Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, guys, this is naive. And you've reached the Mosaic Church Podcast. So excited that you're part of our listening community, and I'd love for you to be even more connected.
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[00:00:59] Speaker B: Good morning. Good morning.
Welcome, welcome. Yes, we are going to continue in the book of Acts. We're going to pick up where we left Paul last week, kind of on a cliffhanger. But before we do that, I need your help.
Have you ever adopted a pet before?
Has anyone adopted a pet?
Okay, what have you adopted? Dogs. Dogs. I got a lot of dogs. Anything else?
Cats.
I'm looking for something a little different, actually. Okay, still not there. All right, here's the thing, guys.
Okay? I have a dog. We love him.
But also, there is another animal that I would really like to adopt permanently into my family, and they are deer that are in my backyard, Actually, I'm gonna show you what I'm talking about.
Okay? This is my sunroom. I walked out, and it's hard to see. So there's Mama. Look at. Whoops.
I was like, why are you stomping your foot at me, ma'? Am? What is happening?
And then that's why. Can you see? Can you see what's there? A tiny, little dear baby. So I go upstairs, look out the window from upstairs, thinking, surely she won't see me there, you guys. Another one had been born.
It is like National Geographic up in my backyard. Okay? It is, like, slimy. Like, it barely doesn't even know how to use its legs yet. It was, like, fresh.
Okay? Look at Mama staring me down. I'm just trying to watch the babies. They're born in my yard, okay? They're my babies now, too. And she was, like, not having it. So this is what I do now. I don't work anymore. I just watch. Ooh, they're so cute. This is this morning. I was having my Coffee.
I have decided I always wanted twin daughters. And so they're in my yard. I get to decide, Okay, I have two now, twin little baby girls. And I'm currently taking name recommendations. You guys, it's the cutest thing ever.
I'm currently thinking that I'm gonna name them Mary and Martha.
Because Mary is always out. I'm pretty sure she's the older one that was born first. She's always out learning about the world. And Martha, like, stays hidden, you know, back, waiting for mom to bring her food. If you have any ideas, you can let me know.
But I have decided that I am going to adopt the. Those deer into my family. And if you think I'm nuts, that's okay.
If you know me, you're like, no, this actually is expected behavior.
We are not surprised by this. And I also think that it's fine that they are a different species. I think it does not matter. You know, I'm going to bring them in. My human daughters are probably going to be a little frustrated that they have to start sharing a room.
Communication might be a little rough at the beginning, you know, But I think it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. And do you know why I think it doesn't matter that they're deer and we're human?
Because God did this first, you guys. Okay? Think about it.
God is God and we are human.
And that makes us different species.
And if you're like, Kristen, you took it a little too far this time.
Did I though?
Tammy? Ephesians 1:5.
God decided in advance to what?
Into his own family.
To his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do and it gave him great pleasure. See, God is God and we are human. So this is like, definitely interspecies adoption.
This is what's happening. What is actually gonna happen here. And I'm making light of this, obviously making light of, you know, this verse. But I want to go through it more deeply because it's really imperative that we understand the concept of what is actually happening here, because everything that we're gonna talk about today kind of hinges on this. So it says in advance, before you were born, before you ever asked for forgiveness, before you ever committed your first sin, before you even knew who God was.
He adopted you into his own family. He brought you in to his family through Christ, Jesus. So you are already in. You are already in. You are already in. You are already in. You're in. You're in. You're in. You're already in. Everybody is already brought in to the family of God. Because why?
Because having you in his family makes happy, just like having two twin dear daughters in my family makes me happy.
And this is something that I actually struggled with for a while, this concept of God's family, because I grew up in church, and faith has always been a really important part of my life and my upbringing. But it was always my faith, right? It was my sin and it was my forgiveness, and it was my salvation. It was my church which led me to have my version of Christianity.
And so then everything was kind of built on my certainty, my knowing of what a Christian did and what a Christian believed and how a Christian was supposed to show up in the world. It was built on my certainty of knowing what the criteria were to decide who gets to be in God's family and who doesn't and who is actually going to be out.
And I had to go through a process of a number of years where I had to kind of deconstruct, if you want, take apart, relearn whatever you want to say, but basically let my faith expand and evolve in so many ways.
It was actually so imperative to who I am in my formation that I wrote a book about it.
It's my very first book. It's my very first book. I'm very excited. It's coming out this fall, and it's called the Other side of Certainty.
And I wrote it because I want people to understand that while it can be a hard and a challenging process, that that is what we have to do. We have to be able to broaden our perspective outside of just our personal faith, so that we can see how our faith intersects with other people.
Because that is the only way that we can get a really full understanding not only of what God is doing now, but also of what God has already done, what he's already started.
And so maybe for you, you're like, that doesn't apply to me. I've never questioned my faith. I've never really had doubts or wrestled. Like, I've got a strong, solid Christianity.
So my hope for you today would be that your Christianity would lead you to Christ.
What I mean by that is that your Christianity, this head knowledge of God that maybe you were given and that you were taught, would lead you into a deeper relationship with the person of Jesus.
So that's what we're going to see happen today in the story of Paul, where his foundation in Judaism was actually what led him to Jesus.
Even though all of the people around him think that he was actually turning his back on that faith.
So like I mentioned, we left Paul on a cliffhanger last week, right, where there was this specific group of zealous Jews, people who had decided that they were going to be self appointed guardians of the faith because it was very important to them to uphold all of the ancestral laws and traditions and all of the things of the Jewish faith. And so they were going to do whatever it took to protect that. So what we saw last week was that they sent in a mob to capture Paul, drag him away, pretty much with the plan to beat him until he was gone.
Like, you know, gone.
So Paul is there and he gets pulled away for his own safety. And he says to the person that's handcuffed him, he's like, hey, can I actually speak to this mob? Because they think I'm telling Jewish people to abandon their traditions, but that's not what I'm doing at all.
And so this is where we pick it up in verse three.
Then Paul said to the crowd, I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia but brought up in this city.
It's like, I'm from here.
I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law of our ancestors. I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.
So he was raised there. He was raised in this city, which means that this mob, this group of people, was not paid protesters like brought in for optics. Okay? These were people that Paul knew. They were probably family members and friends and other people who had studied alongside him right there present in this group.
And so he's like, you guys, hello. You know me. You have known me. I love God. I have always loved God. You have watched me grow up in this faith and take it very seriously, Might I add. He's trying to help them to remember who he is.
So he goes on. In verse four, he says, I persecuted followers of this way to their death, arresting the both men and women and throwing them into prison as the high priest and all the councils themselves can testify.
I even obtained letters, permission slips, if you will, from them to their associates in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished. And then Paul tells a story of doing just that where he's got his permission slips and he's on his way to go arrest and punish people who are following the way of Jesus. But before he could get there, Jesus himself actually shows up, blinds Paul, and is like, my guy, why are you doing this to me?
He's like, you're gonna continue on to Damascus, but this whole persecution thing is done.
You've got a new way of living now. And so Paul's crew that he's traveling with, they take him there. He gets to Damascus, and he meets a man named Ananias. And it's through Ananias that God gives Paul his new mission, to tell people about Jesus. And there's a reason that Paul is telling this very specific part of the story to the crowd. Because Ananias was very well respected in that Jewish community, even though he had also become a follower of Jesus. And so Paul is trying to relate. He's trying to parallel. And he's like, you guys, just like Ananias, I am not here to criticize your tradition.
But God had shown him that there was more to a relationship with him than just following laws and traditions. And Paul wanted them to see that Jesus was actually going to be the fulfillment of all of the things that they've been waiting on for generations.
So Paul keeps talking to them, and he's like, you know what? That happened? And I came back here to Jerusalem, and I was in the temple and I was praying, and God told me to leave you because. Because he said that you were never gonna listen to me. But I defended you.
I told God that probably that wasn't right. And this is what we see in verse 19, he's explaining to the crowd, but, Lord, I argued. They certainly know that in every synagogue, I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. And I was in complete agreement when your witness, Stephen, was killed. He's like, I held onto their coat so they could just have at it. Like, I was the guy there supporting the whole thing.
And so he's pleading with the mob now, trying to convince them to listen to him. It's like, surely you can see the change of what I was doing before and who I am now after meeting Jesus.
He keeps going. He's like, but God did still tell me to leave because you weren't going to listen. Oh, also, by the way, not only that does he want me to go, but he told me to go to the Gentiles.
The Gentiles, verse 22. The crowd listened to Paul until he had said this.
Then they raised their voices and shouted, rid the earth of him. He's not fit to live.
All of a sudden, this crowd that was listening is back, ready to take him out.
Did you catch what it was that made the crowd so upset? Again, it was the Gentiles. It wasn't that Paul had A transformation. It wasn't that Paul was now following Jesus. It was that Paul wanted to take their God to other.
Because for centuries the Jewish people had been told that they were chosen, that they were chosen by God. And so God was for them and God was going to rescue them, and that God was their God, which is why they held on so tightly to all of those traditions and rituals. Because not only was it a way of honoring their God who chose them, but it was also identity for them. It was a way of telling everyone else, you see me doing all these things, it's because I'm part of the group.
You see me doing all of this stuff, it's because I need you to know that we are God's chosen family. He chose us. And I am also part of us.
I'm in.
I'm in the family.
And the first thing that we learn from this story is that fear hurts family because it lies to us.
Fear hurts family because fear says that if you lose what. What's yours, that you will lose what's yours if it's available to other people too, that if they can have it, you no longer will. And fear grows distrust. And distrust in a relationship kills connection. Because you cannot be connected to someone that all of a sudden is a threat that fear tells you to be afraid of. And so Paul was just inviting the Gentiles into the family of God, where the Jewish people had already existed for generations.
All they could see was that Paul was going to take their God away from them to someone else.
A lot of Christians today, Christianity is very much the same thing.
Christianity is not just a belief system and these values that we have, but it is an identity. It's part of who we are. And it's also tied to a group where we are in a group with other people who believe the same things and have these same identifying criteria.
And so if that criteria changes, if the traits required to be long are now different, then it feels like a personal attack on the people who are already in.
We see people get offended or even defensive of other people wearing the label of Christian because it feels to them that fear is saying, hey, you're going to lose this. If we let other people in, if we take the identity that we've always worn with pride, right, the label of Christian, and then it can also be extended to other people on the outside.
Fear says, you're not going to know who you are anymore. Your identity is going to be lost, and you also will be lost.
What we see God do is continue to bring in other people and adopt in all different kinds of people to his family.
And including diverse and different people into the family actually means that we have to make accommodations.
We have to look at our homes and our churches and our small groups and see who it is that's being excluded.
And then we have to ask ourselves why?
Why are those people being left out? And what is it that fear is telling us we'll lose if we include them?
Is fear telling us that we will be less special if God loves other people just as much as he loves us?
Is fear telling us that our theology will crumble? And if it all of a sudden becomes more inclusive, is fear telling us that all of Christianity will go sideways if we don't remain the gatekeepers controlling who it is that does and does not have access to God?
We have to pay attention to the voices and the things that fear is telling us at the same time. Remembering Paul's mission from the words of Jesus himself. We're gonna go all the way back to Acts chapter one.
He says, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses telling people about me everywhere in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, into the ends of the earth.
See, our Christian identity becomes dangerous when we think that God is reserved for us.
It becomes dangerous when we who have been adopted into the family of God tell God that adoption is a bad idea and that he should stop letting other people in the family.
That is a dangerous Christian identity. If we ignore Jesus words to take him to the ends of the earth, then instead we operate out of a scarcity mentality. And that mentality tells us that God's favor and his protection and his compassion and his access belong to us and that they're ours to dole out to whoever we see fit based on the right criteria.
But the identity of Christianity will no longer be people who follow Jesus if we listen to fear.
Instead, we will be people who resist God growing his own family.
We have to pay attention to the voice of fear and not let it hurt God's greater family.
So we keep going in the story, and this royal commander, you know, drags Paul back inside. And Paul reveals that he is a Roman citizen. And he does this because it is illegal to punish a citizen without a fair trial. So as we go into chapter 23, we see Paul being brought before the chief priests and the Jewish High Council, which, funnily enough, are the same people that wrote him those permission slip letters to go and get Christians before.
And Paul decides that he's Going to have a little fun. And so he rage, baits them, like, real hard, okay? In verse six, it says, then Paul, knowing that some of them were Sadducees and the other Pharisees called out in the Sanhedrin, my brothers, I am a Pharisee descended from Pharisees.
That's not even the controversial part.
I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.
When he said this, a dispute broke out between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection and that there are neither angels nor spirits. Yet you die and you're done. Nothing after that exists. But the Pharisees did believe in all of these things, see? So Paul knew exactly what he was doing by calling out the very thing that he knew. They had the most extremely divisive views of verse 9, there was a great uproar, and some of the teachers of the law who were with the Pharisees stood up and argued vigorously. We find nothing wrong with this man, they said. What if a spirit or an angel had spoken to him?
The dispute became so violent that the commander was afraid Paul would be. Help me out.
Yeesh. Torn to pieces by them.
He ordered the troops to go down and take him away from them by force and bring him into the barracks. So once again, Paul is removed, taken back into captivity for his own safety.
And have you ever noticed that no one ever thinks they're the villain of a story?
Right? We always think that we're on the right side and that our side is the one that needs defending.
The problem is, as soon as we choose a side, we forget the second point, which is that it's all about people.
This mission is all about people. Everything we're doing is all about people. We say this at Mosaic all the time. We're in the people business because people matter before service. Before the first service, we gather up our volunteers for the day, and we have a huddle, and we encourage them and we hype them up a little bit. But the first thing that we do is we remember the people who are standing there. And so we remember their birthdays and their prayer requests and celebrations, because every single person that's here helping to create Mosaic helps us to create a space where the Imago dei, which is the reflection of God in every single person, will be honored whenever someone walks in the doors of Mosaic.
I recently interviewed Justin Gibney for the Becoming Church podcast, and you may know him as the president of the and Campaign. They started the and campaign for Christians who want to bring both compassion and courage into our real lives and the issues that Christians are dealing with in our everyday lives. And he asked the question that has stuck with me for weeks.
He said, as Christians, as followers of Jesus, do we want to reach people or destroy them?
Do we want to reach people in such a way that, that we can connect with them and help them to see what the way of Jesus is in all of these very real issues that we're facing?
Or is the goal just to eliminate anyone who disagrees with us?
And friends, we all have this temptation. We all have the temptation to live in an us versus them mentality and perspective. Because when we do that, we can justify our own actions.
But when we do decide that other people are irredeemable, that they're so far gone on the other side, we stop even trying to reach them.
When we stop seeing people as people and we just start seeing them as ideas, it turns us inward, okay? And it looks like it's an outward thing because there's a lot of finger pointing, there's a lot of blame going on. But what it actually is is it's narcissism that makes us double down in our legalism.
It's narcissism that makes us argue all of these things because it's a way of self protecting what we think matters the most.
So we focus on arguing issues instead of getting Jesus to people.
It's almost as if what we believe about Jesus becomes more important than who Jesus actually is.
This is why it's a narcissistic place.
And the only way to grow God's family is that we can't be more important than all of the other people that God wants to bring in.
So the Pharisees and the Sadducees get so distracted, right, trying to win this argument that they actually forget about finding justice for Paul and they end up putting him in danger instead.
And so now Paul's alone, he's back in captivity, he's rejected, he's isolated, he's by himself. His own people are plotting against him. And this next verse is the one that I really want you to hold onto this week.
2311 says, that night the Lord appeared to Paul and said, be encouraged, Paul, just as you have been a witness to me here in Jerusalem, you must preach the good news in Rome as well.
And scholars agree that this is Jesus once again showing up and revealing himself to Paul.
And I want you to notice that Jesus doesn't say, hey, Paul, good Job convincing them, hey, Paul, don't worry.
I'm gonna make them apologize. They're gonna say they're sorry.
Jesus does not say, hey, Paul, buddy, don't worry about it. You're gonna get your reputation back.
What Jesus says is be encouraged and keep going.
The third point today is that courage keeps going.
Courage keeps going.
And as hard as it is to silence the other voices in. In your head sometimes, especially if maybe some of the voices that you're hearing are voices that used to be proud of you for your devotion to your faith, but no longer are, if you can separate yourself from that, if you can put those voices aside for just a minute and focus on what God is saying to you, that's what we need to listen to.
Do you hear from God more or less than you did in the past?
Does your life look more or less like Jesus than it used to? And I'm not talking about someone else's version of Jesus that they have then, you know, relayed to you and said, this is what it is. I'm talking about going to the gospel and looking at the words and the ways of Jesus by what he taught and what he modeled.
There are millions of reasons, millions of reasons to go back to a small version of God, to an old version of God, to go back to a past religion, especially when the people around you are making you question and making you doubt yourself and making you doubt if this is even real, if God even said this to you, maybe they're telling you that you're backsliding. Or maybe you've heard this one. God would never tell you to do something that his word is very clear about him being against, like, female pastors, okay?
It happens. It's there. It's easier to have a God that we can explain and a God that's manageable and a God that we can control.
But, friends, if God has opened your eyes like he did for Paul, and he has shown you something, and not only were you able to see it, but then you had the courage to actually pay attention and to let it change you, that is a real Holy Spirit transformation.
You can trust that, and you can let it lead you and keep going, keep following that lead.
A few years ago, I had this silly idea, this desire, I guess, to go and speak to all kinds of conferences, because in my brain I was like, all right, that's how I'll know that I'm really doing what I'm supposed to do and I'm making a difference for Jesus. The invitations are just gonna pour in And I'm going to be speaking at places all the time.
That did not happen.
What I noticed happening instead was that I started getting all of these messages on Instagram, on social media.
People that I did not know from across the country, people in different countries and different continents were sending me messages because they saw a sermon clip or TikTok or something that I'd put out there about an evolving faith, and they were like, I have no one else to talk to about this.
So I have started pastoring people on my phone, and I get to help them, and I get to help them process and take those questions that I asked you and help them to work through them. And I get to help them understand that they're not broken and that they're not going backwards and that they haven't missed it just because they're not turning their back on God, because they're taking the faith that they were given and they're holding it accountable to the words and the ways of Jesus.
All of a sudden, where I felt like I wasn't going anywhere, I was like, oh, I'm kind of going everywhere.
And I get to tell people now about Jesus and about his ways in creative ways that I never would have considered if I'd quit because it wasn't working the way I thought it was supposed to work.
And the second thing that I get, the first question that they usually ask me is, am I crazy? These are the messages. Am I crazy? Am I crazy for thinking that this is the way of Jesus? Am I crazy for thinking that Christianity has, like, gone off course a little bit here?
And so after we work through that, the second thing that they say is, I thought I was the only one.
I thought I was the only one.
So now when I can, I can also help connect these people to churches and communities that are in their area.
And see, I love that. That's my way that I can make faith personal for people. People that I don't even know, but that feel like they have no community.
I can engage with them and have that conversation. And I love that Paul makes it personal.
Jesus, sorry, makes it personal for Paul in this moment because he uses Paul's name.
He's like, hey, Paul, I got you.
And he's speaking to you just as personally as he spoke to Paul then.
And some of you need to know that because you don't believe it. And I need you to know that Jesus is not only encouraging you and saying, keep going, but he is confirming what you think you heard from him. He is affirming what you think you're supposed to be doing because you heard God, you saw it, but then other people came in and made you doubt and question.
And I want you to know that Jesus is saying, hey, I know you.
I see you. I showed you something, you saw it, you're doing it. Keep going, Keep going.
There will always be other voices that are telling you to do it differently and that it's hard or that the reason that it's hard is because it's wrong.
But no one had it harder than Paul, right? And he had the courage to continue to keep going. Jesus was even there in the moment to tell him to keep going.
And so as we wrap up this chapter, the Jews are planning an even larger plot to kill Paul.
It says the next morning, some Jews formed a conspiracy and bound themselves with an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. More than 40 men were involved in this plot, formed a conspiracy.
See, I think that's a really interesting word choice because these Jews were so convinced that they needed to eliminate a threat and that they abandoned their own values. They're like, we already tried to take matters into our own hands and it didn't work.
So what we're gonna do now is whatever it takes to eliminate the threat. They abandoned their own values to do something that goes against them by killing another person.
And see, conspiracies happen. When we get further and further away from the truth, what happens is people begin to justify things that they would normally never do or, or believe because fear takes over.
Conspiracies and fear do things to our mind where we think it's related to our faith, but it's actually a distorted version of truth.
And that mentality shuts down all of our questioning. It shuts down our self reflection where we stop asking, what if we stop asking, could I be missing something? We stop asking, could I be wrong here? Could there be something else that God wants me to see?
Could my framework be too small? And that God is actually so much bigger than I ever thought was possible?
Instead of asking those questions, then, like these devout Jews, our guiding question becomes, how do we keep them out of God's family for good?
How do we stop these people?
And I want us all to remember back to that crowd that Paul is talking to in this group of people coming against him. Remember, it was people he knew.
So I think it's easy to assume and go, okay, well then they all were not supportive. Maybe they were even offended by him because they were there in that crowd.
But I don't Believe that every single person that showed up there was a bad person.
I don't believe that that crowd, that that mob was made up of just bad people.
I think some of them were probably just repeating what. What they'd heard from the loudest voices of the time.
I think that some of them had their own questions and their own wrestling and their own doubt, but they were afraid to voice it for fear of becoming the next target after Paul if they, too, voiced and said out loud the things that they were thinking.
And so I think a lot of them just followed along because they didn't have anyone to show them that there was another way.
And Paul was human friends, just like us. It's painful for us. I have no doubt that it was painful for Paul to go through this. But he was so focused on his mission to bring all people into the family of Jesus that I wonder if those faces that he saw out in the crowd, the people that he knew, actually became his motivation to keep going.
See, Paul had no idea how many churches would get started one day because of his persistence.
He didn't know how many people would get saved and come to know Jesus because he continued on.
But I wonder, as he stood there and looked out at faces he knew, I wonder if part of him thought, you know what? Maybe one day, maybe one day they'll get it.
If I keep going, and I have the courage to keep going, maybe one day these people that used to be proud of me and now think I've turned my back on Jesus will also meet him and their Christianity will be able to lead them to Christ as well.
So that's my motivation for pastoring here and on my phone and in my book.
I want to be able to be a person that can look back and remember where I came from. This is who we want to be at Mosaic as well. We want to be people that create a space where people come in and we can remember what we used to believe.
Maybe who we used to be, maybe even how we used to weaponize our faith to keep ourselves in good standing, even if it meant keeping other people out.
We want to be people who extend grace and create a space where other people can come in and change their minds about what they believe about God and about themselves and about the world and the people around them.
And I know that some of you didn't have that and you've had to do this on your own, and I'm so sorry.
Cause it really is so hard.
But we now get to be the people that we did not have.
We get to be people that show the people in the mob that there is another way.
Friends, you have already been adopted into the family of God. And there are people that are watching you.
Some of them are pretending that they're not okay.
Some of them might even be trying to get you to, like, come back to an old version of. Of your beliefs.
But there are other people that are watching you, and they're silently questioning and they're curious and they're wondering and they're looking at you to see, can you be a safe space where I can come in and process and ask you my questions without shame and without being punished or without being kicked out and losing my belonging in my community?
God will convict or convince or change people's hearts or whatever he does, because that is God's job.
Our job is just to show up with grace, with humility, with openness, to be people who will listen and be curious, who are humble, open, and willing to learn new things, and who will take the invitation of God's family to the ends of the earth.
See, these people, this mob, thought that stopping Paul would protect the future of their faith.
But it was actually Paul's persistence that led to the future faith that we get to have now.
It was his persistence.
So let's keep moving Christianity forward by inviting other people in.
Amen.
All right. I would love to thank you if you're able. I would love for you to stand. I would love to pray for us this morning.
God, we thank you for who you are first and foremost. God, we thank you that you love the version of us that we are today. God, you're going to love the version of us we are tomorrow. God, you have loved every version of us that we have ever been.
And right now, God, I pray for the person that's in the room who is struggling to believe that.
God, I pray right now that you would move in their spirit, God, that you would somehow speak to them, even if it's not an audible voice. God, maybe it's a quickening of their. Their pulse or a change in their breathing.
God, but that they would know that you are speaking to them right now.
God, and then what you want them to know is how much you love them.
And it doesn't matter what they've done, and it doesn't matter how long it's been since they were in church. God, it doesn't even matter if they're not even sure what they believe about you or their faith or Christianity anymore.
God, I pray that you would encourage them to keep going to pursue a relationship with Jesus. God, to get to know you more, Lord, that even in this moment, whether it's the first or the hundredth time that they would say, I want to do things your way, I want to turn back to you, God, and be in a relationship with Jesus. Not because I have it all figured out and not because I think that I can live perfectly, but because living the way of Jesus is what you are have called us to do. And it's something that they want to try to do as well. God, I pray that as a community we would come around these people, God and each other, be a place of community and of belonging. Lord, people feel safe to ask their questions and show up exactly as they are. God, we thank you that you have already created Mosaic to be that space.
And God, yes, it's thanks to the amazing people, God, that call Mosaic home, Lord. But it's also because of the way that your spirit shows up here.
God, would you give us the courage to take your spirit out into the world, God, so we can continue to bring more and more people into your family?
God adopting the people who have been told they don't belong or who have walked away or have been told that they can't be here anymore. God help us to move Christianity forward, making it look more like Jesus.
It's in his name we pray.
Amen.
Thanks for listening to this message from Mosaic church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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