It is all about Jesus

“It’s All About Jesus” – Sermon by Caleb Campbell, September 12, 2021

Church, today we conclude a five-part series that we’ve been going through called “Groundwork” — in which we’ve been looking at some of the core values of our church family and some of the ways that we express them.  To put it another way, these are things that you’ll hear us say a lot around here at DSBC.  Today we’re looking at one that summarizes all the other weeks, as well as adds a little piece to it.

For those of you who are joining us in person, if you did not get one of the handouts on your way in, if you just raise your hand, wave your hands up in the air like you just don’t care, one of our hosts will get that to you so that you can follow along with this.  We’ve been printing these out each week so that you can make notes, mark it up as you like and have your eyes on the same text that we’re studying.  On our website there’s a big graphic that says “Groundwork” with a link to download the study guides.  In fact, if you missed a week, I would encourage you to go back and review the sermon and the study guide.  For those of you who are joining us online, on the front page of our website — dsbc dot church.  Does anyone have a full house?  No, OK, so these are also collectors’ items for you.

Today we’re looking at a phrase that says this:  We strive to help people be with Jesus, think like Jesus, and love like Jesus.  You’ll notice that it’s on a crown because we believe Jesus is the King.  We’re going to study in John Chapter 15.  So, if you have a Bible and would like to open, we will be in John Chapter 15.  And as you’re turning there, I wanted to give you a cool story.

Two weeks ago, we shared as a church family that we recognized that there were a lot of refugees coming out of Afghanistan, many of whom would be placed here.  As Governor Doug Ducey said, the state of Arizona welcomes refugees.  Arizona has been home to the refugee resettlement program for years, and we’ve done ministry with refugees in the past.  But we specifically noted that a lot of the agencies that serve the Valley that we love partnering with are now in a position where many of them are underfunded to handle the massive influx.  We said at the time that for the next two weeks, anything that comes in through our benevolence fund — which is designed to support our neighbors’ life-sustaining needs — would go specifically towards those agencies.  Then something crazy happened that made the front page of the New York Times.  Your generosity made the front page in the New York Times, and we’ve been getting emails and phone calls from people all around the country.  Some of them are folks, saying, “I’m not a church person” — I get the impression many of them have a generally unfavorable view of the church — but they said it’s so good to see a church like yours, actually living out what they believe, which is awesome.  Just to be a witness for Christ and for His generosity.

And then I got a call from a dude I’ve never met in Denver and he said, “Hey, I read your story in the New York Times, and can you tell me a little bit more about it?”  So I told him about it and he’s like “Cool.  Can I send you some money?  And Pastor Caleb’s answer to that question is always the same: “Yeah, yeah yeah.”  But in this case, I said that all we’re going to do is to give it to one of our partner organizations that we love.”  And he said, “No, I’d really like to give it to you, but can you do it in one of those things where it’s like a matching donation? So like if somebody gives $10, I’ll give $10.  I’ll do that up to $1000.”  So Pastor Caleb’s answer to that question is almost always yes.  So I said yes. I get a text message from him about 10 minutes after we hang up the phone and he says, “Let’s make it $2500.”

So we are going to extend the timeframe until next Sunday, so anything that goes to our benevolence fund until next Sunday is going to go so support the life-sustaining needs of our refugee neighbors, many of whom are still on their way as they go through the government process.   Also, on our website, the DSBC dot Church up at the top, you can find a link if you want to give of your time or material resources or you’d like to donate directly to one of the organizations we’re partnered with.  It’s there on the top menu of our website.  I want to encourage you guys to take that opportunity.

We say in our statement we strive to help people be with Jesus, think like Jesus, and love like Jesus.  And I said a moment ago that this statement actually encapsulates the other four statements that we’ve gone through during this series, but it adds something else.  So if you just think about the last four weeks or the other four parts of this series again, all of the previous statements up until now have been a means to articulate thinking like Jesus and loving like Jesus.  Thinking like Jesus and loving like Jesus, but we’ve intentionally added something today that, by and large, as a church we have not had the volume turned up on a lot.  Does anyone know?  What it is?  It’s not think like Jesus, it’s not love like Jesus.  What was in the phrase or the statement that you noticed?  “Be with Jesus.”

Be with Jesus.  It’s something that we’ve failed to turn the volume all the way up on, but I as we as we engage in the Scriptures today, I’m going to argue that the thinking like Jesus and the loving like Jesus — if it’s disconnected from Jesus — actually becomes poison.  It actually becomes destructive, and I think Jesus thought that and I’d like to prove it to you from John Chapter 15.  But we also notice how many times Jesus is mentioned.  How many times is Jesus mentioned in this statement?  Thrice, right?  Isn’t that a little bit too much?  No, and I’ll tell you why.

This is a little thing — one of this pastor’s pet peeves — but here we go.  I hear people talk about God a lot and I appreciate that, but here’s the deal.  When people say I love God or I’m a God-fearing person or I’m a godly person, here’s my question:  I think you should actually ask which one?   Which god?

Because if you read your Bible — which by the way, I would highly encourage you today after you go home — you’ll see this throughout the whole of your whole Bible.  You’ll notice that there is a repetitive theme that kind of goes like this.  You might even be familiar with it, even if you’ve never read the Bible, which is totally fine.  You might have even heard of the Ten Commandments.  They’re kind of like popular.  There’s one that says “I am the Lord your God.  You will have no other gods plural before me.”  Throughout your Bible you’re going to find that there are all these entities or things that are competitors for the one true God.  Competitors for our hearts, for our intentions, for our desires.

As sometimes it’ll they’ll be straight up, referred to as gods or false gods, or sometimes be referred to as idols.  Sometimes they’ll be referred to as the powers, principalities, rulers, and authorities.  There’s this spiritual dimension that I think as Westerners, we fail oftentimes to recognize that there are places and spaces and things and entities and created beings that we can give our hearts to.  They often are called by strange names like Baal or Mammon or whatnot.  But in modern society we might call them sex, money power, nation, family,  et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  Now are those things, good things, or bad things?  Those are good things created by God as gifts, and yet the corrupting power of sin can take a good thing and corrupt it.  And here’s one of the ways that sin corrupts the good gifts of God.  When you and I, when we as people, elevate the good, created things of God to the status of God, it poisons them.  They become corrupt.  So family is a good, but when family becomes god, it ends up poisoning us.  We end up hating our family for not living up to our expectations of them because we think that if our family is OK, I’m OK.

You could do that with your career.  You could do that with money.  You can do that with sex or sex appeal.  You take your pick.  One of the things that — if as you read through your Bible, your whole Bible tonight – one of the things that you’ll discover is that humans have a desire to elevate something to the ultimate level of importance.  So where you get your dignity, your worth, your value, your peace, your security, your future, your whatever, whatever your heart is looking for, — whatever gives to you those things that may well be your god or gods.  And so the reason that we say “Jesus” a lot is to be real clear which God we’re following.

I couldn’t actually show it up on this screen because we’d have to blur the whole thing out because it’s vulgar, — but I saw the back of the vehicle and it had two bumper stickers.  And on the one bumper sticker, the font was made of AR15 assault rifles and it said expletive – the worst one — and then a political figure who this person obviously had disdain for.  And then on the other side of the vehicle, in the same gun font, it said, “faith.”  Now hold on, hold on!

I know you guys love Hobby Lobby philistines, right?  We go to Hobby Lobby or at Target or the Magnolia Farms, and there are all these little signs, right?  “Faith, friends, family.”  Here’s the question that I want to ask you to consider:   faith in what?  We all have faith.  Another way to put faith is allegiances.  We all have allegiances.  We’re all worshipping some god.  When I hear people say “I’m a God-fearing person,” my next question is which one or ones?

If I saw an advertisement for a prayer and worship event I’d ask “In which direction will you be pointing your prayer and worship?”  Because there are many forms of prayer, there are many forms of worship, and if we’re not careful, we can just assume that if a person is using God speak, they mean Christianity.  They mean Jesus, but the reason we’re articulating Jesus is because if we want to be crystal clear that we are following, we are following and pursuing the way of the triune God made manifest in Jesus the Christ.  God the Father, God the son, God the Holy Spirit.

OK, so we follow Jesus.  The reason we’re articulating it with Jesus is because we want to be very clear which God we serve.  It’s the one who became manifest in Christ.  So when you think of the cross, that’s the one yes with me so far.

Now I want to make a little a little aside.  A lot of people — and I totally get this, it’s confusing — they’ll say His name like it is a curse.  Or maybe they’ll refer to him as Jesus Christ as if Christ is his last name, like in the modern construct in the West.   We put last names where?  Last.  So Caleb is my first name.  Campbell is my last name.  I get that it’s confusing that when you read your Bible later tonight, you’re going to see Jesus Christ.  The Christ Jesus, the anointed One Christ, is just another way to say Messiah.  It’s “anointed one” or “the one” that all of Scripture points.

Tonight in your whole Bible reading, you’ll see that especially in your Old Testament, you will find a longing for — a repeated theme that there’s coming a Messiah, a chosen one who’s going to restore all that which is broken to rights.  And then in your New Testament, because we switch languages in the New Testament, you’ll find that it’s called the Christ.  Christ is just a way to translate Messiah.

And so Jesus’s last name isn’t Christ.  He is the Christ.  Now in English we put the title before, right?  People sometimes refer to me as Pastor Caleb, not Caleb Pastor.  So you could say Christ Jesus, which may just dig in a little bit more on the fact that He fulfills an office that was longed for throughout your Scriptures.  It’s OK, I think, to say Jesus Christ, ’cause there’s only one Messiah.  There’s only one promised one.  There’s only one chosen one.  There’s only one Jesus.  So we are careful to articulate the one that we’re following — the God that we are following — is the one that became manifested in Jesus.

And here’s the really crazy thing about Jesus, contrary to all other gods.  There are two things.  All of the other gods — because they’re good things created by God, but we elevate them to a position of godness — they demand our life from us.  If work and success in work, which is one of my greatest temptations, if success at work becomes my dignity worth and value, I will move heaven and Earth, and I will actually sacrifice my family and y’all just so I can feel good about the work that I did.  It could be not always, but it could be tethered to workaholism that says as long as my jobs OK, I’m OK.  My who I am comes from being Pastor Caleb.  Do you see it?

Now for some of us we think, “That’s dumb,” and I get it.  But you’ve got a god or gods that are calling out to you all the time, don’t you?  And I don’t know what God or gods are calling out to you, but I know this for a fact:  All of them demand our life from us.   Jesus is the one true God who gives His life for us.

Here’s the other cool thing.  If we don’t just grind and work to make sacrifice for these false gods, they want nothing to do with us.  These false gods will disown you faster you can drop a hat.  Many of us have experienced that.  Many of us have found that when we’ve given our life to something — maybe a lover, maybe a substance, maybe, maybe work, maybe some other identity-forming entity — that when we don’t please it, it turns its back on us.

But here’s the thing about Jesus.  When we turn our backs on God, He is constantly in pursuit, calling out to us come back.  Come back.  Come back.  Come back to me.  He is the constantly-pursuing God.  All of the other gods turn their back on us when we betray them, when we don’t meet their needs.  But Jesus is the one true God Who follows after us.  Come back home.  And so when we walk the Jesus way, we recognize that He’s the one God who actually wants to be with us.

Everybody, just take a big deep breath in.  What would your life be like if every moment you recognized that Jesus wants to be with you?  And right now for many of us there are things being conjured up in our minds, our own failures, our past hurts, things that people have done to us.  We say how could Jesus want somebody like me?  Someone so broken like me?  I just want to cut to the chase here:  Jesus knew you and all your imperfections before time began, and He gave His life for you.  He rose from the grave, conquering over Satan, sin and death, including all the brokenness that you feel.  And he still yells and screams, come back to me.  There is no thing or action or thought that can separate us from the love of God.

What He calls us to do is to the word repentance, which is a word that a lot of a lot of people get weirded out by. Repentance is a change of mind.  I’m going to turn from this way of thinking and I’m going to turn to Jesus.  That’s right.  OK, so I’m going to turn towards Jesus.  And do you know who Jesus says yes to?  Everyone who wants Jesus.   Read your Bible.  And so when we turn from walking our own way, we turn and we walk the Jesus way.  And the crucial thing about the Jesus way is not our actions.  It’s not our thought processes.  It’s being with Him.

Let’s go to the text.  This is in John Chapter 15.  Now I’m going to read it.  Then we’ll talk about it.  Then we’re going to do some cool stuff.  OK, here we go.  This is Jesus speaking.

“I am the true vine.  My father is the gardener.  Every branch that does not produce fruit He removes.  He prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit.  

You are already cleaned because of the Word I have spoken to you.  Remain in me, and I in you.  Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.

I am the vine.  You are the branches.  The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit because you can do nothing without me.  If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown aside like a branch and he withers.  They gather them and throw them into the fire, where they are burned.  If you remain in me and my Word remains in you, ask whatever you want and it will be done for you.

My father is glorified by this — that you produce much fruit and prove to be my disciples.”

OK, so here we go.  We’re going to zoom in on this.  So number one — Jesus is riffing on a theme that you can see throughout your Bible.  Trees are all over the place in the Bible.  Now I’m going to ask that you would suspend just for a brief moment your modern Western scientific understanding of things.  And I would just ask that you would put yourself in the mind of an ancient Near Eastern agriculturalist who doesn’t have all the categories we use.

I’ll just show you here just really quickly.  In the beginning of your Bible is the Book of Genesis, and it starts with the story of the garden that is in Eden.  And in the garden that is in Eden, at the center of the garden, there is a tree.  And the tree produces life-giving fruit.  Out of the fruit of the tree comes life and life abundant.  It’s generally referred to as the Tree of Life.  If you want to see something really cool right, spoiler alert — if you go to the end of your Bible, you’ll see that the Tree of Life actually makes a reappearance.  Well, that’s interesting.  I wonder what might be happening there.  OK, good question.

Let’s keep going. Fast-forward.  You get to Moses, who has a personal experience with the living God through a tree.  Some of us might refer to it as a bush, but that’s again, maybe projecting our modern idea or categories onto the ancient.  It’s a tree.  It’s a small tree that’s on fire, but the tree is not consumed.

You fast-forward and you find that that in Psalm chapter one, the opening of the Book of Psalms, the wise person who meditates on the word of God constantly is referred to as a tree planted by the waters.  And in Psalm 80 you’ll see that Israel, the people of Israel are referred to as a vineyard or a type of tree.

Do you guys know about Christmas?  Yeah, it’s coming up here soon.  (My Christmas wish list is on Amazon, just as an FYI.)  At Christmas, one of my favorite songs is “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Have you guys ever heard this song before?  It is a longing song.  It’s a lament and a longing that the Emmanuel God with us would do what?  Come into our lives.  I love that song because Christmas is the answer to this prayer.  And there’s a line — it’s usually in the second verse and is translated differently in different occasions — but it says something like this.  “Oh, come, thou branch of Jesse’s tree, an end sign of thy people before the rulers silent fall and people hear your mercy call.”  So the author of “Oh Come, oh Come Emmanuel” is tethering this prophetic language about Jesus being a shoot that comes out of a chopped down tree, namely Jesse’s tree.

And Jesus, here, standing before his disciples or sitting before his disciples in John Chapter 15 says, “I’m the vine.”  I’m the great tree.  By the way, have you guys ever seen a vine before, like the one that grapes grow on?  What do they look like?  Trees.  Jesus here is God.   I think that all of those who are listening to Jesus who know their Bibles see exactly what Jesus is doing here.  Because out of trees come what?  Good fruit and life.

And Jesus uses a metaphor that everyone would have totally gotten, right?  Those of us in the post-Industrial Age, we might miss it.  But if you were to be walking along and you see a fruit tree and there’s a branch on the ground not connected to the tree, what do you just assume about the status of the branch that is disconnected from the tree?  Would you pick it up and say “Fruit, please?”  No, you and I all — even for those of us we go to grocery stores — even we know that a branch disconnected from the life source is just dead.  Only those who are connected to the vine, only the branches that are connected to the vine produce what?  Fruit.  If I take a branch that is disconnected from the vine and I duct tape fruit to it and say to everyone, “Look at this awesome fruit,” what inevitably will happen to the fruit?  It will die.  It will become corrupted.

I just want to press pause here and just say that it is easy to watch somebody point at fruit, “Look at this faithful ministry.  Look at this good thing that God is doing.” On the outside it may look like good fruit for a season.  But if it is disconnected from the life source, it’s poison.  I’ll put it another way.  Not everyone who uses Jesus’s name is connected to Jesus.

All right, let’s keep going.   Notice how Jesus speaks of His relationship with all who turned from their sin, repent and believe the gospel.  They believe the good news that Jesus is the risen King, and He says follow me.  Follow the Jesus way and you know  He does not say this: “Produce fruit and then you earn connection with the vine.”  Notice the order.  This is so crucial.   Notice the order. What comes first, the connection with God or the fruit?  American individualistic consumeristic moralism says “Be a good person, then you get to connect with God.”  Right?  There are so many of us who say God would never love me because of all this stuff I’ve done.  That is American consumeristic individualistic moralism that says produce fruit, then God will connect you to His life source.

But Jesus says I’m the type of God who gives My life for you.  You just connect with Me, and as you connect with Me, you will see good.  What is the fruit?  I think Jesus leaves it intentionally ambiguous.  The later New Testament authors are actually wrestling around with this.  They kind of take shots at “We think that this is fruit, or at least this fruit.”  None of the lists in my experience are exhaustive.  So I’ll just put it to you this way.  This is what I’ve come to understand.  OK, follow me here.

The fruit, so you’ve got the grape, right?  Where is its life source?  The branch or the vine?  The vine.  The fruit is all the essence of the vine.  You guys with me so far?  The vine has given its life source to the fruit through the branch, and so the fruit — I’m pushing the metaphor, but hold on -the fruit should taste like, smell like, and remind us of the life source, the vine.   Whatever the fruit is, it’s Jesus in us.  Is that OK?

We ask, “Is this fruit charity?  Well yeah, if it’s Jesus in you and it’s fruit of faithfulness.  Yeah, if it’s Jesus in you and it’s the fruit of a reconciling relationship.  Yeah, if it’s Jesus in you — we would exhaust ourselves trying to come up with a complete list of the fruit that Christ produces in and through us.  So we’ll just call it fruit, and if it reminds us of Jesus, if it tastes like Jesus, if it smells like Jesus, it’s likely His fruit.

Here’s the other thing, too.  Just because God has produced a certain type of fruit in your life in past seasons, don’t feel like He’s going to keep doing it.  He may have a fresh desire for you.  And too often we look around for old fruit and trying to stick it to ourselves, and it just becomes poison.

Religion — American individualistic, consumeristic religion says “I obey; therefore, I’m accepted.  I’m a good person so God has to love me.”  Jesus says “I love you and accept you because of who I am, not because of who you are, what you’ve done.  Follow me in obey.”

And the obedience is not to earn His favor.  The obedience is so that we might find fruit in our lives.  Jesus’s call to obey is only ever for our good.  And He’s the only guy who does that — which is why I want to make sure we’re real clear that, as a church, the God we serve is the One who hung on the cross.  The One who went in the tomb.  And then the One who beat it.

What is your connection with Jesus like? He is so so, so much of my life.  I have read this text and I’ve thought “OK, what’s the thing I need to do in order to be with Him and get it right?”

So I just want to encourage you in prayer, worshiping together, reading your Bible together, especially with other people who are not like you, just sitting quietly.  The list goes on and on and on and on of these spiritual disciplines.  For my wife and me, we do frame some of our time together around certain disciplines, like a date. You guys have heard of this.  I hadn’t actually heard of it till after high school, so I didn’t hear about dates during high school at all.  Did not experience many of them.  So a date is when you say, “OK, you and I — because we want to go deep in our relationship, because we’re in relationship with another — we’re going to do something together.

The date isn’t the point.  No, the relationship is the point.  The date is just the way in which we intentionally spend time together.  But we also spend time together just, you know, doing nothing.  We spend time together going on trips.  We spend time together at the dinner table.  There are always different opportunities to spend time with each other.  But the focus is not on the thing we’re doing.  It’s focus on the one we’re with.  So I just want to encourage you, whatever means of connecting with Jesus — whatever you find to be the most fruitful — do that.

Do you know who Jesus says yes to?  Anyone who wants Jesus.  Do you know that Jesus longs to be with you, to be connected with you?  And he’s calling out, “Just follow me.  Come to me.”  Out of that comes fruit.

So when we just think about our statements here as a church family, we want to be very clear that all of it — a life of generosity, living as ambassadors, living as a community of misfits — all of that is coming out of the power source of Jesus. It’s all coming out of a connection with Jesus.

And here’s the deal.  If we try to do the other four things without being connected to Jesus, they will become corrupt poison.  Because all we’ll simply be doing is just taking fruit and trying to put it on to us.  But if the fruit is disconnected from its life source, it becomes spoiled and harmful if we try to consume it.

What does your connection to Jesus look like?  It’s something that I want to encourage you to think through and pray through — not only individually but also communally.  What does our relationship with Jesus look like?  For He has called us to one church family in unity.   So I want to ask if you would please do me a favor.  We’re not gonna do anything weird but I’m gonna ask you to close your eyes and just let the worries and the concerns of this world — all of the thoughts that have come in — just let them go.  Just allow maybe a quiet to come over your mind.  I’m just going to ask you to hear the words of Jesus that he spoke directly to his disciples:

“Peace I leave with you.  My peace, I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your heart be troubled or fearful.  You have heard me tell you I am going away and I am coming to you.  If you love me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.  I have told you now before it happens so that when it does happen, you may believe.  I will not talk with you any longer because the ruler of this world is coming.  And yet he has no power over me.  On the contrary, so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do as the Father commanded me.  Get up and let us leave this place.  I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  Every branch in me that does not produce fruit, he removes.  And he prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit.    Now you are already clean because of the Word I have spoken to you.  Remain in me and I in you.  Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.  I am the vine.  You are the branches.  The one who remains in me and I in him will produce much fruit because you can do nothing without me.   If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown aside like a branch and he withers.  They gather them, throw them into the fire and they are burned.  If you remain in me, and my words remain in you.  Ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you.  My Father is glorified by this, that you produce much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.  As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you.  Remain in my love.  If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love just as I have kept my father’s commands and remain in His love.  I have told you these things so that my joy would be in you, and your joy may be complete.  This is the command:  Love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this — to lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends.  If you do what is commanded of you, I do not call you servants anymore because a servant does not know what his master is doing.  I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.  You did not choose me, but I chose you.  I appointed you to go and produce fruit, that your fruit should remain so that whatever you ask the father in my name, He will give to you.  This is what I command — that you love one another.”

Let’s pray together.  Jesus, we want to be a people who are shaped by, compelled by, guided by you.  And you call us to abide in you, to remain in you.  And so, Lord, by the power of Your spirit, right now, in this moment, would you give to each of us a sense of Your abiding presence.  You remain in us, and we remain in You.  Lord, for those of us Lord who are weary of trying to produce fruit by our own might and our own power, right in this moment, Lord, would you give to us a sense of your calm?  You are rest and, you call us to take up your easy and light yoke.  Help us to recognize the way that you have set before us and the means in which you call us to follow your way, Jesus, even though it not be easy.  You give us the power to take every step that you call us to.  Continue, Lord, to shape us into the type of people who look like you, Jesus.  We ask these things, knowing that you love us and You’re powerful to bring them about, and we entrust ourselves to You, Amen.  … (End of sermon, announcement follows.)

In a moment, we’re going to do something that was mentioned a moment ago.  On the front lawn we’ve got some of the construction materials – namely, cinder blocks.  They’re going to be used in the construction of the elevator for the two-story kids’ building.  The reason that we’re building this elevator is that we believe that everyone from our community, regardless of their abilities, ought to be able to participate in the life-giving ministry that’s going on here, as we point people to Jesus.  And we recognize that the only way to the second story of our kids’ building was to climb stairs, which limited accessibility.  And so a couple years ago we raised funds through our Build 100 vision, and we received those funds.

Actually — this is crazy — at the time just before COVID hit, we received a donation from another local church for $200,000 because they believed in what we were doing.  At the time we thought that’s awesome because we had raised a couple-hundred thousand.  I’m forgetting the details around inside my head, but we had raised a lot, as well.  What we didn’t see coming — the price of the elevator doubled since we had initially laid out our plans in 2019.  What a blessing that God used another church to help us cover the spread!   And so we’re able to build this not only because of your generosity, but also the generosity of the people of God here in Phoenix who believe in this.

So, what we’re going to do today as this construction begins this week, I’m going to ask that you would go out and find a brick.  And I believe there’s some Sharpie pens available, and I’m going to ask that you would just say a prayer — not over the elevator, but for the people who will use it.  That they would meet Jesus, that they would be drawn to Jesus, and that Jesus would use this church family to minister to them. And if you want to write out a prayer or make a mark, or you can just a note or a drawing — whatever works for you.  If you would just write that on those bricks, and for those of you who have children in Adventure Kids who want to do that together as a family, please go pick the kids up first.  Bring them out.  There’ll be plenty of time available for us.  And, by the way, these will not be exposed after the construction is done.   So if you want a memory of it, you know, take a picture of it because we got to plaster the outside of the thing.

We are doing this as an act of striving to follow the Jesus way, and so as a church family let’s also be a people who pray as we take those steps forward.  Let me just talk to the folks online really quickly.  I know we couldn’t mail you a brick.  The postage was a little expensive, so here’s what we’re going to do.  On the front page of our website dot church, there’s a contact form.  If you fill out that contact form, just say “Hey, I wanted somebody to put this on a brick,” if we receive that — maybe it’s a prayer or or a statement or whatever — If you send that in, we will transcribe that onto one of those bricks for you.  Just send that to us and we’ll write that out this week on your behalf.

But please also be in prayer that God would use this to bless the children and the students will be utilizing this in the many years to come.  So church family, love, y’all.  More importantly Jesus loves you so much.  We’ll see you guys next time. ###