Shepherds and Servants

Cool. How are we doing today? Good, good. It’s good to see everybody. Hey, this is going to feel a little out of left field, but something happened in the world yesterday that we should give a moment to. I’m not normally super tied in to the news. I’ll be honest, I unplugged from most news a couple years ago just because it’s all so stinking negative and just kind of tired of getting whipped up into stuff. But every now and then something happens in the world you need to know about. So our afternoon, evening over in the Middle East, Jerusalem was attacked directly by, I think it was Iran.

So a couple weeks ago during our Mark series, I specifically preached on end time stuff. Anybody remember that? Johnny remembers everything I ever say, so I know he’s got it. So I specifically said what Christ said when He said, wars and rumors of wars will always be with us. So this is not something for us to get too whipped up in an end times way about. But we should always care about war around the world. And even though Israel is thousands of miles away from us, this feels a little closer to home, right? For us as believers, we owe a lot of our scripture to the Jewish people. We owe a lot of our even practices today to them. And God is extremely explicit throughout scripture that Israel has a special place in His heart. And He even goes so far as to say that the church is Israel now.

So here’s what I want us to do. We’re going to begin our service this morning by praying for them. All right. This is going to feel awkward for five seconds until you’re following me. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to, where you’re at, stay exactly where you are, but just buddy up with somebody close to you. And we’re going to pray out loud for Israel and peace in the Middle East, okay? We’re going to have Miss Mary Lucia is going to play a little something on the piano to fill some of the space. I just want you to pray. Pray that God would pacify what’s going on. And ultimately that we would look to Him in the midst of it. And in a second, I’m going to wrap this up. So if you will, just pray for a moment where you are.

Jesus, I’m not going to pretend to understand all of the whys behind the what’s of the world. Lord, I don’t really understand why that attack happened yesterday. I don’t really understand how that would benefit a country. But God, I do understand that You are king of this world. And no moment passes without Your notice. God, from quietest thought and doubt of my heart, Lord, to the loudest explosion of a cruise missile being shot down over the temple. Father, nothing in this world passes without Your knowledge. God, the word also says that You’re sovereign. And some of these things happen because of Your direct actions. God, I don’t think it’s my job to do all the spiritual arithmetic to figure out what exactly happened yesterday. Lord, I think my job is just to pray for it. And to continue to trust You, the one that keeps me trusting.

Lord, I pray for our believers, the believing brothers and sisters that are in both Iran as part of an underground church, but also in Israel as part of a spiritual minority. Father, for those that trust in the Messiah, the promised one, back in Genesis 3:15. God, I pray that You would help them, Lord, that they would look to You, that they would trust You right now. Father, that they would be encouraged and built up in their faith, knowing that people around the world are praying for them. And God, I pray that even in the midst of this, Your gospel, Your word would expand and it would go forth. And Father, for the millions of people, Lord, in the Middle East, the billions that don’t know You yet. God, I’m begging that Your gospel would be preached. Lord, that people would come to faith in You. Lord, that ethnic Jews would recognize that their Messiah has come. And His name is Jesus Christ. That they would place their trust in the Lamb of God that was slain for the sin of the world. That they would stop waiting and start just embracing and living. Living in the life that You have for them. And Lord, I pray for the Muslim folks of all their various groups, Lord, that they would see the beauty of the gospel and the beauty of the lives of believers. Lord, that they would submit to the gospel themselves. Father, all that brings us back here, County Line Road in Ravenel. God, that the believers here in this room this morning would treasure the gospel just a little bit more. And that those amongst us that don’t yet know You, Lord, would they see the beauty of this good news. And they would embrace it and submit to it. Lord, we love You. And it’s in Your name that we pray. Amen.

Well, thank you all for joining me in that. There’s some times in life where I was, I did not get up this morning planning on doing that. But it was one of those things where it’s like, okay, Lord, I think as a shepherd of a group of people, this is what we need to do. So thank you all for joining me in that.

Last week, though, we started a new series that we’re calling Blueprint. If any of us have been in the construction business or built a home, or if you’re just interested in old buildings, you’ve seen a set of blueprints. This would be the diagrams, the drawings of how a building, a house, would need to be built up. It would have everything from the width of the walls to where sinks go to where a staircase or an elevator is.

And we made this claim last week based out of 1 Timothy chapter 3, where Paul, writing to his protege Timothy, says, The local church is God’s house. We have to separate the building that we as a church meet in from the people who are the church, the inhabitants. God makes this incredible claim that it’s not just a temple He dwells in, but it’s hearts, and it’s a family, and it’s a group of people that He dwells in.

But that leaves us with the question that I know you’re burning with. You’re just yearning for the answer to this. How should the local church be organized? Right? You just woke up this morning saying, man, I hope he preaches on organization today, right? He said nobody.

Now, here’s the thing. Local church organization is incredibly important, and I guarantee you care about it. Because we all have an opinion on how this ought to be led. Correct? Correct. We all do.

Now, God’s word is not silent on this topic. And in fact, the beginnings of church organization actually come from a moment of conflict in the church. So if you will open your Bibles to Acts chapter 6, the scripture will be on the screens, but it is so much better in your hands, all right? Acts chapter 6. And we’re going to look at a moment where the church, the early church, had some pretty deep conflict. But God resolved that through what we might call some organizational means, all right? So I’m going to read. This is out of Acts chapter 6. I’m just going to start with verse 1. It says, [inaudible]

Man, so we’re just jumping straight into the middle of a plot scene right here. If you ever turn on the TV and a movie is on and you turn it on and two guys are chasing each other down the back alley, you’re like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I’m missing all the context here. What in the world is happening? So let’s catch ourselves up for a second.

Immediately, if you’re a note taker, you would see there is a problem. Immediately, verse 1 says there’s a problem. It’s because there’s major disunity between two groups of Jews, some Hellenistic Jews and some Hebraic Jews.

Here’s some things for us to recognize. Hellenistic Jews and Hebraic Jews would have been of the same faith and the same ethnicity. These are all Jewish people. They would all ascribe to what we would call the Old Testament. They would all celebrate the festivals and the feasts, and they would all have been indisputed in Jerusalem for the day of Pentecost, celebrating something they’ve been celebrating for thousands of years. Whenever Peter gets up and preaches that famous sermon that we call the day of Pentecost, they would have all been there.

But the Hebraic Jews and the Hellenistic Jews would be different in their culture and their language. Someone much smarter than me said it this way. It’ll be on the screen. The Hellenistic Jews, in verse one, would have been Greek-speaking Jews from the dispersion or their descendants. These are people who lived in or around Jerusalem and attended synagogues where Greek was spoken.

You see, the land of Israel has been occupied and has been fought over for a very, very long time. And There’s this group of people that would have been taken from or pushed out of Israel. They would have been pushed out of this epicenter, Jerusalem. And as Greek-speaking people would have been coming in, their cultures would have mixed a little bit. This happens all the time. You go down to Charleston and you see some of the folks moving in from out of state. Their culture kind of adds to this pot that all gets stirred up together that depending on how long you’ve lived in Ravenel, you like or you don’t like. I don’t know. There’s this sort of come here versus been here sort of a thing. I hear that’s a thing.

So there’s this tension going on in the early church where there’s the same group of people. They all believe or they all come from the Jewish background and because they’re part of the church, they all believe that Jesus is the Messiah. But some speak Greek, some don’t. Some are wearing the new Greek togas or whatever and some aren’t. And there’s this rift. There’s this cultural divide, which would have been natural, but it was over a problem that was preventable.

Okay, I know I’m doing a lot of lead up. This matters. See, there was a problem with benevolence. If you look back at verse one, there’s a group of widows being overlooked in the daily distribution. All right. Again, there’s another much smarter guy. He writes it this way. In its charity, the early church may have followed somewhat the precedents already set in contemporary Judaism, which had a double system of distribution to the needy. All right. The Jews had a weekly dole for needy residents called the kappa. You say that with me. It’s just fun to say. Kappa. You know, like I want a cup of soup or I need a cup of money. Thank you. It was given out every Friday and consisted of enough money for 14 meals. There was also a daily distribution known as the tamui. I have no tamui-based pun for you. Okay, I tried.

So there was already this system established in Judaism where people would be taken care of. The needy amongst us would already be taken care of. The church adopts this ancient precedent and makes it a contemporary practice. If you were to turn a couple pages left in your Bible, you get to Acts 2, where the early church is born. You don’t have to do it, but I love to hear the wrestling. In Acts chapter 2, there’s this group of believers and it says there was not a needy person amongst them because everybody is taking care of everybody. And then you get to Acts 4. The church has grown and the same thing happens. But instead of just sharing dinner, they’re selling property. And they’re saying, hey, I’ve got 50 acres off of County Line. Could this go to take care of some needs in the church? Yeah, man, do that. Hey, I’ve got 200 over on Edisto Island. If I sell that, could you find some folks in the church that need some financial assistance? Yeah, we can make that happen for sure. So people are doing that. They’re selling their land. They’re bringing the proceeds to the apostles. The apostles are having to take care of people and keep track of all this stuff.

So they had this church practice, but it became a failing. The sheer number of new converts with this existing divide between Jewish background Jews and Greek culture Jews creates this problem. And that’s where our church conflict comes in. And that’s where this organizational solution comes. You see, there’s a failure to make sure that the Hellenistic Jews were being taken care of.

If we were to zoom out a second, I think there’s something fascinating happening in this passage. And I’ve kind of already told you, I’ve told you there’s church conflict. I’ve told you God’s gonna solve it. This conflict was not a theological disagreement. No one was attacking the deity of Jesus. No one was saying that it’s grace plus works. It was nothing like that. Nor was the conflict actually related to a leadership decision. Nobody said, oh, Peter, he’s getting on his high horse. Nobody said, oh, yeah, Apostle John. He’s just calling himself the beloved apostle all the time. Who does he think he is? That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is an unintended failure because of an organizational oversight. And that was directly tied to how stinking successful the church was. It’s crazy.

Verse one starts off. It says, in those days. This is a lot of lead up, but I promise it’s gonna matter. In those days. Just listen.

to how successful the Jerusalem church was. Back on the day of Pentecost, Acts 2:41. Those who accepted Peter’s message were baptized, and that day, 3,000 people were added to them. What if our church grew by 3,000 people next week? Do you think we’d have some organizational oversight issues? We had breakfast this morning, and I think we had like, what, 40 omelets? How do you make 40,000 omelets next Sunday? That’d be astronomical.

Later in chapter two, it says that every day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. So the church is growing again. Acts chapter four. Peter starts healing people. People come, and they’re flocking. So Peter says, I’m gonna go ahead and preach again. This is kind of what I do. So he preaches. And then, 4:4. Many of those who heard the message believed. The number of men alone came to 5,000. You assume most of them are married. You assume some of those couples have kids. That number’s probably 10 or 12,000 people in the church.

Acts 5:14. Believers were added to the Lord in increasing numbers. Multitudes of men and women. The author stopped keeping count at that point. He said, it’s a lot of people, guys. It’s just a lot of people. Trust me, you had to be there. And then the direct context of our chapter in verse 42 of chapter five. Every day in the temple and in various homes, the apostles continue teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah. The church is growing like crazy. And that’s creating a procedural problem. Thus, people come to the apostles, and the apostles make a proposal. Let’s read about it in verses two through four.

The 12, the apostles, summons the whole company of the disciples and said, it would not be right for us to give up preaching the word of God to wait on tables. Brothers and sisters, select from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the spirit and wisdom, whom we can appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.

Man, I love to see the apostles use their authority for the good of the group. Isn’t that incredible? The apostles could have said, hey, Jesus left us in charge, and whatever we say goes, so you need to stop worrying about this problem. Now, that wouldn’t have been right to them. They could have said, hey, don’t bother us with such lowly matters as food distribution. We have to take care of preaching the word. That’s not what they said. What they said is, hey, this is important, and we’re gonna find a solution to it, but we’re gonna bring some others in to help take care of this problem.

So this is their proposal. It starts off with a commitment. They said, hey, we are committed to preaching the word. We have gotta keep shepherding this group of people. Our main task is to pray and to preach. Now, the growth came because they were preaching. The growth came because they’re sharing the message of Jesus, and people are believing it. That’s why things are happening. So they said, hey, we can’t stop doing that. That’s our primary task. It would not be right for us to meet this need, not because it’s not necessary, but because somebody else needs to take care of it.

So they make an offer. They say, select seven men from among you, men that we can appoint to this duty, men that can take care of this, men that will do a great job with this. It reminds me of when I was in college, and Becca and I are dating, and we knew it was going somewhere. I knew I needed some cash for a ring. So I’m working at Bonefish Grill over by the convention center, over by the airport and all that. I am begging my bosses, please, I’m done hosting. I gotta start waiting tables. Because I knew when it comes to waiting, the lows are lower, but the highs are higher. And I was like, I need some cash. I’ve gotta be able to buy this girl a ring that’s respectable on some level, please.

And my bosses would tell me something whenever I would mess up. That happened like twice whenever I would mess up. Thank you. They would say, don’t bring us problems. Bring us solutions. And they would, essentially, I’d say, hey, table five, I totally goofed their order. They asked for a steak, and I took them a grilled cheese sandwich. Could we make the mistake real quick? They’d say, yeah, of course, good solution. It’s going to come out of your tips. And I’m like, I know, whatever. But that was their line. Don’t bring us problems. Bring us solutions. They trusted us to help solve the problem we saw. And the apostles are doing the same thing. They said, hey, help be part of the solution. Don’t just bring a problem, but actually bring a solution to this, okay? So that’s what they’re saying to this group of believers. And they say, these men, these seven men that we can appoint, they need to be three things. They need to have a good reputation. They need to be full of the Spirit. And they’ve got to be full of wisdom.

That would have implied a couple things if you’re reading between the lines. Someone can’t be full of the Spirit unless they’re actually a Christian, right? So there’s no imposters. There’s no just good dudes. They have to actually be born-again believers of Jesus Christ. They’ve got to be full of the Holy Spirit. They’ve got to be submitted to the Holy Spirit. And they have to have a good reputation. No bad business dealings here, okay? Nobody that may be shrewd with money, but we don’t actually trust to handle the money. And they’ve got to be wise. They’ve got to be able to understand who’s the actually needy family and who’s the family that just wants a bit of some help, okay? So they lay out these qualifications.

And the church likes it. These men, or the apostles, they say, hey, we’re going to remain devoted to preaching the Word. We’re going to remain devoted to prayer. But we are going to solve this problem, okay? What’s really cool in verse 4, when they say, we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the Word, that word ministry, it’s actually deacon. So they say, hey, while somebody is deaconing tables, we’re going to continue to deacon the Word. While you are serving food, we’re going to continue to serve the Bible. While you are continuing to distribute benevolence, we’re going to continue to distribute the Gospel. We’re all going to be deaconing. We’re all going to be ministering. We’re all going to be doing it. And it’s going to cohere. It’s going to go together. But it’s going to be different. We’re going to keep doing this. And y’all are going to do it.

Which brings us all to my one thing. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from today, if there’s one thing you write down, make it this. Every church needs shepherds and servants. You see, if the Jerusalem church was all shepherds, no servants, that would mean that these needs aren’t going to get met. Some folks are going to get frustrated. Others are going to have to just leave. And the movement is going to stop. If it’s all shepherds and no servants, the movement stops. Yeah, you’re going to keep teaching, but there’s going to be nobody to teach because the people that you want to teach are going to have to get help elsewhere. But if the movement became all, or if the church became all servants and no shepherds, man, nobody’s going to teach, which means faith won’t be reproduced, which means the movement will stop. For the Jerusalem church movement to continue, they needed shepherds to deacon the word and prayer, and they needed servants to deacon the physical needs. They needed both together.

So what happens next? If you’re following along in verse 5, you see the beginnings of a striking product. I’ll read it, verse 5 through 7. This is crazy. So the word of God spread. The disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly in number, and a large group of priests became obedient to the faith. It started off with an incredible problem of disunity. The apostles made a proposal to, hey, let’s find some new servants while we continue to shepherd, and it ends with a really striking product.

You see, the proposal pleased the whole company. Now, that’s wild. All jokes aside, have you ever seen something please everybody in the room before? No. It usually doesn’t happen unless you’re saying, hey, we’re giving out free fillets. They’re over in the fellowship hall. Like, usually something doesn’t please everybody. There’s thousands of believers here. So they’re able to recognize this is right. In fact, the word pleased in verse 5 is the word for right in verse 2. This is crazy. This passage is just mirroring itself. In verse 2, the disciples say, it would not be right for us to give up preaching the word to wait on tables. It would not be pleasing. And in verse 5, they say, oh, this idea is pleasing. It was pleasing in God’s eyes. It was pleasing in the church’s eyes because it was just so inherently right. It said, we have to do this. This is an incredible proposal. Thus, they implement the proposal right away. Seven men are chosen who are spiritually commissioned for this task. When the apostles pray for them, they lay their hands on them.

A few minutes ago, I was talking about my time at Bonefish. And I said, hey, the managers would tell me, don’t bring problems, bring solutions. Which meant the person that was experiencing the problem had to be part of the solution. These names in verse 5, commentators say, would be Greek names. These are Hellenistic names. You remember what the problem originally was? It was the Greek Hellenistic Jews that weren’t being taken care of. The church entrusted the implementers of the solution from the population that was being not taken care of. That’s incredible. Incredible when you think, hey, okay, the folks that are hurting the most, they’re going to be part of creating the solution and carrying that solution out. Incredible trust on part of the apostles. Incredible trust on part of the church as a whole.

So they choose these seven men. And these are no slouches. You start turning to the right in your Bible, and you see where Stephen is going to be martyred for sharing the gospel. The next chapter, you’re going to see where Philip is sent by the Holy Spirit every which way to preach the gospel to folks. And then he just blip. He’s just kind of off the map. We don’t really know what happens to Philip afterwards. These are incredible men that are chosen, that are commissioned to this task.

And once the proposal takes effect, oh boy, it bears some fruit. We see in verse 7 three things. We see that the word of God spread. The apostles, because they are freed up for their task, continue doing what they do best. They’re back in homes. They’re back in the temple. They’re back in synagogues. They’re back in the marketplace. They’re back sharing the gospel, proclaiming the truth, preaching that Jesus Christ is the Messiah that they had been waiting for all this time. The word of God is active, and it’s spreading, and it’s going forth. And that’s only possible because the apostles were able to give away this necessary responsibility.

So the word of God spreads. And that’s not, I will say too, when the apostles give away that responsibility, it’s not so that they could work less. It was so that they could double down in their work. And they knew we have to focus. For the thing to continue, we’ve got to focus. So the word of God spreads.

Because of that, the disciples increase in number, which is crazy because numerical growth begins this passage, and it ends it too. Which means that this system, taking care of our own, making sure there’s no needy amongst us, coupled with the gospel as this beautiful apologetic of truth, where people around them would have been able to say, okay, their walk matches their talk. They say Jesus is love, and they love their own. They say that God cares for the widow and the orphan, and they do too. I can buy into that.

And because disciples are increasing in number, there’s even this large group of priests that become obedient to the faith. When you think about the role that priests played in Easter Sunday, we know that the priests were the ones that, that were along with the Jewish leaders that made the decision to put Jesus on a cross. We know that the priests were the ones that were mocking Him. We know that the priests were the ones that were whipping up the crowd to call for Barabbas to be released instead of Jesus. These were persecutors of Christianity. These were folks that were trying to oppress what was going on, trying to keep this movement under their thumb. And even they said, we can’t resist this anymore. It’s too stinking beautiful. These people really love their own. And they really love us. They’re putting their money where their mouth is. And we can’t resist that. What are we gonna do? And they become obedient to the faith.

Man, they don’t just toy with Christianity. It doesn’t say they considered the gospel. It doesn’t even say that they took a step toward Jesus. It doesn’t say that one time they gave a tithe or an offering. No, it says they became obedient to the faith. Their entire lives were changed as they saw the early church, adopt this new organizational structure. And that’s where we Kind of bring it full circle. I know you woke up this morning and wanted to talk about organization. It is so incredibly important to God’s design for the local church that there be a particular organization that we follow. Not purely because of tradition. Certainly not because of logic. But because hearts are too costly. Lives are too valuable. Families are too worthy for us to ignore how He’s instructed us to do this.

There’s a lot of authoritative voices that we could toss into the ring to say, “Hey, moving forward, this is the type of church we’re gonna be.” What’s got to be true of us is this right here. Amen. What’s got to be true of us is this right here. Which means that how we treat the needy among us and the hurting around us will always be a defense of the gospel inside of us. How we take care of the hurting in here and out there, it better match what we proclaim.

If we’re gonna say God is love, man, we got to love the hard to love. If we’re gonna say that God cares for all of the needs of the people here, then man, we’ve got to aggressively and proactively take care of needs. If we’re gonna say that the Bible is our guiding authority, then we gotta say, okay, where do we not match? And how can we adjust?

But there’s, this is all great. This is fun. We agree with everything here. And it was great for the early church. But I’ve got a question. Where are the words pastor and deacon? Earlier, I showed that the Greek background of what the apostles and the seven were doing was deaconing the word and deaconing needs. But nowhere here does it say that seven deacons were called or that the pastors were leading the local church. So what do we do with this?

You see, explicitly on its surface, the office of pastor and deacon is not used in Acts chapter six. Now we will see office, the offices of pastor and deacon be used very quickly, very soon, I should say. You look at like, I’ll just read it for us. In Philippians, “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus in Philippi, including the pastor, overseer, elders, and the deacons.” Or you go back to 1 Timothy, the passage that we looked at last week, verses 14 through 16. You know what comes in verses 1 through 13? It’s the qualifications for pastors and for deacons.

In fact, if we were to just continue in the storyline of Acts, we would see in chapter 10 and 11, 13, 15, 19, 20, explicitly elders slash pastors and deacons being mentioned. Now what we did here, we dropped into the middle of a storyline. And we’re sitting here in 2024 with thousands of years of Christianity and tradition. And we’re looking at this, and it’s so easy for us to take all of what we have and we put it onto that. But that’s not the way you read the Bible. You got to let it come out and wash over you, not you go and wash over it.

We will see the words pastor and deacon be brought up. But for the early church, it’s 30 years before they’re really talking about that. You see, Paul wouldn’t write 1 Timothy until he’s in prison in the mid-60s AD. This moment in the early church happened in the mid-30s AD. The form of church was developing. Yet, this is an incredible template for us to follow, right? Obviously, we see the beginnings of something here that Paul and others would continue to roll forward. And that’s going to continue to be what we are studying in this Blueprint series.

As we continue to grow as a church, we will continue to do what we’ve always done, which is look at how we are doing things, compare it to the Word, and say, okay, what do You have to say for us now, Jesus? That’s what we’re going to continue to do.

But here’s the beautiful thing. There’s some folks in the room, and you came in this morning, and you’re like, what in the world did I step into? This may be your first time. It may be your thousandth time. And you’re like, what is that whippersnapper, Jeremy, up to up there? Here’s the main point of all this, really. It’s the fact that through the gospel, everybody has a seat here.

Let’s just think about the family of God for a second, okay? Because in the very beginning, God created all things. And He created it really good. There were no missiles.

There were no drones. There was no barbed wire fence. There was nothing like that in God’s original design. In fact, it was just a garden on a world that was supposed to be this place of peace and unity and love that would never be attacked. And God created the very first people to be receivers of and representatives of His glory and His grace and His love and His mercy. That’s how He made us to be, which would mean that there would be no organizational needs because things would be taken care of. There’d be no deficiency at the grocery store. There’d be no short change at the gas pump. There’d be no getting to the end of the month and you’re like, “Man, I don’t have enough cash to make this all meet. I can’t be able to take care of this stuff.” There’d be no relational discord. Now, we would have been learning. We’d have been building. We’d have been doing things, but there wouldn’t have been problems with it.

But sin comes in and disrupts and distorts everything. And it takes God’s goodness and it mars it such that there’s now disunity, anger, hatred, war. But God says, “I’m going to bring you back to a place of unending peace and prosperity. I’m going to send My Son and He’s going to absorb the full consequence and the wrath of sin that I’ve got for you so that you can receive all the love and the grace and the acceptance that I have for Him.” So Jesus comes and Jesus dies on a cross, making a way of peace for all people. The people that press the button to send the drones into Jerusalem yesterday can have peace with God through the gospel. And the folks that were shooting down the drones can have peace with God through the gospel. That is the world’s greatest problem is sin and lostness. And the world’s greatest provision that God ever gave was His own Son, His only Son, so that all who accept Him can have eternal life now and forever.

And Paul is writing about this in Ephesians chapter 2. And he says, “You were dead in your sins and your trespasses, but God, but God who is rich in His mercy and His kindness, sent His Son so that you could be saved.” Not by your works. No, not by your effort. Not by your doing. Not by your family. Not by your heritage. Not by your church attendance. Nothing like that. Uh-uh. Because He says in Isaiah that your good works are as filthiness to Him. You’re saved by grace. And He sends His Son to save us by grace. That’s Ephesians 2, 1 through 10. Starting in 11, he says, and through Jesus, you can have peace, not just with Him, but with others. You’ve got to read that later today. It’s an incredible second half of an incredible chapter of Scripture, where God says that through His Son, those over here and those over there could be brought together into one family so that we as Sauldam Baptist Church, the come-hears and the been-hears, we can worship at one table together. And we can say, “Hey, doesn’t matter what your last name is, we are family in Christ.” That is what God has made us to be.

But because we do not yet live in that place of unending peace and provision, God gives us His Word to help us know how to live. And He organizes us for the good of us and for the glory of His name. So that’s what we’re gonna be looking at over the next month and a half. For God’s glory, for our good, how does He intend to organize us? Super exciting stuff, I know. In the gospel, though, this comes alive to you because you know, “Oh, Sauldam Baptist Church, that’s not just a place I can go be. Or it’s not just a place I can visit. It’s not just a membership role I can inhabit. No, it’s a family I could be a part of.” And that’s what God’s making.

So how about this? Let’s pray as we close out our service. And I should say, if there’s anybody in the room that wants to talk more about these things, what it means to come into God’s universal family through placing your faith in Jesus, what it means to come into God’s local family by joining Sauldam, I’d love to talk during the last song.

Lord, thank You for today. God, You’re incredibly good. Lord, I will confess, I am a nerd. And I do actually enjoy thinking about organization. I do think in those terms. I think in flow charts and all that stuff. But Lord, I marvel. Lord, truly, I marvel at Your intention, Father. Your intention to bless us through deacons and through pastors. God, Your intention to protect us, to take care of our needs, to unify us. Lord, I feel like in such a divided, angry, hostile world, the unity that we can have with others that we are not kin with, Father. That is striking. It is beautiful. And it’s a testament to the truthfulness of the gospel. Lord, for anybody here this morning that does not yet know You, I would ask, God, that You would please, You would introduce Yourself right now. And Lord, they would embrace the good news of Your Son. And Lord, for those that do, God, I pray they would fall more deeply in love with Yourself. So that, Lord, we would be just a group of people that would love You. Father, thank You. We’re here for You, and it’s in Your name we pray. Amen.