Matthew 16:13-18

Mark 1:15

Mark 2:13-17

Romans 12:10

Listen, we are so glad that you are here. And genuinely, I I want you to know that, that we really do love our church. And so if you are brand new, maybe you had a neighbor that invited you or a coworker more than anything, welcome. I hope you feel comfortable. I know that it can be weird going into a brand new place for the very first time. And I know that we’ve got people that are all along the spectrum in terms of faith journey. So we’ve got people here that are mature Christians, that have been a Christian for a long time, that, that love Jesus and been fallen after Jesus. And then we’ve got people in the room that, that you’re an atheist and you’d say, well, I don’t really know about that religion stuff. And maybe you’ve got questions or you’re intrigued, or maybe you’re somewhere in the middle.

And I just want you to know, wherever you are on that spectrum, you are welcome and we are glad that you are here. Now, when we say this phrase, yeah, absolutely, we can clap back when we say this phrase, I love my church. Here’s what I wanna clarify. Here’s what we don’t mean when we say I love my church. ’cause It can get a little bit confusing. What we don’t mean is that our church is perfect. As a matter of fact, if you come to our church long enough, we will do something at some point that you do not like. It could be today, it could be right now, it could be this message that you’re gonna come and you’re gonna have a song that you don’t like, or you’re gonna come and you’re gonna have an experience that you don’t like. Or you’re gonna go to a program and you’re gonna say, well, I don’t really like the way that they did that program.

Or, we’re gonna do something that you are not a fan of. It could be my sermon right now. You’re gonna walk out the car. You’re like, well, he was okay, not great. I mean, I, I couldn’t really tell where he was going with all that. And that illustration. Yeah, a little, little short. There’s gonna be times where our church messes up. And maybe that’s your experience with church. Maybe you’re coming in today and, and you have some barriers built up about church, possibly for some really healthy good reasons. Because here’s what we know. There’s no church that is perfect. We also don’t mean when we say I love my church, that the people in my church are perfect. I, I can promise you hang around enough of us and you’ll learn that that is true. Sometimes you’ll come to church and you’ll hear a sermon.

You’ll worship God with people to your left and to your right. And then you’ll go out into the parking lot and someone will cut you off and you will say, what happened? <Laugh>? Like, were you paying attention in there to out here? Like, where is the disconnect? But the reality is that we have imperfect people that are inside this church. And then here’s what I can promise you that the pastor is not perfect. And I’m talking about me. I tell my kids all the time, I, I’m not a perfect person. I apologize often in my family. I say, I’m so sorry for how I handled that. I’m sorry for the way that I responded. I, I’m sorry. The way I got frustrated in this circumstances. ’cause I need them to know that, that I, I do mess up. And I’m aware of that also professionally as a pastor.

I, I’ve had a lot of mistakes. I remember when I was 25 years old, I was a children’s pastor and one of the big things that children’s pastors do are Easter egg hunts. So we decided we were just gonna have the biggest Easter egg hunt of all time. We, we planned on somewhere between 20 503,000 kiddos showing up for an Easter egg hunt. We packed 30,000 Easter eggs. Now they don’t come pre-packed, which means it was me and a bunch of volunteers just sitting there for like a week packing really cheap candy into really cheap plastic eggs. And then the day we’ve been, we’ve been playing for months leading up to this Easter egg hunt. The day finally arrived. We, we thought we were super prepared. We thought it was gonna be amazing. And, and let me just add the asterisk that when a big church doesn’t Easter egg hunt, there’s really no hunting involved.

You don’t hunt 30,000 eggs. You just put ’em on the ground. It’s more of an Easter egg gathering than it is an Easter egg hunt. But we were so excited. We’ve been promoting to the community for a really long time. And do you know the only thing worse than having an event that zero people show up for an event where too many people show up? Because we plan for about 2,500 to 3000 kids and we had somewhere closer to 10,000. And that’s a bad event. I can just tell you right now, that’s a bad event. It’s too many people. There was no parking, there was lots of crying. Like everything was just crying. Kids were walking out, they got an Easter egg basket. There’s no Easter eggs. I’m like, I’m so sorry. I’m like, here, take my shoe. So you have something. Mom and dad are crying ’cause they, some other kids stole their kids Easter eggs.

I’m crying ’cause I’m like, this was just terrible. You know how many Easter egg hunts I’ve done since that day? Zero. None. None. It was a terrible professional failure on my part. And I can just tell you that I will have more issues and problems. I’ll make mistakes. ’cause When we say I love my church, we’re not saying that we think that the pastor is perfect. So what then do we mean when we say, I love my church. Why do we love my church? It’s really because of what the church represents. And here’s what I’ve found in my life. Maybe you found it too, that most things don’t last forever. I think back to my childhood, I had an awesome childhood. There were some amazing memories in my childhood, but so many awesome things now are gone. Like for example, on a Friday night, the coolest thing that you could do in my childhood was go to this place right here, blockbuster video.

And I remember you just run around and there’s just all these videos and movies. And I remember being disappointed when you’d run up to the new release section and there’s like a hundred DVDs or VHSs of the same thing and they’re all gone. None of ’em are there, but there’s just something about going to Blockbuster and going home and watching that movie and having their popcorn. And now it’s gone. There are no more blockbuster. Actually, I take it back. There’s one blockbuster, it’s in Washington. So if you ever really get a Hankerin on a Friday night, it’s just a short 20 hour drive away. Blockbuster. I would’ve never believed that. It would no longer exist. And yet it is gone. I’ll tell you another thing. My best friend growing up as a kid he got one of these for Christmas <laugh>. And, and I, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

I thought the future had come. I remember going over after Christmas and laying down on his bed and just like, oh, like wow. I mean, I can feel the ocean right now. This is just amazing. Like this is the future of beds. I remember going home and saying, mom, dad, I need a water bed. My my best friend got one. It is so amazing. And these, they’re, these are gone. They just don’t exist anymore. Anybody in the room? Show of hands. Anybody have a waterbed? Yes. No way. There’s like, I am impressed. Seriously, we got some people that were, that were alive in the eighties. I can tell you that right now. <Laugh> you remember these, these don’t exist anymore. Disposable camera. I mean when they came out, it was like this, this is brilliant. This is the coolest thing in the entire world. You click that little thing like bam.

I tried to describe to my kids disposable cameras one time. I mean, I, I was, it was like I was speaking a foreign language. Kids are used to, you take a picture of your phone and they say, can I see the picture? And you turn around and you show it to ’em and you’re trying to say, well, when I was a kid, we couldn’t, we couldn’t see the picture right after a second. They’re like, what? What happened? Well, we had these cameras that you, you’d snap a picture and then you’d have to wind the camera. They’re like, why? I was like, don’t, don’t worry about that part. ’cause That’s really hard to explain and I don’t really understand how film worked. So then how would you get to see the picture from the camera? Well, we would take that camera to typically a drugstore.

And we would drop it off for about an hour and then we would come back and then a stranger who we’ve never met before in our entire life, they would’ve looked through all of our pictures before we get to look through the pictures, and then they put it in a little package and they hand it to us. And then we looked through and we realized most of them were terrible pictures. And they go in the trash. And that’s why there’s very little documentation of my childhood because that is the process that used to exist. And now this totally gone does not exist anymore. One other piece of technology that I really thought would be with us the rest of our lives is dial up America online internet. You you wanna talk about? Hard to explain to a kid. I tried to describe this to a ch to my kids and, and this was my son’s response.

He said, wait, so your computer called the internet? That’s how it worked, <laugh>. I was like, I don’t really know. I don’t know how it worked. But he was like, and, and that’s something happened when that noise came on. And then you were connected to the internet. And so there are a lot of things in our life right now that we don’t realize, but they will be gone tomorrow. They will no longer exist. But here’s what I want you to understand. That the church, and when I’m talking about the church, I’m not talking about Cherry Hills community church. I’m talking about the capital C Church. The church will last forever. That, that when Jesus creates the church, he didn’t just create it for a season. He didn’t just create it even while we were on this earth. The book of the Revelation tells us that the church, the capital C Church will live, will last forever.

It will live on for eternity. And sometimes we think in America, in our context, we think, well, the church is dying. It’s not doing very well. But but here’s what I want you to know. Here’s what recent studies will tell you that the church has more Christians and more churches right now than at any other point in history. Matter of fact, if you look at the last 10 years, Hey, here’s what the studies will tell you, that there were 300 million new Christians in just the past 10 years. Now we think, well, in America, it’s, it’s going the opposite direction. That might be true. But when you look at Africa and Asia, 290 million of those salvations were in Africa and Asia, that the church is exploding globally, that there is revival where people are turning towards Jesus and giving their life to Jesus. And so it makes me ask this question, what is the message of the church?

And why is it just as powerful today as it was 2000 years ago? Why are 300 million people in the last 10 years turning towards the message of the church? What is the message of the church? If you’ve got a Bible, turn with me to Matthew chapter 16. If you don’t have a Bible, you can fall along in the app. Everything we put on the screen is always in the Cherry Hills app under that note section. And obviously you can fall on the screen as well. Matthew chapter 16, we’re gonna start in verse 13 is what it says. Now, when Jesus came into the district of cre of Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the son of man is? This is a reference to himself. He’s saying, who do people say that I am? Son of man is an Old Testament term.

We see primarily in the book of Isaiah and Jeremiah. It’s talking about becoming mess. Messiah. They say, who? Who do people say the Jesus I am? And they said, the disciples answer him. Some say John the Baptist. Others say Elijah and others, Jeremiah or some of the prophets. So they list off some of the famous figures that we see in the Old Testament, the Old Testament Jeremiah. There’s a whole book about him. He’s a prophet that speaks on behalf of God. Elijah is this amazing prophet in the Old Testament, never dies, gets on a chair, goes up in the heaven with God. That’s phenomenal miracles. And so when the crowds are discussing Jesus, this new guy on the scene, this guy who’s performing miracles, this guy who’s teaching in a way that they’ve never heard before, they start to bundle up together and they say, who is this guy?

And so the murmur, the word on the street, the rumor is that, well, he’s gotta be a prophet from the Old Testament. Maybe he’s Elijah, come back. We’re not really sure who he is, but he says to them, but who do you say that I am? Oh, okay, that might be what the crowds are saying about me. But Jesus turns to the people that know him the best and they say, who do you think that I am? It says, Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you Simon Barona for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Now we will unpack for a second what this means but understand that this is the moment that Jesus creates the church.

Now the church, that Greek word for church is just ecclesia. It means a local gathering of people gathering together. There were churches before Jesus created the church, but he puts this exclamation mark on his church where he says that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. I mean, that’s a pretty bold statement. He’s saying, I’m creating something new, something that has never been done before, something that you’ve never experienced or been a a part of. And this church, this local gathering, the very gates of hell will not prevail against it. Jesus was creating something that would totally and radically transform the entire earth. And he’s saying that thing that the gates of hell will not prevail against. He said, it’s built on this rock. And now the way it’s worded, sometimes people falsely think he’s talking about Peter, that, that on Peter, that person, he would build his church.

But what we don’t get, what gets lost in translation, we talked about, about a month ago that Peter’s name, we see three different names for Peter in the New Testament, that Peter is his Greek name. That’s the most frequently used. Then you have Simon, that’s his Hebrew name, and that gets used often. But then he has an Arame name CFUs. And CFUs actually translates also as rocks. So there’s this play on words about who Peter is and the phrase that he had just said would be the rock of the church. Now, we know that the rock of the church is not Peter himself because Peter in his letter in one Peter says that the cornerstone of the church is Jesus. So to unpack it a little more clearly, when it says the rock that the church is built on, it’s talking about the phrase that Peter said, woes Peter’s phrase, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, that the church is built on Jesus.

But, but specifically the fact that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Now, when I was a kid, I, I thought that Christ was just Jesus’ last name. My name is Kurt. My last name is Taylor. Jesus’ name was Jesus. His last name was Christ. I assume that there was Mary Christ and Joseph Christ and Jesus Christ. Like that’s how I thought that it worked. It wasn’t until later on that I realized, oh, Christ is a title. It has a meaning. And the way that we think of Christ can also be translated as Messiah. That’s the Hebrew word for Christ. But it also sometimes gets translated as Savior because that’s the function, that’s the purpose of the Messiah from the Old Testament, that this Messiah would come to save the nation, to save the people. But really probably the best way to understand what a Christ is, a messiah, a savior, is to us understand that Christ would be a king.

That Jesus was coming to be king Jesus. That Jesus was ushering in a new kingdom. In the Old Testament, you had David, and David was the king that they referred to as the goat. Just the the greatest king of all time was awesome, a warrior made after God’s own heart. But in the prophecy it says that one day there would be a messiah from the lineage of David, but the new Messiahs kingdom would have no end. And so when we think of Jesus the Christ, it’s a, he’s a king ushering in a new kingdom. At the very beginning of the book of Mark, the gospel of Mark, he describes this. It says, insane. The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel. He he’s saying, Jesus has brought a new kingdom. You need to turn, repent, turn from your old way of thinking and believe in the gospel, the good news that Jesus is bringing with him.

Now the way that we think of Jesus’ kingdom is based off of what we see Jesus talking about in his kingdom. In John, actually, Jesus says, my kingdom is not of this world. So we, it’s easy for us to know that when he’s talking about his kingdom, he’s not talking about a literal earthly kingdom, although there’s pieces of that. He’s talking about an eternal kingdom, a spiritual kingdom. But in the first century, that that’s not how they understood it. That they saw Jesus as, okay, this is a king who is ushering in a brand new kingdom except over and over and over again. Here’s what Jesus starts to teach, that his kingdom would look different than any kingdom that had ever existed before or ever would exist in the future. Jesus started bringing in these radical ideas that when you look at the Sermon of the Mount, we oftentimes call it the upside down kingdom.

‘Cause Everything that he says seems to be upside down. He uses these phrases like he says, you’ve heard it said that, but I say to you, he says odd things like the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And what Jesus does is he takes the cultural normative values that existed in the first century and he completely flips them upside down. He, he pushes back on this question. The culture had then and culture has. Now, where is it that I find my value? I’ve got a picture of a purse that I wanna show you. This is not just any purse. Now, now some of you in the room, probably most of the guys in the room are looking like, okay, yeah, this looks like a purse. There are a few of you in the room that you know that that’s not any purse.

That is a Christian di purse, which means that the value of this purse is significantly higher than what you might guess at first glance. Like if you were just in your mind to, to guess how much you think this purse costs. And right now it’s for sale. You go on their website, it’s available for you for a purchase. You can do it as soon as you’re done with church. Here’s a slide from there’s taken from this week. Here’s a slide that shows the actual value of this for sale right now, $6,500 for that purse. Now, in their defense, there’s lots of different color options. So sometimes you gotta pay for those, alright? For most of us, we would look at that and say, well, wait a second. How, how is a purse worth $6,500? Why would someone pay $6,500 for a purse? They’ve done studies where they took the purse and they looked at the materials and the thread and the the leather and the stitching and how much labor would be involved.

And, and here’s the estimate on the cost to produce a Christian to your bag somewhere between 57 and $99. That’s how much it costs. We would say, well, that’s how much it’s worth. But that’s not how much it’s worth. What gives the bag its value? The the bag doesn’t have its value because of the material or even because of how it was made. Primarily the bag has its value because of the label that is on the bag. That label communicates a message. And with it, there is a value that as a result is placed on that back. The same is true in our lives. Here’s what I figured out about labels. And we’re all wearing a label. I mean, if you look at your shoes and your shirt and your your pants, you’ve got a bunch of labels on right now. And here’s what I’ve realized in life, that labels can add value like a Dior label, but labels can also reduce value.

Everybody in here has certain labels that you carry with it. I have labels that I carry. Some of you don’t even realize the labels that you’re carrying because at a very early age, what starts to happen, we start to place labels on people. And some of ’em are really positive labels. We say things like, you are just so smart and you are just so beautiful and you are so gifted and you are so talented and you are so wonderful. Those are great labels. When we get those labels, what happens? All of a sudden we start to walk a little bit, a little bit up. Like, yeah, feeling pretty good about myself. That’s what everybody else thinks about me. But there’s some other labels that we wear too, aren’t there that even at a young age, we’ve got young kids. Sometimes they’ll come home and they’ll say, well, so and so said. And so labels start to stick labels like you’re ugly and you’re stupid and you’re not very great and you’re terrible. You’re an awful person. I don’t like you.

And so we have these other labels that all of a sudden can stick to us. And the question ultimately gets down to this root, where does my value come from? Now when Jesus starts talking about ushering in his kingdom, his new kingdom in the first century, we gotta understand a little bit of the cultural backdrop of what’s happening in ancient Rome. In the first century, they had a social class. And the social class was this pyramid where at the very bottom of the pyramid were slaves. Now, in the first century in Rome, one third of all of Rome were slaves. Every time Rome took over another country, everybody got enslaved. They got an earring and their ear, they became a slave. They could work that off. But they started as a slave. One level above slaves were the plebeians. These were the manual laborers. These are farmers, these are shepherds.

These are people that are working with their hands. Jesus, his family would’ve fallen into this category right here in in mark, he uses the Greek word tekton which means day laborer. We often talk about him as being a carpenter. We’re not actually a hundred percent sure that he was a carpenter. We do know that he was in this social category. So this category, they weren’t slaves, but they were very, very poor. One step up from that were the equestrians. The equestrians were wealthy, business class, wealthy enough to own property. Most people in Rome did not own property, but the equestrian class did own property. The reason that they’re called the equestrian class is because occasionally Rome would call all the men of a certain age to battle. And regardless of whether you were in the army or not, you could be called into war.

And if you were part of the equestrian class, meaning that you owned a property when you went to war, you were allowed to ride a horse. Thus, the name, the equestrian class, one group above that were the Patricias. This was the wealthy of society. These were the descendants of the original senators, and they were the ruling class that existed in Rome. Of course, above them you had the emperor. But the Patricias are typically what we think of when we think of Rome. If you go to a Roman party themed party, you’d probably wear a white toga. The reason is not because this group over here, or even this group was wearing a white toga. It’s because this group wore white togas. And it was to demonstrate something to everybody else that a white toga was representing the fact that they did not do manual labor.

They didn’t do hard dirty work. In addition to that, it was demonstrating their wealth because it was hard to keep a white toga clean. And in order to do that, you had a lot of money. So not only was that the social pyramid that existed, in addition to that the way that they viewed religion was that God blessed people with wealth and prosperity that he liked, and he cursed people that he didn’t like. So it was this cosmic view of karma. Now, although that’s what the Romans believe in the first century, that’s actually what the Hebrews practiced in the first century as well. You see this in the New Testament. The Pharisees would say, well, someone who is living for God, God is going to bless. That’s why phrases like cleanliness is next to godliness. This idea that, well, if you love God and you’re following after forgotten that he’s going to bless you.

And if bad things are happening in your life, then clearly that’s your fault, your sinning, and therefore God is cursing you. And so the value that was placed on people was very much based off this pyramid. And then overlaid on top of that was God’s value that correlated to your social standing. Now, Jesus comes in and he does something really, really different. Now, look what happens in Mark the very next chapter of what we quote about Mark saying that the kingdom of God, kingdom of Jesus’s at hand. Then a chapter later in Mark two, we see what Jesus’s kingdom looks like. We see how it’s different than the current kingdom. It says he went out again beside the seats talking about Jesus and all the crowd was coming to him and he was teaching them. And as he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alpheus Levi’s, the Hebrew name for Matthew.

Matthew who wrote the book of Matthew, the tax collector who becomes a disciple. So Jesus sees Levi, the son of Althea, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. And as he rec climbed at table in his house, it’s a quick transition, but he’s at Matthew, the tax collector’s house says, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors said to his disciples, why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? Some translations translate it as why does he eat with scum? That was their view. But wait a second. This is the very bottom of the social ring. These people have no value. These people are terrible.

God doesn’t love these people. Why would Jesus, who, who appears to me a man of God who’s doing miracles, who’s who’s teaching new things? Why would he be hanging out with his group? It says, and when Jesus heard it, he said to them, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick, I came not to call the righteous but sinners. See, Jesus’s kingdom turns things upside down. And he took the marginalized in the first century and he said, I value you and the church, the capital C Church, in the first century, they started to live out what Jesus had taught them day in and day out. And so the first century church looked very different than every other religious establishment that, that had ever existed before that, that the people in the first century that didn’t have value, people like women and orphans and children, that in the church they had value and they were elevated.

And we see that play out when Paul writes in Romans chapter 12 verse 10. Paul says, love one another with brotherly affection. And then he says, says this phrase that, that is confusing to us. But he says, outdo one another in showing honor. The first century was an honor and shame culture. If you did good things, you got honored. If you did bad things, you got shame with that. If you were wealthy, that brought with it honor. If you were poor, that brought with it shame. But Paul is saying, I want you to outdo one another in honor. What he’s trying to say is, I want you to honor everybody you see, it’s easy to honor those people that already have on. He’s saying, I want you to outdo everybody with honor. Now, although the first century, the class system is not exactly how it plays out today, we see remnants of that and just how we function.

If you think of in our world, who has the most honor, I’d say all you have to do is look at social media or the people that have the most followers, the most crowd, the most likes, what’s gonna be celebrities. It’s gonna be artists, musical artists, athletes, really rich people that, that we have a tendency just like they did 2000 years ago to honor those people that are the wealthiest and the brightest, the best looking, the best athletes. But the message of the church is, no, I want you to outdo one another in showing honor to everyone. Why? Why is that the message of the church? It comes down to value. Now, I’ve got with me some different bills, all the different denominations. I I’ve got a a $1 bill, jump up to the $5 bill, got the $10 bill, got the $20 bill. There’s a $50 bill all the way up to the a hundred dollars bill.

What’s interesting when I look at these is if I close my eyes and I I start to shuffle through ’em, I can’t tell a difference. They’re made of the exact same material. They’re not paper, although oftentimes we call ’em paper. It’s 75% cotton. It’s 25% linen. It’s the same material in the $1 bill as the a hundred dollar bill. They use the same type of ink to make each and every one of them. If you think of the inherent value of this bill, it’s almost nothing. It’s not a lot. And so what then really is the difference between a $1 bill and a hundred dollars bill? It doesn’t even have anything to do with the condition of the bill. If I take a hundred dollars bill and I crumple it up and I spit on it and I rub dirt on it, or even I take a sharpie and I draw on it, it does not change the value of this bill. As long as you’ve got 51% of the bill, it retains its value, but not because of what it’s made of, not because of the bill itself. What gives this value? It’s the face. It’s the face that’s on the front of it. What makes a hundred, a hundred is Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin’s worth a hundred. George Washingtons. You see, here’s what I want us to get. The value is not the bill. It’s the value is what the bill represents. In the same way, the value of the church, it’s not the church, it’s what the church represents. Your value, my value, when Jesus enters into the world, the kingdom that he brings changes everything. Here’s what he says. He says, our worth falls short by ourself in Romans, it says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Jesus came and said, it is an equal playing field. None of us are worthy. None of us deserve the honor. And so what does Jesus do? Jesus comes and he gives the least honor and value. Why? not because of the intrinsic value that they have, but because of the image that is imprinted on them, that we are made in the image of God.

So each and every one of us have value because God created us with value. But then Jesus takes it a step further. He says, I wanna repair that relationship with God. So Jesus goes to the cross. Jesus dies on the cross for our sins, for our punishment, the punishment that we deserve deserved. And Jesus gives us value when we will take that step and put our faith and our life and our trust in Jesus. I I, I think sometimes we have this idea about ourselves because of the labels of the world around us. We feel like just this crumpled up Bill, well, I don’t have value. Look at all these labels. When Jesus enters into that space and says, it doesn’t matter how crumpled up you are, it doesn’t matter how beat up you are. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter what your history is.

Jesus says, you have value ’cause of me and ’cause I love you. And so the church, the message of the church is to ascribe value to people, not because of their worldly worth, not because of their accolades, not because of their wealth, not because of what they have done, but because of what Jesus has done. Jesus, the church tells us that at the cross on our knees, everybody is completely equal in value. There’s a, a book that I I got a handful of years ago called I Stand by the Door. It’s about a guy named Sam Shoemaker. The book’s actually written by his wife after he died. Sam Shoemaker was a pastor up in New York. He died a little before 1957. That’s when this book came out. And his wife put together a book that had his poem at the front and then tells a little bit about his story.

Sam Shoemaker was instrumental in helping start Alcoholics Anonymous. He was one of those foundational people involved in that, the 12 Steps program. But he wrote towards the end of his life a poem called, I Stand at the Door. He wrote this, I stand by the door. I neither go too far in nor stay too far out the door is the most important door in the world. It is the door through which men walk when they find God. There is no use my going way inside and staying there when so many are still outside. And they, as much as I crave to know where the door is and all that so many ever find is only the wall where the door ought to be. They creep along and walk like blind men with outstretched, groping hands, feeling for a door, knowing there must be a door.

Yet they never find it. So I stand by the door. The most tremendous thing in the world is for men to find that door, the door to God. The most important thing that any man can do is to take hold of one of those blind groping hands and put it on the latch. The latch that only clicks and opens to the man’s own touch. Men die outside the door as starving beggars die on cold nights and cruel cities in the dead of winter die for want of what is within their grasp. They live on the other side of it, live because they have not found it. Nothing else matters compared to helping them find it and opening it and walk in and find Jesus. That’s for me. I shall take my old accustomed place near enough to God to hear him and know he is there, but not so far from men as to hear them and remember that they are there to wear outside the door. Thousands of them, millions of them. But more important for me. One of them, two of them, 10 of them, whose hands I am intended to put on the latch. So I shall stand by the door and wait for those who seek it. I’d rather be a door keeper. So I stand by the door. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, our

Our heart’s desire as a church is to help people find the door that our heart’s desire is to, to live out the calling that you have placed on us, a bunch of broken people coming together. The mission of the church that you gave so long ago is thriving today, built on who Jesus is. That he is the rock, he’s the Christ, the Son of the living God, that he is the door. So, Lord, help us as a church to take the people in our community and help them find that door. And we wanna be a church that disciples people, well, helps people fall deeper and deeper and deeper in love with you. But we also wanna be a church that is reaching people for the gospel each and every day. I pray for anyone in this room right now and that does not know you, Lord, that today can be a day that they walk through that door. I pray for anyone in the room that that walks in with labels that are unhealthy worldly labels, labels that bring shame and guilt. God, I pray that they will understand that they have value, value that comes from you, that they’re created in your image. When we pray for what’s next, help us to be humble and walk on our knees and then when Jesus we pray, amen.