The Blessing: When Blessing Creates Impact (Andrew Meher)

Andrew Meher: If you have a Bible, will you open up to Genesis chapter 24? Genesis chapter 24. Before we get into the text today, I want to just say a couple of things about this study that we're continuing through Genesis. First thing I want to say is we will be continuing all the way through Labor Day weekend, going through the book of Genesis. We're not reading every single verse, every single chapter. We are tracing the theme of blessing. That pops up over and over again in Genesis. Over the next four weeks after today, the next four Sundays, you all have the privilege of hearing from four different voices. Some from our church, some from our district, our metro district of the Christian and Missionary Alliance that we're a part of. And some friends as well. And next week in particular, because I won't be here, I want to make sure that I play. Plug him in advance. the Reverend Sean Wallace is going to be with us. Sean is we okay? Okay, I'm getting the thumbs up, I can keep going. Sean is works for our Metro District office, and he is the point person for our church for what we call our accreditation process. For those of you who have been a part of Highlands Community Church for a little while, you will be aware that we used to be the plant church about six months ago. We were part of we were a second campus, a second location of a a location the church that originally started in Mawa, and we Planted and launched this church location. God's been working here and our ourselves here in this church location, our our church leadership in Mawa with the plant, our district leadership. We had been praying and discerning, and we felt like the Lord was actually sending this location out to be its own church within our denomination. And so as of January 1st, we have been become Highlands Community Church. And in our denomination, when you begin a process of becoming a new church. you be you enter into what's called developing church status. I'm gonna give you just a tiny bit of this and then we're gonna move on. I promise. I'm not trying to bore you here. I just wanna give you a setup a a little bit of a context of where we are currently and why Sean will part of why Sean's here next week. so when you enter developing church status, there's several things that that gives us space to work on as a church to prepare to be what what our denomination calls an accredited church. An accredited church just means we are kind of functioning on our own as part of this district. We have our own board, we have discipleship stuff happening. There is reaching out into the community. We're on mission with Jesus. They want to see that the church is generally healthy and moving in the right direction. We have no guarantees of when the official accreditation date will happen yet. Can you just say to me, Pastor Andrew did not just give us any guarantees? There's no guarantees. You're all hearing me say that. Because what I want to say next is recently and I'll we'll be sharing more about this in the next few weeks recently we we've had some good conversations with the district Office where they feel like we are in a good traject trajectory to potentially be fully accredited in the new year. And this is really, really exciting for us to only be in this developing church process for a year. Again, did I promise anything or guarantee anything? No. Okay, good. So no one say, you said, no, I didn't. But the process feels good. So part of that is I Sean was going to be coming anyway. It just so happened that I will be on vacation next week, and I invited Sean to preach because I want Sean to who took over for Jen Ashby, who you might have remembered. She moved on to another position at our national office. So, Sean, I just want him to have the opportunity to get to know all of you. So behave. Please. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just joking. Please be yourselves, but please make sure you go out of your way to say hi to him. He's so excited about what's been happening here, and he is really excited to meet you all. And he will be continuing our series in Genesis next week. The week after that, my friend Stephen Bailey will be joining us. He attends Attends currently the the Mawa location, which is the plant church in Mawa. he's in the process of a doctorate in biblical studies at Northern Seminary, and he's he's a very smart dude, and he's a great preacher and a great great heart, and and he's got a lot of good stuff that he'll be preaching on August 2nd. The following two Sundays, our own Mr. Tim Nye is gonna be preaching, which is super exciting. And then the The week after that, I'm gonna save it. We have one more surprise person preaching. But I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna leave you in suspense the week after that. Okay? I'm just gonna leave you in suspense. Maybe in a week or two I'll share. but I I'm I'm really excited to have voices from around our district, but other voices as well, because you it's not good for you to just hear me preach. Someone say amen. I'm glad you weren't John the loud. I was kind of expecting my brother-in-law to be the loudest on that and just be like, amen. Like really loud. Anyway, no, that's okay. But I wanted you to know what's coming over the next month. I'll be in and out. I have a couple of vacations and some ministry conferences I'm gonna be attending. I am also gonna be spending a lot of time praying and planning for the fall. And we're gonna be spending a season of learning how to pray like Jesus this fall. And I'm really excited for that. And so we're gonna have some space to learn how to do that. but I just wanted to share what. going to be happening over the next month as we continue to move forward as Highlands Community Church. So if you have your Bible and you got it open to Ma Genesis chapter 24, I'm going to be skipping around because it's a long story and and part of this story is the person that is involved with the story starts repeating what happened already in the story. And then just to kind of sum it up, I'm going to read to you verses 34 through 38. 42 through 49 and 58 through 67. If you want to follow along on the screen, you can. I'll try and let you know when I'm jumping to the next section if you like to follow along in your own Bible. Alright, let's read this from Genesis chapter 24. Starting verse forty thirty-four, it says this So he said, I am Abraham's servant, and the Lord has blessed my master abundantly, and he has become wealthy. He has given him sheep and cattle, silver and gold. Men servants and maid servants, and camels and donkeys. My master's wife, Sarah, has borne him a son in her old age, and he has given him everything he owns. And my master made me swear an oath and said, You must not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites in whose land I live, but go to my father's family and to my own clan and get a wife for my son. Verse Verse 42. When I came to the spring today, I said, O Lord God of my master Abraham, if you will please grant success to the journey on which I have come. See, I am standing beside this spring. If a maiden comes out to draw water, and I say to her, Please let me drink a little water from your jar. And if she says to me, Drink, and I'll draw water for your camels too, then let her be the one the LORD has chosen for my master's son. And you guys thought Tinder was risky. Before I finished praying in my heart, Rebecca came out with her jar on her shoulder, and she went down to the spring and drew water, and I said to her, Please give me a drink. And she quickly lowered her jar from her shoulder and said, Drink, and I'll water your camels too. So I drank, and she watered the camels too. I asked her, Whose daughter are you? And she said, The daughter of Bethuel, son of Nahor, whom Milkah bore to him. Then I put the ring in her nose and the bracelets on her arms, and I bowed down and worshipped the Lord. I praised the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who had led me on the right road to get the granddaughter of my master's brother for his son. Now if you will show kindness and faithfulness to my master, tell me, and if not, tell me, so I may know which way to turn. And so they called Rebekah and asked her, This is verse 57, Will you go with this man? I will go, she said. And so they sent their daughter or their sister, Rebekah, on her way, along with her nurse and Abraham's servant and his men. And they blessed Rebekah and said to her, Our sister, May you increase to thousands upon thousands. May your offspring possess the gates of their enemies. Then Rebecca and her maids got ready and mounted their camels and went back with the man. So the servant took Rebecca and left. And now Isaac had come to Beer Lahiroy, for he was living in the Negev. He went out to the field one evening to meditate. And as he looked up, he saw camels approaching, and Rebecca also looked up and saw Isaac. She got down from her camel and asked the servant, Who is the that man in the field coming to meet us? He is my master, the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself. Then the servant told Isaac all he had done. Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebecca. So she became his wife, and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Holy Spirit, as the word of the Scriptures are proclaimed and lifted up today, we pray, Lord, that you would guide us into the truth that Jesus has for us today. We pray, Spirit, that you would give us eyes to see and hearts to receive what you are saying and how you are leading us. And we pray, Lord, that the words of God Of the text would sink deep into our hearts and become the meditation of our mouths. In your name we pray, Lord Jesus. Amen. Amen. I really enjoy when I have the opportunity to making a homemade Caesar salad dressing. Any of you love a homemade Caesar salad dressing? You get your anchovies, get your garlic in there. what else is in there? A parmesan cheese, get some egg yolks, right? Lemon juice, lots of olive oil. It's a very simple thing to make. It doesn't really take that long to put all the ingredients together. But there's one step in the process that always kind of stresses me out. And it's when I need to emulsify the ingredients and have this become one cohesive rich substance. I mean, I know I can do it with an immersion blender and it'll take like two seconds, but where's the fun in that? So, you know, you sit there with a whisk to do it by hand, and man, that that's hard work. to to whisk something and emulsify it. You to continually work the mixture until down at a microscopic level, all of the different components of the ingredients that would normally separate and stay away from each other. It breaks them down so much that they begin to come together and transform into this rich, creamy texture. And for most of the time you're whipping the mixture and it doesn't seem like anything is happening. So when I'm doing that, I find that it's helpful to start looking for certain signs that the emulsification is looking. That it's working, right? What are some signs that the emulsification is starting to work? Well, the color starts to change, right? Slowly these things are blending together, and I see a little bit of change in the color. the dressing kind of starts to to thicken up a little bit. And I I know that when I see that, those are signs that encourage me to keep going and keep working. At it until the dressing is complete and I can enjoy the salad. What I want to talk to you about today is how God's blessing and promise takes a lot of time and endurance to show itself. It takes a lot of time to work itself out in our lives, like that emulsification process. But there are signs along the way that the blessing is starting to get into the fabric of our lives. Are you with me? As we've been focusing on the life of Abraham the last few weeks, we've seen someone whose life has been whipped up. And churned up and mixed up over and over and over again. We've talked about how our own lives can feel like they've been whipped up and churned up over and over, how we go through testing and trial, bringing about a purification so that we can be the kind of people that carry God's blessing well. But today I want to talk about how we can begin to tell if the mixing and the churning and the testing is working? How can we tell if the emulsification of our lives is happening? If there's real transformation taking place? How do we know if God's blessing is really starting to be at work in our lives? Let me give you the answer right now. You know that God's blessing is starting to get worked out in your life when you start to see God at work in the people around you. At least I believe that's what our text tells us today. Let me give you a little background for where we're at in the story. Even though this story that we read here focuses on Abraham's servant primarily, and a little bit on Isaac and Rebekah, this story is really part of the end of Abraham's narrative in Genesis. The servant is always referencing his master Abraham until the very end when they meet Isaac and he refers to Isaac as his master. This was a story about what happens when we've Begun to allow God's blessing to work itself out in our lives. And we start to see it at work in the lives of those around us. Remember, up until this point, we've really only seen in the story of Abraham God at work in Abraham and in Sarah's life, trying to bring them into a place of deeper trust, trying to help them rest in the fact that God would provide for them and that they should not attempt to try and bring about God's blessing on their own terms. Abraham, as we saw last week, passed the test. God showed Abraham what was inside of Abraham, that there had been a transformative work into a faithful, obedient servant of God over the course of Abraham's lifetime of testing. And that's the first sign of God's blessing at work in someone's life. You've been tested, and when you're tested, you see that you remain faithful to God in the midst of the testing. Like our emulsification, that's just one sign. We need to keep going. But there are other signs that begin to emerge that show God's blessing is at work. As I said, it's when you begin to see God at work in the people around you. Remember, we tend to think about blessing in terms of us, what we experience. Am I experiencing or feel like I'm receiving some kind of comfort and security from God? Right? When we think of that, hashtag blessed, that's what that is. That sense of like, I am getting something from God. That's what we tend to think of as blessing. But God's blessing in Scripture, especially in Genesis, we see is something that is going out to others. It is impacting their lives and it is changing their lives. When we are blessed, we are blessed so that others can be blessed through us. In our text this morning, we're dropped into the middle of this conversation that Abraham, his servant, is having with Rebekah's family. He's made this journey because Abraham has sent him back to his homeland, to the land where his family's from, to find a wife for Isaac. This is Abraham's final act of faith in the story, ensuring that the next generation was going to be properly prepared to continue to steward the blessing that God wanted to give them. It is here in this story that we begin to see the signs that the blessings that God was bestowing were starting to work their way out into other people's lives. Because before this, all we have is God saying, Abraham, I'm gonna bless you, and through you I'm gonna bless the whole world. But we hadn't seen it start to bless other people too much yet. Repeatedly, though, in this passage, we start to get clues that God's blessing and God's work is starting to impact other people's lives around Abraham. Repeatedly in this passage, we see the servant attribute the success of his mission to God, and not just any God, to the God of my master Abraham. We see the servant praying. He prays to the God of his master Abraham. We see him praising the God of his master Abraham for leading him directly to his master's relatives. Even with Isaac at the end, we see Isaac goes out into a field to meditate, to pray, to seek God. Abraham's life of faithfulness is starting to rub off on other people. The Old Testament scholar talking about this servant in this passage, Victor Victor Hamilton, he says about this passage that this instance of this servant asking and praying, specifically, God of my master, today answer. If you will do this, the first person who comes, the first maid that comes to the well. Let her be the husband. This is the first time, Victor Hamilton tells us. The first passage of many in Scripture where the urgency of a prayer, an appeal, or a command is qualified by the word today. All throughout, especially the Old Testament, you hear things like today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. There's a prayer. God, today, answer us in our distress. God, today, hear our cry. That echoes and repeats all throughout Scripture. And urgency. God, we need help now. But this is the first time someone has the gusto to say, Lord, I have a situation in front of me and I need your help. Right now, there is an urgency in prayer to God that is starting to enter the everyday life of other people in the story of Genesis that was not there before. God, will you come through? The servant is asking. Will you show yourself to be faithful? Will you show yourself to be good just like you have been to Abraham? And God's answer is yes. Yes, I will show myself to be faithful, just like I was to Abraham. There is an attention. Directed in this story over and over again to the servant's dependency on God as an extension of Abraham's dependency on God. Do you hear what I'm saying? This is really important. God does not speak directly to the servant. But the servant attributes everything that happens in this story as being the result of answered prayers and the provision of the God of his master, Abraham. It's really interesting that this prayer, this first time, this urgent prayer of today happens. It's not Abraham that ever says this first. Noah or Sarah doesn't say this first. None of the main characters say this. God uses this servant that's sort of on the edge of the story. God keeps doing this, doesn't he? He keeps using people in Genesis that seem to be on the sides, and he gives them this moment to trust in God. Think about Hagar a few weeks ago. Someone who's on the periphery of the story, and she has two full-blown conversations with God, while Sarah has none. And now this servant is someone who's on the periphery and is somehow in this moment thinking: I should pray to the God of my master Abraham. That'll help me. This is not a small thing. I want you to understand how big a deal this is. This is in a culture and in a time where everyone, every household, every family, no matter where you came from, you would have your own household gods, your own deities that you would call upon. And so it is incredibly significant to see this servant choosing in this moment to call on the God of his employer. Something has entered into the culture of Abraham and of Abraham's household. A culture of prayer, a culture of trusting the God who would become known as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I really want you to see that this is through the hard life of testing and learning to be obedient. That Abraham was able to show who God was to others in his household and beyond. Do you see that? This servant only thinks it's a good idea to pray to the God of his master because he has seen his master's life be shaped by obedience to this God. This is how the blessing is starting to flow. And now this servant the servant has this assignment. He sees this assignment that he's been given through the lens of the Almighty God, who is the one who could do everything. And so the servant prays and asks, God, today, help me. And then the servant praises God when God leads him to Rebecca. And then the servant, throughout the whole narrative, if you read all of chapter 24, he continues to attribute his success to God's work and God's provision. Over and over and over again. God was the one involved with doing everything, bringing about his purposes in the world. In this servant, We start to see the beginnings of how blessing starts to ripple out from our lives. His whole worldview started to change simply because Abraham had decided to be obedient for all of those years. Now, there are other people beyond Abraham whose lives were being affected by his faithfulness. These future generations were going to be affected. Here's the point. The point of faithfulness to God for you and I, the point of enduring the testing seasons, the point of endurance and perseverance. is so that future generations, friends and neighbors can be impacted by the blessing that God gives to you and I. Did you hear what I said? The whole point of blessing. The whole point of faithfulness to God. The whole point of enduring the testing seasons as we've been talking about. The whole point of endurance and perseverance is so that future generations can be impacted by the blessing that God gives to you and I. You might be sitting here wondering, no, you've got me confused with someone else. Abraham was a great person of faith. He's someone that God blesses and God used in amazing ways. But I've got problems. I am not the one that this happens through. Other people this can happen through. This doesn't happen through me. Have you been paying attention to the story of Abraham the last several weeks? This man had a lot of problems and most of them were his fault. And yet God still works through Abraham, who keeps coming back and keeps working at faithfulness, and God does a blessing work through him to others around him. His ultimate obedience and faithfulness to God meant he was able to pass on a legacy of blessing, even though he was a train wreck. You ever felt like an absolute dumpster fire in your life? It's just like not going well. Like the rest of you are lying. You've all had that moment where you're like, this is bad. This is really bad. Even you, in your dumpster fire moments. Some of you have not woken up yet, or you're thinking about the Argentina-Spain game later. Even you, in your dumpster fire moments, God wants to work in your life. Wants to work out through a process of testing and trying and endurance to bring about a blessing to those around you. You are someone who God has blessed. We might even say, in some ways, more so than Abraham, because of what the writer of Hebrews said. He says this: that none of the people who walked faithfully in the Old Testament received the promise, but we have. You are walking in something that Abraham, Moses, David, all of these famous people that we think about as great people of faith in the Old Testament, you are walking in something that they never thought they could ever see. And they never did see. You are walking in the promise of the Holy Spirit, of God's life living in you, drawing you together into this new family called the church. Everyone who follows Jesus has been given the gift of the Holy Spirit's presence and power in their lives. And this means that God has blessed you with Himself. It means that I have something to pass on in the future. Because God has blessed me with himself. It means that you have something to pass on in the future because God has blessed you with himself. Could you please take a moment and turn to the person next to you and say, God has blessed you with himself. It means that it is never too late to start living into the faith that Abraham lived into, so you can pass it on. Proverbs 13, 22, perhaps you're familiar with the words of the wise writer when they write, a good person leaves an inheritance for their children's children. Sometimes it's said, a righteous person leaves an inheritance for their children's children. Now I used to think that that was strictly about financial and material wealth, and I would start to get concerned, man, if I'm not able to leave an inheritance for my children's children, then I'm not a good person. And and some of these things are out of our control, right? But we have to recognize that that means far more, and there's a much deeper reality to that wise word in Proverbs. It means that we have to live with a posture as being faithful followers to God, and that we are always thinking of others. We're always living for the sake of others. To be living in such a way that the faithfulness of God that we have and the willingness to walk through the tests and the triangles. Trials and remain faithful to God are part of the inheritance we're passing on to our neighbors. We're passing on to biological and spiritual children, adoptive children in whatever way, passing on to friends, to neighbors, to other brothers and sisters. It is what we are going through, what you are going through, when you remain faithful to God, you get to pass the blessings of that along to all the people around you right now. So stay in it. Stay in it. Keep being emulsified and look for the signs of God at work in people around you. And recognize that that means God is blessing you. Are you with me? If you are struggling through a season of testing, if you are wondering where God is in the midst of difficult situations, but you remain faithful to God in the process, I want to tell you. That something is happening in your life that will eventually transform the lives of those around you. Just like when I made that Caesar dressing. It's probably already happening, but you're not looking for it. Or if you're too busy and you're not spending time in proximity, relationship with other people, they're not able to experience what's going on in your life, and therefore they're not able to. Start to have God working theirs. Are you with me? You gotta be like around people for this to happen. And so if you're not seeing it, either ask: Am I around people? Or am I not paying attention? There's a lot of different signs that this process of blessing is starting to happen in your life as you look at other people. You might start noticing someone around you that you spend time with saying something like, Hey, I know you pray. Would you pray for me? Simple, right? It's a sign that God is doing something in you and they see it. They might say something like, I know you're someone who believes in God. What do you think I should do? It's a sign that God is doing something in your life. Someone else might say to you, you seem really at peace. How do you do it? And you might be like, Who are you talking about? They are seeing something that you don't realize is going on in you. It is a sign that God is at work in your life, that God's blessing is in you because they are experiencing it. And there's something that is drawing them, not to you, but to God who is at work in you. These are all signs that flow out of a life that's been surrendered to God. Surrendered to God to be mixed and tested and flipped upside down so that the richness of his blessing can be shared with others. I wanna close with with this idea and j draw your attention to to why this might be significant for for our church. we we have three what we call postures as a church. we use this language of postures because we we think of it as like this is active language, things we want to do, not just nice words that we we say we like. These these are things we want to do as a church. Does that make sense to you? So we call them postures, so they're active. And there's three postures that we have as a church. The first one's this, that we are presence-based, that we live dependent on the presence and power of Jesus. To transform us and lead us into all things. We also say that we are practice shaped. And by that we mean that we commit to a way of life, practices, that Jesus gave us. And it shapes our love for God and for others. And finally, and this is what I want to focus on for a moment, we're a church that we say is people-driven. And when we say people-driven, what we mean by that is that we commit to a way of life which Jesus gave us. I'm sorry, that's not it. I read the wrong one. We live, when we're people-driven, we live intentionally for the sake of others, no matter who they are, so they can meet Jesus too. That's what it means to be people driven. This third posture is what we've been talking about today. As Jesus shapes our lives, often in ways that we're like, is anything even happening? Like when I'm trying to emulsify my dressing. I'm not even sure. Jesus shapes our lives, but Jesus does not shape our lives for our benefit. Jesus shapes our lives for the sake of others. For the sake of our neighbors. This is our whole mission statement that we want to follow Jesus for the sake of the highlands. This whole region that we live in and call home. We are not walking through life following Jesus for our own benefit. We are following Jesus for the sake of others. Everything we do here is not about us. It can't be about us. It can't be. Someone in our church recently had an opportunity to to demonstrate just practicing being people driven. a friend of of Alyssa and I, Alyssa said I could share this story. Alyssa, just like on, I don't know, Thursday night or something. Thursday afternoon. She she had a friend that runs a sports clinic, and because of the heat wave that we've been having the last few weeks, and because of of the smoke that was coming through earlier this week, this past week, they had to keep canceling all of the sports clinic sessions. And and her friend was just really like, What am I gonna do? And Alyssa just goes, We have a gym. It it's not a great gym, but it's what we have. Needs a lot of work, but it was available. I love that amen on that. It was available. And and so Alyssa did a lot of work to help her friend in like a very quick 24-hour turnaround so that they could run the clinic. And and I wanna. And she came in early too and helped like clean and tidy the space a little and fix some things that need to be taken care of. And I I want to just say this: it was awesome, but I I want to just take great pains to say it was incredibly inconvenient. It was inconvenient for Alyssa. It was inconvenient for me. It was inconvenient for the parents who were like, Are we gonna have this? Are we not gonna have this? It was inconvenient for her friend that's trying to run this. It was chaotic because there were moments where we weren't sure it was going to be able to happen because of some paperwork things with her insurance and all of that. But in the midst of that, Alyssa, being people driven, made this intentional move that opened up space with her friend for some amazing conversations and some amazing prayer with this person who's going, she's just having a hard time. And then was able to connect with all the parents that came through that that night in a new way that she hadn't been able to previously. This is what being people driven is all about. It is inconvenient sometimes. Actually, I'm gonna say it's inconvenient often. This won't work with your calendar many times. Don't try and make it work. It's gonna blow up your calendar. It's going to blow up what you hope works out for you in your life. But let me tell you something. When we start living in this kind of tense space where we're trying to figure out, well, I'm going to see if this works, I don't know if this is going to work. And we go into these situations, we start living through a lens of asking this question, huh? How can I be a blessing to others? Can I let the work that God has already done in my life be a blessing? Alyssa wasn't sitting there going, like, I am spiritually prepared for this moment. God has been equipping me my whole life for this moment to help my friend and minister. Alyssa, I don't know if you were thinking that, but I doubt you were, right? She wasn't, but I want to let you know that God was preparing her for that moment. And you're going to have opportunities to have inconvenient, people-driven moments. And I want you to not back away thinking, I'm not ready for this. I want you to step into it and pay attention to how people respond around you because I bet God's doing way more in your life than you even realize. And so when you step into these moments like Abraham did throughout his life, it starts to affect other people where they go, I don't know what this God is like that you follow, but tell me more. Or will you pray for me? Or can I talk to you? Can I get something off your chest? It happens over and over and over again if we can open up and ask the question: how can I be a blessing? Trust that God's already blessing you and turn around and say, hmm, I wonder how I can be a blessing. How can I be a blessing to my neighbors? How can I just be around people and let what God's doing in my life naturally come through? We've been pushing these summer connections to help us kind of answer that question in a simple way: how can we be a blessing? That's a really practical way for us to learn how to be people-driven as a church together. These summer connections serve as just a simple, practical way for us all to be intentional about spending time with our neighbors and friends who may not know Jesus. It's not so we can necessarily sit down and go, okay, I'm going to tell them about Jesus. Please don't do that. Please don't do that. If they ask questions, then answer them. But just be with them and trust that God has already been at work in your life and they are watching your life. Now, the point of these connections is to build relationships and spend enough time with people so that they see what is already happening in your life, and then they have an opportunity to meet Jesus through how you live. Just like Alyssa's friend did. Summer connections are just one practical thing we're doing here as a church to encourage us to be people-driven. But it's a way we can be intentional together this summer. So, as we're asking this question, how can I be a blessing to someone else? Here's what we're gonna do. As we close, I'm gonna ask if we could just put the summer connection slide up on the screen. And I'm going invite us to do this prayerfully for a moment as our response to the Lord before we before we worship and take communion together. I want you to to spend a moment praying and asking the Lord, who else in our church community should I reach out to today and say, Hey, do you and I can you and I invite one or two friends who don't know Jesus and can we just hang out together? Can we go get coffee together? Can we take our kids to the playground? Can we have a barbecue? Can we go to the lake for the day? Whatever it is, large, small, whatever it is, I want to challenge every person that is a part of our church to do this today. So spend a moment right now and pray. Lord, who in our church. Should I ask the partner with me? And Lord, who are my neighbors or friends that don't know Jesus that you are asking me to invite to hang out with us? And we're just going to spend a moment and be still right now. And pray earnestly. Because the Spirit has people that He's already been bringing into your life and wants to show you right now. So, Holy Spirit, would you speak to us as a church right now? About who you want us to be around to bless. You might have a name or two coming to mind. You might have a picture of someone's face coming to mind. Trust the Lord's voice is speaking to you. And if it's someone where you're like, how about another person? Nope. That's who God's bringing to your mind. Go for it. Go for it. Someone to invite to partner with here, or someone in the neighborhood or a friend that the Lord's saying, invite this person. Spend time with them. Be intentional. So here's what I want you to do. You've got that person in mind. Another person in your church you want to ask to partner with or a friend that you're going to ask. Here's what I want you to do. Scan that QR code that's on the screen. Is that QR code there? Where's that QR code? It's there? I'm sorry, I couldn't see it in the the glare. Scan that QR code with your phone. Because here's what we want to do as a church is this is our way of helping keep each other accountable. Is that's gonna take you to a form, very simple form, where you can share, here's what I'm doing to connect with people, and here's the person that I am prayerfully gonna do this with or invite to do something with me. Does that make sense? Take a moment now. Go ahead. Scan that. Be bold. No one's going to be like checking in with a notebook in three weeks to make sure you did it right, by the way. We're not, Abraham didn't have this figured out before he followed God on his call. He just started to go. God began to work. And then we started to see people like the servant live differently because God was at work in Abraham's life. And he's going to do the same in your life. Would you stand with me? I want to pray for you.

Genesis 24 · chapter mention Genesis 24 · chapter mention Genesis 24 · chapter mention Genesis 24 · chapter mention