As soon as I find the book of Micah and we will proceed we are going to read the first seven verses together of Micah chapter 4. It is a glorious picture of what the world will look like when the king comes back. It is a beautiful prophecy to give our attention to in the days in which we listen to this description. And it will come about in the last days. One of the last days, the last days were inaugurated by the first coming of Jesus Christ. Those are the last days. We are in the last days. It is the last era of God's redemptive work in our world. It will come about in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains. It will be raised above the hills and the peoples will stream to it. And many nations will come and say, come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob that he may teach us about his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For from Zion will go forth the law even the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he will judge between many peoples and render decisions for mighty distant nations. Then they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation. And never again will they train for war. And each of them will sit under his vine and under his fig tree with no one to make them afraid for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. Though all the peoples walk each in the name of his God, as for us, we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever. In that day declares the Lord, I will assemble the lane, gather the outcast, even those whom I have afflicted. I will make the lane a remnant and the outcast a strong nation. And the Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion from now on and forever. Amen. Lord Jesus Christ, your people pray, may it be so, Lord, may it be so, may your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We pray in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen. Be seated, please. Have you ever heard of Florence Chadwick? Florence Chadwick was a female endurance swimmer. He was a prodigious athlete. She was the first woman to swim across the British channel and back. She in July 4th, 1952 was attempting to swim from Catalina Island to the coast of California. I don't know if I that is, but no woman had ever done it. It's the challenge of this swim. It was not so much the distance, though, as the bone-chilling numbing cold water. She left early in the morning and surrounded by support team and boats. Only it was so foggy that she couldn't even see them. She made her way through the cold, through the difficulty. Florence Chadwick never quit. She never gave up. Sharks came into her perimeter. They had to be fended off with rifles and with the activity of her support team. After 15 hours and 55 minutes in the water, she quit. She got out of the water a half mile from the shore. When she realized how close she was, she said, well, I would have never stopped. If I had had any clue, but it was so foggy, she said, I couldn't see where I was going. I had no idea what lay ahead. I had no idea how close I was. It's a terribly disparaging thing to not have any vision, to not be able to see, to not know what lays out ahead of us in the future. That's why we turn in the Bible this morning to Micah chapter 4. It's not my vision for the world. It's not yours. It's not Micah's. It's God telling His people, this is what it looks like. Let me paint you a picture of what it looks like when I restore the world to its fullness, to its wholeness, to what I made it to be. What do we learn in Micah chapter 4? We learn a day is coming in which the nations of the earth and unity will stream to the mountain of the Lord. We're told that people will walk in the ways of the Lord. They'll be righteousness and holiness and justice on the earth. We're told that there'll be no war in that day. The nations will not train for war. That swords will be beaten into what? Cloudshares and spears into pruning hooks. We're told that it will be a day of plenty, a day of peace. Everyone will have enough. Everyone will sit under the vine, under the fig tree, a contented full, satisfied, having all that they need. We're told that in that day that the land, the outcast, the disenfranchised, the discards of this world will be loved, cherished, cared for and all will be well. It's a glorious picture and the Bible says when will that day take place? When will that day take place when the king comes? Now when is the king going to come? In other words, when the king re-enters the world to put it back the way it should be, cast out all pretenders to his throne, his power, his rule, and re-establish the world as it was designed to be. That's when that will happen. That's what lays out in the future. That's what God says. That's what we keep our vision on. And when's the king coming? Oh, is it any wonder that the Church of Jesus Christ limps along? He came 2,000 years ago. And when Jesus walked onto the world stage, imagine living as if we're waiting for the king. The Bible says he came 2,000 years ago. He walked onto the world stage and the Bible says everywhere he went, he spoke, taught, proclaimed, announced the gospel of the have you got that? The gospel of the kingdom. I tell the pastor's class, go to the nearest tattoo parlor. Right to get them to tattoo the word righteousness on your arm. Every Christian ought to understand the term righteousness. And I'm going to tell you, you got another arm. Go down there and get the word kingdom. Put on that other arm. So when your thinking gets fuzzy, when you're swimming through the waters of life and it's all bogged in, you can rip off your shirt and say kingdom, the king is come. He's establishing his rule and his reign. He came 2,000 years ago. And I say, if you read Michael 4 and you said that would begin to happen when the king came, but I don't see much of that in our world today. Oh, why isn't the whole world like Afghanistan? Because the king came. Women, what in the world are you doing in this room with men? Whoever gave you the idea that you had to write to sit here and worship with men? The king. The king said it was so. Women, who gave you the idea that you had a soul? Who gave you the idea that you were to be cherished or valuable? Whoever said you could go out in public without being covered from head to toe? The king treated women with dignity and respect in a way that nobody had ever walked on your head done before. You can look around this room and I can see people who would not be alive. I can look in the faces of three of my children who would not be alive. It would weren't for the advances of modern medicine. My wife would not have survived the birth of our first child if it weren't for the advances of modern medicine. Why did we make those advances in modern medicine because the king came? Why did we not own slaves? Or why are we not perhaps in slavery in the Western world? Why was slavery outlawed? Who fought against slavery? Who vanished it from the world and who's kept it out of the world? And who resisted in Sudan and other places in China and the world today? It's the king's people. It's because the king came. The world is dramatically transformed, dramatically different. Life has value, the weak, the disenfranchised, the poor, the helpless, the elderly, they have value because the king came. Now the king only stayed for three years of ministry and then he left. Where are you going, Jesus? Where are you going? I'm going to come back someday. But in the meantime, I've left you in charge and I want you to advance the kingdom.
Who did he leave to advance the kingdom? How the vision's coming into focus? That's what the church is. That's what the church is for. They're the people of the king living. We are the special forces on the ground. And what often feels like the enemy territory, right? The stealth warriors of the king advancing his kingdom cause and his purpose. Now how are we going to accomplish that? I really want to suggest this morning that the primary way in which we'll accomplish the advance of this kingdom is through offering the world what it most craves. Community. Community. In these microphones, now in three services we've had people get up and say, what I like best about seven rivers and if I were to take all the comments that were made about half of the people said, what I like best is that this is a family. It's what people crave with all their heart all over the world. I want to belong. I want to be cared for. I want a family. I want community. So we will advance the kingdom through the creation of a distinct gospel infused community. And then that community using the instruments at our disposal, the instruments of truth and love, deeds of word, deeds of mercy, the kingdom will advance. Now the method that we're most interested in is what a friend of mine calls the church as Vaskin Robbins. Do you like Vaskin Robbins? I'm convinced there's Vaskin Robbins because the king came. You know, I mean this is one of the great advances of the world. And if you walk in Vaskin Robbins and you might say that you don't know that you want anything there because you don't know how it takes. And so as you stroll down the aisle and you're looking at all that beautiful array of ice cream there in Vaskin Robbins, you can come all the way down the end and see Jemoka Alman Fudge. Now you might say, I don't like coffee or I don't like nuts, but they'll give you a little spoon. And on the end of that spoon will be just a dab of Jemoka Alman Fudge. And if you put it in your mouth, you will be converting. You will say I was born. I was made to have this in my mouth. That's what the church of Jesus Christ is to be in the world. Is the people come into it and they say, there I get a taste of what the world will be like when the kingdom reestablishes his domain. When the king comes and reestablishes and heals his fractured world, that's what it'll be like. And the church exists in the midst of the darkness as an oasis that could say, come, when you have that taste to say, we'll take your sermon outline. And we'll ask first, what is that, what is that community that exists to give a taste of living under the king, the delight of it all? Well, it is a gospel-sote, gospel-saturated, gospel-estanished community. Brothers and sisters, what's the gospel? We use the word a lot. What's the gospel? The gospel is this. It says that we can be reconciled to our creator, to our father. And we are reconciled to him not through any work that we do, but through the work of our older brother, Jesus. And at the effort of this church, the effort of going to church, the effort of being a Christian isn't to try to cobble together a life where I'm a good dad and a good husband and a good person and a generous person. And if I could only do enough of this stuff, then God will have regard for me, and he'll welcome me into heaven, and it'll all work out in the end. That's not what we're about. That's exactly the opposite of what we're about. The gospel is that we don't offer a righteous life up to God, but Jesus Christ lived a righteous life which God provides for us, so that in the reception of the righteousness of Christ, I experience the dream of every creature on this earth, the pleasure of God. You stop and think about it. What is every little boy or every little girl want in the deepest recesses of their heart? They want a parent to be what? Kids love it when they're the object of attention, don't they? When they're playing in the middle of the living room for, and all the eyes of the room, the parents' eyes are on them, the parents' eyes are adoring them, and they're soaking up that attention. In our heart of hearts, that's what we want from God, every little Jewish boy, every little Jewish girl was taught from the earliest stage that the dream, the ultimate dream, the ironic blessing that the priest would announce over the Jewish people. The Lord bless you and keep you and the Lord make his face too, not scale. God's face would not come towards us with disdain, his fingers pointing, his wrath, his anger, his impatience. That's not what we'd experience from our dad. The Lord make his face to shine on you. What do we call it today? We have another word for that. When somebody's face shines upon you, we call that a smile. God has what we sing in this church that warms our hearts, the smile. God and the Lord make his face to shine upon you and the Lord lift up his countenance upon you. It's that God and I would be who looks at each other face to face. God and I would be intimate. God and I would be friends. What would happen if a whole church decided to believe the Bible enough that that's how God felt about us? What would happen? It would look like the king came.
I'm going to tell you a couple things that would happen. There's about 90 things that would happen. Here's just a few. Number one, I believe it would breed a terrifically optimistic place. An optimistic and unquenchable optimism. There is in churches so much dourness, so much sourness. People shuffle into church. People shuffle through life. People turn on CNN. People know more about anthrax than they know about their children. People read about this and that and Christians seem to be the worst of all, writing doomsday books and doomsday scenarios and devilish signs and 666 and dark clouds are in the horizon and the earth is going to hell and the devil is so powerful and they just drip the sense of we are living in this world and we are oppressed and everything is dark and dreary and you just don't know how attractive that is to people don't go to church. How much they'd want to flood in and just be a part of such a community. What does the Bible say? Jesus said in the opposition of the Holy Roman Empire, the opposition of the Jewish power structure of his day, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not stop me. They killed him, so he resurrected. He could not be stopped. He took 12 nondescript guys from a region that nobody would have paid them any honor with no particular gifts and he radically transformed the entire world. Should we not be the people of God who always say this? God is at work. Whatever happens. God is at work. God is always at work. Every day he's at work. Every moment he's at work. He never rests. God never rests. The Bible, Jesus said, the Father is working and I myself am working. They are building the church and they never stop and that's the way we handle. Is there ever bad news that comes our way? Is living in this world hard? Absolutely. Has this church tasted hardship? Have we had elders die in this church? Have we had staff members commit immorality in this church? Have we had financial this or that? Whatever. Listen, whatever we've had, we could have more tomorrow and you know we'll say when we hear word of it, God is at work and he will not stop. He will not be deterred. He will create his church. I've told other groups if we're trying to build a sanctuary. Six million dollars is the budget for that project. We've got a little over one million in the bank. What if at this service somebody would walk up and give me a check for the remainder? Five million dollars and by the way, wait till after the service because it'd be distracting too. How would I respond to that? What if just today? Somebody said, I've got the means and I'm going to do it. We just rip all our clothes up and run up and down 44 and just make a big scene. I want to tell you something and you could say, you're a liar, Cortese, but I want to tell you something, the reaction will be, it will not be different than if tonight I got a call and said there's been some embezzlement and that million dollars that you thought you had, you don't have any. The reaction wouldn't be any different because it doesn't matter whether the circumstances are hard or whether the circumstances seem glorious. The truth is unchanging. God is at work. Do you believe that? Do you believe that in your life? Do you believe that whatever you can pick up the phone today and hear the most glorious news you've ever heard or you can pick up the phone today and hear the most devastating news you've ever heard and I want to tell you something God is at work. He's building his kingdom. He loves you. He's for you. He gives his children nothing but good gifts. Do you see how it breeds in a church a sense of gospel, momentum and gospel optimism and gospel tenacity that we will not be deterred? We will not stop. It really doesn't matter what happens. God is at work. He's going to build his church. If he wipes this one out, guess what? He's at work. He's always at work. The kingdom is advancing. It cannot be stopped. To understand, believing that makes all the difference. Every day, let me tell you that it affects the way you approach ministry as well and that is we ought to believe. We ought to have the sense of gospel, boldness and confidence that the kingdom is advancing and no one can stop it and that means you ought to go with the love of Christ to anybody you know even if they seem like the hardest, hearted, most resistant, defiant person that will never become a Christian. God is at work. Do you really think they're an obstacle to him? You ought to have an increasing confidence that the nastiest person out there could become a worshiper of Jesus because it's already happened. You're here to understand that you're the worst person I know other than me and you're here.
God's at work. If he could redeem you, get out of breed and you're hard in mind a sense of my. This is a God who loves his church. This is a God who can do everything. This is a God who cannot be stopped. This is a God who loves his church enough to die for her. So the gospel astonished community is relentlessly, unquenchably optimistic because this is God's church. It's not my church. I don't lose sleep over how things are going in this place. You know why? I don't own this place. It's not mine. Somebody else bought it. They bought it with their own blood. It's Jesus church. It's in great hands because the leaders, the elders, the deacons, we get weary, we sin, we fail, we fall away, but there is one who never sleeps nor slumbers. He always watches over his people. He is always at work. Secondly, not only relentlessly optimistic, but a sense in this church of of of of celebrative worship should be what we're about. A people who gather in this place for celebration and for joy. If you're a if you're a baseball fan, if you're a Boston Red Sox fan, there have been all together two sparing moments for you to celebrate. But there is a moment in Boston Red Sox history that even the most casual of baseball fans can draw to mind. It's 1975. It's the sixth game of the World Series. The big red machine is the enemy, the Cincinnati Reds, and Carlton Fisk is at that. When a ball connects with his bat, soars out away towards the green monster at Fenway Park, and Carlton Fisk, the Boston catcher, begins to cheer the ball over the fence at his big punch. And as he runs down the first baseline, and if you have any recollection of baseball history, you can remember the moment the ball clears the fence and Carlton Fisk and all of New England leap into the air, enjoy an ecstasy. And in fact, John Angel wrote about it. He said, at that very moment, the organist at Fenway Park began to play the hallelujah chorus. And he said, in little eddies and areas where boats were all around the New England area, people were shaking their boats. He said, New Englanders pulled their cars off the road and amidst the remote areas with nobody else had just honked their horns and jumped up and down on the pavement. Now some of you are sitting in this room and saying, you know, that kind of sports stuff and people getting all excited about sports, why don't they get a life? I'm going to tell you something. You don't have a life until there's something that you're willing to jump up and down about. What are you jumping up and down about? I'd rather you jumped up and down about the Boston Red Sox than sit on your keyster all the time. What makes you jump up and down? I hope you jumped up and down at least in your spirit in this worship this morning when you were accounted the goodness of God on this place. When we come to weekend worship, that's where we jump up and down because we say, there is something I was created to worship. I was created to experience ecstasy and I experienced that when I come into a place and I hear my father say to me again, nothing will ever separate you from my love. Child, no one will ever get you from me. You are safe and you are secure. I've paid the price for you. You ever get enough of hearing God say, my eyes are on you. I've known you before the world began. I know your name. Your name is written on my hand. And I'm crazy about you and I'll do anything to have you in my family. And it's the truth of the knowledge of the love of God sinks into our souls. My goodness, we better be the people who jump up and down and celebrate. Now I want to tell you something about worship in this church. We don't have contemporary worship and traditional worship. And we don't try to find a perfect balance in our church between, we've got to have just enough contemporary to keep a certain age group happy and just enough traditional to keep a certain age group happy. That's not our objective. And we don't have 20's worship and we don't have Gen X worship and we don't have. And guess what? Nobody is sitting up in an office during the weekend thinking, how can we fashion a worship that's the most popular for our community to come to? I've got a secret for you. Worship's not about you. This isn't a customer driven business or looked at another way. We only have one customer. And believe me, in that case, the customer is always right. And so we sit around and plan worship here. And we say we're going to take the best of the old, the best of the rich heritage of the worshipping people of God. And we're going to take the best of the new. But all of it is going to be authentic, rich, melded together. And we are going to not be fractured groups of people, all worshipping in a God in a way that makes me feel good because it's not about us. It's about him. I don't think I like it when we have the organ. I don't think I like it when we have guitars. It's not about you. It's about him. And I think he loves it. He loves when his people come into this place. And so by the way, we don't have a choir director in this church. I don't mean not right now. I mean, we don't have one ever. We have a worship director. We don't have worship leaders in this church. We have lead worshipers. They don't lead us in worship. Get up in worship in front of us. Just get up in worship. And we don't have spectators who come to watch people preach and watch people sing solos in this church. We have worshipers. We're made to worship. And I want to tell you a powerful worship is what draws in people who want to come and watch Christians ignite and say, I don't know what that is. But we ought to get a little of it. Martha, you know, gospel saturated community, relentless optimism, celebrative worship. And I want to say third, it breeds a comfortable security. If God loves me because of a righteousness that Christ produces and gives to me, then I've contributed nothing. I never will contribute anything. So when I'm rotten, I don't put that in peril. When I'm good, I don't make that more likely. I'm completely secure. And as I realize that security and realize that in most church situations, you're told to give your money and witness and work and be good and smile a lot and say a lot of holy things like God bless you and brother and sister. How are you? And be fakie. Because after all, we've got to pretend that we're really good because that's the key. Maybe God will think we're good. Now a community that has a comfortable security of the gospel determines that they will boast in nothing. But what? What's our only boast?
I asked the staff this week. I said, I want you to tell me what you think about. Tell me what you think of when you hear about seven rivers church. And one said, Tara Brian said, simple, we stink. God rolls. There it is. We stink. God rolls. We're going to put that on the balloon outside.
There is a gospel security that allows us to start telling the truth about ourselves, to be scathingly honest about who we are. And I want to tell you that the target of the preaching in this church is changed. The target of the preaching in this church. And you might say, I don't agree with that. But listen, you haven't been here. Not as long as I have. And you haven't been in every service. I have. And I'll tell you, the target of the preaching in this church used to be people didn't come. And they weren't about to come because they were the target. It was liberals, Democrats, unbelievers. That was the target of the preaching. Because that's what makes church goers feel better is when they hear how rotten everyone else is. But what the gospel does is it sets you free to realize that the biggest problem is me. The target of the preaching now is the pastor.
It's a fascinating thing. When I tell you what a screw-up I am, the reaction is interesting. Young people come up to me after the service and they say, thank you so much. Because this thing is so hard for me and I'm not doing it very well. And I can't believe that you struggle too. I come every week and I look up and I think, God, I got such a great question and I'm not. I feel so guilty. And it just feels good to hear that you're not an angel. And seniors come up to me, you know what they say? Don't be so hard on yourself, preacher. You're not that bad. But the truth is, I'm so much worse than anything I ever admit to you.
And so are you. So are you. So much worse. And you know when the church starts to tell the truth about itself, guess who starts to stick their nose in the door? When the church is willing to look out at if the church is willing to say to each other, we're the problem. We're self-righteous, we're egotistical, we're self-absorbed. We are proud, we are unloving, we are arrogant. Then the people outside the church start to think, I mean, something's up because church people just don't get it. I mean, they know we're jerks. We're just the ones who don't. When I actually hear the church start to repent of its sins. And they start to think maybe there'd be a seed here for them. Maybe that's the kind of community that broken people are allowed to come to. It's a beautiful thing is the security of knowing that our salvation was accomplished by what Jesus did. You know, self-righteousness is such a bane of the church. I think of Winston Churchill and his governing coalition, he had a man named Sir Stafford Cripps. He was the president of the Board of Trade during World War II. Cripps was a tea teller and a vegetarian in Churchill's eyes, somewhat crabbed in personality. His only concession to pleasure was smoking cigars, but Cripps renounced that habit too, declaring to a wartime rally that he was giving up cigars as an example of sacrifice for the cause. Too bad Churchill whispered to a colleague on the same platform. It was his last contact with humanity. Cripps was also a strong Calvinist and in Churchill's eyes Cripps sense of the providence of God had steeped across into his own sense of self-importance. His self-regard we might say was a trifle high. One day Cripps left the cabinet room and Churchill turned to the others and said, there but for the grace of God, goes God. I asked Ryan Jeffus, what do you think of when you think of Seven Rivers East Head? We're the church that gets in the most trouble on all the mission strips and I thought about that and I thought, oh praise God for that. You know, it really struck me that that's because we're a happy family. You know, there's a family that has to go wash the windows on the house. Washing the windows on the house is one of the great days of life, isn't it? I mean, it had fun taking off the screens and scrubbing around and washing the windows in both. I have to say it's just a day every family looks forward to, right? You know what the happy family does? They don't like to wash the windows on the house. Nobody likes to wash the windows on the house, but while they're washing the windows on the house, what do they do? They spray each other. They soak each other. They bring food outside. They end up eating out on the lawn. And at the end of the day, you fall in bed and you say, how's the best day? It's a happy family that is secure under their dad and so secure in their father's love, even though life is hard and life is difficult, they're going to play all the way to heaven. I said before you this day that this church will always, as long as I have any say, be a playful church. We will throw donuts in the food tent for the glory of Christ because this is a happy family. And that's the way happy families act. Now, those, that's the community that God would create. What are the weapons given to us? I'll close with this. They're the weapons of truth and they're the weapons of love. They're seven rivers church ought to be hard to categorize. It ought to be a conundrum. People want to stereotype churches. People will look at us and say seven rivers churches. And by the way, if anything I sound like I'm saying is bragging about our church, then you've missed the point. What did I say we were? The misfits of the earth. This is recounting the goodness of God in our midst to create a gospel community out of scraps and make it something awesome. And so a church is to be a place of truth. And so the fundamentalist church is a place of truth. They believe the Bible. They tend to be legalistic. They're committed to evangelism, but legalism doesn't really produce much love for people who don't go to church. And so their evangelism is not particularly attractive and not very effective. Well, over on the other side, you have the liberal church. They're not much about the Bible and salvation and Jesus and all that. But I'll tell you what, they want to feed the poor. They want to take care of the needy. They want to fight against racism. And they'll take their stand there. Problem is, without the work of the Holy Spirit and the truth of the Bible, nobody gets converted. So nobody goes from their superior attitudes toward the poor to really having a humble and servant attitude towards the poor. So they'll say they care about the poor. They're not particularly effective or attractive and they're dealing with the poor. So what's the church of Jesus Christ that's experienced the gospel love of God ought to look like? It's a place that has the backbone of gospel truth and yet it is dying. I know it'll stand for Jesus in this world and yet it will fall on its knees to wash the feet of people who are outside the church and far from God. And people look at us and say, I don't know which they are. I don't know whether they're liberal or conservative. And the answer is we're neither one. We're just people who have experienced the gospel love of God. And now we're going to walk out into the world and we're going to speak the truth to our world. So we are a church of truth. We have the Bible. The Bible we believe is the word of God. The Bible is the hope of the world. The Bible is truth. Our world says there is no truth. There's nothing you can say that there is no right or there is no wrong. A terrorist who blow up buildings and fly planes into them and kill 6,000 people. We won't even in our world. Many people won't even call that act wrong. It's only because of the influences of a hostile nation and the mistreatment of the Palestinian people that set the climate for this kind of reaction. That's all they're doing. They're reacting. If we had a more loving world people wouldn't act that way. There is no right. There is no wrong. Everything's relative. That's the message of our world. A little girl saw with her mother they were driving by the town library and there was some hideous sculpture there. And it was some grotesque thing and the little girl said to her mother, what's that? Your mother said that's art. And the little girl said did a car hit it? Well, but in our world we'd say art and beauty are in the eyes of the. The whole truth is in the eyes of the whole. Whatever you want truth to be, you construct it, you believe it. Nobody can contradict it. Guess what? Jesus said, I am the truth. Everything else will be judged by the standard of me. And if you know the truth, the truth will set you free. And when a church starts to believe the truth and when a church stands in the face of its culture, Martin Luther King said the problem with the church that disgusted him in his day is that the church was not a thermostat. It was a thermometer. It was always taking the temperature of its culture. Churchill said, I'm told that the great leaders always keep their ear to the ground. He said, I don't think the British people will respect the leaders they find in that somewhat ungainly position. So if we want to stick our rear end in the air and our ear to the ground, then we'll have no respect in this culture. The culture is going to respect and give heed to and desperately need churches that will say, this is the truth. And we will die for it. And I'll tell you where that truth will take us. It will take us to self sacrificial service for the neediest of our world. What kind of church dramatically affects its community? It's a church where, like where my friend who's taken his family to live in Harlem. He said, why would anybody move their family into Harlem? Jeff White says, because there's something more important for a father to give his children than a large backyard to play in. I want to give my children the chance to die for Jesus. Do you believe that experiencing the sacrificial death of Jesus leads us to sacrifice as well? It leads us to adopt children. It leads us to visit the prisoner. It leads us to feed the poor. It leads us to love our neighbor. It leads us to make ourselves of no account, not with swords loud clashing or roll of stirring drums, but with deeds of love and mercy, the heavenly kingdom comes. Phillip Halley was a professor. He studied the, his life's work was Nazi German medical experiments on Jewish children. He said, do you know the costic effect of going to work every day and studying that? He said, I read for years undonted, unstopped, uninterrupted, account after account of cruelty, of the strong oppressing the weak until it became to be really boring, until one day I discovered the story of a little town in the mountains of southern France, Les Chambons, a town of 3,000 people,
and I began to read their resistance. They were the only town that resisted Nazi Germany. They were the only safe haven for Jews. He said, this is not a Christian writing. He said, I began to feel something on my face and on my cheeks as tears rolled down my face in the midst of the darkness and the midst of the inhumanity. In the midst of the cruelty, this town of 3,000 saved 5,000 Jewish children. He said the Naziism was storm, thunder, lightning, darkness, Les Chambons was the rainbow. He said, you can, this is what he said, he's a World War II veteran. He said, you can have Normandy. You can have the Battle of the Bulge. He said, that's an awesome story, but I'll take the story of Les Chambon as the greatest story of the era. It's when the Church of Jesus Christ rose up and resisted the darkness. Why? He asked. And then he discovered because in Les Chambon there was one dominant church. It was a reformed church of Huguenots who had experienced 300 years of persecution. Deep in their heritage and their bonds was a commitment to Jesus Christ that they would not surrender,
but they would make their lives of no account for the kingdom. What about you? What about me? To whom much is given, much is required. This week you will hold a commitment card in your hand. Don't you dare think that what you're doing when you make that commitment is building a building. That's not what we're asking. We're asking you to give up your life for the kingdom. That's what we're doing. That's our vision.