Content in the Middle of Discontent | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Amen.

Um I want to uh uh we're gonna look today.

We're gonna be in Acts chapter six.

So if you have your Bible, you can go there.

We're in a series of messages.

While you're turning there, I do want to draw your attention uh to the seat in front of you.

We have some of these cards.

We are uh right now in the the process of raising money and executing projects to be able to expand our community as a church.

Uh the short version is uh we're gonna be adding a new auditorium.

It's about 1,400 seats.

Um we're gonna be retrofitting this space for our kids' ministry, and then this whole wing for our kids.

We're gonna be adding uh we're several hundred parking spaces to improve the traffic and not only parking, but uh reworking the traffic on the property to be more efficient, and then we're adding over 2,000 square feet of special needs space as well.

And so it's a big project, it's not cheap, uh, and it takes all hands on deck.

Last week we talked about uh the relationship between the feeding of the 5,000, 4,000, and 3,000.

And the 5,000 was a kid with five loaves and two fish in Jesus, and the feeding of uh the 3,000 in Acts 2 was everybody's loaves and fish and Jesus.

And so I just uh want to invite you, if this is your church, uh to be a part of helping us to pull this off.

This is something that really is going to take all of us.

Uh the card in front of you has a couple things.

It's pretty simple.

On the back, we have a QR code that will take you to our website uh that will tell you all about the Next Is Now projects and then give you a place uh to ask a question if we didn't answer the one that you might have.

And then over here is just uh the this part is just communication.

Um we would it would really help us to know what you intend to do uh if the Lord puts on your heart to be a part of it.

If you tell us that, uh that helps us to to uh do a lot better on this end, but when we have to try to guess, uh it's very difficult as you can imagine.

So um thank you so much uh for this.

And you can again uh drop those um on your way out.

You know, I probably should have asked that.

Do we have some kind of receptacle or something for people to give those?

Huh?

Yeah, just just kind of throw them in the lobby and uh we'll get them.

No, there should there will be something, right?

By faith, there will be there will be a very obvious place for you to put this.

Okay.

Let's pick up where we left off last week.

We are um in the book of Acts, just as a little recap, Acts was written by Luke.

So he wrote Luke and Acts as one book, later separated as two.

So anytime you see, read the book of Acts, it's the gospel according to Luke.

It's it's the story of Jesus in Luke.

And the Acts in the book of Acts is the Acts of the Apostles.

So it's like the baton handoff from Jesus as Jesus Christ to the body of Christ, and to see what people full of the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead, uh, how that played out.

And so uh I want to just go back to what we, you know, and kind of use this as our starting point this week, to go back to where we were last week, Acts 2, 42 through 47.

It says uh essentially they were at the uh festival of Pentecost, which was in Jerusalem.

So a little quick context, uh there's a word called the diaspora.

Have you ever seen that word diaspora?

It's essentially referring to the Jewish people who had been scattered throughout the world because in their history um they had been exiled by various empires.

So the Babylonians, the Assyrians came in, took over their land, and took many of their best and brightest back to uh their home hometown.

And so uh when they did that, now you have Jewish people spread all over, as far as uh Alexandria, Egypt.

Some of them were in Cyrene, which would be North Africa.

So they're they're children of Israel, but they've been culturally spread out to where they grew up in these different places.

They spoke different languages, uh, they had in many ways become Hellenized or they become part of those cultures.

And now, every so often, like the Feast of Pentecost, everybody comes together uh to celebrate something in our heritage.

And so that's what they were doing.

And so when they did that, and then um God begins to move in the power of the Holy Spirit, now you have all these people that have said, hey, God is doing something here, and we're gonna stick around and we're gonna be a part of it.

So now you have both um uh Hebrew um believers, you have people that are from Jerusalem, they're the home team, and then you have um all these people that are spread throughout the world that have come together, and so they're even though we're all children of Israel, there is a clash of culture.

So in Acts 2 it says this group of people, when they first came together, they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer.

Everyone was filled with awe.

All right, I want you to don't forget that word, awe.

Everyone was filled with awe.

Their minds were blown at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.

All the believers were together and had everything in common.

This is just powerful unity language.

They were sharing what they need.

Oh, you need one?

I've got one of those.

Here you go.

It was organic the way they were meeting needs.

Verse uh 45.

It says they sold property and possessions to give to everyone in need.

This is generosity language.

So we have unity, we have generosity.

Verse 46.

Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.

This is consistency.

They broke bread in their homes, they ate together with glad and sincere hearts.

This is a beautiful picture, verse 47.

Praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people, and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

I mean, who wouldn't want to be a part of a unified, consistent, generous community?

Of course.

And so what happened is everybody's jumping on board.

All right, this is that's Acts 2.

Now, we're gonna fast forward, skip a few chapters.

As this thing's continuing to grow, we're gonna get to Acts 6.

And in Acts chapter 6, we're gonna start reading in verse 1.

Acts 6 · chapter mention

It says, but as the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent.

As the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent.

I want to talk to you today about the relationship between awe and discontent.

No matter who you're with or no matter what you do, at some point the thing that's magically amazing, that starts out as awe, eventually will have some discontent.

Things that are novel eventually become familiar.

When they're familiar, they become ordinary, sometimes they become demanding, and sometimes they become disappointing.

Even the most powerful romantic relationships, right, at first they start out with awe, fascination, that you just can't believe that somebody this amazing wants you.

Every conversation feels electric.

And over time, uh, with daily routines, unmet expectations, sometimes even unresolved uh issues and hurts, the mystery's dulled.

Uh it's it's amazing how somebody's quirks during the awe phase of the relationship, their quirks are cute.

And now we've been together a while and you're just messy.

And it's uh it's become irritating.

What once was novel and cute is now irritating.

It's true in romantic relationships.

I won't ask for a show of hands, but you know I'm telling the truth.

Uh same for career, or what some some of us may call uh refer to as calling.

Uh you land your dream job and uh you step into your calling, and and it's not hard for you to feel a sense of purpose every single day, and you have this sense that I was made for this, and yet over time, with bureaucracy, uh fatigue, butting heads with coworkers, at some point this uh sacred work just feels like work.

Uh it's true for parenthood.

I think probably the the place in the world that the word miracle is uttered the most is in the delivery room.

You have a a child, and the first time you hold them, it's just pure wonder.

Every single smile is a miracle.

And then over time, there's a thing called sleep deprivation.

There's a thing called adolescent rebellion.

Uh there is often a clash of parenting styles that takes the some of the shine off of the joy of the original awe, it turns into discontent.

This is true in faith.

Uh if you think of the first time, you became really aware of God.

You felt connected to God.

You have this early sense of nearness that's electrifying, and every scripture, every worship song is exhilarating.

And then over time you have to start to contend with the realities of unanswered prayers, sometimes extended times of suffering, and even disillusionment with religious people.

You get into the community that at first was passionate and unified, and all of a sudden you start to see the humanity of the people around you, and it can turn into fatigue and sometimes even cynicism.

So we we know this.

If you've been around the block more than once, you know that things that start out with awe will end up in discontent, and uh, we have to learn that maturity teaches us to see the beauty of the things that are ordinary and familiar, not just the things that are novel and new.

And that that is a lifelong process to continue to do that.

And here's kind of the the when we think about the idea, the relationship between awe and discontent, uh, here's the line I want you to remember is when novelty wears off, maturity needs to kick in.

When novelty wears off, maturity doesn't always kick in, but it needs to.

Uh there's a lot of people that never develop the maturity to cultivate something that's become ordinary.

Uh, they just go from shiny object to shiny object.

They go from novel to novel.

Uh, novel people, novel jobs, novel environments.

They they their happiness is in some new city, new place, new, new, new, new, new.

They need new all the time to sort of keep them up.

And they they've never learned how to get, once I get beneath the surface and the thing lost its new car smell, how do I take care of that car?

How do I change the oil on that one?

How do I change the tires on that one?

They just jump from new to new.

And I'm not here today to beat you up if you you've made a career change, or there are some times that's warranted.

Uh, there are sometimes even relationships come to an end and it's time to move on.

So it's not about that we're supposed to latch on to the first one and and never let go.

Uh, but really, it's it's really looking inwardly to find out is there an issue of my own maturity that I have uh been caught off guard consistently by the expectation that the thing that starts out with awe will never experience discontent.

You you will.

Uh and so this really, in some ways, uh at least part of this message is about values.

What is it and who is it that you value enough to cultivate, to stick in there, uh, to uh ultimately apply the appropriate discipline when novelty's gone that you're gonna stick around and even when you're not getting the adrenaline kickback anymore.

So we see this in Acts.

I mean, come on, this is a this is a profound move of God.

Uh the Holy Spirit's being poured out on these people.

There are signs and wonders, there's uh people being added, the numbers are growing, and yet even in the book of Acts, even with something that profound and clear, you still have people uh who are experiencing a sense of discontent.

And so uh let's look at it.

What are they so upset about?

Where's the discontent coming from?

Let's go back to Acts 6, 1.

It says, as the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent.

Now here's what here's the scene, here's what's going on.

The Greek-speaking believers, in other words, the diaspora, some of your Bibles say the Hellenistic Jews or the Hellenistic believers, the people from the outside, complained that the Hebrew-speaking believers, in other words, the home team, the people who were from Jerusalem, they complained about them, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food.

Okay?

What's interesting here is he's talking about this grumbling or this complaining.

Um, Luke is doing something to his Jewish audience here that would be reading it, that's hearkening back to the children of Israel lost in the wilderness.

So if you looked at the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, you would see that Luke draws the same word that was written 200 years before in the Septuagint, the same word that was used for the children of Israel in the book of Exodus and the book of Numbers, grumbling and complaining to Moses and Aaron about being in the wilderness.

So they're looking back at Egypt and they're going, you know, here in the wilderness, we have to live paycheck to paycheck.

Here in the wilderness, we have to live day to day.

We we, I mean, this give us this day, our daily bread thing is real.

Like we're we we don't have a big abundance.

We're actually so dependent on God uh that we just for our basic needs, at least back in captivity in Egypt, we had meat to eat.

We we had we had uh assurance, we had some uh a sense of um uh uh clarity and and even certainty about tomorrow.

And out here in the wilderness we don't, so they're complaining about their needs, and so Luke draws that same word out of the Septuagint from the from the Greek lexicon, ultimately to talk about, hey, this new Israel, this new covenant people are dealing with the same sense of discontent.

When you look more closely at this, though, it's interesting because to look at not only what the problem was they were dealing with, but how the the apostles responded to it, it sort of gives us a little bit broader view of complaining or grumbling.

Uh often I think people, sometimes leaders, uh, when they hear grumbling and complaining, they get upset and they spin off into a sermon that, you know, complaining is a disease and nobody should ever complain, and that's what's wrong with you.

You're your complainers.

And uh certainly, let me just say this as a caveat: some people, let's be straight, they complain about everything, okay?

I mean, they just do.

They are.

I mean, it is an issue for them.

Like wherever they are, they're nitpicking everyone, they're nitpicking everything.

The food's either too cold or too hot.

Uh the person either said too much or they didn't say enough.

When you say something, they're tearing that apart.

We don't say anything, they're upset about that.

I mean, they just complain all the time.

So that's that's a separate issue.

But not all complaining is bad.

Sometimes when people bring things up, it's for good reason.

I remember when we started the church, um, our church was doing pretty well in the first couple years, and so the church multiplication network, which is a church planning organization, asked me to go around the country and train church planners.

And I said, I'd be happy to.

So I went around, it was wonderful.

Got a chance to look at people that uh I had just been in their shoes a couple years before and try to give them all of our learnings the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Here you go.

And um at dinner time, I would meet with other pastors at dinner and who were doing the same thing I was doing, and we would compare notes about our most recent challenge.

And I was uh talking to one guy, and I remember he was going on and on.

He was basically complaining about the complainers.

And he's like, you know, we got a bunch of complainers in our our church, and they they complain all the time, and I just can't keep up with these complaints and all this.

And I was sitting there thinking, you know, we really don't.

I was thinking, like, our church, I don't really hear a whole lot of complaining.

Uh, and and I didn't want to tell him that because I didn't want to ruin his night, you know.

I want to be, oh yeah, yeah, man, I know it's it's it's rough out here.

But like I didn't really have a lot of complaining going on, and then uh so I sort of chalked that up as a victory, but then I started to think about it and I thought, you know, in our church, people don't complain, they just don't come back.

And I thought, man, you know, we need a few complainers around here, you know.

We need a few people who care enough to complain, you know.

I mean, I mean, there's those nasty complainers that just do, okay, and they can go somewhere else, but like the the ones that actually care enough to go, you know, this is broken.

This isn't good.

This needs to get better.

I love these people and I love this place enough to bring up something that we have outgrown our structure.

We've outgrown our systems.

Greg, if you knew this, I think you'd do something about it.

I think you'd want to know this.

And and so it was funny because once people started finally to complain after about three years, I was like, thank you, Jesus, finally.

People that will come back and we'll we'll talk about.

So what happens?

You've got the diaspora who have come from all over uh these are these are Greek-speaking people, these are people who um, you know, culturally are different.

They're people that, frankly, the Hebraic Jews would have looked at as worldly.

Because you're you're wearing emblems of Hellenism.

You look like the world.

And so we've come together, and we're there's there's been a sense of unity, but as this thing has grown, we've not only outgrown our structure, but we're now hitting a cultural clash.

And as we've done this, again, they again, these people complain.

Now look how the disciples respond.

They don't scold them for being complainers.

They say in verse 2, so the 12, these are the apostles, called a meeting of all believers, and they said, We apostles should spend our time teaching the word of God, not running a food program.

And so, brothers, select seven men who are well respected, are full of the spirit and wisdom, and we will give them this responsibility.

When we apot then we apostles can spend our time in prayer and teaching the word, okay?

Now, when you read that in English, it almost feels like the disciples are, you know, sitting over here, you know, sipping theology, they're pinky out, and they're like, you know, we can't be bothered with this food food line.

Uh we are men of God, okay?

We are so spiritual and you know, we have the important job.

And so they almost it almost seems like when you read it in English, when they say we we we can't be in charge of the food line, like they're blowing this off.

Um, this is absolutely not what's going on.

What they're doing is they're saying, thank you for bringing this problem forward.

This is a problem, and this problem needs special attention.

And what they have the wisdom to realize that they themselves are not scalable to fix all the problems.

And so now we have to get into just some good old-fashioned delegation, communication, giving authorization to people to go solve this problem.

And they said, don't just get anybody to do it.

They said, get the most highly respected, the most competent, people who are full of wisdom.

In other words, they've been there, done that, and they know how to get it done.

And then on top of that, they're full of the spirit, which means that they love people and they have real-time wisdom, even if it's stuff they've not done before.

They know how to work through things and to see people the way that God does.

So get seven of the best of the best of the best.

What's interesting is that the the original language it's written in gives us uh this uh uh picture uh because of a very key word.

So in verse one of chapter six, where it says that they were that the um Grecian widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.

The word for distribution of food is the word deaconia, which means service.

In other places in the New Testament, dieaconia is translated as ministry.

So the same word that they talk about, the distribution or the ministry or the service of food, they use in chapter four when they say the dieaconia of the word.

In other words, we need to have both the deaconia, we need to have the ministry of the food and the ministry of the word, and we cannot trade one for the other.

We cannot deprioritize one for the other.

We we have to raise up a group of people to be able to take care of this.

Now think how critical this is.

Because again, at first, what it looks like is that they're that they're prioritizing one over the other, and that's not what the disciples are doing, is they're saying in some way the ministry of the food and the food line is actually bringing to life the ministry of the word.

We we can't separate them.

So think of it like this: imagine you are a Grecian Hellenistic widow.

Okay?

You are from Alexandria, Egypt.

You came to the Festival of Pentecost at great expense.

Not only financially, but physically.

You make this long, weeks long journey to get there, and you show up.

And God starts moving in a special way, and you decide you're gonna stick around.

And you are sitting at the feet of Peter, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, and you're listening to them tell these stories firsthand.

You hear Philip himself tell you about the dialogue he has with Jesus at the feeding of the 5,000.

You listen to Matthew.

Matthew tells you about the time Jesus touched a leper.

You listen to Matthew tell you about when Jesus stood there with a Roman centurion and offered to go into his home and nurse his sick servant back to health.

You hear Peter tell you the story about the demoniac who was so full of demons.

And that every he had been pushed to the perimeter of society.

He's living in caves and he's living among the tombs.

And that Jesus cared about him.

And that Jesus cast the demons out of him and gave him a new lot in life.

You hear Matthew tell you about Jesus' interaction with the Syrophoenician woman.

You hear about all of this.

And then you hear him go, give you some Jesus sound bites.

They said, now listen, this is what Jesus said.

All the law and the prophets.

All the law and the prophets, all the theological holy scriptures that you have can be summed up in this.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength.

Yep.

And the second is like it.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

And so you're sitting there getting the diaconia of the word.

And then it's lunchtime.

And the same people that said gave you the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Okay, at this point, these are platitudes, these are lofty concepts, these are theological, amen, brother.

And then all of a sudden, the same group that's talking about do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, and love your neighbor as yourself, and then they're like, in Jesus' name, Amen, let's eat.

And then they push you to the side of the food line.

And you become now invisible.

And now the fact that you dress the way that you do or you talk the way that you do now becomes significant in what order that you get to eat.

And so the disciples realize this is not grumbling to be blown off.

This is a huge deal.

Get the seven best you can find the most respected, the most wisdom, and who are full of the Holy Spirit, and we're gonna delegate, we're gonna lay hands on them publicly, we're gonna delegate this authority and responsibility and go, guys, you cannot fail at this.

We have to get this right.

Because the ministry of the word and the ministry of the food line are not separate.

They are together.

In fact, it might be the first place that we get to apply what we just heard about Jesus.

So so this is not a devaluation of the practical program.

It's actually the integration of the program into the ministry of the word.

They're inextricably linked.

If we mess this up, we really confuse that Grecian widow.

And guess what?

We go to the ends of the earth, we're gonna confuse them too.

Keep going, bro.

That is good, that's a good word.

Acts 6, 3.

That's alright.

Sometimes you just gotta amen yourself, all right?

You've had to do it too, right?

Encourage yourself in the Lord.

Verse 3 select seven men, well respected, full of the spirit and wisdom.

We'll give them this responsibility.

Alright, find people, understand the problem, care about the people, and can get it done.

Here we go.

Now it's about to get good.

Verse 5.

Everyone liked this idea.

And they chose the following Stephen, a man full of faith in the Holy Spirit.

Philip, Procurus, Niconor, Timon, I have no idea.

Nicholas of Antioch, an earlier convert to the Jewish faith.

Alright, now understand this.

By the way, I could have faked my way through that, but there's probably somebody in here who knows Greek and they're like, you fraud.

Alright, so I just uh thought I would own it.

Um so what it says here of Nicholas of of Antioch, it says an earlier convert to a Jewish faith, so this is a proselyte.

This is somebody who's not even um uh in terms of he's not Jewish, but he says, you know, I believe in Yahweh, and so he's gone uh full in.

And so this is again somebody that that many of them, especially the Hebraic Jews, wouldn't have considered a son of Abraham.

They wouldn't have considered part of the end, they would have considered him uh uh not not necessarily born into this culturally.

Verse 6 says the seven were presented to the apostles who prayed for them and they laid their hands on them.

All right, now here's here's what's interesting about this.

Two of the people mentioned in this story we get more data on.

So Stephen, we know is gonna become the first martyr, and uh we know that his ministry is gonna be more than just um you know doing the the feeding program.

He's gonna do even uh more than that.

It's gonna start the feeding program, uh, but he's not, he he's he's gonna be a huge part of the book of Acts.

Philip is the next one.

We have a ton about him.

Philip is later known as Philip the Evangelist.

This is the guy who actually go and he'll preach the gospel, he'll preach the word in uh, you know, start to go from Samaria to the ends of the earth.

He's also the guy that will get up, we talked about this last year, the man uh who God sent to the Ethiopian eunuch to get up into his chariot and to explain to him the book of Isaiah, to look at who God is and then ultimately to see who Jesus is through Isaiah.

So this is a learned, intelligent, uh educated guy, okay, but he said, I'm not too good uh to run the feeding program.

What's really interesting about this list of seven names is they're all Greek names.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean that every last one of them was part of the diaspora, but their names are not Hebrew names.

They give seven Greek names.

And so what it seems like, you know, that that makes pretty obvious what Luke is saying that they did.

How did we solve this problem in the early church?

That they said we have an issue that the Grecian widows are being mistreated in the food line, and so we're going to get seven men who understand this group that's being excluded and discriminated against.

We're going to listen to them, we are going to empower them.

By the way, we need people, okay, who aren't just Greek, they're well respected, they're wise, and they're full of the Holy Spirit to be able to come in and go, how do we take something that this early in the book of Acts could divide us and actually have it to be something that brings us together?

Um look what it says in verse 7 after this.

So God's message continued to spread.

The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem, and many of the Jewish priests were converted too.

What we see in verse 7 is the result of their willingness, once they came up to not only an issue of infrastructure, but an issue of cultural clash, that because they were willing to fight through the discontent, when all became discontent, instead of going, you know what, I'm going back to Alexandria, they stuck in where they were, they dug in and they said, Let's work through this, and they were able to figure out systems, processes, and grace in the process to be able to come together despite the discontent.

Um this is really critical.

You see, this is where, in some ways, when you when you look at this in Luke 6, this feels like a layup.

It's like, come on, if we can't get on the same page about widows, we can't get on the same page about widows in the food line, we are cooked when it comes to the ends of the earth.

If you go back in the story, okay, who wrote this Acts story?

Luke.

Luke and Acts together.

Remember, we said that.

So if I go back, remember last week we looked at the feeding of the 3,000 through Jesus' training in the feeding of the 5,000, 4,000, we have the same thing with this one.

Before we ever get to Acts 6 in the Grecian Hebraic Jewish issue, you go all the way back to Luke 10.

When uh an expert in the law comes to Jesus and says, Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

When he says eternal life in their context, he wasn't just talking about life after death.

He was talking about life before death and then perpetual life.

It's what they call life unto the age.

So essentially, it's your best life connected to God.

What must I do to inherit eternal life?

He said, Well, you're a law, man.

You know the book.

What do you think it says?

And he says, Well, I think I should love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then love my neighbor as myself.

And he said, Yeah, do that and you'll live.

Do that and you'll have your best life.

And the man says, Well, then who's my neighbor?

And that's the backdrop where Jesus gives the story of the Good Samaritan.

And the story of the Good Samaritan is Jesus takes the person outside of this man's boundary of who he thinks is his community.

He takes them further than he wants to go.

He picks a hero for a story that if you were on Netflix and you were looking for something to watch and you saw a thumbnail, and that person's the hero in the story, you would keep going.

I don't even want to watch that.

And Jesus force feeds him the story.

He said, Well, you want to know who your neighbor is?

Your neighbor is a Samaritan.

The Samaritan who acts in a way that is in alignment with Yahweh's heart.

And so what he says to him is, your neighbor, your neighbor, how you need to think about your neighborhood, the boundaries you need to draw, it's everybody.

It's everybody.

It's the ends of the earth.

So that's the priming in Luke 10.

And now we get to this critical moment where we're no longer talking in platitudes, we're no longer uh talking in big lofty concepts, we're in a food line with widows.

And this is a critical moment for is the Great Commission going to be able to flow through us or not?

Because once it gets to that point where now we're putting our Dukes up for our widows, okay, which is about the about the most noble thing you can fight for, are your widows.

And at some point they go, are we able to put our dukes down, shake hands, and say we love all the widows, and we're gonna take care of every one of them.

And I don't care if they're Greek or if they're Hebrew or they're from Alexandria or they're from Jerusalem, they're widows, and they're gonna eat, and they're gonna eat first, and we're gonna figure out how to do this, and none of us are gonna eat until they eat, and we're gonna get this system figured out, we're gonna get the structure figured out, we're gonna complain appropriately so we unearth problems so we can deal with it, and we're gonna stay in it even though the awe has been outpacing the disappointment.

Can I stick with it in the disappointment?

And can I be faithful?

And let me tell you, we're just we're right back there.

We're right back there.

We are right back there.

We're in a place not only within our community, within the world as a whole, where we need people who are full of wisdom, people who are full of the spirit, people who are well respected, to come together to have a mature enough mind, a mature enough life experience to go, guys, nothing maintains awe on its own forever.

We need to see the beauty and the ordinary, not just the novel and the new.

We need to come together to solve problems.

We need to listen to one another, we need to honor one another, we need to do something that our flesh doesn't normally do.

So I want to take a moment, I want to pray for you and with you.

I want you to start with the first thing, the first part of the conversation.

Is there anywhere in your life that someone or something that started out as awe has become discontent?

And maybe it's something that you need to commit to.

You need to, maybe you even knew this before today, and yet today was a helpful reminder to come back and say, you know what?

I need to remain faithful and obedient.

I need to make some decisions here to see things differently than I've been seeing it.

I've I've been allowing my discontent to outpace my awe.

I'm gonna come back and cultivate something important, not just move on to something new.

So maybe that's for you today.

And then the second is I want to call our whole church together.

I want to call us to not sweep problems under the rug, but to bring them out, to complain appropriately, to bring things to the surface, but then to commit ourselves to wisdom, being full of the spirit, and acting in a respectful way to move through things together.

And I'm just telling you, the world will not teach you to do that.

That that's an that's a work of the spirit, and that's a beautiful thing that God has been doing in this church for a long time, He's doing it now.

Let's commit to never stop doing that together.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

We thank you, Lord God, that although sometimes when we experience discontent, we think that you have up and left, and yet, Lord, often it's in the discontent that you do some of your best work.

Lord, it's where we take these ideas like loving our neighbor as ourself.

Take these ideas of Jesus touching the untouchable, and all of a sudden now it becomes our real life.

Lord, we know this food line concept is more than just a food line, it has really broad application.

Help us, Lord God, uh, as a church, to get this right and to keep getting it right.

Help us, Lord God, to navigate through our frustrations and our discontent in the right way.

Help us to keep loving each other unconditionally.

We praise you, we love you, we thank you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.