he says, Here's what I want you to be about.

I want your life to be about helping other people find and follow Jesus Christ.

Now, if you've been around church for any length of time, you've probably heard messages on this passage, maybe a lot of them.

And you might have an initial reaction, even when I introduce this, where you say, Ah, here we go.

This is going to be a guilt message telling me that I need to do more, give more, participate in more to help make disciples.

Heard it, been there.

And if you aren't somebody who's been around church a lot or isn't really certain of your own faith journey, this might even be one of those things that when you hear it, you say, ah, this is part of what I don't like about Christianity.

They're always trying to convert other people, always proselytizing, always trying to make somebody else believe what they believe and behave like they behave.

And I'm not sure that I like that.

And maybe you had a relative or a coworker, a friend somewhere who was always inviting you to something, always kind of pestering you, telling you that you needed to believe or consider something.

And so this is one of those things where you just have a little bit of a resistance.

Like this is part of what I don't like.

Just let people believe what they believe and be what they are, might be your reaction.

And on top of that, probably some of us realistically say, you know what, I'm not sure that this really is all that helpful.

And the reason that you might say that is because you know people who believe, who are miserable and miserable to be around.

You undoubtedly know some people who who have all the right doctrine, all the faith, and talk about Jesus all the time, but but realistically, when you're around them, you say they're miserable personally, and they're a little miserable to be around.

And you probably know people who have no Christian worldview, no perspective of God in their life, who seem to be joyful, happy, who seem to go from one good experience to another.

And so there's a little question that that we ask that says, is this really worth becoming a disciple and making disciples of Jesus Christ?

And what we know is that in order to make a disciple, we actually have to be one, that we can't share something that we don't have.

And so what I'd like to do today is just simply talk about two reasons that we dismiss this command of Jesus to make disciples.

Two reasons that maybe we don't find that to be our priority.

And the first reason that I'm going to say that we do this is that we don't have a compelling vision of God.

Now, here's what we see in this text.

Verse 17, it says, when they saw him, they worshiped him.

Now, clearly, that's talking about physically seeing Jesus.

This was the disciples in between the time of Jesus' death and resurrection and his ascension.

And it says they saw him.

So this was talking about physically seeing Jesus, but here's what we know in the Bible, and that is in Hebrews chapter 1, verse 1, we're told that he is the exact representation of God.

Hebrews 1:1

In other words, Jesus is the picture of God that we need to have.

We also know from our Bible in the Ten Commandments, the second commandment says, You shall make no images of God.

I heard somebody say that there are some 8,000 false images of God in the Bible.

I didn't like try to count them, so I don't know that that's true, but but this person said that there are 8,000 plus false images of God in the Bible.

And here's what probably happens for some of us, and that is we get an image of God, kind of a picture of what God is like, that isn't necessarily the true image of God.

And as a result, we say, that's a God that I don't want to believe in.

That's a God I don't want to worship, that's a God I don't want to serve.

And this can happen to both people who say, I'm not sure that I believe all of this, and even to people who say, I believe, but then you don't have a compelling vision of God because that vision of God doesn't compel you to worship, doesn't compel you to bend your knee and say, This is a God that's worthy of my life.

And so what I'd like to do today, as we talk about having a non-compelling vision of God, is just share with you four versions or visions of God that I think are false images, but are common, incorporate maybe a lot of those 8,000 images and keep us from having either a faith in God at all or from being so compelled by it that we say this is worthy of me making it a priority in my life.

So here's the first image that I'm just going to say that we have.

And these are all hinted at in this text, not fully explained, but hinted at.

The first one I'm just going to say is police officer God.

And police officer God is the version of God that some of us have that says basically God is the rule keeper, and he is always on the lookout for anybody who's doing something that they shouldn't do, something fun, and he's gonna put a stop to it.

And if you ever violate what this policeman God, police officer God wants, then he's going to make sure that you know about it and that the charges are filed and that you feel guilt and you feel like you have to do something to win that God's favor.

Now, probably very few of us actually conceptualize God like a police officer, but probably many of us, when we really think about God, don't think about Jesus as the one who went to the cross to be a sacrifice for humanity as much as we think about a divine being with rules to follow and things that we have to do to please this God, and if we fall short, then we will hear about it.

And the hint in this text about this version of God is where it says baptizing, because baptism, and if you were here over the last couple of weekends, you saw us practice baptism.

Baptism is a symbol of a reality, and it's a symbol in the sense that you are washed, you are cleansed, and that you don't do anything, but it's all done for you through Jesus Christ, and and it's a symbol of having had your life changed by what Jesus has done.

See, Romans 8, verse 1 says, There's now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Romans 8:1

And what that's pointing to, what that means, is that the compelling version of Jesus, of God, is a God who comes in grace and says, wherever you are, whatever you've done, I've paid.

But when we have a vision of God that says, I have to obey in order to somehow earn my way, it becomes just another voice of law in our lives telling us all the things that we need to do and how we need to get better.

And that's a false image of God that may keep you from faith or may keep you from being excited to share your faith in this world.

Here's a second image of God.

And this is one that if you were around a few Christmas Eves ago, I think I talked about this.

I call this touchdown Jesus.

Now, here's a picture of a big Jesus with his arms raised, the touchdown, but but the idea has been more popularized probably by the University of Notre Dame.

And I don't think Notre Dame people at Notre Dame actually believe this.

This is more of a joke kind of for them on a whole.

But the idea is they have touchdown Jesus, so when they're playing football against other schools, presumably pagan schools, that they can appeal to touchdown Jesus, and touchdown Jesus will help them get a touchdown and help them win the games.

Now, that worked well when they were really good.

Now that they're not any good, that's not that doesn't work as well.

And my question has always been what happens when they play another Catholic university?

What happens when Boston College comes to town?

And you know, the the the Catholics at Boston College are saying, touchdown Jesus, we need a touchdown to beat Notre Dame.

And the and the and the people at Notre Dame are saying, you know, we need a touchdown to beat Boston College.

Now, you may say you're poking fun.

And again, I think for the people there it's actually all in fun.

I don't think they actually believe it.

But but here's the real view.

And that is, I'll go to God, I'll go to Jesus when I need something, and his role is to help me be successful and to help me be happy.

So I find a way to go to Jesus or God and He'll help fix my life so that my life doesn't have pain, doesn't have hardship, doesn't have any difficulty.

And here's the hint in the passage again.

When we're told that we're to go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them so that they understand salvation, help them find Jesus Christ.

And then it says what?

Teaching them to observe all that I command you.

You see, the the teaching isn't just that that Jesus has done for us what we can never do, but but it's also saying, God doesn't exist for you, in a sense of making your life better, but we exist for his glory.

And when we come to understand that, what happens then is instead of being heartbroken or disheartened toward faith, when something doesn't go our way and we say, touchdown, Jesus didn't give me a touchdown, we lost.

You know, my version of God didn't give me the new job, my version of God didn't let that relationship work out, my version of God somehow let me down.

We start to say, I worship the God of the universe, whether he gives me what I think I need or want or not.

So that's another version.

Here's a third.

I'm just going to call this the force.

And this is maybe a little bit different from the forces that's been explained in movies as I'm using it here, but but for some people, Jesus and God are a little bit like this magical force.

And if you can line your life up with the force, then good things happen, and and some people can really sense the force and sense the presence of God in all kinds of ways.

But what happens for some of us is we might come into a service, a worship time like we've had here today, and you see somebody who's there raising their hand, kind of swaying and everything, and you're like, I'm not getting what they're getting.

Like, I'm not feeling what they're feeling right now.

Any of you ever have that experience?

And when we conceptualize God as a force, something that we'll always feel, something that if we line our life up with, then everything will be good.

What will happen is when we don't sense God, when we don't experience God in our presence, or when things again aren't working the way we think they should, then we'll start to say, I don't know about this God.

I love in this passage what we see.

Here's the hint of it again.

The end of verse 20, it says, And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

And so Jesus says, as you go, as you go to make disciples, I want you to know whatever comes, whatever happens, and many of these people did not experience the force coming through for them.

They died for this mission.

He says, I'm with you, whether it feels like it or not.

And just a little earlier, when it says in verse 17, and when they saw him, they worshiped him.

Do you know what the next phrase is?

And some doubted.

Now I find that comforting.

And I find it comforting because what we see here is that the people who physically saw Jesus, watched him do miracles, saw that he was dead, saw that he came back to life, were with him in this moment.

All of a sudden, the text says they saw him and they worshiped him, but they were still questioning him.

This is, by the way, one of the good evidences for the truthfulness of the Bible, because if you were writing something to be pure propaganda, you'd be like, these men, like they levitated or something.

You wouldn't, you wouldn't say, Oh, these guys were questioning God, questioning Jesus at this very moment, but they were.

And you see, if your version, my version of God is He's this force that helps us in life and we'll always be able to sense him, then we won't have room for doubt.

And if we don't have room for doubt, then the assurance I'll be with you even to the end of the age will feel shallow.

Because we'll say, if I don't sense it, if I don't feel it, then where is God?

But if we have room for that, then we can have a compelling version of God, one who's bigger than our feelings, our emotions, one who's objectively true, even when our subjective experience doesn't tell us that it's so.

And let me give you one more, just kind of false image.

I'm just going to call this the trump card deity.

Now, when I say that, I mean nothing more by the word trump there than the actual idea of a trump card.

So if you play cards, if you've ever played cards with somebody who has a trump card, the highest trump card, do you know what happens when you have the highest trump card?

You sit on it, you wait on it, until all of a sudden you get a chance to throw it down and you're like, yeah, I just I just killed that hand.

And some people have approached faith a little bit like God is a the ultimate trump card to any debate.

And so what happens is they basically say, well, well, since the Bible says something or God has said something, then that ends all intellectual inquiry around that issue.

Now don't misunderstand me, here at Orchard Hill, we clearly believe in the sufficiency and the authority of the Bible, meaning if the Bible speaks to an issue, we believe that that is the final answer, period.

But what happens for some people is because of that, they say no other questioning, no other thinking is even allowed or permitted.

And so when science says something and the Bible appears to say something else, rather than rigorously trying to understand the two seemingly contradictory approaches, it's just, oh no, we just believe the Bible.

Shut down your scientific mind, don't ask the question.

Or when philosophy and the Bible seem to be at odds, people will say, well, okay, you just take the Bible and dismiss the great thinking of our world up until now.

But ultimately, trump card deity, trump card God, leads us to a shallow kind of a faith that when we're confronted with things that are difficult and challenging, rather than being able to enter into a true dialogue around them and come to some kind of an answer, we've been programmed to simply say, just dismiss it.

And here's how this works: you grow up in a church, you go off to the university for the first time, and you encounter a professor who says, There's no reason to believe in a resurrection, there's no reason to believe in the reliability of the New Testament documents.

Why would you believe such a thing?

And if you've had trump card God all the way along, what happens is you say, Well, because the because the Bible says so.

And you haven't learned to think critically all the way along.

And then if you throw in a little bit of police officer God and you say, you know, I want to go have some fun, I don't want any rules right now, and now I have somebody who is intellectually telling me I don't have to believe this, you can start to say, hey, here's my agnosticism, at least for the college years, and maybe my twenties and thirties.

Instead of having a compelling version of God, one that's full of good news, one who says, I came so that you would understand and know who the God of the universe is and could relate to this God.

And this God will bring about positive changes not just in your life ultimately, but give you the promise of an eternity with full restoration, where all that's broken will be restored.

So that's one reason that we dismiss God.

Here's a second one one reason that we dismiss the idea of making disciples because we don't have our own compelling version of God.

And here's a second reason, and I'm just going to say that that's because some of us aren't convinced of the calling, the personal nature of this.

Here's what we're told.

Verse 19, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I command you.

Jesus is very clear to his disciples in that day, and because it's recorded and passed on to his followers in this day, saying, Here's what I want your life to be about.

I want you to organize your life around helping other people find and follow Jesus Christ.

I want that to be the dominant thing that you are.

So if you are my follower, that should be what's dominant in your life.

And here's what happens for some of us.

We say, Well, that's a nice idea, but you know, there's people who give their lives to that.

I can contribute a little to that.

I I can be about something else.

I can be about my own advancement, my own success, my own career, my own comfort.

I don't have to make my life about that.

I'll just I'll just do a little something toward that.

And yet Jesus says, if you're my follower, this is what I want you to do.

I want you to make disciples.

So somehow, someway, he says, your life should revolve around that.

For some of us, what will happen is we'll say, Well, I don't know that I have the ability, the skills to do that.

I I don't know enough, I'm not comfortable enough, I don't have those kinds of gifts.

Again, notice what Jesus says.

He says, I am with you always, even to the very end of the age.

I will help you do what needs to be done, is what he says.

And the idea here is really simple.

And that is when you look back at the disciples that Jesus used, a ragtag bunch of individuals that God used to change the world, he says, I'm still basically, I can still be in the business of changing the world through imperfect, flawed, broken people.

If you'll trust me enough to say, I'm going to point others to what's important.

For some of us, maybe the challenge is a runaway theology that says God's sovereign over everything, and and therefore he's going to do what he needs to do, and I don't need to do anything, but but he's still commanded and said, Here's what I want you to make your life about.

And when our life is about that, what happens is then we begin to see God work in ways we don't expect.

This last Tuesday at our staff worship time, we meet on Tuesdays usually to have a time of worship and teaching and prayer together as a staff.

Russ Brasher, who serves as the pastor to our students here at Orchard Hill, is a great guy.

He and his wife Lindsay joined our team here a couple years ago, along with Jenna Bajuzic and uh Jared and Brooke Avon, have done just a great job with our students.

But but Russ was sharing a story about how he saw God work through he and his wife in a way that he didn't even expect.

And so I asked Rush just to share that story here today.

So, Russ, come on up and uh and share your experience with us.

Thanks, Kurt.

So this past weekend, my wife, Lindsay, and I, we got a chance to go back to Toledo, where we're both from, Toledo, Ohio, and we got to attend a 50th anniversary celebration of Young Life.

Young Life is a youth outreach ministry that played a huge role in both of our lives and helped us come to faith in Jesus and helped us grow in our faith.

And so we were really excited to go back and just celebrate with all the different people that are gonna be there that have helped make Young Life uh be what it was for the last 50 years and get excited about what was gonna come in the next 50.

And if you've ever been to an event like that or or something young life related, you you always know that at some point in the banquet, in the event, a student's gonna show up and they're gonna share their testimony about how God used a ministry like Young Life to impact and change their life.

And sure enough, about halfway through the program, this teenage girl, this junior in high school, got up and she began to share her story.

And the first part of her story was really hard to hear.

And she began to talk about how she came from broken home.

And since she was one year old, when she was one, her dad removed himself from the picture and had been absent ever since.

And that hurt her in ways she didn't know how to process and handle as she grew up.

And she shared about how by the time she had gotten into high school, by the time she was a freshman in high school, she had been diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety.

She had become addicted to self-harm and was hurting herself.

She had attempted suicide on multiple occasions, and she had been using boys and very unhealthy relationships just to feel, as she even said, I knew it was temporary, but just to feel temporary love and comfort and acceptance from male figures.

And that was really hard to hear, and you felt her heart in that.

But again, if you've been in those rooms and in that setting, you know that at some point in the story, the gospel was gonna come, that somehow Jesus was gonna show up in her life and make a difference and impact her.

And then she began to talk about her sophomore year of high school.

She said, as I entered into my sophomore year, everything began to change.

In a way that she described it as God at work in a morale.

Miraculous way in my life.

You see, during her sophomore year of high school, this senior girl, who for reasons that she couldn't understand at the time, began to love her and show kindness and care towards her and began to share her life with her.

She began to do it in the hallways as they passed and in the lunchroom when there was opportunity.

And as this relationship and this friendship grew, all of a sudden there were ways for her to step in and say, Hey, I know that you ride the bus to school.

Can I take you home, you know, so you don't have to ride at home?

Can I pick you up in the morning so you don't have to wake up early?

And those car rides turned into conversations where they shared life one-on-one together, where they talked about the things that she was dealing with.

And this senior girl got to meet this sophomore girl right where she was at.

She said that she walked into my brokenness.

She stepped into my mess and loved me for who I was, where I was at.

And regardless of how I was responding to what she had to say and what she was offering, she just loved me.

And this relationship, this opportunity that was growing, again opened up more doorways for her to invite her to things that young life was putting on where she could hear about Jesus and have fun and process the gospel in ways that she could understand and relate to.

And she said that in her story, it wasn't some young life event, it wasn't a summer camp trip, and it wasn't a specific message that she heard.

There wasn't this exact moment where all of a sudden she understood God's love and she committed her life to Christ, but it was through this relationship, through this senior girl sharing her life with her, walking in life together, discipling her, and finding opportunities to share the gospel with her, not only with her life, but with her words.

And she said, It's because of this senior girl that I came to know Jesus, that I could understand God's love for me through this senior girl.

And the beauty part of her story is she then went on to talk about how when she came to know the Lord, that God, our Father, became the true father figure in her life that she had been searching for her entire life.

She talked about how the event was on a Saturday night and that Friday prior marked the one-year anniversary that she celebrated of being self-harm free, that she had broken that addiction.

And she talked about how excited she was to be able to start doing this, to be able to start sharing her life and using her experiences and her life story to disciple underclassmen now that she was an upperclassman.

She couldn't wait to do it because of what this senior did for her in her life and brought her to Jesus.

And it was a beautiful story, and people were clapping and cheering and celebrating and praising God.

But to be honest, you you expected that.

You knew how that storyline was gonna go.

But what happened next, I didn't expect, and I know my wife didn't expect either.

After she had shared her story, they did something that caught us off guard.

They invited the senior girl who was now a freshman in college, and they brought up on stage and they asked her the question: Why did you do it?

Why did you give up the lifestyle and the freedom that is a senior and all that's out there for you?

Why did you give all that up to spend your life investing in this sophomore girl?

And she said, Well, it's easy.

And really, there were two reasons why.

The first one was because Jesus said so.

You see, she had been studying scripture and reading the gospel, and she came across Matthew 28 where Jesus says, Go and make disciples and share what you know of me with other people.

However, that looks for you, and however you can make that happen, share your life.

Go disciple people, tell them about me, show them who I am, show them how I'm real in your life.

And the other part that she said, the other reason was because I know that if someone didn't do that for me, if someone wouldn't have stepped into my life and done that for me.

And she was talking about her young life leader, Chloe, who Chloe became, she once she got into college, she became a volunteer young life leader, and she decided to invest in this group of girls, one of them being this senior girl, and she discipled and loved her and showed her and taught her everything and what it means to disciple other people and how to share your faith and what that looks like, and how that means car rides and how that means paying for Starbucks, and how that means inviting and sharing life one-on-one together.

She said, Chloe showed me how to do all of that.

Chloe did that for me in my life, and so it was easy for me to model what was modeled for me.

It was easy for me to do what someone else did for me, and that's why I did it.

It's because Chloe did it for me, and so I'm gonna do it for this girl.

And that's when the puzzle pieces in my mind started to get put together.

That's when I started to connect the dots.

Because then I looked over at my wife, Lindsay, who was sitting at my left, and tears at this point are flowing from her face.

Because you see, 11 years ago, 11 years ago from that day, Lindsay was a freshman in college, and we had started to date, and she became a young life leader, and she got placed at a really rough school.

And she found this group of freshman girls, and she said, I don't know what it's gonna look like, I don't know what it's gonna take, but I'm gonna love these girls.

I'm gonna invest my life in them.

I'm gonna share everything that I have to offer.

My Dodge Neon, my little apartment, my minimum wage paychecks.

I'm gonna do whatever I can to love these girls where they're at, who for who they are, and no matter how they respond, I'm gonna find ways to love them and when I can share the gospel with them.

And so Lindsay spent four years when it was fun and it was easy, when it was hard and it was painful.

Four years of her life discipling this group of girls.

And one of those girls turned out to be Chloe.

And all of a sudden, we saw this 11-year impact that discipling can make in ways that Lindsay never thought of.

Lindsay never could have seen had we not attended that.

Because we had no idea who that girl was, we had never met her before, but she came to know Jesus because someone discipled her.

And that girl came to know Jesus because Chloe discipled her, and Chloe came to know Jesus because Lindsay chose to disciple Chloe.

And it's such a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God coming to life here today.

And it's a beautiful story of how discipleship matters, and it makes impacts in ways we can see and sometimes we don't see.

And so that's my story, and thanks for listening.

Thanks, Kurt.

I appreciate it.

I asked uh Russ to share that because a lot of times you can't see what investing in somebody will actually do.

And I thought it was really awesome for Russ and Lindsay to be able to see that 11 years later here's a girl who's no longer cutting, no longer hurting herself because she's come to experience the love of Jesus through somebody that Russ and Lindsay didn't know, through a girl named Chloe that they had invested in themselves.

And so what I want to do for just a couple of minutes is talk about how do we live this today, here.

And I'm going to suggest just three things.

The first is this, and that is we need to take a step toward Jesus.

And I say that because for some of you, you might be here and you might be in the category that says this is one of the things I don't like about Christians.

They're always trying to get other people to believe what they believe, to behave like they behave.

But maybe the Jesus that you've conceptualized isn't the compelling version of Jesus that we find in the gospels.

And so for you, maybe taking a step simply means uh saying I'm going to read the gospels and actually interact with Jesus on his own terms and not just some some version that's been hoisted on me or that I've concocted over the years.

For some, maybe taking that step is today just saying, you know, I have had a false image of God.

And as we've talked here today, I I've come to see that God is the Savior through Jesus Christ and that Jesus has done for me what I could never do.

And maybe today is your day just to say, God, I'll believe that in a new way.

It's it doesn't have to do with the church I go to, the religion that I practice, it has to do with what Jesus has done on my behalf.

Maybe for some you believe that, and that's been part of your life, but you need to take a step toward Jesus because your version of God has become so weak that it's not compelling any longer.

And so the reason that you dismiss Jesus' words is you realistically say, even though I believe the God that I worship is not moving me to witness.

Here's a second thing, and that is I just encourage you to involve yourself in the mission and the ministry of an outward-facing, doctrinally pure church.

Now, certainly, I hope that that's Orchard Hill.

I hope that that's what we do here.

But you may have a different church, you may live in a different location, so so that may be a different place for you.

But but what I'm saying is find a church that teaches the gospel of Jesus Christ, not some uh false image of God.

And then is outward-facing, is intentional about helping people find and follow Jesus Christ, and then say, How can I help serve the ministry of that church?

Because every time that you show up in park cars, you serve in kids' ministries, you lead a student small group, you invest in first impressions, you help in the tech team, you help with the cafe team, you help with the building in grounds to make it what it is.

You you invest in a life group or a life group community, you involve yourself in a study.

Every time what you're doing is you're saying, I'm part of what God is doing here in helping more people come to know Jesus.

And then finally, I just say look for the opportunities personally to invest.

Usually God works through people.

It's a person, whether it's in an organized way or a disorganized way, investing in somebody who becomes a Chloe who invests in somebody who invests in somebody.

And you may feel like your life right now is on a detour or you aren't where you want to be.

But maybe, just maybe God has placed you exactly where you are right now because there's a person like Chloe there.

And God has a mission for you in that, to help at least one person find and follow Jesus Christ in the place that you are.

And even if it's not to your liking, to be able to say, I'm going to arrange some things in my life, to invest in somebody, to help point them to what I believe is most important.

And I know for some of us as we're here, you may say, well, that again feels like the arrogance of Christians, but I don't think it's arrogant.

Because it's not saying, come and be like me, it's saying come to the one that I know is the answer.

I heard somebody put it this way.

They said what Christian evangelism is, what discipleship is, is it's one beggar showing another beggar where they found bread.

And all we really want to do as a group of people who call Orchard Hill our church home is say, we're flawed broken people, but we found the one who has bread.

And we want to share with other people who are hungry where to find bread.

And that's the mission that Jesus calls us to.

So I'm going to pray, and then we're going to celebrate communion today.

And if you're a person of faith, we invite you to come.

You can come to the front from the outsides to the outside.

There's some gluten-free tables in the balcony.

You can go to the back as well.

And just take the bread, dunk it in the wine, and maybe today you just say, God, thank you that through Jesus Christ you have made it possible for me a beggar to find bread, for me a sinner to find life.

Maybe you you'd be able to say, God, I I've had a false image for a while that that's been non-compelling.

And maybe you just confess that to God and say, God, but I'm going to remember that you are the savior, the sacrifice, the one who is actually beautiful and worthy of my worship.

The prayer rails will be open as well if you want to do that.

So would you stand?

And I'm going to pray, and then the team will lead us in song.

Father, we ask very simply today that you would help each of us to have a true image of who you are.

And that it would be compelling to us and compel us to your mission.

And we pray this in the strong and beautiful name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.