You may be seated. I wanted to come up real quick before we go to prayer. Leading to prayer this morning is going to be Ernie Perez. Ernie is one of our residents at Grace Community Church of Willis street, our residency program. Our men going to start and explore the call of ministry. And Ernie's going to be preaching here at Trinity sometime this year as a part of that residency. And he's visiting today. So I want to invite him up to pray and read Scripture, and then I'll be right on back. Heavenly Father, we thank you this morning for bringing us together to worship you and glorify your name. Lord, we thank you for getting us out of our beds and waking us up. Thank you for getting us stressed and getting through the traffic that we had to deal with to get here. Lord, we just lift you up. We're so, so happy to be a part of your kingdom. Lord, we ask that you bless this word today that we're about to listen to out of the Book of Mark. God, we ask that you just open our hearts and you just make a way so that we can listen, so that we can follow your calling and just live out the life that you have for us. Lord, we glorify your name. We love you, and in Jesus name we pray. Amen. I'm going to share today. In the Book of Mark, chapter six, verse one through 13, it says, a prophet without honor. Jesus left there and went to his hometown accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue. And many who heard him were amazed. Where did this man get these things? They asked. What's this wisdom that he has been given then, that he even does miracles? Isn't that the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, only in his hometown, among his relatives and his own house, is a prophet without honor. He could not do any miracles there except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith. Jesus sends all 12. Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village, calling the 12 to him. He sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits. These were his instructions. Take nothing for the journey except a staff. No bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals, but not an extra tunic. Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave As a testimony against them, they went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with the oil and healed them. Thank you, Ernie. All right. Well, friends, we're continuing our series in March. And as I prepared this week, I thought about a time that my wife was walking along in Disney World. And the reason I tell the story is we were. I was off getting food or serving my family in some other heroic and important way, and Alyssa was walking. And, you know, sometimes if you're walking in kind of a crowded area, you don't really realize who's around you. You're kind of just focused on yourself. And Alyssa is walking along with this group of people, and suddenly she hears a young girl scream. And it wasn't a scream of terror, but a scream of joy. The girl was about 12 years old and was incredibly excited. And the reason she was excited was because of the person that Alyssa had been walking behind for some time. And the person she had been walking behind was. Is named Jonathan Crichton. Now, Jonathan Crichton is better known as. Better known as JoJo from the YouTube channel JoJo's World. Mike Fry knows JoJo's World. I'm just kidding. That's not true. No. It's a fairly large YouTube channel, 1.61 million subscribers. He creates videos about Disney World, theme parks, travel, what have you, and apparently is very, very popular. Alyssa had no idea who this gentleman was. And she's standing there as he kind of has this fan interaction and the people he's with, because he's with other adults, she, like, kind of go off to the side, and Alyssa starts talking to him and says, does this happen to you guys? Like, with. They were like, yeah, it's pretty frequent. Like, you know, as we're walking here and there, and she goes, is it strange? Oh, yeah, it's incredibly strange. Like, we don't. You know, I mean, it's. We don't. He's just a guy that we know, and, you know, we're just walking around and this happens. And, you know, and as they talk, what became clear is that our reactions to people differ depending on our experience with that person. Right. To Alyssa, this was just a man that was in front of her with his friends. To his friends, it's just a friend. But to this little girl, it was. She was meeting a celebrity, right? And it's. And it's interesting how, you know, our level of familiarity with a person can affect our reaction to them. And that's kind of what we get in this passage as Jesus goes back to his hometown. Cody, I'm just realizing I forgot to check if we're recording. Are we recording? We're good to go. There we go. Thank you, my friend. And so Jesus is going back to his hometown in the Gospel of Mark. And as I've said, kind of as we've gone through this series, Mark wants us to ask questions. Mark wants us to read these texts. And he wants us to put ourselves among the people. And he wants us to say, how would I react if I were there? What would I do if I were there? What do I think of this character called Jesus? And it's meant to put Jesus in front of us over and over again and say, what do I have to say about this? So with that in mind, we think about Mark 6:1:6, which Ernie just read for us. It says, Jesus left there and went to his hometown accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue. And many who heard him were amazed. Where did this man get these things? They asked. What is this wisdom that's been given him that he even does miracles? Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him. They took offense at him. Jesus said to them, only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor. He could not do any miracles there except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith. As this story starts, you think this is going well? Jesus is teaching. He's in the synagogue. He's. And they say, you know, it says, you know, where, like, you know, the people who heard him was amazed or thinking, oh, amazed is good. But then we see the questions that they were asking in verse 2. Where is he getting this stuff? Where does he get all this wisdom? He's doing miracles. That person is doing miracles. Isn't this the carpenter? Now, we would read this wrong if we heard that they were trying to say he was, you know, some type of. Isn't this some, like, laborer or something like that? The word carpenter just means, like, maker, right? So it means that Jesus could have been kind of more on the lowly side of just kind of basic carpentry, or he could have been a stone worker or somebody who created in some way, right? So that's really the idea that's being communicated. But their point is this isn't a teacher. This is a person who makes things with his hands, right? And it doesn't mean someone from like a societally low position necessarily. But then they say, well, that's Mary's son. We know his brothers and his sisters. And they take offense, right? This is their reaction is similar to if you ever hang out with people who just knew you when you were much younger, right? Like, you know, it's just like when you get around, you know, people you hadn't seen in 20, 30 years or maybe like since high school, right? And they just. The version of you that remember that they remember doesn't even sound like a person, you know? You know, and they're like, oh, remember when you did this? And you're like, honestly, I don't remember that at all, you know, but their whole personality of who you are is formed by kind of who they thought you were when you were a kid. And that's what's happening. Jesus here, they're saying this guy is bringing new teaching. It's a teaching that others are excited to hear. And the people of Nazareth reject it because they say, wait a minute, that's that snot nosed kid who grew up here, right? Like, that's not somebody who should be bringing new authoritative teaching. That's like, that's Jesus, that's Mary's kid, right? And you know, one commentator points out like that at the end, it says, at the end of the verse it says, we find out that he doesn't do much there, he heals a few sick people and that's it. And one commentator says, you know, I wonder if Jesus didn't do miracles here because him performing a miracle would have just hardened their heart, right? Like we talked earlier in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus would perform miracles and some people would follow him and others would not, right? You know, you wonder if kind of the same thing is happening here where if Jesus had performed miracles in Nazareth as he had performed them other places, maybe it would have just led to people further rejecting him because they'd have said, well, it must be some type of parlor trick because I know that kid and I know, I mean, I know he's not healing people, so you know, he must just be making it up in some way, right? And so we don't know exactly why Jesus didn't perform miracles. But you know, the first part kind of comes to a sad ending where Jesus is rejected because his people, his family, his friends, people who know him end up rejecting him. Now this adds in some way, parts to this Adds in some way an exciting part to other parts of the Christian story that we know because we get, you know, the letter of James later in the New Testament. This is very likely the very same James, right? And so eventually these, some of his brothers, James being one of them, becomes a leader in the first century church. And so at some point, James would come to a place of faith where he would decide that his half brother, right, that this person that, that he shared home with, no, that actually was the Messiah. And there's some interesting stuff about James journey kind of to faith, right? But eventually they become followers of Jesus. But at this point, as far as we could tell, they are not there yet, right? They reject him because they know him, right? And so we get kind of this sad ending to the first part. And then in verse seven, we kind of get a change into the next section of the Gospel. This, this passage we're looking at kind of skirts the two sections of the Gospel of Mark. And it says, then Jesus went around teaching from village to village, calling the 12 to him. He sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits. He told them, take nothing except a staff, no bread, no bag, no money in your belts, wear sandals, but not an extra tunic. Whenever you enter a house, take stay there until you leave that town. And if any place will not welcome or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave as a testimony against them. They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them. So the disciples get sent out because they are excited about the mission of Jesus. They get sent out and they are told to do two things. They are told to serve people, right? Cast out demons, heal the sick, spread the gospel. And they're told to depend on people. They say, you know, you need to be kind of in a humble position as you go into these towns, right? You need to kind of come in and depend on the hospitality of people. And he says, stay in one place. And the reason he says that is because, you know, I don't want you to move from place to place, like as you find better accommodations, right? And, you know, I want you to stay in one place, not create an offense and serve the best that you can, right? So right after Jesus is rejected, he tells them what to do when they would get rejected, right? And this is a testimony that dates back to Leviticus. But what would happen was that in Jewish life, the Jews, when they traveled from gentile land to Jewish land, they would stop and they would shake the feet, shake the dirt off of their feet as kind of a marker of moving into, you know, moving into what they considered holy ground, but also as kind of a statement of judgment against the town, against the place that they had left. The idea was to kind of communicate that they were shaking off the curse of that land, that they were. That they were, if you will, kind of warning them, hey, you guys are on the outside of God's blessing and we are on the inside. And so Jesus tells them to do that, but he says as a testimony against them. And what's interesting is we're going to talk about this in just a few minutes. But I think that Jesus is actually in some ways redeeming this idea into what it was intended to be. And that is to kind of communicate to the people that, hey, if you reject Jesus, if you reject this message that we have, you're on shaky ground. You're missing out on the blessing. That again, in context of the story of Jesus teaching in Nazareth, that what he's trying to say to the people is that when you reject this Messiah, you're missing out on the opportunity for him to work in your midst. And so that's kind of what's happening. And we shouldn't read into it the idea that he was telling the disciples to be petulant, that he was telling him to say, well, I don't need you, or something like that. In fact, it was a warning to say, hey, don't reject this message. So we look at this passage, and in the beginning of the passage, we get a message of. We get a message of how familiarity, right? Familiarity with Jesus leads ultimately to the rejection of Jesus. And then we get a mission, an encouragement, right? And as I thought about kind of the best way to think about these things, I thought about two statements that actually date back to the EC National Conference. The pastors of the EC Church go up to Messiah College and we have a conference together. And one of the speakers there, the speaker for the evening session, did one of his messages on Come and See and Go and Tell that he summarized the whole Gospel into this idea of it's an invitation to come and see, and it's an invitation to go and tell. And his kind of frame was this idea that as pastors, we can't get too focused on go and tell. We also have to focus on the come and see. But I see that in this verse, first of all, this idea of come and see, the people of Nazareth refused to come and see. And as we think about our invitation today, our invitation is also to come and see. See, there's a lot of ways we can miss Jesus as Christians in 2026, right? There's a lot of ways we can miss Jesus as Christians in 2026. We have busy lives, right? We are always doing something. And I find it interesting. I'm still relatively young and I, you know, kind of constantly tell myself that some future time, I will have more future time, right? Like, you know, when my kids are potty trained, we'll have more time because I won't be changing diapers. You know, my kids are a little. When my kids can make their own sandwiches, we'll have more time because we won't. And the reality is that's never true, right? Like, those of you who have grown kids, there was never a time where you were like, oh man, it got easy, right? Like, it was just like, it just got, you know, kind of different and more complicated, right? We live busy lives, right? And generally most of us engage in some form of entertainment, right? Like we watch some type of tv, we watch maybe some type of sports. We engage in something maybe, you know, it's not tv, Maybe it's some type of sport you participate in, right? You do something that's normal and fun. And there is always an opportunity for a way to spend your time for kind of, you know, the important things to get crowded out. And as Christians, it's easy for us to miss Jesus because the reality is, is that maintenance of our spiritual life tends to be not boring, but it tends to be in the, you know, in the regularity, in the coming back, in the going back and doing the same things over and over and over again, right? Like if we were diagnosing your spiritual life, right? Like if we were sitting down and you said, I feel like my connection with Jesus is bad. I feel like I'm missing Jesus in my day to day lives. You know what questions I would ask you? I would say, well, how's, how's your devotional life? How's your study of scripture? What are you reading? What are you watching? How are your prayers, right? And these things are, you know, these things. We all know that this is how we grow our faith and yet it is hard to create time for it. But the reality is we have to choose to come and see over and over and over again. My prayer for me and my prayer for you is that we would find Jesus captivating in our own way, that as we discover our faith, we would be captivated by the person of Jesus, by the reality of Jesus, that as we study and learn, that there would be new things that pop forth and interesting things, that we would come into church and you say, you know what? I was reading my Bible this week, and something kind of became clear to me in a way that's never been before, that I haven't thought about in a long time. That is what a vibrant faith looks like. But the reality is, is that we lose this in the ordinary, and we see it in the Nazareth. And then in the Nazareth people, the people from Nazareth, right? Jesus hometown, misses the kingdom of God because they couldn't accept the. That hope could come from a place like that, that they wanted something new, they wanted something flashy, they wanted something more interesting. But the reality was Jesus was who he was, that Jesus was who he was. And yes, they knew him, but that did not mean that he was not the source of hope. That did not mean that he was not the source of the kingdom of God. Let me be very clear. As Christians today, sometimes we can get caught up in nonsense that we believe, that the only things that can push our faith deeper are these complicated or kind of esoteric or new and deep things. And people get caught up in this. And it's what leads people into, oh, I was reading this thing online. It turns out the Bibles we have aren't real. None of it's true. And people have been hiding it from us for hundreds. I got a YouTube ad the other day about Ethiopian Bibles, and I watched the entire thing. It was. It was. I'm not joking. It was an AI voiceover, and it was all Lego. And so it got me. But it was all about, like, you know, we're supposed to have, you know, relationships with angels, and we all have personal guardian angels, and you have to learn to pray to them. And it's in all these hidden books that the government hid from you. And, you know, and all this stuff. And here's the thing, if you've become bored with Jesus, you watch that. And that's how the lies get in. That's how you end up believing nonsense. Because you watch an ad like that and you go, you know what? Yeah, my faith doesn't really feel vibrant. My faith, I do feel disconnected. I do feel lost. And the lies of the enemy come in and say, yeah, it's because Jesus is hiding something from you. And, you know, it's funny, I didn't think about this when I wrote this, but isn't that Satan's first temptation? If you eat of the tree you will be like God, knowing good and evil. He's hiding something from you. And so when Jesus becomes mundane, when Jesus becomes familiar, these new things creep in and the enemy speaks to us and says, the problem with your faith is, isn't that you aren't doing the things to grow your faith. It isn't that you need to read the Bible more. It isn't that you need to study the Bible more. The problem with your faith is that there's some new, exciting thing. And that if you just open your mind and open your heart to this new and exciting thing, then you'll have the faith that you want. And I'm here to tell you that that's a lie. That's not the way that this works. Jesus is Jesus. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of God. Listen, it would be great if I could sell you some secret course that explained how to be a Christian to you, right? Like, the cult leaders make a lot more money, right? You know what I mean? We could get it going here and we could, you know. No, that's not the truth, though. It's a lie. It's a lie from the enemy. And we have to be so careful as Christians that the familiarity of Jesus, the accessibility of Jesus, that the reality of who Jesus is, that we are welcomed in on his merit and that we are invited into communion with Jesus, and that the message is simple. And that doesn't mean it stays simple. I think one of my professors at college used to say, it's deep enough for an elephant to swim, but shallow enough that a child would not drown. Right? And I don't think that's original to him. And if I'm missing my quote, you could let me know, right? But like, you know, is the reality of Scripture, right? A person can be a simple Christian who simply is, Jesus saved me. I'm happy about it. That's it. I'm going to learn how to apply it to my life. Or a person can spend their whole life in study and never get to the end of discovery of who Jesus is and who he's called us to be and the ways he's worked in the world. And neither one of those people is wrong. And that is the beauty of faith. That is what is wonderful about it. And if someone comes along telling you that, oh, they're hiding something from you, or, oh, the real stuff is this, it's false, it's a false gospel, and it's not real, and you can't get caught up in it. And if you need to be more Convinced. Think about how everything in your life works, right? Think about how everything in your life works. And the truth is, is that everything in our life, if we embrace the seemingly mundane and the regular, we make our way to, you know, the desires that we want. Right? If I wanted to learn to play guitar, right, Should I practice for eight hours once and that just be as good as I get, or should I do it, you know, 30 minutes a day for as long as I could do? 30 minutes a day, Pastor David. 30 minutes a day, Right? Yeah, that's the one. Right? And that's not surprising to us, right? If you want to have a great marriage, like, imagine if you came to me and asked Addison, how do I have a great marriage? And I'd say, you marry a great wife. That's it. That's the whole game. No, you know, but like, I. And if I said, oh, it's all about dates. It's all about dates once a month, have the best date you can. And you'd be like, oh, I thought maybe, like, helping out around the house. No, don't waste any time helping out around the house. Don't do any of that. I thought, like, maybe working on. No, no, not communication. What are you. Get out of here with that. It's just the dates. Just plan the best date you can every eight weeks, and you'll have the best marriage imaginable. You'd say no? Of course not. Right. If I talk to you about exercise, right. Spend a whole day running as long as you can, and you'll be in shape for three years. No, that's not how it works. Right. If I talked about healthy eating, right? Okay, Just have, like, one meal that doesn't taste good at all. And, you know, and then. And then if you do that, it'll make up for all the not healthy meals. Right? Nothing in our lives works that way. And the same is true of our faith. It's not about the big mountaintop moments, although those are wonderful. It's not about the, you know, the conference type things or the big breakthrough type things or the, you know, everything coming together type things. The reality is that the big stuff is the little stuff. That marriages are built on communication and help and communion together, that raising kids is about presence and about paying attention to the little things. Right. Exercise is about showing up and moving in some way every day. Right. Eating healthy. The people who eat the healthiest that I know have some of the most boring diets I've ever heard of in my life. You met Josh March here. He's popped in a couple times. He owns a gym. One time I asked him, I was like, what are your lunches? He goes, oh, I grill a bunch of chicken and I make a bunch of rice and I make a bunch of vegetables and then I put it in these plastic containers and that's what I eat for the whole week. It's like, dude, that is right above prison food. It's like, you are right above incarcerated. That's the diet that you're choosing. But that's the reality of those things, right? And if we miss Jesus because he's familiar, we will miss the work that Jesus would do in our lives. If you want a deeper faith, it is just showing up. It is just consistency. It's just doing something every day. And maybe it's just reading for 15 minutes from scripture. Maybe it's just, you know, going through a daily bread devotional. I think sometimes we get caught up in thinking that because our thing isn't like complicated or like it isn't some type of system or it isn't, you know, hard in some way, then it's never going to work. No, that's not the reality. Jesus invites you to come and and see, and it is just a simple choice to come and see over and over and over again. And if you're outside of faith, if you have a friend who's a non Christian, or if you would consider yourself a non Christian today, what I would ask you relative to this is if you've rejected Jesus because of something arbitrary or silly. Right? Because, because like I said, Jesus invites us to come and see. And the people in Nazareth that rejected him, rejected him because they said that couldn't possibly be, because we know that kid and that kid is just some kid who grew up here and they push Jesus away. You know, when I talk to people who aren't Christians, usually the thing they're hung up on, I don't want to say it's not important, but a lot of times they'll say, well, I just can't get around. And it's something that's kind of very much on the periphery, very much on the outside. And I'll just say, well, I don't know if that needs to necessarily stop you from being a Christian, right? Like, oh, well, the reason I'm not a Christian is like, when I was a kid, we were a part of a church and they were terrible to my parents and it really messed up our family. Listen, that's horrible. I don't think churches should ever do that to people. I Think that is real? I think that is something that happens to people. But if you are outside of faith because of that, then I would ask you, well, I mean, is that worth losing your faith over forever? Is it worth never coming and seeing who Jesus is because of something that happened to you? Have you considered at least revisiting that? Jesus might be captivating to you if that thing got out of the way. But then we get this encouragement at the end to go and tell. And what's interesting is when we are truly captivated by Jesus, when we truly come and see, we don't even have to do a lot of work on the go and tell part, right? When our faith has captivated us, it kind of goes into every area of our lives, right? It shows up in every area of our lives, and it's going to spill out of us in every possible way. But look at what the disciples do, because we can't miss it. They go into these towns and villages and they serve people. They heal the sick, they cast out demons. They. They heal the sick, they cast out demons and they go in. And that is what they lead with. They lead with finding ways to serve people. I think sometimes as Christians, we've become addicted to leading, with trying to win people over with words or with telling them they're wrong or with just kind of showing them how what they're doing is the wrong way. But that's not what Jesus tells the disciples to do. He says, go, cast out demons. Heal their sick. Alleviate their suffering, right? Go and tell. Go and tell. And then there's the piece about if they refuse, you shake the dust off your sandals. And I think that when I said that Jesus was redeeming kind of that practice, I think that as Jesus was preaching this, their familiarity with that practice would have been very judgmental in nature. It would have been Jewish people looking at Gentiles and saying, I'm knocking this cursed dust off my feet because you're cursed and I'm not. But Jesus is saying, do it as a testimony against you. And when this word shows up in other parts of scripture, this practice, when we see it in the Book of Acts as Paul does it, it says it used a different word. He says he shakes off his coat as a warning against them. And so why I think that's important is because the way Jesus taught his disciples to do it, I believe is actually kind of a redemption of what God probably intended. That the shaking off of dust and looking at somebody is a loving warning to them to say, hey, I want you to know that the ground that you're standing on in your life isn't stable, that the things you're choosing to invest yourself in ultimately won't lead you to the life that you want. Right? That the warning we give to people. A pastor named John Piper put it wonderfully. He said, as Christians, if we ever answer the question, am I going to hell with yes, we ought to do so with a tear in our eye. If I ever answer the question, am I going to hell with yes, we ought to do so with a tear in our eye. And so Jesus, as he's been rejected by his hometown and as he's sending the disciples out, he probably had this type of thing in mind. And, you know, later, before he's crucified, he looks at Jerusalem and he says it, says he weeps. And he says, if only you would have heard. If only you would have heard. And so the question as we go and tell is, what is our posture? Right? Do we have a posture that is kind of judgmental in nature, that kind of just can't wait for them to get there? And, you know, and. Because if you have that posture, that's not the posture of Jesus. Jesus desires that we would be saved. Jesus loves people more than we could possibly love them. Yes. Including whoever we just thought about when we said Jesus loves them more than we could ever possibly love them. Jesus desires that all people come to a saving knowledge of him. And the challenge for us Christians is that we have to constantly have a posture of love and inviting back in into those who we would consider on the outside, that we have to have a posture of love and welcoming back into anyone, including those that we would consider on the outside, that we would choose to continue to invite them in, that if anyone is outside, we would truly regard them with sadness that someone is not experiencing the hope that we would experience. I was working with a family through a pretty complicated situation, and there was, like, unforgiveness and stuff. And the one brother was, as far as I knew, a Christian. And we were talking and he said, you know, I went in and I said to him, I'd like for you to forgive me. And he said, and he said, well, I don't want to forgive you. And he goes, and, you know, I mean, you and I both know what the scripture says about people who won't forgive. And it was like an awkward moment in the phone conversation because I wanted to go, brother, you're not supposed to be psyched about that. You know what I mean? I was just like, you Know, that's not how that's supposed to, you know, it's like, it's, you know, and as Christians and, you know, I hope that I'm not stepping on any toes. As Christians, we should not read judgments against us that are designed to say, don't harbor unforgiveness in your heart and say, oh, they're not forgiving me. They're going to get theirs one day. Come on. Really? Right. And Jesus would say to us that our posture towards other people would be that our desire was to lovingly warn them, that we are truly telling them to get off the railroad tracks because the train is coming. That we are truly telling them that the ground that they are standing on is shaky, that we have a posture of love. And look, I understand that we're all naturally not going to feel that way, and that is why we have to come and see. Because in the process of coming and seeing and coming and seeing and learning who Jesus is and who he would call us to be, the Bible, this thing happens that the Bible calls sanctification, that we are changed evermore into the image of God. That we are changed evermore into a Jesus who would sit on the cross and say, father, forgive them, because they don't know what they are doing. That, that posture towards people who we would consider our enemies would slowly be adopted as we do kind of the quote unquote boring things, right? As we embrace who Jesus is and as it works through every part of every part of every part of our heart and our soul, that we would be changed over and over and over again into who Jesus would have us be. That as we go and tell, we would serve our friends and neighbors and we would love them and we would desire that they would come back. And that is not to say that there is no truth, right? Because at some point you ought to say, yeah, you're in sin. Yeah, you are living outside of who Jesus would have you to be. Yeah, you need to change the way you are living. But we lead with service and love and care, and we pray that the Holy Spirit would do its work of conviction. So what do we need today? Do we need to find the beauty again? Do we need to be captivated? Do we have to get out of our own way and begin to embrace who Jesus is? Right. Do you have to say to yourself, you know what, this week I'm going to make five minutes a day and I'm just going to interact with Jesus? Or do you have to go and tell, you know, have you kind of fallen Asleep at the wheel of telling people how Jesus has worked in your life, do you need to find ways to have those conversations? You need to cultivate relationships with friends who aren't Christians, right? I think some of us, if we're honest, I mean, this is a big one for me. I work at a church, right? If I have a non Christian co worker, they're getting fired. You know what I mean? I'm half kidding. Pretty sure that I don't know. I don't know about fired. But you know, but like, you know, you have to cultivate relationships with people who aren't Christians. We have to get to know people in our lives who don't know Jesus, right? And then as we again, as we serve and care for them, we find opportunity to tell them who Jesus is. So do you need to be captivated by Jesus? Probably all of us that's true for. Or do we need to go and tell again, probably all of us that's true for. But wherever you find yourself, the good news is, is that Jesus desires that we would live this kind of life and he is ready and willing to help us as we pray that he would do so. So let's pray together as we close. Lord, we thank you. We thank you, Lord, for being who you are, which is that you are captivating, that you are worthy of our worship, Lord, and that you are deep enough for an elephant to swim, but shallow, that a child would not drown. And that, Lord, as we discover who you are, as we go deeper and deeper into who you are, we are transformed into your likeness. And Lord, I pray that you would do that work in me and among my friends at Trinity Church. And I pray that you would change us into people that come and see over and over again and that go and tell out into the world. And Lord, we thank you that you want to do this in us, that you want to use us in service of our friends and our neighbors. And I ask that you would do it and that you would help us to grow into who you would have us be. And we ask all this in your name. Amen. I invite you to stand as we close with one more song.