Orchard NEO | Pastor Jimmy Kozy

Romans 10:9-15.

Romans 10:9–15

Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe

in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For with the heart one believes and is justified,

and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

For the Scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek.

For the same Lord is Lord of all.

Bestowing his riches on all who call on him.

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

And how are they to preach unless they are sent?

As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those

who preach the good news.

Well, hey,

welcome to the weekend gathering of Christ Community Chapel.

So great to see you this morning.

If we've not met before.

My name is Jimmy Kozy.

I'm one of the pastors here as a part of my role

I also have the privilege

of leading Orchard NEO, which you just heard about on video.

Orchard NEO is our church planting organization here at Christ Community

Chapel.

We started it in 2019 with the goal that by the year 2050,

we would plant 60 churches in communities

all around Northeast Ohio. And Jorge

and Brandon, who you just met via video represent our 11th and 12th churches

that Christ Community Chapel has planted in Northeast Ohio.

And I

was having a conversation with somebody in the community recently,

a person who works in the school district I coach there.

And, this person, she was asking me about my day to day here at CCC.

And one of the things that I told her

is that I'm involved in church planting, and I could tell that didn't

really register with her because I don't I don't think she's a Christian.

And so I said, well,

we start new churches and communities all around Northeast Ohio.

So we bring a guy in, we train him, we resource him,

we find him, and after two years, he leaves our program,

the pastor of a fully independent, autonomous church.

And I could see the question on the tip of her tongue, why would you do that?

With all the things that a

church of our size and with our resources could be involved in?

Why are we so engaged and invested

in starting new churches all around Northeast Ohio?

And the answer is found in Romans chapter ten.

In Romans chapter ten, I see there's a three part answer.

It goes like this.

This will serve as our outline for this morning.

Jesus gives clarity.

Jesus gives us clarity.

Clarity creates urgency.

And then urgency drives action.

Jesus gives us clarity.

Clarity creates urgency.

Urgency drives action.

We'll start with that first point.

Jesus gives us clarity.

Let me read for you Romans chapter ten, verses nine and ten, which say this

because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe

in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For with the heart one believes and is justified,

and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Here's what I mean when I say that Jesus gives us clarity.

Because of Jesus, we can know God.

And if you're here today and you are not a Christian,

or you would not identify yourself as a Christian

if you don't hear anything else I say this morning, hear this.

You can know God.

You don't have to wonder about him.

You don't have to wonder what he's like, what he's interested

in, what his plan is for you, what he expects for you, what he expects

from you, what it means for us to have a relationship with him.

All of those things have been revealed to us

through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What that means is that God is not ambivalent toward you.

He's not standing at an arm's length.

He's not hiding from you.

He wants to have a personal relationship with you that is made possible

through the blood of his son, Jesus Christ.

You can know God.

So if you ever wondered what is God like, look at Jesus.

If you ever, ever wondered, what does God want from me?

What does God want for me?

Look at Jesus.

Does God want to have a relationship with me?

Look at Jesus.

He sent his own son to die that he might have relationship with you.

You can know God.

Jesus gives us spiritual clarity, crystal clarity

about what the nature of our relationship with God is like.

But that clarity creates urgency.

And that's my second point.

Here's what I mean by that.

Let me read for you again from Romans chapter ten.

I'm going to read verse 13, which says this

for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

This verse is both amazing

and terrifying simultaneously, and here's why I say that.

It's amazing because of what it says about the goodness

and grace of God that is available to you and I through Jesus Christ.

Here's what it means to have a relationship with God.

God sent His Son Jesus to die so that the barrier between us

and him could be broken down so that we could be forgiven of our sins,

so that we could be reconciled to him and have the opportunity to belong to him

forever. Here's a test if you really understand this.

One way to think about it is this if you stood before God today

and the question was asked of you, why should God accept you?

If your answer is anything other than the body

and blood of Jesus Christ broken and shed on my behalf,

then you may not understand fully what the Bible says

about what it means to be a Christian, because what that says

is that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

That means that everything that you think that you need to do to please God,

every bit of religious performance, whether it's being a good person or

being moral or being generous or attending church or reading your Bible,

all of those things, while they are good things they don't accomplish for us.

Our relationship with God.

Our relationship with God is based solely on the performance

of Jesus Christ on our behalf that is credited to us all we do

is trust in him, call on his name and be saved.

That is amazing.

But it's also terrifying.

It's terrifying because of the converse of that statement.

Because if it's true that everyone who calls on

the name of the Lord will be saved, then the logic must follow that.

It must also be true that everyone who does not

call on the name of the Lord will not be saved.

This makes me

think about Jurassic Park, and I know what you're thinking.

I can't believe this guy is going to try to connect Jurassic Park to the Bible.

That's a fair criticism.

I guess it's possible I spent so much time thinking about whether I could, that

I didn't stop to consider whether or not I should, but we're going anyway.

I love Jurassic Park.

If Jurassic Park is on, I'm in.

Like if you held up an iPad

in the middle of the service right now with Jurassic Park,

I would be tempted to stop and just watch it play out.

There are seven Jurassic parks by this point, I think.

Seven.

And I was watching the seventh one a couple of weeks ago,

and I noticed something that maybe you already know, and it's this

every Jurassic Park movie has essentially the same story.

It goes like this.

There's this guy over here.

He's got dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are great.

Check it out. Don't worry.

The dinosaurs are under control.

That's part one. Part two. Whoops.

We made a mistake.

The dinosaurs are loose and people are getting eaten.

And we need to get out of here.

That's what I mean when I say clarity creates urgency

in every Jurassic Park movie.

Whatever the side story is,

if it's about genetically engineering crops or building a theme park

or creating new species of dinosaurs, there's this side story that's going on.

But there's a moment in the movie where you realize, oh, the dinosaurs are loose,

and that that clarity creates urgency because everything else

that you were thinking about at that point in time for the characters

in that movie, it's over that the movie just becomes about,

we have got to get out of here because the dinosaurs are loose,

because there's a piece of information that raises the stakes and clarifies

things such that you can't think about anything else.

You just got it. You just got to move.

Listen, people

who do not trust in Jesus go to hell.

That's what the Bible teaches.

In John 14 six, Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Nobody comes to the father except by me.

And I know that depending on your spiritual or religious background,

the idea of judgment and hell can be uncomfortable.

But it's what Jesus teaches.

And so if we're going to follow him, then we need to follow everything

that he's teaching and not pick and choose things based on their comfort level.

Because if we do that, it flips it upside down, then we're not following Jesus.

We're asking Jesus to follow us.

He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Nobody comes to the father except by me.

And this creates incredible urgency for us because of what's going on around us.

Northeast Ohio has 4.5 million people.

I saw some data from a survey that was held in 2024.

The most recent thing I could find estimated that about 40%

at most of people in Northeast Ohio would consider themselves Christians.

If you think about what that means, that means that right now,

there are 2.5 million or more people

within driving distance of where we are who have not called

on the name of the Lord and will not be saved.

That's urgency, but it's personal.

It's more than just big numbers.

It's about you and I.

Every one of us has people in our sphere of influence friends, neighbors,

kids on our our or parents of kids on our other, our kids sports teams,

people who play golf with people we see on a day to day basis,

who we know are not Christians, have not placed their faith in Jesus.

That's what I mean when I say clarity creates urgency,

and that

leads to a feeling of somebody needs to do something.

We need to do something.

So the question is, what are we going to do about it?

And that leads to my third point, which is urgency drives action.

You can see that logic, by the way, play out in this passage.

You know, it starts with if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord

and believe in your heart, God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved.

That's clarity.

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Urgency.

And then he moves immediately into a cascade of action oriented questions.

Listen to this in verse 14 and 15.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

And how are they to preach unless they are sent as it is written?

How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news?

Urgency drives

action, and that's what Orchard is.

Orchard is action driven by urgency,

created by clarity given by Jesus.

Because Orchard, know at its fundamental

core, is not a church starting organization.

Orchard NGO exists so that people in Northeast Ohio

who do not currently have a relationship with Jesus, who have not called

on the name of the Lord and therefore would not be saved,

have an opportunity to hear about Jesus, the goodness

and grace of God that is available to all of us through him.

Church planting is a means to an end.

The end being that people would be able to come to faith in

Jesus because they heard,

because they believed, because they heard, because someone preached,

because someone sent the exact order that plays out in that passage.

That is the mission that we are on.

And it's a mission for us as followers of Jesus

that is driven by personal transformation.

A few weeks ago, I stayed at a Ritz-Carlton.

I don't if you don't know me very well.

I'm not really a Ritz-Carlton kind of guy.

That's not really my vibe or my scene.

I'm more of a a Frontier Airlines kind of guy, which we'll get to in a minute.

But I was at the Ritz-Carlton for a conference,

and as a part of this conference, they gave you a room at the Ritz-Carlton.

I know I said, tough job, but I'll take this assignment.

It's going to be hard.

So I'm at the Ritz-Carlton,

and it was the day that we were supposed to leave,

and our flight wasn't until later in the evening.

And so you have meetings all day, and then you got to try to

get to your flight and get out of there.

And I had a I had a situation because I needed to check out of the room,

but my flight wasn't until later that evening.

So I went to the desk at the Ritz-Carlton and I said, hey, help me out.

I have to check out of my room, but my flight's not till 5 or 6 tonight.

Is there anything you can do?

What are my options?

And, the Ritz Carlton is known for its hospitality.

They're supposed to be the pinnacle of guest experience and hospitality.

So I had high expectations going into this conversation.

So I went to the desk, and the first thing the person says to me

is, are you a Bonvoy member?

And I said, no, I'm not a Bonvoy member.

And so they said to me, well, I can't really do much for you.

The room is available, so you could pay for another night

if you want, but all I can really do for you is give you another hour.

You fast forward to later that evening.

We're trying to get home. My wife was with me.

This was on the weekend, a few weeks back when the FAA reduced all the flights.

And so trying to go anywhere in an airport was an absolute nightmare.

It was chaos.

And so we're in Sarasota, Florida, trying to get back home to Cleveland.

So our flights were supposed to be Sarasota to Atlanta, Atlanta to Cleveland.

We're sitting in the airport and everything gets canceled.

And so we're just sitting there trying to figure out, I run,

you know, to the line

to rebook, to try to figure out how are we going to get home tonight.

And as I'm waiting in line, my wife, Emily, who is a charter

member of the Frontier Discount Den, gives me a call and says, hey,

frontier has a direct flight to Cleveland tonight from Tampa,

which is about an hour away in about four hours.

Should I book it? And I said, yeah, I booked a flight.

So she booked the flight.

We hustled to the Tampa airport.

You know, we get there and it's just chaos.

You look on the screen, everything is red, yellow, blinking.

Every flight's delayed, every flight is canceled.

And so we run through the airport, we get to our gate.

Our flight is supposed take off at, like, 8:20 p.m..

So we're sitting at the gate having an experience

that's probably a universal experience for anybody who's ever flown.

Says 820.

Then the time changes to 850, then it changes to 930,

then it's 1010, then it's 1050 finally settles at 11:06 p.m.

that they say this flight is going to take off.

My wife and I are just sitting there saying, there's no way,

you know, there's no way we're getting out here tonight.

We're gonna spend the night on a bench

in the Tampa airport because it's too late to go find a hotel,

because we have to get back for an early flight the next day.

And so we're sitting there and it's about 1058.

And I see this frontier crew in green polo

shirts come sprinting through the airport, run up to the gate.

And I'm telling you, I have never seen a flight crew move

with such urgency in my entire life.

They got us on the plane in minutes.

They were doing it was like they were going to do

whatever they could to get us out of there. That night.

They were moving so quickly, like the guy got up to do the whole safety thing.

He said, look, this seatbelt is not going to do anything for you if

this plane crashes,

I can.

Would you please just put it on so we can push back from the gate?

So, so we can get out of here.

I mean, it was it was amazing.

They were moving incredibly fast and doing whatever they could.

So as we were flying home, I was juxtaposing these two experiences

against one another.

On one hand,

you had the Ritz-Carlton, who's supposed to be known for their hospitality,

and they were relatively ambivalent to the situation that we were in.

On the other hand, you have frontier, which is a budget

airline and often lives up to their reputation as such.

But it seemed like they were going to do whatever they could do

to get us to Cleveland that night, and it didn't make sense to me.

I was puzzled by this, and I was trying to figure out,

and it didn't make sense to me until I walked off the airplane

because Emily and I walked.

We were among the last off the plane.

We walked down the jetway with the crew,

and as we're walking, the crew is laughing.

They're joking, they're celebrating, and I see they've all got big bags on.

And I realized in that moment, every person on

that crew was from Cleveland.

So for them, this flight was not about doing their job.

This flight was about getting home.

They needed to get home just as badly

as anybody else on that plane.

And that is the heart behind Orchard now.

That's why we do what we do because of what Jesus has done for us.

Because of him, we have the opportunity to have relationship

with the God of the universe, who loves us and wants us to belong to him.

And so we want

to take as many people with us as we can.

That's why we plant churches.

This weekend at CTC, we are going to baptize 36 people.

That means that year to date, in the year 2025,

we will have baptized 265 people

at Christ Community Chapel.

And if you think about what that means when somebody gets baptized,

they're saying, I have called on the name of the Lord and been saved.

And this is a symbol for all of you to see.

That's 265 lives

that have been transformed by the goodness and grace of Jesus Christ.

That's why we celebrate, because baptism is not a bonvoy membership.

Baptism is a plane landing in the middle of the night, in the cold, in the rain,

at home, when you never thought that you'd get there.

And we want to take as many people with us as we can.

Chad Young this year one of our church planters in Ravenna planted

Upward City Church they launched on Easter just eight months ago,

and on their launch Sunday, they baptized 13 people.

They've baptized 14 people now, and they have

six more who are in the queue to get baptized.

That's 20 people in Ravenna who had the opportunity

to hear of the goodness and grace of Jesus available to us.

Jorge Alvarado is headed to Latin

American immigrants, which are flocking to the Canton and Akron area.

And when I met Jorge, we could not find a single

Spanish speaking church in that area.

So Jorge is going to go.

He's been sent to preach so that they might hear and believe

and call in the name of the Lord and be saved.

Brandon Stubbs headed to Chagrin Falls Park, a neighborhood

I'm guessing you didn't even know existed until 20 minutes ago.

So the people there might call on the name of the Lord

because they believed, because they heard, because Brandon was sent to preach

to them.

That is why we do Orchard now.

It's so that every community in Northeast Ohio, 2.5 million people,

might have the opportunity to hear of the goodness and grace of God

that is available to every one of us through Jesus.

Let's pray together.

Father in Heaven, we thank you for the goodness

and grace that you've made available to us through your Son, Jesus.

The first and foremost.

If we've trusted in him, we have been made new.

We've been forgiven. We've been redeemed.

We've been given new life, and we belong to you.

We pray for our orchard church planters.

We pray that you would send them with power,

that you would give them favor, that you would help them

to have success in their communities, not so that they would grow an organization,

but so that people would come to faith in Jesus Christ, your son,

who you sent to die for us, your son, in whose name we pray.

Amen.