Our sermon text reading today is found in Acts chapter 9, verses 32 through 43, that's Acts chapter 9, 32 through 43. Now as Peter was traveling through all those regions, he came down also to the saints who lived in Laita, 30 found a man named Neneas who had been bedridden eight years, for he was paralyzed. Peter said to him, Neneas, Jesus Christ heals you, get up and make your bed. Immediately he got up. And all who lived in Laita and shared and saw him, and they turned to the Lord. Now in Japa, there was a disciple named Tabitha, which translated in Greek as called Dorkas. This woman was abound if deeds of kindness and charity, which he continually did. And it happened at the time that she fell sick and died, and when they had washed her body, they laid it in the upper room. Since Laita was near Japa, the disciples having heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him, imploring him, to not to lay in coming to us. So Peter arose and went with them. When he arrived, they brought him into the upper room, and all the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing all the tunics and garments that Dorkas used to make while she was with them. But Peter sent them all out, and knelt down and prayed. And turning to the body, he said, Tabitha, arise, and she opened her eyes. And when she saw Peter, she sat up, and he gave her his hand and raised her up. When calling the saints and widows, he presented her alive. He came known all over Japa, and many believed in the Lord. And Peter stayed many days in Japa with a tanner named Simon. The grass withers, and the flower fades. The word of our God stays in our earth. Please pray with me. Thanks be to God, who always leads us in his triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of him in every place. I thank you, Father, for a certain Tabitha, whose life gives us such a clear picture of the life of our elder brother, Jesus. Thank you for the family resemblance to him that we see in her. And how I pray, Father, that you would by your spirit know, increasingly conform us to that same glorious image of Jesus Christ. I pray that for the saints here that you would advance our sanctification, that you would humble us where we need to be humbled and bold in us, where we need to be emboldened, that you would give us the grace of repentance, where we need to mourn over our disengagement from our community and other people. And for non-Christians who are here, O Father of Mercies, would you introduce them today to the most indispensable of all lives ever lived, and still being left, that of Jesus Christ. And would you grant today in this place the gift of salvation, the gift of a conversion wrought in the power of your Holy Spirit for the glory of Jesus Christ. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well, let me be honest and share with you one of my greatest fears as a pastor. And it is contentment. I'm talking about contentment with the status quo, spending my life in the service of a frivolous and therefore largely loveless orthodoxy and theological correctness. I fear contentment with what I think Paul would describe as a noisy gong and clanging symbol orthodoxy one that is barren of love. I fear being content to champion a version of the gospel of the kingdom that is little more than a paper tiger that doesn't really change much in the world around me or in the lives around me. I fear being content with holding on to the gospel ball that I have and being content to just spend my life running down the clock, mostly concerned about myself and the ones who are nearest to me. That's what I fear. That really scares me, which is why I'm grateful, very grateful to God for the hard questions our passage this morning has posed to my heart all week and which surprised me. I thought, and God does this to me frequently, I thought in my dance planning that this passage was going to be a transitional passage and that I was basically going to hook it on to the beginning of chapter 10 and God would have none of that, which usually means that He wants me to slow down and to listen to what He has to say about my own heart. A lot of what I'm going to tell you this morning is an autobiographical autopsy, if you will. Let me first look with you at the hardest questions that are posed by this passage. Let's identify them. Let me begin by saying what those hardest questions are not. I don't think the hardest questions about this passage are the miraculous healing of anias, or even Tabitha's resurrection. Those are not hard. I mean, those are a piece of cake to explain, piece of cake, we believe in God, right? If we're Christians, we believe in God, and the God we believe in spoke the whole universe into being with a single command, so it shouldn't be hard for us at all to believe that that same God who James galaxies, who manages supernovas, who holds on to galaxies in the way that my kids hold a helium balloon, that he could with a simple word, tell a man who had been bedridden for eight years, it's time to get up, or a woman, excuse me, who has died to command her a single person to now rise from the dead. That is not hard to believe at all if you begin, if your starting point is a belief in the God of the Bible. No, I think there is a harder question in this text for Christians in particular. Let me tell you where I see them. It goes down for me, the most staggering aspect of our passage is this, Tabitha, a Christian woman, had lived a life so devoted to the selfless service of others, a life of such rare quality and impact, not as a leader, not as a great teacher, not as an artist, not as an author, not as a great musician, not as a great hero in some sense that we would recognize heroes like on the battlefield, that she had lived a life of such quality, such selfless devotion to other people, that she had literally made herself indispensable to the community in which she lived. So indispensable that when she dies, so valuable that when she dies, the people of God and the people of her community are driven to come to God and say, we need her, raise her from the dead, please. They sign a petition in their tears and they send a delegation of two men to go find the apostle Peter, so valuable was this Tabitha and we know nothing else about her from the New Testament. Isn't that amazing? She was such a rare life that people were moved to ask God to raise her from the dead so they could have her back again. Now I find that incredible and that fact of this text is like a laser beam on my heart. You know what it does? Well I'll tell you what it did. It forced me to ask that question to myself. When you die, Mike, will people in your community outside of your family, okay? Outside of your family, petition the maker of heaven and earth to raise you from the dead because you've had such an impact upon it because you have abounded with deeds of kindness and charity to them. Don't refer my glory, don't misunderstand me, it wasn't for Tabitha's glory, okay? It's not the point, it's not for my glory. The question is, do we see that in the prayer of those people and in their pursuit of this act of God, this powerful act of God, their desire for this, do we see a measure of the type of life upon which God looks with approval? That's what I see and so when I had posed the question to myself, what I'm really asking is Mike, how are you living? How are you living? Are you living for yourself or are you living for other people? And as I asked those questions about myself, I asked them as a pastor about my church and you should ask them about yourselves and you should ask them about our church. Because if a manual pressuritarian church disappeared tomorrow, for whatever reason, would anyone besides us in this town notice, would anyone besides us care? Would anyone be so moved to go before God and say bring that church back? Why? Because we're great church? Because we had lived a life as the body of Christ and expressed the power of His gospel in such a way that we had infected our community, like Jim was praying, I love that. Would people miss our church because we had so woven our hearts into the concerns and burdens of our community that they could not conceive of a deland or a deberry or an orange city or a lake island or a deli on springs or a new sort of beach without a manual pressuritarian church. Again, not because we're glorious, but because we have become so committed to the cause of Christ, not just with our mouths, but with our hands and our feet, that we had become indispensable to our community. And that's a question that I think we need to ask. Have we and are we living a life individually and as a church, abounding, so abounding with deeds of kindness and charity that we actually make the gospel more plausible to non-Christians? So if you're non-Christian and you're here, first thank you for being here. You're welcome to be here or thrilled you're here. And your questions about the church are really important to us. And one of those questions, if you're a thinking person, is, okay, you guys have so much passion in your worship services. You may not be able to keep up with the hymns very well sometimes, and you may mess that up, but there's so much passion and conviction in the way you guys talk and the things you say, what difference is that making at street level in the community? I mean, shouldn't Jesus and a relationship with Jesus change the way that you come in contact with non-Christians? And I would say to you, my non-Christian friend, you're absolutely right. We need to ask those questions and we need to think about them. We need to be more like Tabitha. Tabitha has made me think long and hard about my own heart, and I haven't been thrilled quite frankly by what I've discovered there. I just think about Tabith and her community. She's a remarkable woman. Luke gives us some direct evidence here and some circumstantial evidence. I mean, I see three big things about Tabitha that mark the quality of her life that has led these people. The widows, I think, are not Christians actually, because later on in verse 41, Luke says, and he gave her his hand, the Peter gave her his hand, and raised her up and calling the saints and widows. So it's like Luke is wanting to make distinction between the saints who are obviously Christians and the widows. I think these are non-Christian members of the community that she's reached out to, otherwise that makes no sense to me, that he would use that expression. So when I think about Tabitha and the quality of life that has impacted non-Christians in the community around here, here's three things that stand out from me first. She is, as Luke tells us in verse 36, she's a disciple. She is a follower of Jesus Christ. She is not a consumer. She gave her such an impact upon the lives in her community, it was that she knew Jesus. Okay, so we're complicated to that. She had a living relationship with Jesus. He was not a distant historical figure for her. He was a living presence in her life, and she knew that having a relationship with Jesus would necessarily change the way she interacted with the world around her, and beyond the borders of her Bible studies and her interactions with Christians. She knew that having a relationship with Jesus had to influence the world around her, that just as her master's time upon the earth had had an impact upon non-Christians, so hers was to influence lives as well. So friends, are you a disciple or are you a consumer? You understand that the call of Christ placed upon your lives is not to be filled so that you will stay filled, but to be filled so that you will pour out. Tabitha, secondly, was also a servant of others. This is what her discipleship meant. So I think you see pretty clearly, I mean, to do what she did to develop relationships with the widows to find them, to be aware of what they needed, and then to spend time being a seamstress, to put together tunics and underclothing for them. That takes a lot of time. There are a lot of opportunity costs to that. I mean, there are a lot of things you have to say no to. A lot of television programs, you probably have to turn off and computer gaming, you can't do, and yard work, you don't get done, and all kinds of relaxing you don't get to do. She was a servant of other people. Shinder stood that a follower of Christ is not to look at every relationship and opportunity always asking the question, what's in this for me? She understood that to be a servant means to live like the greatest of all servants. Jesus Christ never asked the question in his entire life, what's in this for me. He never evaluated anything on the basis of what he would get out of it, but always on what he could put into it. You see, I think when I look at my own heart, I have it reversed. How about you? I'm an investor, big-time, but in myself. I tend to evaluate opportunities and relationships in terms of what I will gain or gain to benefit from them. And the more I'll benefit, the greater importance I assign to them. The tabitha wasn't like that. See, Tabitha understood what one of my professors in seminary used to say to us was the definition of righteousness in the Bible. Here's the definition of righteousness according to Bruce Walt Key. It is disadvantaging yourself in order to advantage someone else. Real righteousness is the premeditated, active, disadvantaging of yourself for the purpose of advancing someone else. And that's the kind of life that Tabitha led, isn't it? Tabitha also had a very simple plan. That's the third thing. She tried to solve everything. She looked at her community. She looked at the needs in the community and what she did, did she pick everything? No, she picked one thing. And notice this, it wasn't in a weekend kind of campaign spurt that she did it. She stuck with it. She had relationships. She dug in. That's what I love about what David testified this morning. My favorite line I wrote on the front of my bulletin, David, I'm going to quote you now. You're going into my quote bank, okay? And I don't know if you even knew what you were saying. Yeah, I know you knew what you were saying. But when he was asked, how long do you think it'll be before things return to normal? And his answer was two years. But he said this, this is the new normal for now. I love that. That's the way it is. And for Tabitha, she wasn't engaging in two hour outreach programs. This was her lifestyle. There's something to learn there, I think, right? Developing relationships takes a while. Mercy. It evidences the gospel more when we are committed and we engage and we dig in for the long haul. And we remain committed when others break off. It's real easy to do something for a week, okay? Think about marriage, okay? Think about marriage. I thought about, not just about Tabitha, I thought about the church in Japa. What was the church like? What was the climate in the church like in Japa that would produce this kind of disciple? What was the atmosphere? I mean, people clearly understood what I love about Tabitha, you know, as a pastor who's constantly feeling as he looks at the church like we don't have enough leaders. I love the fact that Tabitha is not a leader. I love the fact that Tabitha is a member of the congregation who's gifted by the Holy Spirit in mercy and helps and who knows what else. And you know what she's doing? She is not waiting around to the elders of the church in Japa to say, is it okay now for me to love people? Is it okay for me to be bold and to do think, do I need your permission in order to obey Jesus Christ? I love that. I love the fact that the church in Japa, clearly from her life and the life of the disciples who goes is a church that got the vision that every member is a minister, that there isn't some kind of hierarchy in the church of Jesus Christ where the people's job is to kind of show up and do what the leaders tell them to do, but that most of the ministry is done by leaders. That's not biblical, by the way. And Japa appears to have gotten that. Do you guys know that you are the ministers of a manual pressuritarian church? You know that. You're the ministers. The place that I occupy on the front line of this church about that wide, it's about that wide and it's about that deep. My job is the ministry of the word and the ministry of prayer. That's my job. And those things are to be used to equip you to do the work of the ministry. And that was what the church in Japa was like, very clearly. I also thought about the pastor of the church in Japa, what a man he must have been. Who understood and probably modeled for somebody like Tabitha much to my shame. Who understood and modeled the principle that what a person actually believes is not what they say they believe but what they do. What a person actually believes is not what they say they believe but what they do. Now I confess to you that I, my name is Mike Francis and I am a self-aholic, okay. That's what I am. I am a self-aholic and Tabitha exposes that in me. Exposes the shallowness with which I engage in the love of Christ. I realize as I thought about this, I thought, okay Mike, how to change, what do you do? How do you begin to become somebody who in the power of the gospel is moving towards people like Tabitha because I would imagine I am not alone and kind of being overwhelmed by the quality of this life and let me just start. When I ask myself questions like this, I always start at the lowest shelf possible. I am looking for the cookies on the lowest shelf. And the lowest shelf that I could identify here is in order to serve other people in order to lead a life like Tabitha, you know where you got to begin, you actually got to be aware of other people. Now, how's that for radical thesis? You actually have to be aware of other people. Now, intellectually, right, I'm aware of other people. I know you're not a figment of my imagination, but on a practical level, I have to admit that very often my interactions with people, I think about them in the same way that I think about molecules and atoms, not in the sense that they're being small, the sense of being things that are, that I need in order to get done what I want to get done, that really like the quote in the bulletin says that I'm really the main part of my story. Life is a story about me, that's functionally so much how I think and feel. Life's a story about me. Now, you guys are kind of like props in that story, but the main plot line centers around the protagonist, my Francis. And emotionally, I have to tell you, often, I'm not much better, so you have to report it. You know my favorite part about flying in an airplane is, when you're coming into, well, I like landing, I really like landing. But it's a part before you land, as you're approaching, you're down beneath the clouds, and you're close enough to the ground so that you can look and you say, oh, that's actually what a subdivision looks like from the air and you see all the little houses and little boxes and you say, oh, there's a swimming pool and you see the yards and the ball fields and then if you go in at night, you see the car, you see the little lights going on the road. Right on the cars. And you know, it's easy to look at those boxes and those shapes as you're flying over and not appreciate that there are stories going on in those, right, that they're pain in those houses. But there's crying in those houses, that there are cancer diagnoses of being received over the telephone in those houses, that there's ache and there is bad stuff going on in those houses and there's incredible bewilderment and joy is going on in those houses. It is so easy as you're flying over like that, even at a low altitude to be completely detached and disengage from the stories that are going on in those boxes. Now when I'm honest, I have to admit to myself and to you that I do the same thing on the ground all the time with other people's lives. So you don't have to be in the air to do that. You can do that from the ground with other people and treat people like empty shells. Taffa didn't do that, you notice that? That's not the way Taffa was. I think churches can get that way sometimes. Do you? Let me give you an example where we sit in the sanctuary. I think it's very interesting. I've observed it for a long time. We say that we are a visitor-friendly church and we want to be that way. I don't think that the way we sit reflects that at all. If you were a visitor in this church and you maybe were a non-Christian and you had finally decided you're going to come to church, chances are you would not be coming in at 10-15. You'd be coming in maybe right before 10-30 or probably a little bit late. Now if you were a non-Christian and you walked into this sanctuary, where are you least going to want to sit? Friends, if you're a Christian, what should you be thinking about when you come this room? You should be thinking about God and non-Christians. You should be saying, I don't want to get spit on, but I'm going to do this for the glory of God and for the service of other people. We come in here. You see, now that's a very innocent thing, but you see, actually it's not innocent, it's a very serious thing because what it reveals is that we do not think as part of our culture automatically about what someone else who's not like us feel like if they came into this room. So you know what ought to happen without putting ropes out or anything else? Every Christian should fill up the seats in the front row and those back seats should be reserved for the people who are going to feel incredibly awkward coming up here in a church service. Do you think like yourself as a person who's been in the church for 20 years or do you think like a non-Christian? Does it even matter to you or do you fly over the top of those people? The reason this is so important is because Jesus wasn't that way. You ever thought about that? Jesus didn't fly over the top of people. How did God get the gospel to us, my friends? Did He send a blimp to fly over the top of people? Did He sky-write it in the sky? What did He do? I mean, God could have just sent a book and all He needed to send right was a book. So what did He do? He took His Word, His very Son, the essence of all that He is, and He said, now we're going to wrap you in human flesh and you're going to walk at sea level eye to eye with the people and sending you to save, and I'm going to give you hands and feet so that you can do things for people so that you're side by side with them. The incarnation of our Lord Jesus puts hands and feet on the gospel, and I'll guarantee Jesus would not be blocking up seats for non-Christians in the back. He'd be up front. He'd be thinking about non-Christians. Now how do we apply this more broadly beyond seating in the church? Well, I think the first thing is repent. We need to be broken over the ways in which our selfishness is deeply entrenched and the way in which it almost has become invisible in so many of our habits in our lives. I think about your prayer life. Let me just ask you this. How much time do you spend praying for others, relative to how much time you spend praying for yourself? Very interesting indicator and barometer. Are you self-absorbed in your prayer life? If you are, you need to repent. You need to be broken over the gap that exists between the heart of your king who's redeemed you, who did not fly overhead, but who entered into your box, literally, to tell you the truth of God, to tell you the truth about yourself, and then to live and die in your place, to secure your freedom. We need to be broken hearted over that. That's where we've got to start. We have to admit the truth about who we are, and that's where you find freedom in Christianity. Somebody pretending that we're not as selfish as we are. Come on, guys. I think that I think we've got to break through this. I think God has got to do a work in us at church. We have a great vision, but you know the problem with our vision? The problem with our vision is that necessarily it will require the reorganization of the architecture of our own hearts. God's going to have to continue to make us a people who would be fit messengers for the vision he's given us as a church, not fit in a sense of being great, but in a sense of being broken hearted, and wanting, wanting to resemble Jesus in our interactions with the world. So I encourage you to begin with repentance. Let me share a story with you. I've been reading a book, a very unconventional book called Blue Like Jazz, that has been a great breath of fresh air for me. Some of you may know that book, and some of you now may say, I know that book, and I can't believe that pastor is reading that book. I love that book, so get over it. One of the stories that Donald Miller tells in that book is about Reed College, which is outside Portland. Reed College is this place, so philosophically liberal, it is so morally loose and libertine that it makes Berkeley look like Jerry Falwell's next career move. I am serious, this place, I remember when we lived in the Northwest, I would hear stuff about Reed, and I would just go, oh my goodness, and there's a small group of Christians on the campus at Reed College, and they were petrified because this was not a fun place to be a Christian in the sense of there weren't a lot of non-Christians on that campus saying, hello, Miss Christian, will you share the gospel with me, please? And every fall, there's a big festival on the Reed College campus, and it's a, just a, they keep the police off the campus, there's all kinds of bad stuff that goes on, and it's for the students, and it's just this ultimate expression of depravity, okay, and so the Christian group on campus gets together, and they say, okay, now what can we do at this festival? And one of the guys, just as a joke, and the group says, hey, let's have a confessional, and everybody goes, oh, that's funny, nobody would come, and he said, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand, and what they did was they built a confessional right in the middle of campus but don't misunderstand it, they invited students in not to give confession, but to hear the confession of the Christians, boy, that spoke to me, and what was it, what was it, that was the heart of the confessions that the Christian students would give to the people, the debauched students who would come in, the confessions will centered around the failure of the Christian community to be faithful witnesses of Christ's love on that debauched campus. Not a self-righteousness, but a humility and a brokenness in the face of non-Christians. That set me to thinking, I thought, well, what would happen, if I thought about the spheres of my life, I thought, okay, well, if I put a confessional in my neighborhood, what would I say, if somebody came in, I'm not going to do it, okay, but if I did, if that was part of my vision, and if that was on my front lawn, and my neighbors could come in and most of whom are non-Christians, many of whom whose names, there are 73 lots I think in our development and I probably only know about 50 of the names, I've lived there almost five years. That's the first thing that I would confess to them. I ask your forgiveness for not even being willing to invest the time. I ask your forgiveness for spending more time on my yard, and if you see my yard, you know that's not very much. For spending more time on my yard than I have on cultivating relationships with you, what if I put that confessional here in the middle of church? I would ask your forgiveness and I do right now for the imbalances in my ministry in which I repeatedly, repeatedly and programmatically emphasize head and heart over hands and feet when it comes to the gospel. I have not led you well, I have not been a good model in that regard, and what if we set a confessional in downtown Deland for members of our church, what would we say to people who came in? I think some of the things we would have to say is that we ask for our communities forgiveness for really not making much of a dent in the hard places in our community, even though the church is 20 years old. I ask something we need own, we need to own that our church so often is more like a pond than it is like a river flowing away from us toward others. Now we're getting better at it, okay? We're getting better at it and I'm encouraged. But the status quo is not something we ought to be content with, friends, because I think that Jesus has more for our community. So I want to ask you to ask yourselves this, do you even know your neighbors? Nice. I mean, some of you, I would imagine, don't even know the people really on either side. Do you know what's going on in your neighbors' homes? Do you know the widows in your neighborhood? Do you know anybody who's lonely in your neighborhood? Do you, do they know you're a Christian? I had a professor in seminary who said, you know the way, if they do know you're a Christian how? How do they know that? I had a professor in seminary who used to joke kind of cynically that the way that the Christians and his neighborhood identified themselves from the non-Christians is the Christians would be the ones who would waive to you as they were driving into their garage and have the door closed right behind them. They're kind of outwardly friendly. We can't be like that because Jesus wasn't like that, okay? It's just that simple. Tabitha wasn't like that. When's the last time that you inconvenienced yourself, purposely disadvantaged yourself in order to advantage someone who wasn't in your family? Somebody who has no blood relative, nothing. When's the last time you did that? I mean, really go out of your way to the point where you're uncomfortable and I'm not talking about checks. I'm talking about time. I'm talking about being extremely uncomfortable, picking somebody up for church who is a quadriplegic and for whom it takes an hour to get ready to come to church and ask yourself this, are you living out an imbalanced version of the gospel in which you emphasize the private at the expense of the public, the word at the expense of deed, orthodox belief at the expense of orthodox practice? When we as the people of Jesus Christ don't engage, indeed, ministry, we make it much harder for non-Christians to believe that the gospel is true and we need to own them. Our job is through the life of the church and through our worship and our work to make Christ visible, to make his reality visible, to make his character knowable and accessible and if all we do, or the main thing we do is gather like ponds where we love each other and that are scenic and beautiful, but we don't pour out for people who have nothing to give us by the way, then we make it much harder for non-Christians to believe, much harder. So let me ask you, in your life groups, the next time you gather in a spirit of tabitha and her example, please spend some time together asking yourselves this question. If our group disappeared, would anyone notice? Anyone not in the group, okay? That's a hard question. Would anybody in your neighborhood notice? I don't know where you're meeting, but does anybody in that neighborhood even know there's a life group and doesn't make any difference whatsoever? I'll tell you, our gay neighbors knew there was a life group at our house last year and they were a little uncomfortable with that. That's good, okay? Now what I should have done and where I failed as a leader is I should have had my life group love on those. So I want to encourage you, as life groups, of what difference does your life group make for anyone outside your group? And would you ask God to give you a shared vision of something you could do that would be about more than just serving yourselves? And the picnic, guys, if the picnic, I'm so glad Darren hit this so hard this morning because if the picnic is just about us, then it's not what's doing, right? Do you agree with that? If the picnic is just about us, if all we really have here is church people or Christians, then we have largely failed in the mission of that opportunity. Find a lonely person in your neighborhood and bring them. Go find them, unduars, inconvenience yourself. So in conclusion, let's just reflect on God's providence in the story of our church. It's about 20 years old, okay? So if we're going to be good stewards over what God has given to us in the past and over what he's doing for us in the present, we have to reflect on our history. And I think if a non-Christian asked, came up and asked us and said, okay, Francis, your loudmouth, where's the action? If you said to me, you came to me as a non-Christian, you said, okay, what difference is your church making in your community? I would really have two answers for you. The first answer would be, way more than you think, Mr. Non-Christian, and far less than should be happening, okay? Way more than you think. I know there are things going on, but it's still less than we ought to be doing. I believe that there is far more of Jesus Christ to give to our community than we have given already, okay? Is the story of the first 20 years of our church mainly about what's been going on at 8-11 Orange Camp Road, or is it about, is it mainly about how we, as a people of crust, have been impacting and changing our community in the power of the gospel? And if it's not that way, then let me ask you this, what about the next 20 years? What is the story? Now here's the question that I don't have the answer to, because we have to live it out. But what about the next 20 years? What about the next 20 years? What do we want the story to be in and through our church in the next 20 years? Do we want it to be just a carbon copy in the last 20, or do we want to press farther? If you want it to be different, genuinely, then let me ask you, what are you prepared to do about it? Is it just going to be another one of the sermons you go home and you say, gosh, kind of went on kind of long? I agree with that, or are you going to actually take what you've heard this morning and say before God, what do you want me to do, having brought me under the hearing of this sermon about tapetha? See, it's your responsibility now. I've lived with it all week, and I share the love with you now. I share tapetha with you. And now the question becomes that you have to prove out in your own life. What are you going to do with it? Let's take up the example. Now where all this leads is not to tapetha, tapetha is not the hero of this passage, right? Jesus Christ is. Because ultimately, what's going to break the back of selfishness, it's not willpower, what is going to move you into your community? It's not good planning, that's going to help, but ultimately, what's going to motivate you to disadvantage yourself in order to advantage other people. It's not planning, okay? It's not paper. It's being captured by the love of Jesus Christ. I said earlier that tapetha had proven herself indispensable to her community, and that that's why those people prayed that she would be raised from the dead. Well, the most indispensable of all lives is Jesus Christ. And that's why he's the hero of this passage. Tapetha is meant, not to be an end in herself, but she is meant. The story of her life is meant to lead us to the one who has made himself indispensable to every single person on this planet earth, indispensable because he is the only mediator between God and man, utterly necessary. There is no way to approach God or be reconciled to him apart from Jesus Christ. That qualifies as indispensable in my book. He's indispensable. He lived a life abounding with deeds of kindness and charity, didn't he? So rich, the greatest of which was to give himself willingly to his father as the substitute first people to bear their sin and then having risen from the dead to prove his work was completed to be able to offer to any and every person who will call upon his name to be saved, something that Tapetha could never give, not a tunic, not covering that would fray and decay over time, but a robe of a blazing, righteousness, the righteousness of God that he offers to any right to close any who will come to him and call upon him as Lord and Savior. That kind of love that would lead him to sacrifice himself and then to be so lavish upon those who have done nothing to deserve it, that being captured by that, realizing that that love drove him to give himself, to die, to be raised again, why as our assurance of pardon tells us so that those for whom he died would no longer live for themselves, right? For him who died and rose again on their behalf, it is seeing Jesus clearly that makes Tapethas. It is realizing that that love is for you and the lengths to which he has gone in order to demonstrate it, to live and to walk with you as a man on this earth, eye to eye and heart to heart and to spend everything whole, nothing back. Now that, that has the power to break the back of selfishness and what is so amazing about Jesus Christ is that unlike Tapetha, his life isn't over, right? That's what it means to be a Christian is that we worship one who didn't just have a life abounding with deeds and kindness and charity, but one who even now is still living abounding with deeds of kindness and charity and who is willing right now to give himself fully to you and to make you a child of God. The living Christ is the one who presides here at this church. So my friends, look through Tapetha to Jesus Christ and then look again at your community. It will not be the same. Let's pray. Father God, now we pray. We pray that you would make us more like your son Jesus. We thank you for your kindness and goodness to us in the history of this church for preserving the gospel in this church over many years and bringing many people to faith here and having an impact on our community, how we long for yet more, how we long for a fuller harvest and would you set us apart to be the messengers and the bearers of Christ, to be the hands and feet of the gospel of Father, not just hearts and the minds of the gospel for our community. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.