The Kingdom: What is the Gospel?

Hi family. How are you?

Good.

I'm so excited to be home. Let me see if I remember how to do this. It's been a minute. I got a wonderful message from someone in our congregation that was like, "Hey, you haven't been here for a few weeks. I hope everything's okay." I was like, "I'm great. I've been in Israel." It's great in Israel. Let me just say this. We are at a unique time in the land of Israel in that the country is wide open as far as there's just no one there. If you ever wanted to go to Israel and you're on the fence about it, you need to come in May because for the next year it's going to be this slow recovery process.

We went, like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, there was no one there. Usually it's shoulder to shoulder and the lines are so long to see anything. There was no one there, it was a ghost town. The St. Anne's Cathedral, which has got these incredible acoustics and people go into it to sing. Usually you sing and then there's groups lined up on all the benches that are just waiting for their turn. So you have to sing and then run out, and sing and run out, and sing and run. There was not another human in the building. We were able to just sit in it, which was... if we hadn't been so pressed for time we'd had a full-blown worship set, because it's powerful in there. It's powerful.

I'm just saying we had this opportunity to experience the land of Israel in a way that is just different than most other times right now, and different in a good way. I really want to invite you to that. If you've thought about going, May is the trip to go to Israel. In another year this window will be, it'll be back to normal. Which on one way that's good. I have said multiple times, I'm grieving for Israel right now because there's no one here, but it was great for us. It was great for us. Here's another thing I'd like to say just real quick before we get rolling. I'm praying for the persecuted church today. Right out here if you go out and take a right next to the prayer room, Anita Andres is there with a table that has several pieces of information about the persecuted church.

One of the things that she has there is a handout with 10 ways that you can pray for the persecuted church, which actually be really useful. Because I know a lot of us are like, "Yeah, I don't like that for them. But I don't know exactly what to do or how to pray. This will be a way to help guide your prayers on behalf of the persecuted church. That's there and available to you for free. We are going to tie down our kingdom series today. I'm excited about this when we're talking about what is the gospel. If there was ever for me a message that is a life message for me, this is it, and here's why.

I've had an incredible privilege to be connected to some tremendous evangelists. People who just are supernaturally empowered to bring people to Christ and everywhere they go it seems like people are repenting. I'm like, "Gosh." Then I try it and people are like, "Okay, first of all, that was weird. Secondly, don't ever do that to me again." Here's the thing. Nobody's off the hook about sharing your faith. I mean, that's not the same as evangelism. Sharing your faith, that should be the most natural part of who we are. I know what's important to you based on what you talk about. You're going to know that I'm married. You're going to know that I have kids. Why, because those relationships are important to me. I'm going to talk about them. I'm going to find ways to factor those into the conversations that we have.

My relationship with the Lord is just an important part of me, and it's an important part for you as well. Talking about our faith is different than evangelism. Evangelism is that closer on that moment of somebody saying yes to Jesus for the first time, and God makes people for that purpose, he does. There are people that are so good at it and they make the rest of us envious. I get frustrated with people like that because I'm like, "Dang it, I want to be the closer." I'm not the closer. I used to feel guilty about that for years. I used to feel guilty about that. But then I started doing some study on the actual gospel and that set me free a little bit. I hear people say to me, "You need to preach the gospel more," by which they mean you need to tell people how to get saved.

Here's the deal. People need to know how to get saved, I'm not diminishing that, but that's not the gospel. That's like, if the gospel was a house, salvation is the front porch. You're not even in the house yet. You're at the house, you stepped onto the front porch. That's good, but you're not in the house yet. The gospel is the house, the gospel is this big thing. What I want to do is step back and look at the gospel and then maybe ratchet it down into some implications for how we frame our Christian conversation in our life and in our community and see if there's not some places for us to apply it. The Greek word [Greek], not new, it means good news. So gospel means good news. They're not just synonymous, it's the same, means good news.

It's not uniquely a Christian term. I think for a lot of us we treat the Bible as if it was written in a bubble, in a vacuum. But real people in a real place at a real time wrote it. The problem is, if we don't understand the context around it, then what we do is we take the Bible out of context, and nobody likes to be taken out of context. Nobody likes to be taken out of context, and the Bible doesn't like it either. The Bible doesn't do well when it's taken out of its context because we then start trying to make it say what we want it to say rather than what it was actually intended to say. So good scholarship, good research, good Bible study, demands that we get into the context and see what's going on around, what's being written, so we can understand it better.

Authorial intent, that is the goal of any research. We want to get to authorial intent, but that's especially true with the Bible and context matters! Here's where it comes from. A lot of the Caesars sent out a [Greek], a messenger with the good news, the [Greek], of a new reign from Rome. Like, "We have really good news, Augustus sucked, but this guy is awesome. Titus is amazing. Titus was terrible but Nero's going to change everything. If you thought Nero was bad, wait for Domitian. Good news we have a new ruler. Hey, yay, another person to pay taxes to." How's that good news. But that was their good news of a new reign in Rome. The gods have shown up in man form and he is Caesar.

Zeus was called the giver of good news, the [Greek], the gospel and Hermes was called the bringer of good news. Zeus gave the message, Hermes spoke the message. If you remember when Paul and Barnabas go to Lystra and they say, "The gods are among us." They said Barnabas was Zeus and Paul was Hermes. Why? Because he was the speaker. He was the bringer of good news, the gospel. This shows up all over. Now, it has a broader use of any giver of good news, so the person can be called a [Greek], or the message itself, the gospel itself, can be a [Greek]. That's important because you, at the end of the day, are the gospel. You are the gospel in how you live. You're the messenger.

Now there's this place called Priene. We go to Priene when we go to Turkey, it's an awesome sight and it gives you such insight into the cultural context of what Christianity was up against in the ancient world. There were two tablets found there dated to 9BC and the inscription on it, the title of it, was called The Emperor's Gospel. It's what it was called. They're actually on display at the Berlin Museum today. If you're interested you could just hop over there and see it after church or something. So the first tablet contains a proposal from a guy by the name of Paullus Fabius Maximus, cool name. For those of you with child, I offer for you Fabius Maximus. That would be rad. The kid would either be really, really tough or get beat up every day. Just, I don't know.

This guy, Paullus Fabius Maximus proposed to the assembly, the government of Asia, which is a subset of Asia Minor. So Asia Minor is the whole region that is now today Turkey. Asia was just the western section. That the provincial calendar, the calendar that that area goes by, should be reorganized to begin with the new year on September 23rd, because that was the birthday of Augustus. The second tablet records the response of the assembly, and here's what it says, "Since providence, which has ordered all things is deeply interested in our life." By the way, just a pet peeve of mine. I've been off for a while so I got a lot of offloading to do. I don't like it when people talk about the universe. It's not the universe, it's God.

"We just send these out, send it out to the universe." When we're talking about providence, "Since providence, which is deeply invested our life. No, Since the universe, which really cares about our life." No, it's God, it's God. Call it what it is. Bible things by Bible names, let's stick there. Call it what it is. "We're manifesting to the universe." Nope, praying to God. It's what it is. Call it what it is. "What of putting good vibes out?" Great. Put good vibes out to God because that's who it is. God is not the creation, God is this creator that stands outside of it, and that's actually really, really important. "Which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life has said in most perfect order by giving us Augustus. Whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a savior, the same word that's used to describe Jesus as savior.

"Both for us and for our descendant that he might end war." Now here's a great question. Did Augustus end war? Negatory good buddy. "And arrange all things. Since he, Caesar, by his appearance," which is an epiphany. Which if you've been in a high church tradition growing up you know that that's exactly what we celebrated at Christmas service, the epiphany of Christ. "Excelled even our expectations surpassing all previous benefactors and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he's done." Augustus is something. Not only was he way better than anybody else, but there's nobody else in the future that's ever going to measure up. That's a significant statement to make because you know how the Caesars all try to, "Well, I know they did this, but I'm better." They all do that, right? They're like, "No, Augusts forever."

"Not leaving posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done. Since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news," the [Greek], the gospel. "For the world that came by reason of him." Who reasoned the world into existence? Augustus. That's the gospel. When we read in the days of Caesar Augustus in the Bible, it's just one sentence, but it's loaded. Similar inscriptions to this have also been found in Apemayum, Dorilam, Imunaum, and Mayoniom which I say that because this wasn't an isolated incident. This was the general consensus of how they viewed it. Now the great question is, did they actually believe that or were they just saying it? Depends on where you are, quite frankly, but this is the message. This is the gospel that was going forward.

On the surface, the description of Jesus and the description of the emperor seem to be running in parallel tracks. They're both the divine son of God. They bring peace and prosperity. They bring fullness of life. They bring the remission of sins and their arrival is called a gospel, a good news. The reason why that matters is because you and I want to go out into the world and try to prove that Jesus was God that he forgave sins... but if we had showed up in the Roman world in the first century and said, "Let me tell you about Jesus. He's the divine son of God and he comes with the gospel of good news. He brings peace and prosperity and the fullness of life through the remission of sins." They would have been like, "Fantastic. We already that through Augustus. We don't need your Jesus."

By the way, in light of what they were up against, their message actually moved in and took over. Maybe we ought to pay attention. Maybe we ought to pay attention to what they actually lived out because their Christianity worked. On the surface it looked like the same message, but it's the deeds that ran perpendicular to the Roman empire. It's the deeds that hit the crossroads. For the first readers of the gospel, the word itself is not the revolution. That it's tied to the kingdom of God is what makes this so incredible. Now, we were just in Israel and we went and hung out in the Galilee, like you do. Literally Israel is this amazing place in that you can take a shovel and go out on any hillside and just start digging and unearth civilization. This is true.

It's really interesting because I can't even tell you how many of the archeological sites that we know today were found completely by accident. It was like, "Whoops, we wanted to expand our offices." This happens at Betshan. They wanted to expand the office of one of the phone companies' offices and they dug and they uncovered an arena, a massive arena. They didn't even know it was there. We went to Caesarea Philippi brand new dig there just less than a year old, actually less than a year old. We went to go and look at it and I can tell you it was so moving to me... the dig itself isn't so stunning to look at, but the story that it tells is profound. I brought groups there for almost 10 years and we stood right on top of it. Nobody knew it was there.

They found it because there was a retaining wall that started to sag in a little bit and they wanted to support it so it wouldn't collapse. They were like, "Hey, we better poke around here a little bit, make sure we're not hurting anything," and they unearthed this incredible dig. Of course this is the way Israel is. So let's say that you and I were amateur archeologists and we decide to go out and just dig around in Israel and see what we can find and we unearth a synagogue. We're like, "Oh my gosh. So cool." We go into the back office of the synagogue and we find the filing cabinet. We open up the filing cabinet and we find this whole drawer of old bulletins, synagogue bulletins. Because churches keep that stuff, right? They keep that stuff.

I'll bet the at the church I grew up in still has the bulletin from the Sunday we moved there in 1983 somewhere in a filing cabinet with the really fancy cursive typewriter font, remember that? Let's say we pull out the drawer and we're thumbing through bulletins and we pull out one that says, John the Baptist was there, And we're like, “woah, John the Baptist preached here? What was his message?" We look at what his message was. Here's what Matthew chapter three versus one and two says, "In those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, 'Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.'" This was his message. His message wasn't, "Here's how you get saved." His message was, the kingdom of heaven is near.

Now, that isn't near. We almost think like, we open the door and the kingdom of heaven is just on the other side. It's so close we're almost there. It's about ready to cut loose. That's not what near means. The same word that's used here for near is used in the book of Isaiah when he says, "I drew near to the prophetess and she conceived and bore a son." This near means so intimately present that it can't be any more close or real than it is. That was his message. Now, let's say we keep thumbing through the filing cabinet and we pull out another one and we find that they had this Jesus of Nazareth guy. Maybe you've heard of him. They had him show up at the synagogue and he preached. I wonder what his message would be. Do you know that right after he's baptized, he gets driven out into the desert for the temptation. Then right after that, he starts his ministry.

We know what his message was. It's such an incredible find that we have this bulletin, right? Matthew chapter four verse 17. Here's what it says. This is right after the temptation. "From that time on Jesus began to preach repent for the kingdom of heaven is near." Sound familiar? Jesus had these 12 guys that kept following him around, and so this synagogue had these guest speakers coming in. They're like, they didn't want to pay for a real preacher, just having new guest speakers coming in all the time. Each one of the 12 apostles that Jesus sends out in Matthew chapter 10, they come in. Do you know that he gave them specific instructions about what to preach when he sent them out? You know what it was? Matthew chapter 10 verse seven. Here's what it says. "As you go preach this message. The kingdom of heaven is near."

Same near, by the way, same word. In Luke chapter 10, Jesus sends out 72 people, disciples and he tells them what to preach too. He tells them in Luke chapter 10 verse nine. Here's what it says, "Heal the sick and tell them the kingdom of God is near you." This is not a very interesting sermon series. "You guys won't talk about anything else." Because maybe the kingdom is the point. Maybe the good news isn't how to evacuate this planet. But the good news is that God saw our condition and he showed up. The good news is, he's not asking you to have it all figured out. He just wants you to partner with him to help restore what sin and broke so that this world can experience the redemption of all things, all things. You know what the Greek word all things means? All things. There's nothing eliminated from God's desire to redeem it. Nothing and no one.

After Jesus was crucified he rose from the dead, and then he has 40 days with his guys. He spends 40 days talking with them, getting them ready to be without him, right? If you had 40, like this is it. This is your last chance to invest in them. What would you talk about? What would Jesus find so compelling to talk about? Acts chapter one verse three. Here's what it says. "After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of 40 days and spoke about the kingdom of God." Boring. "Talk about something else. Let's be interesting." Maybe we'll talk about the kingdom of God like this, kingdom of God. Because the message ain't changing, right? The message is the same. The message is what it is.

Jesus' passion wasn't for us to figure out how to get out of here, but how to bring that here. That was his passion. Yes we're in a broken world and it will be broken until the day Jesus comes back. It will be. But from now until then, our role is to make this as much like heaven as it can be. Yes, we're dealing with our own brokenness and it's not going to be completely fixed this side of glory. I'm looking forward to heaven when my wife can stop telling me all the things I did wrong. I'm not bitter. I guess I know what I'm talking about in counseling this week. We're all looking forward to heaven when there's a resolution of the kingdoms. But for right now we're living in this space where we have a firmly planted in the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world, and we got to figure out how to live in that tension.

The kingdom God, it's here, it's here, and it's now. Jesus ascends to heaven and the disciples start preaching in Jerusalem, but they won't go anywhere. Everybody talks about the great missional movement of the book of Acts. There's no great missional movement in the book of Acts. No there isn't. There's persecution. They weren't like, "We have this vision for the world to know." Nope. They got kicked out of Jerusalem. That's what happened. But the thing is everywhere they went they started talking about Jesus. I wonder what their message was. In Acts chapter eight and verse 12 we see the message that Philip, who was one of the disciples, starts talking about. He says, "When they believed Philip, he preached the good news of the kingdom of God in the name of Jesus Christ and they were baptized both men and women."

These guys are one trick ponies, they have one message and they just keep talking about it over and over and over again. Because the goal of God's kingdom, the goal of making God more and more present in this world, is to make much of him not to be interesting. We just need to make much of him because he's worthy. Now, one other guy that we probably need to deal with and that's Paul. Kind of a big deal, wrote over half the New Testament. Towards the end of his ministry in Acts chapter 28, he spends two years in prison in Rome. Here's what it says. 28 versus 30 and 31, here's what it says. "He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance."

That's his message. That's a boring sermon series. These guys all talk about the same thing over and over and over. They talk about the same thing. It's the kingdom of God. It's about his rule and his reign now. What that means is it's not about my orthodoxy, it's not about my systematic theology. It's about how I live subjected to the king. We don't like subjection. I'm not talking about abusive subjection. I'm talking about submitting to the authority of God in our life. That we would allow the king to king and that we would follow him. When we do, we give off a certain kind of a stench as a group. Let me set this up for you. We have four kids, two girls on the outside and boys in the middle. When our oldest son turned 13 he decided to have a party with seven of his 13-year-old friends.

I made a deal with them. I said, "Guys, you can stay up as late as you want just don't go outside. Destroy the house. I don't care, we'll fix it, but don't go outside." So my wife and I got a big box fan and locked our bedroom door and went to bed not knowing what we would discover in the morning. I walked out in the morning. The second thing I noticed was... so we had a couch that had a walkway behind it and there was a kid literally sleeping bent over the back of the couch like this. I was like, "How is it even possible?" But the first thing I noticed was the 13-year-old boy funk that emanated from that living room. It took a week to get it out. I would have welcomed locker room smell. It is a stench that they give off. Listen, when you and I act like the kingdom of God, we give off a stench. The Bible calls it the sweet-smelling aroma in God's nostrils.

The kingdom isn't just about living within the box. The kingdom is the ethos of us. It's the vibe of us. When we come off staunch, and stoic, and legalistic, and fundamentalist, we give people a certain picture about what our God's like. Here's the thing I believe in truth. I believe truth is important. I just don't think we should lead with it. I think we should lead with compassion, then people hear our truth. But when you lead with truth, people aren't interested in. It doesn't mean isn't important, it just doesn't change the world, love does. That's what Jesus said, "By this will all men know that you're my disciples by your love for one another." That's what Jesus said. We hear that and we're like, "Yeah, that's true, and this is true, and this is true, and this is true."

We get so ruptured down into truth that we miss compassion, we miss grace, we miss love. Lead with that. That should be the ethos that we give off. The stench of the church should be compassion, then your truth sits in its proper place and people can hear it. It doesn't diminish truth, it sets it in its proper context. The ethos matters and here's why. Jesus, in Luke 17, has a conversation with the Pharisees. Here's what he said. He's being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed." It's not like there's going to be this military-like overthrowing of the government. "Nor will they say, 'Look, here it is or there,' for behold the kingdom of God is in the midst of you." What he means here is, the kingdom of God, it's the ethos of you.

We've talked about this before, but all of us get painted with the same brush. Whether that's fair or unfair we all get painted with the same brush. Oh, you call yourself a Christian or, oh you go to Southeast. Oh, that means this brush. We all get painted with the same brush. What we have to do is as a community we have to make sure that we're living consistent with the values that the kingdom is supposed to be driven by, because that's the stench we give off. When we give off a good stink, that's funny, we honor God. That's stinking honor. When we don't, we still give off a stink, it's just not a stink that honors God. That's the problem is that we have to figure out how to give off a stink that honors the Lord.

You don't get to do it individually because it's not about you individually. It's about those of us that call ourself residents in the kingdom together. I know that that's a really hard mindset for us to understand as Westerners because we value independence. But the reality is you don't get to be the kingdom of God by yourself or the kingdom in the community. It's in the midst of all y'all. The you there is plural. It's in the midst of all of us together. So you can have whatever belief system you want to. But if you stand in opposition to the community you're a part of, it's a problem, it's a problem. Because you don't give off the right stink.

I have some implications for us and I want to take some extra time in the implications this morning to make sure that we land this plane well. Implication number one is this, discipleship must be more than teaching. It is the pursuit of our God-given purpose which can be fully realized in this life. In other words, in as much as it can be fully realized in this life. This is important because, again, we're not going to hit perfection in this world. We're not. Perfection's not the objective anyway, but we're not going to hit perfection in this world. But discipleship cannot be just teaching. It's you investing in my life and me investing in your life in a way that brings about the God-given potential that's in each of us. Because when we were conceived God put a piece of his image in our life to be displayed to the world. As a community we need to call that out of one another.

Here's the thing. What we want to do is we want to say, "Well, I'll tell you what we'll do is we'll eliminate weakness. So anytime that there's a sin we'll call that out." Here's the deal. I don't need you to tell me I'm a sinner, I already know that. Furthermore, if you want to list the sins that I've done, I'll give you 100 more you don't even know about. Because I know what's going on in here. I know the dark parts that nobody knows about. What we don't see in ourselves that we need people for is the potential that we have, the things that God's doing in our life, the places where God's at work in us that we just don't see it in ourself. But somebody else can see it and call it out, that's discipleship. Got to do it in community, it's not just teaching. Doesn't invalidate teaching, but teaching has to take its proper seat at the table. Discipleship is about helping each of us fully realize our God-given potential.

Number two, we do not get to decide by ourselves what it looks like to live out the kingdom of God. That decision must be made in community. This is called binding and loosing and it's a very Jewish concept. Jesus, didn't come up with it. Remember when Jesus is at Caesarea Philippi he says to Peter, he says, "Whatever you bind in earth be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth be loosed in heaven." Binding in loosing is a common practice. What it is a community coming together and figuring out how are we going to actually execute on the guidelines God gives us for life? Because some of them are real clear. Some of them are actually hard. It's hard to know how to live it out. So as a community, we decide, this is how we're going to execute on this. You don't get to do it in a vacuum. You be like, "Well, I don't like what our community says, so I'm going to do it my own way." Don't get to do that.

It's not how community works. "Well, I don't like that." Okay. You don't have to like it. But what we do have to do is fight for the understanding of one another, which by the way is what we like to call emotionally healthy rather than... because here's what we do in our culture. Right now, especially, it's so polarized that every time somebody says something we're nitpicking every flaw in it. Which does two things. Number one, I will never value your mind or what you have to offer. Number two, I'm going to have to twist the words that I hear you use in order to fit my preconceived idea of what you're saying because I don't want to just fight to understand it. You can never be understood correctly when I'm doing that. That's really, really hard. In the kingdom it shouldn't work that way. As a community we come together and try to understand one another.

Don't assume the worst, you don't have to assume the best either. What you want to do is sit down and have a conversation and say, "Help me understand what you meant by that." That's called maturity. The only thing that keeps us from maturing is places where we're emotionally stunted. That's called brokenness, and there's a great place for that. We have a phenomenal counseling center. They're amazing to help people with that. They're amazing to help people with that. I go twice a week. You guys know I've been on a counseling journey for a long time and people are like, "How do you talk about that?" I'm like, "Why wouldn't I talk about it?" "People will think you don't have it all together." Who doesn't have it all together and has two thumbs? This guy. I don't have it all together. I don't, I'm trying. I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to heal, I'm trying to get through all that stuff, but it's a journey, right?

But I'm actively working on it. Why? Because your voice matters. Because my wife's voice matters, and because I want to have best marriage that we can have with one another and my brokenness is getting in the way of that. What we do too many times in our relationship is going, "Well your brokenness is getting in the way of that." True. But when two people in a relationship are pointing the finger at each other and going, "You do this, you do this, you do this. Well, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this." Both people are right and nobody changes. Here's why, because nobody's going, "I do this and I'm going to take responsibility for that and work on it." That's what maturity. We ought to get good at relational maturity. We ought to be good at it and work on it. It doesn't mean we're not going to have hiccups. It means we're going to work towards understanding.

Kingdom of God decisions, how we live out the kingdom in our community, those decisions aren't made by one person, they're made by community. Number three, the invitation of the gospel isn't just about salvation. It's an invitation to a new way of understanding how to live life in this world here and now. Yes it's about some glad morning and I am so excited for heaven. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to not be broken anymore. I'm so excited that my wife won't look at me and go, "You did that wrong," anymore in heaven. She might try, but I'd be like, "I'm in heaven so I can't be more righter than I am now." She's not bad at it. I just am wrong that often. She's never out of bounds when she says it, she's right dang it.

It's one of those things. By the way, the invitation of the gospel it is about that day, but it's not just about that day. It's about the here and now. I don't need a God for some glad morning only, I need a God who shows up today. I need a God who has strength for living today. I need a God who helps me understand and filter the complexities of this world today, because the world isn't getting simpler. Number four, therefore our testimony is not about deliverance from sin, it's about the goodness and faithful generosity of our God. Do you remember Sunday night church? Remember when we used to do that. My dad was a preacher. He had to preach two services on Sunday morning and then Sunday night and Wednesday night. He had to have a sermon for Sunday morning, a sermon for Sunday night, and a sermon for Wednesday every week. Different.

He was only allowed to miss two weeks a year. That's 150 sermons a year. How do you preach at any depth when you have to preach that often? Do you know what I'm saying? It's impossible to spend the time that you need studying because you don't have it. You don't have it. So every once in a while when dad was tired or whatever they would have what we called testimony night. Remember testimony night? Testimony night it always started off simple enough, but then it got to the one, the testimony of testimonies, that was all about whatever, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, whatever. "I've killed 87,000 people. I did hard time in the clink. The clink." Whatever, that testimony. It seems like the bigger the sin the more we were like, "Oh, that's awful." Which for me growing up in the church was like, I don't have, that's not my story. I don't see God working in my life, because my life was super boring.

Here's my testimony. My parents are still married. They're 80,000 years old. I don't know how old they are. My parents have been married longer than I've been alive, which if you think about it is a good thing, especially because I'm the youngest. We had devotions in the morning and we went to church every Sunday and life was painfully boring. I tried to be dumb and do my own thing, I was never any good at it. I've never known my life without God in it, and it's been ridiculously boring and uneventful. Nobody wants that testimony, but it's the testimony everybody wants their kids to have. But the problem is when your testimony is about the sin you were delivered from, that's not a good testimony. Testimonies in the kingdom aren't about what I got saved from, it's about who saved me and how good he is. It's about his faithfulness and his generosity to me.

Here's the weird thing. Jesus said, "If I be lifted, I'll draw all men to me." Maybe I don't have to be a great evangelist. Maybe I don't have to be the great closer of the deal. Maybe the way for me to represent the kingdom well is just to make much of him. Because in doing that, he brings people to himself. I don't get any credit for it but the kingdom moves forward, and it's beautiful, and it's good, and people are free, and families are restored, and addictions, people are liberated from addictions. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful community to be a part of when people make much of God without having to make a big deal about themselves. Every week we take communion together as a simple reminder that calls us back to this ground zero of where all this starts. It all starts with an acknowledgement of who he is, who Jesus is, of his heart and his plan for us, and a commitment to follow him in it.

Maybe as we prepare our hearts for communion this morning, I would just invite you to talk with the Lord for a minute about where are you stuck?Where's the block? Maybe it's a space where you're like, "I'm not getting noticed and I feel unseen. I feel unseen by people. I feel unseen by God." Maybe that's it. Maybe it's something else, I don't know. But as we settle in to remember Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection on our behalf, maybe it's a good space for us to settle in and go, "Okay, Lord, I'm recommitted to making much about you so that your name can be great." Let's talk with the Lord about that as we move forward. On the night Jesus was betrayed he took bread and he broke it and he said, "This is my body which is given for you, so whenever you eat this bread do it in remembrance of me." Let's remember him this morning. Then after the dinner he took a cup and he said, "This cup, this is the blood of the covenant which is shed for you. So whenever you drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me."

Let's pray. God, thank you for the amazing invitation to so much more than salvation. God salvation would be enough. Your goodness would be fully displayed in salvation and yet you don't settle. You invite us to so much more. Lord help us to be able to make much of you so that we can experience your kingdom in its fullness here on earth in Jesus name. Amen.