The Locker Room | Next Man Up | Chad Bruegman

How are we doing, Richmond campus?

Guys good?

I love it.

Hey, let's say hi also to everyone at our Missouri City campus, everyone at West End, all of us watching online this weekend, and let's do this, every campus.

Let them let them hear you.

Uh all the men at God Behind Bars at our Rams unit.

We love you, gentlemen.

It's an honor to get to worship with you.

So we're about to jump into our uh last week of this series we've titled the locker room.

But before we do that, I just have one uh announcement.

To me, this is a really big announcement.

And so at every campus, I'm gonna ask, especially the gentleman right now to lean in uh because this is ultimately uh for you.

Uh this Friday night, everybody say this Friday night at uh 6 p.m.

So October the 23rd, 6 p.m.

is when we're starting.

We're gonna have a guy's night.

Um, this is long overdue.

And what we're gonna do, I've been missing having uh more things from all the campuses coming together.

And so, all the men at West End, I want you to listen to me.

I want your wives to write this down because I know how you gentlemen work.

Uh, men at Mo City, same thing.

We are gonna come and gather at the Richmond campus.

Um, and at 6 p.m., we're gonna start off the men's night this way.

We're gonna do what men love to do.

We're gonna eat, we're gonna break bread together, and we're also gonna do what men love to do, a little bit of friendly competition.

If you want, you don't have to.

You can spectate or you can sit on the sidelines and talk trash to the rest of us, but we might break a sweat a bit, who knows?

Um, we might throw some axes, we might have some golf competition type stuff and other things.

But uh we're gonna have some fun together and eat together as we should.

And then as soon as the sun starts going down, that's gonna be our cue to come into this room right here, this sanctuary, and we're gonna do uh something that I know makes the heart of God smile, gentlemen.

This is something that if you will prioritize this week, I promise you you won't regret it.

Your spouse, your girlfriend, your future spouse, your kids will not regret it.

Um we're gonna worship God together.

Paul told uh his young protege, Timothy, when he was training him up as a pastor, he said, Timothy, when you pastor that church in Ephesus, I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer.

I want men to come together and I want them to pray together.

I want them to worship together.

And so we're gonna worship God singing together.

And God's gonna smile.

We're gonna worship God by how we listen and lean into his word.

And then my favorite part is uh we're gonna have a time as men to do what another pastor of ours said to do, uh Peter, in 1 Peter, he said, humble yourselves, gentlemen, therefore under God's mighty hand, and he will lift you up in due time.

We're gonna have a time before we leave of just humbling our hearts together.

And one thing I've learned about life is it's a lot better together.

It's a lot easier together.

And I'm telling you, gentlemen, when we walk in a humility before God, we bring everything, the good, the bad, and even the most difficult and ugly things in our life.

When we humble ourselves and get on bend and knee and we seek God and pray to God, I'm telling you, uh his business is exaltation, his business is provision, his business is resourcing you, his business is providing for you.

It takes a lot of pressure off you, and we want to have a night of that.

And so do this real quick.

In fact, I'm no longer talking to the men, I'm now talking to the ladies, because we know.

Uh, ladies, get out your phones.

The QR code at every campus is about to come up.

Sign your men up, right?

If you're a single lady, do this in faith.

Write a name down.

Get that guy in your mind.

Sign him up.

See what God does.

Who knows?

I don't know how that works, but who knows?

Give it a try.

At every campus, we're gonna have three giveaways that are specific.

We're gonna have plenty of giveaways beyond that, but we're gonna have three giveaways, one for each person that signs up during this service.

So you can skip the intro of my sermon here in a minute.

This is more important, and you can sign up for that, and then we're gonna put all your names in a raffle if you signed up today and we're gonna be giving away some really cool stuff just for uh some fun, but way more important than that.

Uh, we would just love to have you there.

I promise you will not regret it.

Okay, we good?

All right, so this is week six.

Yes, we don't normally do six-week series, but this is how important this series was.

If you're new or visiting or have missed, we tied it to the locker room, right?

Hopefully by now, if you come a lot, you know what this is about.

And the whole idea with the locker room was number one, it's football season, so we knew it would work.

But number two, and more importantly, we we talked about this thing called the church gathering.

This thing we do on the weekends where a bunch of Christ's followers all come together and we call this place our home, away from home.

We call this place church.

The Bible in the New Testament has a word for it, the eklea sea or the gathering.

And what we said was, without even meaning to, this gathering can look and feel, if we're not careful, a lot more like a Friday night game than it does a Sunday morning worship service.

But the gathering was never intended to be the game.

The gathering was always intended to get in the locker room together so that we could suit up, so that we could prepare for the game, so that we could deal with wounds, we could deal with injuries, so that we could once again go over game plans and talk about strategy and all the different things that we as the church are supposed to do to be mobilized and to be empowered.

So what?

We walk out of the doors today, ready to go onto the football field called life again, out into the workforce, into our homes, into our schools, and kind of just re-upping on the vision for what a healthy, powerful, uh, transformative church should look like on the weekends.

And so I'm ending with a message that I don't know how you're gonna receive it, but this I think is so fundamental and so important to the health of our church.

And so sticking with the football metaphor, just one more time, some of you you're over it, right?

Football's not your thing.

You're like, if I hear one more analogy about football, I'm gonna I promise we will do a pellet cleanser this next week, next series.

But every now and then, unfortunately, if you really love football, one of the hardest things about it is throughout the season, because it's a violent game, players get injured.

And sometimes, like, really important, like future Hall of Fame players get injured.

And you can just feel the oxygen leaving the stadium and you can see it on the coaches' faces.

They're trying to be strong and play it cool, but you know the implications of that person or people getting injured.

And then every good coach in the NFL or college or whatever, they have to go to a press conference after every game and answer questions.

And when they get the question about the big injury, they all say the same one line every single time.

They go, you know what, it's it's hard and it's tough, and we really uh, you know, need him out there, but here's the deal next man up.

Next man up.

And here's what they're saying: every coach that's worth their weight and salt in any sport, if they're really a good, effective coach, they get the second string players and the third string players and they get the rookies to train and to practice and to play in practice as if at any time they could be the next man up.

They don't condescend to them, they don't treat them like second-class citizens on the team.

They they charge them and then they train them to train as if you're gonna start every single week because in a violent game like football, guess what?

You're one play away from all of a sudden having your number called, so they go, next man up.

And if you're taking notes today, this is the title of this last message uh message I've titled it Next Man Up.

And again, I want to be clear this is not about football, this is about our church.

This is about River Point and West End's locker room.

And the reason I call it Next Man Up is because of this.

Do you know in our church there are seven different generations represented?

Seven.

Talking about football, you got the veterans, longtime veterans, in the room.

And then you've got the brand new rookies in the room, and then you've got everybody in between.

We have the silent generation.

Those are the elders of our elders.

Those are the people in our church that deserve the utmost of respect.

We're talking late 80s and people in our church in their 90s.

They deserve the utmost honor and respect.

If you're 90 and you got to church, especially in our parking lots, you better be honored while you're here.

Taken care of, affirmed, esteemed.

Right?

Then we have the baby boomers.

We got any baby boomers?

Every campus makes some noise.

You got a whistle left in you.

I appreciate that.

And then we got my generation, the Gen Xers, the middle child, the forgotten generation, they say.

I think we're awesome, but where are Gen Xers at?

There we go.

Then we've got those pesky millennials.

Where are you at, millennials?

Starting to see the energy.

You see how this works?

And then we got what?

We got Gen Z.

Anyone in here?

Okay, I love it.

And then we got, I think we're getting close to youth group now, so there are much of them are in different buildings.

Uh, what is it?

Generation Y?

Is that it?

What's next, right?

Generation Alpha, where are you at?

In kids ministry, okay.

And then if you got like a one-year-old or a little bambino and hear a little baby, then we got generation beta.

If you hear them crying, take it up with God.

He loves that generation.

Whatever's gonna come of them, he loves that generation.

And listen to me, having seven generations of people represented in our locker room makes the heart of God smile.

This was how God always intended us, the church, to live together and to be together and to work together.

How we treat and how we take care of each generation in this church has a direct influence on the blessing of God and the favor of God over our church.

And don't you want to go to a church where you can just sense and feel the blessing of God?

You may not be able to define it or explain it.

I pray so hard all the time.

It's it's the top of my list for our church is that the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit would be felt every single time we're in a small group, every time we gather on the weekends with the big group, every time we're doing anything in the church, I pray that it's the Holy Spirit.

You can't fully define it, you can't fully say what's happening, but you can just intangibly feel that no matter what happens each weekend, the presence of God is in this place.

The presence of God is being affirmed and being honored in this place.

And one of the greatest ways we do that is by leveraging the beauty that every one of our seven generations brings to this locker room and to this family.

But doing the locker room thing with multi-generational approach, it also makes the health of our church and the unity of our church a lot harder, more challenging.

But I am telling you, this is a challenge that is worth accepting.

Twelve different times in the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testament, do you know what God is referred to by his people?

They would pray to him like this to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Why would they do that?

Because he's the God of multi-generational storytelling.

The story of God does not work without every generation, with its distinctions, with its differences, with its strengths, even with its weaknesses and shadowsides.

Every new generation that God puts on the earth is with the ultimate purpose of continuing to tell his perfect plan and his sovereign and perfect story as it moves along.

But what we all know about any good story, broken up by chapters or generations, is the next chapter is only as good as what was set in the chapter before it.

When they prayed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, here's what they were realizing.

Here's what they were declaring is this Abraham got the covenant promise that got all of this started from God.

But Abraham could never have fully realized that covenant and that promise if he didn't, by God's grace, give birth to a son named Isaac.

Isaac could have never been the person Isaac was created by God to be if he did not first stand on the shoulders of his mother and father.

Isaac then gives birth to twins, both playing an important part in God's story for totally different reasons, one of them being Jacob.

Jacob was a scoundrel when he was born.

You ever give birth to one of those?

Coming out of the womb, lying, cheating, deceiving.

Like that was Jacob.

He was literally, his name literally meant in the Hebrew deceiver.

And then all of a sudden he starts wrestling with God.

God refuses to let him not play a part in the story.

God refuses for the generation of Jacob to be the one where the promises don't work anymore.

And so he wrestles with him and he changes his name to what?

Israel.

We would not have had Israel, which was the seed, the nation of Israel through Abraham, was the first seed God planted in his garden of restoration and redemption.

Not so it would grow up to be the only part of the garden, but so it would be the first plant in the garden to prepare for all nations, all tongues, all tribes to enter into that garden.

And it was through Jacob, because you know what?

For everything wrong with Jacob, you know what he was really good at?

Making babies.

He had like 20 of them, boys and girls.

But he would famously go on to give birth to twelve sons that would become known as what?

The twelve tribes of Israel.

It was through his sons that uh the the the nation of Israel and eventually the kingdom of God through Christ would get bigger and bigger and bigger.

And Jacob, although he wasn't the best of humans half the time of his story, do you want to know what God used Jacob to do most in terms of what his contribution was?

It wasn't anything he did or did not do, but rather it was who he had as children.

That'll preach to a few of you.

Down on your luck, insecure about your career, getting older in age, and looking back with maybe some regrets you think you should have because you didn't go as big as some other people went, or you didn't do as great things as other people you hear about?

What if the biggest reason in your part of telling God's story was simply not what you were gonna do, but the kids that you were gonna have?

What's better than that?

Let me tell you just about a few of his sons that would be the twelve.

There's a one named Joseph.

And some of you you'll get this.

Joseph couldn't have been any different than his father.

If you read the story of Joseph in Genesis, do you know what you'll walk away calling him?

A man of complete integrity.

Like he sets the tone when it comes to integrity.

Jacob would have died a death of starvation.

Way too young, if it wasn't for Joseph.

But instead, because of Joseph, who he gave birth to, Jacob, if you read his story, would go on to die the way we all want to die, of old age, with his whole family around him, burying him and blessing him as he passed away.

Not by anything Jacob did, but because of the son that he gave birth to, the next generation.

He gave birth to his son, Levi.

Without Levi and the tribe of Levi, we wouldn't have the Levites who literally gave birth to the priesthood and to the stewardship over God's first locker room ever, which was his temple.

God gave birth, or Jacob gave birth to a son named Judah.

You ever hear Jesus a couple times in the Bible referred to as the lion of the tribe of Judah?

Without Judah, we don't have a bloodline for King David, number one, but way more importantly, that's the bloodline Jesus eventually came through.

He gave birth to a son named Benjamin.

He was the last one and the smallest of the tribes, right?

What can small things do?

Well, it's through the tribe of Benjamin that the first anointed king over Israel came through hundreds of years later, King Saul.

And then you skip all the way to the New Testament, and we get another Saul that we get introduced to, who told us in his scriptures that he came from the line of Benjamin.

And he got his name changed from Saul to what?

Paul.

And you know what's funny is we're going to be reading in a few minutes the very words of Paul.

The locker room is a multi-generational, interdependent dynamic that we have to look at and that we have to talk about to end this series because of the seven generations represented in our churches, they are in no way, shape, or form mutually exclusive from the others.

But here's why it's challenging, because I know how we get.

Everything that used to drive me nuts.

You ever grow up with grandparents?

We walked uphill both ways in the snow to school and back, and we're sitting there going, why?

Like, get a car.

Like younger, you know, younger gen, they're like, couldn't you Uber or something?

You know?

And I'm like.

Or a better question is, if there would have been a car or an Uber for you, would you have still just nobly walked uphill both ways?

No, you would have gotten in the car like we do.

Well, those darn, those darn kids and all their screens and their phones and their screen time, can I just remind us, my generation and the boomers above me, we're the ones who built those screens and put them in their hands.

We can't be mutually exclusive from each other.

See, God designed every generation to be ready, equipped, and prepared to take all the wisdom you've learned from simply living and then become a blessing to the next generation.

But the temptation is, as we get older and the world's changing at a rapid pace, and you no longer have the energy or margin to keep up with all those changes, is to just think, oh, the world's over, these darn kids.

But we have to forget, the Bible says where sin doth abound, that much more does grace abound.

You go, what's that have to do with generations?

That tells me, yes, in some ways this world is going to get darker and darker.

We see that happening in many different aspects of life, but at the same time, it will not get darker than the light of Christ no matter what we walk through.

So we can take two routes here based on that.

We can just sit around and get fixated, uh, full of fear about all of what the world looks like it's turning into, or we can get up, we can get fired up, we can look at the generations below us, know that God's gonna put a new song in their heart to sing to the world, and we can say, let us help teach you how to sing that song that God's put in your generation, that God's put in your heart.

Let us be the people that have had some uh experience and some wisdom and some time under our belt.

Let us be the people that bless you and that speak life over you and that find the giftings in you and call them out maybe the same way somebody did for us when we were younger.

The question I wanted to answer as we end this series is what does it look like for us at River Point and West End Church to have a healthy multi-generational church?

And I love the book of Proverbs.

Almost every sermon I use one because it's just a hard-hitting one-liner.

And King Solomon says this in Proverbs chapter 20, verse 29.

Proverbs 20:29

He says, The glory of young men, and you can add young women in there, because in the Hebrew ancient way of writing, they would just write about the men on behalf of everyone.

Sorry, ladies, we're trying to be better.

The glory of young men is their what?

Their strength.

And the gray hair, or what meant in the Hebrew splendor of old men and women, is their what?

Their experience or their wisdom.

And then he just stops and he's like, What's your point, Solomon?

And that was Proverbs, there wasn't a point.

The point was for you to search that out and figure it out.

And after years of reading that and living a little bit more on both sides, I'm getting some grays now, but I also remember what it was like to have abs and strength and energy.

King Solomon's saying this: if you really want to do it God's way, then you have to take the gray hair that you earned through life and experience and hard times and blessed times and everything in between, you have to take that gray hair, and then you have to come over to all of these younger kids and generations that are full of margin and strength and zeal and passion and what I call divine naivety, keyword divine.

Naivity by itself is almost always a negative, but I'm talking about God ordained naivety.

They haven't lived enough life to let cynicism win out over childlike faith yet.

We had generations in our church that haven't lived and been through enough things yet to have all the cares and craziness of this fallen and broken world get in the way of what they believe is possible in the name of Jesus.

So we have a responsibility to leverage that strength of those kids and those generations below us.

To maximize it.

Not for their selfish gains, but to Be a church that teaches kids to do something in their life that's bigger than themselves, that's bigger and getting outside of themselves.

Use that strength.

Use that single life.

Use that time, margin, energy, and passion that you have for the glory of God.

Because eventually you're going to get adult bills, and eventually you're going to have babies, some of you, and eventually you're going to have a lot more pressure and promotion at work.

And guess what?

It's going to be a lot harder to walk in that young first love that you were given when you first met Jesus Christ.

So when we have kids that are growing up and getting to know Jesus Christ over in our kids' ministries, over in the youth ministries, our kids that are 18, all the way up to 30, these young professionals, these young adults, man, I want to be a church that empowers them.

I want to be a church that speaks life over them.

Listen to what the Apostle Paul says in 1 Timothy, and just so you know, so this matters more, Paul is writing the last writings he would ever write in 1 and 2 Timothy.

Paul even mentions in 2 Timothy his death was impending.

Rome was about to put him on public display and kill him for his leadership in the early church.

Timothy was one of his, if not most important, proteges.

Paul mentored Timothy like he was his own son.

Timothy was going to be the pastor of this church Paul loved that he started in Ephesus.

And so Paul's writing him some final letters, just covering every last thing that he's tried to teach him over the last 15 years that they had done missionary work together.

Listen to what he starts by saying in 1 Timothy 1.

Paul, he writes, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the command of God our Savior, and of Christ Jesus our hope.

Now here's what I want you to hear.

To Timothy, my what?

My true son in the faith.

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Why did I read that first?

Because I want to be a locker room.

I want to be a church where we don't just bring our biological sons and daughters, which is huge.

What if you, as you got older and a little more gray, started praying a prayer like, God, I love my sons, I love my daughters, or God, we were never able to have sons or daughters, or God, I never wanted to have any real like biological sons or daughters.

Great.

Everyone's a different story.

But God, I would love to go to my deathbed with a few spiritual sons and daughters.

I would love to have what maybe I never got.

I'd love to have somebody that's been there and done that.

I'd love to have had somebody older that just encourages me relentlessly, that speaks life over me, that sees things in me that I don't yet fully see, that refuses to let me be anything other than my best self.

I would love to have someone with some gray hair in my life who loves me so much that when it's time to maybe challenge me or rebuke me or exhort me, it's not an offense.

Instead, it's a blessing because I know they have nothing but my best interest in mind.

To talk like that is not uh to wish for something that sounds nice but is not real.

This is the plan of God.

This is the model of God.

It's the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

I'm talking about being a locker room moving forward where, and I'm already proud of the last 30 years of work that's been done here, but refusing to accept that we can't even be better and better at being a church with seven generations and all of those generations being challenged to work in unison and harmony together, to understand what each generation brings to the table of this locker room.

What each generation needs from each other, what they have to give and what we have to give.

That is one of my driving passions before I ever hand this church off.

Whenever it's my time to take the baton I'm now holding that I got from Pastor Patrick and to hand it off to whoever that might be.

One of the legacies that I will not feel good about if I do not leave when I leave this place and my time is done, is that we did not get ready for the next 30 years by equipping and embracing the generations who were gonna blink and they're gonna be the next leaders of this place.

See, we've had 30 incredible years, River Point.

Look around.

The harvest has been plentiful, it's been good, it's to be celebrated.

But one of the natural patterns of churches is you spend so long celebrating what is and what was that all of a sudden you blink and all of a sudden there's nothing prepared for what's supposed to be next.

And I think what's supposed to be next, and I'm not just talking while I'm here, I'm talking about after I'm here, I'm believing it's gonna be better than anything they've ever experienced here in Southwest Houston, in downtown Houston.

I'm believing for that.

Why?

Because God says that's the pattern, how when you do it, not perfect but healthy, that's how it should be.

Every generation of the bloodline should get a bump, should get better and better and better.

And so Paul looks at Timothy in chapter 4, and he says this to Timothy because historians and theologians believe Timothy was between 25 and 35 years old when he took over the church in Ephesus.

They believe Paul was somewhere between 55 to 65 years when he was writing this letter.

They had a couple decades between them, and they were like BFS.

Paul could not have done what he did without Timothy.

It wouldn't have worked.

And Timothy would have never even tried to do what God used him to do if it wasn't first for someone like Paul becoming a spiritual father and treating him like a spiritual son.

And so he says this, his parting words.

Timothy, don't let anyone in that church look down on you because you are what?

Young.

But do this, Timothy.

Set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity.

And the reason I wanted to read that is because we, if we're a healthy locker room, will be a church that does not condescend to the young people, or ignore them, or dismiss them, or think they're next up later.

They're now generation.

Do you know the historians and theologians believe, based on very educated guesses, that every disciple of the twelve except for Peter was a teenager when Jesus said, Come and follow me?

Only one that was over 20, the only one that asked Jesus for money to pay the temple tax, and Jesus didn't say, Well, here, here's 13 coins.

Pay it for all twelve of us and pay it for you and me.

He said, Go get two coins and pay the temple tax.

Because in Exodus chapter 30, verse 26, 38, excuse me, verse 26, the command for Israel was, it wasn't until you're 20 years old that you pay the drachma, the temple tax.

Exodus 30:26

Jesus looked at teenagers just learning how to work, just fishing with their fathers and doing other things.

Young Bucks, formidable, divinely naive, and said, if this kingdom's gonna move forward, I gotta have faith of a child.

This older generation that I came into, they're too steeped in religion right now.

They've been too corrupted by legalism.

They've completely misunderstood the power and the beauty of the law.

So I need some people that are fresh, some clean slates to get this thing moving again in the right direction.

Now, did Jesus sign up for some really annoying problems with these young bucks that he wouldn't have had if he would have had some more gray hairs?

Absolutely.

I'm sure Paul had that with Timothy.

But he said, I'll start with this.

I'm not waiting for someday for them to be next.

I'm gonna call them the next generation, I'm gonna call them the now generation.

So come and follow me, and they did.

Don't let anyone look down on our kids because they're young.

We're not gonna be that church.

We're gonna empower them only if we're willing to walk alongside them.

Because they're gonna do some beautiful things in this church and they're gonna do some annoying things in this church.

It's just a fact.

But then what does Paul equally say to Timothy in terms of how he pastors elders?

You want to talk about weird pastoring people older than you, smarter than you, wiser than you, live longer than you?

He says, He says, Timothy, here's your now responsibility.

Don't let them look down on you because they're young, but live a life of purity in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.

I want to have a church where we start to do things like never before, where we teach our kids from the youngest of ages.

Come on, moms and dads, you know, you know you want us to help you out with this.

You know we're here to help you out.

Parenting's hard, right?

It takes a village.

We're here to be that village.

We want a church where from the youngest of ages we start to teach and mentor our kids what it looks like to live a life of purity, a life with pure speech, pure living, pure conduct, honor, respect.

Do you know in 2 Timothy Paul said, Jesus is coming back, but until then, the world in many ways is gonna get worse.

This is how you're gonna know he's getting closer to coming back, and then he lists all these really bad things that are gonna happen, and one of those things on that very long list is children are gonna become more and more disobedient to who?

Their parents.

In the end times.

But not our children.

We're gonna do everything we can to be a church that teaches kids what it looks like to live a life of honor and respect and purity.

What it looks like to remember, kids in your young, naive age, that you stand on the shoulders of parents that have sacrificed for you in ways you'll never know about because of how much they love you, they're never gonna tell you how much sacrifice it was to raise them.

You're never gonna know about the nights they cried themselves to sleep.

You're never gonna know about the times where they prayed to God in hopes that there would be a meal on the table for dinner and not just lunch.

Because of parents, this is what we do.

And we owe it to the older generations for the sake of their kids and their grandkids and great-grandkids to be a church that teaches from the youngest of ages what it looks like as a kid to grow up and be a leader, not a follower, to grow up and be someone who walks in honor and walks in respect.

Living a life of honor and respect is an issue of a witness for us as the church.

So he says, until I come, Timothy, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.

And then he says, This, Timothy, do not neglect the gift.

Now here's the question.

When and where did he get that gift?

Listen to this.

Which was given to you through, big Bible word here, prophecy, when who, I love this, the body of elders laid their hands, that was an ancient way of blessing and anointing someone to do a work, when they laid their hands on you.

And this prophecy here wasn't they were predicting your future, it was speaking the words of God over this young man Timothy, about the gifts they saw in him and what he would become and what he could and what he would do.

And it was elders.

People that had been there, done that, lived a lot more life than Timothy, earned those gray hairs, earned that splendor, earned that experience, earned that wisdom, that put their hands on this young man and said, We bless you to be our pastor.

We bless you to lead us.

We're speaking this.

We can see in you what you can't yet see in you.

I have a lunch buddy.

He goes to the West End campus.

He's a really important person around here at this church because of the person he is.

His name's Mike Moore.

He's got a couple decades on me.

When I first got here, he started taking me out to lunch.

We go to the same ma and pop seafood shop downtown, close to the West End campus, every time we meet.

He's only here in town, this phase of life, about half the year, but all year, we'll go sometimes where we can't have lunch for a while.

I'm getting texts from him regularly.

I'm praying for you, Chad.

I'm praying.

And then he starts naming different kids that we talked about in my family that he names them by name and says, I'm praying for so-and-so specifically today.

I'm praying for you and Rachel today.

How are you doing today, Chad?

And then when I meet with him at this seafood restaurant, I promise you this guy smells more like Jesus than most people I've been around in my life.

There is a lightness to a life well lived and a lot of hard lessons he's learned.

There is a man in his 70s looking at a man in his 50s and is reminding me life will be hard, leadership will be hard, Chad, but just keep bringing it back to Jesus.

And then he starts giving me anecdotal evidence in his own life as to how faithful Jesus has been to him and his family through some hell that they've been through like the rest of us.

And every time I leave that seafood restaurant, there's a spring in my step.

There's an excitement to get back to work, there's less fear to do my job the way I'm supposed to do my job.

Why?

Because someone with way more gray hair and way more life under their belt took the time.

And that's vulnerable for him too.

What if this young guy just thinks he's better than everyone and he's the next thing?

And what if he doesn't want to uh hang out with me because I'm just old and boring and this and that?

And no, no, no.

I understand that he put himself out there, and I just wanted to meet him with honor and respect for that.

And when those two things work the way they're supposed to work, I I just I don't know about him, he'd have to speak for himself, but I leave literally more excited about my relationship with Jesus.

I leave more excited about being a pastor of a church.

I feel again like I can do it again.

And this is how God designed it to be for all of us is to take care of each other in that kind of way.

And so I want to read one more thing, Paul says to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 5.

1 Timothy 5 · chapter mention

He said, Timothy, you're gonna be a good pastor and you're already super insecure because of how young you are, then let me help you out here.

He says, Do not rebuke Timothy an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were what?

Your father.

You want to be a good pastor at your age?

Talk to the older men who've been there and done that.

Not like you're their leader, talk to them as if they're your father.

He says, treat younger men as brothers.

Listen to this, ladies.

Timothy, you want to be a good pastor?

Treat older women who have been there and done that, who have more gray than you.

Treat them as if you're talking and leading your own mama.

And younger women as sisters.

And he says, do it with absolute purity.

I am on a mission with our team, and we've been talking about this for a while now.

Not up here, I'm just getting this out for the first time up here.

We've been talking and strategizing for a while now about how to take everything in the younger generations to another level.

And it's not just everything we do for them, but it's teaching and training them as to what their responsibility is to do back for us.

But we as the elders, those of you I'm talking to the elders now in our church, we have to set the standard.

We have to first go first, right?

So, so what is, and now I'm talking about the age group from 30 down to zero.

I want to have a church where we just get better and better and better and more intentional about how we train them in the way that they should go so that in the end, when they get old, they won't depart from it.

I want to send seniors in high school off to college, where they go to college and college doesn't take the faith out of them, but instead they bring a whole new passion and faith to their college.

And it's possible.

I want to send seniors in high school out into the workplace and into the marketplace that won't be going to college, that will be studying trades and all of these other things that are beautiful as well.

How to go into that and not just be a young tradesman who's trying to earn some money, but how to take that trade and make it your ministry.

Man, we don't want to have them just grow up and hope eventually they get it.

We want to do everything we can to make sure by the time they're out of here and you have to have that tearful goodbye, and they start their very awkward adult life as 18-year-olds, which is crazy enough, that they're empowered and ready to go.

And we can do this.

Here's the deal, though.

I want to end by talking about one particular group, and it's the group of students from 18 to 30.

My observations over the last two years, and even when I was guest preaching, was this there are so many incredible, healthy, good things at this place, but there is a forgotten generation in our church.

And it was the group of people, once they leave high school, to about 30 years old, forgotten.

And I'm like, this is way too important of a season of life for them to be forgotten.

Here's what I've named this season for lack of a better term: 18 to 30.

Purpose puberty.

Right?

Not biological puberty, purpose puberty.

You know how awkward it is when you're going through real puberty?

All the changes, all the awkwardness?

This is what it's like when you're 18 and say goodbye to your parents and go to some dorm with some person you just met for the first time, or out into the marketplace, out into the workforce.

And the biggest question we get from these 18 to 30 year olds is what's God's will for my life?

What am I supposed to do?

Who am I supposed to marry?

What school am I supposed to go to?

How do I know what God's telling me to do?

Who should I pick?

Who shouldn't I pick?

What should I do?

What shouldn't I do?

Somebody help me.

What's God's will?

I don't want to get this path thing wrong.

Every decision feels like if you don't get it right the first time, you're toast for the rest of your life.

They're going through a purpose puberty.

They've never needed us more, but do you want to know?

Uh, and there's data on this, do you want to know why that group gets forgotten accidentally more often than not in any other church?

Is because they're no longer in the groups age-wise.

A lot of them go off to college, so they're no longer sitting here, and you know what?

They drop the least amount of money in the bucket.

We can't be that church where we don't give them everything we can give them simply because they don't have the resource that a bunch of us have.

One of the biggest reasons we have gray hair in this room is because you've worked hard enough and done enough life to be able to resource that generation that can't fully yet resource themselves.

And when we start working together like that, God starts smiling and the blessing of God starts coming on this church in ways we haven't seen in a while.

Do you know last year we just said we're tired of talking about it, we're just gonna start doing it, even if we start with two people.

So we got a bunch of people on staff that said they would volunteer to start a young adult, 18 to 30 ministry.

Young adults, young professionals.

Every one of them didn't get paid a dime to do it, and they already had a full job description.

And within several months, over a hundred people that weren't zero before that started showing up on Thursday nights to our Missouri City campus to have young adult services.

Go ahead and put up a couple pictures just to show what I'm talking about.

Leave that picture up for a minute.

Why wouldn't we want to invest in that?

Remember the glory of young men and women is what?

Their strength.

Not just physical, I'm talking zeal, passion, first love, divine naivety.

This first love feeling, this childlike faith.

Look at that.

They're supposed to be at the age where they would never get on their hands and knees and worship God because a cute girl might be staring at them and they don't want to lose their riz or whatever they call it.

But that's an environment in a room where nobody's sitting around worried about that.

They're basking in the presence of God.

It's moments like that at altars on your knees at that age where God is speaking into that.

What am I supposed to do next?

Where am I supposed to go?

What's up, what's down, what's left, what's right.

Those are moments, because I had them and a bunch of you had them, where God is solidifying as they're figuring out their purpose what he wants to do in them and through them.

Why wouldn't we want to resource that?

And I finish by just simply saying this.

This is what I built up to simply say.

We have been nursing our finances since I got here back to what we consider healthy.

Took a bit of a hit when there was a transition.

That's normal.

No whining, no complaining, but we've slowly in the last two years been nursing that back to health.

I have to stop and brag on you guys for a minute.

We have been going in the last year up and to the right, slowly and steadily, every month, up and to the right, because we've asked for help, and guess what?

This locker room at every campus has been stepping up and helping.

But one thing that has never been in the budget and won't be in the budget unless we are able to put it in the budget, is this 18 to 30 year old group that we will no longer ignore.

And so many of you in the last year have been giving for the first time ever at this church.

And I don't take that lightly because that's worship, that's your hard-earned money that you are giving to God for a cause that's bigger than yourself.

And I love when it happens because I'm like, I can't wait.

You're gonna learn lessons over doing this.

You're gonna see that when you start getting open-handed and you start giving to causes that are bigger outside of yourself, you will watch God start to get really interested in your cause.

It's just how He set it up, it's just how it works.

And so I guess what I'm asking at the end of this series is this.

I'm asking for more and more people to consider.

Maybe those of you who've been going here for a while and you said, hey, part of my locker room experience hasn't been helping fund it.

I'm just gonna ask some of you to pray about it.

It's between you and God.

I'll never know.

I don't look at who's individually doing what.

I'll never know.

That's not my business.

My business is to ask.

Pray and ask and trust.

But I know this is the church that wants to do this and will be happy to do this.

And I promise you, I can't prove it right now or talk you into this, so I'm not gonna try.

I promise you, it will affect the overall blessing, protection, and favor of God over our locker room.

Everyone will win when each person is doing their different part based on the different generation that they're in.

If you've already been given and you're fine and faithful with that, I say thank you.

If you want to pray about uh doing something extra specifically for this age group, we won't turn it down, I promise you.

But either way, I wanted to say to everyone, thank you.

You guys have been faithful.

We're nursing this thing back to health.

But I'm not just seeing health, I'm seeing moving forward.

And right now, the vision for the future is we want this church in the next 30 years to be even more fruitful and more of a blessing to us and to a community than it was in the first 30 years.

But we have to start taking these younger generations and equipping them, teaching them and resourcing them at the highest level.

I promise you it's worth it.

I've said more than my piece.

You guys are amazing.

I hope you've enjoyed uh this series.

I'm gonna do this.

I'm gonna pray a blessing over us.

Gentlemen, don't forget this Friday night, uh, 6 p.m., would love to have you here.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, I pray that you bless every single person in the sound of my voice.

God, that you'd keep them in the grip of your grace.

God, that you would cause your face to shine upon us yet again this week.

God, that you would be radically gracious to each one of us as we leave today, that you would turn your countenance towards us.

And God, I pray everyone would walk out today with a peace that passes understanding, that guards our hearts and guards our minds.

In Christ Jesus, we pray this.

Everybody said, Amen.