Chest of Joash

Hi family. How are ya? So I just want to say before we jump in and we've got miles to go before the sun sets today, so buckle up, we're going to cover some stuff! But a lot of people asked me like this contextual teaching thing that you do, where can I go to get more or have that kind of teaching? Brad gray is always the number one place that I refer people to. This weekend is going to be tremendous. And I would really encourage you to, to jump in and be a part of that weekend. Um, so that's all I'm going to say about that. You will -- I don't know how to help you understand -- you'll regret it if you don't when you start hearing people in the mail, man, I wish it was there. You could have been. So, I'm just like get signed up or -- it's going to be a great weekend. Okay.

So today what we're gonna talk about is somethings kind of fun. We're gonna talk about money and like help you cringe a little bit. Always me. It has, what I can tell you is today is the first time in 27 years of ministry, that I have been excited to talk about money. So, I’m really excited about what we're going to do. Today, we're going to read a passage out of II Chronicles, and then we're going to leave that and we're going to talk about our church and kind of our state of the union. And then, because a lot of people have been asking me like, Hey, how's the church doing? Like, how are our finances? I'm going to give you all the info today, all the skinny it's going to happen right now. Well, not right now, but in a few minutes. Then, what we're going to do is we're going to tie those two things back together and talk about where we're going forward. So I'm super stoked about this. 

2 Chronicles 4. Let me tell you what's happening. We're in the period of the divided kingdom. That means in the Northern kingdom is Israel, the Southern kingdom is Judah and there's each one has a King and they're kind of not getting along. And the Kings, every once in a while there's a good King, but a lot of times they're just not very good Kings. And so the countries are struggling and they're not coming together. And then other nations are coming in and making them suffer and all this crazy stuff going on, all kind of rooted in the fact that they're not doing real well with the Lord. They're not making him a priority. And so what we do is, we see every once in a while, there's a good King and they'll set everything right. And then after they die, then it goes back to the bad things again. And so no, no exception here. Second Chronicles chapter 24 is the story of Joash. And Joash is a good King and the generations before him were not. And so what's happened is that the temple of the Lord is in disrepair it's been kinda mistreated and beaten down. The implements that were in the temple -- his uncles actually took those implements out of the temple and used them, instead of worshiping God, to worship Baal, which is not going to go over well. So, I wanna, I want to read the story out of chapter 24:1-16, and then, and then just kind of take a look at what happens here. So let's begin the story. It says, “Joash was seven years old when he began to reign, so, I'll just let that one sink in for a minute. And he reigned 40 years in Jerusalem.” Now it's probably --just a side note --that's probably a literal 40 years, but anytime you see the number 40 in the scripture and you know, that that number shows up a lot in scripture, right? Anytime you see that, always think period of testing. Joash’s reign is a period of testing. Are the people going to come back or not? This is a test. So, “he reigned 40 years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Zibiah of Beersheba. And Joash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada the priest. Jehoiada got for him two wives, and he had sons and daughters.” After this, I'm assuming some time went by from age seven to wife's and sons and daughters. It was probably some time in there. “After this Joash decided to restore the house of the Lord and he gathered the priests in the Levites and said to them, ‘go out to the cities of Judah and gather from Israel money to repair the house of your God from year to year and see that you act quickly.’ But the Levites did not act quickly. So the King summoned, Jehoiada the chief and said to him, ‘why have you not required the Levites to bring in from Judah and Jerusalem the tax levied by Moses, the servant of the Lord, and the congregation of Israel for the tent of testimony?’ For the sons of Athalia, that wicked woman,” …there's a legacy to be known by… “had broken into the house of God, and it also used all the dedicated things to the house of the Lord for the Baals. So the King commanded, and they made a chest and set it outside the gate of the house of the Lord. And proclamation was made throughout Judah and Jerusalem to bring in for the Lord the tax that Moses the servant of God laid on Israel in the wilderness. And all the princes and all the peoples rejected and brought their tax’ -- rejoiced. They didn't reject. They rejoiced. I don't read good. ‘The people rejoiced and brought their tax and dropped it into the chest until they had finished. And whenever the chest was brought to the king’s officers by the Levites, when they saw that there was much money in it, the king’s secretary and the officer of the chief priest would come and empty the chest and take it and return it to its place. Thus they did day after day, and collected money in abundance. And the King and Jehoiada gave it to those who had charge of the work of the house of the Lord, and they hired masons and carpenters to restore the house of the Lord and also workers in iron and bronze to repair the house of the Lord. So those who were engaged in the work labored, and the repairing went forward in their hands, and they restored the house of God to its proper condition and strengthened it. And when they had finished, they brought the rest of the money before the King and Jehoiada, and with it were made utensils for the house of the Lord, both for the service and for the burnt offerings, and dishes for incense and vessels of gold and silver. And they offered burnt offerings in the house of the Lord regularly all the days of Jehoiada. But Jehoiada grew old and full of days and died. He was 130 years old at his death.” Lord Jesus, no “And they buried him in the city of David among the Kings, because he had done good in Israel and toward God and his house.”

So, here's the story. The temple is a mess and Joash, being a good King, since he's like, Hey, Levites, let's spruce the temple up. Let's put it back in order as it should be so that we can use it for worshiping and they don't do it. And so Joash was like, fine. I'll do it myself. So, he creates a chest and then the people from all over the country come and they deliver things that get put in the chest of Joash. And by doing this, what happens is, they're able to restore the temple to where it should be so that they could worship in it.

Now, I want to step outside of that. And I want to give us a bit of a state of the union address for a church. A lot of people ask me like, where, how are the finances doing? What are we doing? I want to give you the whole picture today. When we got here, the church was going backwards financially to the tune of about a hundred thousand dollars a month. Now here's the thing. There's so much foresight from people who, before that time had had the foresight to put money in savings, and so the church was able to weather that season, which was a hard season, but because of that, they were able to stand in there and get through it. But you can, you know, for sure, like if you're burning a hundred thousand dollars a month, you're burning through savings pretty quickly. Right? And so that's where things were at when we got here. Now, for me, I'm from the church planting world last 25 years of ministry. That's been my world in planting churches, myself, and I've planted two churches and also helping in other church planting organizations. And, you know, a few weeks ago when I was gone for a Sunday, when we were in Turkey, we had a guy who was a new church planter in Castle Rock that came up here and preached. And, and so that's still kind of part of my heart. I believe that new are important, but if you're living in a church planting world, kind of like starting a business, you know that you've got to kind of run on a shoestring budget. And so my last 25 years of ministry has been like, man, we just got to run lean, lean, lean, lean, lean, lean. We can't do anything frills. Because we didn't have the resources to do it. When Tom and I got here, as we looked at the budget, there was just, and it's not evil. It just, it happens over time in churches. They have a tendency to get a little bit extended on the things that they spend money on. And so, we immediately went to work and started slashing and cutting and doing all that stuff. We trimmed out almost $700,000 out of the budget and then immediately reinvested some of that into some really important things. But we wound up landing with about a half a million dollar cushion that we just trimmed out of the budget. I was like, we don't need these things right now. Maybe one day we will need them, but we don't need them today because we're going backwards. Make sense. So, we did that. And then we had this, if you think about a sink, you know, you have the drain and then you have the faucet. Like if, if, if water's running out of the sink and you don't want it to, you got to do two things. Number one, you got to plug the drain. Number two, you gotta turn the faucet on. And so that's how we were kinda like let's, let's plug the drain, let's stop the bleeding here, financially. And then let's see if we can't figure out how to turn the faucet on.

And so here's what we did over the last year. We've refinanced the building. Let me tell you the story of that. This is incredible. In 2004 or ‘05, whenever this section of this building was built, the final debt load, when it, when the dust all settled was $19 million, that's what they owed here. And the mortgage payment on that was about $138,000 a month. And that's just where it was. And I love this. I love having this room. I love being able to use this space today, but that comes at a cost, right? Like square footage of square footage. It comes at a cost. It just is what it is. And so this is, this is something that was like, here's the -- I wasn't here for this -- $138,000 a month was a mortgage payment. That average weekly offering was $60,000 a week. That means more than two weeks of the month went just to pay the mortgage, right? Like there's one way to look at that. It's like all that's, how could they ever approve that? But the other way to look at it, in a way that I have a tendency to look at it, based on the people that I know that were part of that was, that is some kind of faith. They believed God was going to do something and they put their money, literally, where their mouth was on that. Like, that's amazing. I was like, ha ha. When I heard those numbers that I, like, I had an anxiety attack. I was like, whew, that's crazy. But they did it. And they were diligent and they worked on paying that debt down. Jeff Akers is amazing. I don't know if you guys know that. He's awesome. He's such a, but he's so many of you have been through Financial Peace with him. He's just awesome. And he's diligently worked on all of those things. He paid it down, paid it down, paid it down till today, we owe about 10 and a half million dollars. And we, we refinanced that. And so our mortgage payment went down, from where it was, all the way down to $48,000 a month, which is awesome. Now here's the cool thing. What that, along with other trimming that we did, what that allowed us to do was upgrade our tech in our worship center, which it needed, it was 16 years old, right? Like it was broken. It didn't work. And the great thing about this, if you know anything about technology, you know, that 16 years is like eternity in the tech world. This, things move on. And they, the people that originally bought that had the vision and the foresight to buy stuff that would last that long. Like, that's, incredible that they did that, but it was, it was broken. It was tired. It didn't work, it wasn't effective. And so we did some video upgrades with some of that stuff in your Led Zilla is one of those things. Like that's, that's one of the things that we were able to do because we trimmed out and did some of that stuff, refinancing the building and all of that. 

Then another thing that we were able to do that I'm actually really, really excited about as you guys have noticed, maybe probably over here, this construction zone, that's going on. Here's what we did with that -- that's where the old offices were and now our offices are in a completely different building. And so what we're doing is we're opening that up and we're doing two major things with it. Number one is we're creating classrooms for our birth to pre-K age children. Here's why that matters. We have this gargantuan building. I don't know if you know this is a big building, and our early childhood director, Megan has been having to set up and tear down every week in our building, because there hasn't been space for her to be able to have class for her babies, which she loves. Now, let me say this. I was a church planter for years, setting up and tearing down every week gets old in a hurry. It gets old in a hurry. And she's able to do that. Now, we're going to make a permanent space so that she doesn't have to do that anymore. Here's the other thing why that matters. Here's the other thing why that matters. Thank you. Here's why that matters though. It matters because, if you've been with us for a while, you know this -- I have a real high priority on showing up for worship on time. Like, you should be here to tell God who he is to you on time. And this is my running joke. But if some of us showed up to work, the way we show up to church, we'd get fired. And I feel like telling God who he is to us is more important. It's more important than that. And so like, but here's the problem that things were so spread out for our kids, right? That if you had a kid in early childhood and a kid in elementary, you literally could not make it to worship on time. Like, because of our own structure, we were getting in the way of something that we want to value. And so we're fixing that. We're fixing that for you. The other thing that we're doing with that 8,000 square feet is we're creating three adult education conference style classrooms, which is going to be awesome because here's why. We will teach our people, the Bible. It's so necessary to know the Word of God, because if you don't know the Word of God, this foundation, this anchor point for us in our life, then any good logical idea, they're all equal. And we just kind of find whichever one we want to latch on to. No, the Word of God says what it says. I don't get to negotiate that. And I can come up with all the excuses in the world for why I don't like it, but it doesn't matter. The Bible says what it says. And when we don't know that, we're like infants being tossed around on the waves, that's what Ephesians 4 says. That's why God gives us spaces like this so that we can use them to train our people. And so we will do that. And so we have three conference rooms that are going in there that we'll be able to use to teach our people, the Bible. I'm super stoked about that. I don't know if you know this, but the Bible is important to me. It's important to me. And so we will do that. We will do that. So that's happening over in this remodel that's going on over here, we're going to do early childhood classrooms and we're going to do adult education classrooms.

Now, here's something else that we've been able to do. That's been really, really cool. Some of this stuff you will have heard before, some of it you will have not heard before. So just bear with me. During  the quarantine, we were able to give $50,000 to churches that were not going to make it financially. We were able to support them with that. Part of that is because of the cuts that we did. Part of that is because a lot of the things that we had budgeted, like camps and VBS and those kinds of things, we didn't wind up spending money on those -- because of, we couldn't do them. We couldn't have groups together. Right? And so we, and we had a decision to make, we had a decision to make, like, what are we going to do with this money? Like, are we going to hoard it and protect ourselves and make sure that we have enough, or are we going to reinvest it in the kingdom and make sure that we, by example, show that we trust that the Lord's got us as a church, in his grip and we're going to be okay. And so we came up with three values as a staff that we were going to leverage to make decisions. These three values are real simple, but these have been our values all the way through this entire process. Number one, we're going to stay flexible because what we believed at the time and what's born out to actually be the case, is that information changes on a dime. And we're going, we have to take these big swings and react and make differences. And it all is kind of constantly in flux and changing. So we're just going to stay flexible. We're not going to own any idea or approach. We're going to do the best that we can with what we have, the information that we have. And we're going to move forward. Number two, we're going to be default aggressive. What that means is when we don't know what to do, what option do we take? We're going to take the aggressive path because we're going to move the kingdom forward regardless of what context we're in. Number three, we're going to fail forward. Let me tell you what happens when you get default aggressive, you make mistakes and in some of, -- and there's some of you were like, yeah, that's why he shouldn't be aggressive. Listen, if you sit and do nothing, you make a mistake too. So we're going to make a mistake, try and do something that's. So we're going to fail forward. Like these have been our three values. And so we didn't hoard the money. We didn't hoard the money that came in during quarantine, during COVID during all that stuff, we reinvested it. We reinvested it in the kingdom. Some of that in some of our programs, some of that in programs that nothing to do with our church. One of those programs was Royal family kids. You guys know that we have a huge Royal family kids camp that we do every year. Royal family is an organization dedicated to putting on camps for foster kids. So these kids from hard places get loved on and shown Jesus for a week in a way that nobody else really does for them. And you know, in your life like those major pivot points in your story, they're always tied to a person. They're always a coach, a teacher, a parent, a kid like this. Those great moments are tied to people. And what we're doing with Royal family is creating those pivot points for kids in the name of Jesus -- kids that don't have a lot of positive in their life. Super powerful. The problem with that is Royal family didn't have any of their Camps this summer. And so they were in fear of going under. So we were able to give them $17,000 to Royal family to help support them, to get them through so that they could get into the next year where they can start having camps again.  Like that's not a small amount of money. That's an amount of money.

Some things that Steve talked about last week in talking about missions, we doubled our missions budget this year, over last year, doubled it! Here's why that matters. What Steve said last week is he is now, at this point, managing the largest global missions budget in the history of Southeast Christian Church. Like we're giving more to global missions than we ever have in the history of our church. 

Here's another thing we did. We established life groups this last year. Some of you heard about that. Life groups, crazy. We started life groups in February and then March. God has got a crazy sense of humor, right? Like, Hey, get these relational environments happening. And then I'm going to shut the world down. Like, come on, give us a heads up on that. You know, stall us on something like, Oh, we can't get them -- we just can't pull it together for February. We'll do it in April. That would have changed the whole game. But we did, we did it. And we actually increased our number of life groups during quarantine, while you guys all had to meet in zoom. That’s the worst. There's this new term now called zoom fatigue. You, maybe you've experienced it, Right? Like we did it. And here's why, because we will, as a church, be a group of people who make disciples. That is our mission from Jesus, himself, and disciples have to be made in the context of relationship. And so what life groups do is create the right kind of environments so that relationships can be formed so that discipleship can happen. 

They're so critical for us. And we did it. We established a life groups team that didn't even exist when we got here. And so we did that.

We maintained a hundred percent staffing during COVID. We didn't have to lay anybody off, which was really exciting for us because we, I mean, like all of us, I was super nervous about that. And we just got with our staff on zoom -- because that's what we do. And I just told them all right up front, like, look, we're going to cut a whole lot of things before we start cutting staff, because I want you guys to know we’re here to take care of you. And so we paid, even when people weren't working, that were hourly, we're like, look, we know that this isn't your fault. We're going to pay you as if you were working your normally scheduled hours because people have to buy food. So, we did that.

Something else that we've done over the last year. When we got here, when Tom and I got here, the staff hadn't had a raise in five years and I get it -- when they're going backwards financially, they had, that's hard to do, but we did that. We fixed it. We fixed it. And bigger, bigger than that, is when we got here, there was a 30% discrepancy between men and women doing the same job. And I looked at that and both Tom and I looked at, I was like, Tom, that's sin, that's sin. So we fixed it. And so now, not by cutting salary, but by bringing the women up to an equitable salary. And that was really, really cool because not only did we do that, but each position in a church, you have a bandwidth -- a high and a low that your salary should kind of travel in in order to be quote unquote competitive. And what that means is you look across the country at churches of like budget size, like numbers of people size and you look at kind of where the acceptable ranges of salaries, where do they live in? And what I can tell you is that today, where almost none of those people were in those salaries a year ago, today, all of our people on staff are within their acceptable bandwidth for salaries, which is awesome. That makes me really happy. But what I know about when we start talking about staff salaries, everybody gets weird, right? Like, I don't like giving to a nonprofit cause it's all overhead. I want my dollars to go the mission. I want my dollars to go to the mission. I don't want it to go to overhead. I want it to go to the mission. Let me tell you something. I'm a little bit passionate about this. The church that we came from, my dad was on staff at that church for 12 years. In that 12 years, my dad was the marriage and family pastor. And what he did, almost exclusively, was marriage and family counseling. Okay. We figured it out one day in his entire 12 years there -- from divorce eminent to healthy marriages moving forward. Well, my dad invested in and saved 1,183. Don't clap at that. Here's why I tell you that story. 100% of the church resources invested in those 1,183 saved from being broken homes is labeled in a budget as overhead. So if before you go, well, I don't want my money to go to overhead. Think about what your overhead does. If you don't have overhead, you don't have the mission. We’ve got to think differently about that because that's one that's that's investment in a changed life, relationally that's, but it's all overhead. It's all overhead. Well, it that's, that's wrong thinking. It's wrong thinking. And we got to fix it.

We are, for the first time, investing money in local missions, like we've always invested in global missions, but here's the problem with that. This is the problem. The thing that's never made sense to me is that we would throw millions of dollars at people overseas and let our neighbors go to hell. We will not do that here. And so what we're doing now is we're investing in local missions. Things like Covered in Treasure House of Hope and those kinds of spaces that are places that we can invest in that we know are going to make disciples with that money. They're going to build relationships and journey with people from brokenness to wholeness. They're going to do the things that they need to do in order to help these people become wholly devoted followers of Jesus Christ. And we're investing resources, not just, not just attaboys and pats on the back, we're invest in resources because we can. And so because of all of this cutting and trimming and rethinking budget and all of that stuff. What we've been able to do with resources in our church is awesome, but I want to take it a step further.

As I look at our, as I look at our budget, we have this one major piece that we need to fix. We need to retire our debt. If we could do that, if we could be debt free, that would reinvest $48,000 a month back into ministry. It would reinvest $48,000 a month. So we've got to thinking about this, like what could we do if we had 48,000 additional dollars a month, what would we do? So I have some things that I would like to share with you. What could we do if we retired our debt return, our debt is not flashy. It's not sexy, but let me tell you what it is. Here's the first thing we could do. We could feed 520 families a month through Secor, 520 families a month with one month of mortgage one month with one month of our mortgage, $48,000. With that amount of money we could afford to take 75 women through the two year program that covered does 75 women for $48,000 a month. We could rescue 75 women out of human trafficking. We've talked about making a difference in the trafficking industry, in our, in our area, because it's a big deal in our area. Like, listen to me, this is not a social club. This is a launching pad. Where a bunch of reckless crazy Jesus followers go out and make a difference in the kingdom. So before we get off, I don't want to mess in that world. That's scary. That's where Jesus is calling us. If we're not going to do something, we're not going to make a difference. If we're not going to be counted for in this world, what in the world are we doing here? I can take a nap! With one month of our mortgage payment. Right now, we could provide school supplies for nearly all the foster kids in Douglas County in the entire County. One month we could send 23 people on a mission trip and you know this, if you've been on a mission trip, they change your life. We could sin. We could pay with one month of our mortgage payment. We could pay for 23 people to go on those trips. Remember last week, Steve talked about the 10/40 window and the fact that there's about 7,000 unreached people groups in the world. You know, one of the scriptures says that the whole world will hear before Jesus returns. I really want him to come back. Do you know that with one month we could fund a missionary to go reach one of those unreached people groups. That would, that would bring Jesus back sooner. I get excited about that. I get excited about that. I'm kind of tired of the complexity of navigating our world. I just want to go be in heaven and be with Jesus. With one month of our mortgage payment, one month we could help five students attend Southeast Christian school, five students we could pay for to get a faith-based God centered education to carry them out into the world. We could do that with one month. We could pay the rent for 35 struggling families in our community. And they're there. People are struggling. 
We could send with one month of our mortgage payment, we could send 70 foster kids to Royal family Kids Camp changed their life forever. We could do so much. 

And, and here's, here's what I want to say to our online audience for online people. And I'm not talking about the ones that are in our community and we'll come back to the church. As soon as they feel safe. I'm talking about those of you that are watching our services around the country. We have, I think when the last time I looked, we had 38 different states represented in one service that are watching online, that all call Southeast home. And I love that. I love that, but here's the thing. We're not here to create a good show to entertain people. We're called to make disciples. And so ,if this show doesn't facilitate that at every level with them, we're missing something. And so for those of us that are online that are like, but I live in Maine or live in California, I live in Washington or I live in Iowa, whatever, whatever, whatever, like we love having you be part of our family. What we want to do is to figure out how to help resource you so that when you go out into your community, you have real needs there and real organizations that are doing great work. What would it look like for us to empower you to go make a difference there? What could we do with $48,000 a month to help that. Like, those are all the things that we, we were like, man, we could do that. We could do it. We could do it. We could do it. We could do it if we would just retire the debt.

So here's what I want to do -- out in the lobby when you leave, you'll see an open chest. It's the it's affectionately dubbed the chest of Joash. And here's what we want to do this isn't there's also a tab online. You can actually designate funds online. Do it there. But here's what I want to do. I want us to commit to start 
contributing to the chest of Joash. And if you'll do that, and this is not your tithe, this is over and above and it doesn't have to be a massive amount of money. It can be. If you've got change in your ashtray in your car. If you've got change in your pocket, if you got like, just throw it in the chest, just throw it in the chest. If we all do a little bit, we can really accomplish a lot. Now some of you are like, well, I'm just going to write that check. Hey, cool. Let me know. And we'll take care of that. We'll take care of that. You can, if the Lord lays on your heart to give more, you can certainly do that. But this is an opportunity for us to step in and make that a little bit of contribution. Make a big difference at each week as you come, that chest will be there for you to be able to invest in it. And here's my promise to you. If you'll commit to giving to it, 100% of the money given to the chest of Joash, we'll go towards retiring debt. 100% of it, none of it will go to overhead. It'll all go to retiring debt so that we can get that debt dealt with so that we can get on with the business of advancing the kingdom. 

And I'm excited about that. I'm excited about that. I have some implications for us in this. This is where I get like, whew. Implication number one is this. God is ready to do big things in our world. Any time that things get dark, like the brightest light shines in the darkest dark, right? Like it's we live in a dark world. It's all jacked up. People are weird. People are weird right now. And like, I it's, it's crazy. I did some research this weekend. The divorce rate, since quarantine, is up 34% above the norm, 74% of those who got divorced in the last, since March, 74% of them said that the quarantine and the Corona virus had a catastrophic effect on their marriage. 74% of them, like this is killing marriages. The abuse rate is skyrocketing, addiction rate is skyrocketing. You know, the, one of the funny, not funny things that happened right at the beginning of quarantine is that they initially shut down liquor stores, as a non essential service. Okay. 
And then like within 30 minutes they made an follow up with us like, Hey, we're probably gonna keep those open, but that hasn't been helpful. Has it been helpful? Like people have tried to drink their way through it and it has not gone well. It hasn't gone well, right? The, addiction rate is skyrocketing, abuse rate skyrocketing. People are weird right now. I was in, I was in Costco this Friday. I know big mistake, but I was there right when they opened and Costco is always a little bit crazy. Like it's always a little bit crazy, but here's, here's the thing people were -- it's, it's almost like in order to wear the mask consistently, we have 
to withdraw into a mental space that's so disconnected from other people just to find the mental ability to actually do it. And it’s -- so here's the deal, my daughter 
is a freshman at LuHi this year. So she's, this is her first year in school, her first year in high school. So she met all new friends and you know that she doesn't even know what her friends look like. Like she doesn't even know because they only see each other with masks on. It's the most bizarre, like an unintended consequence, right? It's an unintended consequence and I'm not arguing for or against masks. It's just a world that we live in and it's taking a toll on people. People -- normally when you're in Costco, especially cause it's busy -- and when you come to an intersection, you kind of want to look both ways before you cross the street. Right. It's just healthy, safety and health, right? Like keeps you alive that way. I watched four full on full-steam collisions. Like people -- just, they're just not paying attention because we're so withdrawn there. People were looking and meandering like, and they're looking up in the air. Like they're not even looking at merchandise on the shelves. One lady was there with their little kid and she's like this and her kid got hit by a cart. Like she was like, Oh, like it, like, it snapped her out of reality or out of her fantasy world back in real, like this is people like we're in a weird space and we got to get through it. But I promise you this. On the other side of this space, God's people are going to have some big work to do because we've got to be ready and mobilized to re-engage people in a connective way because we've been isolated far too long and it's hurting people. God has big things that he wants to do in our world. And he's inviting us to partner with him.

That's the second implication. God is inviting us to partner with him in his work, in his work, not in what I think his work should be, but in his work. God's inviting us to partner with him in his work. 

Implication number three, our level of partnership with God, it's tied to the way we steward our resources, both individually and corporately. What we want to do is to be able to maximize every dollar goes to the best kingdom impact that we can have. And we work really hard at that, but here's the deal. We will do ministry at the level that God provides resources for us to do that. We will do that. And if we could retire that debt, man, that would be a massive, more massive amount of resources that we could do that.

Fourth implication is this. When we joined together to put things in order, we can see more of God at work. And here's the deal, I don't want to be a part of seeing 10% of God at work. That's cool. I'll take it. But I want to see a hundred percent of God at work. I want to see all that God's up to around us. I want to see it all come to fruition. So want to retire the debt, the chest of Joash is out there drop some money in it. When you walk by it doesn't have to be a ton. If you want to give more, you can give online or you can write a check, send it. I don't care. I don't care how you do it, but we're going to work diligently at getting this debt retired so that we can reinvest those dollars back into ministry. And we want to do that. The running joke in church campaigns, which this isn't a campaign, technically, but the running joke in church campaigns is this -- the good news is we found all the money we need to pay off all our debt. The bad news is it's in your pockets. So that's the, that's the, I mean, it's a good news, bad news kind of thing. But I believe this. I believe that if we can work at this diligently and if we all are willing to do a little bit, then a lot can be done in the name of Jesus. A lot can be done in the name of Jesus. And at the end of the day, that's what we're here for. We're not here to be entertained. We're not here to feel, to come in and sit down and just fulfill our spiritual obligation and move on with the week. We're here to be a part of a movement of God. I don't want to be a part of just coming to church and punching our church time card every week. I'm not, I'm not here for that, by the way, the Holy Spirit's not here for that either. There's more for us to do. There's differences to be made there's hearts to be healed there's lives to be transformed. Marriages to be put back together and we can partner with God and helping that. And that's our invitation.

And I love thinking about that. And in this movement towards communion time, as we think like Jesus held nothing back for us, God's only son held nothing back for us so that we could be sitting in this room. What are we holding back from him? He held nothing back from us. What are we holding back from him? Let's think about that for a minute as we prepare our hearts for communion 


On the night, Jesus was betrayed. He took bread and he broke it. And he said, this is my body, which is given for you. So whenever you eat this bread, do it in remembrance of me. And then in the same way, after the dinner, he took a cup and he said, this cup is the new covenant of my blood, which is shed for you. So whenever you drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me. Let's remember him. Let's pray, God, I pray that you convict our hearts to stand with you in faith, believing that you want to do great things in the community, around us and around the world. God show us, lay on our hearts, how we can support your mission, right where we live. And God, thank you for your promised presence in all of this, thank you that throughout the last eight months and in the next two months, you never left us and you're not going to forsake us and that we can trust you and that we can rest in you. And that we can be a part of big things because you're in them. God, thanks for all that you are and all that you're doing in Jesus’ name. Amen.