Barrier to Entry: Finish the Task with Pastor Clayton

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I want to welcome you to our last week of the Barrier to Entry series.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

And we have been focused at the beginning of this year on the vision that God has given us as a church, as a movement for the next five years.

On January 7th, we celebrated our five-year anniversary and all that God has already done to get us to this point.

We are focused on kingdom expansion, and that's drawn right out of some of the last words that Jesus said while he was on earth.

This is recorded in Acts chapter 1, verse 8.

Acts 1:8

Jesus said, But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

And what we see in this verse is a concentric strategy for kingdom movement.

Jerusalem is where the followers of Jesus already lived, and that's where this movement started.

And so we're starting in the next five years by focusing on our Jerusalem, which is where we live, right here in San Antonio.

God's given us a big, audacious, God-sized dream, and we're articulating it this way.

In the next five years, we will have a meta church venue within 20 minutes of every person in San Antonio.

You see, when you read scripture, one thing becomes very clear.

There is an expectation for followers of Jesus to expand his movement and to get his gospel, that's the good news of what Jesus offers us, to as many people as possible.

We see them doing this in the first century, right after Jesus left.

They took these words seriously and took his message and planted churches all over the known world.

We have bought a lie, especially in the West, that the idea for Jesus' movement is for people to sit in a Sunday service once a week, hear a message, and sing some songs.

I'm at a church, we reject that lie, and we're gonna find out what we can do to replicate the congregation we have here all over our city, and maybe someday even beyond that.

And so many of you know this because you questioned whether or not there was a church where you could really belong.

Maybe you had some kind of spiritual curiosity, but your background in church or some spiritual hurt in your past kept you until finally someone invited you and said, No, really, you can actually come here, you can dress however you want.

You showed up to metachurch, you realized this is a place you can belong and be loved even before you believe.

You got to wrestle with life's biggest questions here, and then you met Jesus here in this movement, and he changed your life and moved you on towards your purpose.

It's now our job to give as many other people that opportunity as possible.

Say amen if you believe that.

Amen.

So we've been planning for this and getting our processes in order, um, but that's just on the staff side.

The staff just kind of helps organize our movement.

For us to do this and to execute on this vision, you have to move because you are the movement.

We've been talking about barriers to entry in our personal lives and barriers to entry for our movement.

We've seen God's given us everything that we need here at MetaCurch, and our one barrier has been our finances.

None of us were okay with that, so we decided to do something about it.

We made it visual.

So if you were here at our five-year anniversary, um, you know that this brick wall was significantly bigger.

It stretched from side to side and was about this tall.

We put 800 bricks on stage.

We said every brick represents a commitment of$50 a month, an increase in your giving.

A$50 a month increase in your giving, and we have now gotten rid of over 400 of those bricks.

Yeah.

We crossed the uh halfway mark last Sunday in the first service.

People are still exercising their generosity.

So many of you have already done that.

You've gotten your bricks, you've done your part, um, but we all still have a role to play.

My message today is finish the task.

Finish the task.

Would you pray with me?

Uh Jesus, we love you.

I ask that you would make it clear to us what what it means to each of us uniquely to finish the task, to continue pushing this movement forward.

I thank you for the insane generosity of your people at MetaCurch that has already been made evident.

And Holy Spirit, we ask that you continue to move today.

We love you.

We pray these things in your name, Jesus.

And if you're ready to finish the task, say amen.

Amen.

One of the things that uh we always do with scripture here at MetaCurch is we try to set it really well in its proper context.

And there are some verses throughout scripture that preach really well, um, but we take them out of their context to make them say what we want to say.

That can be quite dangerous.

Uh, we've talked before about a verse like Jeremiah 29, 11, where it says, For I know the plans that I have for you, says the Lord, plans that are good for you and to prosper you.

And we take that and we give that to people like graduation when they get out of high school or whatever.

Well, when you actually look at that, um, that's written to very specific people in a very specific time.

And the verse right before it says that the blessing will come in 70 years.

So if you give it to your 18-year-old, you're saying, You'll be blessed at 88 years old, you know.

Like, you gotta understand the context a little bit.

I want to show you another verse that we do this to a lot.

It's in Philippians chapter one.

It says, I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you, always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

Now, here's the verse that we take out of context.

Because I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

This is a verse, uh let me just tell you, as a preacher, if you can pull it out of its context, preaches really well.

Like if you're talking to people about their spiritual gifts and they might be like laying dormant inside of them, and if they'll just take a step of faith, then those gifts will start being released, and then you can say, For I am convinced of this, that the God who started something in you will bring, or if you're talking about someone's salvation and how they can be absolutely sure that the moment they believe in Jesus, that they will end up in eternity with God, and that's true, and then you can take this verse and you can cap it off until the day of Christ Jesus.

The problem is that's not the context of this verse.

It preaches well, but for us to really understand what scripture is instructing us, we have to understand it in context.

So let me give you a little bit of the context for Philippians chapter one and why it applies to us in our barrier to entry series.

This verse is from the Apostle Paul.

It's actually a letter that he wrote to one of the many churches that he started, and this is to the church in Philippi.

That's why it's written to the people who were the Philippians.

Now, Philippi was in a province called Macedonia, and there are a few churches that Paul started in this area.

Philippi, which we have the letter to the Philippians.

Uh, Thessalonica, we also in our New Testament have the letter to the Thessalonians.

He also started a church with the Bereans, who we don't have a letter for, but he does talk about them some.

Macedonia was a very affluent area, and almost everyone who lived there was also affluent.

It was full of natural resources, surrounded by rivers and beautiful trees, and the people there were very, very prosperous.

Now, the Apostle Paul, he's famous for his missionary journeys.

What he would do is he would travel around the known world, he would teach people about Jesus, and the people who believed in Jesus, he'd gather them together and he would start a church in that area.

Now, this presented a real problem because at that time people were incredibly hostile to this new Christian movement.

The churches endured heavy, heavy persecution.

The people would face lashings and beatings, they were ostracized from society, some of them were even killed.

Most people would be disowned from their family, they would lose their jobs, and because they lost their jobs, they would lose their sources of influence.

In Macedonia, it was no exception.

The Bible says that in Macedonia, the people came under severe afflictions that left them destitute, and ultimately, some of them in extreme levels of poverty, living your whole life in affluence, and because you've believed in Jesus, now you're living in poverty.

It was during this same time that Paul began collecting a special offering from the churches that he had started.

Paul did this from time to time.

God had expanded this ministry all over the known world, and Paul was absolutely fearless in how he went about this because he believed so much in what God was doing on the earth, he had no problem asking people to make a sacrifice and to fund it.

At the end of the day, Paul knew that as believers, we are called in all areas of our life, including our finances, to do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus.

Specifically, this is what Paul is talking about to the Philippians.

In verse 5, he says, because of your partnership in the gospel.

In verse 5, he is specifically talking to them about their financial partnership.

The letter to the Philippians, in large part, is a fundraising letter from Paul to one of his churches for an offering that he was taking.

It is in that context, he then says, and I'm sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Paul is saying he is confident that they will finish the task of funding the larger gospel work that was happening under his leadership in the movement that they were a part of.

Now that's important information and that's great and all, but you can probably imagine being in one of the Macedonian churches.

Maybe you can picture yourself as a part of the church in Philippi.

Your whole life you've lived in comfort and affluence, and now, specifically because you've put your faith in Jesus and have been publicly outed as a Christian, a Jesus follower, now all of a sudden you are living in some level of poverty.

Your life is harder than it ever has been before because you are a part of the Philippian church.

And now Paul decides to come and ask you for some money.

Now, if you've been here for the last two weeks, this might not be all that hard for you to imagine.

Some of us can remember three, four, five years ago when things cost a whole lot less money.

When we could go to the grocery store without having a panic attack.

A few years ago when we could fill our car up for about half of what we're filling it up for today.

Inflation was much lower.

Some of you can remember 10 years ago when it felt like the deep racial wounds that are a part of our history in America seemed like they were finally being healed, and now statistically, we're far more divided racially today than we were in 1990.

It's like our world keeps falling into more and more chaos, and statistically, people are more and more anxious.

And right now, people feel economically poorer than they have in several years.

And for the last two Sundays, I've asked you to grab some bricks and give more money.

So maybe you can understand exactly what the Philippians were feeling like.

Right now, this is when this fool's coming with this.

Paul was fearless and actually helps me have courage.

He believed in this movement that we're still a part of today.

Now, what's interesting about most of what we have in the New Testament, the different documents that make up the New Testament of our Bible, is they're not narratives.

And so Philippians is not a narrative about the church in Philippi.

It's not a story.

Once upon a time in Philippi, Paul showed up.

We don't know what happened, because most of the documents are not narratives, they're letters.

This is a letter that Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, handed to someone in the church.

They traveled back to Philippi and read it to them.

Which means in the book we call Philippians, we don't find out whether or not they followed Paul's instructions.

I'm confident in this.

You're gonna do it, you're gonna make room, you're gonna grab your version of bricks, you're gonna help fund this thing, you're gonna push the movement forward.

We don't find out in Philippians if the Philippians did that.

It doesn't mean we don't find out.

What's so cool is that Paul had started churches all over the known world, and he was writing letters to all of them, and we have many of these letters and documents, ancient documents, and they make up the majority of our New Testament.

And we actually find out what happened in Philippi later in a letter that Paul wrote to a different church in a different city, a city called Corinth.

In the second letter that we have documented from Paul to Corinth, he says this in chapter 8.

We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that was given to the churches of Macedonia.

In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul is going to be specifically praising the Philippians, the Thessalonians, and the Bereans, the Macedonian churches, the people who grew up in affluence, now we're living in poverty as a part of the movement of Jesus.

And what's so interesting is he sees their generosity as proof that God's grace is on those congregations.

And so what Paul's gonna do in the very next verse is he's going to set up kind of a spiritual equation.

And so I want us to do like some some heavenly math, some like angelic algebra.

We're all gonna have ninth grade math, PTSD here together for just a second, just to show you how differently God tends to think about these things, and how differently God's economy functions compared to our economy.

And so he's gonna set up an equation, and I'm gonna put a variable in there and see if we can figure it out.

It goes like this joy plus X.

Oh, now you get it, we're gonna solve for X.

Some of you, your hands just started sweating.

You're in tenth grade all over again.

Joy plus X equals generosity.

Now, if you saw this on an IQ test and you had to solve for X, I have some guesses of what your answers might be.

The most obvious is joy plus money.

If you have joy and you have money, then maybe that equals generosity.

Or maybe not just money, but like a lot of money.

Like joy plus wealth, you know, because you can have money, but it doesn't mean you just got money to go give it away.

So maybe it's joy plus wealth.

Or maybe it's not just wealth, maybe it's surplus.

Joy plus surplus equals generosity, or maybe it's margin, or maybe it's inheritance, or maybe it's joy plus finally winning the Powerball lottery equals generosity.

You know, that's how we would instinctively fill in this equation.

I want you to listen to how Paul sees this from a heavenly perspective.

He says this in verse 2 during a severe trial brought about by affliction.

He's talking about the Philippians.

A severe trial, living in poverty now because of their faith.

Here's what he says their abundant joy plus their extreme poverty overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.

Here's the equation Abundant joy plus extreme poverty equals a wealth of generosity.

Now, if you're like me, who likes to tie things to logic and reason, that's how my mind tends to function.

Not everyone's that way, it's how I am, then you see this, it's a very cool spiritual idea, but also what does it mean?

You know, like what can that possibly mean?

Like generosity comes from our poverty.

How does that actually make sense?

And how does it actually make a difference as we seek to move forward as a movement?

I want us to look for a moment, we'll come back to 2 Corinthians, because I want you to finish hearing Paul talk about the Philippian church, but I want to go to a moment earlier in time.

Back in the Gospels, this is a moment from the life of Jesus himself.

We find it in Mark's gospel, this is Mark's historical account of the life of Jesus.

He says this in verse 41 sitting across from the temple treasury, Jesus watched how the crowd dropped money into the treasury.

It doesn't say he watched what they were dropping in.

He was watching how they did it.

And many rich people were putting in large sums or giving their offerings.

In verse 42, then a poor widow came and she dropped in two tiny coins worth very little.

These coins are like an eighth of a penny.

We handed all of you two pennies on the way in, so don't say we didn't ever give you anything, we gave you two pennies on the way in.

Here's my guess for most of us.

You might be the exception.

If instead of putting those in your hand, they had been sitting on the ground, you would not have stopped to pick them up.

It's just two pennies.

The coins he's putting in is worthless.

Verse 43.

Summoning his disciples, Jesus said to them, Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.

Now maybe it happened and Mark didn't record it.

What's shocking to me, he's got 12 disciples listening to him, one of them's Peter, who always has to speak up.

What's shocking to me is I imagine myself sitting there with Jesus, and he kind of lands that spiritual nugget on us, and I tell you, she put in more than the rest.

Count to about 10, and then I'm saying, right, but also she didn't, though, right?

Like, but factually, Jesus, like, I'm sure you're making a point, but also I just want to acknowledge, because math still works, that also she didn't, though, right?

Jesus is making a point.

And he drives the point home in 44.

For they all gave out of their surplus.

But she gave out of her poverty.

She's put in everything she had.

All she had to live on.

It's the same concept.

Her joy, plus her poverty, overflowed in a wealth of generosity.

We can look just and say, on one hand, she did not put in the largest dollar sum of money in the offering.

What Jesus is pointing out is that he put in more of age sacrifice than anyone else.

And that maybe, if we trust God, that God can do more with a small amount that is sacrificed.

And with all the wealth of the ages, that is given in the wrong way.

Maybe heaven's economy works a little bit differently.

You see, that widow gave her two coins, and it's been instructing us how to trust God with what we have for 2,000 years.

And it's making a difference, and all series long, what we have seen is if we can trust God when we actually don't have enough, that God can take our not enough and he can use it to be more than enough.

If we can trust God with incremental things, then he can use it exponentially.

If we can trust God with the things we consider an exception, he can do something exceptional with it.

Over and over and over again, we learn the same lesson.

You're gonna have barriers to entry into the life of purpose and power that God has called you to.

And so if you trust God with what you have, and will you just keep walking step of faith by step of faith?

Over and over we learn the same lesson that if you just have five loaves or a little bit of oil, you'll give it to God.

And remember, we're in a world that is going to tempt you to hoard for yourself everything you have.

If you can make room, if you can create margin, if you can give a sacrifice.

See, the valuable lesson this teaches us is something we've been saying since day one of Mediturge.

We always say sacrifice is scalable.

The difference between a status quo life and an extraordinary life generally is whether or not you learn how to live sacrificially.

Sacrifice is giving up something today, believing in something for your future.

And instead, we live in a world of instant gratification.

Keep it for yourself, spend it while you've got it, feel good right now, worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

Maybe don't worry about tomorrow at all.

Y'all already?

Remember the worst trend of the last 10 years?

YOLO! That's the first time I've ever said it.

This YOLO attitude, just do it today.

Spend it today.

Sacrifice.

Builds great lives.

And you can do this on your own.

You can sacrifice for your future.

Instead of spending all your money, you can you can maybe put it in an account that bears lots of interest, live a great life later.

When you start talking about sacrificing to the Lord, you take that exponential.

You literally take it eternal.

What we've called you to do since day one, and what we're really calling you to do with these bricks is to sacrifice.

Not just to give out of a surplus, not just to give out of what you have, but to actually look and carefully assess your life and ask the question: what can I sacrifice in my life today to make margin in my life to then give to God and watch him do miracles with it?

The little boy could have eaten his own lunch and missed out on the miracle of watching his lunch feed 20,000 other people.

How are we gonna make room?

Everyone can give a sacrifice, and a sacrifice will look different to every person because sacrifice is scalable.

We're gonna go back to 2 Corinthians.

Paul's gonna keep bragging on the Philippians and all of the churches in Macedonia.

This next section, it shows us that if we really can see it, if we really understand the movement of Jesus, if we understand the potential that our movement has today, then not only will we be willing to kind of begrudgingly make some room for God, we will beg to be a part of sacrificing on Jesus' behalf.

He says this, I can testify that according to their ability and even beyond their ability, of their own accord, they begged us.

They earnestly begged us for the privilege of sharing in the ministry to the saints.

And not just as we had hoped.

Instead, they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us by God's will.

What's so incredible, and I hope you see it, about the passages that we're looking at today, is we've spent the first three weeks of January looking to the future, the next five years, what's ahead of us in our vision.

But what our verses do today is they ground us in the sobering reality that not only does our vision move forward into the future, it moves backwards 2,000 years.

This is our legacy.

You are a part of what was started in Philippi.

You are a part of what was started in Thessalonica, you are a part of what was started with the Ephesians and the Corinthians.

This is the same movement.

And they honestly believed that if their joy and their poverty combined into generosity, they could be a part of a movement that changed the world.

Those people died never even knowing that a North America existed in the universe.

2,000 years later, we're here on the other side of the world, still a part of that movement, still a part of that legacy.

And I'm telling you, if the church would wake up and realize Jesus didn't call us to sit in a service and check a box, if we actually would believe that if we sacrificed and made room for what God wanted to do, that we could see the same impact that the first church saw, then we would be a part of something in our lives that they will write books about, that will reach thousands and thousands of people, that we could have a ministry that spans the globe as well.

A bunch of nobodies and Philippi kicked out of their homes, kicked out of their jobs, decided, oh, in my poverty, I'm gonna believe in a God who loves me enough to die on a cross for me, and that's why we're here today.

This movement can move, it's done it before.

He makes such a great point.

The next verse, verse nine, rather, he says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Check this out though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.

It's not just the widow, it's not just Philippi.

Jesus himself modeled this.

This may be the biggest understatement in the whole Bible.

Jesus, though he was rich.

Like, yeah.

He had the riches of the heavens, the streets paved with gold.

He owns all of it.

He stepped out of perfection and down into our misery and brokenness.

You know what Jesus told people one day when they wanted to follow him?

He said, just so you know, the birds have their nests, and the foxes have their holes, and the son of man, that's a prophetic name for God incarnate in human flesh.

The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Jesus died in poverty.

What do we call the crucifixion?

The passion, joy, plus poverty, unleashed the riches of eternal life for all of us.

There is something heavenly about this equation if we just understand it.

If we just look at our lives, no matter how complicated our life seems right now, no matter how difficult our life seems right now, if we can challenge ourselves to sacrifice, make room, and allow God to take our sacrifice, oh man, what we could be a part of.

Every once in a while there's a verse when I'm studying.

That it's not that I read it, it's like the verse happens to me.

And this is this is me uh manically studying, and when a verse happens to me, the same thing happens.

I get out of my chair, I walk out of my office, I walk down the hallway, I do a lap around the kitchen island, and then I have to go back.

I just have to walk it out after it happens to me.

When Katie sees me, she she already knows what's going on.

She doesn't even have to ask about it anymore, she doesn't have to call anybody.

Verse 10 happened to me.

This is gonna this blew my mind.

Even if it doesn't blow your mind, I need you to at least be like a just so you pretend so I don't feel crazy about this.

Listen to verse 10 and where we're at and what we're doing.

And in this matter, he says, I'm giving advice because it's profitable for you, who began when?

Last year.

Not only to do something, but to want to do it.

Last August I was like, you gotta be here August 20th.

Cancel it all, change it all, change your plans, cancel the flights, you have to be here August 20th.

Because God had laid this vision on our hearts.

And here's what I knew Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth, five years, 20 minutes, everyone in San Antonio, all it's a great vision, but you're the movement.

And so if you don't buy in, the vision doesn't happen.

So I needed you here.

And you came.

It was like non-Easter record attendance.

You all showed up.

We talked through it, and I asked, if you're in.

And I told you what that means.

If you were here, I said it means you're gonna get here.

You're gonna prioritize being a part of the body, it means you're gonna grow here.

When you're off track or you're not healthy, you're gonna do what you need to do, like like the Movement Academy.

You're gonna go through a process, you're gonna get here and grow here, and you're gonna give here.

Everyone can sacrifice because sacrifice is scalable.

And when we open new meta churches, you're gonna go where the Lord calls you to go.

When we open Helotus later this year, God's gonna call some of you to go help stand that up and establish it and get it started.

And then what we did is we took our graphic for the series and we blew it up and we put it on stage and we said, if you're in, come sign it.

If you're in, come sign it.

And there are hundreds and hundreds of signatures on this board.

Well, we started last year, not just to do something, but to want to do it, to see it, to desire it, to imagine your life as a part of it.

Nick said, I'm in.

Angel said, I'm in.

Lalo said, I'm in, Sabrina said, I'm in, Alyssa said, I'm in.

Watch me read every name.

No, I'm just kidding.

I'm in.

I'm ready.

Last year.

There's not a lot of like uh time-based references in scripture.

I just read that last year.

Started something, wanted it, dreaming about it.

Like, that's where we're at.

Here's the next verse.

So now finish the task.

Just as there was an eager desire, there may also be a completion according to what you have.

For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what a person has.

He's gonna make it real clear for you, not according to what he does not have.

Jesus wasn't like, do you see that widow?

Good try.

She had a little bit more.

She gave what she had.

Sacrifice is honestly assessing your life and seeing where you can make room, where you can create margin, what you can give up, what you can shift around to give out of what you have.

I was real honest in week two.

I'll let you know how most churches fund things.

They have a handful of people who write real big checks.

Six, seven, hard to believe, but some churches, people who can write an eight-figure check.

There's a lot of commas in that check.

We don't have any of those people.

Not that we know about.

We don't need them.

We need you.

You are this movement.

And you've been moving.

You've been flexing your generosity.

You understood the assignment and you've showed up.

We're now talking about finishing the task.

Some of you, you've got your bricks, you made room.

For you to finish the task is to continue praying and seeking the Holy Spirit and seeing how he's wanting to use you and make sure that you're getting here and make sure that you're growing here.

And if the time comes, whatever God calls you to, to trust him.

Keep walking.

There's barriers in the way, trust him.

Whatever he's given you, he'll remove them, he'll expand your faith.

So I'm gonna echo Paul's words right back to you because I can say them so confidently.

I am sure of this.

That he who started a good work here at MetaCurch, he who started a good work in your heart will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Here's what we said all series long.

We must commit to incremental increase in our giving.

If you've grabbed bricks, that's what you've done.

Incremental increase in our giving to allow God to bring exponential impact to our movement.

Last week we went from, last two weeks, from 800 bricks on the stage, now we're like somewhere in the 300s.

If everyone really follows through, giving what they were giving, and this increase, we will not just open Holodus, we will open it the right way.

We will open it with vigor.

We will open it with the right staff, the right equipment.

We'll be able to let people know we're coming.

A year from now, we'll be talking not just here, we'll be talking to people on the other side of town, and God's just getting started.

So let me remind you exactly what we're doing.

We're asking everyone who can, who hasn't already, to consider increasing their giving by$50 a month and setting that up as a recurring gift.

Each brick equals that$50 a month commitment.

You come up during the song the band's gonna play, you grab your brick, there's QR codes all over the seats, set up your recurring gift.

If you can give more, some of you, God's really blessed you.

You can give$100 a month, you grab two bricks.

Give$200 a month, grab a bag, four bricks.

That's how we've got this wall down.

We're calling on the people of God to make room.

We're trusting in God's economy that every single one of these bricks can do exponentially more than we can even imagine.

If you're joining us online, our online crowd has taken dozens of the bricks off this stage, moving with us.

Some of them living out of out of town, believing in faith.

Maybe there'll be a meta church there someday.

It's incredible, incredible what God is doing.

I want to show you as practically as possible.

If you scan that QR code, you can put in$50, set it up once a month, put whatever day you want it to come out, it'll come out on that day every month.

You can do$25 off each paycheck by picking every two weeks or the first and the 15th.

I'm asking you to set it up as a recurring gift.

So many of you have followed through with that, and I want to thank you.

Because what that does, if it's recurring, we can forecast and we can plan off of it, and we can get to the future God's called us to even faster.

Let me remind you: sacrifice is scalable.

Your joy plus your sacrifice will result in miraculous multiplication of this movement.

If you've given already, you've taken your bricks.

Spend this time in prayer.

That what God has begun in your life, He will keep you moving and keep you growing and keep breaking down barriers as all of us together move in our city.

Let me pray for you.

Jesus, we love you.

We thank you for your great love for us.

I thank you for what you've already done.

You have blown us away.

As we all get to see the generosity of this movement, God, I pray that you would just continue to move in our hearts, whether you're asking us to be generous financially, generous with our time, generous with our gifting.

God, we thank you that we are a part of a vision that has been going on for 2,000 years.

We're humbled by that.

We trust you.

I pray you continue moving in our midst, Holy Spirit.

We ask it in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.