Here For Him | Why The Church Gathers | Rainey Segars

That's his girlfriend Molly.

There.

Teddy is currently single, and we've protected Molly's identity, so this doesn't end well.

Here they are.

Every night at dinner, our family shares our high and our low of the day, and Molly was his high every day.

Until one day, Molly was the low.

One day he said, Today was a bad day.

Molly's breaking up with me.

And he said, I don't really know what that means, but it looks like it means the person doesn't want to play with you anymore.

So apparently, this other boy in the class told Molly, Teddy doesn't really love you.

And for Molly, that was that.

Molly went from I love you to I hate you, and she never came back.

Now I happened to know that Molly's parents had gone through this really awful divorce, and so there was a lot of boys are terrible, don't trust boys language in Molly's life.

And so Molly was done.

And then, poor thing, she started mimicking the stuff she heard at home, and so she told Teddy, I knew I should never have trusted you all these years.

And it really got bad.

She finally got to where she would find him on the playground and she would take his face in her hands and say, Just remember, you didn't dump me.

I dumped you.

I left you.

I don't want to play with you.

And all of a sudden, my little boy who loves school was coming home every day crying.

It really got bad.

It finally got so bad that I had to go up there and have a meeting with the teachers, and I said, Y'all, this is what he's telling me.

Is this, is he exaggerating?

Is this true?

And they said, No, it really is true.

You need to rehearse and practice with him at home how to stand up for himself.

It really got to be a big problem.

So, within all of this situation, Teddy's really sad, but I'm livid.

I hate this kid.

Like, I'm sorry about your sad home life or whatever, but you are seeking my angel baby out on the playground, and you're saying cruel stuff and you're making him cry, and I hate you.

I was so angry.

I was fixated on it.

So about this time, I go out to dinner with my lovely friend Casey.

Um, and of course, she makes the mistake of sitting down near me, and so she gets the full Molly story, and she listened, and as always, she was so compassionate.

Um, but then she did something that really affected me.

She said, I am so sorry this is happening.

Poor Teddy, you must be so angry.

Um, well, we follow Jesus, and so we know that the only way forward is to forgive Molly and to pray for her.

But this is still so painful, I know.

Um, so for now, why don't I pray for her for us both?

And then she prayed for our food and she said, Lord, we pray your healing for Teddy, and we pray your healing for Molly.

And in your name we forgive her, and we ask that you would set her free into healthier relationships.

Amen.

And for the moment, Casey prayed for Molly for me.

And praying together, we resembled Jesus more than I could have on my own.

Now I know I'm supposed to forgive and pray for enemies like Molly.

That is our calling.

There's no way around it.

Um, but I just sort of thought you should forgive them and pray for them when you can, and then just feel guilty about it and live in sin until then.

But what Casey did was far more biblical than what I was picturing.

Because as I listened to her pray for Molly, I couldn't do it myself yet, but I knew it was good and I was attracted to the goodness of it.

I still needed to forgive and pray for Molly myself.

Casey's obedience could not replace mine.

But seeing her obedience did a lot more to encourage my own obedience than quiet, angry guilt ever would have.

Together in prayer, she and I were the body of Christ in a way that I could not have been on my own.

Now, as Westerners, when we think about our identities, um, we tend to think about ourselves as singular individuals.

And we actually believe that more deeply than any community in human history ever has.

And so our mindset is new, there's no name for it.

And so historians have had to come up with a new name for this way that we think.

And they are calling our mindset expressive hyper-individualism.

We believe that you are an individual, and the healthiest, best thing to do is always to authentically express that self.

And if other people don't like it, well, that's toxic of them.

And any flaws that you have are just trauma from people not receiving the special riddle that you are.

You be you, we think.

We don't need the community.

In fact, the community probably squashes the real me.

So we're gonna blow off these oppressive social norms and we're gonna congratulate ourselves on being brave.

So this week I Googled, I just put into Google, inspirational quotes.

Help me live a good life, Google.

Tell me what to do.

So here's what Google had to say.

There were tons, but I've got a couple.

Here's what Google had to say.

Follow your heart.

Life is too short to be sidetracked by things everyone else wants you to do.

Anonymous.

If you listen to your parents or your teachers, they'll just sidetrack you.

Okay, number two.

Sometimes you have to follow your heart no matter the consequences.

Anonymous.

Do what you feel.

And look, my horrible choices may create incredible damage, but hey, I can't be wrong if I'm being true to me.

And notice they were all anonymous.

Nobody wants to own up to any of this junk.

There were tons of them, but here's our last one.

Sometimes following your heart means losing your mind.

Anonymous.

Don't worry about how foolish or how unreasonable your behavior is.

If you feel it, it's right.

I asked Google to inspire me.

And this is what the 21st century had to say.

We've got this crazy view of how good and wise and complete we are alone.

And because we are the first community in history to believe this as strongly as we do, history really can't tell us how this will work out long term.

Like what will this long term produce?

But we are starting to find out.

And so the Manhattan Institute says this about us.

We used to believe that the basic unit of society was the family, and we now believe it's the individual.

Even when we think of religion, we think primarily of expressing ourselves.

Rather than deeply enmeshing, we have placed ourselves above society and the institutions that should give us meaning.

But it turns out our individualism is insufficient at best and destructive at worst.

Turns out you do you is really disorienting.

We're afraid to acknowledge it.

But our age of individualism is dysfunctional, and we have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation.

And to be clear, these are not Christians.

This is not a religious view.

These are just people looking.

It turns out this is bad for us.

And that is one of the many reasons the author of Hebrews tells us do not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing.

Your creator is shouting from these pages.

I know how you work.

My eyes and hands and fingers have been deeper in your brain and your heart than even you've ever been.

Let me tell you how you work.

Our Maker wrote a manual to tell us how we do and do not work well.

And it says, we have to follow Jesus together.

We have to pray and worship and believe together.

We do not believe in or follow Jesus well alone.

Your heart is actually wrong about a lot of stuff.

Your heart is precious and priceless, and Jesus died for it.

But it's also self-centered and greedy and scared.

And you need to bring that thing to the body of Christ and have it reminded of truths and encouraged towards obedience that you could never achieve by yourself.

When we think, I don't really think I need this, I can just listen to a Tim Keller podcast and a worship playlist on a walk by myself, and that's pretty much the same thing.

That is not the truth.

That is a dangerous way that modern Western thinking has slid into our faith.

D.A.

Carson says this haunting thing.

He says, giving up meeting together is not full apostasy, but it is a troubling precursor to withdraw from the church community.

It doesn't mean you're not a Christian, but it's often the beginning.

When we try to follow Jesus alone, after a while, we tend to stop following him.

Because the church is his only body.

So if you drift away from Jesus, you tend to drift away from Jesus.

We need the church if we're going to pray without ceasing.

We need the church if we're going to love our enemies, not Christian Instagram.

We need the church.

So, to understand what the church is and what it's for, we sort of have to understand what humanity was for.

So when God made the world, what we're seeing in that story is the building of a temple.

God builds this joyful, blue, leafy temple to himself.

He's building this wonderful spot for his own worship.

And anytime people build temples to deities, ancient people maybe built them to Zeus, modern people might build them to Shiva or Vishnu, but anytime people build temples to deities, you build the space where the deity will be worshipped, and then you put the deity's image up in the space.

You put a statue or a picture of the deity in there so that you can connect.

And Yahweh, the only true deity, does that.

He builds this happy, sunny, turtle-filled temple to himself.

And then he puts a picture of himself in there, and that's us.

Humanity is his image.

And so when I'm tender with you, I'm showing you his tenderness.

And when you're patient with me, you're showing me his patience.

How we treat each other and the animals and the creation is designed.

By design, it's a picture of how God is.

But when we disobeyed in Eden, it broke.

We said, I don't want to look like you.

I want to look like me.

And so now we still bear his image, but we often bear it badly.

And so a dog biting me might hurt.

But when I see a picture on Instagram that a group went to the lake and I wasn't invited, they left me out, that hurts deeper.

Because how I treat you is designed to carry the weight of how God feels.

So when I make you feel like you're annoying, that hurts way deeper because I'm giving you a false sense that he thinks you're annoying because we bear his image.

And we're doing it badly now.

And so for the whole rest of the Bible, we see God trying to rebuild some group of people who will bear his image.

The question is, who will show everybody?

How I talk to you is how he would talk to you.

Like, where are those people?

And so we see him keep trying.

He chooses the Israelites and he says, okay, now you're gonna look like me.

And he gives them the law to show them how.

And in the Ten Commandments, you might know this, the third commandment is, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

And we have come to use that as like a to mean don't use God's name to cuss.

Um, this doesn't have anything to do with cussing.

The verb here for to take is the Hebrew verb nisah, which means to pick up and carry something, like a backpack.

And so this verse actually says, you shall not carry the name of the Lord your God in vain.

You carry my name.

Represent me well.

Don't go out there and exclude and act superior, because when you do, you're showing that person I'm disinterested in them and I'm not.

Don't carry my name badly.

So he says to Israel, okay, now you bear my image, but no, they say they will, but they start building calves and chopping folks up.

It doesn't help, it doesn't do it.

Then he tries with the Levites, no.

And so the story is begging where are the people who will be the hands and feet and face of God?

Is there anybody?

And then finally there is somebody.

And Paul says about Jesus, finally, here is the image of the invisible God.

Here's the person who acts just like him.

Someone finally was the image.

And then Jesus dies for us so that finally the people that he has cleaned and filled with his spirit can do what humanity was always supposed to do.

He did not just die to rescue individuals from hell, he died to create the church.

What we are is not just a collection of saved individuals who benefit from hearing a sermon and a worship song.

Colton said it last week.

We are the only group of people on earth who are not just called, but also empowered to actually treat you like Jesus would treat you if he were here because he is here.

We are his body.

We are not just saved from hell.

We are saved from the inability to bear his image.

And we have never borne his image well by ourselves.

He never picked individuals.

Jesus is the only single individual who could ever bear God's image rightly all by himself.

You were not just saved, so you don't go to hell and you can be a nice person till then.

No, no.

God has given me a little bit of himself to share with you.

And he's given you and you and you and you little different bits of himself to share with me, and together we're the face of Jesus.

And now the temple has its image again.

Sometimes we love somebody who's lost.

And there's this craving.

We just wish that Jesus could be here because we just know that if they could just talk to Jesus, if they could just be around him, it would change everything.

Well, they can.

Paul says in Ephesians 3, his intent was that now through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known.

It's through the church that God makes himself seen.

Now you might hear that definition of church and go, I don't think so.

I've been to church.

I was raised in church.

That ain't what I saw.

The church was not Jesus' face to me.

I've actually been more abused, excluded, or gossiped about in church than anywhere else.

You got anything to say about that?

Yes?

I'm so sorry.

You came to the face of Jesus, and they told you he didn't want you, and that is a lie, and I'm so sorry.

He is desperate to have you.

He would have died only for you.

And in the perfect name of Jesus, we rebuke any other message you ever received.

If the church has hurt you with abuse or condescension or gossip, please allow us to apologize because you need the healthy, godly church.

Jesus is only here.

We're not supposed to find him on the beach or the pontoon boat or while we do yoga.

He's only here.

This is his body.

If you want to know Jesus, if you want to follow Jesus, you have to be part of the church.

We often badly misunderstand what the New Testament is teaching us when it tells us how to follow Jesus.

And one of the reasons is there's an important error that we make because we read the Bible in English.

And our issue is that in English, the word for you singular and the word for you plural is the same word.

So if I say you went to Huey's, we don't know by the language how many people went.

How many were there, we don't know.

And the big problem with that is that the word you is in the New Testament around 3,000 times, and almost 2,200 of them are plural.

Way more than half of what the New Testament is asking us to do, it's talking about the type of community Jesus wants to build.

This is a lot more than just a grammar error.

This makes a huge difference in our understanding of whether or not the church is useful to us and whether or not we should even go.

Because if the church is for worship songs and a sermon, you can do the exact same thing with a podcast and a playlist.

But actually, Jesus' teachings require a church to follow them.

There's all these very famous Bible verses, very famous.

You are the light of the world.

But we can't see that this is plural.

He says, Y'all are the light of the world.

Y'all are the salt of the earth.

Y'all are the body of Christ.

Let y'all's light shine before others, so they may see y'all's good works and give glory to y'all's Father.

All these really famous Bible verses, and not one of them is talking about you as an individual.

All of Jesus' beatitudes, all plural.

He's not describing individuals he wants, he's describing the community he wants.

He says, seek and y'all will find.

Blessed are y'all when y'all are peacemakers.

Don't you know that y'all are God's temple and the Holy Spirit dwells in y'all.

The Spirit will guide y'all into all truth.

I appointed y'all so that y'all could go bear y'all's fruit.

Following Jesus is not about you being nice.

It is about us creating a community of forgiveness and enemy love that does not exist in America or Canada or any other place, only in Jesus' country.

We're supposed to bear fruit as a community so that we are a pocket of new world culture.

And if the lost or the hopeless want to see Jesus, they know where to go.

What's almost impossible for an individual becomes possible in an obedient, prayerful kingdom community.

It is not better or more authentic to do it alone.

So with the rest of our time today, I want to look at four things that Jesus calls us to do, four things we're asked to do.

But we might get discouraged or burnt out because we're trying to do them by ourselves and we're actually called to do them collectively.

So for the rest of our time, our mantra will be you are called to, but you are not called to all alone.

Number one is pray.

We are instructed to pray without ceasing.

But I don't know about you.

For me, to pray without ceasing sounds very overwhelming.

Personally, my experience of prayer can be really negative.

Um, because my toxic trait is that my prayers turn into this listing of potential problems.

So, sample prayer.

Dear Jesus, please save Teddy.

Please don't let Teddy be lonely at school.

Please don't let Teddy get bullied.

Please don't let Teddy get kidnapped.

Please don't let him get on drugs.

Please don't let him choke on a grape.

Please don't let him get hurt while he goes climbing.

And please don't let him get hurt this summer on the jet ski.

Amen.

Or any boat.

Amen.

Well, this feels awful.

Imagining all these possible problems makes me anxious.

So then prayer feels like anxiety.

And I don't want to do that.

So then to pray without ceasing sounds terrible.

But I know I'm called to pray a lot.

So what to do?

Well, at our previous church, our women's ministry director was named Helen.

And so one day I needed prayer.

And so instead of praying for myself by myself, I went to Helen and I asked her to pray for me.

And Helen is just a gifted prayer.

She's just good at it.

She's known for it.

She's claiming promises and rebuking stuff.

So this is what I came up with.

And then Helen goes, Lord, thank you for the victory of Jesus over sin, Satan, death, and hell.

It is our joy to obey you.

We bring ourselves under the authority and the blood of Jesus, and in the name of Jesus, we resist any of the devil's schemes for reigning.

We rebuke a spirit of fear.

We renounce confusion.

We renounce any attack that would stop your power.

We pray liberty, life, faith, freedom, and the power of the Spirit.

We pray all this in the perfect name of Jesus, who died and rose to give us abundant life.

At the end, you didn't want to say amen.

You wanted to go, woo! Now that I could do without ceasing.

That I could crave.

I needed Helen.

And if you feel discouraged in prayer or like you don't like to pray, it might be because you are primarily praying alone.

Pick somebody who's better at it than you and ask them to pray for you.

It might build your faith to hear a sister claim God's promises on your behalf.

Now the enemy might whisper individualism to you, that's cheating.

That doesn't really count.

But no, Jesus says, I'm there when you gather.

I like when there's more of you.

I'm not saying you should never pray alone.

Jesus does ask us to go into the closet and pray in secret, but there are more ways to pray than just alone, and we need them.

I struggle to pray every day.

But I do want Helen to pray for me every day.

Being with an obedient sister encourages my obedience.

I need people like Helen, and so do you.

So you want to pray without ceasing?

It's why Hebrews begs us: do not give up meeting together.

Number two, we are called, but we're not called all alone, to stand firm.

Over and over in the New Testament, we are called to stand firm in our faith.

Don't doubt, don't get scared, don't drift away, don't be double-minded, stand your ground when the day of evil comes, stand firm against the schemes of the devil, stand firm in the Lord.

This is our calling.

But when things are really bad, it's hard to stand firm.

So it's a good thing all these verbs are plural.

They say the most intense training in the military is joining the Navy SEALs and going through Navy SEALs hell week.

They don't let you sleep.

You're completely sleep deprived.

You've been swimming and running and doing sit-ups, so you're about to die.

And their goal is for you to quit.

They say that 70 people, no, 70% of people who sign up to be Navy SEALs don't make it because of this week.

So near the end, they take you down to Mexico and they put you in the Tijuana mud flats.

And there's a SEAL named Admiral McCraven, and he tells this story in his book.

He says, You're down in this mud, you hadn't slept in a week, it's night, it's freezing.

And about that time, the SEAL instructor will come out and start saying really gently, really sweet, just quit.

Come join me by the fire.

We've got hot coffee and chicken soup.

You don't have to stay here all night.

And McCraven says that he was down in the mud and one guy breaks.

He's out.

He detaches from the group and he starts to walk toward the fire and the coffee, and they try to grab him, but he's gone.

And as he walks out above the howling wind, they hear a voice of one of the men singing.

And the voice is raspy.

It's scratchy and exhausted, but it's singing.

And one voice becomes two, and two becomes four, and suddenly everyone was singing.

Now the SEAL instructor gets furious and he starts screaming into the bullhorn, stop singing, stop singing! But they just sang louder.

And McCraven says the guy stopped, turned around, walked back from the fire, got back in the mud, linked arms with McCraven, and joined the song.

That man would have never gotten back in the mud on his own.

He was headed for coffee and soup.

But the singing of the group brought him back.

And the SEAL instructor is screaming for them to stop because he knew what God knows, and that is that the resolve of a group can get us to do stuff we would never be able to do by ourselves.

When we're just in too much pain, and we just doubt that God hears us or loves us or that Jesus really will come back and heal the world.

Peter tells us, your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour.

Resist him, he says, stand firm in the faith.

How?

Because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of suffering.

Resist the enemy, Peter says, but how?

Come and see that it's hard for the other believers too.

As you well know, we are so excited to have Ella, our new minister for the youth girls.

And she was at Bible study the other night, and we were talking about C3 and her getting started.

And I said, Oh, we're so excited.

It's so wonderful, you're gonna love it.

Um, but I said, ministry comes with a lot of doubts and a lot of attack from the enemy.

I want you to know.

And she goes, Oh, that makes sense.

God's doing something really important at C3.

She just said it real offhand, like it was obvious.

And I was like, Yeah, God is doing something really important at C3.

And she goes, Yeah.

And I was like, yeah.

And her assurance made me more sure.

We're supposed to be immovable together.

Your feelings are valid, but God's promises and covenants are a truer truth than your feelings.

So when you're afraid for your kids' salvation, when you're afraid for your reputation, when the enemy attacks your faith, you need us to remind and support you, and you're supposed to need that.

There's a New Testament uh seminary professor named Sarah Heinrich, and she says this about the armor of God.

She says, the armor of God is for individuals and their lives, but perhaps more importantly, the whole community is armed with faith, truth, peace, God's spirit, and prayer.

The words calling believers to stand fast are plural.

One believer alone does not have to be a kind of Don Quixote for God in the midst of a godless world, lonely and not taken seriously.

This passage calls for corporate resistance to evil.

I like this.

Together we testify to his power.

Together we stay confident that the Lord who lives in the heavenly places has already won the battle.

Standing firm is what the church does.

So do not give up meeting together.

All right, number three, we are called not to believe the enemy's lies.

I don't know if you struggle with this.

One of my longest standing, nagging, gnawing fears is that I'm not saved.

I just struggle to relax and be at peace and trust that I'm saved.

And so an enemy lie that works really well with me is see, you sinned.

Even Jesus says you need to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.

Even Jesus says that there will be people who say, Lord, Lord, and he'll say, never heard of you.

That's you.

And I try to be like, he's not.

But he just goes, Yeah, it is.

And it's in the Bible.

So it's a real source of struggle and unsettledness for me.

But it's not for Colton.

Colton has different doubts, he's got a different personality.

And so verses that are scary and troubling to me don't trouble him.

So I can silence the enemy.

I can understand the scriptures better when I bring the verses that are scary to me to Colton and go, is this scary to you?

So this just happened recently, like a month ago.

I read this in Hebrews 10, got all freaked out.

Hebrews 10 says this if we deliberately keep on sinning after we've received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.

And I'm like, see, I knew it.

I sin.

So I tote my Bible over to Colton and I'm like, see this right here?

This is not good.

You with all your confidence, what do you make of this?

And Colton goes, nah girl.

This is talking about the Old Testament animal sacrifices.

Now that Jesus has died for us, you can't just keep using the tabernacle system.

This is about willfully rejecting Jesus and trying to sacrifice other things than Jesus to pay for your sin.

Are you doing that?

And I was like, No?

And he goes, are you trusting in Jesus' death on the cross to pay for your sin?

And I was like, Yeah.

And he goes, then calm down.

And I was like, okay.

But I still wasn't completely sure, so I went and checked with the commentary, and Colton's right.

When the enemy uses even the scriptures against us, which he did that to Jesus too, he likes to do that.

I need to hear another believer speak the gospel.

The enemy knows what lies work well with me.

But those don't bother and confuse Colton the same way.

So alone, I'm stuck down deep in this fear, but my brother Colton can hear right through it.

The enemy is an excellent liar.

Jesus says what he mainly is is the deceiver.

He knows what you're scared of.

He knows your main fear is your kids.

Or your main fear is being worthless.

And he will whisper, you are.

And we need to learn to say, like an email, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.

That's not the truth.

So if we bring his lies to the church family, other people's personalities will help correct the natural errors of your personality.

So don't give up meeting together.

All right, last one, number four.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians, we've got to share our giftings.

He says a manifestation of the Spirit is given to each person for the common good.

If you are saved, then God has filled you with the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit has given you a particular strength.

You are similar to Jesus in a particular way.

And look who that is for.

You expand our experience of Jesus in a way that nobody else in the room does.

He gave you the Spirit not just to save you, not just to bless you, but to bless us.

So if we don't have you, we aren't benefiting from the aspect of God's personality that He gave you to show us.

Peter agrees with Paul.

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms.

I will not feel God's care.

I will not experience God's grace as fully as I'm supposed to if I'm not impacted by your spiritual gifting.

God wants his bride to experience all the various forms of his grace.

And so he put a fleck of capability, a fleck of his personality in you, so that I can know him better by being around you.

When he wants to take care of me, he sometimes does miracles.

But way more often, he fills Tommy and Patty and Colin and Bryce and Kelsey with the gift of service, so that when we all arrive here, the room is ready.

Jesus got the room ready for us through Tommy and Patty and Colin and Bryce and Kelsey, so that in these chairs and in these slides, God may be praised.

I don't know if you've ever had Colton tell you you did a good job at something, but he has a spiritual gift.

When Colton tells you you did well, it is this hot blast of supernatural encouragement.

He has a gift I do not have.

After my sermons, he makes me feel like the internet will break.

His feedback, it's so specific and so supportive and so much.

But after, God love him, after his sermons, he'll say, How was that?

And I'll go, awesome.

Really good.

One time he said, Can you encourage me, please, the way I encourage you?

And I said, No.

No, nobody can.

Colden can encourage you the way Jesus would encourage you.

And I just cannot match it.

My mother-in-law, Tina, she can welcome you into her home in a way that I cannot.

Many of you have been to my home, and if there was anything for you to drink other than water from the sink, you probably brought it yourself.

I'm like, uh, welcome.

I've got water and whiskey and milk.

And between you and me and the wall, the milk has gone bad.

But Tina, Tina's ready, man.

She's ready with hot tea and roasts.

She is ready for you.

She remembers what you like from last time.

But she's not more ready for you than God is.

He's a better host than she is.

So her hostessing is a glimmer of how God is ready to host you.

I'm ready for you, he says, and I sent Tina to show you.

If you want to know how to serve Jesus, if you're like, I believe in Jesus, I just don't know what he wants me to do.

Then biblically, you need to look around at our church family and find something that makes you go, ooh, somebody ought to be doing that.

It's you.

Come on, girl, hop up and show us some of God's grace.

We really ought to be doing more for the homeless in Memphis.

We really ought to have more for the youth.

You're right.

Come on.

Come show us how much God loves the homeless.

You come show us how much God loves the teenagers.

Let's not be asking why somebody else doesn't do more.

He sent you to show us part of his care that we need.

So we need you in the church.

And you need to be in the church.

To fully serve and follow Jesus the way he has asked us to, we have to do it as a community.

With our personalities and our giftings combined, the world can see Jesus' face.

The way we behave as a church tends to be the reputation Jesus gets.

So a mother would deliver the baby, and then they would take it and show it to the father, and he had full legal right to receive it or reject it.

And the mother could not do anything.

And so cleft palate, limb difference, girl, if dad doesn't want it, mom can do nothing.

And they take it out to the woods and leave it for the coyotes.

And if the mother is shrieking and weeping, well, that is just too bad.

Well, one of the things the early Christians were known for is that they would go out into the woods and rescue the babies and raise them.

They got a reputation for it.

And then women started to come and join the church because the rumor spread the Christians won't make you leave your baby in the woods.

The Christians will take care of the cleft palate babies.

And then that reputation got very rightly projected onto Jesus.

The Christians care about the babies, their God cares about the babies.

So some of the people hiked out in the woods and got them, fought off the hawks.

Some of the people then raised them, some of the people raised the money for them, but together their collective reputation became the Christians rescue the babies, which then credited Jesus with caring about the babies.

Our culture and our priorities as a group tend to be the reputation that Jesus gets.

The unbelieving world might understand our calling better than we do.

They tend to understand maybe better than we do that we are the body of Christ.

And so they tend to interpret how the church is as a picture of how Jesus is, and they are supposed to.

Biblically, the gospel does not mainly spread through discussion between individuals.

What was central to most people's conversion was the power of the church's life together.

In John 17, Jesus prays for the future church.

He prays for us, and he says to his father, I ask also for those who will believe in me, that they may all be one, so that the world may believe that you've sent me.

So, how do you need the church to serve you today?

How do you need to serve the church today?

What part of obeying Jesus has you burned out or hopeless or discouraged?

Who do you need to ask out to lunch to encourage you?

Where do you need a brother or a sister or the men's group or the prayer group or the Bible study to help you stand firm?

Their obedience does not replace your obedience, but it does spur it.

But if nothing else, the most important thing we need to hear someone declare to us is this.

And he says, Let me trade you.

You can't bring that thing into God's new world, so trade me.

You take this warm, crispy perfection.

Give me that drippy, stinky thing.

I'll wear yours and you wear mine.

He'll reject me and you walk in like a friend.

And while you stumble your way here, I'll stand beside the Father and I'll argue on your behalf until you're all the way home.

He promised, I've gone to prepare a place for you.

The coffee's hot and the sheets are clean, your room is ready, you're almost here.

It's not long now.

This is the truth.

This is the truth, regardless of your feelings.

So come here today and let us declare to you this is the body of Christ broken for you.

So we'll say this liturgy the way we should say everything.

Together.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

But if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

If anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world.

My sins have been forgiven on account of his name.

This morning, if you are trusting in his perfect life and death to make you clean and bring you home, then come to the table and let's declare it together.