Real Church

Well, today is a little bit of a different day.

Once a year, we take a Sunday and we talk about who we are as a church.

We talk about our vision.

We talk about who God is calling us to be, and it's it's very, very important for us to do that.

If you're here for the very first time, uh, welcome.

Today's gonna, like I said, be a little bit different, but you actually picked a great day to be here for the first time because you're gonna learn about what we value, what we care about, the church that we believe God has asked us to be.

This is the the best day in a lot of ways for you to be here for the first time because you'll be able to find out whether or not this is for you or not.

We really hope that it is.

So it's gonna kind of be me and a whiteboard.

I'm gonna apologize in advance for my handwriting.

I'm left-handed.

We live in a right-handed world.

That's my excuse.

Okay?

If you're not a lefty, you have no idea our pain, us lefties.

It's it's hard.

Everything's your car, everything's designed for you to have a right hand, but you know, just gonna have to work through it.

But it's just gonna be a chance for us to talk a little bit about his hands.

And it's so perfect the timing of this conversation, because for the last few months we've been in a series called A Year of Real.

We've been talking about all the real things that God has for us, because we live in a world full of fake, and we live in this world that's constantly trying to sell us some counterfeit version of something God has actually promised us.

But if it comes from God and if we get it from God, it is real, which means it lasts, it endures, and it works.

We've talked about real peace and real hope, real wisdom, real purpose.

Today we're gonna talk about real church.

Because just like we want to be individuals whose lives are defined by what's real, we want to be a church defined by that word real.

We're gonna talk about what we mean by that today, and I want to say this at the outset.

I love this church.

I love this church.

I've spent 10 years of my life here.

It's actually 10 years, this this last week was it was 10 years for me, and I'm 33 years old, and so 10 years is actually a pretty big chunk of my life.

That's that's a pretty big percentage of my life has been here, and I love the vision of this church so much.

I believe so strongly in what this church is about that I'm I'm giving it my life.

I'm a lifer.

I love this place, and I love all of you, and I believe that the vision that God has given us is very unique, very necessary, and I believe he intends it to do something very, very big in our community and beyond.

I think God wants to use his hands to see some really necessary things change in our world.

And I'm really excited to talk about that today.

It's very important for us as a church to be on the same page.

It's important for us to make sure that we're not just here because we like the music and we like the teaching and we like the kids' stuff or whatever it is that we're involved in.

We should ultimately be here because we believe in what it's all about.

And we're excited to see it get to where it needs to get to.

So that's what today is all about, and I'm really grateful that you guys are here for this.

I want to start with this question.

What are we called to do?

What are we called to do?

That's a very important question for us to understand, and this word called is actually really, really key.

Because in the Bible we see the word church pop up quite a bit, especially in the New Testament.

And the New Testament was written in Greek, and we've translated it to English, but not everything translates perfectly.

And so when we say the word church, we often think of things like a building or an institution, an organization.

It's this very official thing.

That's not what the word church in the Bible means.

Every single time you see the word church in the Bible, it's talking about people.

We are the church.

In fact, that Greek word is the word ecclesia, and if you want to translate ecclesia directly to English, it would translate something like those who have been called out.

So the church, by definition, are the people who have been called out of something and into something new by God.

But if we don't know what our calling is, we really can't be a church by definition.

So we've got to ask ourselves, what are we called to do?

And the answer is pretty simple, Jesus.

When you're in church, Jesus is often the right answer.

You can just throw it out there and you've got like a 50-50 shot at being right.

When Jesus walked this earth, he made some pretty big claims.

He said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life.

If you want to know God, you you you get to know me.

Once Jesus called himself the gate.

And the idea was that there's this life for us, this life where we are connected to God, where we've been forgiven of everything that holds us back from Him.

We receive grace and mercy, we receive all the real things we've talked about, real love and real purpose and real hope and peace.

We receive a real passion for living, we receive the Holy Spirit, which is God's actual spirit in our life that's actually creating those things in us.

And Jesus said, All that belongs to you, all of that is for you.

I'm the gate.

You just you just walk through me and you have access to all of that.

That's that's what Jesus said.

And so he's actually given us our calling, he's given us our ultimate mission.

It's to get people to Jesus.

Because people need Jesus.

Our world desperately needs Jesus.

Our world does not need religion, it has plenty of that.

Our world needs to know him.

And if that's something that you you think about and you go, is that really true?

Just ask yourself: if the world looked more like him, would it be a better place?

Our world needs Jesus.

He is the answer.

He is the answer for the problems that we see in this world.

It's his love, it's his presence, it's his power.

This world needs Jesus.

We've got to get the world to Jesus, but how we choose to get the world there is it's kind of up to us, the approach.

But the approach matters.

There's a lot of different ways to try to get people to Jesus.

You can yell at them.

That's an approach a lot of people take, right?

Make them feel real bad about themselves.

That's a good approach, I guess.

Not at all, actually.

Our approach is pretty simple.

We believe in it.

We want to love people to Jesus.

And we didn't just come up with this because we thought it sounded good.

Jesus actually said, the world will know you belong to me by the way you love one another.

Not by how righteous you appear to be.

Right living is very important.

We want to live right, we want to walk in obedience to God.

But Jesus did not say the world's gonna know you belong to me because you look so holy.

Jesus did not say that the world will know you belong to me because of how successful your life is.

Look, God wants your life to be a success.

He wants your marriage to be successful, he wants your kids to grow up into successful adults.

He wants your career to do well.

He loves you, he cares about those things.

But Jesus did not say that the world's gonna know you belong to me by the fact that you've got it all figured out, you have it all together, and everything's going really well.

Praise God that that's not what he said, right?

He said, the world will know you belong to me by the way you love one another.

It is love that is supposed to define us.

So we believe the way that we get people to Jesus is to show them God's love.

To love people in such a way that they get a taste of God's love for them.

Because if you get a taste of God's love, you want more, and if you want more of God, there is always more of God to have.

So that's our calling as a church, love people to Jesus, and it's never going to change.

There's never gonna be a day where God's like, you're done, you're done loving people.

You've loved all the people.

No people left to love.

Mainly because people keep making more people.

And so, just when we think we're done, oh no, here's another person that needs love.

No, no, this will never change.

We will always love people to Jesus.

That is the mission God has given us.

But we're always asking God to refine that for us, to help make it more clear.

Because the more clear we are about how we do this, the more aggressive we can be doing it.

And so we've had some things that have come up over the years, some things that we've said a lot, some things that you've seen on screens and things like that to help us categorize and remember what our calling is so that we can go out and actually do it.

Like get, grow, give love.

That's something that you've probably seen a lot.

We've got t-shirts with that on it.

Get, grow, give love.

We want people to get God's love.

We want them to grow in his love, we want them to give that love away.

Because if people can get, grow, and give the love of God, we're gonna see people loved to Jesus left and right.

We're always asking God to make it more clear.

This last year, we really felt like there was something else.

Something else that needed to be communicated as a clarifier for us.

And it had to do with the word love.

We just we feel like love's kind of a hazy word in our world.

We say love, we throw love around all over the place.

Everybody uses the word love.

You can listen to music and hear love talked about, but the love that's talked about does not look anything like the love that Jesus talks about.

And so when we say love, what do we mean?

And this kept coming to us, we really believe this is from God.

Real love.

We think these two words define who we are as a church, as well as any two words in the English language, real love.

We want people to experience real love because just like we talked about a few minutes ago, as we were doing Lord's Supper, until you know the love of Jesus, you don't know what real love is.

There's a lot of fake love in this world.

But the love that Jesus has for you, it is it is real and it is life-changing.

A few weeks ago, we talked about love as part of our series.

There's a message from a few weeks ago called Unreal Love.

And if you weren't here, listen to it online, go to our podcast, go to our mobile app, grab a copy from the source, and listen to that, because we just went deep into what we mean by love, and I just don't want to go over all that again for the sake of time.

Today I really want to focus on the word real and how important that word is to us, and how if we can be a church that is defined by love and by that word real, we can change the world.

Alright, agree or disagree with this statement, people want what's real.

I agree with that, right?

I mean, I wrote it, so hopefully I would.

But but do you agree with that?

People crave something real.

You ever have an experience where you uh you think you have the real version of something, but then you actually get the real version and your eyes are opened and you're like, wow, this is this is what this is meant to be.

This is so good.

Anybody a big fan of 80s music?

That's about the response I expected.

I love 80s music.

I was born in 1983 and I listened to a lot of music as a young kid.

I was really into music at a very, very young age.

I still say that Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone, the theme to Top Gun, is the best song ever written, ever performed, ever recorded.

It's just it's appropriate for so many things in life.

It just is.

Danger zone.

Listen to it later.

If you've never heard it before, you haven't lived.

You haven't, you have just like I'm talking, you haven't heard music until you've heard Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone.

As a little kid, I loved, I loved music, and my favorite music was rock and roll.

My favorite band was Bon Jovi.

And so, I I don't actually remember this, but my mom has told this story so many times throughout my life that I believe her.

When I was three years old, I had to have tubes put in my ears.

I had a lot of ear problems, and and some of you have probably had that experience.

And so I went to a doctor and they had to put these headphones on me, and I had a microphone.

And I guess there were beeps and little noises that they would make, and I was supposed to say what I heard so they could kind of gauge where my hearing was.

My mom said, I walked into this room and I saw the microphone, and at three years old, I walked right up to it, and I went, shut through the heart! And I just like started going into Bon Jovi.

I loved Bon Jovi.

I remember the music videos for for those songs.

I remember like living on a prayer.

Can you picture that music video?

If you can't picture it, just Bon Jovi.

It starts with the band walking toward camera, but they're only backlit, right?

And they just look so cool, and their hair's just, it's just there.

And they're wearing like matching denim jackets and jeans with bright yellow and pink tank tops that are like shredded on purpose.

And they just, it's just the the exact picture of masculinity, right?

80s hairbands.

I I loved, I loved, I just loved hairbands in the 80s.

As a little kid, I didn't know that that's what they were.

I just I thought that was rock and roll.

A few years ago, I was watching this documentary on on music in the in the 90s.

And it's always fun to watch documentaries of decades you've been part of.

They have some of those on Netflix and places like that.

It just makes you nostalgic.

And Dee Snyder, who was the lead singer of Twisted Sister, was being interviewed.

And he was uh someone just got really excited.

And we just went, yes! Twisted Sister.

They only really had a song.

We're not gonna take it.

No, we're not gonna take it anymore.

That's it's Twisted Sister.

It's okay, you don't have to pretend like like you don't listen to good music, okay, in church.

It's alright, it's all good.

Even though I think Twisted Sister is not that good, but whatever.

So they're no poison, I'll say that.

They're no poison.

Don't even get me started on Strider or Europe or any of those other bands.

I mean, it's just come on, they're definitely no Kenny Loggins.

But anyway, D.

Snyder, he's talking about the end of the hairbands.

The moment that it all just sort of went away.

Because it actually happened in an instant.

Literally, like one moment happened, and hairbands went from being the coolest thing in rock and roll to completely and totally obsolete.

And that thing was called Nirvana.

And so, if uh if you're my age or a little bit older, you're probably familiar with Nirvana.

And Nirvana launched this whole new kind of rock and roll.

It was, it was grunge rock, and it was the antithesis of everything that hairbands were about.

Because hairbands were about the costumes and the makeup and the hair, and their shows were these spectacles.

If you went to a hairband show, I mean it was like lights and pyrotechnics and guys being lowered on wires while they were playing guitars.

It was just over the top.

It was a show.

And Nirvana, this whole grunge rock thing, it was like, yeah, none of that.

It was just sort of raw.

And people saw that and they perceived that as being real.

They went, oh, that that's genuine.

I'm not saying it was healthy or good necessarily, but they were like, that's genuine.

And all of a sudden, when they saw that genuine thing, they they looked at the hairbands and they were like, no, no, your day is done.

And it was.

Because people crave something real.

I'm not saying we want to be their nirvana of churches.

I'm just saying we don't want to be the hairband of churches, okay?

No, people crave something real so much so that when they see something real and they recognize that it is real, they cannot stomach fake anymore.

See, Jesus is real.

He is as real as it gets, not just in his existence, who he is.

If you were to describe Jesus, words like sincere, honest, open, transparent, vulnerable, those would be the words that you would use on top of words like powerful and compassionate.

Jesus was real, so much so that real people living real life, dealing with real problems, loved Jesus.

They couldn't, they couldn't get enough of Jesus.

It was the real people, the everyday people of his day, that could not spend enough time with him.

They loved him.

It was the the religious people, the people who were really good at faking it, they couldn't stand Jesus.

Because that's what religion tells us to do fake it.

Wash the outside.

Don't worry about the inside.

That's not important.

It was the fake that hated Jesus, but but real people loved him because Jesus was and is real.

And so here's the the irony of the situation.

We live in a world that craves something real.

Our world hungers for something real because we're sick of being lied to, being marketed to, being sold to.

It happens all over the place in every sphere of life.

We want something that's real, and Jesus is as real as anything.

He is the most real person that has ever lived, and so our world actually craves Jesus.

Our world may not realize that, but we live in a world that desperately wants Jesus without knowing it.

And our calling is to give people what they actually already want.

They want something real.

But there's this disconnect.

See, because the Bible says that we, the church, we're the ambassadors of Jesus.

We're supposed to be his representatives.

And fair or not, if you were to go poll thousands of people who do not go to church or want to be part of a church and ask them to describe what church is to them, you're not going to hear a lot of synonyms of this word.

You're not going to hear a lot of people talk about how church is just this real thing.

And it's about transparency and honesty and openness.

You're not going to have people say, you know, I don't actually believe in God, but if I did, the first place I would be on a Sunday morning would be church, because even though I don't believe God is real, even though I believe all those people are delusional to believe in God, I'll tell you this: you will never find a group of people more honest, sincere, open, transparent, and real than church people.

That is not, that's not the reputation that the church has.

Now, part of that's just because people have bias and people have misconception, part of that is earned.

What you will hear is a lot of people say things like this, like, I do believe in God actually, but I don't want to be a part of a church because it's just so fake.

There's hypocrisy left and right.

There's just, it's pretentious.

There's always an angle.

I always feel like I'm being pitched something.

And so we have this disconnect.

We have we have Jesus who is real in a world that craves real, and then we have we have church that by and large is not known for being real.

Often has a reputation for fake.

What gives?

Why the disconnect?

And and look, we we could talk for hours about this, we could talk about church history, we could go into thousands of years of events that have happened that have allowed religion to seep in, that have allowed religion to kind of get its hold and have its effect.

We really don't have time for that.

What I want to talk about is just one simple fact, something that I really believe, and this is my opinion.

I could be wrong, I often am, but I really do believe this, and I think I think it holds up.

Churches, by and large, and let me say this too.

I'm not talking about all churches, I'm not, I'm not talking about specific churches.

I love churches.

God loves the church.

He loves the church even when the church messes up, just like we love our kids, even when our kids get off track, that doesn't change the fact that we love them.

God loves the church.

He has not changed his mind after 2,000 years and said, you know what, the church is no longer my ambassador.

Even through our mistakes, he loves the church.

But as the church, which is all of us, we are the church.

I just believe that we should look like Jesus.

I think it's really simple.

If church just looked like Jesus, the world would change.

And so the truth is the church as a whole just doesn't value being real very much.

Transparency is not a priority.

Vulnerability is like a word that doesn't exist.

There's all these other things that the church as a whole values so much more than being real.

Take this one for example, and it seems like a good one, excellence.

Excellence is a good thing.

We want to be excellent, we want to do things well.

When I was a kid growing up in church, excellence was not a priority.

I can just say that.

And I loved the church that I grew up in.

It was this little Baptist church in southern Missouri, and that's where I met Jesus, and I had so much fun.

I had friends, I had such a blast.

I have nothing, nothing but fond memories of that church, except for this one thing.

It was called special music.

And some of us don't know what this is, some of us maybe grew up in a church that had special music.

Here's the concept behind special music.

This was a thing in my church.

On a Sunday, there would be this five-minute block of time that was carved out for someone in our church to sing a song, to perform a solo.

And here was the criteria.

You just had to sign up.

So anybody could sign up and perform special music.

And it was just terrible.

I mean, some sometimes it was good.

Like, like every once in a while, someone would be an actually legitimate gifted musician, and you would be like, wow, thank you.

Right?

Sometimes it would be a young kid or something like that, so it would be endearing.

But most of the time it was it was just bad.

And that was sort of okay because excellence was not the goal.

It wasn't the goal.

I remember when American Idol came out, and it was this phenomenon of people auditioning for the show, and they were so bad.

And the world did not know how to process this.

How in the world can these people think they're good and they're clearly not?

I mean, this is this is like this is like nothing we've ever seen before.

And I remember watching that going, I've seen this before.

This is special music.

This is what that is, right?

And so about 20, 30 years ago, we started to see some big changes in church culture as a whole in our country.

I don't think there's ever been a time where church culture has changed as rapidly as it has in the last 30 years.

I mean, you walked into a church in 1980, it would have looked like a church in 1950 for the most part.

You walk into a church that's been started within the last 15, 20 years, it's gonna look wholly different.

Because what happened was church leaders started to recognize there's a disconnect between us and culture.

We're losing our voice and culture, we're losing our credibility.

We gotta fix this.

And the the funny thing about fixing problems is that there's almost always more than one problem to fix.

You have to figure out what problem is the primary problem.

Because you can actually spend a lot of effort and time and money and resources fixing a problem that is a problem, it's just an auxiliary problem.

And you can solve it, but it doesn't solve the primary problem.

My car could have a transmission that's going bad, and my tires could need fixing, and I could spend all my money and time on the tires, and if my transmission's not fixed, it's not gonna do me any good.

And so, excellence is a problem that the church, in America at least as a whole, really addressed.

It's a problem that got solved, but it wasn't the primary problem.

That's my opinion.

Because you can go to to a church now and you can you can experience excellence, you can be wowed.

I mean, you can have a you have a A light show and a and a performance, and just someone speak and there'd be vision just blow you away.

There's like legitimate customer service.

It's like a five-star hotel.

It's excellent.

But the primary problem wasn't excellence, it was authenticity.

The primary problem was not people going, man, this just wasn't that great.

I need to be entertained, and wow, the primary problem was I don't believe you.

I don't believe that this is genuine.

So you can actually have something I call excellence at the expense, I'm very pressured to spell things correctly right now, of authenticity.

Because as excellence goes up, authenticity does not always rise with it.

In fact, sometimes the opposite is true.

Just because you make something more excellent doesn't make it more real.

Sometimes you can make things super excellent, and the genuineness actually goes down.

It's like children's TV.

It's good, it's just too good.

Right?

The smiles are too big.

The laughs aren't genuine.

The energy and the enthusiasm feels rehearsed and forced because it is.

It's children's TV.

Sometimes church ends up looking like children's TV when excellence is valued above all else.

It's really good.

It's just fake.

Because you don't smile that hard.

You don't.

No one does.

It happens.

And when that happens, and this is honestly, I believe this is like an epidemic happening in church culture.

And obviously, I'm a pastor.

I care very much about church culture.

I don't expect all of us to be passionate about this like I am, but I want us to understand what we're doing here and why it's different.

Because when you value excellence above all else, church becomes a production.

It becomes a show.

The intended result is for people to go, wow, that was amazing.

But we're not meant to wow people to Jesus.

We're meant to love people to Jesus because people do not need more entertainment.

People do not need to be wowed, they need to be loved.

And see, there's a problem with church being a production.

And this word production happens a lot in the church world.

Excuse me.

And the problem is that Jesus is not a product.

He's not.

And when church becomes a production, Jesus becomes a product.

And we start trying to sell Jesus to the world.

And we start trying to sell Jesus to the world like we sell anything to the world.

You market it.

You've got to make sure that it's it's been approved, that its image is right.

You start caring about things like branding and image management.

Things that Jesus cared about not at all.

Like he cared zero about things like that, his image.

He didn't care about it at all.

But when you treat Jesus like a product, when you make this big production out of church, that's what you care about.

You start selling Jesus.

And it's like it's like a focus group has happened.

And so people sat down with Jesus and said, hey Jesus, we think we think you're actually pretty awesome.

And we think it with a few tweaks to your image, we can really connect you with culture.

I mean, we we really think, number one, Jesus, you got a beard and kind of long hair.

That's actually in right now.

That's good.

Okay?

So so you you you look cool.

And you know, Jesus, you said some really amazing things.

You said some things that everybody likes.

Everybody likes the stuff you said about love.

Everybody loves that kind of stuff.

You said some things that just work perfectly on motivational posters in a principal's office.

And so we really want to highlight those things that you said.

Now, at the same time, Jesus, you said some stuff that's not, it's just not a fit for the world we live in.

I mean, you you you said some pretty intense things.

And so, you know, we're just gonna downplay that a little bit.

I mean, people want to discover it for themselves, but we're not gonna take it out of the Bible.

We're just not gonna talk about it on a Sunday morning.

It's kind of controversial, Jesus.

And people don't don't like to have their feathers ruffled.

And Jesus, the miraculous stuff that you did and all the stuff you said about the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit being in us and working in us and miracles happening around us because of God's power in us, that's just weird, Jesus.

People think that's weird.

And so let's just sort of let's just kind of amputate the whole Holy Spirit stuff from the equation.

Um, it's just not, it's not as crucial, maybe, as as some other things are.

And and this happens.

This this happens.

Jesus gets treated like a product when church is a production, and so the world has sold Jesus, but it's not the real Jesus.

Because I'll be honest, Jesus is kind of difficult.

He says things that make you go, well, I don't know what to do with that.

Sometimes Jesus says things that they just they tick me off.

There are things that Jesus said in the Bible that I wish he had not said.

Because if he hadn't said those things, I could just, I wouldn't have to struggle.

I wouldn't have to wrestle with those types of frustrations that I wrestle with.

And the whole miraculous stuff, the spiritual stuff.

Jesus talked about that at length.

Jesus talked about the Holy Spirit.

As practically as he talked about anything else that he said.

He said that if you know me, you will have the Holy Spirit.

He will be in you, he will do more through you than you've even seen me done, but but seen me do.

And the thing is, you can go to a lot of productions on Sunday mornings in our country and you don't hear a word about the Holy Spirit because people think it's too weird.

Holy Spirit's God.

And I don't want a fake Jesus.

I don't need a fake Jesus because fake Jesus is like a nice addition to your life.

He's like a cup holder in your car.

Like a cup holder is great.

I love my cup holder.

I use it often.

It's nice.

But when my life is falling apart, my cup holder is useless to me.

And the world does not need a fake Jesus, a diminished Jesus.

The world needs a real Jesus.

The real Jesus.

And that can only happen when the church, the ambassador of Jesus to the world is real.

See, when people experience the real Jesus, things happen.

There was a woman in the Bible, a woman at a well, and she was a woman of ill repute.

Her life did not match the way God would have us live life, and she was ashamed about it.

She was embarrassed about it, so she hid it.

And one day she had an encounter with the real Jesus, and he loved her.

In fact, she is the first person that Jesus ever says the words, I'm the Messiah to.

She's the first person that he shared that secret with.

And in one conversation with the real Jesus, she starts going around to her hometown, telling everybody about her life.

She says, Guys, he knew everything about my life.

And instead of hiding her issues, she's actually talking about them because now they've been changed.

Because Jesus has entered her life, and instead of being ashamed of her past, now she's saying, Hey, he loved me anyway, in spite of all this stuff.

There was a man named Zacchaeus, and he was a criminal.

He stole from people.

And he had one moment with Jesus, one dinner conversation with Jesus, and he became the most generous person that anyone had ever encountered.

The real Jesus changes you.

The real Jesus changes everything he comes into contact with.

That's why this 30-year-old carpenter with no advanced education and no political power whatsoever lived a life in a small part of the world 2,000 years ago, and we named time after him.

Because the real Jesus changes things.

And our world needs the real Jesus, not some product.

We've got to be real.

Because we live in a world of fake, and the last thing the world needs is something else that's fake, something else that's rehearsed, something else that's.

What would happen if when people walk through the doors of a church, they experienced a level of genuineness and authenticity and honesty and openness and transparency that they had never seen in the world?

How many barriers would that remove between people and Jesus?

What would it be like if people walked into church and realized I don't have to hide my stuff?

I don't have to pretend like I have it all together.

I don't have to act like I've got it all figured out.

I can actually say, hey, I've got issues, I've got problems, I don't know what to do, but I know Jesus and He loves me and He wants to be with me.

I can just I can just come to Him.

I don't have to pretend what would happen if church was the most real thing anyone ever encountered.

I think it would change the world.

Because I believe people are hungry for something real.

And we have what's real.

We have Him.

I believe a church dedicated to being real has the capacity to be like a lighthouse to the world.

Like a lighthouse to people outside the church, saying, look, you can come as you are, and you will be loved, and you'll be helped, and you'll be changed, transformed by the love and the power of Jesus Christ.

And I believe a church defined by the word real can actually be a lighthouse to the church in America as well.

Because the church in America is afraid to be real.

I'm a pastor.

And I sort of stumbled into this role.

This was not the plan.

And so I'm kind of playing catch-up.

It was God's plan, it wasn't mine.

My plans aren't that good.

I'm kind of playing catch up and learning how to how to be one of these pastor things.

And so I'm often, you know, reading stuff and just finding whatever I can to help me be better at this.

And I came across a really interesting poll about three months ago.

And it was a poll of pastors who deal with issues like you know people do.

And uh and the question was, does your church know about your struggles?

And the answer was overwhelmingly no.

I mean, come on.

We're the life experts.

We're the ones that have it all together, right?

We're the ones that you're supposed to look at and go, wow, wow, wow.

How can I be like them?

No, the the church doesn't know about our issues.

And then the question was, if your church found out about your struggles, would it be a good thing or a bad thing?

For your church.

Not for you, but for your church.

And overwhelmingly bad.

They don't need to know this stuff.

This would this wouldn't help.

Because, see, that they don't think people care about what's real.

They just they need to believe a lie.

Right?

That's the idea.

They need to believe that everything's good.

I love this family.

You guys are my family, and I love that I don't have to stand up here and pretend in front of you.

Thank you, by the way.

Thank you for the gift of me not having to fake it and having to act like I have it all together because I don't.

And if you're looking for a life expert, this is not your church.

I am not a life expert.

I'm still figuring out my life.

I definitely don't have yours figured out.

I've got to get mine on track.

Because of the culture here, because we are a church that values being real, I've been able to be real with you guys about things that most pastors would would literally not even be able to contemplate talking about.

Like if you've been here for long, and maybe you haven't been here for long, so um, you know that I I had a 10-plus year long addiction to pornography.

Woohoo.

Um I just have to do awkward things when I say that because I don't know what to do.

So that's why I said woo-hoo.

Like, what how do you what do you say after that?

Um you know, I was introduced to pornography in the third grade.

I'm part of a generation of men that were introduced to things like that long before we should have been, before we had any capacity to understand it.

And that's why pornography has such a huge grip on so many men in our country, because no one ever sat us down and said, hey, if this happens, here's how you respond to it.

We were just exposed to it, and it it woke something up inside of us that didn't need to be awake yet, and we didn't know how to process it.

That's what happened to me.

So I was in the third grade when I was exposed to it, and it just grew into a full-blown addiction until my mid-20s.

God is so good.

I've been able to walk in recovery for the last seven years.

It's awesome.

But, and that's I hope you're clapping for yourself because I couldn't have done that if I wasn't part of a church where I could actually have the ability to say, I need some help.

I wasn't in this role yet, but I was part of this church, and and I was actually here given the courage to go, I have a problem.

And hiding it has not worked.

And whenever I've talked about that, there have been a few people who have said, you know, you shouldn't do that and whatever, and I just ignore those people.

I'm good at ignoring people.

Um the uh I'm some hey, okay.

That sounded rude.

But sometimes just the stories I could tell, weird things.

Like, we had a person, okay, this is an aside, and you guys, I know what time it is, I'm sorry.

But um, the uh we had a person one time that not that long ago that put, and this is you by the way, I'm so sorry that I'm calling you out.

I don't know your name, you didn't put your name, so whatever.

But uh, they put, I hate baptism Sundays.

Please tell us when it's gonna be a baptism sundae, so I can't come on those days.

And I was like, what?

People are what?

Like, what?

That was all.

And so some comments you just ignore.

But uh, where was I going with that?

Wow.

This is probably a moment that I'll look back on one day and be like, yeah, don't do that.

But uh, that's okay.

We're all we're all in process.

This church is a church that has has let me be real.

I didn't know how to be real until I was here.

I knew how to fake it, I was good at that.

But but this is a church where when I when I share about things like that, that's where I was going with this, when I share about things like that, while there might be a few comments that I just have to ignore, overwhelmingly it's people saying, Thank you.

Because we all need to be reminded that we have permission to struggle.

Because that's real life.

And our world needs what's real.

Because fake doesn't work.

I believe the vision of being a real church has the capacity to give courage to churches everywhere.

So the churches everywhere can go, hey, you mean we don't have to fake it?

We don't have to invest all this time and energy and money into marketing and branding and bumper stickers and billboards, and and we don't have to have a pastor that looks like a model and dresses 20 years younger than he actually is.

You mean we can actually just be honest and real?

And the world's gonna go yes to that.

Yes, because the world's hungry for something real.

Stop faking it.

You don't have to.

Jesus has freed us from the need to fake it.

Let's be real.

I just I believe that.

Our world needs that.

And you guys are that, because you're the church.

I mean, this is this is the most real group of people I've ever been around in my life.

And I love that about this place.

Thank you for that.

Keep that up.

Because a real church can change the world.

Now, I want to talk really quickly, one final thing.

What's our part in this?

And some people were like, oh, okay, here it comes.

Right?

I'm gonna talk about three things very, very fast, very, very quick, because we have a part in this.

We are the church.

I mean, being here on a Sunday morning and going, yes, I agree with that.

That is nice.

That is, thank you for that.

That is helpful.

But when this actually works, when this actually starts to do what we're talking about, starts changing the world by showing the world what a real church can actually do, that happens when we all jump in and say, What can I do?

So I want to talk about three things.

Number one, serving.

A lot of you guys serve on teams here.

How many, by the way, how many people are on a team?

I'm not trying to like make anyone feel bad or good or I'm just curious.

Okay, a lot of us are on teams.

And many of us aren't, and that's that's okay, by the way.

You don't have to have have been on a team.

At some point in time, we'd love everybody here to serve on a team.

That's actually why we started our second service, because we wanted everyone to be able to have the opportunity to serve and be served on a Sunday morning.

So let me let me share this statistic with you.

We started as a church 10 years ago with our very first Sunday here, we had less than 400 people.

It was like right around 400 people.

Okay?

On a given Sunday, I'm not talking about some big Sunday, I'm not talking about Easter or anything like that, just a normal Sunday today.

We average in a week about 500 people just 18 years old and younger.

Okay?

Which is really cool.

That is really cool.

Because if you actually do out the math and you look at like life expectancy and how how young those those kids are, if you kind of take an average of their age, it means that on a given Sunday, there's about 35,000 years of life just in our kids' areas.

What would it be like if if their lives were lived connected to the real Jesus, right?

That's pretty awesome.

That's pretty awesome.

And so I say all that to say this.

Um, as far as serving goes, we need 40 people to join our garden team.

That's that's the youngest kids up to kindergarten.

Because y'all keep having kids.

I don't know if we just have a church with the most healthy marriages in America or something like that.

And if that's the case, someone just cheered.

But we we keep having every single Sunday, I'm like, there's another baby.

There's another, they're just they're multiplying everywhere.

By the way, guys, Elon had her baby, if you were wondering.

She did have her baby.

And it's a girl, like the other two.

And so, what was that?

Wait, wait, hold on.

Was that an uh or was that an uh?

I couldn't tell.

It sounded from here, it was like okay, good.

For some reason, for I thought my my immediate reaction was you guys are gonna like uh, like, oh no.

But no.

Do pray for Tab, her husband.

Um, because that's Tab and four girls now.

That's that's he's a football coach, so he's got enough, you know, testosterone around him to make it work, but uh but pray for him.

So we keep having babies.

There are actually 800 four through 11-year-olds that are part of our church, because not everybody comes every Sunday.

Last year alone, we got to invest in 1,800 people, 18 and under.

That's awesome.

That's awesome.

Okay?

So when I say that we need 40, it's because there's a lot of those kids.

And they're amazing, and they're awesome, and they have the capacity to have a relationship with Jesus every bit as real and powerful as any of us, and they're worth it.

And so, as that area has grown, we just have a need for more people volunteering on Sunday mornings there.

Volunteering in there, by the way, it's not like you're giving up your life.

You serve two services out of the eight we do every single month.

We do eight services, two every Sunday.

You commit to two services a month, which means on the mornings you serve, you can you can serve and then stay or come early to the first service and then and then serve afterwards.

It's actually a lot of fun.

It really is.

You get so much more out of it serving, you really do.

But we need 40, and we need it like now.

So I actually prayed this morning, um, and this is up to you to answer my prayer.

Um, you know.

I pray that we would have all 40 sign up today.

I really hope that happens.

By the way, if you're married, you and your spouse, you know, so if you want to nudge that person right now, just 20 couples would solve that.

And that would, not only would that bless those kids, it would bless those volunteers, those of you who serve in that area, it's it's it's it's not easy, but it's awesome.

And thank you for that.

It would bless those people, and you you actually get the chance to be part of these kids' first encounters with Jesus.

The first moments where it clicks for them, and they go, Oh, he loves me and he's real, and I can you get to be part of that.

That's awesome.

So the Connect Desk, that's where you go.

So let's let's serve.

If we believe in the vision here, let's serve and be part of it.

We have a ton of other teams, by the way, it's not just that one.

You can serve in a lot of places, but that's a need that we have.

You know, giving, everyone's favorite subject in church.

Um if you're new or relatively new, here's how giving works here.

We trust God to speak to you and tell you what to do.

We trust you to listen and respond.

That's it.

We don't we don't do giving campaigns.

And if you've been part of a church before, you might know what a giving campaign is.

It's every year.

Uh there's a really, really well-marketed uh push for you to give.

And it's it's it's like it's pretty hard-hitting usually.

And we we've never done one.

I'm not saying we never will.

We might need to one day.

I don't know, but in ten years we haven't ever done one.

I actually don't believe in giving campaigns.

I mean, I believe they exist.

Um, you know, it's not like they're they're unicorns or something, but I I don't believe in the way that they're usually done in church culture, because I just don't think it's genuine.

And here's why, real quick, I'll explain this to you.

Oh.

Please work.

Um, okay, so we all have wants.

That's an A.

And we have needs.

I do not.

Uh we all do.

I really, really want a 4K TV.

I really, really need to fix my car.

Wants and needs.

And so here's the way it should work in life.

You, you know, you do everything you need to do to pay for your needs.

If a big need arises, you sell whatever you gotta sell, you you do whatever you gotta do to meet your needs.

But if you have a want, you're supposed to save up for it.

You're supposed to buy it when you can afford to, when it makes financial sense.

That's how it's supposed to work.

It's not how it often does, but it's how it's supposed to work.

But in church, you can you can really make wants seem like needs.

Like we really want to renovate the grove, which is our K through third grade area.

We want to so bad.

We have this idea.

Um, and I I think it's just gonna be awesome.

I think it's gonna be so, so cool.

It's a want, though, because the grove is is amazing.

There's very, very few churches in the country that have a space like that just for K through third graders.

So it's a want.

Now we could make it seem like a need.

We could come to you guys and be like, it's for the kids.

We could show you pictures of them and go, guys, don't they deserve this?

Right?

And not only is it for the kids, it's for God.

And so here's the campaign, and you gotta make this happen.

And what's really happened is that the church has a want, and rather than do what people have to do, which is save up and wait until it actually makes financial sense to do it.

We're like, no, no, we need it now.

We're not willing to save up, we're gonna make it everyone else's spiritual duty to meet our wants.

That's wrong.

That's manipulation.

We don't believe in that here because that's not real.

So we've never done a giving campaign because we've yet to have a need arise that we actually would need to do one.

One day we might.

Like we're gonna need to replace our roof sooner than later, probably within the next five years.

It leaks, big deal.

One day, it might be a big deal.

And when that comes, we'll talk to you about it, because it's kind of a need.

But honestly, I hope that that never even has to happen because if we would all just do this, and this is how we believe in giving, and we need really, we need everyone to do this for the most part.

Like everyone who can, which is 95% of us.

Hold on, this is gonna bug me.

Okay.

Three things pray.

Ask God to give you a percentage.

He might tell you 1%, 2%, 5%, he might tell you 50%, and if he does, I'm so sorry.

We're praying for you.

You've been called to do something great.

So, I mean, that's between you and God.

And then just make it a priority.

They all begin with P.

Did you notice that?

Look at that.

It's the three P's of uh, no, so that's cheesy.

But just pray.

Say, God, show me what to do.

A lot of times we feel like we can't.

We feel like we can't afford to, whatever, but the truth is, most of us, the vast majority of us, can something.

It's just, we get these ideas in our head because we don't think we can do some huge thing, we should do nothing.

No.

Just pray and say, God, what do you want me to do?

And the percentage thing, that's actually biblical.

That's a biblical principle.

Just pray that God gives you a percentage.

And whatever He puts on your heart, by the way, if you're if you're married, have your spouse pray with you and make sure you agree on that.

It's important.

And then when that happens, just make it a priority.

And month in, month out, just say, okay, I'm gonna do this and do it.

That's how my wife and I do it.

That works, by the way.

We've seen God do some crazy stuff as a result of that.

We really have.

But more than that, we get to share in a joy here that we wouldn't get to otherwise.

If we all did this, by the way, if all of us just did that, any of us that aren't doing that yet just started to, even starting small, like 1%, we have what we need.

We're good.

So let's just do that.

And the final thing is this, and then we're gonna get out of here.

Real love.

Like, okay, it's great to serve here.

It's important to give.

But the most important thing that we do to fulfill the vision of this church is to walk out of these doors and really love the world we live in.

That is by far the most important thing we do.

And so if you believe in the vision of his hands, if you believe that real love is what this world is lacking, that real love is what this world needs, and that if people would experience the real love of Jesus, their lives would change, then walk out of these doors and love people.

Like love them, all of them, even the annoying ones.

Love them.

Love your neighbors, even the ones you don't want to talk to because they're weird.

I have one of those.

It's hard.

Because it's weird.

But I'm probably they probably think I'm weird.

But whatever.

You know, love them.

Love the people you work with, even the ones that make it hard for you to work with them.

Love your boss, love your employees, love your teachers, love your parents, love your children.

That's hard sometimes.

Love them.

Love your spouse.

Even even if right now you're in a hard place, just say, I'm gonna love this person.

God help me love this person.

Love the people you interact with on a day-to-day basis.

Love the people that that serve you at a restaurant today.

Love love the people who call you.

Because somehow some telemarketing company got your number.

And this this person, that's their job, that's what pays their bills.

And they called you and they interrupted your day.

Love them.

Love them.

You don't have to talk to them for a long time.

But you can say, hey, I don't have time for this.

I'm not interested, but you're a great person.

I love you, and I'm gonna pray that you have a great day.

Goodbye.

Like, love them.

Okay?

You can do this.

This this real love thing, this needs to be our mission, our purpose.

We need to take this from here and take it out there.

Because our world needs us.

Our world needs us to be like Jesus.

Our world needs us to be real.

So let's be real.

Alright, let's do this.

We can do this together, guys.

We can we can change, we can change things together, but we've got to be this.

We've got to be real love.

And we've got to be willing to do whatever God calls us to do to see that through.

I I'm in it for life.

That's my calling.

And those of you who want to be part of it, I can't wait to work with you.

I can't wait to see what God does.

All right, but let's pray together.

We're gonna wrap things up.

Jesus, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, God, for loving us like you do.

Thank you so much for giving us a family of people here that we can be real with.

We don't have to fake it.

Thank you, God, for the opportunity to show the world and the church.

That because you love us, we can just be real.

We can be honest, we can be transparent, we can be open, we can be vulnerable, and we don't have to worry about the opinions of others because we know your opinion of us.

You love us, Lord, and that's all that matters.

We pray that you bless our weeks, God.

Give us the courage to be honest and real, give us the strength we need to love people, to love everyone around us.

God, help us leave this place, taking your love with us, so that we can give your love to every person we encounter.

We ask this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Thank you, guys.