Bethany Community Church

BETHANY COMMUNITY CHURCH

September 11, 2016

JANELL: I pray, Holy Spirit, that You would impress on us the desire to love You more. And also, flowing out of that, to love one another and to love others all the way to the end of the earth, Lord.

Please bless this offering that we're giving this morning or have given online this week, I pray that You would use it to further Your kingdom and to teach us to trust You and have faith in You for Your providence, Lord, because it's all Yours.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

As the bags are going around, if you don't have time to fill out your connection card, you can leave it in the box in the back.

One announcement today. In your bulletin is a pretty little flier talking about our 30th anniversary celebration, which is coming up in two weeks. So in two weeks, we're going to have one service at 10:00. So if you come now, you'll be in time for lunch almost. So come at 10:00, or if you want to sign up to set up, there's a sign-up sheet for various ways you can be a part in the foyer. Please consider doing that, because we need a lot of help. There's information about food as well on here. We're going to have a picnic. We'll all be together. The kids are going to be here. It's going to be great. So just come prepared for that, to have a great time together as we celebrate our 30th anniversary

And lastly, before we continue worshiping through music, I would like to ask you to look at the screen up here. We're going to watch a video as we remember the 15th anniversary of 9-11.

(Video.)

ANDREW: Stand with us as we continue our worship.

Why don't you take a second, turn to someone near you, maybe someone you don't know and say hi and then more words after that.

KEVIN: Good morning. Welcome to Bethany again. I see some folks I don't know, so my name is Kevin. I lead the pastoral team here at Bethany. Welcome to Bethany. I would love to meet you after the service. We'll be around.

It's a good morning to be here. Honestly, I'm really excited to be here because yesterday I was feeling so bad I didn't know if I would be here. So I shared with everybody last week I have this weird thing going on that's been going on for several months now where my adrenaline system goes nuts. God is a healer, as we just sang, and I'm grateful for that.

I would like to ask you all to pray, because what I'm facing is nothing compared to a lot of people in our church family. I have one dear friend facing cancer surgery this week. Others who have heart things. Frances is back with us after her stroke. It's so good to see her, our bookkeeper.

(Applause.)

1 So what I got going on ain't nothing compared to what a lot of people have going on, but hey, pray for me anyway. As I can tell you, when you have something chronic going on, I see Diane with chronic fatigue over there, it's just so easy to become discouraged when you have something chronic going on. It's really easy to get down. So I 100% guarantee you that there's someone within 15 feet of you who is discouraged this morning.

Last week we talked not only about accepting each other, drawing each other to ourselves, but then encouraging each other. The Apostle Paul says we can encourage each other by our prayers. So I will pray for all of us out loud, but you pray in your heart. There's someone in your life who needs your prayers.

God, thanks that You love us and that You have called us to be family, as we've been learning all summer long.

God, as we bring this series to a conclusion, we really do want to be the friends that our friends deserve. Surely that means we should pray for them. So God, I want to pray for a whole lot of people. I won't list them all. But people in our church family who are facing hard things right now. God, some are facing these medical challenges that are just so wearying. So God, be present for them and lift them up.

Some are facing relational challenges that are just so tough, where the voice of the enemy sometimes comes through the mouth of a friend. God, we pray for strength and wisdom and the capacity to endure.

And God, some here today are facing financial challenges where it doesn't seem like there's an answer, but You are the answer and You are the one who provides. So God, we lift them to You as well.

Now, Holy Spirit, we invite You to come now as Janell said earlier. We pray You come and be our teacher, showing is us how to love each other the way Jesus first loved us. We pray this now in His powerful name, amen.

Two quick things to tell you about. You know the empty basket out there, shopping cart? We want it not to be empty. The compassion team has shared with me that our food drive over the summer was a little less effective than some in the past have been. There's hungry people out there all the time, some in our own church family that we help to keep in food. So as you're shopping, basically we always have a food drive. You can always bring food for our food pantry any Sunday. We would love to have that.

Now, some good news. I'm about to introduce to you on the screen, the elder candidates for our new ministry year. In two weeks, those who have completed our membership process will have ballots and will vote to confirm a group of guys to be our elders for the new year. So now, I, the old sailor here, I get to be with this group of people because of my role as the senior pastor. But we want do you know our families too. This is my wife Ann up here in the front and our two beautiful daughters who are in Australia. This is the day they left to go back. Ann's face is the only one that mirrors our mood. The rest of us were faking it.

Greg in the back row back there, Greg has been an elder for a long time. He's our elder chairman and I think it's about 20 years now that he's been doing this. This is his lovely wife Carolyn up here interpreting for me and their pride and joy is Elliot right there in the middle.

2 Ken Collignon, over here with his wife Sharon, is coming back. He leads a lot of stuff related to our Andros Island mission project. He just got back from down there as two different pastors passed away within ten days of each other so Ken was down there lifting hearts.

This is his family. One is getting married this year. One is a volunteer firefighter. So that's their family.

Jacques McCord is excited to be coming back on the elder board. He's sitting right back there. For the last couple of months at least I think Jacques would be proud to say, oh, yeah, I'm Tammi's husband. So she was up here and kicked this series off for us. That's "little" Jarod right next to them. He's 11, and he's the one that Tammi told you looks like he's 18-19. So we'll talk about that again in a minute.

This is Russ Nemec, Mr. Bike-Riding Superstar, finishing his ride across the state of Iowa. Actually, let me tell you this. So when the other elders were deciding who was coming back on, we said Jacques will be the nicest elder by far compared to the rest of us who are already on the elder board. And then we were like, well, maybe Russ. So those are the two nicest elders. Then there's the rest of us.

(Laughter.)

This is Russ' family, his wife Karla -- Navy Karla -- and then their twins. They're the most traveled. Where is this? Italy? That's Mount Vesuvius, there you go. So don't blow up.

Last but not least, we are very excited to say that Billy Ennis --

(Applause.)

-- has agreed to serve as an elder. A lot of you know he completed his PhD last summer, and he's on the faculty at Gallaudet University.

This is his beautiful family. There's his wife Natalie and his little ones Liam and Lily. So for the very first time we will have a Deaf elder, and we are very excited to have him.

(Applause.)

So here's what's going to happen. Two weeks, you all have to vote. Unlike the knuckleheads who are running for president, I'm not going to go there, these guys all need a 75% affirmative vote. So three out of every four folks who vote have to vote yes. That's the way the rules here work at Bethany. We've never had less than a 90% confirmation. But you can start praying for these men right now, because they will all be working very hard on your behalf and it's a big, big, big responsibility. So it's my honor to serve with them.

Now I'll invite you to take out your outline. I'm going to take you back to 9-11 as you're grabbing that.

Where were you on that day? If you're 18 or older, I bet you remember. I was right down the hall, all the way at the end, in the room that's now our lay counseling meeting room. That was the construction office at the time. We were days away from moving into this building, at least that half of it. We were very angry with the fire marshal for not letting us in. So I was down the hall. I got the call that the first tower had been struck and we had a little black and white TV here in the construction office. We turned that on. I was on the phone with Ann and then with our architect, and he graduated from Cornell. He had friends in the tower. But he was telling me that they were going to fall down. Because he knew the engineering related to what was going to happen. And sadly, his prediction came true.

3 What I didn't know in that moment was that one of my friends was on one of the planes. This is Ken Waldi. He was the President of our Naval Academy class. He was on one of the planes that crashed into one of the towers. So it all became very, very personal when that news happened.

But today I want you to think about this. It's really sad that that prayer ended a little early, the video, because what the author of that prayer was praying about was unity, how wasn't it amazing how the country came together. And so for weeks afterwards, there was this spirit in our country. We knew we were at war. The President got on TV that day and said, we are at war. Everyone knew they had to come together.

Well, guess what? We're still at war. And I'm not talking about Islamic terrorism. Our enemy, the adversary, still seeks to divide. Often his most fertile ground is right here in the church.

So as we conclude this series today, what I would like to talk with you about is us coming together. I'm going to zoom zoom zoom right through the review. The first week of this series, Tammi boldly got up here and said, we have work to do in the area of racial reconciliation. And we so affirm that to be true. Here, inside the church, and then let it flow out. Because Jesus is the answer to that very persistent problem.

And then in week 1 we talked about how Jesus called us to love each other the way He loved us. The theme of the New Testament is we're supposed to be like Jesus, love like He loved, forgive like He forgave. That's a tall order.

Every week since then we've been trying to find ways to do that.

In the next two weeks, we talked about really the responsibility that we have to challenge each other, to teach one another, and to admonish one another and be there. And Ann reviewed that a couple of weeks later when she said we're to be the irritating friends in each other's lives, the friend who can tell you the hard stuff.

Sharon, our lay counseling ministry coordinator, who is a professional counselor herself, talked to us about bearing each other's burdens. Remember? Like if you have been through some stuff, then you have the capacity to help other people through their stuff.

And then Tim came up and said, as we begin to do that, we become family to each other. If you're a guest with us, I don't know if you noticed, but there were some pretty significant hugs going on around here because we know some people here who have been through some hard stuff and have had a hard week and sometimes you just need a hug from somebody who gets it and really cares. That's what we're supposed to be for each other.

So I told you that Ann said a couple of weeks ago, it's not just hugs. Sometimes we have to stir one another on. We have to spur one another on to do the things that God has called us to do.

And then last week I got to share with you for the first time in a while how the Holy Spirit when He comes in power, He also gives us a supernatural capacity to reach out and draw people to ourselves, to accept them, wherever they are, and then to encourage them as they move forward.

So now I take you to the text that's at the top of your outline. You know it's an old song too: Behold how good and pleasant it is when the brothers dwell together in unity. You guys know that song? It's been around forever.

4 The thing about this, it's also really rare. The church is not known as a place of unity. Is it? You know, if you think about the history of God's people in your Bible, we don't have a very good track record. God calls the people of Israel to be His people, and their entire history is marked by division, ultimately marked by Civil War that would lead to the construction of two nations ultimately who turned their back on God.

Now, God still has a hope and a future for the Jewish people. I wish I could preach about that today. In the New Testament, the picture is not much brighter. So here's these 12 guys who walked closely with Jesus. And just before He dies in their place, they're fighting for who gets to be first.

You come to the next book, the book of Acts and you find Paul and Barnabas, two of the greatest man in the history of the church, and they have a fight. And we don't know if they ever reconciled. They went their separate ways.

Here at Bethany, we've experienced that with people who have grown up in our church who we love to death and ultimately got mad and left for somewhere else. Because we don't always get this thing right.

If you keep going in your New Testament, get past Acts and you find things like the Corinthians fighting over who will be their leaders and the Galatians literally biting and devouring each other and Paul thinking that both the Ephesians and Colossians needed to be taught about unity. And the church in Philippi, two women were fighting and it was tearing up the whole church.

Like I said, we don't have a very good track record on this unity thing. I would like everybody to look that way for a minute. You see those two columns over there? In our church, we fought over whether they should be black or white. This is like the 14th anniversary of that fight. What do you think? Black or white? Well, they're going to stay white. But you know what? We were so stupid back then! Because we let stuff that didn't matter at all cause division in our church.

Now, I'm pleased to tell you that was 14 years ago and we've learned a lot of lessons, but maybe they're worth reviewing so let's do that. If you have your outline open, we can get started.

You see, God has called us Bethany, to be family, and he's called us to this thing called unity. Not uniformity. That's something very different. We're not all supposed to be the same. That would be stunningly boring. We're supposed to be different but different together.

See, if you look in your outlines, you'll see Jesus' prayer in John 17. It's a sacred moment. He's just about to die for us. So this isn't His final prayer, which was for the thief on the cross, and before that He prayed in Gethsemane, but this is His last lengthy kind of prayer, and what He prays for is unity. He says, "My prayer is not for them alone," meaning his disciples. "I pray for those who will believe in me through their message." That's us. "That all of them may be one, just as you are in Me and I am in You." He's speaking to His Father.

The scholars kind of divide over what He meant here. Was He talking about us being one with God or one with each other?

I think it's a false distinction. He says, "May they be brought to complete unity so that the world would know." How is the world going to know we're His followers? By the way we love one another. Jesus was praying, God, let them so be connected with the trinity, with God the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, let them be so connected here that they will also be connected here.

5 And Rita will talk next week about how if we get so connected here, then we get connected here and that's going to overflow and other people will get connected too. So it's the very heart of God that we pursue this thing called oneness.

When I coach couples, I coach them to make decisions based on what will enhance the oneness that they experience with each other. Knowing full well that they are very different from each other. This is just one quick example. Paul talking to the Romans says even though they're one body, they're all different and they all have different gifts and abilities. Look around the room. One thing we all are is hot, but beyond that, we're deaf and hearing, black and white and brown, men and women, you have noticed? We don't understand each other. We're all different. We're from different places on the globe. We're from different religious backgrounds. We're a lot of different in here.

Which is beautiful.

How many of you grew up with a hymnal? Wow. Yet you like this rock and roll church. My daughters go to this church in Australia with fog machines and lights and way too loud for me. But it's beautiful.

But do you know how many churches fought over this? Even our own church. We don't play enough hymns. We play too many hymns. The music is too loud. It's so boring, you need to turn it up.

You know, it's real easy to get divided over things that are just preferences that don't really matter.

Let me tell you a really great thing about our church, though. A long time ago, in fact, it was 30 years ago, we discovered this saying. I've researched the history of this saying then, I've researched it again now, and what I can tell you with confidence is nobody is sure who said it first. But it's been around a while. It's about around for 500 years at least. I'm going to read it to you: In essentials, we are to have unity. In nonessentials, we can have liberty. The word "nonessentials" there in Latin meant in indisputable matters we can have liberty. In all things, we have love. In a minute I'll share with you there are some things I think are absolutely essential and there can be no compromise. But there's a lot of things that don't really matter, like earlier today, that was uncovered and there was water in there because we baptize people when they're kind of grown up, at least this big or so, and we dunk them all the way under water.

Other churches take babies and sprinkle water on their heads.

Which one is right? Well, clearly we are.

(Laughter.)

No, let me tell you something. Those people are our brothers and sisters.

In some churches they worship with their hands like this and in other churches that would get you like, because you need to kneel and be quiet and silence. Which one of those is right?

It doesn't really matter. Because Jesus shows is up at both of those places.

Listen, this is important. The devil is going to try to divide us in our new ministry year. We are going to do this thing. You will hear more about it in two weeks, in the next two weeks, called strat ops. We've asked just under 20 leaders to lock themselves away for three days, eight hours a day, to hear from God and to plan the future of our church. Again, I'll tell you a lot more about this at the annual celebration.

6 Some of those plans might not exactly be what you think we should do. And so the devil might try to divide us. He might even try to divide us about who should be in that room. There are lots of ways he will try to work.

We're also going to relook this year at the role of women in our church. We've had women on the pastoral team just from the beginning, but you can find anything on the internet, so I found this meme. We're going to look at whether it's biblical for women to be elders or not. In this room right now there are people who are thinking, absolutely not. And other people are like, are you kidding me? We should have done that 30 years ago. And there's everybody in between.

So the devil would want to divide us. We won't let him.

So let's talk about how to build unity. You see, unity comes from a shared calling. Beloved, you are called by God as one of His kids. He has a plan for your life. And if you're here as a part of the Bethany family, then He has a plan for us collectively to unfold together.

If you look at the passage that's in your outline or up there on the screen, I want to read a little bit more of it to you.

Paul says he's a prisoner of the Lord and he urges his friends therefore to live a life worthy of the calling that they have received.

Then he admonishes them to be humble and gentle and to bear with each other.

He says this: Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. And then he says, there's one body and one Spirit, just as we were called to one hope, the hope of Jesus, the hope of the resurrection and the hope that He's coming back. Verse 5 is the important one for this morning: One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is over all and through all and in all.

We at Bethany believe in Jesus, that He is who He claimed to be, the Lord of the universe. If you have a friend who is a Mormon or a Jehovah Witness or a Muslim, they don't believe in the deity of Jesus. We do. We unapologetically believe Jesus is who He claimed to be. The faith we share here at Bethany is a biblical, informed faith. I've said it in every membership class for 30 years that we unapologetically believe in the Bible. So if you believe in the Koran or the book of Mormon or something, you couldn't be a member here at Bethany because we believe the Bible is God's inspired word. It informs our faith. We don't have a blind faith. In fact, what we like to say is Jesus died not to take away your mind but to take away your sin. So we at Bethany encourage people to think it through. We have one Lord and we have one faith that we share and it's a biblical faith which leads us to this one baptism. It's a baptism that comes from the Holy Spirit when He regenerates us and makes us new from the inside. We believe that salvation is by grace, that that's how it works, you can't earn your way to heaven.

Those are the essentials. Deity of Jesus, authority of the scriptures, salvation by grace.

There's so many other things that don't matter so much.

But now, having said all that, once we have that down, and I hope everybody in the room agrees that those three things are cardinal truths of our faith. Once we have that down, now we can get to work. Because our calling is to follow Jesus together to the places that He has prepared in advance for us to go.

7 In Ephesians 2:10 it says we're God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works He has prepared in advance for us to do.

I've introduced you to this guy several times now. Sherry took this picture. Leaning over is Bobby. Above him is Res, the leader of our Tanzania project. Bobby is our director of cross cultural ministry. Far right is Kim, over there, who will be going back to Africa in two weeks with Christi.

In the middle is grandma, mom, and a little boy whose name is Tumaini. His name means hope. But apart from this church, he doesn't have any hope.

Let me ask you a question. In all of the Washington, D.C., area, there are thousands of churches. How many of them would you guess have vibrant deaf ministries? How many would you guess? Five or six? A handful? I mean, it's a handful. Literally. That actually have vibrant deaf ministries like we have here.

Let me ask you another question. Out of all of the world's churches, there are millions of churches in the world. How many of them care about Tumaini and have the resources to do something about it? One. Your church. Our church. Right now there's nobody else other than his church there in Tanzania, but they don't have the resources to do what needs to be done. There's nobody else that cares about this little boy. But we do. God has called us together to care about this little boy and his neighbors and the 14,000 deaf people who live in that region who right now are really by and large without hope. Do the math with me one more time. There's 14,000 deaf people in the Diocese of Central Tanzania where our team will go in two weeks. 14,000 deaf people. About a third of them are children. So do the math. Let's say there's 3,000 children. About 200 are in school. 2,800 or so deaf children without hope, without language, with no way to hear the gospel in a way that they can take it into their heart.

Wow. You see, God has called us together to do important things, and this is just one example. I hugged a friend this morning who used to be homeless. Our church is on the cutting edge of that too. God has called this kind of average sized church to do things that are going to matter forever. And we'll talk about that more in two weeks. We have a calling on our lives so we have to come together and not let the stuff divide us that so often does.

See, Peter, when he was getting ready to die, he wrote a couple letters to his friends. He was concerned about this, that they would let little stuff separate them. He and Paul got into it at one point over whether or not you're allowed to eat a ham sandwich. Those guys got into whether you can eat pork or not.

So he says this: "Finally, all of you, have unity in your spirits. Have sympathy and love for each other. Have a tender heart and a humble mind. Don't repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse. On the contrary, repay with a blessing. It's for that that you are called."

He's talking to people in the church when he says this. Because people in the church sometimes still do mean things to each other. I promise you, if you become my friend, I will disappoint you. I will offend you. At times you will be hurt by me and I'll be hurt by you.

So let me lighten the mood a bit. Everybody know grumpy cat? Grumpy cat owns the internet. What grumpy cat reminds us of this morning is that we are awash in a culture that gets offended at everything! Literally everything! You can't post anything on the internet without some troll telling you what's wrong with you in a mean-spirited way.

8 That thing, that quick to take offense thing, it makes its way in here. The devil has had thousands of years of practice at dividing people from each other. So we must learn how to overcome him.

You see, for unity to be preserved, we're going to have to learn to forgive as Jesus did. You know that theme I mentioned earlier in this message about how we're supposed to be like Jesus? One verse after another, forgive like He forgave. Love like He loved. Bear one another's burdens, that's the way you fulfill His law and so on. Jesus is our model, and He forgave.

Colossians 3 there's this magnificent passage that could be a whole sermon series. There's so much good advice in here. It starts practically by saying, hey, the way you used to be? Stop it. Put aside anger and rage and malice and filthy language and all that stuff. Don't lie to each other. And on and on.

Then Paul says, look how different you are? But those things don't matter and he lists all these different ways that they're different.

Then verse 12 he says this: "As God's chosen people" -- you've been called and chosen by God. "As God's chosen people, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness, humility, gentleness, patience."

And then here it is again: "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have. Forgive as the Lord forgave you."

How did He forgive us? Well, Paul told the Romans that while we were still His enemies, He died for us. He didn't wait for us to say we were sorry. He didn't wait for us to understand what we had done. He chose to forgive us.

And we are called to be like that to each other.

But it's hard. I will tell you honestly, sometimes it's so hard that we need each other to help us.

There was a season a couple of years ago on the elder board where several of us were not getting along too well. One of our friends, also an elder, grabbed us by the scruff of our necks kind of and said, hey, your kingdom heart needs to connect with his kingdom heart and vice versa because what unites us is way more important than what you two are fighting about.

He was right. And we fixed it.

Apologies were spoken, forgiveness was given and received and friendships were restored. It's a beautiful thing when it works. But we need your help. Your elders are not above needing your help. We all need help because this is supernatural stuff and the devil is really experienced and good at dividing us.

But I pray that you would commit with me this day that we will do what we need to do, that we might preserve the unity that in two weeks we will celebrate.

See, let me give you some really good advice because it's not from me, it's from Jesus. In Matthew 18 He helps us learn how to forgive. Here's what He said to do. He kind of said, come right here. And look. See, in Matthew 18, He told this story called the unmerciful servant, where there's a guy who has been forgiven a lot and then he doesn't forgive a guy under him who needs to be forgiven just a little.

I have been forgiven a lot. A lifetime of forgiveness from Jesus. And so when a friend of mine does something that offends me or disappoints me, Jesus says, don't look at that offense. Look at that cross.

9 Look at the magnitude of the forgiveness that you have received, and then it will be way easier to forgive.

In that same chapter, He says, you know, you go to the person and you talk to them. And then if they won't listen, you take a friend and then more friends and you know how that unfolds.

He had some other advice. If someone has offended you, the first thing you should look at is your own eye. Because maybe they're offending you because you actually offended them first and maybe you need to take the log out of your own eye and then go to them. But we do have to go to each other.

We're just about done but one more bit of really important advice. In that same passage, Matthew 18, where Jesus said, go and if they won't listen to you, take a brother? The beauty of that instruction is that it tells us we're not alone. See, if you're in a relationship right now in our church or in your marriage and it's hard, what it can often feel like, what the devil can use is the feeling that you're in that by yourself. And every divorce that I've ever seen happen happened because one of the partners couldn't take it anymore and felt alone and they bailed out and did something stupid and the rest is history.

Listen, hear your pastor: You are not alone. You not only have the living risen Jesus with you, but you've got all the rest of the knuckleheads in this room with you too. And I will commit to you with an absolute certainty that your elders will come with you whenever they have to to pursue unity in this church. And not just the elders, but lots of other leaders and lots of other friends. You are not alone.

So now we get to where the rubber meets the road. You see, I want to ask you, as we prepare for our 30th year together, who in this room has hurt you? Or offended you? Or disappointed you? To the point where there's still distance between you. If there's a ready answer that just came to you from the Holy Spirit, then this second question is for you.

What is He telling you this morning to do about that? At a minimum, He's telling you to forgive. You see, forgiveness is a really interesting thing. We forgive because Jesus asks us too. But there's sort of a selfish motive as well, because if you don't forgive, you will be miserable. There's a really wise person -- I don't know who first said this either -- who said, you know, not forgiving is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die. You heard that?

Unforgiveness, Paul told the Ephesians, gives the devil a foothold and he can bring you down.

So in just a minute, we're going to pray quietly together. We're going to ask the Holy Spirit to do His work. If there's someone that you need to get it right with and you haven't gotten it right with them, then let's do that.

Here's the last story and I will really, truly shut up.

You know the Amish up in Pennsylvania? They only have communion a couple times a year, sometimes only once a year. And they take it very seriously. So if Ann and Sherry were having a fight, let's say, if Ann Yoder and Sherry Yoder were having a conflict about who sells the best eggs, then the rest of the community would become aware of that and they would go, Sister Sherry and Ann, you guys have to get this worked out, we have communion in two weeks. The whole community takes it as a responsibility to make sure reconciliation happens before any of us comes to the table.

10 Everybody here will be back at the table in a couple of weeks, so if there's some things we've got to get worked out, let's work them out, because God is calling this church to really significant things together, so we must move forward as one.

Pray with me, would you?

Jesus, we love You. We know our ability to love You is a gift from You because You first loved us. Jesus, we acknowledge just freely that we're a room full of knuckleheads. We've hurt each other. We've hurt our family. We've done a lot of things that we regret. Help us now to come here to the foot of the cross and receive the forgiveness that is ours.

But then, Lord, it wouldn't be real if we didn't forgive others as well. We would find ourselves becoming the unmerciful servant, whom You said You would turn away from.

Jesus, by Your Holy Spirit now, show us if there's any bitterness, any anger, any disappointment that we need to resolve. Help us to move forward towards one another with grace and forgiveness and truth.

Jesus, don't let us rest until we've made it right.

God, I just thank You for the work that You are about to do in making our church even more one than we've been before.

God, I pray for every person whose Spirit is being stirred right now, that You would give them courage to move and do what they know they need to do.

God, we entrust these next several weeks to You now, because it's an important time in the life of our church. We're going to ask You to speak to all of us about the future of our church. We're going to ask You to speak to all of us about the direction that You would take us in, the important things that You have prepared in advance for us to do.

So Jesus, as You speak, we promise that we will listen. We pray this now in Your powerful name, amen.

Thanks for praying with me. The team will come and lead us in a song that enables us to worship Jesus, to fix our eyes on Him, which really is the best thing to do if God is calling you to go forgive.

While they're coming, I want to tell you about next week. Rita, who is sitting right there, is known to us because she sings up front. You might know her as a Christian counselor because that's her day job. But she's also trained and gifted in the area of spiritual transformation, helping Christians to grow. She's written several books. She knows a lot about this topic. So we asked her if she would present to our congregation next week on the topic of prayer. Her title will be something close to this. What Rita is good at is helping us connect deeply with God for the sake of other people out there.

As we talked about today, when we become one with the Father, we can become one with each other. When we become one with each other, the world looks on us and knows we're followers of Jesus.

What Rita will initiate next week is a month of earnest prayer for our church. She's going to teach us how to pray and experience God, and then in the month ahead, we'll do that together.

Let's experience Him together right now as we stand and sing this wonderful song.

11 ANDREW: Hey, go have a fantastic week. If you've heard Rita talk before, you know you need to be back here for next Sunday. I hope your football coma this week doesn't last too long and you'll be back next week.