Amen. Ah, well, good morning again. If you're just joining us. What a good morning so far. Wasn't that baptism incredible? How awesome is that. The idea of a soldier about to depart, but having already won the greatest battle that there is. I mean, that's that's incredible. So I'm so glad that we could all share that this morning. Um, a few weeks ago, we kicked off 2016 with this series that we've started called More. And the premise is really simple. We want more out of life this year. That's not us being greedy. That's not us coming from some place of discontentment, that we're not content with what we've been given. But there's something about us as people, isn't there, that just naturally believes there's more. I mean, you don't get to a certain point in life and go, well, this is it. This is as good as it gets. It's all downhill from here. It's never going to be better than this. And if that's ever been a thought that's crossed your mind, that's a lie. Because God put something in us that makes us as people desire more. Something in us that makes us always think about and believe and hunger for more. And I believe that's very simple. I believe that God put that in us because there is more and he wants us to have it. Jesus said it this way in John 10, 10. He said, I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of. God came to this world over 2,000 years ago, not just to save us and rescue us from the power of death, Jesus came to give us more life than we could ever experience without him. And so it's good for us to desire more because there's more. Couple weeks ago we talked about having more of God in our lives, how the one thing he wants us to have more of, more than anything else, is himself. And we can live this year, 2016, experiencing more of his presence, more of his power, more of who he is than we've ever imagined possible. No matter your past, no matter where you are today, there is no limit on the amount of God you can experience. He wants you to have more. Last week we talked about more breathing room. How we want to have more room to breathe in our lives, less stress, less anxiety, less worry, and more room for the joy and the love and the passion and the peace and the goodness that God wants to fill us with. We want more breathing room. We want to make room for more. And I told you last week that we were gonna talk today about how to have more growth, how at the end of 2016 we can be better people as individuals, personally, we can be better at the end of this year than we are today. And I wasn't lying to you, we are gonna talk about how we can have more growth. We're gonna talk about that next week. Today needs to be a little bit different. See, we're we're a family. That's what I love about this group of people. This is not an organization, it's an organism. This is a living, breathing family. You guys, I've known some of you for 10 years almost. It's about a third of my life. Some of you, maybe you're new, maybe you know it's only been a couple years or or even a few months and three years, four years, but no matter what, if you're here right now, we consider you family. And and one of the great things about family is we get to celebrate life together. We get to live life together. We get to celebrate the highs in life. We also get to walk through some of the lows together. That's what families do. And today is gonna be a little bit of both. A little bit of a low in some ways. But I believe a great, great high as well. So our church started in 2005 in a David Buster's, which is very appropriate for his hands. We started in 2005. I didn't even live here yet, I was in Kansas City, Missouri, but uh, but God was was doing some great things even then to bring me here. It's been the greatest honor of my life to be part of this church. And our church was started by two incredible people, two people that I would call my spiritual mom and my spiritual dad. Two people that have taught me more about who God is, what he's like, two people that gave me an entirely different target for my life than I ever had before. Two people that showed me how much of God a person can experience and how much of God a person can display in their lives to other people. Those two people are Steve and Susan Craig, and we love them so much, they're amazing. And on Friday, Susan passed away. And uh I know for some of us that's a punch in the gut. Maybe you weren't aware of the fact that for the last year Susan's been battling cancer. And man, one thing about Susan, if you know Susan, when I say battling cancer, I mean battling it, because Susan never goes down without a fight. I've never seen her lose an argument. Okay, so she fought with prayer, she fought with with chemotherapy, with everything you do. But on Friday at about one o'clock in the morning, she went home. Some of us have been aware of her situation. We talked about it a few months ago as a church. You've been praying, you've been sending your thoughts and your regards. And even though you're semi-prepared for something like this happening whenever someone you love has such a serious condition, it doesn't prepare you for the moment that it happens. It doesn't prepare you for this. And for some of us, for some of us, we're we're maybe people that have never met Susan. You know, Susan and Steve stepped back from leading this church directly about two, two and a half years ago, and maybe you've only been coming in the last two years or the last year. And like I said a minute ago, we've grown by right at a thousand people in the last in the last year and a half alone, so there's a good chance you might be someone that doesn't really know Susan. But here's the thing: you need to. In fact, even if if you're here for the very first time, you picked a really good day to come. You picked a heavy day to come, for sure. But you picked a really good day to come because if you want to know what this church is about, you really need to know what Susan is about. Because there is a lot. I mean, there is a lot of Susan in this place. So if you can get your mind around Susan, you'll understand how a lot of things work here. You picked a good day to learn about this church. The series that we're doing right now, more, Susan's the inspiration for this series. I'll just come out and tell you, it was it was you know Christmas time, and my mind was on Christmas, and my mind's on a new baby that's coming soon in our lives, and and there's a lot of things going on here, and so I was really focused on the holidays, and and then I had this moment of panic, like I usually have, where I'm where I'm nearing the end of a series and I haven't quite figured out what the next one's gonna be, and so I kind of go, God, what's it gonna be? God, you gotta help me. And and I had this sudden memory of a story that Susan used to tell. And I don't know if it was God giving me that or me thinking a lot about Susan as I was. It's probably a combination of both. But it's a story that Susan used to tell about more and how to how to have more of God in your life. And the story goes something like this. Susan grew up in church, like maybe many of us did, but the church she grew up in was not like his hands. And I don't mean just the music style and the casual dress and the authenticity and all that kind of stuff. This church is really unique. Even amongst churches that are kind of in style like this, there's something unique about his hands. So I'm not just saying that that she didn't grow up at his hands. She grew up in a very, very, very different church culture. And she believed in God, the God of the Bible, but but the God she grew up to believe in, the God she was told about, was not a very enjoyable God to be around. He's a God that mostly cared about the rules, your ability to follow those rules determined the way he felt about you. And so, as many of us may have experienced, you just grow up guilty, right? You grow up with constant guilt. Want to be a Christian? You want to feel guilty every day? Doesn't that not, you know, join the church. That's how it used to be. But see, there's this amazing thing that Susan and a lot of us have grabbed a hold of. The Bible says that Jesus is the exact representation of God. So Jesus was not God trying to reshape his image. This was not God rebranding himself. Okay? Jesus was not God in a good mood. Jesus is the clearest picture of God that we will ever have because he just so happens to be God. And so if we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus, and Susan recognized the fact that the God she grew up being told about didn't resemble Jesus very much. And so she she felt in her heart that there has to be something else. And so she and Steve, pretty early in their marriage, they kind of went on a journey to discover more about God. They kept believing in God. They just knew that what they had experienced, it was not all that they could experience. And they started to go to different churches and learn different things. And that journey found them at this church was very different than what they had grown up. And it was a church that was all about freedom, and it was a church that actually believes that a supernatural God can do supernatural things. And so the Holy Spirit can speak to you and tell you things that you would never know other than him telling you. And one day they're at this church and this man was speaking, and this man had a reputation for hearing from the Holy Spirit, and they're kind of sitting in the back, a little bit nervous. And this man stops and he looks in their direction and points toward them, and he says, God has a message for someone sitting over there. And Susan, she's like on pins and needles. Her eyes are wide. If you grew up believing in the very guilt-driven God that a lot of us may have grown up being taught, you go, Oh no, what's God gonna tell everyone in this room about my life? Right? I'm about to be exposed, you know. But the man just said, God wants you to know there's more. And Susan burst into tears. She lost it. Because see, what that man didn't know, what he couldn't have known, what no one around her knew was that for years, for years, there had been this thought in the back of Susan's mind that was so clear. It was as if a voice was saying this to her over and over again. And she knew it had to do with her understanding of God. It was this phrase that was just repeated over and over again for years and years in the back of her mind, and the phrase was simply this there's more. And so when that man spoke that, Susan, she knew that was for her. That was the that was the words, those were the words that she had heard year in and year out. There's more. And from that point on, Susan's life was all about getting more of God, but then taking that more that she had and giving it to other people. And the reason that we're all here today, the reason that we know each other, the reason I get to look at this amazing group of people every Sunday is because Susan refused to keep the more that God gave her to herself. And she made it her life's purpose to take that more of God that she received and give it to anyone and everyone who desired more. We're here today, because Susan Craig got more and gave more. That's why this church exists. A little caught for that. And I love, I love how God is good. He knows what he's doing, right? There's sometimes that we doubt that a little bit because life doesn't go according to plan for us, and so we start to sort of go, hey God, I don't know if you're paying attention or not, but I have some suggestions, right? We've all done that to God. He knows what he's doing because to give Susan Craig, if you know her, to give Susan Craig the word more is very appropriate because Susan is a lot. Like Susan is more a lot of things than anyone I've ever known. Susan Craig is more opinionated than any human being I've ever met in my entire life. And I'm married to Megan. Okay? And that's saying a lot. So I have this memory of probably three or four years ago, maybe even a little longer, I can't quite remember, but but Megan was asked by Susan to sort of re-invigorate our nursery. To redo it, to redesign it, redecorate it, change the structure, create a curriculum, just do all this stuff to take our nursery from at the time something that was good and make it into something great. And that is how the garden, which is what we call it now, that is how that came to be. It was Susan and Megan working together, and it was this incredible, awesome, stressful experience because Susan moves at like a thousand miles a minute, and she was gonna get things done, and Megan was just along for the ride, and she'd never experienced something like that. And I remember this one day, they were they were both here in the building, and I was looking for Megan. And so someone told me, oh, Megan's with Susan, they're in one of the nursery rooms, they're picking out paint colors, okay? And so I walk into the nursery to look for them, and I come into the room, and sure enough, there they are, and they're they're picking out paint colors. Susan had gone to Lowe's and gotten sample little batches of paint, different colors of blue, and they had taken those sample sample jars and they had put a little bit of this blue paint on the wall, a little bit of this one, a little bit of this one, so they could look at it on the wall and make a decision. And you might be thinking, as you're picturing this moment in your mind, that there were five different versions of blue on the wall, or maybe ten, if they're really out of, you know, if they're crazy or something like that. But no, no. It wasn't 10, it wasn't 15, it wasn't 20. I kid you not, there were like 39 shades of blue on the wall. I mean, it was just this just blue. All shades of blue on the wall. And the crazy thing is, Susan did not like any of them. She didn't like one of them. And so she's she's talking to Megan. I'm in the back of the room watching this, she's talking to Megan, and she's saying things like, Well, if we take this blue and make it like 15% lighter, let's take this one back to Lowe's, make this one 15% lighter, let's take this one back to Lowe's, let's have them make this one 10% darker. And I'm in the back of the room going, like, Susan, if you make that one 15% lighter, it's just gonna be that color that you already have on the wall. And if you make this one 10% darker, it's gonna be this color because you have every shade of blue that exists on the wall right now. And I'm thinking about this poor person at Lowe's that to start had to mix 37 different colors of blue into tiny little sample jars. And now we're taking these back to them, saying this one needs to be 15% lighter. She is inventing new colors of blue. That's what's happening. Okay, and that's that's Susan. She was right though, she was right because man, when she was done, it was it was beautiful. And it still is. I mean, you walk back there, and and I just want you to know if you have children in the nursery, every single shade of every single color you see was handpicked and debated about and argued over by Susan because she is the most opinionated human being I've ever known. She she had strong opinions and she was not afraid to stand for those opinions until everyone else agreed with her. That was Susan. That was Susan. Susan is more fascinating than anyone I've ever known. She's not just more opinionated. Susan is, it's so fascinating. She is the most fascinating person I think I've ever been around. And many of you know this. One conversation with Susan would have you hooked. You would just stop and say, I need to know more about this person. I need to understand them. I need to find out what makes them operate the way they operate. Susan was so fascinating. You could just watch her lead worship. She stood right here and she led worship so many Sundays. You could listen to her talk about God, and she'd always do this thing. She'd go, you know what I mean? Here's the thing. This is her. Here's the thing, right? Here's the thing. You can listen to a message she gave, it's way down at the bottom of the podcast. Here's the thing, probably 48 times. And here's the thing, and here's the thing, here's the thing. That was Susan, right? She would just, but she would talk about God in this way that would draw you in. She's so fascinating. Mesmerizing, captivating. A few months ago, we took Lily, who's not even two years old, to see Susan in the hospital. We dropped off all those thank you cards you guys filled out for her. Those, those blew her away. Thank you for doing that. And we were only there for 30 minutes. 30 minutes in a hospital room. We were trying to mainly keep Lily from pulling on things and unplugging stuff. You know, that's nerve-wracking with a little baby in a hospital room. And we're there and we left. And it was it was really amazing because in that 30 minutes, Susan made such a giant impression on Lily. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. Susan was wearing a hat and she had a blanket wrapped around her, and Lily calls blankets night nights. That's what she says. She's night nights. And for the next two, three weeks, every single time Lily would see someone wearing a hat, she would point at them and say, Susan. And she would put hats on in our house and look in the mirror. She likes to do dress up and stuff like that, and she would just go, Susan, Susan. She would point her hat and touch it and say, Susan. We've been around so many people. There are so many people that Lily has been around for 30 minutes and that's it. And she's never walked away imitating that person. No one's ever left that kind of impression on her before it. And even this week we were talking at home and Megan stopped and looked at Lily. And keep in mind this was three, four months ago, and if you're not two, three or four months, that's a big chunk of your life. That would be like me asking you, hey, you remember 20 years ago? Whenever, right? Megan stopped and said, Hey Lily, do you remember Miss Susan? And Lily said, Yeah. She doesn't say yes, she says yesh. So Lily said, Yesh. Um, hat night night. She she just remembered Susan because Susan is more fascinating than anyone I've ever known. She she just did that to people. Susan is more generous than anyone you'll ever hear about. And there's so many examples of that. This this building, it's a big one. It's a big, a big display of she and Steve's generosity. And if you're new, you don't maybe know the story of how this got here. Here's the way it usually works in church. I have friends who are pastors all over the country, and and I'm the the way it usually goes is this you start a church. Either you start a church out of another church, maybe it's a church plant, or you and a bunch of friends get together and you're like, hey, let's start a church. And you begin a church either in someone's home, or if you have a good bit of people, maybe even a couple hundred, you rent a place. You go rent a school that's not being used on Sundays, or you rent a movie theater and you meet there. And if you grow and it becomes successful, eventually you get to this point where you need to rent a bigger space. And if you grow and maybe you're a thousand people or something like that, then you go, oh, we need to build a building. We need to own our own building. That's a big step. And so you create this big giving campaign and you get everyone to give, and you wield a giant thermometer on the stage every Sunday, and you go, hey guys, the thermometer is not at the top yet. We gotta get it to the we gotta build a building, right? That's how it goes. And that's fun and that's exciting, and everyone gets involved, and it's it's it's awesome, but that's not how this got started. God told Steve and Susan that they were supposed to start a church, and so they bought an abandoned Kmart. Because, you know, people do that. This used to be a Kmart, if you didn't know. They bought this property and they began to renovate it, and they built this before his hands even existed. When his hands church first started, even at Dave and Buster's, this was already being built. This was already, they were all in, man. They were committed the very first Sunday that they ever got together in here, there were like 200 something people in this building. They're like, well, I hope it's that field of dreams. If you build it, they will come, kind of thing, right? And and you need to understand, they spared no expense. I mean, Susan liked nice things, okay? If you know Susan, she had high standards. And so I'd been in the lead role for maybe about a year here. Uh, and Brian, who leads our facility team, came to me one day because we're we're approaching 10 years in this building, which is really exciting. But just like in your home, when you hit the 10-year mark, things start to break. And so Brian comes to me one day and he says, Justin, there's a faucet in one of the bathrooms that is no longer working. And I don't really usually get involved in discussions about faucets. So I was kind of like, all right, let's we should probably fix that. And Brian said, Well, here's the thing. Um, you know, it doesn't just need a new battery because it's one of those automatic faucets. Um, he said, I I looked up the serial number on that particular faucet, and replacing it, it's four, it's a $400 faucet. And he said, Now I found another one that looks almost the exact same, and it's $60. Which one should I buy? And I said, Well, that's a tough decision. Um I asked him, I said, Does water come out of the $60 one? He said, Yes. I'm like, let's let's go with that. Okay? And I walked away, being like, I'm I started to do math in my head, which I'm not good at, so I quit really quick. But I was like, there's a lot of faucets in this building. You know, there's bathrooms over here, a lot of faucets, bathrooms over there, the kids' areas, there's bathrooms in the youth areas, there's a lot of bathrooms, there's a lot of faucets, and I'm starting to go $400 a faucet. Who on earth would buy $400 faucets? And I'll tell you who, it's Susan. Okay? And just so you understand, this was not a misuse of church funds. We buy $60 faucets now, so you know that we're being frugal with what you give, right? There were no church funds. This was Susan's funds, and I'm pretty certain Steve was not involved in the faucet selection process, knowing the two of them. And so this is Susan looking in a catalog, and Susan is saying, you know what, when people wash their hands at his hands, I mean, maybe it's that we're recalled his hands, and she's thinking, hands, water, I want them to have a premium experience as they wash their hands, right? And she was willing to pay for that. But here's here's the thing about Susan, you just gotta understand this. Susan wanted the best, but not just for herself. If you were friends with Susan, she was committed to you having the best. When Susan and Steve built this building, Susan wanted the best for every single one of you. She wanted the best for your children. She wanted the best for your teenagers. She wanted the best for you. She wanted you in this place to have the best. And she was willing to spend whatever she could to give you the best. That is who Susan is. And she was generous financially, but she was even more generous with herself. There's so many people that she invested in, so many people that she took in and just poured into and mentored and led and trained. I have the amazing privilege of being a man who watched Susan pour into my wife. And it changed her. She became much more opinionated. And like, I mean, there's still a few things where I'm like, hey, Susan, I mean, help me out, right? She's already steer her. What about compliance? Is that a thing? Is that, you know, no? Okay. And now we have nice faucets at home. I mean, there's a lot of repercussions for that. Susan was unbelievably generous. See, she was just more. She was more generous. She was more fascinating. She was more intense and opinionated. She was more passionate. She was more positive. But there is one thing, there is one main thing that I can say standing right here that Susan was more of than anything else. One thing she had more of in her life, and one thing she gave more of than anything else, and really than about anyone I've ever seen. And that's love. It's love. One of Susan's favorite verses, and I know this because she said it a lot, was Ephesians 5, 1 and 2, and she loved the message version. Here's what it says: Watch what God does, and then you do it. Like children who learn proper behavior from their parents, mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious, but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us, but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that. That is the way Susan Craig loved people. She did not love cautiously. She loved extravagantly. She didn't love in order to get something for herself. One of the amazing things about the vision of this church is that Jesus is the only person that gets famous. Susan Craig's picture and name was never on our website. She's beautiful. She was never on a billboard. This church was always about Jesus, his love, and people, never about her. She didn't love in order to get attention, even though her story was amazing and captivating and people would have been like, wow, and enthralled. She didn't love in order to get praise. She loved simply to give of herself. She loved like Jesus. And that is very important for us to understand as a church, because if there is one thing that defines us, that defines his hands, it's love. It's love. Our vision is to love people to Jesus, which means that we are called to love people in such a way that they recognize the love we're giving them. It is not normal love. It is not the love of this world. It's not circumstantial. It's not love because, hey, you have something I want, so I'm gonna love you and I'm gonna maybe get on your good side. No, no, no. It's it's love that just gives and gives and gives. It is undeserved and it's unquenchable. That is the love that we're called to have. We love people to Jesus, and we measure that in a few different ways. We want you to get his love. We want you to grow in his love. We want you to give his love away. We don't want you to get his love, to grow his love, to keep his love. We want you to get it, to grow it, to give it. Because if you can get to the point where you're in a place that allows you to give God's love away, that means someone else gets his love. And then they can grow it, and then they can give it, and someone else gets it. As a church, because of what Susan did here, because of the love that she put in this place, because you guys got to understand, love is everywhere. You're sitting on love right now because Susan wanted you to have comfortable seats. When you wash your hands, love is coming through the faucet for crying out loud. Right? Love is a current that runs through everything that we do here. Love is in the worship, love is in our kids' area, love is in the culture, love is everywhere, and love is here because Susan Craig loved passionately and she loved like Jesus, and she made sure that his hands church would be known for its love. And I'm I'm forever changed as a result. I know that thousands of people are forever changed as a result. See, see, here's the thing Susan understood. We are supposed to be defined primarily by our love as followers of Jesus. Jesus said this in John chapter 13: Your love for one another will prove to the world that you're my disciples. Your love will be the evidence that you belong to me. That's what Jesus said. And see, I grew up in church, but I never really believed this. I mean, I believe the Bible, and so if you would have told me or someone would have said, hey, Jesus said this, I'd have nodded my head and said, Oh yeah, yeah, love. Yeah, love's good. But I didn't believe that love is really the greatest evidence we have. The thing that really says to the world that these people belong to Jesus, if you would have asked me, I would have said, Oh, the the righteousness in our lives, like the way we abstain from doing fun things, that is what proves to the world that we're Jesus followers. Right? I don't watch that, I don't listen to that, I don't drink that, I don't smoke that. That's how the world will know that I belong to Jesus. It's my righteousness, it's that I live a respectable life. See, religion loves respectability. Love doesn't care about respectability. And we're not called to be religious. We're called to be lovers. See, I believe that it was how respectable my life looked on the outside. There's a problem with that, though. If you buy into that, you realize pretty quickly in life that you're not nearly as respectable on the inside as you can appear on the outside. And so you get into this weird game where you start to look a certain way, but on the inside you're different, and you feel guilt and you feel shame because you feel like you're living a double life and you're a hypocrite, and we're all hypocrites. That's why we're in church. Where else are we supposed to go, right? So, Susan, she freed me up from that. She freed me from worrying about my outer life having to be the greatest example and evidence of my faith in Jesus. And what's really crazy about that is once I finally understood that it's the way I love that defines me, that defines who I am in Jesus, I actually got better at dealing with those righteousness issues that I struggled with for a really long time. Maybe it wasn't righteousness, but I also would have believed that maybe our success, that's what shows the world that we belong to Jesus. It's how together we've got it, right? It's how neat and tidy our lives look. The world's gonna look at us and they're gonna say, wow, look at their healthy marriage. Look at their amazing, smart, successful, athletic, gifted children. They must know God. Wow, they're they're really successful in their career, and oh man, uh it's amazing. Look at they've got life figured out, their finances are healthy, their relationships are healthy, their marriage is healthy, everything about their lives looks like it's clean and tidy and awesome. That is the evidence that we've got Jesus. Because doesn't Jesus, doesn't God want his people to just have it all together all the time? And don't get me wrong. Absolutely, a good father wants his children to live good lives, to live righteous lives, if you want to use that word, to live right, to do well. God absolutely wants you to have a healthy marriage. God absolutely wants you to be successful in your career. He absolutely wants all those things for you, and all that's really, really good, but it is not what defines us. Because see, you might be here today and you might, being honest with yourself, say, I'll be just completely blatantly transparent. I'm a mess. My finances are not gonna wow you. My relationships have have some issues. This relationship is strained. I've got some sin issues in my life and I'm working on it. I'm doing my best, but I'm just not quite there yet. This isn't quite working, this isn't 100%, this isn't great. And Jesus would look at you and he would say, Yeah, we're gonna work on all that, but but let me ask you a question. Can you love people? Can you can you love people with passion, with everything you have? Because if we're willing as a church to say, hey, we are all messed up, but man, do we love people? Then Jesus will look at us and he will say, They are mine. Those are my people. I love the Bible. If you can't tell, I love it. And I read it and I study it, and there's so much in it that's practical and that's good, and that if you apply it to your life, you will see your life get better because God's way just works. But here's the thing, guys, the Bible is not just this collection of life hacks. The Bible is a story. It's a true story about a God who loved with such passion that he would not let anything come between him and the people who he wanted to experience his love. He would not let their own mistakes, he would not let their own stubbornness, he would not let the powers of Satan and the powers of hell, he would not let anything stand in the way of his love. You are the person that God created for one primary reason, and that primary reason is to be loved by God. That is your purpose on this earth, to receive his love. And the challenge is just to take what you've received and give it. But you were created to be the focus of his love, and that's that's scripture. Read Ephesians 1. You were created by God to be loved. Susan understood that. She soaked in God's love. Susan knew she was loved by God. And people might come to Susan and criticize her and say things about her, and she used to take her shoes off on the stage when she'd worship, and she probably got her shoes off right now. But and people would be like, hey, I don't know if that's okay, and she'd just go, God loves me. She knew. She didn't need anyone else's approval because she knew whose approval she had. She lived and fulfilled her primary purpose, which is to be loved by God. Because here's what we've got to understand love is above everything. And this is still kind of controversial, which is weird because Jesus says it really clearly. Love is more important to God than righteousness. God cares more that you love people than he cares about you not sinning. And again, I'm not saying that sin is good and we should just be like, ooh, whatever, let's just do this. We're loved. But but I'm letting you know that God cares more about the way you love than he cares about anything else, including whatever whatever issues and mistakes and sins you have in your life. And that's that's just clear in Scripture. Paul wrote this in 1 Corinthians 13. If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn't love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clinging symbol. If I had the gift of prophecy and I understood all of God's secret plans and I possessed all knowledge. I mean, just think about what he's saying. If I knew everything that God knows, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but I didn't love others, I would have, I would be nothing. And if I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it. But if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing. Paul is saying, hey, no matter what, no matter what you do, no matter how you live, if love is not something that just flows out of you, it doesn't matter. 1 Peter 4, verse 8 says, Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins. And so you might be here this morning and you may have sinned a couple times today. Maybe you can't look at your life and say, oh man, I'm nailing it. I've got it, I've got it all figured out, it's all good, everything's right. Maybe some part of your life is amazing, but another part's struggling. The love of God, it covers your sins. Love covers all. Love is above all because love covers all. Susan Craig put love in this place. She poured love out day in and day out. Before anyone stepped foot in this building, love was here. And love will always be here. A lot of people ask me this week, what can I do? What can I do? It's normal, it's natural, right? There's this feeling of indebtedness. I don't know about you, but I hate to feel in debt. I hate it. In fact, a few months ago we were driving through Dunkin' Donuts because we're all about health in my family, and we're going through, and we uh we pull up to pay, and and the person that we we go to to pay says, Oh, the car in front of you paid. And I'm like, oh no. I didn't know who that was. I hadn't I wasn't paying attention. Who pays attention to that? We're not a church that does the whole bumper sticker thing, so maybe we should, because then I would have known, no, it's a his hands person, right? Maybe we should start doing bumper stickers. That's a good idea. Okay, so we uh I kind of have this moment of panic, and I'm like, well, what do I do? You know, I I wish I would have ordered more, number one. But every every Sunday morning we have a routine in my family. Me and the kids go through Dunkin' Donuts, and Megan goes to Starbucks, and Megan's Starbucks alone costs way more than our Dunkin' Donuts combined, and so I kind of wish the person had been at Starbucks. But either way, either way, it was still a nice gesture. But see, I don't like to feel in debt. I don't like to feel like I owe someone something, so I'm just like, uh, here's $20, pay for the next person behind me. Because I just want to quickly cancel the debt. I want to quickly get that burden off my shoulders and feel like I'm good. I've settled it. I don't have to walk around feeling like I gotta do something good for someone. I'm good. Romans 13, 8. It starts really strong. I really like the beginning because it syncs with my approach to life. Don't run up debts. Isn't that great? Don't owe anyone anything except, and oh, once it gets here, I hate this verse. Except for the huge debt of love you owe each other. I'm just gonna be honest. We owe Susan a massive debt of love. We do. And and I you might be here today and maybe you never even met her, but you just you can tell how special she was and is, because we will see her again. But but in her life on this earth, you can just feel, you can look around and you can understand what she's done and what she what she gave of herself. And you might feel this tinge of indebtedness, like, ooh, maybe I should do something. And I want you to know that you feel that because that's appropriate. That we owe Susan a huge debt of love. And so I don't know how you want to repay it, but I'm telling you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give my life to the vision of this church. I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give my talent, I'm gonna give my time, I'm gonna give my finances, I'm gonna give everything that I have. I'm gonna give everything that's within me. I'm gonna give every ounce of love that is in my body to making sure that the vision of this church advances. That's how we honor Susan. Because, see, guys, Susan and Steve had the courage to say yes to God. And they had the courage to start this. And it was not exactly popular when it got started. There's a lot of churches like his hands now, in the sense of like the music style and all that. There were not a lot in Woodstock when we began. And people said things. Letters were written. Mean, nasty, horrible letters. It wasn't like they started this church and the community said, Wow, thank you. Literally. Apparently, God has horrible taste in music. I don't know why. Whatever. People always use this is an aside, you just gotta forgive me because I need some humor for my own sake. Um, people used to say, like, this was this this is I'm glad this is changing in church culture because people used to say, your church's music sounds like the world. That was like this thing, this Christians say weird stuff. The world. And I would be like, yours does too. It just sounds like the world 300 years ago. I mean, sorry. Nothing wrong. But then you gotta stop me. But we love each other, we're on the same team. We're on the same team, right? We're good. We're gonna start a traditional service next week. So come next week, early, wheeling an organ, it's gonna be awesome. Susan would come back and put a stop to that in a second. That happened. Nathan, it would. It happened. So I I have a big request today. And I see, I love this. Um, I I'm I'm unique when it comes to what I can ask you guys because Steve and Susan started this place, and they, if you know them, they they just didn't like to ask anyone for anything. I don't have that issue. Because I I'm not the one, I'm not the one that that started it, so I don't feel this burden I think that they felt sometimes being like parents. I mean, they were like our parents, right? And and I don't tend to ask much of my kids. That's kind of strange. It's it's hard for us. Some of us are even at a stage of life where maybe it would be helpful if our our kids who are are now adults could help us out, but it's a weird thing to be like, hey son, could you help me out with something? It's just hard for us, you know. And they were the parents here, so it was really hard for them to reach out to us and say, hey, we need your help. But see, I'm not the one that started this place, so I don't have that holdup. It took a lot of courage for Steve and Susan to start this place. It's gonna take just as much courage for us to finish it. It took a lot of courage for Steve and Susan to be generous enough to get this off the ground. It's gonna take just as much generosity for us to see this thing through. It took a lot of love to get this place started. It's gonna take just as much love for us to move it forward. And see, we have this long tradition in our faith of people who gave everything, people who said yes to God. Jesus said yes to God and he gave it all. And then the people that followed him said yes to God and they gave it all, and then more people did that, and it's continued for 2,000 years, and Susan is part of this amazing legacy of human beings who said yes to God and gave it all. And I don't know about you, but one day I'd like to reconnect with her in heaven, and I'd like to tell her the story of how her life inspired thousands of people to do the exact same thing and to say yes to God. And so I'm gonna respond. I'm gonna honor her by honoring Jesus because that's how she lived her life, and I'm gonna honor her by making it part of my life's purpose to have the courage and the generosity and the love required to see this thing through. Because when it comes to loving people to Jesus, we've barely gotten started. There are people in this community that do not know they are loved by God, and we can't stand for that. There are people that are Christians, people that go to church that still don't understand that the God of the universe loves them, is passionate about them, wants to know them, isn't concerned with their little issues. He wants to embrace them and hold them and empower them. We can't stand for that. We exist to love people to Jesus, and we have a spiritual mom who loved all of us in such a powerful way, and the only way we can repay that debt of love is to love back. And so I'm just gonna ask one thing as we wrap up, and we're gonna um we're gonna do two more worship songs because Susan loved worship, and uh, and I got to see some of these. There were times where Steve's message would maybe be a little longer, and he would have a conversation with Susan and say, hey, it's getting a little longer, maybe we you know do one less song, and she's like, nope, sorry, they're just gonna have to be here longer, so we're gonna worship. Um the song we're about to do, Nathan's gonna do, and uh, and it's it's a song Susan used to sing all the time. It was kind of our theme for a long time, years ago. We haven't done it in a long time, so it'll be it'll be good. Uh then we're gonna finish with one more. I know she'd be really proud of today. I know she'd be proud that we had someone going all in with Jesus. I know she'd be proud of all of you and all you do. But but I refuse, and I know you are the same way, to receive so much love and so much good from a person and not do anything about it. I can't do it. It's not within me. And so, and please don't raise your hand out of obligation. Um, because I know some of us, his hands, we're still new, we're still figuring it out. And if, you know, I know that that that's where some of us are, but if if his hands is your church, if you are like, this is my church, this is my place, this is my family, I belong here, would you please raise your hand so I can just see who you are? Thank you. Can we can we finish this and and understand this? It's bigger than our lives. I mean, Susan is the leader. She she's leading us in the fact that this church is bigger than our lifetime. And so when I say finish it, I mean I mean take the torch that she carried, carry it, improve it, grow it, and then hand it off to another generation that will do the same. Can we see it through? Can we? That's the way we honor her. You want to honor Susan, you just need to love. You need to love a lot. Because of Steve and Susan, we know what happens when two people say yes to God and give everything. What happens if 2,000 say yes to God and give everything? Please pray with me. Jesus. Thank you so much for Susan Craig. Wow. Man, you know what you're doing, God. She uh she is such a light for us. She set a really inconveniently high standard for us to live up to. So thanks for that. But we are family. And I believe I can speak for everyone in this room, Lord, when I say that we view it as the greatest privilege and honor of our lives to be his hands. And to love people. To love each other. To love our community, to love our nation, to love our world. God, we we need your comfort right now. You say in your word that we're blessed when we mourn. We need that. Right now, Lord Jesus, we we need you to give us the strength, the faith, the courage, the hope, the joy, the passion, and the love required to take this torch and to pass it to the next generation. To do what Susan did for us, to do that same thing for thousands more. We love you, Jesus, and we ask all this in your name. Amen. Amen. Um, before this song, I do want to let everyone know that we have a memorial service for Susan today at 4 o'clock, right back here. And so if you'd like to come, please come. I would just do me a huge favor if you can. Try to get here a little early. There's gonna be a lot of people. And uh and so it's at 4. If you could try to get here around 3 30. Um it's gonna be very low key. It's what Susan wanted. And uh I just want to invite you to be part of that. Let's uh let's worship just a little bit longer together.