BONUS TRAIL | Fresh Starts

So in June, we embarked on a pilgrimage through the Psalms of Ascent.

And one of the key elements here that I've been trying to convey is to approach our life not as a journey, but as a pilgrimage.

And the distinction, maybe it's too fine of a distinction, it's one I make, that when life's a journey, it seems more random than when I say life's a pilgrimage.

When I'm on a pilgrimage, life's a journey seems like, you know, I just take what it comes.

It's not that a pilgrimage doesn't have the same kind of ups and downs, zigs and zags as you if you refer to your life as a journey, but it's it's purposeful.

And that I see those things that happen in my life, and I I see them in a manner that how are they shaping me?

A journey, I think we see more of how are they slowing me down?

How have they hurt me?

How have they made this harder?

Pilgrimage, it's a little bit of a pivot.

And Lord, what are you doing with this?

How are you?

I know you're trying to shape me because we're on two different, we're on the same pilgrimage, two different facets, right?

We're on a pilgrimage to become more like Christ.

And to become more like Christ, frankly, take zigzags ups, downs, peaks, valleys, hard, easy, right?

And then the other, we're we're on a pilgrimage to heaven.

That this place is not our home, that we are sojourners, we're traveling through.

Um it's it's it's a good place that we live.

It's just not going to be the last place that we live.

All right.

And so I want to keep living, and I want to keep living with the Father, and that's the pilgrimage we're on.

And so we started going through the Psalms of Ascent.

I've done everything possible to extend this series as long as possible, and I have found another way.

Um so on the sticker out there, we've kind of slept on this bonus trail.

So we're gonna take a through we're gonna take a bonus trail for three weeks, and it kind of got prompted a couple couple ways.

One, Pastor Chris is gonna be speaking on community next week as we get ready to launch into groups and we do this welcome social.

But once a year, I try to I try to do a series around mission and vision, and I thought this is the best fit for that, best timing for that, because together we are also on a pilgrimage as a church.

Um, we're not, although it may feel this way, you're we're not a random group of families and individuals that make a decision to meet here at a certain time, at a certain place on a certain day.

You might walk in as individuals, but especially over time, what what you start to get a sense of is that we're a body, we're a fellowship, we're we're one, we're actually going the same place.

We're here for the same reason, same purpose.

So I thought I'd talk a little bit about that, frame our church in that same kind of language as a pilgrimage that we're kind of all on together.

And so this is this is what I've this is how I've said it.

You can you can you can in insert church and pilgrimage, that those are interchangeable.

I wrote a pilgrimage, but a pilgrimage has a compelling why has a purpose.

And a pilgrimage has a clear who.

Who do we want to become?

That's vision.

A pilgrimage has a workable how.

That's a that's a mission.

And a pilgrimage has a distinguish distinguishable what or vibe, for the lack of a better way to say it.

So culture.

So if we're we're all on this pilgrimage to get pilgrimage together, I thought over the next several weeks it would be good for us to understand who we are, where we are, why we're going that way, and those kind of things to kind of unify us in a greater measure.

So before you would think that this is just organizational lingo, let me help you put this in perspective.

A purpose is what moves you off center.

So no purpose, you just don't get off the couch.

So there was a compelling why, there was a purpose, which my wife and daughter and the Stambaughs and the Petersons moved from Atlanta in 2006.

There was something, was a compelling why that got us off the couch.

Okay?

So a vision, so that's your that's your why.

A purpose moves you off center.

A vision orients you in the right direction.

It orients you in the right direction.

You're all going to go somewhere.

Where are you gonna go?

That's gonna be dictated by vision.

All right, the workable how, the mission orders your steps.

If you have a vision and you don't have a mission, then it's just a dream.

Dream with no actionable steps, you don't you don't ever get there.

You run in circles.

So a mission becomes your workable, your workable how.

And then a culture sets the tone, how all of this takes place, how you do these steps, and a culture actually also compels others to join you.

So that's my definition of culture.

So let's begin with a gateway's compelling why.

The statistics at the time in 2005 identified church planting as the single most effective tool for evangelism.

No other method of evangelism was returning the results of church planting.

And I think there's for two discernible reasons, especially given the time in 2006, the American culture had really fully embraced what's under what's understood and known as postmodernism.

And so modern, a modern approach to anything was very linear, very scientific, very orderly.

Um, so that's why during during the long modern stretch of church in the modern culture, answered a lot of questions around who is God?

Who is God?

How do you know God's real?

How can you hold on to that?

It was a very, very linear um approach to God.

In this postmodern shift, postmodernism throws out all kinds of stuff.

It throws out one red thread, which's called a meta-narrative to our lives into the world.

It throws out a, you know, you're living this, it throws out one objectable truth.

It throws that out.

And so here's what was happening.

A postmodern culture wasn't asking any longer, does God exist?

A postmodern culture was asking, why does it matter?

Okay, it was a start, it was starting at a different place.

So you can imagine if if for some reason you had any kind of church in your background, great-grandma, whatever, and you were going to church because you were looking for an answer of something tugging and nagging at you, and the church wasn't answering that question, you can understand why then there's a generation of people that would end up saying, Well, that's not relevant.

It's not relevant to me.

Because it's it was stuck answering a question that there had a there was a question behind that question.

So a church focused on a generation that would that was asking, so why does it even matter?

What does God matter to me?

So that that was one compelling, that was one of my compelling whys.

All right.

The second reason why uh new churches are are necessary for for evangelism is because the longer a church exists, the less effective they become at evangelism with new people.

Now, why is that?

There's a number there's a number of reasons.

Um of them relate that we get more comfortable with who we are and get more settled on what we need.

We get more comfortable with who we are, we get more settled on what we need.

So what that ends up doing is it creates an insider-outsider feel when you come into a place like that.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed this.

How many got coffee on the way in?

How many coffee got where did you go to get coffee?

You went to a kitchen.

There was no exchange of money across the counter.

There was no insider, no outsider, you weren't doing an exchange of goods and services.

You went into a kitchen.

Your kitchen.

Now someone prepared the coffee, they ground the beans, they made the coffee, but you went around a kitchen island and you got your coffee.

If you have a question about gateway after service, you're not going to go to a counter with someone behind the counter asking, answering your questions.

You're going to go gather around something else made to look like a kitchen island where you will have discussion, not unlike you can have discussion around your kitchen island at your home.

How many checked kids in today?

You checked kids in.

Did you hand your kid over a counter?

You did not.

In fact, even the table that the mechanisms of checking your kids in safely, they're pushed against a wall, and the people are in front of the counter.

See, it's just something simple, but it matters to us to convey everything we try to do is to eliminate the barrier between an outsider and an insider.

Because we were all outsiders.

We were all outsiders to the faith, we were all outsiders to the church.

And so whatever there can be to symbolize and demonstrate that this is not a place where there is insiders and outsiders.

Church planting will always be special to me.

I never want to do it again, but it will always be special to me, and church planters will always be special.

I tell you all the time of how many good friends I have pastoring good churches here.

Just two weeks ago, Citizens Church, which is a church plant, maybe it's one year old, that meets in Pierre Elementary School in West Haven subdivision.

They had no place to meet for a leadership meeting because they meet in a school.

So our great room turned into their meeting area and their dinner experience for their new church.

There's always going to be a need for more churches.

Now, you say, in Nashville?

I'll first remind you that Charleston has the moniker Holy City, not Nashville.

I don't think Holy City will apply to Nashville, right?

But when we moved here, there was more churches than McDonald's in Nashville.

So, like, why do it?

Well, John 3.16 is the pillar scripture for the compelling why.

For God so loved the world that He gave that whosoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

So why is there a need for more churches?

Because there is a world of whosoevers that need to have a place.

And so I celebrate them all.

Come one, come all.

No church has the ability to reach the world, but a world full of churches, a world full of like-minded people that understand this concept.

That's what reaches a world of whosoever.

So that's the compelling why there are people, more people, that still need life-giving churches and life-giving people.

So here's our vision, then, our clear who.

We aspire to be the most spiritually influential people in place on the planet.

I say it nicer on the website and nicer on this little uh sticker on the wall out there.

Um I'm not nicer is not the right phrase.

I say it more um, well, this is pretty bold to say that you want to be the most spiritual influential people in place on the planet.

But here's the thing, it's not competitive.

I'm not trying to be more spiritually influential than New River or Conduit or Rolling Hills.

I just, it's it's it's a target for us.

It's a target for us.

Um I'm not comparing us to anybody else.

Um, it's just it's just our target.

So here's how I define spiritual influence.

Spiritual influence as the act of moving someone one step closer to a life-transforming relationship with Jesus as a result of my interaction or my relationship.

Simple definition.

But I've run my life through this grid.

Are you more likely?

Are you a step closer to understanding and discovering who Jesus is because of your interaction with me?

Are you neutral or are you less?

All three happen.

Are you more likely?

Less likely, I've had no impact.

That becomes my grid and has been my grid for 20 plus years, when I finally was putting enough language to this to understand how I wanted to live.

In the mid-70s, there was a mysiologist that came up with a graph.

Um, it's called the Ingalls Scale of Conversion.

Turns out when when you create something, you can call it by your name.

So the the way he first played this out was from a negative eight to a plus three.

Um someone starting, do you realize that your relate, if you're a follower of Christ today, your relationship had steps to it?

Okay?

Later it gets modified and it looks like this.

This this 15-step continuum, starting out with no awareness of God.

No awareness of God.

Did anyone in here, your faith journey was just you.

Just you.

There was there was nobody else engaged with it.

Anybody in here?

We had one in the first service.

No one else was involved with that.

But more than likely, there was someone involved in your process.

If there was someone else involved in you taking these steps, raise your hand.

Okay, so that person was a spiritually influential person in your life.

And so what this chart does is just shows the different steps people go through before they finally get to a place where they go, Yep, that's it.

That's how I want to live my life.

And then it kind of carries on, it carries on past that point.

Um in the mid-90s, I encountered a pastor that said this.

He said, Evangelism is a math problem.

There just aren't enough people doing it.

And then since then, I've tweaked that to say evangelism evangelism is a math problem.

There just aren't enough spiritually influential people in places engaged with spiritually lost people.

There's the math problem.

That there that it's just way too possible for someone to live their life and go about their day and never encounter someone that would that can change the trajectory of their life.

And not only is that the person I want to be, I want you to be that way too.

So I have an agenda.

I've had an agenda for decades.

That anybody that would come in this place and stay here long enough would leave at some point in time, but they would leave wanting to do exactly that.

That somebody had a better chance of finding Jesus because they met you.

So here's the pillar of the scripture for this.

The pillar of scripture is Matthew 9.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them.

This is Jesus speaking in the gospels, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.

And then he said to his disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.

There's your math problem.

Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

Listen, I get fired up about culture and society as much as anybody else.

But you can't be mad at people, you can't be mad at the harvest for being the harvest.

In other words, you can't be mad at a sinner for sinning.

You can't be mad at someone that doesn't share your spiritual perspective.

Because there's no way to reach someone and influence someone spiritually when you're mad at them.

It's almost impossible to pray for someone when you're angry with them.

So the fields are whitened to harvest.

So another one phrase I've used through the years is there's nothing wrong with the harvest.

The harvest they are what they are.

And there's and it's plentiful.

So the responsibility or the burden of more people not finding Jesus rests on our shoulders.

They're ready and right.

See, ripe is an important term here.

Um my son-in-law's grandfather and I had a discussion.

I've shared this many times, and he's he's an atheist.

And I read something, I read something, he read my book, and um he read my book and then sent me 10 questions around my book.

And he was very kind and it he just said, We come from two different, we come from two different places.

First time I met him, and he found out, you know, well, this is the pastor that his grandson's uh his grandson's marrying into the family.

Um he says, so why do you think you have the right to convert people?

That was his first question.

That uh at the rehearsal dinner.

That's nice to meet you, Dave.

Pleasure.

But because, listen, I I don't want to, I'm not trying to shine the spotlight on me, but because I have want to live my life through this grid, the question did not at all offend me.

At all.

And I just went, well, you know what?

That's actually not my objective at all.

Well, wait a minute, aren't you a pastor?

Yeah.

And your objective is not to convert people.

No, not at all.

He said, Well, how do you actually stay in business?

And I said, Listen, my objective is to give people a choice.

He said, What do you mean?

I said, There's just way too many people that don't know about Jesus.

And if you don't know about Jesus and what he can do, then you have no choice but to follow what you've been taught or led or sought from growing up.

But once you get the choice, it's amazing how many people choose Jesus.

That there is that's not the definition of evangelism I grew up with.

That's the definition of evangelism I live.

That's the evangelism that I want you to live.

All right, so um uh all right, that's our clear, our clear who.

How about our our workable how?

Our workable how.

So I haven't met anybody, I haven't met any follower of Christ that said that they do not want to share their faith.

What I do is I meet a lot of people that says, I don't know how, I'm intimidated by it.

Um, and that that I meet people hand over fist.

All right.

So I began pondering years ago, actually in 2000, I started pondering this idea of why aren't more followers of Christ sharing their faith, active in sharing their faith, and why aren't they any better at it?

And the conclusion I came to, the conclusion I came to was they were missing three particular ingredients.

Now you would think it was, well, I don't know this and I don't know that, and I don't know how to articulate this, and I don't articulate that.

That that is not what I thought I saw in people that I thought was spiritual influential.

Here's what I saw: someone had a fresh relationship with Christ, it was being shaped in community, and they actually understood that they had a purpose outside of their day job.

And that is what I ended up calling fresh starts, great friends, and real purpose.

That these are three DNA structures that if you can weave them into your life, you just ooze spiritual influence.

So freshness has has two rings.

Um, the first is where we all started before we even found Christ.

You can read that in Ephesians 2.

This is how the message version.

It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old, stagnant, stale life of sin.

You let the world which doesn't know the first thing about living tell you how to live.

You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief and then exhaled disobedience.

We all did it.

All of us doing what we felt like doing when we felt like doing it.

All of us in the same boat.

It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.

Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us.

He took our sin dead lives and made us alive in Christ.

He did all of this on his own with no help from us.

Then he picked us up and set us down in the highest heaven in the company with Jesus, our Messiah.

So where we all were, we were all stale, stagnant, dead.

Jesus finds us, Jesus brings us new life, and now we are fresh.

But it's not just a fresh, it's not just a one time experience.

He identifies himself in the gospels as fresh.

Bread, fresh water, fresh air, fresh wine, later a fresh identity, all of that equates to the spiritual influence.

So the question isn't how do you how do you stay fresh?

Because you can you can be a follower of Christ and be stale.

Is that the truth?

So a church a church can be just the stale.

But a church can be just the state.

So how do you how do you stay?

No magic, no magic secret.

John fifteen.

So never has a plan.

Fresh always has a plan.

You have to have a plan if you're gonna stay fresh.

Stay in motion until acted upon by but once it's act upon friction, friction slows things down just by nature.

Friction will slow things down.

Um things never drift into order.

They drift into chaos.

Um I'm not here to give you a plan.

Um I'll tell you that I have to pay attention to my worship.

To stay fresh, I have to pay attention to the word.

For me to stay fresh, I have to pay attention to prayer, how I pray to stay fresh, and I have to pay attention to how my shirt to stay fresh.

So that that becomes the things that I look at for me staying fresh.

How are these things operating in my life?

Now, if you're a perfectionist, you're always looking for that perfect plan.

It it doesn't exist, and even when you find one that works for a while, you'll find that it doesn't work forever.

Does anyone have that experience?

I need something for that.

So I said, I can give you this plan.

Uh I I always recommend life 180.

I handed another coin.

I hand another coin after first service somebody completed from Genesis to Revelation, 180 days.

I'm just telling you.

So there's a quote from from uh General George Patton.

So if you don't know this, he was a general in World War II.

And um he said a good plan and he was a tank commander, so that explains this next week.

Finally, we execute it now.

It's better than a perfect plan next week.

It is it is the quintessential plan.

Work what's in front of you to work.

What can you do now to stay fresh and you stick with it until it's no longer fresh?

And then you find a new plan.

Now, the great friends piece that Chris Pastor Chris will get into, and the and the real purpose I'll get into the week after that uh are important.

But that that I wanted to hone in on that.

So our workable how, it's not just a catchy phrase.

It's why it's on a wall now.

Fresh starts, great friends, real purposes are workable how.

If you work those three things in your life, you will be spiritually influential.

All right, how about our distinguishable what?

Our vibe.

Um it's because culture is difficult to describe.

In fact, you feel a culture before you ever understand the culture.

Right?

It's kind of what I explained to you about.

I guarantee you, very few of you, unless you've been around a long time, had no idea how those kitchen islands and kids' chicken, how purposeful that was.

You probably had no idea.

But what you felt, what you felt is the culture.

Um Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet, said this who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying.

And then Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern modern management, says culture each strategy for breakfast.

Which means you can have the best plan ever as a church or as a family.

But if your culture doesn't scream something else, it's not going to be received.

So I want to give you there's more detail to this you can get out of uh Discover Gateway that's coming up in a little bit if you're new.

But here is how I've described culture for the sake of this morning.

The heart of gateways culture is grace.

The engine of gateways culture is leadership, the gate the engine of gateways culture is hospitality, and the target of gateways culture is known and love.

Heart of the culture of grace.

We bought the property in 09, it's a half mile to walk this property.

When you walk to a primitive property, it's right out of half a mile.

I can't tell you how many miles were logged walking this property, praying that this property itself would scream.

In fact, when Pastor Harry and I were going to interview an architect downtown to design the first building, um, we went in and uh they said, What do you want to look like?

And I said, Great.

So I wanted to scream great.

And they just blank.

And we were meeting ironically, their offices was in a church that they had bought and refurbished, which initially I thought, great.

And then I thought, oh, not really.

So we designed it on a napkin and hired someone to build it.

That's kind of how that how that went.

But there are there's been testimony after testimony after testimony that people have driven in this place and just said they just felt compelled to pull in.

There's one young man, he's not a young man anymore, he's an officer in the JAG Corps in the Air Force.

His dad dropped him off when he was a high school student.

Pulled in.

Hispanic family young man didn't speak Spanish, was getting bored to death at the Spanish church dad was going to.

Dad said, I'm gonna find you another church.

Drove in, pulled in on a Sunday, introduced us to him.

And he gave a testimony a couple years ago before he went in the Air Force that would just make your mouth drop.

Sitting right where you're sitting, Nick Courtney Evans, her dad, drops her off for college here, brings her in on a Sunday, introduces this is your new family.

A couple years later, she shows up with a fiance and I said, We did not talk about this.

We did not have this conversation.

So see, the the the beauty of grace is not one of us has ever deserved it.

Grace is not dependent on us.

It doesn't, it's not dependent on who we are, where we've been, what we've done, what we've not done.

It is a freely, it's a gift freely given to us by the Father.

It's grace.

So that then transforms hospitality.

The engine is that I can serve you.

I can serve you, I can greet with you, I can greet you, I can engage you with grace because it has nothing to do with you.

It has everything to do with what I receive from the Father.

So I have a full reservoir every Sunday to give you what I've been given.

It doesn't even come out of me.

It comes out of him.

So I can engage people, we can engage people with a great hospitality.

Customer service, I get good customer service, right?

Customer service is supposed to be a win-win.

Company wins, company wins, and the customer wins.

But still at the heart of that is a transaction.

There is no transaction in grace.

Grace-based hospitality is I'm serving you because I've been loved by God so lavishly that I can love you.

That's the engine.

That's the end.

The target is something Pastor Chris put on a mug 10 years ago after an Easter message I did called Known and Loved.

Known and Loved.

I remember at that, I remember in that message.

I remember I used a clip from a movie called Wonder.

It'd be great if you haven't ever seen it.

You gotta go back away.

Julia Roberts is in that movie, and Owen Wilson.

And um young man just felt completely unloved.

He was gone through so many surgeries from from birth that really distorted his physical appearance.

And one night he's crying, and mom says, I love you.

He said, You have to tell me that because you're my mother.

You know, and his response was her response was no one knows you as well as I do, Augie.

And I love you.

See, the beauty of God's love is he actually knows everything there is to know about you.

All the stuff you don't want anybody else to know.

The stuff that you would keep hidden as long as possible, keep hidden.

And he knows it.

And he loves you not in spite of that, he just loves you.

And so the idea of learning someone's name has always been a big deal around here.

I I'm getting worse at it the older I get.

My wife's the the the kind of the punchline for a lot of years was the little sprit, little notebook my wife carries with her, where she would write, she meets you, she'd write your name in somehow that she can remember who you were.

And now we're 20 years in, close to 20 years in, and this yesterday, she was tran she had to get a new little notebook.

I don't know how many she's had, and she was transferring the names that she still needed to remember into the new book because she had more room to meet new people.

It's known in love.

Someone calls you by name, it's respect.

It communicates I'm interested in who you are as a person.

Now please don't hold it against me when I forget your name.

But I will tell you, if you tell me a story about you, I'll remember the story.

I'll remember the story.

And I and I keep getting my my point is we're not the only ones that do that.

Because in a culture, that culture ripples.

It ripples.

So that's our compelling why, our clear who, our workable how, and our vibe.

So I get asked this because we've been growing pretty rapidly over the last 18 months.

So I get asked, Pastor, how are we gonna maintain, or how will you maintain, depending who's asking me, the culture if you continue to grow at this pace?

And here's my answer.

I've thought about it.

This should be the easiest, easiest thing about Gateway to scale.

Our culture should be the easiest thing to scale.

Now it's counterintuitive, but let me tell you.

So we've taken two years to try to put in a sewer system.

It's been a two-year process.

Hopefully, it will come to an end in a couple months.

That was difficult to scale.

We could put another chair in any room without that sewer system.

That is tough and expensive to scale.

Culture, it's simple.

If you've been touched by the culture of grace in this place, share it.

In fact, it should not just be the easiest thing, it should be the fastest thing we're able to duplicate.

I ain't asking to learn anything.

But if you've been engaged by someone and now you got handles on that, they are giving you grace, give some.

Did someone have a meaningful conversation with you on a Sunday and you didn't know them?

Have one.

Did someone chase you out in the parking lot to say hi, we didn't get a chance to meet?

Chase somebody out in the parking lot and tell them you hadn't got a chance to meet them.

This is not, listen, I'm telling you, if church was complicated, I would have not done well at it.

This is not complicated.

It starts with receiving and then freely giving.

It's really quite simple.

It's really quite simple.

But you gotta have a plan.

You gotta be willing to go on that pilgrimage.

And I wanted you to know what you were signing up for.

Now I'm glad that I was able to raise a family in this culture.

My daughter has thrived in this culture.

My son-in-law and my grandkids are thriving in this culture.

I love the fact that I got to raise raising my family in this place.

This place has brought a lot of benefits to Gene and I.

Last night we're kind of doing a house purge after 13 years.

We opened up a couple big containers, and there were cards and letters from years from this congregation.

We just sat in the floor and we laughed together, we cried.

Um, it was an amazing experience.

Um that's the kind of experience I want everybody to have.

So, Usher, as you guys come, we're gonna receive communion as our response today because this is the quintessential fresh start.

We take communion in a lot of different ways here.

I offer to you every every week to my left and right.

We take it by intincture, an ancient method of receiving communion.

And then every four to six weeks or so, we want to do it in this manner where we receive, we receive it as a body.

I want you to think about this.

That this act we're doing with Christ traces all the way back to the apostles.

All the way back to the apostles.

So every believer since the first century has taken communion.

Now they're gonna pass it.

The cups are nested, the top cup has juice, the bottom has a gluten-free wafer, so you're gonna take both cups and pass the trail.

We'll keep talking, and then we're gonna receive communion.

So you guys, you guys go ahead and pass.

And this is what well, I didn't even give the scriptural pillar for uh grace is 1 John 14.

This is love.

Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

Verse 19 says, We love because he first loved us.

Paul says this in 1 Corinthians.

When he walks, he's walking this body in Corinth uh in Corinth through receiving communion.

He said, For I received from the Lord, for I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread.

We're gonna wait.

I'm gonna do a different passage for us to receive.

I just want you to hear his take on this.

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and he said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this whenever you drink it.

And here's the part I want to get to.

He said, In remembrance of me.

And then Paul tacks on, for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

You are proclaiming this grace love message.

We receive this as a body.

We ingest it.

It goes inside.

The impact of something inside working outwardly, the grace of God, given this, not just symbol, given this sacrament to remind us of this is where the fresh stuff comes from.

This is what we're compelled to give.

And every time we receive it as a body, it should be a remembrance of what He did for us and what so desperately other people are looking for, but they can't name it yet.

They don't have the language for it.

They don't have the experience for it.

They don't have enough people in their life to demonstrate it.

And this is what we do.

This is what we do together.

Now, my go-to in communion is the gospel of Matthew.

Has everybody been served?

So I read to you this out of Matthew chapter 26.

Matthew 26 · chapter mention

While they were eating, Jesus took bread and he gave thanks and he broke it and he gave it to his disciples, saying, Take and eat, this is my body.

Let's receive the body of Christ.

Then he took the cup and he gave thanks and he offered it to them, saying, Drink from it all of you.

This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now until the day when I drink it anew with you in my father's kingdom.

When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

Let's partake of the bloody of Christ.

He knew where he was headed.

He knew his arrest was imminent.

And they still sung.

They still sang.

Not just any song.

A hymn is something that would acknowledge and honor who God is.

And he knew where he was headed.

Settled in his heart.

I'll save my final remarks.

As well, a modern song.

But a hymn in this setting.

We hope you were encouraged and challenged by today's message.

Again, to learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, find us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

Thanks for joining us today.