Connect With Outsiders - Noel Heikkinen

What's happening, Riv? How are you? Have you guys ever heard of Derwood Merrill?

Does anyone know who Derwood Merrill is? Anyone? Derwood Merrill is a former Major League Baseball

umpire, and he wrote a book that he called You're Out and You're Ugly Too, by the way.

Yeah, that is the name of his book, which tells you a little bit about Derwood Merrill's

personality. And one of the stories that he tells was when he was a rookie umpire in one of his very

first games, he had to face, he was at the plate calling balls and strikes, and Nolan Ryan was

pitching. Now, if you know who Nolan Ryan is, you know that back in the day, he was one of the few

pitchers that would hit 100 miles an hour in his pitches. And to put that in context, we all know

100 miles an hour when it comes to our car, but 100 miles an hour in the baseball, if you were a

batter, you've got 400 milliseconds between the time that pitch leaves the pitcher's hand and the

time it crosses the plate. And so you've got to decide to swing at about 100 milliseconds, something

like that. You've got to decide to swing. Now, for an umpire, they've got to not only pick up that

ball, but they've got to determine where it goes in the plate in the strike zone. And so Derwood

Merrill tells this story about the second pitch of the game, Nolan Ryan throws one of these heaters

and he doesn't see it. The umpire just didn't see it, like, at all. And so he just froze for a second

and then he just yelled out, strike. And the batter kind of put his bat down, turned around and said,

well, don't feel bad. I didn't see it either. And I actually remember the first time I saw a 100

mile an hour fastball in person. My sons and I were down at Comerica Park and it was Joel Zumaia

throwing over 100 miles an hour. And I was like, oh, that's a good shot. And I was like, oh, that's

an hour. And seeing that in person is absolutely unbelievable. It's unreal how fast that looks in

person. The difference is now between the time of Nolan Ryan and today is there's a ton of people

throwing 100 miles an hour now. It is, in fact, there are 16 starting pitchers this year that have

thrown 100 miles an hour, starting pitchers. It used to be only closing pitchers did that. And so

you can no longer be a Derwood Merrill as an umpire who doesn't see the 100 mile an hour fastball

anymore. You have to see it coming. Now, why do I bring all that up? Because I kind of feel like

Derwood Merrill. I'm 52 years old and I've been doing this ministry thing for a minute. And this

culture that we're living in, I remember 10, 20, 30 years ago thinking it was changing so rapidly.

But I was a young guy, you know, I was a young guy. I was a young guy. I was a young guy. I was a young guy.

I had sharp eyes and I couldn't believe that the old guys couldn't see how culture was changing.

But now everything is moving 100 miles an hour, like pop culture and technology and science. It's

all moving so fast. It's like everybody is pitching at 100 miles an hour. And I'll tell you, this last

year, there was a pitch that came at me in our culture that I not only didn't see coming, I think

it was like not only 100 mile an hour fastball, I think it was 100 mile an hour curveball because it

changed directions on me.

This last year, in a way that I didn't expect. You see, for decades, people have been talking

about like the end of Christianity as we know it in Western culture. Like in America, we watched

what was happening in Europe and especially in the UK. And we just would always talk about the

fact that this is what is next. But then all of a sudden, over the last year, it's like the ball

changed directions for me. It started with some of my friends in the UK

and now it's like, oh, no, this is a church that's actually going to be a revival. And I'm not

just talking about the end of Christianity, this is a revival that actually is coming. And then I

realized that the end of Christianity is coming. And I started looking at some of my friends in the

church that I was at. And I said, you know, I'm not interested in that. I'm just going to go back

and look at what's happening in the world. And I said, well, I'm going to go back and look at the

Christian homes, but they were searching for truth. And now they're finding it in Jesus.

And then came my own experience talking to tons of young people who I assumed would be skeptics

because of their situations, but they weren't. And then I stumbled onto this podcast called

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Really not a catchy title, but

it is exactly what it is, the surprising rebirth of belief in God, where they've been interviewing

people from all walks of life, especially scientists, philosophers, who are abandoning

atheism and coming back to religion and specifically to Christianity. You know, as a pastor and an

optimist, I thought I was seeing the end of Christianity in the West. I was committed,

you know, to do everything I could to combat it to the bitter end. But now it seems like,

especially in Western cultures, the tide is turning. It's almost as if Jesus was telling the truth

when he said, I will build my church and the gates of Hades or the gates of hell will not

overpower it or prevail against it. We should never forget, by the way, that we are not in the

church building business.

We don't build the church building business.

We don't build the church building business. We don't build the church building business.

We don't build churches. That's Jesus's job. And he said he is going to do it. And notice one

really important detail here. He says the gates of Hades or the gates of hell will not prevail

against his church. Gates are not an offensive weapon. In other words, what Jesus is saying

is Satan has territory, the devil has his turf, and I'm taking it, Jesus says. And he said,

and no one is going to stop that from happening.

And then in like the greatest goof of all time, and I really do believe this is one of the craziest

things of all time, Jesus, Jesus who is God, you know, real G-O-D God, that's Jesus, right?

Decides that he is going to invite us into his church building business. Think about it. Jesus,

everything in the universe is created by him and for him. That's what Colossians 1.16 says.

Jesus has been given by his father, father God, all power and all authority,

and what does he do? He gives us a role to play in this building of the church thing that he

promised that he would do. Us. I'm not sure if you've met us. Like I almost fell over putting

my pants on this morning. And you know how messed up you are, right? And yet this is what Jesus

says to you and what Jesus says to me. He says, go into all the world and preach the gospel.

Preach the gospel to all creation. This is how Jesus builds his church. He sends crazy people

like us, right? With the good news of the gospel, and he sends us into all creation. Into, let's be

honest, Satan's territory. Jesus trusts us with this message of hope and joy and peace, and there

are so many ways he could have done that, and yet he decided to use us. And it is the combination

of these two thoughts. That Jesus is going to build his church and the gates of hell will not

prevail against it. And that he has invited us to play a part. That's the thing that gives me hope

and motivation right now. Because we do not need to be worried about whether Jesus will build the

church. That is a done deal. He's got that part handled. That doesn't mean any particular local

church. Yeah, we could shut our doors next week, but he's going to continue to,

build his church. And so now we can just do our part. We go into all creation, all of the world,

and we just preach the gospel, and we watch Jesus get it done. This is the last week in a series

we've been calling Connect. And I haven't been preaching for like six weeks. Every summer I take

a long break. I still work. By the way, lots of people come, how was your six-week vacation? No,

or did you? I still worked. I just wasn't here. I wasn't preaching.

And I wanted to be back for this week. I wanted to be back for this week and this particular message

because I have a huge presumption about this weekend. This is my assumption. I'm assuming

that most of you, not all of you, are all in. And here's the reason why. It's Labor Day weekend.

And it's sunny outside, which means you don't have a cottage, you have nowhere better to be,

and you're all in because you're here, right? So I knew that that's what, now I know all of you,

we have a soccer team from Oregon State here. So they came, but they're, I'm assuming, by the way,

if they just showed up here, that they're all in just somewhere else. But welcome, we're glad you're

here. But I know that there are some of you that you're not Christians, and I know that some of you

here are, you're just not quite sure about the church thing yet. What I'm going to do is I'm

going to talk to insiders in front of you today, if you'll forgive me. Because what we're calling

this message today is connecting with outcasts.

Outsiders. And I use that term for two reasons, and I know none of us likes to be called outsiders.

But here's the two reasons. The first is, it's a biblical term. And second, it's how people often

feel rightly or wrongly when they walk into a church. They feel like an outsider. The Bible

links these two in a bunch of places. Here's one of them in 1 Corinthians 5. It says,

for what business is it of mine to judge outsiders?

Judge those who are inside? God judges outsiders. Remove the evil person from among you. So Paul,

the guy who wrote this, he makes this division, right? He says, there are insiders, and those who

are part of the church. So those are Christians who are part of the church. And then there's

outsiders, and those are the ones who are not. Now, here is not a trick question. Who are we to,

according to Paul here in the Bible, not supposed to judge? Outsiders, right? And he says, God's got

us. We, holy and appropriately, we have judged those inside the church. Like, are we actually

living the calling that Jesus has called us to? And by the way, the evil person in this passage

is not the outsider. It's an insider who is not behaving as if he was a follower of Jesus, right?

It was someone who refuses to walk the talk. The reason so many people, by the way, on the outside

of the church feel like outsiders, and they feel negatively toward the church, is because we judge

them instead of loving them.

Now, the next passage is sort of crazy. I just want you to be prepared in advance.

In 1 Corinthians 14, 23, it says,

If, therefore, the whole church assembles together, and all are speaking in tongues,

and people who are outsiders or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your

minds? But if all are prophesying, and some unbeliever or outsider comes in, he is convicted

by all, and is called to account by all. Now, I could do a whole message on this,

and I have. If you want it, email me or contact me online. I'll get you the message.

But the context here is Paul is describing two supernatural gifts that were in play in the early

church before we had the completed Word of God, right? The first is called speaking in tongues.

And speaking in tongues is simply someone who has supernaturally been given a gift to speak

an earthly human language that they have never been taught before. It would be like,

right now, I just broke into Mandarin, okay? That's what it is. Okay, that's the gift.

The second gift is prophecy. And prophecy is someone who has given, again, supernaturally

knowledge about either the future or something going on in someone's life now that they had

no business knowing. That's what prophecy was, right? So Paul says in this passage,

the first one, speaking in tongues, has no business happening in a church service normally.

He goes on in another chunk and talks about the fact that if someone else is there who can

interpret that and supernaturally can interpret it, then it does have a place right there.

But pretty much his reasoning is, if you're doing this in the service, you're speaking Mandarin,

you're speaking Swahili, you're speaking French, no one knows those languages,

everyone is going to think you are bananas. That's the actual Greek. You're bananas, right?

It would be a net negative for the church. Why? Because it makes outsiders,

feel way outside. In other words, we as a church should be thinking about

those who are coming from outside of the faith every single week in the things that we do.

On the other hand, he says prophesying, the speaking out about sin in someone's life,

is profitable. Why? Because it's not about being judgy. His other passage already told us not to

do that. But it is about calling sin, sin. Just laying out truthfully that this is,

what sin is. It's not judging someone or casting stones at them. It's speaking a fact about what

sin is. There's also a passage in 1 Thessalonians that says every follower of Christ should have a

good reputation with outsiders. There's a passage in 1 Timothy that says it's actually a job

qualification for a pastor to have a good reputation with outsiders. Which, by the way,

means you cannot be a pastor if you don't hang out with non-Christians. And if they tend to

think you're a tool, you're unqualified. That's just how it works. So let me boil all this down.

In every church gathering, there are insiders. That's those of us who are followers of Jesus.

There's outsiders. That's those who have not decided to follow Jesus yet. And there's a

presumption that we're all together in the church service. And those of us who are insiders are

commanded to behave in such a way that outsiders want to become insiders. Now, why is this such a

big deal?

Because every single person you meet is looking for the same thing. And we have found it.

And the way we live our lives will either show people that what we believe and what we have

found is real because it will change us and it will change us for the better,

or that what we believe is a sham because we're just hypocrites. So as followers of Jesus,

we can be a good person. And we can be a good person. And we can be a good person. And we can be a good person.

So let's talk about what that is and what we're looking for. Well, the gospel is in one sense or

another on every single page of this book. So let's just go to the first page. If you go to

Genesis, it's the story of creation, the story of all things being created good and Adam and Eve,

our first parents being created good, right? And does anybody remember in the middle of the

Garden of Eden, how many trees there were right in the middle? Anyone remember?

Two. What were they? Come on, give her a round of applause. She knows her Bible. Okay.

So there was a tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. Okay. So both these trees

are right there in the middle of the garden. Now let's read this. It says,

the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he planted the man he had formed,

and the Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree, pleasing in appearance and good for

food. So like there's tons of trees. They're very delicious, including the tree of life in the middle

of the garden. And the tree of life is the tree of life. And the tree of life is the tree of life.

So that is also there, also got fruit, also delicious, as well as the tree of the knowledge

of good and evil. And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree of the

garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat

from it, you will certainly die. So in the Garden of Eden, humankind was offered this choice.

Eat from every tree in the world, including the tree that offers you life.

Or eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve chose wrong. And it's not just

them. It's echoed in us. Because what happens is every day, what we do is we end up making the

same decision. Instead of choosing life, we choose death. Notice that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat

from the tree of life. They just chose against it. They chose another path. And now we do this

all the time. We gain knowledge.

When we lack life, this is, I actually think, the reason, one of the reasons our culture hasn't

given up on their search for God, and why they're reconsidering the claims of Christianity.

Because knowledge, we have more knowledge than we have ever had. We have access to knowledge

on our devices. You can just ask your device to tell you anything in the world, and it will,

and sometimes it'll even lie to you, right?

We have access.

We have more knowledge than ever, and we're learning that knowledge is not giving us life.

So we just try over and over and over to find life. And we're just terribly mistaken about

where to find it. If you go to the prophet Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 2, he describes it this way.

This is the word of God through Jeremiah. He says,

For my people have committed a double evil. They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water,

and dug cisterns for themselves.

Cracked cisterns that can hold no water. These are still our two great evils.

Over and over and over, we abandon the fountain of living water, and over and over and over,

we think we can find life on our own. So we dig cisterns for ourselves. You know what a cistern is,

right? A cistern is just like, it's just basically a storage tank in the ground for water, right?

And so the metaphor is just super clear. Jesus offers us a fountain of living water,

like living water.

That never ends. And we look at it, and we're like, you know, I think I can do better than that.

And so we run out to the desert, and we dig for ourselves a cistern,

and we just keep dumping water into it that leaks out of the bottom.

How do we do that? Well, we do things like believing that if everyone just believed the

same way that we did politically or socially, it would fix the world. It would give us life.

That's a broken cistern. We think if everyone just left everyone else alone

and let them do whatever they wanted, we would all have life.

But that's a cracked cistern. And what happens is we're all out in the desert digging our own

holes, right? Building our own. And what happens is we then get into conflict with one another.

Remember, do you remember the last time you got just really ticked off at somebody?

Like, just no elbows. But do you remember the last time you,

really ticked off at somebody? My guess is it happened because someone was blocking you from

what you thought was life. They were standing in the way. One of the things I love watching

on TikTok is I watch way too many of the police videos of people who are just like, they just

completely ignore all rules of society that they don't apply to them. Like the lady who she's

pulls up, cops are blocking off a lane, so she drives off the road and around, and then they

stop her, and she's like, what? I had a place I had to be. Like, that's us, right? Because other

people are blocking our way to life. This is what it says in James 4. What is the source of wars and

fights among you? Don't they come from your passions that wage war within you? You desire and you don't

have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war you do not have because you do

not ask.

This is the cause of violence in schools, road rage, divorce, abuse of power. It happens because

individuals clash in where they think they're going to find life, and the cisterns that we

dig for ourselves cannot hold any water. Christianity is an invitation to the only

fountain that can truly offer life, Jesus. Jesus who lived a sinless life that we can't live.

Jesus who died on the cross and took with him the penalty for all of our sins. Jesus who was

buried in the ground, dead as a doornail. Jesus who rose from the dead, conquering sin, Satan,

and death. Jesus who ascended to the right hand of the Father where he advocates for us who cannot

live the life that he lived. And Jesus who offers eternal life to all who believe in him. He offers

us life, not just life eternally, but life right now. And here's the kicker.

Why don't we as Christians live a life that is eternal? Why don't we as Christians live a life that

is eternal? Why don't we as Christians present Christianity that way to people?

Our message is often shape up, shut up, and stop that. And that is also a cracked cistern.

You know, as counterintuitive as it sounds, the key to life is not to get our crap together.

The key to life is admitting we don't, and then point to the only one who can truly offer us life.

Jesus said this. He said,

A thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come so that they would have life

and have it in abundance. What Jesus does is he boils the whole problem in Jeremiah to one thing.

We refuse to come to him. We refuse to come to Jesus, the fountain of life.

You know, our mission statement at RIV is that at RIV, we invite everyone to know and

understand Jesus. We invite everyone to know and understand Jesus. We invite everyone to know and

enjoy Jesus as we stumble together in our pursuit to love like him. And there's so much in there that

I love. I love the word enjoy because it's a life-giving word. And I love the key to this

invitation that we offer is that as we stumble together in our pursuit to love like him, we want

to love like Jesus loves. So how do we do that? Well, there's obviously a ton of ways that we can

do this. What I want to do is just, I want to focus on four things that we can do as a local church.

And don't worry, that doesn't mean it's another 40-minute message. This will be like 10 minutes.

Four things that we can do as a local church to invite outsiders to know and enjoy Jesus.

The first is we can create a loving atmosphere. This should be a no-brainer, but it needs to be

said. People should be able to walk through those doors and feel loved. And they should walk back

out those doors.

Feeling even more loved. This is what Jesus said in John 12 or John 13.

He said, I give you a new command. Love one another just as I loved you. You are to love

one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. Don't

miss that the one another here he's talking to is the church. It is to Christians. It is to

insiders. This is the crazy part. One of the things that should be so attractive to those outside

is the love that we have for one another. The fact that the environment is just like we just love

one another. It doesn't matter who we are, the background that we come from, or anything. We are

just loving with one another. It is the single greatest marker of a follower of Jesus is that

you love other followers of Jesus. I am all about correct doctrine. I'm all about good organizational

structures. But I think 1 Corinthians 13 would tell us if you have those and you have not love,

you are nothing.

But a clanging gong and a resounding cymbal.

So how do we do this? Let's just get like super practical.

When you walk through those doors, and I'm talking to insiders here for a second.

When you walk through those doors, are you primarily thinking about what you're going to

get today? Or what you're going to give today? Now I know we all have days. We have days. We

have days we wake up in the morning and we're like, this was a terrible week. I just need to

get around some Christians. Hear the word. I know we have those times. But is your posture always

about you? I want to give you a spoiler alert. We're going to mess with you next week.

Just, yeah, yeah. Some of you hate change. Oh, you're going to hate it.

When you show up to service, and I'm especially,

those of you, for those of you at Holt, it's going to be a little bit everywhere else. Your normal

seat may be in a different place. See, we're launching our Saturday services again. And just

as a reminder, as of next week, it'll be 10-ish everywhere. And we're bringing back the ish

language. We don't know why we haven't been using that. We're bringing it back. So, because we'll

start when we start. 10-ish at RioTown, 10-ish at Westside, 10-ish online, 10-ish on Sunday morning

at Holt. And we're also adding a 7-ish on Saturday nights. And so, we're going to do that as of next

week. We're doing all that. And what we're going to do is, with the launch of our Saturday service,

we're going to rearrange this room a little bit. And we realize we just need to move a bunch of

chairs around. And so, when you show up, your chair may be in a different place. Now, what's

going to happen is, some of you are going to be like, where's my seat? And how dare you move my

night chair? Don't you know who I am?

Don't you know, I sat in this seat, like, every week for, like, the last five months, right? Or

even longer. And here's the thing. Are you open to the possibility that if someone else is in

your seat, they're a new person? Ever considered that? Like, when you walk into church, and someone

is sitting where you normally sit, you should actually celebrate. Because either that is a

new person, or what happened is, someone sat down, and someone sat down, and someone sat down, and

the other person's chair, and then they moved, and then they moved, and the freaking domino effect

went around the room, and then your chair is empty. So, what should you do? Well, go to that person

and say, hi, and be loving about them. Introduce yourself to them. Now, here, you know, this is why

it's so important that we have a loving environment. Because it is in a loving environment that we're

able to take the next step, which is to create a truthful environment. See, we often kind of pit

truth and love as if they're not true. We often kind of pit truth and love as if they're not true.

We often kind of pit truth and love as if they're not true. We often kind of pit truth and love as if they're

against each other, but nothing could be farther from the truth, right? It is fundamentally

unloving to not tell the truth, especially about spiritual matters. I was reading a book this week,

and I love what the author said. I don't have the exact quote, but to paraphrase it,

he basically said, he said, you can't will a truth into existence or deny it from existence.

Isn't that great? And Jesus described himself as the way the truth and the life,

you can't deny Jesus out of existence. So we're going to talk about things like sin. We're going

to talk about things about eternity and about things about Jesus. And it's critically important

that we do this in the context of both truth and love, because you know what? It's not just

better for the hearer. It's better for all of us, especially those of us who speak it.

You know, it actually says that in Ephesians 4. It's a crazy passage in Ephesians 4, where it says

this, but speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head. Okay,

this is a crazy,

passage. When you speak the truth in love, you grow up. Isn't that crazy? See, what happens is

we tend to go to one side or the other. Some of us are truth people, and some of us are love people,

right? So what happens is the truth people can hit you with what's true all day long. But you

know what? If you only do truth without love, you are a jackhammer, and you need to grow up.

But if you're just a love person, you're like, I want to love you, I want to accept you,

wrap my arms around you, but I'm not going to tell you hard stuff because I really don't want

that to ruin our friendship. You are a sponge. You need to grow up. And it is when we speak the

truth in love that we all together grow up in Christ. It means if I love my kids, I'm going to

tell them hard things to keep them from destroying their lives. It means that if I have my alcoholic

friend over to my house, it's not loving.

To ignore it, if he grabs a glass of whiskey, it's also not loving for me probably to drink

the glass of whiskey in front of him. And as one of your pastors, it would be unloving

if I didn't tell you about sin and righteousness and judgment.

One of the counterintuitive ways we want to speak the truth in love around here

is to create a beautiful environment.

As followers of Jesus, we don't think enough about beauty, but God cares greatly about beauty.

I love this psalm where it just says simply, the heavens declare the glory of God and the expanse

proclaims the work of his hands. When we look at creation and we see the beauty in this world,

what we're looking at is the handiwork of an artist and we are created in his image to continue

to create beautiful things. In 1995, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted this dense cloud

of gas and dust, and they called it the pillars of creation. And then two years ago, just two years

ago, the James Webb Osmic Telescope actually zoomed in and got a clearer image. Let me show

you both of those images right here. This, isn't this beautiful? We didn't see this until 1995.

And we didn't see this until two years ago. God painted that.

The cloud of gas has always been beautiful. We just never had the tech to see it. The beauty

existed without our eyes ever seeing it. And our universe is filled with stuff like that.

Check this out. Does anyone know what this is? Anyone? Anyone? I heard all kids are going to

give me the answers. That's great. Okay. What do you think it is? A fish thingy. Good guess,

but wrong. Anyone else? Other kids. Let's hear it.

A bobfish. It is not a fish. I'll tell you that. A sucker cup.

Oh, you are getting closer.

What did you say?

It's not a type. Well, close. Okay. I'll tell you what. This is the, wait for it. This is the bottom

of the foot of the male diving beetle.

That's his leg. That's the bottom of his foot. That tiny foot has always been beautiful

even before we had the technology to see it. God cares about beauty.

There's an old theologian that said this. He said, beauty is the harmony that still

shines through the chaos in the world. By God's grace, beauty is observed, felt, translated by

artists. God cares about beauty. God cares about beauty. God cares about beauty. God cares about beauty.

It is prophecy and guarantee that this world is not designed for ruin, but for glory,

a glory for which there's a deep longing in every human heart. This is why we care about art at RIV.

It's why we tend to treat our buildings sort of like canvases that we change

because we want to create different beauty. It's part of the reason we're doing a change in our

seating configurations next week. We want to create a beautiful atmosphere

that points to truth and love. In fact, next week, I'm just going to give you another spoiler.

We're starting a new series on Exodus. And it's going to take us until Easter to go through all

the way through the book of Exodus. And during the series, we are going to play. We're going to play

with art. We're going to play with darkness and light. We're going to play with color in new ways.

And each venue is going to do it a little bit differently. But we're all going to seek to

shine some beauty through the chaos of the world. It's also why we do music the way we do it.

And if you've been around RIV, you know how the music works. It's like Michigan,

if you don't like it, just come back next week and it'll be different, right?

And so the thing is, our bands are primarily made up of volunteers who create arrangements of songs

that are in a style that they love. It's why one week you could show up and it's like country-ish.

And sometimes you show up and it's like R&B-ish. And sometimes it's like a singer-songwriter.

Not even ish. It just is that. And in fact, this week, this coming week, we're releasing a new album

that is just...

Just one song, but six of them. What we did is we took the hymn, Nothing But The Blood,

and we gave it to six of our bands and said, make it your own. And so we'll have six versions of

the same song that we're releasing this week of Nothing But The Blood. Now, the reason we do this

sort of thing is we believe that music and art and visuals and color, these are ways that we can

create beauty to point to a creator who created that beautiful beetle's foot. Finally, as a church,

we want to, for the sake of outsiders, create a family atmosphere. And this is where this all

comes together. Our church is meant to be a family of families. There's mothers and fathers

and sons and daughters and crazy cousins and aunties, right? And Riverview should be a place

that feels like family. Not a closed-off, you-can't-get-in-here family, but a family with

open arms that welcomes the outsider in.

We have so many people at Riv who have fostered kids, adopted kids, welcomed exchange students

into their homes, taken in stragglers to live with them, and this is how it should be.

Let me just say it plainly. I believe that someone sitting by themselves, and I'm sorry if you're

sitting by yourself right now. I'm going to call you out. This is terrible. Someone sitting by

themselves is a crisis. Now, sometimes people just want to be left alone. And if they do,

and you start talking to them and they say, leave me alone, I'm going to call you out.

And they say, leave me alone. And you start talking to them and they say, leave me alone.

alone, just leave them alone, all right? But let's err on the side of not letting someone, right?

Let's err on the side of if someone is by themselves, we're going to go over and stop

talking to the same people that we talk to every single week and plop down with them and talk to

that person for a while. Let's make sure that no one comes in this place and leaves who wants to

talk to someone and yet no one did. That's on every single one of us because I can't do all that.

In fact, this week we rebranded our info center. I don't know if you noticed on the way in,

it's now called the Connect Center because we don't just purvey information, we try to connect

people, connect people to each other, connect people to church, connect people to God, connect

people to the gospel, connect people to resources. We also made our welcome team into a connect team

because they're not just welcoming you, although they're doing that, they're trying to connect you.

Our culture is changing so rapidly that the church,

should be a safe place for us to come to

and search for a truth that can only be found in Jesus.

Because everyone you know is out there digging for life

and we know where to find it.

So as we create an environment that is loving,

an environment that is truthful,

an environment that is beautiful,

an environment that is familial,

we'll be able to point people to Jesus.

So I wanna invite you back next week,

New Service Times, 10-ish everywhere,

7-ish on Saturday night.

We're launching a new series on Exodus.

I'm stoked about that.

It would actually be a great series

for you to bring somebody with you too.

So let me pray for us.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much

that you did not leave us alone,

but you connected with us.

We thank you that the beauty of the gospel is

we were alone and you came for us.

And so we just pray that we would be people

who live like that, not just in these doors,

but when we walk out of these doors,

we would walk out as missionaries

to tell people about Jesus.

And so we just pray for this upcoming series.

We talk about the series change

and we just pray that you would work

through our church family

in ways that we cannot take any credit for.

We pray all this in Jesus's name, amen.

And I forgot I was supposed to make one announcement,

so I'm gonna do that right now.

Because we're rearranging these chairs, we need help.

I need about half a dozen to a dozen people

who'd like to give me 15 to 20 minutes

and help me with some chair stuff.

So after this service,

I'm gonna be standing under that light over there.

Find me over there.

I just need like half a dozen to a dozen people

to give me 15 to 20 minutes to move some chairs.

I'll tell you guys what we're doing.

The rest of you don't get to know.

If you wanna know, come help me.

That's all.