[Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning Summit Church and good to see all of you at our campuses across the triangle um what a weekend we have had on Wednesday uh this past week I got back from Germany where me and a few of our staff and few of our pastors uh put on a church planting and multiplication uh seminar in and what is often said to be the most secular place in the world um meaning that there are more people in that region that indicate that they are atheist or have no religion than any other place
in the Planet uh some of our people there were involved in putting on this conference and I'm just telling you there were like 200 eager Church Planters and church leaders that were there uh it is amazing to see what God is doing around the world um really just through the prayers and the faith in part of of what you're doing here uh on the way back we had the chance to stop in London and visit with our church plant there and to hear the stories of what God is doing there and uh the people he's
bringing to faith in Christ there uh what an incredible week uh it's amazing it's amazing to see how how people who used to sit right here used to sit right in this the the the the congregation of The Summit Church that are being used in places like that around the world and I just wanted you to know that all the stuff that we do whether it's giving and generosity or whether it is um Faith or whether it is prayer like we did together on Friday night many of you um that stuff reverberates around the world
and so uh it was amazing it was amazing um we are on week four four week four of a relationship series that we've called Finding Love in which we are looking at what some of the most ancient texts in the world say about finding love this week I want you to open your Bibles to Mark chapter 3 now if you're paying attention I had planned for this week to be a second message from The Song of Solomon looking at elements of Lifelong Love but over the last few weeks I've really gotten this sense that God
wanted me to use this week differently I could be off I'll admit that I could be off but um I I want to Pivot from I was going to talk about I'm trying to listen to the spirit of God the best that I can uh we're going to pick up the Last Song of Solomon message next week Lord willing um but we're going to do something different this week that I think the Lord wants us to spend some time in um you see I know I know that there are some of you in here listening
to me right now at one of our campuses for whom what we've been talking about um the past several weeks just doesn't seem that relevant for you maybe for whatever reason marriage is just not on the horizon for you or maybe you're interested in marriage but but you're an older single or a widow and the way that we've approached this topic just doesn't seem to fit where you are it's not scratching where you itch so to speak and I get that by the way I hope you will not take this as defensive um but I
knew that going in we are a big church and and I know that the approach I knew the approach that we were choosing to take would not apply equally to everybody um but what I hope you can always realize in these kind of situations is that the church is a family and that means certain messages are going to be more applicable to some family members than they are to others and we put up with that kind of stuff for the sake of the rest of the family amen amen so married people if you're sitting with
your spouse look at each other right now and say it ain't all about us okay say that to them and single people if you're sitting with a friend look at them and say and it ain't all about us either and kids you guys can say that's right old people because it's always about us okay just kid it just kid it just kid it um all that said I did want to take a moment and step back to address the question that we've been dealing with from the perspective of those of you for whom marriage or
a good marriage isn't really anywhere on the immediate Horizon let's do a quick little poll this morning okay how many of you by the way I know when I ask you to raise your hands other people at other campuses like you can't see me I I'm not doing this for my sake um I do this for the sake of everybody around you they need to see your hand raised okay here here's a question how many of you are currently married raise your hand up at your campus okay raise your hand okay all right good good
how many of you now are not married raise those hands up high too come on up up here we go all right okay put them down how many of you are not married and would really be open to meeting the one sometime soon raise your hand okay raise keep them up keep them up I'm doing you a favor right now okay look around see who else's hand is raised okay just kid him just kid him got to hear waving his hand back and forth there we go how about this one how about this one how
many of you met and married the one that you thought was the one but now after a few years you'd like to trade in that one for another one okay just kidding do not raise your hand do not yes sir God bless you sir I see that hand okay I'll pray for you I'll pray for you hey did y'all know did y'all know that this generation is going to remain single long than any other generation in American history the average age for an American male getting married now for the first time is almost 31 for
women it is 28 we have close to 7,000 single people at our church services each weekend and I will acknowledge okay sometimes being single in a church can be tough my family and I have had various singles live with us over the years for seasons of time and one of them told me it felt like a lot of times in our church a lot of people were were subtly pressuring her to get married and almost communicating to her that if she didn't get married then there was this you know underlying assumption that something had gone
wrong she said married people would say things to her like oh don't worry you'll you'll get married someday as if to say buck up poor one you won't have to live in this inferior stage forever one of our our former Elders um was single in this church for a long time he said sometimes when he would go to these weddings here at The Summit Church these sweet little old ladies would come up to him and say don't worry um you know you'll be next you'll be next and he said eventually I got so sick of
it he said when we were at funerals I returned the favor he said I go up there and be like don't worry you'll be and I told him he had a hateful spirit and needed prayer okay um sometimes sometimes this single girl who lived with us said that people in the church would say to her as if trying to console her well God's just got some work to do on you before he brings you that special someone and she would think well does that mean there's something wrong with me that God's got to fix before
I can get married and that's not to mention by the way she said that when she looked around it seemed like some of the most dysfunctional people she'd ever seen in her life had managed to get married and she was like if God gives marriage out as a reward for Readiness then sometimes it seems like he got the wrong address amen amen well the title of our series is finding love and so what I want to talk about is finding lasting love when you're you're not married by the way married people what Jesus is going
to say to us today has profound implications for how you think about your own marriage so I want you to pay attention Okay it starts with challenging what might be the most cherished myth in our culture a deeply deeply ingrained myth one that is sadly Often perpetuated by the church we've actually dealt with it a few times in this series and I call it the marriage equals completion myth marriage equals completion myth this myth holds this myth holds the idea that marriage or having a close-nit biological family is some kind of ultimate state for us
it is the Pinnacle of Earthly blessing and thus if you don't find that special somebody to marry then you will have missed out on the essential part of a full and a happy and a complete life I want to start this morning by showing you how Jesus utterly and entirely refuted the myth that marriage equals completion in several places the first of which is Mark chapter 3 Mark chapter 3 here we go verse 31 and his mother and his brothers came standing outside of where Jesus was speaking where he was ministering they called to him
verse 32 and a crowd was sitting around him listening to him and they said to him hey Jesus your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you I want you to imagine that this happened somewhere today a pastor is up somewhere preaching and somebody comes up to him and says hey your mother and your brothers need to see you we would expect that Pastor to say oh well family first family is my first calling you know so see you guys later in fact we would almost be scandalized if he didn't say that right but look
at how Jesus respond responds verse 33 he answered them who are my mother and my brothers and then looking about at those who sat around him he gestured at them and he's like here are my mother and my brothers for whoever does the will of God he is my brother and my sister and my mother again I want you just to imagine if I did that somebody comes up me he's like your family needs you D JD and I said who is my wife and my family you all listening to the word of God right
now you're my family here's a question was Jesus dissing family no no he was using hyperbole exaggeration to teach something very very important by the way Jesus did that often it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter into heaven if your hand is prone to sin cut it off because it's better to go to heaven with one hand than go to hell with both he's using hyperbole to teach something important and here's what he's trying to teach to quote our friend Rebecca mlin Jesus is
teaching us that our first identity our ultimate identity our primary identity as followers of Jesus is not biological it's theological give me a minute to build this out for you okay and I'm going to I'm going to use several places that Jesus spoke to this I'll put them all up here on the screen for you so you can follow along first let me be very clear let me lay this part of the case out Jesus did not diss the importance of family nor did he he he he diminish the importance of our commitment to it
in fact Jesus had such a high view of the commitment levels involved in in marriage and family that it sometimes shocked his disciples for example Jews in Jesus's day had a whole list of reasons that divorce might be okay but Jesus said in Matthew 19 that getting divorced for any reason any reason except for a marital unfaithfulness was in God's eyes like committing adultery in First Corinthians Paul would expand that list based on Jesus's thinking he would explain that list to include a couple of other things but the point was that Jesus and Paul had
a higher view of the commitment levels involved in marriage than anybody else at the time similarly Jesus put an incredibly high value on the responsibility of parents to care for children far beyond people of his generation in the first century World children were thought of as secondary sometimes as a little more than property the needs of adults always came before they were far more important than the needs of the kids so Jesus in Luke 18 scandalized everybody offended everybody but pushing all the adults to the side and Gathering everybody's kids around himself and telling the
adults that their needs could wait because the kingdom of God consisted of people like these Luke 17 Jesus said that if somebody didn't do right by their kid it'd be better for them that they have a millstone take a one ton Rock hung around their neck and thrown into the sea then have to face God's judgment for neglecting their kids Paul in 1 Timothy said that if a man did not properly care for his family he was worse than an Infidel worse than an in Infidel and Paul made being a good dad if you got
kids a requirement for being a church leader the point is nobody talked about the importance of commitment to our Earthly families more than Jesus did in fact in Mark 7 Jesus called the Pharisees Hypocrites for using religious obligations as an excuse for not providing for their parents in their old age in every situation that I see in the Bible Jesus raised the commitment levels that were expected in biological Earthly families and yet and yet Jesus consistently prioritized spiritual family over biological in Luke 18 right after Jesus talked about the value of kids and the importance
to God about how we treat them Jesus said this Luke 18 nobody who's left houses or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come eternal life and I'm like Jesus is saying that to be part of his kingdom you've got to leave wife and parents and children for the sake of the of the Kingdom isn't that the opposite of what he just taught in Luke 14 Jesus even says if anybody comes to me and
does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters yes even his own life he cannot be my disciple and I'm like hate Jesus said we can't be his follower unless we hate our father and mother and wife and children wouldn't that go against everything else Jesus taught about the commitment we're supposed to have to them his point obviously is not that we should actually hate our parents or our spouses or our kids what he's saying is that compared to the value that we place on him and our spiritual
family our commitment to our biological family should seem like hate y' listen what I'm about to say is radical I mean radical radical and some of you it's going to make you mad and you're going to write it down and you're going to get your Bible and you're going to study all weight try to prove me wrong and you're going to come back saying you were right okay you ready the nuclear family is not the center of God's kingdom now do not miss what I'm saying the family unit is the building block of our society
and it should be by the way God ordered it that way but it is not the center of Jesus's Kingdom Jesus never diss the importance of the new your family he just said that it's not ultimate it's not the most important family connection that we have in the kingdom of God two more places I want to show you where Jesus teaches this and then we'll we'll draw some conclusions and that's all we're going to do today Luke 11: 27 as Jesus was saying these things as he was as he was teaching some great truth a
woman in the crowd called out blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast at which you nurse now y'all I am all into people talking back to me while I preach I love it when somebody's like preacher preacher and so forth but that's got to be one of the weirdest things ever said to somebody while they were preaching is that right blessed are the breast at which you nursed and Jesus turned and said weird no no he said he said rather blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it what
was this woman trying to say she was using a Jewish metaphor that really doesn't translate into American culture basically she calls out Jesus how how awesome it must be to be related to you and Jesus said nope those who obey the word of God are more blessed to me than even my own biological mother yall think about it how awesome would it be to have Jesus in your ancestry tree y'all if that were true about me I'd be working that into any conversation I could oh you were related to some of the pilgrims on the
Mayflower well my great great uncle was Jesus I mean any body who knows me at all knows that if you give me half a chance I will tell you that my great great great great uncle was Dave Crockett if you bring up Tennessee Texas or the 19th century in general I will find a way to slip that into the conversation but how cool would it be to be blood rated to Jesus and yet Jesus says being my brother my mom not that big of a deal being in my family and having my spirit dwell in
you huge deal Christopher Yuan Christian Author Who I Really respect and who has himself self been single for for many many years says this our Earthly families are temporarily Bound by Blood but the family of God is eternally Bound by the blood of the lamb and that's why it takes precedence all right one more Mark 12 for a lot of people they find this passage confusing mystifying even initially depressing the Sadducees who say that there is no Resurrection which is why they are sad you see right asked him a question you I've never heard that
all right you got to read this one by the way in a sanctimonious tone that's how the the the the Pharisees would have said it okay teacher Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but leaves no child the man must take up a widow and raise Offspring for his brother that is indeed in the Old Testament there were seven brothers Once Upon a Time and the first took this one girl as a wife and when he died unexpectedly they left no Offspring so the second one took her and
then he died leaving no Offspring and the third likewise by the way at this point if I'm brother number four I'm going to be like nope not doing it okay but the bottom line is this woman has seven different men all brothers and all of them die how's the Mother-in-law feel about that girl by the way okay verse 22 the seven left no Offspring last of all the woman also finally died in the resurrection when they Rise Again here's the Trap whose wife is she going to be for all seven had her as wife now
I know that sounds like the prologue to a Mormon joke it's not Jesus said to them his it's a trap question Jesus said to them no no no you're wrong the premise of your question is wrong because you know neither the scriptures or the incredible power of God what he's going to be doing in eternity you don't have any concept of that for when they rise from the dead they're neither going to marry nor are they given in marriage but they're like the angels in heaven Jesus answered very simply in heaven marriage and biological family
do not exist as I showed you the first week of this series marriage was God's first solution for dealing with our loneliness but it wasn't his only solution or even his ultimate one in heaven in our ultimate glorified resurrected State we will not have lost our need for companionship it's just that up there God's going to deal with our aloneness in a better way no one is married up there and whoever we're married to down here we're not going to be married to up there now I'm going to admit part of me finds that a
little sad in heaven when I see Veronica there's not going to be anything why at least give her a wink and a suggestive nod maybe you know you say well Pastor that makes me sad too and yet and yet we know that in heaven there's no sadness that's because in heaven you see our Joys are are never diminished our Joys are always heightened transformed matured CS Lewis in his book Miracles had a great analogy for this says a toddler thinks the single greatest thing in life is to eat candy right so imagine you're an elderly
grandmother trying to explain to your toddler granddaughter some of the things you most love about life the joys of friendship the joy of falling in love the joy of staring out over the grand door of the Grand Canyon and your toddler granddaughter the whole time looks at you and says yeah but but can you eat Skittles while you do those things you have a hard time explaining to her that those Pleasures are so much better when you're so wrapped up in them you won't even be thinking about Skittles leis said that we like that child
lack the ability to understand the joys of Eternity we don't know the scriptures of the power of God what we know now the pleasures of Earthly things things like sex and married life and nuclear family leou says we do not know though except in glimpses the other things which in heaven will leave no more room for them so whatever God has got for me up there will be even better than what we have here and that means however things go down up there and I don't really know much about it and I don't think anybody
really does the one thing I'm sure of is that I'll be even closer to my wife and kids there than I am here which makes me less sad so what's the implication of all of this listen to John Piper who's talking about Jesus's shocking words there Mark 3 here's what what John Piper said Jesus here in Mark 3 was calling out a new family where single people in Christ are full-fledged family members on a par with all others bearing fruit for God and becoming mothers and fathers of the Eternal kind marriage is temporary light momentary
it will finally give way to the relationship to which it was pointing all along Christ and the church the way a picture is no longer needed when you see face to face when I travel I car around pictures of my family of course and I will look at them when I miss them but when I'm home I put up the pictures because I now have the reality in front of me marriage Earthly family that was just a picture a distorted blurry fading picture of the love of Jesus and the beauty of his body Jesus is
the intimacy and the tenderness and the uncondition Love Your Soul craves and his church is forever you say well Pastor that's sweet and spiritual but I don't want to be alone at Christmas and I don't want to grow older alone and I don't want to have nobody to take care of me when I'm old that's what I'm trying to tell you you're not supposed to be alone it's just that marriage is not the only way that God takes care of that in fact you catch this I read this a minute ago Jesus said this in
Luke 18 truly I say to you there's nobody who has left house or wife or brothers or Partners or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come eternal life you see that and that's a huge and not just in eternity I'm saying it's all going to be okay I'm saying now right now in your day-to-day life you're going to receive a hundredfold of these things now listen in the book of Acts go home and study this in the book
of Acts the early church faces every kind of hardship you could imagine right poverty famine getting being stoned being Shipwrecked being falsely accused persecution all of it the one thing I can't find a single person in the church in the book of Acts dealing with is loneliness I can't find a single place in the book of Acts where somebody in the church was lonely you should develop the kinds of relationships in the church that you spend Christmases with the kind that will take care of you as you get older here's the point Point singleness is
not a second class inferior state in God's kingdom you think about it Jesus was the happiest most fulfilled most Fully Alive person ever to walk the face of the Earth and he was single at no point in the gospels do we see even a hint that Jesus's singleness was a source of dissatisfaction for him Jesus's singleness certainly did not mean that he did not fully know the experience of love right I mean just before he died Jesus told his disciples greater love has nobody than this what what is the greatest Earthly love imaginable oh the
honeymoon night right that's got to be it how about 50 years of marital faithfulness that's the greatest love he said no greater love has nobody than this that somebody lays down his life for his friends and you the church you are my friends he said he knew and experienced the greatest love available you say but JD I really want to have kids I really want to have kids let me respond to that with the words from a letter that I got from one of our single missionaries a lady who had just come back off the
field where she had served over in East Asia for almost 10 years she said for the first few years on the mission field as I realized that I was going to be doing this single I grieved the loss of being able to have biological children of my own but God used that listen by grace and through my tears to make me the proudest and most joyfill spiritual mom on the planet the day I saw my spiritual son baptized in the unreached corners of East Asia I don't know what it's like to hold my my own
newborn baby for the first time I would imagine that it feels like your heart's about to burst I imagine that because that's how I felt as this young man came up from the baptismal Waters the doctrine of spiritual children that Jesus teaches in Mark 3 has been by far the most inspiring joy-giving biblical Doctrine maybe of my whole life and another perk I only had to wait six months for a spir spiritual grandbaby as amazing as biological Offspring is Jesus prioritized spiritual Offspring even more listen to me it is okay it is okay to mourn
the lack of ability to have biological kids whether that's because just something's going on with you or because you're not married it's okay to mourn that that is a real loss but by grace even that real genuine grief can be overshadowed by an even more real genuine Joy of having Eternal spiritual children the only part of your life that will be truly unfulfilled if you're single is sexual and that is a legitimate Earthly loss I don't want to minimize that but God says that even in that he will give you a special Charisma which is
a Paul's word for a spiritual empowerment 1 Corinthians 7 he'll give you a special Spirit endowment to be able to do that well and abundantly and joyfully God can enable you to live a happy and fulfilled life without sex remember the most joy-filled love-filled man never to walk the face of the Earth lived without sex all the other things that marriage supplies companionship Offspring God gives you those now in an ultimate form in an eternal form in a H hundredfold form through the church Rebecca mofin again she says you won't weather without sex you will
weather without friend and family connection so what's all that mean what's all this mean three things three conclusions they should be kind of obvious number one don't make an idol out of Earthly family don't make an idol out of our Earthly family Idols are not usually bad things or good things we've turned into ultimate things I'm saying this to you whether you're single or married you need to reject the marriage equals completion myth it is a lie and I am not just talking to single people when I say that for a lot of you married
people the reason you got so many marriage problems is that you founded your marriage on this myth and now you both live by it throughout your whole marriage you have been looking for marriage to give you something that it wasn't designed to give Gary Thomas a Christian marriage counselor says marriage does not solve emptiness it just exposes it problems like loneliness and insecurity are not solved by a relationship with another human being they're solved by a relationship with Jesus why I said our first week that you're not ready to date until you're ready not to
date because until you're ready not to date you are inevitably going to try to use that romantic partner for something they were not designed to give you you that romantic partner will never meet your deepest Soul needs they won't they can't they can't Supply the love that you crave that complete acceptance where somebody knows you completely and loves you unconditionally anyway despite all your flaws despite whatever he knows about you that hole in your heart is a jesus- shaped hole not a missing lover shaped hole you're looking for that missing person you're looking for that
one perfect match who will complete you I'm telling you that's not found at the marriage altar that's found at the cross of Jesus Christ find your identity find your security find your happiness in Christ first and when you do that when you do that marriage and singleness will begin to take on a different weight in your life you might still want to be married I'm not spiritualizing that I'm not saying that you won't care what I'm saying is that if God withholds marriage or a good marriage from you for some reason he will give you
the spirit empowerment to to endure that well 1 Corinthians 7 Paul calls both marriage and singleness spiritual gifts which means he says you got to have Spirit empowerment to do either one of them well one of my single friends said that singleness can be like a fast in a fast you go without something that you want like food for a while and during those times of desire you genuinely desire food what you learn is that God can sustain you even without that thing you desire you don't ever have to give up asking for marriage I'm
just saying you won't need it to be a complete person so I urge you Summit whatever stage of life you're in you need to reject the marriage equals completion myth and listen I get it that is a lot easier said than done because that myth is so ingrained everywhere in our culture know it's the theme of our favorite movies it saturates the lyrics of our favorite songs I don't want to think of anything else now that I've thought of you I've been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night and now I only see daylight
I only see daylight and I'm not picking on all you swifties okay I'm not I'm not trashing her all the songs we love say that but you got to reject it Jesus is the daylight that you're looking for only he can lead you out of your 20 year or 40y year or eternity of Dark Knights here's a story I've never told you when Veronica and I got married we're trying to figure out what song we should use for our first dance had to be a slow song cuz I'm not a good dancer we both loved
do not judge me we both love there's no way by Alabama it's an old country song but I just could not bring myself to make that our first dance and y'all maybe I took myself way too seriously about then fact I know that's true but I knew the chorus was patently untrue there's no way I could make it without you there's no way I'd even try if I had to survive without you in my life I know I wouldn't last today oh baby there's no way right it's a sweet song It's a sweet song and
I'll be honest I did not want to live any more days in my life without Veronica and I do not want to imagine any version of my future life anymore without her but ultimately the words of that song are not true for us I could make it without her and she could make it without me and that's because Jesus is our savior he's our daylight he is our completion I'm never going to have to look at my savior in a grave he's the Savior who promised he would never leave me or forsake me and told
me that not even the grave itself could take away his love and presence from me and it's true I don't want to live without Veronica I genuinely don't but Jesus is my life and Jesus is hers too and I don't want to start out our marriage on the foundation of a myth so we opted not to go with that song instead we chose get jiggy with it I'm just kidding we just that's number two number two number two treat your church as family treat your church as family now y'all when I say the church is
family most of us think in terms of a weak metaphor meaning you got some kind of sentimental attachment to this church and feel about it like you do say You're Alma moer but for Jesus saying the church's family it was not some kind of weak sauce metaphor he thought of his body the church as his actual family and he said that his commitment to to his family his spiritual family was of the highest order imaginable he would give his life for the church as we saw Jesus consistently pointed to a day when marriage and biological
relations would be no more and all that would remain would be the church now we are not there yet we're not there yet but that reality should shape how we interact with each other in the church now I heard a story from one newer Christian newer Christian lady whose husband suddenly collapsed one weekend at church he ended up having to spend a week in the you it was a terribly frightening time this newer Christian said that people from her small group volunteered to take off work to keep her kids so that she could spend time
with her husband one even referred to her kids as our kids not in some creepy kind of way they were just making the point that this woman would never again have to carry those kinds of burdens alone she's never she said she never felt so loved and cared for in her whole life y'all I hear versions of that story over and over and over in our church I cannot tell you how many times I will reach out to somebody here who is going through something and they will say to me Pastor it's been an unbelievably
hard time but the church has been awesome and by that by the way they don't mean the staff they don't mean me they mean you the members they'll say things like my small group has been here Round the Clock and made sure that all of my needs were met sometimes y it brings tears to my eyes just being on the phone with these people hearing that person on the other end of the line telling me how much and how well you've loved them the the church is family that means you should invest in it as
family please don't treat this like some kind of religious weekend pep talk where I'm your motivational speaker if that's how you treat this church and quite candidly it's how a lot of you do treat this church then you are only experiencing a fraction of the blessing that Jesus intends the church for you to be I'm not mad at you like you ought to be in church I'm just telling you you're missing it you're missing the blessing that it's supposed to be you say well what are you telling us to do be in a small group
that's what I'm telling you to do volunteer by the way they say that for you newer people unless you have seven personal relationships in this church your first year you likely won't be here for the second year when I meet somebody new in our church I can pretty much predict if they're going to be around next year and it's got nothing to do with the quality of my preaching or anybody else is preaching or the quality of the worship maybe that's what brought you here maybe that stuff impresses you now but I promise you the
novelty of that is going to wear off it's the relationships that keep you connected in a church parents you need to get your kids known here I saw a study that showed that the single greatest predictor of whether your kid will continue on with the Lord after he or she goes to college the single greatest predictor is if he or she has five meaningful relationships in the church with other adults who know their names and invest in them that is the single greatest predictor of whether a kid continues to follow the lord in college to
get your kid known here oh but my kids needs to travel every weekend with soccer yeah that that yeah great do some of that you need to you need to make sure they get connected here because you need to be more concerned about where they're going to spend eternity and where they go to college listen at our church I will goe and tell you we put all the coolest adults in the student Ministry already just go check it out we've already done all the hard work for you we picked out the non-weeb people and just
put them there just take your kids there you'll see what I'm talking about invest in others outside of your family whether you're married or not invest in the kids of this church be the spiritual aunts and uncles to the kids in your small group man get involved in the Men's Ministry or volunteer in the student Ministry where you can speak wisdom into the lives of younger men who are growing up without a father ladies you need to do the same thing in the women's ministry part of how God fulfills his promise to be a father
to the fatherless and a mother to the motherless is by providing those relationships through the church here's another one be like Pastor you just over apply everything yes I get that okay but listen here one more don't rush in and out of here so fast like you're trying to beat the traffic out of a football game that your team has clearly lost y' it's like every week as soon as I'm done watch it happened today may happen less today now I'm saying this but watch it when I the moment I'm done I'm walking off the
stage worship team's coming up and some of you act like it's the fourth quarter in the UNCC JMU game and you're down by 25 and there's no way you can come back so you might as well go ahead and beat the traffic and leave yall one problem with that Jesus has already won okay so stick around for the full celebration I always challenge our staff I tell our staff to do their best to be available for the first seven minutes before church and the first seven minutes after church because that's where we can help this
church feel much less like production and more like family Rebecca mcclaflin who I referred to a couple times here she wrote A Blog in 2018 I love the title of it why I don't sit with my husband and sometimes my kids in church it was an amazing article you should look it up and read it but she said that some of the response she got to that article from the Christian Community was as if she had suggested stomping on puppies in Sunday school how dare how dare you undermine the importance of the family and church
she said but I also got a lot of messages from single Christians who explain how much pain they feel in church when they sit alone and yeah I get it listen sometimes people want to be alone at church and there can be a season for that but in general she says we come to church to be together as the family of God not to have our private moment with the Lord she gives three rules I love these an alone person in our gathering is an emergency two friends can wait number three introduce a newcomer to
somebody else listen y'all I am just charismatic enough to believe that if you notice a new person at church by themselves the Holy Spirit wants you to notice them and go talk to them so don't be disobedient to the Holy Spirit you should be looking around for people at the beginning and the end of service your friends can wait meet them at Chipotle later at church find those people who look alone and introduce yourself to them and then introduce them to somebody else that is spiritual family Summit family what if we reserve the seven minutes
right before church and the 7 minutes right after church just to do this now I know y'all to be in here 7 minutes early means that some of y'all are going to have to leave your house 30 minutes earlier but wouldn't that one thing be a great way of saying to our community hey you're not invisible to Jesus he sees you and we see you wouldn't it be great to be a part of the church like that one more thing on this before I go to point three treating the church like family means committing to
the church like family when you got a family member that's annoying raise your hand if you got an annoying family member raise it up keep it up if they're in the building right now okay no don't don't do that I'm just kidding you don't just kick them out you don't kick out your family you may want to but you know for family the rules are different sometimes you just roll your eyes and you're like well that's Uncle Billy no I'm not talking about ever tolerating sin or racism I'm just saying that in church you are
going to encounter people who rub you the wrong way sometimes they love the music that you hate sometimes they dress in ways you can't understand sometimes they express political perspectives that drive you baddy sometimes when you sit next to them in church they sing off key anybody in here sit next to somebody this morning that sang off key raise your hand I'm just kidding don't do that I keep don't do that sometimes sometimes they smell weird but if we're family you don't just say well I don't know I really enjoy this relationship so I'm out
we're not consumers we're family and that means bearing with people when they are not our favorite people it also means confronting them lovingly when they're doing or believing something harmful instead of just doing the easy thing and being like well I'm I'm going to go somewhere else all right last one number three prioritize expanding God's family not every person in here is going to have biological or Earthly family but all of us can and should and must have spiritual family as important as investing listen in your biological family is and let me be clear Jesus
said it was very important your Earthly family there uh but your Earthly family is not the only family you should be investing in it shouldn't really even be hear me the primary family you invest in if you are single maybe you don't have biological Offspring but but you can have sons and daughters in the faith that's what Jesus said it's what he did and he loved those children as much as anybody has ever love their biological kids let me apply this one other direction sometimes I will hear older people in our church talk as if
the only thing they plan to do when they retire is to invest in their grandkids hang around their grandkids as if biological family was everything and that basically they spent a lifetime building this Kingdom and now in retirement I just get to enjoy it again let me be clear investing in your grandkids is an important and a great ministry it should be where you start as a grandparent I hope you grandparents are like my mom and dad and Veronica's mom and dad that are very intentional with our grandkids taking them out on special trips taking
them on special dinners discipling them but I'm telling you if you're a follower of Jesus Grandpa or Grandma even more fundamental than investing in your Earthly family is investing in the Eternal one don't make your family an idol don't make your Earthly family Idol who are my mother and my brothers Jesus said those that God is bringing into his kingdom so just as you invest in your grandkids as you do that don't lose the centrality the privacy of the kingdom of God hey news flash your kids probably don't want you hanging around that much anyway
they got enough to deal with without feeling like they always got to take care of you like well but JD when I'm retired I'm gonna be old and tired to too old and tired to get involved in some Ministry to quote our current president who I don't quote very often that's Malarkey okay you arguably have the most to add in this stage Paul tells Timothy that older women should be diligent to Mentor younger women that older men should be diligent to invest in younger Faithful Men that's not to mention the great things for God's kingdom
that some people start in retirement Caleb in the Book of Joshua was 80 when he pointed out a mountain and was like that one that's the mountain I'm going to go take for God John Wesley was in his 70s when he headed out to preach the gospel and plant churches in the American Midwest Haron Sanders was 65 when he launched the first Kentucky Fried Chicken right so there's a lot that you can still do don't make an idol at of Earthly family treat your church as family prioritize expanding God's family finding love Jesus said he
came to give us life and not just life but life more abundantly the full essence of life is love finding and showing love is the Pinnacle of the Christian life because God is love the Apostle John said God is love and the ones who know God are the ones who love like he loves and he wasn't just talking about married people when he said that fact he wasn't really talking about married people primarily people talking about our love for God and our love for each other Jesus called you to family he called you to love
so why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses just bow your heads with me if you will I have two very simple questions for you that I want to leave you with just going to leave you with the Holy Spirit here's the first question have you ever just received Jesus's love you know it's literally they waiting for you it's a gift Jesus saw all of your sin he saw all of your shame he came to Earth to die to forgive you of that shame and to make you knew he sees you as
the mess you are and he could not love you any more than he does right now but you have to receive that love as a gift if to receive his salvation as a gift it's extended to you right now have you ever done that have you ever done it if not you could do it literally right now you could just say Lord Jesus I realize that you're the one that I need you're the one I'm missing I give all of my life to you you got to surrender to him I give my life to you
I receive your love and your offer to save me pray that right now if you pray that listen my only request tell the person that invited you or come up here at the end of the service and tell one of the pastors or prayer team leaders at at your campus here's my second question especially if you're single this question is for you are you ready to commit to doing this God's way you ready just to say God I trust you Psalm 8411 says no good thing will he withhold from those whose hearts are steadfast toward
him which means if you're single he's not withholding anything thing good from you can you say Jesus I'm going to believe that teach me to trust you teach me to love like you love teach me to be family like you were I trust you just going to leave you for a moment with the Holy Spirit okay leave leave with the Holy Spirit and in just a minute our worship team will come at all of our campuses they'll stand us up and we'll sing and rejoice in the love of God together you listen to the Holy
Spirit for the next few minutes
