#Compassion Postured for Transformation

Wow. Well, here we are on another

Sunday. I said this morning.

Sunday's come round really quick.

I don't know what about you, but I feel like the weeks just seem

to be getting faster. And this morning I'm going to

actually start by giving you a little update.

So as you will be aware if you were here last year, we started

a mission series last year where we kind of relaunched our

posture towards missions and we kind of unpacked what that meant

for us as a church going after the Great Commission, stepping

in as Acts 18. And Freya already mentioned this

morning about being witnesses in the local, the near and the far.

And we're actually a whole year on, I can't believe it from that

series. And as a church, we've done a

lot this year already around mission globally and locally.

And so this morning, I just want to give you a quick update

before I get into the talk on a couple of things.

And the first is this, that right now our mission team is on

a plane about to land in the Himalayas.

They're up in the air. They should be up here.

This lovely team last night set off from Heathrow, so church do

be praying for them. They have gone out to our

partnership in the Himalayas where we are as a church

empowering the Bible to be made a reality into the oral language

of an unreached people group who are yet to hear the name of

Jesus. But because of what you're doing

in this place, what the translators are doing in the

Himalayas, and because of our encouragement and support, we

are making the truth of God's Word a reality in a group of

people's lives that are going to experience His goodness for the

first time. And that is super exciting.

And these guys are going out to encourage our translators and

understand the process better. So please do keep them in your

prayers in the next 10 days as they go on.

Quite the adventure. And so we continue in that

partnership and it's super exciting.

We know as I updated a while ago, the whole New Testament is

done and they're now diligently working through the Old

Testament. Bless them.

We also had a team in the summer that went out to Sri Lanka to

visit our vineyard partnership in Sri Lanka.

We've got vineyard leaders who were planting churches.

People were coming to Jesus, and the team had an incredible time

in Sri Lanka. And again, all because of

everybody in this room rallying around that team to make that a

reality. We had an amazing Love your

Street back in June where we all got off the seats in this

building and we got out on the streets and we loved our

neighbors well. And we celebrated well because

God is moving. And I've loved that since Love

your street. I've had so many people who come

and say, oh, guess what, Claire, this week I did this, I, I've

kept doing love your street. And that was what love Your

Street was all about. It was about igniting something

in us to realise it's really quite simple to love the people

that live next door to you. And as we go into 2026, I want

to give you a little update. We are expanding our reach.

We are pushing out our partnerships.

And you will remember last year we heard from Sam Miller at Open

Doors. It was a powerful Sunday in this

place that I don't think there was a heart that was not moved

listening to the stories of the persecuted church around the

world. And so I'm delighted to tell you

this morning that as a Versa church family, we are stepping

into a partnership with Open Doors.

We are giving to them every month to stand with them as they

church, which is super exciting. So you will get to hear more

stories and ways to pray with them.

And you can sign up. Just so you know, you can go to

Open Doors yourself and sign up. And honestly, the newsletters

and the powerful prayer points, they, they flaw me every time I

read them and they humble me about the reality that we get to

walk in here on a Sunday and not take this for granted.

We get to love Jesus openly and courageously out loud without

fear of our lives. And there are of Christians

around the world for whom that is not a reality.

So we're focusing that on West Africa.

That will be the area of the world that we will partner with.

And finally, you know, we felt the Lord stirring in us around

justice and compassion. What, what does that look like

Lord to extend our reach into those areas?

And I heard the Lord say it's local and global.

And, and so I'm excited to also share this morning that we are

officially partnering with Azalea in Luton.

I love it. For those of you who don't know,

many in many in this room will know Azalea because we've got

many people in this room that serve with Azalea who work with

them, but they empower and facilitate sustainable

transformation in the lives of those impacted by sex

trafficking on our streets in the city of Luton, also in High

Wycombe and have a global influence.

But we really believe in what they're doing and the

transformation that they're seeing.

And we're also on a global perspective, stepping in to see

things change on the global level.

And so we're also going to be partnering with International

Justice Mission, who work in a similar area to Azalea, but they

look at the root causes of that in governments, in systems, and

they are seeing radical transformation in nations that

look like it would be impossible to see a change.

They're seeing it made possible. And I'm not going to go into

that today because next week we have the wonderful Cath Johnson,

who leads the new wine movement, and she works for IGN.

She's going to come and share about IGN and unpack that for

us. So that is a little update.

We are expanding our reach and we're going after Jesus in all

of these places. And that is because you guys

give generously. It's because we listen to the

Word and we follow his lead. And yeah, I just want to say

thank you for the ways that you give faithfully so that we can

do that. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, Jesus.

Wonderful. Well, we're going to dig into a

new series, which you can see on the back is called Missions

Shocker, as I started with that. But I want to, you know, many of

you will know if you've been around here for very long, that

I love gardening. And, and there's something it's

done even just yesterday as I sat in our lounge looking out at

flowers that are still blooming, shockingly, dahlias that are

still in full bloom here at almost the end of November.

And I was thinking back to the day that I held a seed in my

hand, just a tiny, tiny seed. And it looks so small and

ordinary. But inside of that seed is the

DNA of something absolutely extraordinarily beautiful.

It can be a plan, a seed or a flower, and everything that's

needed for that seed is already inside of it.

It's DNA. But what do we do?

We place seeds into soil. We push them down into the soil.

And for the potential that's inside of that seed to come

alive, it needs the right environment.

It needs the right soil with the right nutrients and ingredients

around it for it to to come to life.

And I want to put that image in your mind as we start this

morning because what we're going to unpack here this morning is

compassion, a vision of transformation.

And I want us to explore God's vision of transformation and the

posture as a church that we hold to be the soil that wraps around

people's lives to bring life as God intended it, their purpose,

their dignity, their value to life.

Particularly in our posture as we think about how we love those

who are experiencing poverty and injustice and going through

difficulty and hard times as we believe record to be a Church of

compassion. So let's pray.

Father, I thank you for this new day.

And Lord, we want to catch your vision this morning, what you

see when you look upon our world and our city and the people that

you have created in your image. Lord, will we have open hearts

this morning? Hear your voice as you speak to

each one of us about our part to play in the outworking of your

transformation in our world in Jesus name, Amen.

Well, we're going to be turning to Isaiah 40 this morning.

If you want to pull that up, you can.

Let's have a quick dive in. I want to give a little bit of

context before we read it. You know, Isaiah is a prophet

and he opens chapter 40 of Isaiah.

It's the second-half of Isaiah, and it is a really key turning

point from a a place essentially of judgement to a place of hope.

The Israelites have been exiled as the Babylonians besieged

their city. And honestly, they're despairing

because what they are experiencing seems to counter

what they've been promised by God to be a great nation whom

God would establish the Kingdom through.

And in the midst of looking at their reality, they're

ultimately falling for the lie that God has forgotten them.

He's abandoned them. And you can imagine, right?

We've all been in those spots where we start to wrestle with

those questions that we thought we knew what we answers to.

But here, because of the reality we find ourselves in, we're

like, does God want to help us? Can he really help us?

Will he help us? I mean, maybe that's just me.

The into that despair that the Israelites had, Isaiah comes and

he speaks God's comfort and he gives them a vision of hope and

assurance that this is not the end of their story, even though

what they're experiencing doesn't make sense or what they

had imagined or hoped or thought it would be.

He paints this incredible picture, a prophetic voice that

calls into the midst of a circumstance and calls forth a

fresh vision of a new reality of transformation.

So let's read from verse 340, verse 3.

In the wilderness, a voice of 1 cause the way of the Lord makes

straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made

low. The rough ground shall become

level, the rugged places a plain, and the glory of the Lord

will be revealed, and all people will see it together.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

And man, I love worship, and I love how God weaves I.

We were sat there at the end saying, and the glory of the

Lord will be seen on all of the earth.

And here we are in this scripture this morning.

The glory of the Lord will be seen on all the earth by all

people. Amen.

And these words weren't just a powerful image for the

Israelites in front of them. They were a prophetic voice

giving hope and vision to a future generation.

And we see that in Matthew 3/3 when John the Baptist walks out

this prophecy where he is the voice crying, and he walks in to

preach in the wilderness as he prepares the way for Jesus.

And the depth and the beauty of these hope filled words in

Isaiah then ultimately unfold through Jesus who came as the

way God's Son, making this incredible declaration that what

seems impossible can be made possible only through Jesus.

And that now, in this moment in 2025, there is nothing beyond

redemption through the cross and the resurrection, which declared

that no person, no situation, you know, no financial crisis

this morning, no relationship, no medical diagnosis, no

circumstance is beyond the power of God's love and transformation

this morning. Amen.

And I think some of us out of the gates here need to hear that

reality and that truth this morning, that nothing is beyond

the power of God's love and redemption and transformation in

your life. Nothing.

Jesus, life made a way, and his declaration is always one of

hope. But these words in Isaiah are

also a posture of hope and a vision of transformation, and a

posture and vision that we as a church, you and me, are called

to hold for each other and for ourselves, but also for every

person in this world. Which is particularly poignant

when we consider missions globally or specifically today

as we consider what it means to be compassionate and how we

express that here as a church in this building.

Tomorrow morning, on Monday, on Tuesday and Wednesday and

Thursday and Friday, we're called church to have this

vision of transformation for every person experiencing

poverty and injustice and difficulty in our neighborhoods

and on our streets and in our city.

And the reason I say this is that about a year ago I was

praying over Versa Care. One of my remits and joys is to

oversee Versa Care, which is a compassion ministry of ours as a

church here. And it happens over there on

that side of the building. If you don't know what Versa

care is, you need to go and ask and come and see and and we'll

give you a tour. But I was asking the Lord like,

OK, God, what is it that you want to sharpen us in and Versa

care? What is the posture that we are

to hold as we serve those who find themselves in these places?

And the Lord said this to me. I want you to call the bride at

the church to be like Isaiah, to be a voice calling in the

wilderness of people's lives, proclaiming that this is not the

end of your story. This is not the end of anyone's

story. Jesus is your story.

And Desmond Tutu has a quote that I love and it says the hope

is being able to see that there is light despite all the

darkness. And NT Wright builds on that.

When he talks about how the how the resurrection is essentially

about us implementing hope, he says that hope isn't a theory,

it's a movement. It rolls up its sleeves and it

put it, it is, as he puts it, implementing the resurrection in

the power of the spirit. And that's why hope matters.

Church hope doesn't sit on the sidelines.

It doesn't sit back and be passive.

It acts. It prepares the way it steps

into the wilderness because the resurrection is already at work

in US. And the church is the only

people on the earth that can truly say this, that hope is

alive, not because we can fix it, but because we can lead

people to the only one who can, the only true hope.

And so my prayer is that God would awaken us honestly to be a

people that can stand and say transformation is possible

because Jesus is here. And that we would be postured

with a vision of transformation even in a world that keeps

repeating a narrative that this is too dark, that this is the

end. This is everything is hopeless.

Nothing's going to change. No, no one's going to bring the

the solutions. It's doom and gloom and church,

it's our hour to rise and be the light of hope and transformation

and be a voice that proclaims who Jesus is.

Amen. Amen.

It's our hour to be postured with vision and to be a voice

that calls out. And so from Isaiah 40, I just

sat in this scripture for us today, and the Lord highlighted

three ways that we're to walk as a church in this day.

And particularly, as I said, looking through the lens of what

our compassion ministry looks like.

And the first is this. We are to be a people of

comfort, you know, before the vision of transformation that

comes in verses 3 to 5. I want to still look at verses

1:00 to 2:00 because what does God say?

Comfort, comfort. My people speak tenderly to

them. And then he goes on to remind

them that their sin is pardoned. Ultimately what their true

identity is. Now, it's interesting when you

look at this word comfort, because the Hebrew word for

comfort is a word that I'm terribly not going to pronounce,

but hopefully it will come up on the screen.

Naturmu, maybe we'll go for that.

I'll go for Hebrew lessons soon, I promise.

But this word is not the modern sense of what comes to our mind

when we think about comfort. You know, comfort in our modern

age is ultimately about making everything feel good.

You know, the comfy blanket on your sofa at night.

It's the the clothes that feel comfortable.

It's whatever it looks like. It's the food that's your

comfort food when you're feeling a bit down and gloomy, you know,

come on, Bit of Cadbury's chocolate.

Can't beat it. It goes.

I should, I should be like Mark and start suggesting my favorite

things up here. Because if you're watching Mark,

you'd be proud. But comfort, it goes much deeper

in the Hebrew. In the original, the root of the

world is related to a physical sighing or a breathing hard, a

physical sense of being relieved after walking through something

immensely stressful and hard. It's an active, strengthening

comfort that gives courage and resilience.

And God here as he's talking to the Israelites, he's talking

about the comfort that's promised that can only come from

him, the relief and deliverance that God will bring as they face

a seriously long period of captivity and despair.

And notice it says it twice. Comfort, comfort.

The repetition of words in the Scripture need to catch our

attention because it highlights the people's deep need for this

kind of powerful consolation from God because of their

suffering. And so when you dig into this,

you realise that comfort is not about making it feel good.

It's this active, not passive life giving reassurance that

impacts the physical meeting people in their physical need,

bringing a relief as a demonstration of the truest form

of comfort, Jesus relationship with him that brings strength to

the whole world emotionally, physically, spiritually.

But I love that God pairs this, this like essentially a posture

of of truth, right? That that's what really brings

strength is truth, but God pairs it with tenderness, because

tenderness is how we speak truth.

And as we bring a demonstration both in the physical and in the

what comes out of our mouths, God's reminding us to do it

tenderly. And Jesus models this right when

we think about his life when people were broken, when people

were lost or rejected, He never started with condemnation.

In fact, he never condemned. He always begins with dignity,

hope, and a reminder of their truest identity.

The woman at the well, Zacchaeus, the woman caught in

adultery. The leper.

It was never get your life together.

This is how you got here. What stupid choices did you

make? He began with what they needed

most, physical demonstrations of dignity and hope and truth,

touching the leper that no one would touch, turning and looking

at the woman in the eye that nobody wanted to acknowledge

they knew. He meets people where they're

at. He offers dignity before

direction. He spoke identity before

correction. And as God's church, we are

called to do the same. Comfort with strength, speak

with tenderness and remind people of their truest identity,

not what the world has told them, not what their own

narrative has told them because of their life circumstances.

The narrative that Jesus speaks over them, that you and my

child, that you've been made in my image and inside of you is

purpose and hope and dignity. And you are made with my

intention inside of you. And that is true for each one of

us in here. And that is true for every

person on this planet. The ones that know Jesus, these

are the ones that don't. They are made in the image of

God. And they need us as a church to

call out that image, to call out their identity and say you are

loved and we're going to show you why.

And honestly, church, we have a beautiful expression of this

that happens every week in this building in Verso care.

We are creating intentional spaces and places for people to

walk in our doors as they are because if I'm really honest

with you, they won't walk in here on a Sunday because their

reality feels so far away from our reality that this feels like

too big of a gap. And so we have Versa care and we

open our doors and we say, come as you are.

We say you're hungry, let's come get some food from our food

bank. You've got you're a single mum

and you've got kids and you've been rallying all week in a flat

on your own. Then coming into our stay and

play, let your kids play with our toys.

You know what they need some clothes.

We've got some clothes, we've got some equipment.

We also want to have a conversation with you as the mum

because we know that life is really hard as a single mum.

We have a cafe where people get to come into a cafe that looks a

lot like a cafe in the middle of town, and they don't have to pay

for the beautiful cake and have someone serve them a coffee

because they're worth the dignity that each one of us gets

to experience when we walk in and tap our card and buy that

latte. But we meet people in those

spaces that are often in crisis, people on the edge of tears.

They feel like their world is falling apart.

They don't know if life is worth the living.

We have refugees that have found themselves on new shores and

unable to speak a language, lost everything that they've ever

known because their family has been torn away from them in a

war zone. And they come in our door and we

say we love you. How can we help you today?

You know what so many of them say?

So peaceful in this building. What is it that's going on here?

Here's the reality Church. Every meal served, every coffee

poured, every peaceful environment created through the

Spirit of God is a prophetic act, a posture that declares,

like Isaiah, that there is hope, there is comfort, there is

strength and assurance that this is not the end of your story.

And there is a God who cares so much that we show up to serve

you a coffee, We show up to give you a bag of food.

We show up to have the conversation with a police

officer that's brought someone who's in such crisis that they

need an emergency bag any hour of the day through the week.

And we will give it to them because we love them, because

they are made in the image of God and they deserve dignity and

value and worth. And we get to make that

declaration as a church. Amen.

Secondly, we are a people who prepare verses 3 and 4.

It says this in the wilderness. Prepare the way for the Lord.

Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made

low. The rough ground shall become

level, the rugged places plain. Isaiah gives a picture

essentially of a barren landscape, which here in the

Scripture is God's people. They had become barren and into

which God shows up. And if I had time to share lots

of stories this morning from Versa Care, you would not be

shocked. I'm sure to know that many of

their realities are heartbreaking and complex.

And often the horizon looks pretty brief and barren if

you're looking from a human perspective.

But God is reminding us in this room this morning.

And this is something I remind our team at Versa Care of all of

the time. We aren't called to see that.

We're called to see God's what God sees.

We're called to see what he, his vision is for their life.

And I love it. He says that every valley will

be raised up. We know those valleys in our own

lives, right? The situations that feel too

much unbearable, or the shame of our sin that so easily entangles

us. But we see the valleys in our

world through injustice and poverty and the forgotten and

the poor and the desolate. And God is reminding us here

that through Jesus every value can be lifted.

And that Jesus through Jesus will be lifted one day.

Every mountain and hill will be made low.

Those mountains of indifference that exist in us in action, our

pride, but in our world, the powerful, unjust structures that

will be humbled, that will be brought down because of Jesus.

And next week you're going to get to hear some of those

stories. And honestly, they are going to

blow your mind at the work of the God through bringing down

unbelievable systems of injustice that have caused much

pain. But the ground will also become

level, a rugged place, a plane, the barriers that divide, the

tensions, the questions, the unknown, they will be made

smooth. And as we stand here in the

between of the here and not yet, we are called as the bride of

Christ to keep believing for what's in heaven, to come to

earth, where we would see the markers of this transformation

happening in the here and the now.

But notice those few words that come before this picture.

Prepare the way the Lord will do the impossible, but he

commissions us to be a people who prepare.

You know, I was thinking about my dad was a a Co Co vocational

pastor Slash. He had his own construction

company and we grew up in Devon and he would do a lot of work on

farms. And I can remember as a little

girl I realised now we'd never be allowed to go because of

health and safety. But I used to go to work with my

dad sometimes on the weekends. And I can remember him being in

situations where farmers were like, can we please make a lane

across this field? And he'd be like, well, it's

very, that's going to be a little tricky given the state of

the land. But he had a remarkable ability

to say, I see it, I see the vision of it, and we can make it

happen. We can make it happen.

And then he was set to diligently preparing the ground.

And my word, to lay a road or a farm lane out of concrete.

The diligence required to prepare the ground is

phenomenal, but he would see it, and then he would get stuck into

doing the work required to ensure it was prepared.

And then the concrete lorry would come and it would pour.

And I'd watch him as he diligently laid out this road so

that the life of that farm in the form of animals would be

able to travel in the direction that they were destined to

travel. And Jesus did the same.

He didn't shout hope from afar. He got close.

He didn't just see the vision of someone's life.

He sat with the lonely. He walked with the poor.

He touched the untouchable. Because compassion was never

pity. It was always proximity.

He built a road into people's lives so that they could walk

towards God's love that would transform them.

But I think proximity, if I'm honest, is the part we often

avoid. We love the idea of compassion

as a church, often churches across the world, but we

struggle with the proximity and the cost.

We think, you know what? I'm, I'm not really core to

that. That's for that person over

there. They've got a deeply

compassionate heart. Can I be really honest?

Compassion is not a personality type.

It's discipleship. Compassion is not a personality

type. It's discipleship as we model

our lives on Jesus as we are his apprentice.

Transformation happens in us when we remember the radical

transformation that Jesus brought to our lives as we came

to the cross and realised what he'd done for us.

We were all desperate, in despair and desolate.

And he walked into our lives and he gave us the gift of life

through his death and resurrection.

And when we sit in the cross and the awe and the wonder like

Eduardo unpacked last week, from that place we are empowered to

become the soil that wraps around the seed of other

people's lives to remind them of what is possible, what is God

has placed inside of them. We're people that are called to

build, to prepare the road, to take up the stones that get in

people's way, to wrap an arm around somebody and say, you've

got this, you can do it. Because we're not called, as

one, John 318 says, to just love with words or speech.

We are called to love with actions.

And in truth, you know, and sometimes that looks like

investor care, recognising that we, we respond in the crisis,

we, we wrap our, our arms wide open and say, come as you are.

But as we love people in those spaces, you know, even as we

invite families into refill in the summer holidays and we say,

there's a table, we want you to gather as a table and eat as a

family because you don't get to eat as a family any other day of

the week because you don't even have a dining table in your

house. As we wrap our arms around

people in those spaces to say, come as you are, what we're also

saying is don't stay as you are. We see something in you that can

change for the good. And we it's like when a seed

grows out of the seed in the ground and that tender seedling

rises up, you know, at home, sometimes I put a stick in to

the ground, it goes into the soil and then I wrap some string

around it and I give IT support. And that's what we do in Versa

Care through our bridge programme.

It's our gold thread programme where we say to people, you are

so worth it that we want to wrap ourselves next to you for the

long haul. We believe in you and we believe

in what God is doing in your life that we will walk with you,

with mentor you. We will be here week in and week

out to kind of process what you're going through.

We will empower you with courses.

You need some help in getting out of debt?

Let's do it together. You need some help in

understanding boundaries and relationships?

Let's do it together. And so we have an incredible

number of mentors who are in this room who sit with people in

Versa care and say we believe in you and we believe in what God

can do in your life. And we want to walk it for the

long haul, right? Just as Isaiah spoke into that

group that were in a long journey of desperation and

exile, God shows up in people's lives.

And we do that together as we have mentors who walk this

journey because we believe that every person is capable of

thriving. Every person is capable of

living in the reality of hope. And we will do what it takes to

roll up our sleeves and walk with them all of the way to find

Jesus, the true transformer of hearts.

And so my question for us this morning church is the verse of

care is 1 expression. Many of you are involved in many

expressions of compassion, but what is your place?

What is the nutrient, essentially, that you carry,

that you bring to the soil of our church that wraps itself

around people who are experiencing poverty and

injustice? Because the question is not if

we should engage, it's how we're going to engage.

Because compassion is not a special ministry.

It is a core piece of who Jesus is.

And we all are disciples of Jesus.

And if we are disciples of Jesus, we are asking him how we

become more like him. Which means the question is, how

are we becoming more compassionate as a church?

And remember that every act, every nutrient, every piece of

that soil is needed. It doesn't always look the same.

And I think sometimes when you talk about compassion ministry

in churches, we all think it's, well, it has to look like this.

The reality is corporately, as a church, we are called to be

compassionate and we all have a part to play.

And so some of us in this room this morning may hear the words

whisper, you know what I need to pray.

Like we've been in this prayer series.

And this week our our focus for prayer and fasting on Wednesday

is missions. It is this stuff.

Our Versa Care ministry is missions on the local hand.

And some of you may be called to come and say, you know what, I

want to pray over our sessions. What would it look like if we

had a team of intercessors every time we open our door that just

pray through our Versa Care sessions and prayed for the

Spirit of God to move like we've never seen it move before in

this place? What happens if we had someone

who said, I want to pray for a team member that is on the front

row of our expression in Versa Care?

I want to commit every week to praise each member of the Versa

Care staff to walk with them through prayer.

Some of you are called to do that and it's a gap right now

that I believe will want us to shift in this place because we

are going to push in to engage together.

Some of us are called to actually serve, to say, you know

what, I'm free on a Monday or I'm free on a Wednesday or I'm

free on a Tuesday and I'd love to come in and help Yvonne sort

the storage room or I'd love to give some administration

support. I'd love to whatever it might

be, you might have time and resource to come and literally

serve in part of what we do in the week.

Some of us though, in this room are called to be radically

generous, not because it's another fundraising tick, but

because you're yes to being radically generous is a

prophetic voice into the wilderness of people's lives to

prepare the way of the Lord to be made known in their life.

And I'm going to be really honest with you, in the current

culture that we live in, fundraising is tough.

And particularly when you are a church and you say that Jesus is

the only hope and the church needs to rise.

We need people that will say, you know what?

I believe in what you're doing. I believe that the Lord is

asking us to be a prophetic voice.

And so I'm going to give and you can do that individually.

You can do it through all our normal channels of giving and

just you can make the memo versa care.

You can sign up to be a regularly monthly donor, and I'm

not pressuring anyone. I'm simply asking you to ask the

Lord, How am I supposed to engage?

How am I supposed to prepare the way of the Lord for people who

are experiencing poverty and injustice on our doorstep to

have the opportunity to encounter Jesus?

You know, maybe you love biking, maybe you love running.

I don't know what it is. You know, we have Paul who's

doing the Christmas treasure hunt and all the funds from that

are going into Versa care. We get to have fun while we do.

Compassion doesn't have to be all serious, right?

There are all kinds of ways to engage and there are about 1000

other ways that I could go through.

But church, I'm asking you this morning, we all have the

capacity to carry hope in this room.

And we all have the capacity to, to believe that what comes next,

that the glory of the Lord will be revealed to all people, not

just a remnant inside this room, to the whole world will see the

glory of God as we demonstrate his love in the world.

And so finally, I want to say this, that we are going to be a

people of expectation in this room because here at the end of

Isaiah, the promise is real that the glory of the Lord will be

revealed and all will see it together when we do what only we

can do. God does what only he can do.

We don't manufacture transformation.

We aren't the saviours. We make spaces for it.

We give Jesus our yes and he fills that space with his glory,

one life at a time. So would you stand with me?