Finding Your Purpose

I'm going to jump into two messages today.

Um, I want to just follow up Easter, right?

Because Jesus died and resurrected, and we just celebrated that at Easter.

And then after that, Jesus sends his disciples into all the world.

And so you have Matthew 28, 19, where Jesus gives a commission and he says, Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And then in Acts 1.8, he says, You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit fills you, comes upon you, and you'll be my witnesses in your hometown, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth.

Well, if you read the historical narrative of Acts, you'll see that they were supposed to start in their hometown, go to the ends of the earth, but they stayed in their hometown for a long time because hometowns are familiar and the ends of the earth are scary.

So it actually took um it took persecution that scattered them, but the persecution worked in their benefit because they were scattered, they started spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth.

If you keep reading within the New Testament, you'll see what are called the epistles or the letters that Paul writes to the church.

Paul was an apostle, which means that he was used by God to go into new territories.

And actually the word apostle, apostle, when we hear apostle, we hear church.

When the the uh first century believers heard apostle, they didn't hear a churchy word.

They actually heard a Roman Empire word, because the Roman Empire, whenever they would take over a city, they would send an apostle to ultimately take the values of the kingdom empire of Rome into that city, and they would redesign the civic institutions, they would redesign the culture of the city, and they would ultimately make that city look like the Roman Empire to follow the pattern.

And so the apostle was the emissary, the apostle was the one to take the kingdom and to put it in the community.

So when Paul says to them, uh, well, ultimately, when they talk about the role of an apostle, that's what it is to go into new places.

And so that's what Paul did.

When he did that, um, it was years later that he's writing letters to help them organize themselves because it was a bit disorganized.

There was no centralized leadership, the disciples started dying and being murdered and killed, and so, but now you have the Holy Spirit who's filling people, the movement is spreading, not just because they had the right information, but because of the way that they functioned and treated people, and so their community was so healthy it was growing.

So if you actually look at the dates of a lot of these books in the New Testament, like Ephesians, which we're gonna look at, it was written in like AD 60.

So you're talking 30 some years after Jesus resurrected, that these communities are starting to really, really form and have issues, and so Paul's writing them, trying to help them to organize themselves.

And this is one of the challenges as we read our Bible, we read in the New Testament, to power wash the principles down to understand which ones of these things were designed for their community and their culture and their context, and then which ones of these things are transcendent.

So as I try, as I look at the scripture, I just want you to know week in and week out, that's what I'm trying to do.

I'm trying to power wash it down to its purest essence and then look at how do we contextualize it.

And I think if we do this well today, uh we'll we'll get not only a picture of what our community should look like, but also that you would now have something to work with for the Lord to show you what is your purpose within the community.

Okay?

All right, so here we're gonna start in Ephesians chapter four, verse one.

Ephesians 4, 1 says, Therefore, I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling.

Okay, you see the word therefore, it should remind you of the fact that you're in chapter 4, which means he said a lot in three chapters.

If you're a little bored in your Bible reading, maybe this week would be a good week to go read Ephesians 1 through 3.

So you know what his therefore was all about.

But the the summary of this is Paul is ultimately talking about the work of God through Jesus and what that means for us as individuals.

And so what he's talking to them about when he talks about living a life worthy of your calling, he's saying, therefore, therefore being because I know who Jesus is and what Jesus did for me, and that I'm right with God because of Jesus, now I'm provoked in a good way to serve him and to honor him.

I'm not going to serve God in order to try to get his favor or to try to um uh earn merit.

I'm doing it from a place of approval, I'm doing it from a place of merit because of what Jesus did.

Now, therefore, he says, uh, as a prisoner serving the Lord, and by the way, he's writing it from a prison in Rome, he said, I beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling.

I just love that language.

Lead a life.

Lead lead your life.

Depending on your translation, if you're in the NIV, it might say walk in a worthy manner.

But lead, I like lead a life, lead a life.

Are you are you just living your life or are you leading your life?

You know, it took me about 40 years to realize that I am the hardest person I've ever had to lead.

And and what distracted me from leading myself well was how difficult it was to lead other people.

And I would just tend to get so fixated on well, if I could just get them to act right, and if I could get him to act right, if I get her to act right, if I could just get the people around me.

And and the reality is I am the hardest person I've ever had to lead.

And you probably are the hardest person you've had to lead.

So I encourage you to stand back and ask yourself that question.

Am I leading my life or am I just reacting?

Am I just existing?

He said, because of what Jesus has done for you, Paul, by the way, who's in prison, going, Look, I'm not gonna just be a prisoner, I'm gonna be a leader in prison.

He said, I beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you've been called by God.

Now, starting in verse 2, in the next uh four verses, he paints a picture of how this community should feel.

Right?

Think about organizations.

Systems are how it moves, culture is how it feels.

We have a way of moving in and out of this room.

You have a way of getting in your car with your family.

Your family has systems around getting in the vehicle.

But once you get in the vehicle, we start driving down the road, the culture of your family comes to the surface.

If I was a fly in the wall of your vehicle, I would know, I would know how your family felt.

Either everybody puts on their stuff and goes introvert, no one talks to anybody, or we all talk and laugh, or we all argue, or I'll pull this car over right now if I have to, or whatever I have to do.

It's how you it feels in the car.

We know what it takes to get people in their seatbelts, get them in, get them out.

That's systems.

But culture's how it feels.

Paul talks about how the church, how the community of faith should feel.

He said, hey, always be gentle and humble.

It should feel like humble and gentle.

Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other's faults because of your love.

I'm so sorry that happened.

It's all right, no problem, man.

Happens to all of us.

I've been there, it's all good.

Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the spirit, binding yourself together in peace.

For there's one body, one spirit.

You've been called to one glorious hope for the future.

There's one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, one church and Father of all, who's over all and in all and living through all.

However, he's given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ.

Um it's interesting, like, to step back from your life and to ask good questions and to create kind of a bullseye for your life.

I I had a meeting this week.

I was with a group of leaders, and there was a guy who was facilitating.

We were actually there to do some strategic planning, but he deviated from that in the morning.

He said, you know, let's do let's just do some like devotional introspective type stuff.

So he said, he started out and he said, Hey, what are you like when you're not connected to Jesus?

And the room went quiet.

And he's like, Go ahead, shout it out, you know.

You know what I mean by connected to Jesus.

Like ultimately, you know, I mean like Jesus says in John, I'm the vine, you're the branches.

Remain in me.

If I remain in you and you remain in me, you'll bear much fruit.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

I mean, you can do something, it just won't be good.

It'll be in the flesh.

So, so he's like, hey, I mean, obviously Jesus has has saved us and sealed us and all this good stuff, but you know when you're walking with Jesus and you're not, when you're walking in the flesh and the spirit.

He's like, so when you're walking in the flesh, when you are not in lockstep with Jesus, what would the people around you say you're like?

I was like, dude, can we just do some strategic planning?

He's like, no, we're going here.

I'm like, all right, so we just start shouting out, group of people, group of some of my favorite people.

And they're throwing these out.

Actually, I brought it up, uh, it's on the whiteboard.

I took a screenshot.

Go ahead and bring it up.

Okay, you can't see it that well, but it was stuff like this.

He's like, uh, on the right side of the board, when I'm disconnected from Jesus, it was like, I'm judgmental, I'm short-tempered, I'm impatient.

It was funny because some of the answers were opposites.

Like one person said, When I am not walking with Jesus, I'm very withdrawn and distant.

And another person said, I'm really needy.

Like, like I suck the life out of people, and then other people said, I don't want to be around anybody.

I want to be left alone by everyone.

I put up walls.

And and and another person said, anxious.

Anxious.

And so we went around and we we talked about what would our family say about us?

What would the people we work with say about us?

How do we lead when we're not connected to Jesus?

Well then he flipped it and he went the other side.

He's like, man, when you now think about when you are really connected to Jesus.

You're really connected, man.

You're you're you're in his word, you're doing the things, even whether it's hobbies or things that you do, that you're like, man, I just feel the presence of God when I'm doing this.

Like you're okay, when you're doing that, he's like, what are you like then?

And it just started like we just started talking about the fruit of the spirit, you know.

It's like, I don't know, man, I'm peaceful, you know, I'm joyful, I'm flexible, I'm grateful.

One person said, I'm grateful.

When I'm not, I feel like everybody owes me something.

When I'm not, I feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick everywhere all the time.

I feel like my life's horrible.

Over he's like, over here, it's like I'm in a state of gratitude, I'm grateful, I'm patient.

Okay.

And he said, Cool, you just created a bullseye for your life.

Congratulations.

Take this, and as you look at your life and you start finding yourself over here, you realize you got to get back connected to the vine.

I'm the vine, you're the branches, remain in me.

This kind of fruit will come to the surface, if not.

Because see, this is the easy self-deception.

Is there a lot of things on the right side of the board that you can attach a virtue to and live in self-deception?

For example, one of them is harsh.

But you you can say harsh, you can just be like, I'm just keeping it real.

Anxious and frantic.

Say, well, I have a sense of urgency.

Um harsh.

If I start preaching harsh words around here, there'd be a group of people who'd be like, that was really anointed.

I mean, dude, you really let us have it today.

Screamed and yelled.

We're angry.

And we attach virtue.

If we're not careful, we can always find a virtuous way to describe us not connected to the vine.

So Paul writes to these guys and he says, Hey, Ephesians, be humble and gentle, patient with each other, making allowance for each other's faults because of your love.

Make every effort to keep yourself united in the spirit, binding yourselves together with peace, for there is one body.

Okay, and he goes into this unity language.

Well, then what he does is he describes roles that are attached to gifts.

So it says in verse 11, these are the gifts Christ gave to the church.

And then he names five roles.

He says the apostles, which we we just talked about, prophets, okay, prophet would be foretelling or forthelling.

So, for example, you're familiar with like Old Testament prophets that would prophesy hundreds of years in advance, things that, you know, the coming of Jesus, or different there's a many, many prophecies within the scripture.

So someone's ability to foretell this is on its way to anticipate.

But then it's also forthelling, like, you know, man, I got a word from God for you, or I've got a word of God for this is a word from God for us.

God wants to say this to our context.

Maybe you've even had people come up to you and say, hey, God told me to tell you this, and you gotta you there's a I could do a whole bunch of messages on that where you you really have to test that.

You gotta measure that, you gotta make sure, does that line up with God's word?

Does it resonate in my spirit?

You look for confirmation for those kind of things.

Because some people even mean well and they come up and they say, God said this, is not always on point.

Okay, sometimes it's what they had for breakfast, or they got an axe to grind, or there's something's not, or they're sincere.

A lot of sincere people trying to do that.

A lot of people from time to time, Pastor, I think God gave me a word for you, and they'll they'll they'll send it to me and they'll say, take it or leave it.

And I'll do it and I'll pray over it, and it's it's good.

And sometimes I've it's been stuff that that was on on the money, and other times it wasn't.

It wasn't, and that's okay.

That's why, by the way, if some of you are here and you sense God's giving you a word for our church, you've whether you've sent it to be a prophetic word, you need to write that word down and you need to give it to one of our hosts.

Because what we don't do is just yell out and interrupt.

That makes sense, because we don't have two people uh uh interrupting each other within this context, but you you write it down.

We had a lady one time came to me, Pastor, I got a I have a word for our church.

I said, Great.

Can you write it?

I said, tell me, what is it?

And she she was stammering around quite a bit.

It was very confusing.

I could tell she was confused.

I I know I was confused.

And so I said, Well, I tell you what, why don't you write it down?

She's like, Well, I don't think I can write it down.

I said, Well, then I don't think I can use it because I can't use some, I have no clue what you're saying.

So go ahead and write it down.

So she's like, Okay, someday I'll write it down.

Wonderful.

So she came to me three weeks later, whatever.

Hey, I think I still have this word.

Did you write it down?

No.

Okay, come back to me when you've written it down.

And then every time I'd see her, honestly, I'd think about it and I'd be like, Did you write it down yet?

She's like, not yet.

I'm like, cool, keep working on it.

Probably six months later, she finally came to me.

This is what I think God said.

I took it, read it.

I was like, is that what God said to you?

Yes.

Did he say anything else, or is that the whole thing?

She's like, That's it.

Cool.

Then I'll share.

And I looked at it, I bear witness with what it said.

I shared it with our church, and I had some people come up to me after church and say, That was for me.

And I said, Nice, here it is in writing.

We run we ran copies and gave it to people.

So that three years later, when you're like, What did God say to me there?

It's not like, oh, dude, I don't remember.

It was like there was like a river running through an atrium, and then there was something, I don't know, I don't remember.

No, man, we got it documented.

We want to steward the word, right?

Okay, so if you sense that, you don't don't interrupt, don't yell out, write down as the Lord gives you the words, and then you deliver it, and then you've done your job.

So prophecy, evangelism, evangelists, of course, in this day it was the the message of Jesus was brand new.

So they're taking new information to the world.

In our world, America, especially in America, everybody knows who Jesus is, or they know who you think he is, or who the church says he is, or whatever.

Do they really know the good news?

Are they really seeing it?

And I think God is using evangelists, people with an evangelistic gift, to demonstrate and to show the good news of Jesus Christ in fresh and new ways.

We now live in a digital age.

There's fresh and new ways to do this.

Even your life being a testimony.

And so we have a little different challenge than the Ephesians had in AD 60, because it's not a brand new message, but in some ways, we need to take it back to its purest essence so people are really seeing who Jesus really is.

And then it says pastors and teachers, pastors being shepherds, people that are taking care of people as the church grows and people are coming in, that we're not just putting on this big production, everybody in and out, and you're gone.

And okay, no, it's in community.

You have someone to weep with you, cry with you, counsel with you, walk alongside you.

So those are people with a pastoral gift, and then teachers.

Again, people teaching God's word, teaching truth.

All right, so if we if we zoomed out of Ephesians 4, verse 11, we would see the necessity of all five of these roles.

Ephesians 4:11

If you think apostolic emissary into new territory, you think evangelistic, it's it's expanding the community, bringing new people in.

When you think of pastors, it's people caring for people, it's people uh making sure that everybody has their place.

When you think of teaching, it's it's it's helping us get our minds right and understand.

And um, and then again, prophetic, God speaking what we need to hear when we need to hear it.

Now, this is really good because he says, hey, just so you know, there are some people that will have these gifts and leadership within the church.

He said, but their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work and to build up the church, the body of Christ.

And I'm just gonna go in on for especially some of you maybe who have been in church for a while and you've heard these titles and you've been around the church culture and subculture.

What's often happened in churches is that we've actually deviated from the essence of what Paul was trying to do here, which was ultimately to help organize people.

God's gifted you.

Now take that to build up other people to do the work.

It would be a giant failure if a bunch of people came and just watched a few people do their thing and then left no different.

Our my job, our job is to build people up, to take the gifts God's given them to go and to do the work God's given them to do, to build God's people up, says to build up the church, the body of Christ.

And he said, this will continue until we come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

You know what's often happened is people then who have these gifts of either expanding the work, expanding the community, or leading and building within, often these titles of pastor or apostle or prophet or whatever, it's it's caused actually the the opposite, which is it's made people lofty and elitist and up over top of other people, which is not the design at all.

He said, actually, your job is to take and lift them up, so to build up the body, to help people see the gift that's inside of them, to turn that gift into a skill and to start using it to build up the body.

It's not so that you would have a special parking spot or so that you would you would be on some other elitist level.

In fact, Paul, who is who is an apostle, why was he an apostle?

Because he loved the work.

He loved the work, the work of the apostle.

God had gifted him and called him to go spread the gospel.

So he would go to a place, Ephesus, raise up the body, attract the body, put in a leader in place, and once they were stable and had a pastor, he would leave and go to the next hard place.

He went hard place to hard place, they were hard for all kinds of reasons.

He went to poor places and they were hard because they were poor, and then he went to rich places and they were hard because they were rich.

He went place to place, and every time he'd raise up, work himself out of a job, and go to the next place.

And so, so but Paul they called him the apostle Paul, he was an apostle, but he was in an environment where now apostle meant you were bigger than everybody else, and Paul writes to him in 1 Corinthians 15 9, he said, You know what?

I'm an apostle because I love the word, but he said, I'm the least of all the apostles.

In fact, I'm not even worthy of being called an apostle after the way I persecuted God's church.

He's saying this not to devalue himself, but to try to create a culture among the Corinthians who had a lofty attitude, an elitist attitude, to go, guys, I don't care what you call me.

I'm not, I don't, I don't care about the title.

I care about the work.

This is the work God's called me to.

He said, in fact, call me the least if you want.

In 1 Corinthians 4 1, he said, look at Apollos and me as mere servants of Christ who have been put in charge of explaining God's mysteries.

If you're gonna call me anything, just call me a servant, man.

That's all that that's all that matters.

He he says in Romans 12 3, I say to each one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.

But rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.

Don't think of yourself more highly than you ought.

Also, by the way, don't think of yourself.

More lowly than you ought.

You're a big deal.

God's given you great gifts for a great purpose.

You're a big deal, but you're not that big a deal.

You're not Ron Burgundy, big deal.

You know what I mean?

Kind of a big deal.

No, you ain't that big a deal, but you're a big deal.

But you're not that big a deal.

But you're a big deal.

You're a big deal.

God's gifted you, put you in a place for a period of time to do important works, it's a big deal, but you're not that big a deal.

But you're a big deal.

But not that big.

So Paul's saying, don't think of yourself more highly than you are, because here's what'll happen.

If you undervalue yourself, you'll end up used by people.

People who undervalue themselves have a low self-image, they're easy targets for people that want to use you.

But if you overvalue yourself, you'll end up using people.

Because you think you're so lofty and elite.

You're a gift to me.

So if you undervalue yourself, you get used by people.

If you overvalue yourself, you use people.

But when you give your life to Jesus and you discover your purpose, you end up used by God.

And that's who you want using you.

Because he's not going to use and abuse you.

What he'll do is use you as a means to his end.

Isn't that what you want?

That's what I want.

I want to be the means to God's end.

That is your purpose.

Don't try to make God the means to your end.

God, I've already done all the thinking.

I've already designed, I got 12 pages of what I'd like you to do.

I've got it all figured out.

No?

Lord, what do you want to do?

And within the mission of God, He's given each of us a special gift to be a part of that.

Your purpose is to be the means to God's end.

So within this community, how we function here is really important for two reasons.

One, it affects the health of this body.

And that's important because I want to, I think you do, and I want to go to a church that's healthy and functioning the way God designed it.

But forget just going to church.

It's also supposed to spill into everything else that you do.

That we have.

We're expanding and reaching.

And at the same time, as we add, we're taking care of what the people that God has brought here.

I had a guy a couple years ago, he reached out to me.

He'd been part of the church when we first started it.

And at that time, he and I and we were spending a lot of time together.

We were doing a lot of stuff, and as the church has grown, okay, more people have come, we've had leaders, we've done a lot, and we weren't together, we haven't been, we hadn't been together as much.

And uh I sat down with he and his wife a couple years ago.

They'd gone through a hard time.

I knew a little bit about what they were going through, but I didn't know all of it.

And so they sat down, they told me about it, and and we we we prayed together, and and they said, Pastor, I I got I gotta tell you, see, we gotta tell you, you know, one church really let us down.

I said, Really?

What happened?

They said, Well, when we were going through all this, no one helped, no one reached out, no one checked on us, you know.

We had served and all this stuff, and we served, and when we served, you know, we got lots of emails and this and that, and then we kind of fell off, and then when we fell off, the only emails we got was like, hey, do you want to serve again?

Or you know, something like that.

And they were like, so we didn't, you know, no one, no one helped, no one reached out.

I was like, oh dang.

I was thinking, in and then our desire to be apostolic and evangelistic, did we miss the pastoral side?

And I'm like, that's not good.

So I apologized up and down.

I felt kind of sick, to be honest.

I started making a list in my head who I needed to talk to and how I was gonna fix the problem and all this, and so we were getting ready to leave, and I was like, hey, I said, guys, I'm so sorry that happened to you.

You deserve better.

I was like, were you guys like totally alone or did anybody show up?

They're like, Well, yeah, fortunately, some few people did show up.

I was like, cool, who?

And then and they named five people that went to our church.

I was like, wait, what?

They're like, Yeah, this person, this person, this person.

So essentially, what I realized is their paradigm of the church was people with a title or people who are on staff or whatever, it's like through the movement of what God's doing here, we'll never be able to the pace, we can't set the pace based on our staff.

Paul didn't even want that.

People ask me sometimes, how come we we don't have all the pastors in the church on the website?

I'm like, because we have about a thousand of them.

Because you're the pastors of you're there's people in the church with a pastoral gift.

I'm trying to bring the word to you.

I'm trying to help create infrastructure so that the people with the pastoral gifts, the people with the evangelistic gifts, people with the apostolic gifts within the church would raise up to take care of one another.

And I said to this guy, I'm like, my man, thank you for coming to me.

Thank you, thank you, pray together.

We definitely have things we need to fix.

But what happened is the pastors that were around you showed up even though they didn't have a title.

Doesn't matter the title, it matters the work, the role, the gift, matching the gift to the need.

That doesn't let us off the hook from organization, but it's like we got to shift how we think about it.

Otherwise, you'll think I'm the pastor of this church, and you'll miss the fact that you're the pastor of this church.

You'll miss the fact that you're, hey, when are we gonna do more evangelism?

When's the last time you did it?

No, I mean what I'm saying is it's it's not like you go, well, I only have one gift, so if you see a hurting person, you're like, well, I don't do that, I'm an apostle.

I don't have that gift.

I know you're bleeding and crying and in the valley of despair, but uh, I'm evangelistic, you know, I'm only expansion.

No.

No, man, we square away.

We we we have the spirit that raised Jesus from the dead inside of us.

So so we we we do cry with people, we do hope, we do, but the only way that this thing is scalable in a healthy way, that we're properly apostolic, properly evangelistic, we have the right teaching, we have the right prophetic, we have the right pastoral, is when we build up the church to do God's work, God's people to do God's work, Paul says.

And so today I want to encourage you to take a moment to allow God to bring that to the surface.

I'll give you this last thing.

I gotta hurry though.

I was talking to this guy the other day, he's retirement age, and he's into fitness and stuff, and he has a bunch of fitness stuff in his house.

But he realized once he retired and he was working out in his house, he wasn't seeing anybody ever.

So he started going to the gym, even though he had plenty of stuff.

He went to the gym just for community, he goes, and they went in the gym, everybody's wearing AirPods, and so he just was like, you know, this isn't good because we have this diverse city and we're not even very unified, but we all have at least we all believe in fitness, and so I'm gonna just start talking to people.

So he goes up and starts talking to people.

He's like, some people looked at him crazy, some people were upset that he bothered their workout, but then other people they started learning one another's names, and then pretty soon they had friendship, and then they started looking for each other in the gym, and then they started pouring their heart out to him.

And they're pouring their heart out to him, and he's sharing Jesus with them, and he's praying with them, and he's got like a flock at the gym.

In fact, his daughters in high school, and guys from her high school work out at the gym, and they're sharing their problems with her dad, and they're going to tell him, Your dad's been praying for me.

Your dad's I told him all my deep dark secrets, and his daughter comes home, he's like, Dad, stop talking to the guys at my school.

Please don't do this anymore.

And he's like, Hush, I'm gonna do God's will.

And so he goes back, and he's and we're sitting there and he's telling me this, and I'm like, Do you know what you're doing?

You're pastoring the gym, dude.

He's like, Really?

I'm like, really?

This is like beautiful, this is amazing.

If you went to the people at the gym that morning and said, What do you think you need?

They wouldn't say, You know, I need a pastor.

They wouldn't say that.

And they might not ever come here.

God sent you there.

So we raise up the gifts within the church.

Raise up the gifts.

God has gifted you, you're a big deal.

Don't get a big head, but you're a big deal.

You're a big deal, big purpose.

God put a gift inside of you, and part of that is as brothers and sisters in Christ, to do something really special in this community here.

But also it doesn't, it's not confined to here.

It's supposed to show up other places.

My goal is that, man, we yes, we want to serve each other in this place, but I don't want to get you so busy you can't pastor the gym.

I don't want to get you so busy you can't pastor your neighborhood in your community.

And so if we do this right and we allow the Lord to show us our part of this, our part of this, not only will we be healthy here as a community, but that uncommon unity will spill out into the world around us.