Homesick | Romans 12:1-8

Good morning, Orchard family.

Uh Bill Hobbs, one of the elders here at the Orchard.

If you could please uh take your copy of God's word, turn to Romans chapter 12.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

This morning I'm going to be reading uh Romans chapter 12, verses 1 through 18.

Romans 12:1–18

It's a little bit more than what Cody's going to cover, but it is all relevant to our life in the body of Christ.

The reading God's Word, Romans 12.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by grace, for by the grace given to me, I say to every one among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

For as in one body, we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function.

So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.

If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if serving in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.

Let love be genuine.

Abhor what is evil, hold to what is hold fast to what is good.

Love one another with brotherly affection.

Outdo one another in showing honor.

Do not be slothful in zeal.

Be fervent in spirit.

Serve the Lord.

Rejoice in hope.

Be patient in tribulation.

Be constant in prayer.

Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

Bless those who persecute you.

Bless and do not curse them.

Rejoice with those who rejoice.

Weep with those who weep.

Live in harmony with one another.

Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.

Never be wise in your own sight.

Repay no one evil for evil.

But give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Come, Holy Spirit, Spirit of truth.

As we have heard your word read, open our eyes to behold its wonders.

Open our minds to understand its truth.

And open our hearts to receive it with faith and obedience.

Lord, as we are one body, we have seen many examples over the last several weeks.

Please continue to be with my wife as she recovers from her surgery.

Through Christ our Lord, we pray.

Amen.

So Megan and I, we have really deep roots where we're from.

Like I'm used to driving over the mountain back home that's actually named after my great-great-grandparents.

Every day I would drive down the same road that my great-granddad built, a one-room cabin in the 30s where my grandmother was born.

I would drive past the family farm where most of my cousins and aunts and uncles all live there together.

And I'm used to literally never needing a GPS to get anywhere that I needed to get.

So the last year has certainly been an adjustment.

And our family has at different times struggled with feelings of homesickness.

We really expected that.

That didn't catch us off guard.

We we figured this kind of move would bring about those kinds of experiences.

And the way that we've tried to frame that as a family is to realize that that doesn't mean that something's wrong.

It means that we love where we're from.

And we love the sense of rootedness and heritage that we have there, and that that is good and right and proper.

That God has designed us and placed something inside of all of us where we like those places and long for those places where we just feel at home.

You know, I think that you can summarize the way that the Bible explains the feelings of God's people as homesickness.

In Egypt, God's people were longing for Canaan.

In Babylon, God's people are longing for Jerusalem.

Today, all of us, we are longing for the kingdom.

We are longing for the new heavens and the new earth to wipe away the last tear from our faces.

That is the story of God's people is the story of a people who were in the wrong habitat, sojourning as exiles, aching for home.

That the whole story of the Bible can be summarized as God bringing his children home, finally.

I think that's why Jesus says both, I go to prepare a place for you, and in the meantime, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.

Jesus wants to make sure that we recognize that our home is in the kingdom of heaven.

But until that kingdom fully comes, he wants us to realize that the local church is meant to be the place that most feels like home.

So we have a home, the kingdom of heaven, and we have a home away from home, the local church.

Romans is really written to a group of Christians that were struggling to feel at home.

The emperor had issued an edict that had uh exiled all of the Jews from uh Italy and had sent them all out, and then a few years later reversed the practice.

So early the church at Rome was largely Jewish, then it became almost exclusively exile, and then all of the Jewish folks come back home, and guess what happens?

When they came home, home didn't feel like home.

And their church didn't feel like their church anymore.

And so there was conflict and there was identity crisis.

So Paul is quite literally writing this letter to the churches in Rome that they would be able to rebuild their home and their lives in the way that Christ intended for it to be.

To make it the home away from home that he laid down his life to be able to get them.

And he wants them to see that just as Jesus laid down his life, that they would have this home away from home, just as Jesus laid down his life for his church, that now the local church is meant to be where they're going to lay down their lives.

That's what I want us to see.

Is that the local church is where we lay down our lives.

You'll notice that in the beginning, that beginning in verse 3 through the end of the chapter that Bill read for us, Paul is describing what our life together is in the church.

But he uses verses 1 and 2 to establish for us a stream of logic that gets us there.

I want us to see that together.

That before we get to the life of the church, first we have to recognize that we individually give ourselves to God.

You know, John chapter 12 starts off with a homecoming party.

John 12 · chapter mention

But it's not a party for a soldier that's coming back from war, and it's not a party for a student coming back from school.

It's the party of a dead man coming home from the cemetery.

That it says, starts by saying that Lazarus was raised from the dead, and it says, so they gave a dinner for him.

That seems about as good a reason as I can imagine to throw a dinner party.

You know, I wonder.

When Lazarus looked at Jesus that night, I wonder how much convincing he needed to know that he could trust Jesus with his life.

My guess is not very much.

My guess is that he was probably pretty confident, pretty ready to lean into Jesus.

That's the question that mercy puts before all of us, not just Lazarus.

Romans spends essentially the first 11 chapters of the book outlining for us the mercy of God, the mercy that we have received, that is unmerited, that is parted from us, that allowed us to already pass through the judgment.

And then when we get to chapter 12, verse 1, he says, I appeal to you, therefore, based on the first 11 chapters.

I appeal to you, therefore, based on the mercy that you have received.

The point of Romans is that just as mercy raised Lazarus from the dead, mercy has raised us to life.

You'll notice there that the word mercies is plural.

It's not mercy, it's mercies.

It's there and it's talking about the manifold ways that he's explained to us that all of us have received mercy.

We haven't just received mercy, we have received mercy.

We have received manifold mercies, many evidences of mercy in our lives.

So think about all that Paul has shown us up to this point in the book of Romans.

Like, let's trace the mercies through the first 11 chapters.

Chapter 1 starts by God revealing himself through all that is made.

But though he had revealed himself through all that is made, we suppressed the truth.

We sinned against him, we fell short of his glory.

And so chapter 6 says that we earned the wages of death and we had no excuse.

But then chapter 6 says that the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

That in Adam we all stood condemned, but in Christ there is therefore now no condemnation.

And how did that happen?

Well, Romans 8 tells us, and Romans 9 tells us, and Romans 11 tells us, Romans 4 tells us it happened by God's decision.

It happened at God's initiative.

He chose to send his son, and his son chose to bear the weight of our sin.

He chose to adopt us as his children, and he chose to give us his spirit.

He chose us out of his sovereign mercy.

He chose to draft us into the vine of his people.

And so Romans 1 through 11 is telling us from every possible angle that God's mercy gives guilty sinners a righteousness that we could never earn and a love that we can never lose.

Who shall bring any charge against God's elect?

It is God who justifies.

Who is to condemn Christ Jesus is the one who died?

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, we have known and experienced and enjoyed the mercies of God.

And Paul's point is that there is only one reasonable response.

The word spiritual there can be translated as reasonable.

He's like, in light of all of that mercy, in light of the manifold glories of God received by us in spite of us, in light of all, therefore, there is one rational, one logical, one reasonable response, and it is to say, here is my life.

Here is my life.

My life to you, oh God, is a blank check.

Write it for whatever you please.

You purchased it, you saved it, you redeemed it, my life is yours.

Here it is.

That it's to present your life to God in recognition that it belongs to Him anyway.

Mercy has raised us to life, and when mercy raises us to life, now mercy calls us to really live.

A living sacrifice, let me change color so that you can see it.

That's really a strange phrase, isn't it?

It seems like to us a contradiction of terms.

Like when you read of sacrifices in the Bible, a sacrifice is killing something of value in order to express the value of God, your devotion to God, your faith to God, and at the same time to express your contrition and your repentance and your recognition of the costliness of your own sin.

It's the recognition of Romans 6 that the wages of sin is death, that blood has to be shed.

But in the new covenant, Jesus fundamentally changes the paradigm.

Jesus doesn't offer bulls, and Jesus doesn't offer rams, and Jesus doesn't offer doves.

Jesus offers himself.

Jesus offers his own life.

He lays his own life down on the altar, not something else.

That on the day of atonement, the entire city of Jerusalem would turn red with blood.

You would hear the screams and bleats of the animals that were being slaughtered and sacrificed.

The stench of death was everywhere that you went.

But for Jesus, for Jesus, it was his own blood.

For Jesus, it was his own cries and his own screams from the cross.

For Jesus, it was his own death that filled the nostrils of the Lord.

That he demonstrates in the most vivid way possible what God is actually worth.

And what is God actually worth?

He's actually worth your entire life.

He's worth everything that you have.

And so when Jesus establishes the new paradigm by laying himself down, what he's doing for all of us who follow after him is he's charting the path that we're going to follow.

So when Paul calls us living sacrifices, his point is that you don't just worship the Lord through your songs.

You worship the Lord through the life that you live.

You worship the Lord not just by offering to him your song, you worship the Lord by offering to him your work and offering to him your family and offering to him your leisure.

You lose money on a deal because of the ethics that you now have in the Lord, and what are you doing?

You are saying, God is more glorious than my bottom line.

You are bringing glory, you are ascribing to him what he is worth.

You miss out on opportunities because of your devotion, and you're saying, God is more glorious than my schedule.

God is the priority of my calendar.

God is the one I need to show.

You sit on the beach, you're on vacation, and the waves roll in one after the other, and you feel the breeze against your face, and you hear your kids or grandkids off in the distance playing.

And where do your thoughts go?

They go to the Lord, the kindness of God, the mercies of God, the generosity of God, and you can't help but in your heart break out in praise.

Oh God, oh God, I'm on the beach, but you are the thought that I have because you are so glorious.

All of this, all of this is you demonstrating how good he is.

All of this is you demonstrating what he is actually worth.

You can't just do that with songs, you do that with the entirety of your life.

Can you imagine how differently Lazarus would have lived after Jesus raised him?

Can you imagine?

I mean, for four days it says that he was dead long enough that he stank.

So for four days, he's on the other side of eternity.

And then suddenly he walks out of the tomb, and he walks out of the tomb by following the voice of Jesus.

Don't you imagine that he spends the rest of his life devoted to following the voice of Jesus?

Brothers and sisters, my point is we're all Lazarus.

We're all Lazarus.

Romans 6 says that in our baptism we are buried in the likeness of Jesus' death, and then like Lazarus, we are raised to walk in newness of life with Him.

That it was His voice that called us out of death.

And it was His voice that called us out of hopelessness, and it was His voice that called us out of shame.

And so here we are saying, Lord, Lord, I will follow your voice for the entirety of my life.

I will devote myself wholly and entirely to you.

Let me ask you, I mean, what is a God like that actually worth?

He's worth your life.

That's Paul's point.

That God's mercy calls us to give ourselves to God.

And then in Paul's mind, the next way, the next step in that stream of logic is once we give ourselves to God, then we're gonna give ourselves to godliness.

We're gonna give ourselves to godliness.

A cuttlefish is one of the best camouflagers in the world.

You can hardly even see it there.

It just looks like a rock, but but there's the cuttlefish.

And they're they're a type of squid, and what they're able to do is they're actually able to adjust their color, their pattern, and even their texture to be able to match and blend in with the environment that's around them.

That they're perfectly equipped to be able to emulate their surroundings.

So think about that.

The habitat determines the form.

Sounds a lot like us, doesn't it?

You hang out with negative people, and what do you end up being?

A negative person, right?

You hang out with gossipy people, and what do you end up doing?

You end up gossiping.

And the inverse is true too.

The inverse is true too.

You hang out with people who are joyful, and you end up becoming more optimistic, more hopeful.

You hang out with people who are who are emotionally healthy, and all of a sudden you find yourself being more emotionally regulated.

That your habitat, according to the design of God, largely determines your form.

And so Paul is calling us to take our habitat seriously when he says, do not be conformed to this world, but rather be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

That he's calling us to an awareness of who it is and what it is that's influencing our thinking, and by influencing our thinking, influencing our living.

That it's a way for him to call us to just stop floating, to stop floating.

The words conformed and transformed, they're very close in meaning.

They're almost synonyms, but if there is a difference, conformity means something that begins on the outside and works its way in, where transformed means something that begins within and works its way out.

So when he says, do not be conformed to this world, he's saying, don't let the ways of the world determine the desires of your heart.

Rather, allow the transformation of your heart chart your way through this world.

You see, before Christ, you're just doing what dead men do.

You're just floating.

You're just floating.

Like the cuttlefish, the texture of your life is essentially established by the environment that you find yourself in.

You're just absorbing worldviews and values and priorities through your immersion in the world.

And so you view marriage with the same contempt as all of the other men in your office.

You view your husband as an impediment to your freedom, like all of your girlfriends do.

You measure the quality of your life and the effectiveness of your life by the same mile markers that everybody else on your street is using.

And one year passes, and the next year passes, and the next year passes, and you're headed in the same direction that everybody else is heading, but you don't really know why.

You don't really mean to, you're just floating.

You're just floating.

You're just going with the currents of the world.

But Paul is saying we ought to stop and ask.

This is what he's implying when he says, do not be conformed to this world.

He said, we ought to stop and ask for just a second.

Is this the American way or is this the Christian way?

Is this the Southern way?

Or is this the Christian way?

Am I just floating with my neighbors or am I actually aiming decisively, purposely, deliberately at Christ?

See, when it says to be transformed by the renewal, overwhelmingly, whenever the word renewal is used in the New Testament, it's used to talk about the work of the Holy Spirit.

It's talking about how we've received the Spirit, and so because we've received the Spirit now, our values don't come from the world.

Our values and priorities don't come from the culture.

Our values and our priorities come from the Spirit.

They come from God.

They come from Him dwelling within us.

That the Spirit transforms our life from a passive float now into an active pursuit.

We know it's active, and we have responsibility because we're being commanded here.

These are imperatives that we're getting.

And so it's a call for us here to stop floating and to start delighting.

To stop floating, stop just being conformed to the image of the world and the directions of the world and the values of the world, and to instead start delighting, start allowing a transformation of your heart, a transformation of your nature, a transformation of your values in alignment with the kingdom of God.

The point is, is that you've been raised with Christ out of the dead of the world.

And because you've been raised with Christ, he placed his spirit within you to transform your desires.

And so the goal, you'll notice, is that you would be able to discern what is the will of God, what's good, what's acceptable, what's perfect.

And the assumption is that when you discern what is good and what is perfect and what is acceptable, what is the will of God, that as a child of God, that you'll now live according to it.

It'll impact your behavior, it'll impact the decisions that you make, it'll impact the ways that you relate to other people.

That what the Spirit does is the Spirit works in us within to take what we love and to take what we want and to take what we desire, and it enables us now to begin to want and to love and to desire what God Himself wants and loves and desires.

If God is at work in us and God dwells within me, and God is at work in my nature, and God is at work in my heart, what is he at work doing?

He's at work within me to make what I want and what my heart is into his heart.

Well, how does that happen?

How do we participate?

If we're being commanded and we have responsibility, how do we do that?

How do we avoid conforming to the world and how are we transformed through the renewing of our minds?

How is it that we give ourselves over to godliness?

I think I have this at the bottom of your screen that Psalms 37, Psalm 37.4 has real insight for us.

I understand Psalm 37.4 to be essentially the exact same thought that we're reading here in Romans chapter 12, verse 2, but reframed in the language of the enjoyment of God.

Romans 12:2

Psalm 37.4 says, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

You can summarize how to renew your mind in the same way that you can summarize the meaning of Psalm 37.4.

And I think you can summarize both by saying this delight yourself and check yourself.

Delight yourself and then check yourself.

Psalm 37.4, when it says, delight yourself in the Lord, he'll give you the desires of your heart, he's not saying if you'll just smile at God the right way, he'll give you a beachside mansion, right?

We know that's not what he means.

We know that's not what he's saying.

So what is he saying?

What he's saying is that if you'll continually move your heart toward the Lord, if you'll continually exercise your faith, if you'll continually be increasingly finding your satisfaction in God, then something's going to happen.

The affections, the desires, the wants of your heart are going to change.

They're going to transform.

That as you delight yourself in God and you find your satisfaction in God and your contentment in God and your pleasure in God, that's what's going to happen over time, is God's gonna give you the desires of your heart by giving you the desires of his heart.

That he's gonna bring the desires of your heart into alignment with the desires of his heart, and then you're gonna do what God would have you do, the good, perfect, pleasing will of God.

You're gonna discern that, and you're gonna do it because you want to do it.

Not because you gotta do it, not begrudgingly, not with drudgery.

You're gonna do it because it's within you to do it, because you desire to do it.

That it's your delight.

Now, what he's inviting us to do when he says to renew our minds is he's inviting us to pull up a chair to the table of the Lord and to gorge ourselves on the means of grace.

He's saying, like, come on, like, give me all of the word that I can have.

Let me stay up all night long talking to the Lord in prayer.

Let me hear the word read, let me hear the word preached, let me sing the word and declare it to the goodness of God.

Let me gather with the saints of the church that what I want to do is I want to gorge myself on everything that is good and everything that is real and everything that is right, because God Himself, through His Spirit, has made these things delicious to me.

That He's calling us to be gluttons on the glories of God.

So it's delight yourself, and then it's check yourself.

Check yourself.

You see, if the result of delighting myself is a transformed mind, and if the result of a transformed mind is that I love the will of God and desire the heart of God, then I need to check myself to see if that's who I am, to see if that's actually taking place.

That'll give me some measure of my standing in the kingdom.

That I need to check myself to see if I want what he wants.

I need to check myself to see if if my heart is moving toward where his heart is.

So this morning, what do you want?

What do you really, really, really want?

What are you obsessing over?

What is your heart asking for?

Where does your attention go?

Do the desires of your heart sound like the desires of God?

Well, I think that lets you know whether you're floating or delighting.

See, Jesus, Jesus tells us about two paths.

One path is broad and easy.

And he says that it's the path that most people are on, because all you have to be to do to be on this broad path is you just float.

You just float and you find yourself there.

But he says there's a second path.

He says the second path is a narrow path and it's a hard path.

And because it's a narrow path, and because it's a hard path, there are very few people that are actually on it because it's it's a path that requires a decision.

You have to be decisive, you have to be deliberate, you have to count the cost and then offer up your life.

You have to take up the cross and follow after Jesus.

And so very few people are on this path.

And he says that the broad path leads to death, and the narrow path leads to life, to delight.

And the dead giveaway to know which path you're on is to look around you and see if it's the path that everybody else is on.

Since most people are on the broad path, and most people are headed toward destruction.

If you look around and your life looks like the world, and your family looks like the world, and your values look like the world, and your priorities look like the world, and you make decisions like the world.

If you're doing what most people are doing and your life looks like what most people's lives look like, you're probably floating.

Narrow is the gate.

And hard is the path that leads to life, and only a few will find it.

So we give ourselves to God as living sacrifices.

And then we give ourselves to godliness.

That's the what, and then that's the how.

And so he lands in the rest of the chapter by now showing us the where.

Where do we give ourselves to God?

Where do we give ourselves to godliness?

And the answer is that we give ourselves to one another in the local church.

Give ourselves to one another in the local church.

That the local church is where we lay down our lives, and the local church is where we give ourselves over to godliness.

See, the Christian faith is not an internalized, privatized, mystical religion that lives up in the ethereal.

No, because think of the God that we're following.

We're following a God that's really been seen by human eyes.

We're following a God that became a real man who lived a real life, died a real death, and was raised in a real body.

We're talking about a God that touched real people and brought healing to them and hope to them, and the removal of their shame.

And in the shadows of the cross, Jesus looked to the community of the disciples, the community that would go on and found the first local church, and he said to them, By this all people will know that you are my disciples.

If you have love for one another.

See, we don't lay down our lives figuratively, we lay down our lives practically and literally by offering them to each other.

The question that seems to be often asked today is, can a Christian be committed to Christ without being committed to their local church?

And Paul dares us to start asking this question in a new way.

Like, can a husband be committed to his wife without living at home?

Or to use the language that he uses more specifically, can a hand be committed to the body without being attached to the body?

In fact, can the hand live at all without being attached to the body?

And the answer is no, because the body lives together.

That's how bodies work.

You'll notice that in Paul's mind it's a seamless transition from Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2 to chapter to verses 3 through 18.

Romans 12:1

It's a seamless transition in his mind.

That he's immediately able to turn from you, you go be a living sacrifice, offer your life to the Lord, you renew your mind, be transformed to the renewal of your mind.

You do that.

These are singular you's that we see.

And then beginning in verse 3, they all switch to plural, you all's or y'all's, if you were able to see it.

If Paul wrote in the South, he would write, y'all, y'all.

So in Paul's mind, there's a seamless transition from you to we to us.

That he turns from the mercy of salvation to the grace of life together.

That it's his assumption that if you're following Jesus, you'll lay down your life for the same people that Jesus laid down his life.

The church.

His church.

You see, Romans isn't just about you being saved by grace.

Romans is about us being saved by grace.

It's about how God is making us into one body in Christ.

In Romans 4, we are saved by faith into a family, into Abraham's family that all of us now can enjoy the promises that were made to him.

In Romans 8, we are adopted as sons and daughters to be heirs, he says, with many brothers and sisters.

In Romans 9, God elects us as a people together, and he calls us his beloved.

In Romans 11, we are grafted into a shared vine with the elect of Israel.

So grace has always been in the process of joining us together as one body in Christ to live together and to grow together and to do what God's Christ's body always does together.

Lay down our lives together.

See, the body lives together, joins together, and then stoops together.

Verse three shows us the hinge point between the you and the us.

Between you be a living sacrifice, you have the your life transformed through the renewing of your mind to the we've got to do this together.

What's the hinge point?

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think.

That it's a narrow gate that leads down the narrow path, and to get through the narrow gate, you have to stoop in order to enter.

That the local church is the habitat of humility.

That this is the trait that is meant to unify us.

This is the trait that brings us in.

This is the trait through which now we serve one another.

See, I think so often that we have thought about us being the body of Christ for so many, we've heard it so long and thought about it so much, that it doesn't tend to register to us the actual magnitude of what a statement like that means.

Doesn't it track that if we are the body of Christ, that we as the body of Christ will take on and emulate the posture of the literal physical body of Christ?

Think about who our Savior was.

Philippians 2 describes him as being one who emptied himself of his glory, to come and empty himself of his dignity, that he might humble himself as a servant.

That was him.

He is a savior that on his body he tied a towel around.

And he said, I have no place for the Son of Man to lay his head.

Peter describes it this way: He says, He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

By his wounds to his body you have been healed.

That it was his body that was stretched over a post and then beaten with the cat of nine-tails.

It was his body that received the nails and the crown of thorns.

It was his body that was broken and bled on the cross.

It was his body that humbled himself and allowed himself to be nailed to a cross and did not take himself off the cross.

It was his body that was humbled always.

That every time we're shown a picture of Jesus' physical body, it's stooping in humility and sleeping in the dirt.

Surely this is a picture of who this new body in Christ is meant to be.

Surely this is a picture of how we're meant to carry ourselves and live with one another.

And the point is this He gave His body for this body.

And if He gave His body for this body, then where are we supposed to give our lives?

We are meant to give our lives for the same people and the same place that Jesus gave His for this body.

That He laid down His life for the church, and now we lay down our lives with the church.

Y'all really do understand why you might hesitate to join a local church and to become more committed and more invested.

When pride and abuse and comparison and politics invade the church, there is nothing uglier in this world.

I have experienced it personally, I have experienced the grief, I have been part of the problem, I'm almost certain.

It makes it ugly because it contradicts everything we know is true of Christ.

But I also know from experience.

And when the church becomes filled with living sacrifices, transformed by the Spirit, people who refuse to think of themselves more highly than they ought, functioning in the likeness of Jesus' stooping, dirty body.

There's no place on this earth more beautiful.

You know, it really was hard for us to leave our home and our families behind.

And I'd be lying to you if I didn't tell you that we're still adjusting as a family.

But do you know what's made the difference?

Do you know what's made the difference?

You.

You.

Our local church.

Our church family.

My wife and kids joined me in Collierville last year on the week of Thanksgiving.

And when we're driving up, everybody is scared and sad and excited and worried and anxious all at the same time.

And when my wife and kids pulled into the driveway of their new house in their new town for the very first time.

Do you know who met them there?

Leah and Mara Williams with cleaning supplies.

The deacons and the elders coming to help us unpack boxes and to pray a prayer of blessing in our driveway.

For the first time in our entire lives, we were not gonna be in the same houses where we had always had Thanksgiving with the same people.

So the Hobbs invited us over to be a part of their family.

It's just the tip of the iceberg.

The Lewis has let me live in their house, y'all.

In their house.

The Hendricks invited my kids to go trick-or-treating with their kids so that they could find their way around.

The Hills have driven my daughter all over the 901.

My point.

Is that the local church has given us our home away from home until we get home.

That's what this is all about.

That's what this series is all about.

That's why we're calling you.

That's the dream that we're calling you toward in membership.

That's why we would love for you to be a part of our Exploring Membership class on November the 15th.

That's why we're asking you to lean into.

That's what we're asking you to become more committed to.

We want you to have a home away from home until you get home.

Because here's the truth.

We're all homesick.

We're all homesick.

This is what it means to be one of the people of God.

But God, in his kindness, has given us a home until we get there.

Can I pray for us?

Father in heaven, thank you for not turning a blind eye to the languishing and sojourning that we do in this world.

It is hard.

And Lord, that's not lost on you.

But Father, I pray that here at the orchard that we would recapture the heart of Jesus for his church.

That it would captivate our hearts.

That Lord, we know we're not going to get there fully.

We know that we're not going to be able to build some ideal church.

But God, we want that dream to be captivating our hearts that we might capture as much of it as we possibly can.

Lord, through your spirit, would you call us closer to each other?

Would you unite us in heart and spirit and mission and vision?

Would you allow us to stop thinking of ourselves more highly as we're all or prioritizing going our own way?

Instead, come together to lay down our lives for each other.

We ask these things now in Jesus' name.

Amen.