Well, I sent a lot of us an email saying, uh, be here, it's an important morning. I'm sure a lot who got that email? Anyone? Okay, good. We check our email. This is good. I'll let you know I've learned lessons uh in life. One of the lessons I've learned, I learned it this week, is that when you say the word important, some people go, is something is something bad going on? And it's funny, I was talking to a friend of mine, I said, hey, I've had a couple people email me, like, is everything okay? And I'm like, oh yeah, it's awesome. Everything's great. I can't wait for Sunday. And I asked my friend, I said, Well, it's not if I asked you to meet me in my office, and we don't really have offices, we have cubicles, but if I said meet me in my cubicle for a very close personal meeting, uh, we have something important to talk about, you wouldn't assume it was bad, would you? And he's like, Well, actually, yeah, I would. I said, Oh, okay, well, duly noted. So this morning, it's gonna be a great morning. I'm so excited that you're here. We're gonna spend some time talking together about where we are as a church and where we're going and what it's gonna take to get there. And if it's your first time or if you're relatively new, I do have a few disclaimers. I just want to be upfront and honest. Number one, I'm gonna talk a lot longer than I normally do, and I'm really sorry. Rather than just go and have you start looking at your watch and wonder if I know. I know. We've kind of readjusted the whole morning around that. So normally there's more worship, less guy on stage talking, so don't worry, this is not the usual. Number two, we're gonna spend a lot of time talking uh amongst ourselves as part of his hands. Those of us that have said, This is my church, this is where I get closer to God, where I want to be invested in. And I say that because we don't spend a lot of time as a church talking about ourselves. We're way too busy talking about Jesus to talk about ourselves. But every once in a while it's important for us to say, hey, let's let's look at where we are and let's look at where we're going. And number three, just in the in the mindset of being upfront and honest, we're gonna talk about some of the things it is gonna take for us to move forward and go where God is asking us to go as a church, and that's gonna include some commitments in terms of serving on teams, and it's gonna include some commitments, maybe for the first time ever, maybe a renewed commitment to support what we're doing here financially. And let me just say this: if you are new, we talk about money less than any church I've ever been a part of, and it's not even close. And it's for a really simple reason. If you're tired of church being about what they can get from you versus what we can give to you, we share that same frustration. And if you've been here for a while, you know that. But we are gonna talk about some things that we need to do, some opportunities that we have to make sure that the vision of this church moves forward. And I'm so excited, I'm so glad that you're here this morning because this is very, very important. And again, that word, it's a good word, important. I've been a part of his hands for eight years. And uh I've spent almost a third of my life working at this church. It's gone by really, really fast. I tell people all the time, I really believe that I'm a lifer. I I came to this church, I love this church. God can do anything. My life's in his hands, but but this is this is my home. And the last eight years have gone by so fast, I really can't wait to see what the next 10, the next 20 have in store to be a dad and know that this is the place that my children are gonna grow up and learn about Jesus. I had some friends over uh the other night, and we were sitting in our living room talking about Jesus because we're just like that. And all of a sudden, my son, who's four, decided to join the conversation. And so he sat on the fireplace and he started sharing about Jesus. And he said some really profound things. He said, You know, Jesus is in my heart and he loves me, and I'm gonna get to go to heaven. I don't have to worry about dying because I'm gonna go to heaven. And he's gonna give me a submarine, and I'm not. And then he looked up at me as if in a question, will I need the helmet in the submarine or not? And I'm like, I don't, I don't know, but you know, I love that. And and the truth is, everything he shared about Jesus, he actually did share some really profound things, but it's all things that he has learned being a part of this church. He loves Jesus and he knows that Jesus loves him. And if that's the foundation he has for the rest of his life, I'm so so excited to see what God does. That happens every single week here. I love this place. I first heard about his hands uh by receiving a phone call from a friend of mine that knew I desired to work with young people at a church. I wanted to work with students. Uh, pretty immature person. I I'll just full disclosure, I love playing video games. I buy them for my son so we can spend quality time together playing Mario Kart until 1 a.m. It's just I'm a good dad. But but I wanted to work with young people, and he knew that, and he heard about his hands. He got a chance to kind of see this place, and he called me up. He said, Justin, you need to check out his hands. This is an interesting place. And then he said a phrase I'll never forget. He said, I just have to warn you though, it's not a normal church. And that amen. There are uh there are plenty of normal churches, I agree. And so it piqued my curiosity. I'm like, what does he mean by that? It's not a normal church. Is it a weird church? I really don't want to be part of a weird church. And we came, we checked it out, and we walked away that first morning, knowing he was absolutely right. This is not a normal church. This is not an ordinary church. We left here blown away, saying, This place is extraordinary. This place is it's unique. And so over the next few years, I sort of slowly absorbed what the vision of this church is, what his hands is really about. And it's very different. It's a very unique thing. And if you're anything like me, I have a difficult time explaining unique things. If someone asks me about a band that I like and they're kind of unique, they're a little different, I'm terrible at explaining to them what it is. Or if it's a movie or a TV show or just some experience that it's hard to define, it's it's hard to put into a category, I have a difficult time explaining that. And so I would bet you there are hundreds of people that will never come to this place because I did such a terrible job explaining to them what it was about when they asked me. Because it's just hard. I say, okay, well, it's like it's uh it's an awesome church, it's laid back, and and you can kind of wear what you want, and there's great music on the stage, and it's kind of like rock music, but it's not a show, it's not a concert, it's not that, but it's really good. I mean, it's not bad, like it's not a concert. Like, I guess you might pay for it, but it's you're never gonna come. You're never gonna come, I know. That's bad. Just find a church. But you know, that's the thing, isn't it though? If if you're part of a place, it takes you years sometimes to sort of fully absorb what it really is about. And and actually, those of you who are here for the first time or you're relatively new, you could not have picked a better time to be here because even though we are gonna talk a lot about who we are as a church and where we're going, sometimes you have to be at a place for months on end to sort of glean this and glean that and finally put it together what this church actually values. We're gonna have a big dose of that this morning. So it'll help you make that decision much easier, and I hope that you decide to be part of this place because it's changed my life. I tell people all the time. I believed in Jesus long before I came here, but I fell in love with Jesus here. This is where I fell in love with Jesus, and I love this place. If it helps you, absolutely, now I know I'm not the only one, if it uh if it helps you to have a mental picture to sort of understand what this church really is, I'm sure some of us in the room are very health conscious with what we eat. I'm sure all of us have tried to be, at least for a day. And if you're one of those people, whenever you buy food at the grocery store, you might pay close attention to what's in that food. You might read the labels, you might look at the ingredient list. And so if his hands as a church had a had a label like you would see at the grocery store, it might look something like this. And so I'd like to talk for just a few seconds. What are the the key ingredients here? What is it that makes this place what it is? I have four main things that that come to my mind as I think about how special this church is. The first one is Jesus. Didn't think we were gonna go a Sunday and not talk about Jesus, obviously not. Jesus is the main ingredient in this church. And that seems like a throwaway answer. That seems like the obvious thing, but but in full disclosure, I've spent lots of time in church my whole life, and Jesus was not always the main ingredient. There were a lot of times that the filters we use to decide how we were gonna treat people, the way we were gonna go about telling people about Jesus didn't really seem to line up with Jesus. He wasn't the main ingredient. He is the main ingredient here. He always will be. Jesus is pretty bold. He said it himself, you search the scriptures because you think they give you eternal life, but the scriptures point to me. I love Jesus. He he makes it so simple. He's basically saying, I'm kind of a big deal, but not in a prideful way. It is about Jesus. Everything we do here is about Jesus. No matter what we're gonna talk about, no matter what we're gonna focus on, if it's a message series or whatever, our focus is Jesus. We're gonna point to Jesus, we're gonna talk about Jesus. Everything we do is going to be to highlight who Jesus is for every single one of us and for this community. He is the main ingredient. If I was gonna list the second thing, I might say genuineness, that's a really hard word to say. And I assure you it is spelled correctly, but it doesn't look like it is. It's one of those words that you're like, that's that's not how you spell that word. And so, just for simplicity's sake, we'll say genuine. This is the most genuine group of people I have ever been around. And I don't know if if we miss the memo, but you're not supposed to be genuine at church. I learned that growing up. You're just not supposed to be. Apparently, we we didn't get that lesson because when I bump into people from here in the grocery store somewhere, you're the same person you are when we talk on Sundays, and that blows me away. That's amazing. That's not normal. And I believe it's because there's a safety here. That we're able to just admit we're we're messed up. Jesus said, I didn't come for the well, I came for the sick. And we're people that admit that we're sick, and a lot of us are people that just admit we got really good at acting like we were well for a long time. And so we can be genuine here, we can be exactly who we are. We don't have to become the church versions of ourselves when we're here. And I love that. I know Jesus loves that. I was gonna add a third thing to the list, I'd say life. This church is full of life. It really is. It's amazing. One of the first things I ever learned as part of this church was a teaching about the tree of life that I'd never heard before. And I grew up in church, I knew all about Adam and Eve and the two trees, and they disobeyed God, and God's very particular about what you eat, I guess. And so he got mad and he kicked him out of the garden, and that's how it all got started, this whole mess that we live in. But I'd never heard a teaching on the tree of life, and it was kind of funny how it happened. Um, I interviewed here, and Steve gave me three message CDs that he wanted me to listen to in like a day's time. He's like, these three messages really encapsulate what we're about as a church, so I want you to listen to these and then we'll follow up and talk. And I got home and I listened to the first one and then the second one, and I put the third one in, and it was blank. I remember thinking, is this a test? Like, is he gonna ask me, What'd you think of those three? And I'm like, oh, they were fantastic. And he's like, aha! One of them was blank, you just lied, you're done. And it turns out, it turns out it was just a mistake. That other one, I guess I'll never know. I'll never know what was so important about it, but uh, but it wasn't on the CD. The second one we listened to was a message about the tree of life. And I remember listening to that with Megan and saying, I've never heard this before. And if you walk around our building, you'll see Marlon's Tree of Life paintings everywhere. They're very amazing and a perfect picture of what we are as a church. You can go to the source and grab one if you want for your home, but but they represent what we want to be as a church, and that is a tree of life church. See, to sum it up really quickly, in the garden you had the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and God said, Eat from the tree of life, have as much life as you want. It's amazing. But don't go to that other tree, that tree of knowledge of good and evil. And so the first temptation was not lust or greed or power or any of those normal sins that we might think of. The very first temptation was just to know right from wrong. Really, it was to settle for simply knowing what to do and what not to do. And God said, no, no, eat from the tree of life. When I heard that teaching, I realized that as a believer, I'd spent most of my life at the wrong tree. I spent most of my life obsessed and worried about what I should do, what I shouldn't do, what music to listen to, what music not to listen to. And I was sitting at the wrong tree. And I needed to go to life. Yes, God changes us, and yes, he transforms us and makes us better versions of ourselves, but it's because we're full of life. And as a church, we're gonna sit and eat from the tree of life. And if anyone ever gets frustrated with that, the good news is we can just say, hey, I believe very seriously in obeying God. And the very first commandment he gave to his people was not to sit at the tree of life. Nope, tree of knowledge of good and evil. We all make mistakes. Tree of knowledge of good and evil. That was the first commandment. I'm going to obey that commandment. It's a great filter that we have here. And every once in a while, this is one of the wonderful perks of this role is that uh you get to hear people complain about what we're doing right or what we're doing wrong. And I actually really enjoy those conversations because uh I, number one, I value people's opinions. Number two, it's a great chance just to hear some opportunities. Number three, it's a great chance to really solidify what we're about as a church and make some decisions. I've never heard someone complain that we don't love people enough. I've never heard someone complain that this place isn't full of life. And when I get complaints about other things, I'll just stop and say, okay, wait, which tree are we gonna sit at? Which tree are we gonna eat from? And it's the tree of life. Jesus said, My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. That's what we're gonna be about. If I was gonna add a fourth thing, a fourth ingredient, I'd say love. You are amazing at loving people. And love is a word that gets used a lot in church. There's a lot of buzzwords that you see come about. We talked earlier about being genuine. Sometimes the word real gets used in church a lot. Real, it's kind of a buzzword, and oftentimes what real actually means is cool or trendy. So just like we're genuine, we're not trying to be cool, we're not trying to be trendy, and we really aren't. We just want to be who we are. Love oftentimes just means friendly, means nice. And that's not who we are as a church. We are friendly, we are nice, but but more importantly, we love each other. We love people. You are incredible at loving people. And Jesus said, by this, everyone will know that you're my disciples if you love one another. How's the world gonna know that we belong to Jesus? It's not the lifestyle that we live, the things that we vote for, and the things that we don't vote for. It's very simple. He says, the world's gonna know you're mine if you love one another. Thank you for loving one another. This church is about Jesus, it's about being genuine, it's about life, it's about love. And if you are someone that's that's health conscious when you buy food, you probably not only pay attention to what's in your food, but you might pay attention to what's not in there as well. They advertise that on the packaging at the grocery store. No artificial preservatives, no added sugar. And just like that, there are some things that we've been very careful not to include as part of this church. Number one, we're not pastor-centric. And here's what that means. It's never gonna be about the person that's on stage, it's never gonna be about the people that you see, the people that are leading in a specific role. And Jesus said it best. This is not some obscure teaching, this is Jesus, it's red letters. He said, Don't let anyone call you rabbi, for you only have one teacher. And all of you are equal as brothers and sisters, and don't address anyone here on earth as Father, for only God in heaven is your spiritual father. And don't let anyone call you teacher, for you have only one teacher, the Messiah. The greatest among you must be a servant. But those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. When I read that, it's it's incredible because Jesus is pretty clear. Really couldn't be more obvious. And sometimes when you look at church culture, it's very different than what Jesus is describing right there. And in his hands, we're not going to be pastor-centric. So the way that that plays out is that none of us have a title. We just play roles. Those roles change from time to time. Nobody's got their name on the front of the building. When you go to our website, there's not bios of those of us who are on staff. We just have to make that sound more interesting than it really is, anyway. There's no one's face on a billboard. No one's ever gonna stand on the stage and tell you to subscribe to their blog. No one's ever gonna tell you to become a follower of theirs on Twitter. There is one person we want to get famous on Sundays. There's one person we want to have more followers, and that's Jesus, and that's the only one. That's how it'll always be. We also make it a very purposeful thing not to include any religion, and that can be confusing. And so, if you are new, let me explain what I mean by that. We are a non-religious church. Religion is a word that gets used often in the Bible, it's only used twice in a positive light. Jesus fought the hardest against religion. It was the most religious people that couldn't understand what Jesus did. They're the ones that opposed them, they're the ones that killed them. Religion is man-made rules that mask themselves as if they're from God, and we don't have any room for that here. You can have religion and not have God. Another word to say knowledge of good and evil is religion. You can spend your whole life obsessed with the religious stuff and not have God. We want to have God without religion. That's what Jesus did. I've tried to describe that in a lot of different ways over the years. It's about Jesus, not religion. The best explanation I've ever heard was Tim Rogers on Tuesday of this past week. We had lunch, and Tim said, You know, I really believe that his hands is a place where religion ends and relationship begins. Wow. Hey, way to go, Tim. Tim's like the opposite of me. He's a man of few words, but when he speaks, it's really powerful. And I'm a man of many words, and I have to, you know, be very careful not anyway. All right, so I'm starting to ramble. No guilt trips. We are not going to guilt anyone anytime in any way to do something because God is telling them to do it. We try to speak from God's heart. His heart is that he loves you, he cares about you, he does have an incredible life for you. He is going to call you and challenge you and ask you to do things that you might not be comfortable doing. That's God. But but though it is our place to tell you God's heart for you, it is not our place to speak for God and tell you what God is telling you to do. We're an opt-in church. And what that means is that we're always going to have the freedom to choose being involved or stepping up in a certain way or whatever that might be. And that's very rare in church culture. That's one of the reasons financially that we don't pass a plate or a bucket or anything like that. That's not normal. It's also not opt-in. You don't have the option of saying, no, no, I'd rather not have the plate in my hands because it breaks the chain. You can't break the chain. You have to take it, hand it to the next person. I grew up in church, and when I got old enough to start giving financially on a regular basis, I would give monthly. But weekly I'd have that plate in my hand. And I feel so ashamed on those three out of the four weeks that I didn't give. I would give for the whole month. It's just easier for me to budget that way, the way that I think. And so I would have to hand that plate to that other person with nothing in it. And I just wanted to look at him and go, I gave last week. And I gave, I gave for the whole month. I remember I have this memory of this one usher that was always the one handing me. He must have been like every other week, and it just worked out that it was always the weeks that I didn't give, and I just never looked that guy in the eye. I couldn't do it. I was so ashamed. See, that's not an opt-in experience. You have to take that. You have to do that. That's not how we are. No guilt trips. We're an opt-in church. This place is about Jesus, it's about life, it's about being genuine, it's about love. We we want people to come here and get love. We want this to be a place that you can grow in your love. That happens in a big way on. Sunday mornings in a huge way in small groups. Those of you who are small group leaders and involved in that, thank you so much. Keep it up because that's that's where we grow love. We want this to be a place that we can give love. We want to get love, grow love, and give love. And see, when we do all those things, we fulfill this purpose. This is why we exist. We want to love people to Jesus. We don't just want to tell people about Jesus, we're gonna do that. We don't just want to point to Jesus. We do that every single week. We don't want to stop short at those things. We want to love people to Jesus. We actually want to love people in such a way that they understand that's God's love. They get a taste of God's love. If you've been here for a while and you have not experienced that love, we've done something wrong. And we love you. I love you. That's just a taste of how much God loves you. That's what we do. We love people to Jesus. It's funny, we've been doing this for nine years, and uh it's gone by really fast. I've been a part of it for almost eight, and we've been loving people to Jesus in a big way every single week for a long time, and we just got to the point, literally a few months ago, where Sunday morning could happen, and we felt pretty good about it. Like, I wasn't stressful, wasn't freaking out on Saturday night. If you guys could know, get a peek into our lives on Saturday night over the last eight years, it's just me freaking out would be Saturday night. And for the last few months, that hasn't been how it is. We haven't been freaking out. It's like, yeah, it's it's it's amazing. Not worried about who's gonna show up or not show up. Everything seems to be running pretty smooth. And see, it's just like God though. When things are are going really smooth and you're like, yes, it's like, now hold on a second. Don't don't get too comfortable. I've got some things that I want to do. That vision that we have of loving people to Jesus, it's incredibly important. Oh nine. Flashing. It's incredibly important. Because there are so many people, so many people in this community that need that love. See, it's not very far outside these doors that there are people in this community that are ashamed of who they are, that feel unlovable. People that are stuck in depression, people that are stuck in addiction, people that don't fit the mold in church culture. People that are hurting, people whose marriages are falling apart, people whose relationships with their children are dissolving, and people who have no hope. We don't have to go very far to find that. In fact, we don't have to leave this room to find that. And if we were honest with ourselves and asked to raise our hands, don't worry, you're not going to be asked to do that. But if we were, so many of us would raise our hands and say, Yep, that's where I am, or that's where I was not that long ago. And in fact, it's it's being part of this place and the love that I got from God here that that changed that. It's because of that unique mixture we have, a place where people can come and they don't have to hide who they are. It's why I could stand here six months ago and tell you that I was addicted to pornography for 15 years and not get booed. It's because you can be genuine here. And those people that are right outside these doors, the people that are like us that don't know you can go to church and be who you are and be open about your needs. We need to always make sure that we have room for those people. Always. We can never allow ceilings to be placed on loving people to Jesus. And so when we encounter a ceiling, we have to move it, we have to lift it. We did that with small groups earlier this year. We had been doing small groups the same way for seven years. We've been doing it on Wednesday nights. A lot of us were familiar with it, comfortable with it, it felt good, it was going smoothly, but there was a ceiling that we had hit. And so we changed it. We moved our small groups to in homes. And last year, the first part of this year, we had 30% more people involved in small groups than we've ever had before. That ceiling got lifted. And the next ceiling that we have to address is Sunday mornings. We have hit a ceiling in terms of how many people we can love to Jesus, how many people we can give a gift of being a genuine, love-filled, life-filled, Jesus-focused church. We've been doing one service for almost nine years. But on Sunday, September 7th, we're gonna go to two. We're gonna go to 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. It's exciting. Some of you are clapping because you get to sleep in. This is good. You know, it's exciting because of the ability to love more people than Jesus, but it is frustrating because we just got comfortable doing one. Like we just, it's like God, but but I'm so excited that a ceiling is gonna be lifted. It is gonna help us make room for those people. Because those people are us. It's not us and them. It's us. We're all broken, we're all in need every single day of our Jesus. And we will never allow a ceiling to keep us from bringing more people into this family. I'm excited about that. It solves a practical need. If you've been volunteering, especially in kids' areas on Sunday mornings, helping out has always been an either-or decision. Either I'm gonna help out and serve the kids, or I'm gonna be in here. And a lot of us are really honest with ourselves, saying, I need to be in here. I need this. And now we're gonna have the option for the first time ever of saying, I'm gonna help the kids and be in here. I can help at nine and stay for 11. I can I can do the opposite of that. I have that choice. You won't have to do it, but you'll have that choice. But anytime you double what you're doing, it creates some needs. One of the big needs is in terms of serving. All of our teams are gonna need a boost. Every single team. I know in this room there's a lot of us that are helping out on teams, and thank you so much for that. Some of us have never helped on a team before. Some of us helped years ago and didn't have a great experience, maybe. I'll just be upfront and honest. We're we're learning as we go, and we're all a bunch of rookies, really, when it comes to this whole doing a church thing. And so the way teams work now versus two years ago, it's night and day. In fact, in the last six months, one of the biggest efforts we've made is to simplify how our teams work. And now, when you sign up for a team, you get scheduled once or twice a month, depending on the team. You're only put on one team, so you're not getting pulled in several different directions. It's manageable, there's great scheduling software that makes it easy. We didn't have that years ago. So if you did help in years past and it was frustrating, I'm sorry. Our intention was for it always to be easy and never burned people out, but we have we have worked on that. And it's so much better. We knew we had to if we were gonna go to two services. Those of us that that are in here that have never helped before, I just want to encourage you and ask you actually to sign up for a team today. We'll have people at the Connect Desk, it'll take you a few minutes. Specifically, if you've been going here for six months or more and you've yet to help out on a team, I want to ask you to do that. There's so many teams you can be part of. It can be something as simple as standing in the front and shaking people's hands and saying hello. It could be jumping in with the nursery kids, the young kids trying to control my son. Good luck. Please help. He's amazing. It could be helping the coffee team. I mean, there's so many areas. So many areas that you can you can help in. There's definitely one that fits something you're actually really good at. If you've been coming here six months, I'm guessing you like it. Or you're a glutton for punishment, one of those two. And so I want to just want to ask you, do it. Don't wait till September. Do it, do it now or or do it next week, because we're gonna need those teams to be ready. I will tell you this though, if if you feel like, oh, I'm gonna give something up, I'm giving something up if I start helping out, you are not giving something up. You're gonna get more out of your time here by serving on a team than you will ever get just being in this room. You absolutely will. When Megan and I were in college, we'd been going to this church for about a year, and we went one Sunday morning. We were engaged at the time, and we walked out, and I looked at Megan and I said, honey, I'm just not feeling this anymore. She thought I was breaking up with her. And uh, right? She's known for years that she's way out of my league. She's known. She knew from the beginning. But uh, but she knew I was talking about our church. And what I actually said, the words that came out of my mouth after that were, I'm just not getting what I want out of this. And the great thing about church is there's a lot of them, right? So you can go to a church and for a year it's fun and it's new and it's exciting, it's different, so you just like being there, and after a while that wears off, and so you you're not feeling it anymore. So you can just go to a new church and be there for a few months, and it's new, and it's exciting, and it's great, and then you're not feeling that anymore, and you just kind of keep doing it, but there's enough churches to let that happen for a long time. See, as soon as those words came out of my mouth, I'm not getting what I want out of this. God convicted me in as direct of a way as he has ever convicted me about anything. And I heard God speak into my heart. It's very clear, it's very, very clear statement. I don't think very clearly, so I knew it was God. As soon as I said, I'm not getting what I want out of it, God said, What are you putting into it? And I was wrecked. I was like, Oh, come on. I just made this decision to go somewhere else. We just got comfortable with one service. That's how God is. And so Megan and I started helping out. And through that, we made amazing friends, and we started to meet these other couples that were young married couples that ended up mentoring us as we got married, really, really young, and we had people to hang out with and things to do. We started helping out with junior high kids. I did not want to help out with junior high kids. I specifically asked, I want to work with high school students. They said, we're gonna put you with the junior high kids. And a year after that, Megan and I somehow found ourselves voluntarily leading the junior high group. And like, how did we get here? We didn't want to do this in the first place. But it was about a year later that this little junior high girl named Xandra decided to get baptized and asked Megan and I to baptize her. And I will tell you that that moment where we baptized Xandra together, there was no thought in my mind about how much I had given up helping out with those junior high kids. There was no concept of that. When you serve, whether it's in a direct way that someone might ask you to baptize them one day or something great like that, or whether you just play a role behind the scenes that no one might ever notice, every single time you watch a video where 27 high school students give their life to Jesus, you are part of that. Every single time we have a baptism Sunday and people go on with Jesus, that's because of what you're doing. No matter what team you're on. So thank you. We need help on our teams. I'm gonna ask you to do that. And thank you in advance for doing it. Again, it's an opt-in experience. You don't have to. I heard one time in a church setting a uh a pastor say that uh if you were here but you weren't giving or serving, you're dead weight. I know. There's no such thing as dead weight in God's kingdom. None of us will ever be dead weight. And I'll be honest, as an opt-in church, if you genuinely just need to sit here and be and just absorb God's love for a while, that's fine. If that's what you need, that's fine. Just know, in my experience, that God tends to call you out of that stage faster than you think you're ready. It's kind of the whole story of the Bible. Another area that we're gonna need to make a big commitment in is financially. It's giving-wise. And we don't talk about this. It's been over a year since we've talked about finances in this church in a significant way about what's going on here financially. And if you're here for the first time and you're saying, aha, I knew it, I knew it. Church and money, that's not a loaded topic, right? I think the next few minutes will help clear a lot of that up. But I do want to be honest with you, I get nervous talking about money for one really simple reason. It has just been butchered in church culture. It's been blown so many times. I don't want to add to the noise, I don't want to add to all the garbage that's out there about how finances in churches work. I grew up all the time hearing you gotta give to God, you gotta give to God. I never wrote God's name on the check. Didn't know how to deposit money right into God's bank account, I'd be happy to do that. But at the same time, I've experienced that I in my life cannot say, God, I trust you with everything. I give you everything. Except for my money. You didn't clock in, I did. I mean, come on. I can't do that with God. I have to recognize that everything I have comes from him. I have to honor him with everything that I have. And that includes finances. Jesus came to this earth to save us from hell and give us heaven. If you're gonna really simplify it. And yet he talked about money and possessions more than heaven and hell combined. So just think about that for a second. It's crazy. He said, for example, don't store up treasures here on earth where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal, store your treasures in heaven where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be. So Jesus just recognizes that if you want to know what we prioritize, if you want to know where our heart is, we just look at where we spend or don't spend our money. There's another verse. It says, You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don't give reluctantly or in response to pressure, for God loves a person who gives cheerfully. And I want to talk about this for just a second. Because there's some huge, incredible things that are laid out there. Number one, you must each decide. Each, God's saying giving is for everybody. It's something he wants all of us to do. Sometimes it's a choice, am I gonna serve or give? And there are times where financially we might be in such a crisis that that isn't possible. I recognize that. But it really isn't an either-or decision. We're called to do both. He says, each. But here's where it's really cool. He says, you must decide in your heart how much to give. Now I grew up in church culture, and most of the time the church told me how much I was supposed to give. That's not what this says. And this is the Holy Spirit. So it's not my place, it's not this church's place to ever tell you how much you're supposed to give. That is between you and God. It'll always be between you and God. I can say, hey, here's what the need is, but it's between you and Him. It always will be. Don't give reluctantly or in response to pressure. If you feel pressured to give, don't give. If I botch this and communicate this in a way that makes you feel pressured, don't give a dime. God loves a person who gives cheerfully. That's pretty cool. For some of us, we understand that. We've gotten to a place where we can give cheerfully. We look forward to the opportunity we have to give what God's given us because we know what he's doing with it, and we just love being part of his kingdom. I've done a terrible job at investing in Megan and I's future. I hope Liam's really smart, um, and Lily too. But you know, we haven't we haven't done a lot of stocks and mutual funds and all that kind of stuff, and and uh we'll figure that out. But God taught me at a really young age that I needed to invest in his kingdom because I'm a part of his kingdom first. And we've experienced blessings from that in incredible ways. But if you look at that and go, give cheerfully, like I can't imagine giving money and being like, hey, less money in my account. It's exciting, isn't it? I don't do that when I write when I write checks to to the people that I owe money to in bills. I don't go, oh, so blessed to have a mortgage payment. I love it. So nice. Thank you, Bank of America, for your interest rates. It's great. None of us do that. So this concept of giving cheerfully, it can be kind of strange, but but I'll be honest, that it's totally possible for for all of us in this room to give cheerfully. We might just have to overcome a few misconceptions about giving. And I want to talk about three of those and then we'll we'll wrap up. The first misconception that a lot of us struggle with is I can't afford to give. I can't afford to give. Now, Jesus said through teaching, through parables, that it's not about what you give, the amount, it's about your heart in giving. And he highlighted her as this incredible example of giving. She gave two pennies. We really can't afford to give. See, the the danger in this misconception, in this thought, is that when I say I can't afford to give, what I actually say is, when I have more, then I'll give. When I have more money, then I'll give financially. And as a man, I have to look at that and say, okay, if I applied that same mentality to spending time with my kids, if I said, I don't really have time to spend with my kids right now. But when I have more time, then I'll give them my time. And if I say that, 20 years are gonna go by and my kids are gonna move out and they're gonna resent me because I never spent time with them. We're not gonna be close because that time isn't just gonna come. If I say, oh, when when I have more energy, then I'll start to work out, then I'll start to exercise and get in shape. But right now I'm just I'm tired. I don't have the energy to do that. If I say, when I have more energy, then I'll do that important thing, it's never gonna happen. And if I say when I have more money, then I'll give, that's never gonna happen either, because life does not magically make room for important things. We decide to do important things, and life organizes itself around it. That's just what Jesus taught. You reap and then you sow. And if we believe Jesus, he said, give and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full, pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount you get back. And so Jesus says, actually, you can't afford not to give. That might be grammatically incorrect and a double negative. I don't know, but I think it makes sense. That's something that I've experienced. I'm sure if I asked a show of hands, I'm not gonna do that, but if I did, how many of you started to give financially and and God blessed you? You would you would share story after story. We can afford to give. Here's the second misconception. I can't trust the church with my money. Now, this one is rooted in reality, right? Because like I said, I've never written a check to God. Whenever I first started to give consistently, I was in college, I worked at Chili's. Anyone like chilies? Yeah, yeah, that's actually about the response I expected. It's a it's okay. I'm not offended. I didn't start Chili's. I remember one time I had a guy that came to my table and he ordered a steak, and uh then he complained that it wasn't good, and I just remember as his waiter being like, Well, you're at Chili's. Like, there's there's a longhorn not 20 feet away, and that's kind of what they do. We have it on the menu, it's not our thing, but you know. Just to get some chicken fingers. Okay, so I was in Chili's, I was waiting tables, and uh and I got this job at Chili's. I've worked all through through high school whenever you know I wasn't uh too busy with school or sports or whatever. I worked during the summers and I got this job because I needed money. I bought my wife's engagement ring my first two months into college, and she was still in high school, and I never told her dad that or anything, but but I bought that engagement ring and I was like, I should probably get a job now so I can pay for this thing. And uh started working at Chili's, and I loved it because I got tips and I kind of enjoyed it. But you know, Chili's is this kind of restaurant where it's not like you're juggling fire or entertaining your tables. There's only so much you can do to people don't come to Chili's to spend big. So you just have to work really hard. But God started to bless it, and I started to give, and I would fold 10% of my tips in half every night, and know that whenever I took that cash out of my wallet, that the folded stuff belonged to God and what wasn't there belonged to me. So I made that a practice and grew to really enjoy giving and started giving that to the church we were at. And that summer I went back home to visit my family. They lived several hours away, and I spent the whole summer there, transferred to that Chili's and And again, started to give to their church because that's where I was that summer. And their church, this huge church. I love it. I just have to say this as a preface. I love this church. Every time I go back and visit, God moves and works there in huge ways. But they had this giving campaign going on at the time. And it was about building this big athletic complex. This is a very large church, 10 plus thousand people, and they wanted to build this incredible state-of-the-art athletic complex. And the vision was we're going to have all these kids in this gym all the time, playing basketball, working out. These kids from the community are going to come in here and they're going to play and they're going to be safe and they're going to have fun. And while they're here, they're going to hear about Jesus. And you may not believe this by looking at me, but I'm an incredibly average basketball player, and I love playing basketball. I love telling kids about Jesus. Those two things I'm passionate about. And so I got excited about this vision. And I gave that summer, and it may be a few months after that summer, kind of coming back and visiting, over $500 to that cause as a college student. I was so excited about that cause. I came back the following summer, and my brother said, Hey, let's go play basketball at the new church gym. They just finished building it. And I got excited because I was a donor. I hadn't received any letters of thanks, but I knew I was a donor. Pulled up to the gym. My name was not on the front of the building. I was a little, I guess someone gave more than 500, whatever. Maybe my name was carved on a brick somewhere. I don't know. But we walked in, had our basketball clothes on, had a ball, and we started to step on the court, and this woman came and stopped us and asked us, Are you members here? And I said, Yeah, we're we're members here. We go to church here. We we love this church. And she said, Oh no, I'm sorry for the confusion. Um, do you have a gym membership here? And I remember stopping in my tracks and going, Well, no, but check all the bricks because my name might be on one. I did. In reality, my heart broke because I just realized I got lied to. And maybe I wasn't there and privy to some conversations. Maybe the funding ran short and they had to come up with a plan B to fund what they were doing, and that happened to be a membership, but that's not the vision that I was I was given. I asked this lady, hey, I thought this was about a place where kids could come. And she said, Oh yeah, a couple times each week we open the gym up for a few hours for kids in the community, and it's awesome. But day to day you have to have a membership. So I asked her, well, how much does it cost for us to just play today? And she said, 20 bucks. And I remember I gave that $500 joyfully. And I gave that $20 as begrudgingly as I have ever given money in my life. And here's what's interesting, though. I don't regret that $500 that I gave. That was between me and God. And he blessed me for it. I made more money that summer after giving that away than I had ever made in the summer before. The hardest thing when I was working part-time was just to get shifts. You would get scheduled two or three times a week and you needed more than that, but for some reason that summer they were shorthanded, and I would get scheduled 11 days in a row with one day off, and I loved it because I got to work so much more and I got to pay off Megan's ring and all kinds of things. So I don't regret that $500. That was between me and God. What they did with it, that was between them and God. But I share that story not to lessen your trust and solidify this misconception. I share that story because it deeply affected me. And it has greatly influenced the way that I believe finances should work in a church. So what happens in church culture, really simply, is when a church starts to grow, and when a church gets big, or when a church feels like it's supposed to grow, the church as an organization decides to create a model for how they're gonna do church. Just like if you have a business, you decide, okay, what's the model? How are we gonna do this? And oftentimes, churches decide a very expensive model. They decide this is how we're gonna do it, and it's it's a really expensive way to do it. Now, there is nothing wrong with giving extravagantly to God. There was a woman that broke this incredibly expensive perfume over Jesus' feet, and people got miffed that they were wasting money, and Jesus said, She's not wasting a dime. I'm worth it. There is nothing wrong with spending big in church for God. There's nothing wrong with that. But what I do have an issue with is when a church creates this really expensive model and says, hey, it's your spiritual duty to pay for this really expensive model for doing church that we've created. And so what we want to do is create the most affordable way to do this that we can while still doing it excellently, because I do believe God deserves excellence. We want to create the least expensive way possible to do that and then ask you to support it. So let me just give you some specifics. We recently started working with a church accountant that specializes in nonprofits and in churches. He's very experienced. And we gave him a tour, we walked him around here, and he said, Hey, you know, it's just really cool because I have a lot of experience with this. And the average church your size, doing what you do, would have a staff of 20 to 30 full-time employees. We have five. And those five people work extremely hard. Extremely hard. They're incredible. So thank you to Nathan and Sheila and Brian and Jacob. I'm the fifth one, I'm not gonna thank myself. Um thank you guys. Our staff team is is amazing, but obviously they're not enough to do it. That's why we have so many incredible volunteers. So just to drive it a little further home, he kept talking. He said, you know, the average church your size that's doing things at the level you're doing them would spend around $3 million a year annually. Now I know that seems crazy to you. I love that. And that would have seemed crazy to me, too. Uh, I have seen the power bill here. Um, but you know, again, there's nothing wrong with spending extravagantly for God at all. There's really nothing wrong with that. It's just not how we want to do things here. So far this year, we are on track to spend less than $850,000 as a church. We kind of mess up the average a little bit. And we do that by in several different ways. We we don't have to have the latest and greatest of everything. We try really hard to keep what we have working. You know, Brian Van Dyne, he's one of our one of our staff, and he's in charge of this building. Brian, I love him, I feel for him sometimes because in the wintertime he's wearing coats because we don't keep the AC and the heat on in here all the time. We keep it on the office, but Brian has to venture out to fix things. In the summertime, he's wearing shorts and just sweating. And he makes this joke that if he ever finds out he has one day left to live, he's gonna come here and get on the internet because it's gonna make it feel like the longest day in the world. We have we have the slow, I don't even, I don't know how our internet's as slow as it is. And we could pay Comcast $13,000 to run cable here. So we have the latest and greatest internet, but we just don't feel like that's that important. We can just learn to manage like we would do in our homes, in our families. That's the way we're always gonna operate as a church. The average is three million, and we're gonna spend less than 850,000. That's just how it's gonna be. That's what we think is important. I hope that that helps with that misconception. The third one, I don't give because it isn't needed. You might come here and you see this incredible facility, and we're not passing a plate, and we're not talking about money all the time. And it's really easy to be here and see that and think, oh, well, it's paid for. It's it's not needed. And that's not accurate. There are big needs. We need a new roof. It's $300,000 for a new roof here. We need that. And we'll deal with it until it happens. We'll put buckets out when it rains. We've gotten pretty good at putting buckets out. We have so many buckets. If you have buckets, bring them here that you're not using because we're not gonna pass the buckets around for giving, we're just gonna put them out when it rains. That's what we that's what we use buckets for. We'll manage, we'll deal. We'll get there. But there are needs. And see, we have kind of an interesting story financially. And Steve and Susan Craig started this church. They had abnormal resources. God had blessed a business they had and they sold it. It was a big business. And they used that money. They spent millions and millions of dollars to start this church. And that's amazing. That really is. That's worth it. And for years, when this church wasn't anywhere close to being able to support the costs here financially, they just wrote a check every month to cover the costs. I've never seen anything like it. See, that's what it took to get this place started. But that's not what's gonna see it through. It's not. The uh there's a story in 1 Chronicles chapter 29. I really encourage you to read it. When you get home today, it's the very first part of that chapter in the Bible. You can pull it up on your phone while you're waiting for for food and all that. And it's the story of King David starting the temple. I shared this back in December. King David wanted to start this temple for God, this extravagant, beautiful temple. And he gave everything he had out of his personal finances. He had abnormal resources and he gave it all, and the church got started. The temple got started. But his abnormal, extravagant finances weren't enough. And so he went to the people of Israel, and the people of Israel came together collectively, and they outgave King David collectively. And the temple was built and it stood for centuries. We've had our King David moment as a church. Stephen Susan gave millions, they gave everything they had, they only had enough left to start a new business, to have an income for themselves. Think about that. We've had our King David moment. We've yet to have our people of Israel moment financially. But I know it's coming. Because if you're like me, you you understand how important the vision of this church is. You understand how unique this place is. And we're gonna see it through. Now the good news is we're not in big trouble. Right now, we average a little under $60,000 a month in giving. And so you can kind of do the math and hear that less than $850,000 number. Understand that we're we're like a family spending what we make. We're not spending it on stuff, we're spending it on the bare minimum. That's why we have that $850,000 instead of that $3 million number. Really, where we should be right now as a church is in the $80,000 to $85,000 a month range. That's where we should be. And that may seem like a crazy big jump, right? $25,000. But that's that's not $25,000, that's not with this size group of people. That if every single one of us in the room this morning gave an extra $25 a month, that would be that. See, King David had abnormal resources, but the people of Israel had abnormal numbers. And collectively they were able to do it. Now use that as an illustration of just how simple it is when this size of a group of people come together and believe in something and work toward it. And again, your arms not being twisted. I want to ask this morning, just like I asked you to sign up and be part of a team to help get help us get ready. I want to ask you to give. For some of us, we've never given before. Maybe you've felt like you can't trust the church. Maybe you felt like you can't afford it. I'll tell you, if you've grown up in church, you hear 10%, 10%, 10%, 10%. That's a good number. That's what my wife and I give. Well, you didn't start there though. You don't have to give 10%. You can give 1%. Maybe it's two, maybe it's five. That's between you and God. No one will ever stand up here and tell you how much to give. It is between you and God. But but I do think there's something important about that verse again. You must each decide in your heart how much to give, to give cheerfully. There's something important about a percentage. Because when I give God a percentage of what I have, I'm recognizing that it's from Him. And I'm inviting Him into my finances and He blesses it. So this morning I just want to ask very simply for you to pray about a percentage. Are you open to God challenging you? Don't feel a tinge of guilt or pressure. There's none. But a percentage, is that 1%? Is it 10%? I don't know. It's between you and him. But pray about a percentage and commit to consistently giving your percentage. What we're going to start doing from now on so that we never have mornings where I talk. I don't enjoy talking this long. You may think I do. I kind of do actually. It's fun. But about every three months, we're going to have about five minutes that we're just going to spend saying, hey, here's where we're at, here's where we're going. This is where we need to get to. We're just going to take five minutes every three months and just catch all of us up. But it's been so long since we've talked about this that this morning I thought it was important. For us to pray about a percentage for us to say, and I just be honest with you, this is what it really is for me. His hands has changed my life. This is where I fell in love with Jesus. And Steve and Susan are like my spiritual mom and dad, and I love them with all my heart. And I just don't have it in me to enjoy what they gave and what they started and not commit to see it through. Just don't have that. There are thousands of people, thousands upon thousands of people that need Jesus. And the only way they're gonna they're gonna get Jesus is to be loved to Jesus. And that happens here every week. They need it, we have it, let's share it, let's see it through. We haven't done this in a while, and I think every once in a while it's important. Uh we are gonna just be done this morning and dismiss so we can all head out and have a great day together. Make those commitments that's between you and God, jump on a team, commit to that giving. We'll talk here in a few weeks about where we're at and what the result of that has been. I want to thank you in advance for doing it because I know I know we're going to. We're family. I know we're gonna do this. We're just getting started. But let's do it hands in the pile as we finish up this morning. If uh if you're new, this will be the weirdest thing we've done today, other than a guy talking for like, what, like an hour? I'm really sorry. But uh everyone, we started, we used to do this all the time. Now we only save it for like really important moments, and it's just us doing like a sports team does, putting your hand in a pile and going, oh, and we yelled Jesus on three, but it's us saying we're on the same team, we're in this together, and we're gonna see this thing through. We're gonna see this thing through, and the best is yet to come. I can't wait for September 7th. The thought of twice as many people being able to experience that love. I can't wait to get there. I can't wait for 10 years from now. I have no idea what that's gonna look like. I can't wait. Let's stand up, let's find a pile, some friends, and let's yell Jesus on three. All right, here we go.

Sorry.

A little rusty. Oh one, two, three, Jesus.