Crafting a Legacy of Faith: Uniting in Christ, Self-Sacrifice, and the Collective Spiritual Journey

Good morning.

My name is Randy.

I am so glad that you're here.

We have some first-time guests in the room.

Your job is to do just what you've been doing the last 10 minutes and that's worship God.

Just worship God and let yourself be in His presence.

I used to give a shout out to folks outside the room and thank you.

By the way, all of you are very important.

What we're gonna talk about today actually is gonna enable a lot of you who are in this area to be not out there but to be in the room with us, if you're physically able to do that.

Because this is good, but this is even much better.

Why?

Because we're all created for our community.

We are built to be together and to suffer together and to celebrate together and do life together.

So thank all of you for being out here.

My shout out this morning is actually to somebody in the room and that's my friend over there, sam.

I don't want to embarrass Sam, but Sam is a special guest with us.

They got to know her a few weeks ago through Rick Perkins and his life groups ministry to the place where she lives, and Sam is rarely able to leave that place, but today she is with us and let's give her a great.

So how faithful would you say you are?

How faithful are you to your career, to your family, to the Lord?

That's what we, the people of God, the church and I mean universal church, the church of Christ, wherever that may be that's what we're supposed to be known for, right, I know if, in the marketplace, if you have a series of meetings and someone walks in the room and they're five minutes late many times and they're very punctual and they they're right on time, the five meetings before that, but they walk in late, usually you get a hey, I'm so sorry, I'm running late.

And somebody will say, yeah, frank, you're always faithful to be here on time.

Well, is that really true?

He's there five out of six times, maybe, maybe not those of you who are married.

If you sit down with your spouse one day and say you know, honey, I love you, I committed to be faithful to you and I will be.

I have been, I am, I'm gonna be faithful 28 days out of every month.

Now there's a couple of days.

I just need a little bit of slack, okay, because anything goes.

Would then I be known as a faithful husband?

Probably not, no.

So how does that work in the spiritual world?

Well, you need a measurement, you need a way to measure faithfulness.

That's why we have the Word, that's why we're called people of the Word, that's why we study the Word every single Sunday here, and we encourage and challenge each other to do it during the week too.

There's our standard, but you know, if you really understand the Word and the cause of Christ Himself, the standard is perfection.

Ooh, we're all busted.

We all are like I've lost before I start.

So where do we turn?

That's why the cross comes into the picture.

That's why we are known as resurrection people.

The cross and the suffering of Christ and the death enabled the resurrection to atone for my lack of perfection and your lack of perfection.

And so, then, the definition that God uses for perfection I mean, I'm sorry, for faithfulness is not my perfection, but His perfection that happens to live in me through the Holy Spirit, and if you have Him and you through the Holy Spirit, you have an opportunity to be faithful and to be known as a faithful person.

Here's the way it works in community, you may not be able to pull off some of God's plans by yourself.

I certainly cannot.

We may not be able to pull off His future plans together, but we will, guaranteed, pull off His plans together with Him in the lead, you following me.

So if we're together and we're together with Him and he's the one creating the plans and the vision and the means to get there, it's a done deal.

All we have to do is live it.

And so I just want to give you some good news today.

As you are faithful, he is building.

I deliberately chose the word building 1 Corinthians, 3, 9 and other places.

Paul uses that analogy as we are builders with Him in a spiritual building.

He says a spiritual house.

He's the designer, he's the architect, he's the employer.

We're just invited to come along.

Hey, and you know what?

Here's the other part.

He's gonna build that house with or without me or you.

The only question is are we gonna be in it or not?

Are we gonna be part of it or not?

Are we gonna be sitting on the sideline watching somebody else build that house?

I'm convinced we were created to be the builders for that house, and if you're a part of the church already officially, or if you are pretty sure that God has led you here by the power of the Holy Spirit, you absolutely are part of that too.

Nobody's here by accident.

Everybody is here, whether this is your only time in the room or your only time watching out there.

Everybody here is here today by a divine purpose, and that's what gives me goosebumps and that's what excites me to know in.

So, hey, how about turning your Bible to Colossians 1?

We're going to real quickly go through some key components to being faithful, because that's going to help us authentically observe this together, which is a symbol of Jesus' death and resurrection.

It's called communion, or the Lord's Supper, and I'll explain as we go on what that means and also some specifics about where SBC is going and what we have ahead in the way of unbelievable opportunities and the requirement for faithfulness from all of us that were required.

So did I say Colossians 1?

Well, that's right.

It's Colossians 1, 24 to 29.

I hope you're there, so let me justwe'll just go through the component.

First component is there's a little bit of self-sacrifice.

That is needed.

Paul is writing.

He's writing to a church.

He says in verse 24, now I rejoice in what was suffered for you.

I suffered some stuff for you.

He's saying.

I fill up my flesh with what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions.

Now he's not saying that Christ's afflictions and death and burial and resurrection did not finish the job.

He's not saying that that was incomplete.

He's saying that was complete and future reward is coming.

But in between, there's still a whole lot of fighting going on.

There's still some battles right.

There's still some spiritual warfare, and you and I are involved in that every single day for the sake of his body, which is his church.

Well, we're back to the body Now.

Please see what he's saying here.

What he is saying is it's really not about me, it's not about you.

It's about the body of Christ.

It's about the whole.

I don't know how many of you there are in this room.

There's a lot of you.

It's pretty full.

We can all try to serve Jesus separately, as 500 or so people, or we can serve Him together as one.

When you serve together as one, it is tremendously more powerful and productive than when we're all just doing it apart from each other.

There is a price to be paid for anything worth doing.

You know that there's always sacrifice for what is meaningful.

Any parents in the room would say, yep, Anybody who has had a successful career in the marketplace, oh, absolutely Anything worth doing.

There's a price to be paid.

But here's how.

This is why I love doing what I do and this is why I love being here.

The price to be paid is for a purpose.

That purpose is far greater than the cost.

The purpose of why we do what we do in serving Christ far outstrips any inconvenience that we may have and any sacrifices that we make.

When you suffer for the cause of Christ and I use suffer, like you know how many times do we really suffer when you pay a price for the cause of Christ?

Why is that purposeful?

I could give you a bunch of reasons.

I'll give you two or three real quick.

Because then you identify with Jesus and what he went through only he went through so much more you can't really identify, but he certainly identifies with us and everything you go through he's kind of like saying, yeah, I know what you.

Yeah, yeah, I get it.

And that bond with Jesus is even tighter.

Another thing I don't understand it, but I've experienced it and many of you have too when you're going through something and you know that he got you in it and he's walking with you through it, there is a sense of joy and contentment in the middle of it.

And the last reason is when you go through something for the cause of Jesus, when somebody else close to you goes through a similar thing, you can walk with them authentically and it will change their life, because you were there and many of you are doing that right now.

It's a powerful dynamic.

So there's always a little self-sacrifice.

Why?

Because it ain'tit's not about me, not about you, it's about the body, everything you got to stick to the truth.

Look at verse 25 through 27,.

I have become its servant, the gospel servant, by the commission God gave me to present to you the Word of God in its fullness.

Commission is a calling, it is a discipling statement.

I'm calling you for a purpose and that purpose is to grow in your walk so that others will benefit from your life being here.

But then he's skipping on down.

He says it's the Word that leads us in all of its fullness.

So let me explain fullness really quick.

When you see Paul talk about fullness, the Word literally meant filled uphave you ever gone to a restaurant or something and you get your sweet tea and they fill it up so full to the rim that in the process of picking it up.

It sloshes over a little bit.

That's this Word.

We're not talking about three quarters, we're talking about to the rim.

One more drop and it starts to slosh over.

That's what God gives you.

It's not enough, it's abundantly enough, it's more than enough.

26, the mystery that has been kept hidden for generations is now disclosed to the saints.

Now, when he says mystery, he's talking about all the Bible they had in those days was what we call the Old Testament.

Right, he says there's a lot of stuff in the Old Testament I don't understand, but we are.

He didn't know it fully, I think, but we are in effect writing the rest of the Scripture, the rest of the script.

Right now, what he wrote as a letter turns into part of our Bible.

What he had known about from 30 years earlier the death and crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, of course, become part of our Scripture too.

So now, with us looking back, what he's talking about is the mystery that has been revealed, is a person, jesus Christ.

When you apply that person to the Old Testament prophecies that you can't understand without Him.

All of a sudden, it's like there he is.

Now we know the rest of the pieces of the puzzle and we take it forward to the New Testament, and the New Testament is basically check Him out.

Here he is and Paul comes along and writes and he's basically saying here's what it means.

Here's what it means that we need to stick to His truth, because that's where our lives are transformed.

You want a little additional reading for this week Matthew, chapter 7 and Romans, chapter 8.

Matthew 7 · chapter mention Romans 8 · chapter mention

Those are great Romans, 8 and Matthew 7.

Let me just read two verses from Matthew 7, verse 18 and 20.

Matthew 7:18

This is Jesus speaking because in order to know the truth, you have to know what's not true.

Right, how many of you would believe?

That's a pretty good thing for today to have in my tool case in this society, to not only know the truth but to know what's not true.

Oh, of course.

So 7, 18, a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, or a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Verse 20, thus, by their fruit, you shall know them.

What's all that got to do with this?

What he's saying is this is how you know false prophets, this is how you know liars, this is how you know deceivers, whom Satan is the great deceiver, the accuser is by this, just like you know a good tree that produces good fruit from a bad tree that produces bad fruit.

A good tree won't give you bad fruit, and vice versa.

The longer we are in Christ, the longer we walk by the Holy Spirit, especially together, the more we're able to discern truth from fraud, truth from fake.

You ever checked into a hotel and in the lobby there's a bowl of fruit?

And, man, it looks good, especially if you're hungry.

Have you ever gone over to that bowl of fruit and pick up that shiny apple and bite into it, only to discover that it's made out of wax?

Well, me neither.

But there's a big difference between a real apple and, obviously, a fake apple.

We need to be able to decide what that is.

The only way we're going to fully know is with this, and we do that together also, because without this and knowing truth from error, we can't know fully where we're going.

And that's what today is about where we are going.

I read where, in the old days where long distance travel was not by plane, really, but by train, the great genius Albert Einstein was on a train, and in those days, as they pulled out, the conductor would come along.

What's he doing?

He's checking tickets, right.

Well, it's like do you belong on this train, or do you not?

And are you who you're supposed to be by your ticket?

And so he gets the Einstein and Einstein's doing this.

Now, einstein was a brilliant genius, but he was legendary for being a little bit absent minded, like a lot of geniuses are.

And so the conductor recognizes and said that's okay, sir, you're okay.

But he wouldn't stop he's doing this.

At one point he gets on his knees and he's looking under his seat and the conductor's saying Dr Einstein, really, you don't have to, I know who you are.

I bet everybody on this train knows who you are.

And Einstein said that's not the issue, I know who I am, I'm just not sure where I'm going at this moment.

I have been there.

I have been there, but I've never been so excited because that's not my issue this morning.

I know where we are going and a lot of you now know that too.

Third, we're going to seek the Lord.

Seek the Lord together.

28 and 29.

We proclaim Him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present anyone perfect in Christ.

That means complete part of Jesus' family, verse 29,.

To this end, I labor, struggling.

That word labor literally in the Greek meant agonize.

I am agonizing.

And then he follows that up like, if that's not strong enough, I'm struggling, which actually was an athletic term to mean, like you know, in those days they had the Greco-Roman wrestling and the Olympic events.

That's it, that's it.

I'm agonizing, I am wrestling, I'm trying to take an issue to the ground here for you, and he says I'm struggling with all of His Jesus energy.

You might as well, in the margin, if you like, to write in your Bible His energy.

That really is, let's.

We can name Him too, just the Holy Spirit.

By the way, the energy of God is the Holy Spirit and is a supernatural work of God on His people when they get together and when they are seeking Him.

Forwe're just checking where you're sending us, where you're coming with us in this, just as Moses said in Exodus 33, when God unloaded a project on Him that was so big.

Oh yeah, you're just going to take a whole nation of people across the desert to a place that's already inhabited with people that don't like you and you're going to just take over.

And I love what Moses said.

He says that's where, yeah, that's where we're going.

And he says, well, unless you go with us, we're not going.

I think that's in verse 14, right, I'm glad to go, but I'm not going unless you're going with me.

And that's where we are today.

And he finishes out by His power that so powerfully works in me.

We're spiritual children.

That means we're children of God.

That means, of course, god goes with His children where they go.

This is where we check ourselves in every aspect of our life, are you?

Do I report in the morning to a J-O-B and I get a paycheck for it, and that's about it?

Or am I being sent by the most holy God, by the power of His Spirit?

So therefore, I do not have a job, I have a calling, and that calling is to do what I do as unto Him, to the best of my abilities, to honor and glorify Him, because there's honor in work.

But do I also see it as a mission field that, lord, whoever you want to put in front of me today, I'm going to be faithful.

I'm going to be faithful because together, me and you, the Holy Spirit, could have an opportunity to see you transform Him, her, for the rest of their life, and then my job takes on a whole new meaning.

And yeah, by the way, I get paid and I support my family but but it's really a kingdom job.

It's just an unbelievable invitation we have.

Theologian Kostenberger said this about this verse, about so powerfully working in us.

He said sanctification is synergistic God operates by divine agency.

The Christian operates by human agency.

You get that.

I don't understand it.

I love it.

It's what I love the most about what I do is watching the Spirit of God come into and with a believer and working together on something he's directed and that believer knows.

I got severe limits here, but all I have to do is be faithful to Him who is in me, and Him who is in me is going to produce the fruit.

So the pressure's off.

I don't have to do it.

I just got to be like the tool carrier.

I don't have to know carpentry to build this house.

All I got to do is know how to carry a hammer for Him who does know how to use that hammer, and might I say he uses it quite well.

That's what Kostenberger says here.

So how do we define the end?

He says by the end?

We define the end by what we do, small in a big way, as a corporate community as well as individuals.

How we serve and love Jesus, in small ways stacks up, and that's the legacy of this church.

For 127 years this church has done the little things in a big way, and then at the end of that you see a massive effect on a whole community.

So what I want to share with you is nothing new to the history of this church.

This church was doing this before any of us was born.

This church has done this and done this very well, because doing small in a big way is the key to the kingdom.

Let's reverse that.

The bigger we get as a church in numbers and resources and other things, the smaller we have to be.

You get bigger not by addition but by multiplication.

And in order to multiply, that's how the cells work in your body.

There's millions of cells reproducing right now, and if that weren't the case, we'd all be dead pretty quickly.

Some are dying off, but there's always cells multiplying in our body.

That's what the living organization called the church, the body of Christ, has to do too.

Paul says in another place God's opened up a tremendous door of opportunity and brother.

He has here, and he has for quite a while.

So let me share one with you.

We have a lot of what has been called positive problems here.

Parking some days can be a positive problem Thank you, parking team for helping us and guest services.

A seating room some Sundays can be a challenge.

This is one of those Sundays and it's the same some Sundays at the 1030 service.

One of the process, as y'all did a year and four months ago, was to multiply out into a second location called Pinewood.

There already up to 300 people on a good Sunday, they're already into two worship services.

We went, as you know, back last year to a third worship service here at five o'clock.

You do the small thing you multiply.

The bigger we get, the smaller we are.

Many of our life groups have been commissioning, sending out a teacher or a pioneer or a few folks to start other life groups.

We've started home groups.

We've started off hours on Wednesday nights or Sunday night groups here in the church.

I think that's smart because the building is wide open most of the time other than Sunday and sometimes on Wednesday for that.

But you know, even with those strategies and everything, praise the Lord, we still got some needs here, and so what needs to happen is we need to gowe need to shift our third service from five o'clock to become a first morning service.

So, lynne, can you put that slide up there please?

So left column, of course, is worship times, and this is not something we just dreamed up.

Tuesday in staff meeting, this is like been going on quite a while.

Your staff has been thinking about this and praying about it and looking at other options for a long, long long time, and now our deacons and others are in on this.

But if we go with 8.15, 9.30, and 11 o'clock, that makes the last service end at not a ridiculously late time.

By 12.15 you're walking out of here, and 8.15 is not all that crazy.

To expect people to come to either worship or a life group right, because on the right column those are life group times.

Will there be like something for every age at every hour in life groups?

No, that's not needed.

What we are saying is there will be, as needed, life groups in all three of those hours too.

And if you see the small print there, kids' church, kids' worship will be two times 8.15 and 11 o'clock.

So what's this mean to you?

Well, for one, we're going to need some help with that.

We're going to need some help willing to build into children the essentials of the gospel and letting children have the freedom to come to know Jesus and to do that in a great environment, a very positive environment.

Our youth group, sunday school groups, life groups will be at 9.30 and there's a lot of freedom with adults to move up, up and back.

Here's where this is going to take all of us, because we may not be able to do this together, but we will do it together with God.

This is going to invite everybody in this room and everybody in the next hour to participate toward a greater good and continuing to create room to reach people, because if our groups will just say, look, we'll send out a few.

That's why this group got started is to send out missionaries.

If we'll send out a few people and if we'll send out a leader to teach and someone to do outreach and in-reach and take care of our people, then to thefor instance, if we're at 9.30, if you're at thenow would be the second service.

If you're at the second service, then and you can say, hey, let's half of us go one direction, half of us stay, then bang all of a sudden the 8.15 and the 9.30 service, which both will be just like this it'll be blended as the 9.00 service.

Then we've got all of a sudden a lot more capacity and a lot more room.

And if you're tired of walking from the back of our property where you parked to get in here, if you come at 8.15, man, you can park right at the door almost.

There are some advantages to that.

In the same token, if you come to your life group at 8.15, you have no parking worries whatsoever.

But I'm just going to be flat out straight up with you.

If we don't in our life groups, if we don't participate and we decide I'm more important than the group, it's really not about the body, it's about my class.

This isn't going to work.

In five years from now we won't have parking problems, we won't have seating capacity crunches because there won't be as many people here.

Because God does this.

He's building what he has envisioned and if we say no, thank you, he says I still love you, I'll go find somebody else.

That's just the way it works.

That's not too abrupt.

I'm just speaking the truth.

But we have an unbelievable opportunity.

Think of the positive.

Oh, my goodness, if we go to this and you multiply your groups we've already seen it for the past five years here your group will really quickly go right back to the size that it was.

The new group will go right to the size that you used to be, and we continue to see people being baptized, we continue to see people transform and we continue to send mission trip people out and we continue to multiply here, because what I'm about to share with you after this indicates that I'm already thinking about not the second site Pinewood is here.

I'm thinking about the third site, and that's why we need more people who are not even here yet to be sent as missionaries, because when we did Pinewood, 110 people walked right out the door.

We need another group of missionaries who are called by God to say, yeah, I love being here, but I also love following Christ, and that's what God's put this church here to do.

I'm willing to be a part of that.

So send me Isaiah.

Who shall I send?

Send me Go.

The third site will be headed out somewhere.

After we train them up, we'll have information and go to the next slide Celine.

We'll have information meetings on this and what I'm about to say next, as you see there coming up, six o'clock Wednesday and four o'clock next Sunday, because here's please put your calendars for this, february the 18th.

It'll be here before we know it, february the 18th, at five o'clock.

Here in the worship center we are having a.

Can you put that slide up here, celine?

We already have it up there.

No, we don't.

Is there a slide after that?

No, that's the last slide.

We didn't.

That's my fault.

It's called a prayer celebration.

We're going to come together at five o'clock and we're going to just celebrate the goodness of God of why he's even including us on such good, big plans, audacious plans.

But because he is, we're going to love Him for it and we're going toand we need to vote.

One of the things we need to vote and approve as a church body, I think, is simply this plan.

I believe that this is a solution to help us continue to be His people and to reach people with the three morning times, the shift from what we're doing.

The second thing that you need to be here for on that day, to pray and to worship and to affirm as a church body that we're all in is we've been looking for property for quite a while now.

Some of you have been helping us with that we have been.

Other people in the community not a part of this have been helping us and this did not happen fully until Monday and we still are working on details and everything.

But as of this past Monday imagine the timing of God in this as of this Monday, we have a track of land that we can purchase and we intend to purchase it.

It's twelve acres.

It's generally in the summer's corner area, if you know anything about Highway 61 going in that direction.

There's still a lot of details to be worked out, but what we need, of course, is church body approval to proceed with the details to purchase that property.

And when we get a price and a number and all of that and some time frames and all of that, we will do it.

But our Pinewood location who's hearing this as we're hearing it right now is going to be in position to move down there and build on that piece of property and continue to reach people like we're reaching them here, unbelievable.

So we'll ask our servant leaders, our deacons, to come forward.

How appropriate is it that we are doing this on this day?

As he gave His body, we can move as His body today, in modern times, to serve Him.