Barriers to Hospitality

[00:00:00] In Jesus name. Amen. Amen. [00:00:03] Amen. You can be seated. [00:00:06] It is a joy for me to be able to be with you this morning. If you don't know me, my name is Alex Culpepper. I'm the pastor at renovation church. I also happen to be good friends with Pastor Craig. We have had the joy of being able to welcome VcE out to our building. We've done some Good Friday services together. We did a Christmas Eve service together. And so I know many of your faces, a lot of your names. And so I am really glad, grateful to be able to share the word with you this morning. I just want to take a moment to express my gratitude for Craig. I got to tell you guys, you have probably one of the best pastors in the whole world. [00:00:42] He didn't pay me to say that. I know it's unbelievable. But I really, really appreciate Pastor Craig and I'm grateful for his friendship and just partnership and ministry and the gospel in this area. And so here's what I want to do this morning. I want to invite you into a little snippet of what the Lord is doing in our church and something that he's kind of aiming us at. Me and the elders at my church about three years ago, we recognized a significant deficit in our community. And that was that we were not really seeing new spiritual life flourish among us. Right. I believe that the body of Christ ought to be a place where people can come and like, encounter Jesus. And because they've encountered, they have this life changing experience. They believe in him, they get baptized, they participate in extending his life to the rest of the world. But that is not something that we were seeing happen in our church. We hadn't really seen new spiritual life come about and start to flourish. We had went several years without seeing any baptisms, and so we started asking a question. We recognized this is an issue. [00:01:54] And over the past three years, the Lord has hyper focused our church on developing an answer to this question. And the question is, what will it take for us to become those who help others encounter Jesus? And as we've been kind of exploring that question, we've kind of honed in on a chief answer to that question for the cultural time and place that we live. And the answer is this. It's hospitality. Now, you may be used to hospitality being like, oh, you know, we're going to feed people and we're going to create space for people. And that's a piece of hospitality, but hospitality is much bigger than that. It's actually two greek words put together the word philo or philos, which is familial love, brotherly love, and zenos, which is stranger. So literally what hospitality means, it means to welcome a stranger like their family, right? So that you would treat strangers the same way that you treat your family members. [00:02:58] So hospitality, it was a cultural assumption of people in Bible times, like ancient people, they had it. We don't have that cultural assumption, for what it's worth. I mean, we do a little bit recognize the importance of welcoming people, but this is not a way that we live our life. It was expected back in ancient times, if somebody showed up on your doorstep and said, hey, I need a place to live, that you're gonna open up your home to them and they're just gonna, like, be able to have a place in your house, right? That's the kind of assumption that they had. But Christians took hospitality and they turned it up to eleven, right? This is how Christians handled hospitality. So I want you to read with me Romans, chapter twelve, verses 14 through 21. I'm just gonna highlight what christian hospitality looked like. Verse 14 says, bless those who persecute you. Verse 15 says, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Verse 16 says, do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Do what is honorable in the sight of all, live peaceably with all. Never avenge yourselves. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. [00:04:14] So hospitality was a cultural assumption. But then Christians came along and said, we're going to do this better than the rest of the world does it. And this dumbfounded the roman empire, by the way. You can read roman historians writing about the hospitality of christians and going, we just don't understand how these people live this way. It makes no sense to us. But this was changing the world around them. As christians lived out hospitality. So biblical christian hospitality, it is powerful, right? It is world changing. So there have been some kind of historical sociological studies that have asked the question, what does it take for Christianity to expand in a place, to kind of transform a culture? And so there are kind of three different situations. When christians are enemies of the state, typically Christianity is going to expand through martyrdom, through christians being willing to die for the sake of the gospel. [00:05:13] When christians are in the cultural majority in a place, typically Christianity is going to expand through the public proclamation of the gospel. Because if Christianity is in the majority, what that means is that most people's assumption is that, like, I'm going to walk into a church on a Sunday morning, like I'm going to walk through the front doors of a church. A lot of people are doing that when Christianity is the cultural majority. But then when christians have been in the cultural minority, typically the way that Christianity expands its influence, it's through hospitality. Hospitality has been the most effective means throughout history. Becoming hospitable is one major piece of what is required for us to help others encounter Jesus, because we're in a period of time right now where we are transitioning as a culture. We have, for a long time, christians have been in the cultural majority in our country. But right now, we live in a culture where we are now becoming and probably are, I would say, in the cultural minority, which means what it takes to expand the influence of the gospel to help others encounter Jesus is changing. So we've been using this muscle for a long time of like, we're going to hold church services, we're going to help people have these great encounters with God, we're going to have great worship services, and we're going to preach the gospel boldly. And that has worked for a long time. But now that we're in the cultural minority, our hospitality muscles have not been exercised very well. And so we're in this state where the thing that we need to activate is hospitality. But we have not gotten used to living that way. But that's what it's going to take to help others encounter Jesus. So here's what I realize. There are particular challenges that make it difficult for us to live hospitably. Right? We all come here with baggage from our past. The things that happened to us in our past, they affect the way that we love other people. [00:07:14] We have all been shaped and formed in particular ways. We all have ways that sin has affected us at a soul level. And all of those things in us are in opposition to hospitality. [00:07:26] So on one hand, you have, yeah, hey, it's important to be hospitable, because if we're hospitable, we'll be able to build the kind of relationships with people where we can help them encounter Jesus. But then, on the other hand, you have these barriers to hospitality inside of us, barriers in the world, barriers in our souls. So what we're going to do this morning is we're going to look at one of those most significant barriers to hospitality and figure out what we can do about it. So real quick, I want to give you a timeline of technological development throughout history. In the year 1455, the printing press was invented. The printing press transformed communication and recordkeeping. When people used to have to write things down on a piece of paper, and it would take days or months or years to copy down documents, that time got transformed. So all you had to do was take the press and push it onto a sheet of paper, and the thing was copied. In 1765, then the steam engine was invented, and that transformed travel again. The amount of time it took to get from one place to another place was cut into a fraction of what it used to be. People could get on ships that could be driven by coal across the ocean. People would get on trains driven by coal across countries, and this transformed travel. In 1876, the telephone was invented. This transformed communication. Now I don't have to write a letter to you to contact you. Now I can call you on the phone. It cuts it into a fraction of, a fraction of what it used to take for me to communicate with you. In 1879, the electric light bulb was invented, and we take it for granted. But do you know how radically this invention transformed society? [00:09:15] People used to only work when it was light outside. [00:09:19] It's a crazy thought. But now with the light bulb, you can work all the time, right? People used to sleep when the sun went down. I don't know, it's crazy. [00:09:33] But no longer. In 1901, the radio was invented that transformed our relationship to information. Now you could get mass communication being put out to many people at the same time. In 1937, the computer was invented. This sped up logic and computation. It turned information into a math problem and then solved that math problem incredibly quickly. In 1974, they took the computer and then made it a personal computer that you could have in your house. It created this kind of cultural ubiquity of rapid computation. In 1989, the World Wide Web was invented, which basically shrunk the distance, again, between you and a person on the other side of the world that you could have instantaneous communication with someone somewhere else. In 2002, the smartphone was invented, and what that did is it took all of the previous cultural things that we've been talking about and compressed it into a tiny rectangle that you put inside your pocket, and you're like, well, what about the steam engine? I can't get on my phone and drive it around places. No, but you can call an Uber from your phone and get somewhere you need to go. [00:10:45] And then 2017, the most recent cultural or technological development. Artificial intelligence is transforming the speed with which we process ideas and research. And it's basically like a calculator for words. That's how artificial intelligence works. We're able to think and process ideas at a much faster rate because of that. So I don't know how you feel about technology and its rapid development. I'm not really into kind of debating whether or not those are good things. I just want to say something. Life used to be lived at a very slow pace, but technology has transformed what we can accomplish and the rate at which we can accomplish it. We can get more done more quickly. And because technology has gotten to the point, the rate of technology, technological development is increasing exponentially, so that we'll come upon new discovery after new discovery after new discovery at a faster rate, so we can consume more information, accomplish more tasks, connect to more people at an exponentially faster rate than at any point in world history. And the overall result is that life moves faster because the world moves faster. And if we're not careful, we will let the pace of the world set the pace of our lives, right? And we'll fall prey into believing and saying something that every person in this room has probably believed and said at some point. And that is this. I'm just so busy. [00:12:23] I'm just so busy. I'm overwhelmed. I've got too much on my plate. Like, theoretically, technology is supposed to free us up to take stuff off of our plate, but more often than not, we let the pace that it creates conform us into putting more onto our plate. [00:12:41] And then what that means is that we can sometimes let our busyness and what we are able to accomplish become a badge of honor, when in reality, what it's doing for us is it's becoming a barrier to hospitality. It's becoming a barrier to us effectively loving our neighbors. So we're gonna look at a story of Jesus together and consider what it would take to remove that barrier. In Luke, chapter eight, verse 40, we have Jesus in the middle of his ministry. And this is what it says. It says now, when Jesus returned, the crowd welcomed him, for they were all waiting for him. Now, before we get into the bulk of this story, I don't want you to lose sight of something. [00:13:25] Jesus knew who he was ministering to. [00:13:30] He had people that he was responsible for. He had kind of committed his life to full time ministry. He had clarity on the people that, that God had placed in his influence. The crowds are the people that he's responsible for. And he did everything in his power to show these people hospitality. [00:13:50] Jesus intentionally planned and prioritized his rhythms of hospitality. He had a group of people. He made a plan to reach them. So he made this group of people in the area of Galilee his priority, which means that he had regular rhythms of spending time with these people. Regular rhythms of teaching them, regular rhythms of praying for them and with them. Regular rhythms of extending mercy and compassion and healing to them. And he had regular rhythms of simply just being a blessing to these people. And it was his planned, intentional regular rhythms with these people that opened up his life to them. Right? He lived more openly, and because he lived more openly, they were more willing and able to approach him and ask him for help in their time of need. So watch Jesus pattern as he goes with these people. And I just want to tell you, if you are a follower of Jesus this morning, I want to be very clear. Just like Jesus had people, you have people. [00:14:56] You have people that only are in your sphere of influence, that only belong to you. People who are made in the image of God. People who God has placed next to you or near you in your personal ministry sphere, right? So what this means, I mean, there are some kind of practical, prioritizing ways of what this means. If you're a spouse, then Jesus has given you your spouse as a personal ministry, as kind of at the top of your priority list. If you're a parent, you have kids in the house, small kids. That's also next on your priority list. But no matter what role you have in life, he has made every single one of us to have room for more than just the people in our family, and even room for more than just the people in our church family. Right? So the following might. It should be true of all of us. [00:15:45] Every follower of Jesus has room to, yes, minister to their families. [00:15:52] Yes, minister to the family of God. [00:15:56] But then every follower of Jesus has room to minister to the unchurched and the de churched. I just want to be, like, real with you. It's not just Craig's job to be, like, reaching out to lost people. It is the church's job to reach out to people who don't know Jesus, who are unchurched and de churched. Which means we all have to take ownership of the people in our spheres of influence. [00:16:20] So I have the joy of being able to participate in something called the Church Evangelism Institute. It's through the Billy Graham center down in Wheaton. And I'm a part of a cohort of pastors. I also coach another cohort of pastors. And so I get to hear a lot of pastors process. How are they living hospitably among their neighbors? And it is amazing the number of pastors who confessed to being too busy to minister to the unchurched and the de churched pastors are notoriously busy. We have counseling appointments. We have things to fill up in our schedule as you set up and tear down, and you're managing outreach and all of this stuff. And so two out of three pastors acknowledge that they have almost no relationship with unchurched or dechurched people. [00:17:13] And yet this is what they know. They know that their churches are not going to bring new spiritual life to people if the people in their churches are not building relationships with unchurched and de churched people. [00:17:25] But here's the thing. If the leaders do not live it out, the people do not follow the example. [00:17:31] And so the first two months of our cohorts are usually pastors taking stock of their time and schedules and asking the question, how can I open up my life more to unchurched people? And we're going to look at some really practical strategies for that, because that's not just a job for pastors, that is a job for all of us, right? We want to live hospitably with people. We want to create space where people feel like they are listened to, where people feel like they are welcomed in as family. [00:18:02] And so Jesus did this. He did this with the crowds. That was his personal ministry sphere. And he's engaging in his planned intentional rhythm of hospitality. And so Luke 841 says this. [00:18:15] There came a man named Jairus who was a ruler of the synagogue and falling at Jesus feet. He implored him to come to his house, for he had an only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she was dying. [00:18:31] So undoubtedly, Jairuse questioned whether or not he should go to Jesus, because Jesus, as he is doing his ministry, he kind of disrupts synagogue ministry. He kind of breaks the rules of the synagogue, and he doesn't follow exactly how they would like things to happen. And so Jairus knows that it would be a bit of a risk for him to go to Jesus, but his daughter's situation has progressed to the point where he's now desperate enough, he's hit a desperate enough situation, situation that he's going to now go to Jesus and ask for help. He is in a vulnerable place, and based on what he's heard about Jesus, he's pretty sure that Jesus can do something about his daughter's situation. So I just want to take note, that is a display of faith, right? That he's now willing to take this risk, to cross this line, to go to Jesus and ask for Jesus's help. And that's a unique opportunity. Jesus is aware of this unique opportunity. So what does he do? Jesus allows his normal, planned, intentional rhythm with the crowds to be interrupted by Jairus. [00:19:44] So I want you to take note of two things with me as we go through this passage. I want you to first take note of the fact that Jesus was interruptible. He was interruptible. And I also want you to take note of why Jesus was interruptible. What did he let interrupt him? [00:20:03] So let's pay attention as we continue on. Goes on in verse 42 and says, as jesus went, the people pressed around him. [00:20:13] Verse 43. And there was a woman who had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone. [00:20:26] So this woman is in a desperate situation. [00:20:29] She is what we would call perpetually unclean because of this discharge that is endless that has been going on for twelve years. What that means is that she cannot participate in the normal jewish religious life that most other people would participate in. But it not only means that, it means that anybody that she touches, if you remember, we're still kind of in the middle of Leviticus, right? But if you remember back to the beginning of Leviticus, anything that she touches then becomes unclean and has to go through a cleansing process, which means that socially she is untouchable, right? She can't touch anything that anyone else touches. [00:21:07] And Leviticus, you might remember this too. In the world that we live in, uncleanness is not good because uncleanness is contagious. Unclean things make other things unclean. But in Jesus case, he couldn't catch uncleanness. In fact, the thing for him that was contagious was his cleanness. [00:21:31] And so go on. In verse 44, it says this, she came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased. [00:21:47] Verse 45, Jesus said, who was it that touched me? And when all denied it, Peter said, master, the crowds surround you and they're pressing in on you. Like, what are you asking? Who touched me? Everybody's touching you. Everybody is pressing in around you. What kind of question is this? Verse 46. But Jesus said, someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me. [00:22:15] So remember Jesus, he had a regular planned, intentional rhythm that he was engaging. [00:22:20] He allowed that rhythm to be interrupted by Jairus urgent situation. But then on the way to help Jairus with his urgent situation, what does he do? He stops. He stops everything. Once again, Jesus is interruptible to the point that he allows his interruption to be interrupted. [00:22:40] Like, can you imagine living like this? [00:22:44] Like just to live so slow and openly to be able to notice things like Jesus. He notices things. To be able to live with enough openness and awareness of, like, what is the will of the father in every situation as you're just walking by, like, you have to live unhurried. That's how Jesus lives. Jesus lives unhurried. He does not allow the urgency of the moment to steal away an opportunity for hospitality he's constantly attentive to. What is it that the Holy Spirit wants to do here? And what is it that he wants to do here? [00:23:28] So verse 47, when the woman saw that she was not hidden. So what has happened now? Jesus said, who touched me? And everybody around Jesus has now backed away from him, right? There's been kind of this opening in the crowd of. And the woman is the only one left standing there. [00:23:46] And she was trembling. [00:23:51] She came trembling and falling down before him, declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him and how she had been immediately healed. She is trembling. She is afraid because she knows that she has taken a huge social risk by touching Jesus. She is unclean. When she touches Jesus, she risks jeopardizing his entire ministry for that day. All of these people are here to see Jesus. All of these people are here, and they want something from Jesus. When she touches Jesus, she jeopardizes Jesus entire day. [00:24:27] She took a big social risk. And I want you to watch how Jesus responds to her. [00:24:34] Verse 48, he said to her, daughter, your faith has made you well. [00:24:43] Go in peace. [00:24:45] I hope you're noticing that Jesus is intentional with the interruptions that he allows. [00:24:52] Right? He allows those interruptions which give the greatest opportunity to put faith on display. [00:25:01] But here's the key. [00:25:03] He's living unhurried enough that he could notice and pay attention to those points. When there is an opportunity for faith to grow, when there is an opportunity for faith to be displayed. [00:25:18] So verse 49, it says, while he was still speaking, someone from the ruler's house came and said, jesus gets interrupted again, right? While he was still speaking, someone from the ruler's house came and said, your daughter is dead. [00:25:33] Do not trouble the teacher anymore. [00:25:36] But Jesus, on hearing this, answered him, do not fear, only believe, and she will be well again. Jesus emphasis here is on faith, on believing. And so this guy, he comes and interrupts Jesus. But Jesus says, okay, here's another interruption. Here's another opportunity. [00:25:58] Jairus has already started displaying faith, and Jesus is saying to Jairus, don't stop now. Right? Don't stop believing now. So verse 51, when he came to the house. He allowed no one to enter with him except Peter, John, and James and the father and the mother of the child. So these five, six people are going into the house, but now they come into the house, and all were weeping and mourning for her. This is a jewish practice. In that day, you would get professional mourners to come whenever somebody has passed away, and they spend days at your house, kind of putting on the best act that they can to display their sadness for the death that has occurred. And so they were all weeping and mourning for her, but he said, do not weep, for she is not dead, but sleeping. [00:26:54] Verse 53. And these professional mourners, right, they laughed at him knowing that she was dead, right? So there's no question in these people's mind, they know that this child is dead. But verse 54, taking her by the hand, he called, saying, little girl, it's time to get up. See, translations are great, and you can trust your translations. I want to let you know that. But sometimes translations do the moment a disservice. Jesus did not say, child, arise. [00:27:28] No, he's in tune with the situation. He's literally saying, little girl, little one, it's time to wake up. You've been asleep. [00:27:40] It's time to wake up. And verse 55, her spirit returned, and she got up at once. She came back to life. So Jesus said she wasn't dead. But I just want to be really clear. Everybody knew that she was dead, right? And Jesus says, little girl, it's time to wake up. And so her spirit returned, and she got up at once, and he directed that something should be given her to eat. [00:28:06] So I just want you to watch Jesus and think of Jesus and his and kind of unhurriedness as he is interacting with this people that God has given him responsibility for. As he's ministering to them, he allows space for the interruption because he's looking for where the opportunity for faith is going to take place. [00:28:27] So, church, our main point this morning is this disrupt busyness by developing intentional and interruptible hospitality. [00:28:40] Right? If you want to be the kind of person who is able to help others encounter Jesus, the only way that they're going to be able to encounter Jesus is for you to develop a deep enough relationship with them that in the time they spend with you, they look and they see and they observe that there's something different, there's spiritual life from Jesus happening there. And the only way that can happen is if you open up your life enough for them to spend that kind of time with you. [00:29:11] And so you need to disrupt busyness by developing intentional and interruptible hospitality. So what? [00:29:18] I have three for us this morning, and they should go pretty quickly. I would tell you to plan and prioritize rhythms of hospitality. Plan and prioritize rhythms of hospitality. So we, at our church, we're kind of going through a nine week series, all different facets of hospitality. But I just want to say one of the things that I have been saying and will continue to say, you will not become more hospitable by listening to my words, telling you to become more hospitable. [00:29:52] The only way that you will actually become more hospitable is for you to practice hospitality on a regular basis. And the only way for you to practice something is to make it a normal part of your rhythm. And in the day and age that we live in, if you do not set your schedule, then your schedule will set you. [00:30:14] So here's what I know. The last thing that most of us need is another thing to add to our schedule. But at the same time, like loving unchurched and de churched people is not an optional part of the christian life. [00:30:27] So this is going to require you to sit down and to make a plan to identify, okay, so who has Jesus placed in my personal ministry sphere? And I would just tell you, as you identify and figure out, okay, who are the people have that I am responsible for? I would just say, always allow room in that sphere for one more person. Right. Because God may always have one more person in mind that he wants to add into your sphere of influence. But then after that, I would tell you to establish rhythms of regular interaction with people. So I want to give you some really practical strategies for how you can live more of your life just being aware and building relationship with people. So I have four kind of practical steps for you to do. The first one, I would tell you, is to maximize twofers. Twofers are like a two for one special, right? So what I mean by that is, what do you have to do in your schedule that's like a non negotiable. You always have to do this. You will always have to take part in this. Here's my question for you. Is there something that you always regularly have to do that you can do around other people who don't yet know Jesus? That you can do in the presence of other people who don't know Jesus? [00:31:42] Maybe this is like, everybody has to eat, right? And so maybe you just figure out a way that you can eat with other people who don't know Jesus, right? Maybe this is, you know, so I'll just tell you what it was for me. I recognized a need that I needed to, like, start working out, right? I had some physical deficits happening, and so I needed to take some ownership of that. And so what I did is I said, I'm going to work out at the same time every day so that I see the same people at the gym every day, and I have the opportunity to build relationship with those people. So how can you plan regular parts of your schedule but do them around other people? I would also tell you this. Do something that you enjoy with others. [00:32:24] Find a shared interest or a hobby that you can do with other people who don't know Jesus. Connect with others over shared pain. [00:32:34] People in the midst of pain have a unique opportunity where they're the difficulty of something. And if you could empathize with their difficulty, or you share that difficulty, and you could talk about how Jesus has brought life in the midst of that pain, there's an opportunity for faith to grow. [00:32:52] You could serve others and ask for help. Right? This is just like living neighborly with people, right? So those are just several opportunities that could help you take more ownership of your spirit. Second, so what this morning is this. [00:33:06] Learn to look for faith opportunities. [00:33:11] I don't want to give you the misconception that Jesus was constantly available to everyone who asked for him at all times, because he wasn't. But at the same time, he was interruptible. And it seems that he was most often allowing interruption for people who had the greatest potential of displaying faith. [00:33:31] Right. Sometimes that potential comes from a moment of crisis. Sometimes it comes from hearing about what Jesus has done for someone else. And sometimes it's just an awareness that God is near. [00:33:43] So when we talk about being interruptible, I'm not saying that we do it for everything and for everyone, whoever comes to interrupt us, that we always allow that in. But I am saying that if we're looking and we're living unhurried enough to notice there's an opportunity for faith there that we would allow that interruption. [00:34:03] The third. So what I would tell you is rebel against the hurry of the age. [00:34:11] If you are living in a constant state of hurry, you're going to have a hard time being attentive to your own spiritual needs, much less the spiritual needs of the people that God has placed in your sphere of influence. [00:34:25] Right? So many of you have full time, stressful jobs, a lot of kids, student activities that you're doing. Like, it is so easy to load up your schedule as students and then get consumed with worry about how am I going to fit this in and how am I going to take care of this test, or how am I going to take care of this assignment, or how am I going to take care of this project at work. Right? And so we get consumed with worry and fear, and it makes us feel like we have to move from one thing to the next thing to the next thing and worry about the task at hand and miss the people who are around us in the process. [00:35:01] And so if you are hurried to the point that, like, when I say you need to sit down and prioritize the people that God has placed around you, because those are like, it's not like a lot of those people, I would wager you may be the only Christian, or at least the only devout Christian in those people's lives. You may be the only opportunity that they have to encounter spiritual life from Jesus. And so I would say if you are able to live unhurried to the point that you can sit down and prioritize who are those people that Jesus has given me, then you will be able to see, okay, what are the opportunities that he's opening up. So I want you to just sit and imagine with me. I'm going to read a quote from, from a book. It's about living unhurried. But imagine what is it going to take for you to slow down enough so that, like, Jesus was able to intentionally love others, you also would be able to intentionally love others. [00:36:02] So this quote comes from a pastor named Tyler Stanton. In his book, praying like monks and living like fools, this is what he said. [00:36:11] Jesus was intentional and interruptible. There's a word for that. Posture, unhurried. [00:36:20] Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? [00:36:26] Because hurry kills love. [00:36:30] Hurry hides behind anger, agitation and self centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God's beloved and she is sister and he is brother church. Would you pray with me, please? [00:36:48] Father, I thank you for the gift that it is to be able to be with village church east this morning. [00:36:55] God, and we thank you that you have given us the kind of spiritual life that you do not intend to just simply stop with us, but you have given us spiritual life so that it would extend, extend beyond us into the lives of others. [00:37:10] And so I pray, Holy Spirit, for the awareness of those that you are calling us to reach for the awareness of our personal ministry sphere that we would know. Yes, the church family, the people in our church family that we need to intentionally love, and the people in our own family that we need to intentionally love. And yes, the unchurched and de churched people around us that we need to intentionally love, that they might encounter some kind of spiritual life through the way that we live hospitably around them. [00:37:46] Father, I pray that you would enable this church to be not simply a church or a gathering of people who are hospitable, but that you would make every individual in this room room hospitable, opening up their lives for the sake of people who do not yet know you. [00:38:09] And so I bless village church east and holy spirit. I ask you would do these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.