Luke 5:1-26

Luke 5, 1 through 11 says this.

One day as Jesus was standing by the lake of Gednesareth, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God.

He saw at the water's edge two boats left there by the fishermen who were washing their nets.

He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simeon or Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore.

Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, Put out into deep water, let down the nets for a catch.

Simon answered, Master, we worked hard all night and haven't caught anything.

But because you say so, I will let down the nets.

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break.

So they signaled their partners in another boat to come and help them, and they came and they filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell down at Jesus' knees and said, Go away from me, Lord.

I'm a sinful man.

For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken.

So were James and John and the sons of Zebedee, Simon's partners.

Then Jesus said to Simon, Don't be afraid.

From now on you will fish for people.

So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything, and followed him.

Let's pray.

God, we thank you for your word.

And Lord, you know, you know our story, you know just where we're at, Lord, as we walk through that door and the little chime makes its funny noise as we come in.

Lord, you know the hairs of our head.

You know everything that's ever happened to us.

God, you know us better than any other person.

In fact, you know our heart better than we know our own hearts.

And Lord, we surrender ourselves to you.

And we we we just confess we need you.

We believe that your word is inspired and can speak to our lives and that you give your Holy Spirit to speak to us.

So, Lord, as we look at this text, we pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would work in our lives.

Thank you for just the testimony that Yuvon shared.

We ask, God, for just that type of work in our life.

That God, you would bring about just a a radical saving work in our circumstances.

Lord, we know you want to save us from our sin and from hell.

But Lord, save us where we're at today.

Lord, you know those circumstances.

Lord, would you would you rescue us?

Speak a word to us, we pray this evening.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So there were two crazy stories that happened this week in the news.

Two two unique stories.

The first one was the story of a woman named Michelle Myers.

She is from Buckeye, Arizona.

She had a very bad headache.

She went to bed and she woke up the next morning with a British accent.

She's never been out of the country.

She does have a passport, and doctors call this the foreign accent syndrome.

You can Google it.

It's a fascinating story that uh that was told.

An amazing, amazing kind of uh deal that took place.

The second story that took place that was just kind of bizarre was this story about a Toronto-based firefighter named Constantinos Danny Philippidus, who's 49.

He just disappeared on an annual trip with friends at Whiteface Mountain in Wilmington, New York on February 7th.

This launched a six-day search for Philippidus involving a helicopter, canines, and 140 people a day combing through the snowy mountains.

Then on Tuesday, this last week, February 13th, Philippidus was found at Sacramento, California Airport in good health.

The New York State Police said he was still wearing his ski clothes, including his helmet and his goggles.

But he couldn't recount how he got there.

He just, it was something happened where he's totally forgotten how he got there.

He can remember kind of sleeping a lot at a big ring, was his story.

Two bizarre stories, out of the norm, right?

When you read them, they really the reason why they got into, they became a headline was because they're not normal.

You see, we live and we believe that normal is how life is supposed to happen.

Normal is kind of the baseline for life.

But yet normal is the backdrop in which God works supernaturally.

Here's the thing.

We call normal, or what we call normal, is actually a world fallen from God's original design.

What we consider normal is really a fallen world.

And here's my question for you as we go into this text.

Are you settling for normal?

Are you okay with the brokenness, the sickness, and the dysfunction that you experience on a weekly basis?

Have you surrendered your expectations to what has become a normal routine?

Or are you fostering and cultivating a vision for the supernatural intervention of God in your life?

You see, this is the difference between kids and adults.

We have a story after story in Scripture where God breaks through, He breaks through the normal and He makes Himself known.

When you look at a little child, they have not yet experienced the devastating, many, many have not experienced just the devastating things that can happen in life.

And many children are optimistic.

They retain a hopefulness, a dream in their life.

And yet, as life goes on and we experience different pieces of life, it's easy to become a skeptic, to lose that hopefulness and that optimism.

And yet, God wants to take by his word and by his spirit and breathe into us a vision for his work in our life.

In Romans chapter 10, verse 17, it says, consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, or maybe you've heard the translation, hearing the word of God.

Romans 10:17

The message, the message is the word about Christ.

You see, our faith is built up as we read Scripture.

The Spirit takes what we read and builds us up in our faith and gives us a vision for life.

I'm not talking about blind optimism or faith in faith.

We're not talking about necessarily the Schuler, you know, dream a dream.

I'm not asking you to come up with your own good ideas for your life.

But I'm asking you to let Scripture influence your perspective on life.

I believe that that will result in a hopefulness, an optimism, and a vision for more.

You know, just two blocks from here, so the street that is right here is Register.

The next street down is Durham.

You know, Durham's used to be called Happy Alley.

It had that alley as well as Register and a couple of these other alleys, had the largest concentration of free colored men before the Civil War.

And at the end of Durham Street off Alicianne was where the Aulds lived.

And the Aulds was the residence where Frederick Douglass was enslaved as an eight or nine-year-old boy.

And Mrs.

Auld, when Frederick Douglass came into the home, she decided that she would teach Frederick Douglass to read.

Up until the point at which Hugh Auld, Mr.

Auld, found out that this was going on, and she had Mrs.

Auld stop the learning process.

And so Frederick Douglass writes this in his biography.

He says this very soon after I went to live with Mr.

and Mrs.

Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the ABCs.

After I learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

Just at this point of my progress, Mr.

Auld found out what was going on, and at once he forbade Mrs.

Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it is unlawful as well as unsafe to teach a slave to read.

To use his own words further, he said, If you give a slave an inch, he will take an L.

A slave should know nothing but to obey his master, to do as he is told to do.

Learning would spoil the best slave in the world.

Now, said he, would would uh spoil the best slave in the world.

Now, said he, if you teach that slave, and then uh Douglas comments, speaking of myself, how to read, there would be no keeping him, it would forever unfit him to be a slave.

He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master.

As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm.

It would make him discontented and happy.

Now, going back to Douglas, he says, These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering and called into existence an entire new train of thought.

It was a new and special revelation explaining dark and mysterious things, that which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggling in vain.

I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty to wit the white man's power to enslave the black.

He goes on to explain that once he learned to read, he had a new sense of freedom.

And I would take this text and suggest to you that we live enslaved to normal, to this baseline in our lives.

And yet God wants us to take and encounter his word and have the same experience that Douglass had, where you're set free to have a higher vision from life, that your faith is fed through Scripture, and that you have an optimism that is birthed by the Spirit of God in your life.

Tonight we're gonna look at three accounts where Jesus worked miraculously.

There's going to be a voice in your head that wants to mute these stories, censor these stories, from encouraging you to trust God for miraculous intervention.

Do you hear that?

We're going to read these three stories, and there's going to be a part of you that wants to mute and censor these stories from their full impact.

Let me encourage you to let down your guard for the next few minutes and allow the Holy Spirit to encourage your heart.

So we look at this first story with Peter.

The Lake Genezaret is also the Sea of Galilee.

In the other accounts of Matthew and Mark, they call it the sea.

Luke likes to call this the lake of Genezaret.

It's the same area that we kind of spoke of last week, this whole Galilean area, and we encounter Peter.

This is the Peter who will go on to be one of Jesus' closest companions.

He will be a leader in the early church, and he will write two letters that will be included in Scripture.

So we look here at the text and we see the fisherman Peter.

But this is the Peter who will go on to lead the church.

This is going to be, this is one of the early encounters that Peter had with Jesus.

There's four, four early encounters that Peter had.

So this call for these disciples to follow Jesus, for some of them, they had more than one encounter with Jesus.

And we see specifically four.

There may have been more.

In 1 John 1, 40, we see Andrew brings Peter to Jesus and says, I have found the Christ.

In Matthew 4, 18 through 20, Jesus is walking along the shore, and he sees Andrew and Peter cleaning their nets, and he says, Follow me.

Then last week in Luke chapter 4, we see Jesus in Peter's mother-in-law's house.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

That may have been out of chronological order.

We don't know because Luke seems to be combining related events, but we see it could have chronologically happened before this event.

So we see Peter's mother-in-law being healed by Jesus of a severe fever.

And then fourth, we have this account of Jesus teaching.

Now, the way that this lake works is you have these rolling hills that just go straight into the lake.

There's not much shoreline to speak of.

And so as these large crowds would gather, the speaker would feel kind of pressed out into the water.

And so it says there that Jesus saw these two boats that he could sit in, and he took one, went out, and he had this great acoustics where people could kind of spread out on the shoreline and hear Jesus teach.

Jesus calls these men's men to be disciples.

The one thing that I wanted to key in on this text, first of all, don't want to discount the fact that what takes place here is miraculous.

Right?

These Peter says, when Jesus says, let's go out into the deep and let's let down our nets again.

Peter has been fishing and he already says it's not going to work.

Like we're not going to catch anything.

Jesus is not a fisherman, he's a carpenter.

Right?

But he has some authority because he spent this time teaching.

He's already laid claim to Peter's life, and he's caught in a common dilemma that you and I are caught in as we walk with the Lord, where God asks us to do things that don't line up with our expertise.

We come into the scene thinking, I'm the expert, right?

I know this setting.

I know this well.

I know what is normal, right?

And yet the Lord wants to speak into what is normal and he wants to raise our vision to a higher level, right?

That God can break through.

He is allowed to break through.

He is allowed to break into what is normal.

Are you going to let him?

Are you going to let him this week?

Are you going to let the Lord break into what is so routine and average?

Now I just want to say in passing on this particular narrative, and Peter as a fisherman, I have, and maybe you've heard this as well, growing up in the church and being around a lot of Christians and going to Bible college, and probably heard more sermons than I care to admit.

But I have many times heard Peter in his fishing vocation disparaged.

After Jesus has been crucified and raised from the dead, Peter goes back fishing.

And it's kind of like Peter is what suggested is that Peter backslid, that he left the Lord, and he stopped caring about the things of God and he went back to fish.

And let me tell you something.

I do not see that in the text at all.

I think that what happens within our culture is that there's a kind of a platonic thought that exists.

A Platonic way of thinking about the world is kind of you have a grace versus nature, a supernatural realm versus what is common, right?

And they're kind of against each other.

And what is supernatural and what is of grace and what is heavenly is of greater value than what is earthly and what is natural.

This played out in art in a number of ways, where what's earthly was kind of put in the background and what was spiritual and special was put into the foreground.

Sometimes you talk about like the ministry being a higher calling.

All of these things are not a worldview that comes at us through scripture.

And in fact, uh scripture teaches us a more holistic view of the world.

Not a kind of spiritual things are better.

Fishers of men are better than fishing for fish is better.

Go back to Genesis chapter 1, verse 26.

Genesis 1:26

If we go back to that passage, what did when God created the heavens and earth, he created mankind, it says in verse 26, then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and all the creatures that move along the ground.

You see, when God created the world, he gave mankind a vocation.

It was not unspiritual for Adam to go and care for the garden.

And yet, somehow in history and in kind of Christendom, there has crept in this idea that fishing for men and being like a pastor or full-time ministry is a higher calling than you know being a fisherman, a guy that's fishing for fish, right?

In fact, in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul tells the church, wherever you are saved, whatever vocation and place in life that you're saved in, you need to stay there.

1 Corinthians 7 · chapter mention

Now, there is a great thing that takes place in people's life.

And obviously we're called to set our mind on things above.

But when we start making the things above, the heavenly, have you ever heard the saying he's so heavenly minded that he's no earthly good?

That's a dichotomy, right?

It's a false dichotomy.

That that being heavenly minded has to be divorced from being earthly good.

But and so this the ramifications of looking at at the earth as a lesser, as as the natural world as a lesser thing than the spiritual arena gives birth to all kinds of problems.

It leaves us kind of at a dead end or at a cul-de-sac when it comes to vocation, because most of us work, right?

Most of us have jobs.

And so how do you redeem that?

How do you redeem the thing you spend 40 to 50 hours a week doing every week?

And yet, if but if you view it as something that's carnal or unspiritual or a lower calling, then you're stuck.

It also views our it affects our view of pleasure, of enjoying nature, you know, of going for a walk or exercising.

That can be viewed as though that's carnal, and it's a lower thing.

It's not engaged in God's work.

That's that's that's not how God wants to be.

It affects and has for years in the Catholic Church infected a view of sex and sexuality.

That oh, that's that's carnal, that's base.

Look, the the key, the hermeneutical key to understanding this is we go back to the garden, how did God create the heaven and the earth?

How did he make it beautiful before he was fallen?

And it'll speak in.

So so I just as we look at Peter here fishing, and as he's called to make fishers of men, that's God calling him to that, right?

But it's not necessarily a better calling, right?

It's not it's a different calling, but it's not a better calling or a higher calling.

You see that God wants to work through you.

As you do your job, you are a uh you are doing that original Adam work.

This week, you're gonna go do your job.

You're gonna some of you are um security guard, you're answering phones at Comcast, you know, you're Working, you're a salesperson.

All of these are forms of caring, doing the atom work of caring for the garden.

Right?

God has God could provide for everybody spontaneously, right?

He could care the care, he could provide food for everybody, but what he has seen fit to do in the world, to care for people in the world, is to do it through the work of human beings.

Right?

Through human economies, right?

Through through the farmer.

He's ordained the farmer to be the one who provides the food for um for us to eat.

Right?

He could just put it on your table.

It could just appear.

But instead, he has ordained the worker, saved or unsaved.

Do you notice that?

You don't have to be the saved farmer to be a part of God's plan.

No, work is a part of God's plan that still exists in the world.

So for your work to be redeemed, it doesn't mean that you have to have a midday Bible study every day.

It doesn't mean you have to put all those crazy Christian bumper stickers all over the palace to redeem your work.

No, God can work through you in your vocation to fulfill his plan.

Amen.

So one of the things in the back of your bulletin is the five for five.

Right?

The whole idea, part of our church, is this five for five.

This is a belief that we are all called, that we are all given relationships with people strategically, in our natural environment.

That if you think about this last week, that you were around people that don't know Jesus yet.

And those people are placed there for you to reach.

So while we want, we do outreach.

I mean, I was here, what, two or three days this week, right?

Derek, we were here.

And we're sharing the gospel with people, and there's people we need to pray for Tommy.

You know, we need to pray for Robert.

There's people we need to be praying for that we're reaching through this place.

At the same time, you've got at least five people that God's put in your life that need to hear about the Lord.

So that's why this is always on our bulletin.

That's why it's a point of emphasis.

We're praying.

What are the five?

What are the five that are in our life that we can do these five things for?

Let's go to the next um the next account.

The next account.

Verses 12 through 16 says this.

And now I'm going to jump out of the NIV version because I have it printed here in the HCSB version.

You know, so organized, right?

Okay, so verse 12 through 16.

While he was in one of the towns, a man was there who had a serious skin disease all over him.

He saw Jesus, fell face down, and begged him, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.

Reaching out his hand, he touched him, saying, I am willing, be made clean.

Immediately the disease left him.

Then he ordered him to tell no one, but go and show yourself to the priest and offer what Moses prescribed for your cleansing as a testimony to them.

But the news about him spread even more, and large crowds would come together to hear him and be healed of their sickness.

Yet he often withdrew to the desert place and he prayed.

So we we come across this individual who has leprosy or he has some other kind of one of three serious skin diseases.

I can't remember the other two from my studies this last week.

But Leviticus 13 makes this provision.

In the law and when God spoke to Israel, God gave specific instructions for a Hebrew plagued with leprosy on how he could be diagnosed by the priest, like the specific diagnosis, and then how to evidence total healing.

So if when you have time, go back to Leviticus 13, 1 through 6.

Here's just a couple of verses.

It says the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, when anyone has a swelling or a rash or a shiny spot on their skin that they may be a defiling, it may be a defiling skin disease, they must be brought to Aaron's the priest or to one of his sons who is the priest.

He goes on and talks about examining the sore, and it's fascinating.

So this guy has this disease and he comes to Jesus and he says, If you're willing, you can make me clean.

You gotta love that.

You gotta love just, I mean, that expression of faith.

Right?

That is how to pray, right?

There.

I know that this isn't say like, here's how to pray, but that is how to pray.

Right?

You come before the Lord, you say, Lord, if you're willing, you can do this.

That's right.

You know the disease, you know the brokenness, you know the the affliction, the lack, the poverty, whatever it is.

God, you know it.

And if you will, you can remedy this.

Now, um, this this text is interesting because one of the reasons it's interesting, one of the things that I wanted to draw out and look at it, is Jesus' instructions after he's cleaned.

Uh, in verse 14, he ordered him to tell no one, but go and show yourself to the priests.

Right?

So, so that instruction for this man seems so counterintuitive.

Because the Christian, doesn't it, doesn't it seem weird?

Like, why is Jesus, who we're commissioned to, though we're fearful, we're like to make him famous, right?

The Lord's prayer is hallowed be your name, you know, on earth as it is in heaven.

Hallowed, hallowed means let your name stand out above every other name, let your name be famous.

So why is Jesus, after healing this man, saying, Don't tell anybody, just go to the priests?

Like, why is he keeping this on the down low?

What's going on here?

I would say this Jesus wasn't interested in big crowds.

He was interested in followers, disciples.

In fact, Jesus was establishing the way.

In Acts, before Christians were called Christians, they were first called the way, not the crowd.

They weren't called the crowd, they were called the way.

Because what they did was a lifestyle.

So Jesus was not looking for a big crowd, Jesus was looking for followers.

The word disciple means people who sit in a classroom and listen to the teacher.

Right?

That's Josh's kind of loose Greek paraphrase of the word.

Right?

So Jesus here will draw crowds.

But Jesus at the same time, you look at it, it's fascinating.

You read through the rest of the Gospels, you read through Acts, you look at the epistles.

The goal is not a big crowd, the goal is a group of followers that are committed to Jesus and committed to one another.

And so this is a part of this is kind of what's what's shining through here in the text.

As we look at Jesus, he um Jesus instead of crowds, Jesus is gathering followers, he's also calling these followers to do life together.

He is forming the church.

We might call this quantity over quality or quality over quantity.

Right?

He wants these people, like he's investing in these disciples.

12 and then 70.

And he knows.

He knows that that crowds come and go.

And what he's really looking for, what it like, as people even come to him and he engages with people, he is not saying stuff to keep people around.

Remember John 6?

He's got a whole crowd around him.

In John 6, what does he say?

He says, Look, unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you can have no place with me.

And what does the narrative say after that?

A bunch of people left him.

Right?

When the rich young ruler came to him, did he try to say something to the rich young ruler that would get all of his other rich young ruler buddies to come?

No, he said, you need to go sell everything you've got and come and follow me.

Right?

He was not doing something that would necessarily build a crowd.

We rejoice in the crowds that were saved on the day of Pentecost in the following weeks.

But it's about followers, right?

He Jesus wants followers.

He wants, he is looking for people who will follow him in a new way of being human.

Let's look at this last passage here, 17 through 26.

17 through 26.

On one of these days, while he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea, and also from Jerusalem, and the Lord's power, the Lord's power to heal was on him.

Do you see that in verse 17?

The Lord's power to heal was in him.

Verse 18, just then some men came carrying a mat, a man who was paralyzed.

They tried to bring him in and set him down before him, since they could, but they could find no way to bring him in because of the crowd.

They went up on the roof, lowered him on the mat through the roof tiles, into the middle of the crowd before Jesus.

Seeing their faith, he said, Friend, your sins are forgiven you.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees began to think, Who is this man who speaks blasphemies?

Who can forgive sins but God alone?

But perceiving their thoughts, Jesus replied to them, Why are you thinking this in your hearts?

Which is easier to say, Your sins are forgiven you, or to say, Get up and walk.

But so you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.

He told the paralyzed man, I tell you, get up, pick up your mat, and go home.

Immediately he got up from before them, picked up what he had been lying on, and went home, glorifying God.

And everyone was astounded.

They were glor giving glory to God, and they were filled with awe and said, We have seen incredible things today.

An amazing account.

So we're we should, many of you are familiar with this story.

If you're not, I mean, it's just a great scene of these buddies of the paralyzed man that are willing to go to the lengths.

When, you know, I know I might carry the guy, right?

I might carry the guy to the door.

It's like, oh, buddy, it's crowded.

It's crowded.

I don't think we can get you in today.

Maybe tomorrow, you know.

Let's just sit here.

Maybe you'll come by on the way out.

No, these were persistent friends.

They're like, oh, look, we could get on the roof, we could cut open the roof, we could lower you down in the middle of the room.

This is like, you know, some practical joke movie, right?

Like, what's going on?

But it says Jesus, when he came down and saw their faith.

Right?

He seed, he saw through all this activity, he perceived in them faith, that they're trusting in God.

And so Jesus says, your sins are forgiven you.

Well, we were introduced at the beginning in verse 17 to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.

These were the legalists, the people who really knew the law well, and they believed they had a relationship with the law of God, that they they believed that by doing the law well, they would be considered righteous in God's eyes.

That because they would take literally out of their garden, they would take their herbs and they would break off, you know, one for God, nine for me, one for God, nine for me.

And they would literally count out their mint and roux and cumin seeds.

And they were meticulous about being, you know, ceremonially clean.

And so they had this internal pride that their righteousness came from the works of the law that they did.

And these are listening to Jesus, and Jesus just drops this bomb on them that hey, your sins are forgiven you.

And their alarms go off.

You can't do that.

Only God can do that.

That's not fair.

What are you doing, you know?

And so Jesus says to them, but so that you may know, this is verse 24, but so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he told the man, Take up your mat, get up your mat, and go home.

And immediately he's healed.

Amazing, amazing.

This is the one.

We are the followers of this king, right?

King Jesus who heals this man lower down on the mat.

It's amazing.

But let me say that I put this in your notes, right?

So that you can um, so that you can tweet this out, you can share it on social media.

I think it's one thing to walk, okay.

So actually, before I take my nice quotable quote that I stuck in your bulletin, this last week one of the brothers was nice enough to bless me with a car wash.

He washed my car for me, which was like the most loving thing somebody could do for me.

And probably even more loving for my wife, because she just loves having a clean car, right?

So he cleaned my car and I it gave me the opportunity to walk across the neighborhood past the school that we love so much, City Spring Elementary, right?

And I stop in there and I'm checking in with them, and remember they're the ones that we got the 160 winter coats for, and we provided them with all those school supplies, and then we bought them coffee and bagels for the 90 staff members, and they loved it.

Um it's been it's it's going really well over there, right?

So I checked in with them.

It's almost time.

It's time to buy them bagels and coffee again.

So the um, and we're gonna do it on the 26th.

If you want to help out, we're gonna help, we're gonna get them some, we're gonna bring in actually a coffee cart and get them some nice coffee this time.

But that's off the point.

So the the the principal was over there, Dr.

Rashad and I, and we talked about the coffee day on the 26th, and I and I said to her, um, what else do you guys need?

Now, mind you, we're a tiny church, right?

We don't have much of a budget, but but we're their church.

Like we are the neighborhood church that that is supporting them.

When I introduced myself to them, I told them, I'm sure you have a lot of other churches that are helping you, we just want to be in the mix.

And she said back to me, we don't have any other churches that are helping us.

So we're their church, right?

We love them, we want to support them as tiny as we are.

So I said, What else do you need?

And she said, you know, well, one thing they need is they need like lots of paper.

So if any of you have any um connections to like a paper company with all like white paper, it would really help their budget.

But the one that I latched on to, she said, you know, there was this kid, this school in Atlanta, and they surprised one of the classes with a free trip to go watch the new movie, the Black Panther movie.

And this this was filmed, like all these kids dancing on the table, so excited to be able to go see this movie.

And she said, I was texting with a couple of my teachers in the school, and we would love to let our kids go and see this movie.

And I'm like, wow, that would be cool.

That would be really awesome.

Now, this is like this school, this school is like 98% black.

There's a couple of like Latino kids in there, but this is like this is these kids are like would identify with this movie really well.

It's it's it would be awesome.

So I'm like, how many kids are we talking about?

367, fifth through eighth graders, right?

And the landmark theater, they're like, it's 750 a kid.

Like, that's not a deal.

750 a kid, right?

And then I'm like, but okay, how are we gonna do this?

So I'm thinking, Lord, that's an awesome, awesome thing.

But how are we gonna do that?

How are we gonna get these kids, right?

So I I picked up, I told her, you know, let me make some phone calls.

So I got this one guy who's really generous, and he's able to write a check like that, and I called him, I just said, hey, look, there's these kids.

You won't understand.

He's really old, you know.

I said, I just I really want to bless him, and I need I need$2,500.

I want to get these kids tickets to go see this movie, right?

And uh he says, he says to me, I'll write the check right now, and I'll put it in the mail for him.

And I was able to tell her, you know, and then I got an I got somebody else who was gonna donate the other 500.

And uh, and so you know, she's she's thrilled, she's excited.

I think March 2nd or 3rd is when when we're gonna take the kids.

They gotta walk, because they can't afford the buses, they gotta walk from City Spring down to President Street to Landmark Theater, but they're gonna be able to see the movie, right?

And it's awesome.

Here's the thing it is one thing to walk into the school and tell Dr.

Roschetta that we love the staff and we care about them.

But it is significantly more powerful to say we love you guys, and we're gonna raise$3,000 to take your kids to see this special movie.

Right?

I think it as a church, as the church walks around town, it is easy to be the church that says, hey, your sins are forgiven you, which is huge, right?

That's what we need.

That's the at the core of who we are.

We need our sins to be forgiven.

But it isn't it, but at the same time, that church is is it is not healing the suffering of their community.

It is easy to be the church that says your sins are forgiven, but it is much harder to be the church that says your sins are forgiven, rise up and walk.

Right?

What we feel called to as a church is to not just say, hey, your sins are forgiven.

But we feel called to meet physical needs in our community.

We can't meet all of them.

And it really, you know, like it if I'm anxious about anything as a pastor, and the things that grieve me the most is the fact that I can't meet every need that walks into the compassion center that we're connected with.

But we are trying.

You know, we're doing Trader Joe's food on Fridays, and we're giving this last week we filled 21 families with Trader Joe's food, and we had a little bit extra that was provided.

Um, we're we're running this place and we're doing what we can because this is the thing is that through those works, as those needs, as people's needs are met, it gives substance to the message of the gospel.

It is so hard.

It is hard when you are sinking, when you feel like you're underwater financially or through your circumstances, to have a church just say, Hey, your sins are forgiven you.

Now your life's all better.

That doesn't do it for you.

Right?

It doesn't, it doesn't.

And so the the model that Jesus gave us is that there is the saving life of Christ.

Yeah, Jesus paid for our true problem, our sin problem, and imputed to us his righteousness.

But his kingdom was breaking through on a daily basis as he preached about the kingdom, people's lives were healed and touched.

So as this man's leprosy was removed, right?

And as this paralytic man was like touched and healed, it evidenced, it gave credibility to this kingdom of heaven that is at hand.

Right?

That's what we're invited into.

We are called, Jesus wants to introduce you and I to a new normal.

He isn't looking for you to be a fan in the crowd.

He wants you to be a follower, living by faith.

And that faith will express itself in very real ways as we do life.

I don't know what the steps of faith look like for you.

I don't know what your what it looks like, like for you to meet somebody else's need, for you to live out the gospel.

The beautiful thing about being saved in the new covenant is that God places his spirit in us and he directs us into the good works he has authored for us.

It's not my job as a pastor to say, this is what it looks like for you to bless one of your five by five this week, to take it and to just communicate in a real tangible way the gospel to one of these people in your life.

I don't know what that's like.

But I know this that the Spirit of God lives in you and lives in me and will lead us this week into those very things.

And the beautiful thing is we do this life together.

We cheer each other on, we encourage one another, right?

We we share one another's burdens, we participate in this together.

So Jesus has called us to not live an average life, but to live a life that is adopting his new normal, where his kingdom invades, interrupts, and erupts into our average life.

Amen?

Amen.

Let's pray.

God, we thank you for letting us be a part of your family, that we're not just in the crowd, but that we get to be a follower of Jesus.

Lord, would you, by your spirit, work in our lives?

What does it mean, Lord, for us to follow you in our story?

Not my story, in the story where you're at right now.

What does it mean for you to live by faith?

God, I pray that you'd reveal that to each of us.

That you would stir up our faith, Lord, forgive our doubt, forgive our cynicism.

Lord, we want to believe you.

And we want to take steps of faith, trusting in you that you are going to work.

And I pray this.

I pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Let me say this.

I'm gonna have the worship team is gonna come back up and um we're gonna we're gonna worship.

I'm gonna turn the lights off.

If you need if you need special prayer.

Um this evening.