MESSY MIRACLES CHRISTMAS AS IS Luke 1:26-38 // Craig Smith December 04, 2016

Transcription

1 MESSY MIRACLES CHRISTMAS AS IS Luke 1:26-38 // Craig Smith December 04, 2016 CRAIG: Hey, I invite you to grab your Bible and if you don t have one feel free to grab one from one of the seats in front of you and that s our gift to you. And I m gonna ask you to turn with me to the Gospel of Luke. We re gonna be beginning our Christmas series by a look at probably a pretty well-known Christmas figure, young girl by the name of Mary. Anybody know anything of Mary s story? Yeah, probably not a big mystery there. But here s the interesting thing, I have two tasks today because it s Vision Sunday in addition to launching the Christmas series, I m also supposed to be sharing about our vision for And when I first heard that I was supposed to do that I thought, Well, that seems like kind of a mismatch. How do we do both of those things? What s really interesting as I began to study the passage for this morning, I realized that the lesson that we learned from Mary is actually the perfect setup for our understanding of our vision for And so we re gonna jump in this morning in Luke chapter 1 starting in verse 26, we re told this, In the sixth month of Elizabeth s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, Greetings you who are highly favored, the Lord is with you. I said we were talking about Mary s story but you notice Mary s not the first name mentioned, right? First name mentioned is Elizabeth. Elizabeth is maybe not quite as familiar as Mary, although if you spent much time reading the Christmas story you probably run into her. But just in case you re not as familiar let me back up and give you a little bit of Elizabeth s story. Because Elizabeth was a woman that Luke describes and I m gonna give you maybe what is the most important thing that he says about her in Luke 1 verse 7, we ll pop it up here. He said this, Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah were from a priestly family. And here s how he described them, But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive and they were both very old. Which always strikes me as kind of a bummer of a way to make it into scripture. Like you get a couple of lines in God s word a natural description, They were childless and really, really old. But the point that Luke is making is this that Elizabeth and her husband Zachariah didn t have any children and yet one day Zechariah was serving as a priest and he was in the temple in a sacred place, and an angel appeared. And the angel appeared and said, I got good news for you, your old wife is gonna have a baby. Obviously, Zechariah and his wife had probably spent a lot of time in their youth praying for child and they hadn t seen an answer to that prayer but suddenly the angel saying it s gonna be answered. And you would expect Zechariah s response to be, Wow. Finally. Thank you. But his response is little different, his responses is, How do I know this is really gonna happen? In other words, give me a little bit of proof. I m not so sure about this. Which is an interesting response because he s a priest so he ought to know how God operates. He ought to know that God often does surprising things. He s in the temple. He s in a holy place so he knows that it s got to be an angel from God giving the message but his response is not really to get on board. His response is to go, Mm-mm, could you give me a sign? Could you give me a little more proof? So the angel goes, Yeah. How about this, you re not gonna be able to talk until your child s born. Not probably the sign he was looking for but you got to be careful when you ask for a sign. And the reason I think Luke tells us that story and the reason he begins talking about Mary by mentioning Elizabeth is to understand this, that child that we

2 celebrate at Christmas, that miraculous conception, wasn t the only miraculous conception. It wasn t the only miracle. And it s often the case that God clusters miracles around things, and there s a reason for that, and I think it s important that we understand it. God gives miracles because miracles are an announcement that God is moving and they re an invitation to get on board. We don t always think about miracles that way, we often think about miracles primarily as kind of one-off events and we just ask for God to give us a miracle and we are like, God, would you fix this family situation? Would you change somebody s heart? God, would you heal my body? God, would you give me a new job? Would you give me a promotion? Would you intervene? Would you do something? But we tend to think about miracles as this kind of one-off event. If you just do this to me, I would be very grateful. But historically and throughout scripture miracles are rarely one-off events. God gives miracles really as signs. They re announcements. They re billboards that He s about to do something. Miracles are announcements that God is moving and they re invitations to get on board. And it s interesting Zechariah s invitation really went unanswered. He didn t say, I m on board, he said, Could you give me a little bit more proof. I need a little bit more evidence. And that kind of sets the stage for this announcement that s given to Mary. Mary is an interesting girl. Luke tells us a couple of interesting things about her here. One of them is that she s from a town in Galilee called Nazareth. And that may not seem like it s all that significant but that may be because you don t know much about Galilee. Galilee was a province in ancient Israel but it wasn t a favorite province. It wasn t the place that everybody wanted to be from. It wasn t New York. It wasn t Chicago. It was kind of an out in the boondocks kind of place and because it was at the fringe of the Israelite country, it had a lot of influence from non-jewish people. It had a lot of gentile influence. In fact, the Old Testament describes Galilee as, Galilee of the gentiles, kind of a derogatory sort of expression. And the idea that God would begin doing something powerful in a place like Galilee didn t make a whole lot of sense. It s a little bit like an angel showing up and saying, Hey, God s about to stir up a great conservative Christian revival in San Francisco. You d go, That seems like an odd place to begin that kind of work, but this is what you ve got to understand, is that God often starts his greatest works in the places that we would think least likely. God doesn t look for places of privilege and He doesn t look for people of privilege. God often begins His greatest works in places and in people that we would tend to think, That doesn t seem like a likely candidate. The other thing He says about Mary that I think is important to understand is that He calls her a virgin. Now, how many of you know what that means? Not every hand went up. You re gonna make me go into it huh? It actually probably does need to be gone into just a little bit because the English word and the Jewish word here that s being used they don t mean exactly the same thing. It s a lot of overlap. The English word virgin is a very generic kind of a meaning and it just means, I ve got to be blunt, it means somebody hasn t had sex, okay? That s what it means. The word that s being used here though in the ancient world had a slightly more specific meaning. It was not a word that you would use for a 30-year-old or a 6-year-old. It was only a word that you would use for somebody who s somewhere between 12 and 14 years old. And what the word meant, not only was that they have not had sex, but it also meant that they are about to get married. It was a word that you use for somebody who was right at the age where marriage became sort of the natural expectation and we see of course that Mary is of that age. She s engaged to be married. Now, by the way, Mary would have been, get this, somewhere between 12 and 14. Right, she was a middle schooler and she was about to get married. But the reason that I think that Luke

3 gives us this term is to do two things. Number one is to set the stage for the miracle but the second thing is to set the stage for a mess because what you need to understand is this, that by calling her a virgin everybody would have gone, Okay, we kind of know what her life is gonna look like. She s of this age, and she s engaged, and so she s gonna get married, and she s gonna have some babies... and her life was kind of neatly planned out. And as soon as everybody heard that word they would have gone, Oh, I know where she is in life, and I know what her next step is. I know what this is gonna look like. And what the stage is being set for us for God to go, Yeah I ve got a little bit of a different plan. The expected pathway is not going to get played out. The third thing that Luke tells us about Mary that s important, he actually tells us by virtue of something he does not say. Luke almost always, when he introduces a main character in the story that he s telling, he tells us who they are by way of telling us about their family. He did it when he mentioned Elizabeth and Zechariah back earlier in the chapter. He mentioned that they were from this priestly family. Even Joseph who s just got a quick little one-word mention here that Mary was engaged to him, even Joseph is told to be from the house of David. And throughout the gospel whenever Luke introduces a new character, he tells us who they are, he helps us zero in on who they are by telling us what family they came from. But when he introduces Mary, he doesn t say a word about her family. He doesn t tell us what family she came in. He doesn t tell us who her father is, what family lines she s descended from which is very strange. In fact, it s so out of character for Luke that it almost has to be deliberate. So why would he do that? Why wouldn t he tell us what family she came from? And the answer is because he wants to make sure that we understand God did not choose Mary because she came from a particular family. God did not pick Mary for this, because she was a person of privilege or because she came from a position or a family. In fact, God didn t pick Mary because of any external qualifications. God picked Mary just because He loved her. His choosing of Mary, it was an act of grace. And if you know what that word grace means it means undeserved kindness. And really the way the angel greets her is indicative of that, most translations read the way that mine did which is to say that the angel said something like, Greetings, you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you. And that s a perfectly accurate translation and it certainly captures the heartbeat there. But the literal translation is very interesting, because literally what the angel said was rejoice, be graced one. That s the literal translation, rejoice, be graced one. In other words, it s a command, Rejoice. Celebrate because you re one on whom great favor has fallen on, which great grace has fallen. You ve been drenched in grace. Interesting. Really what Luke s telling us is this, that the God s choice of Mary was an active undeserved kindness that she was being invited to embrace with joy. And God gives miracles or announcements that He s moving and their invitations to get on board in the same way. Mary has just been told, Rejoice, get on board, God has poured undeserved kindness upon you. But Mary is young, she s not naive and she knows that when God begins to move sometimes things get messy. And so her response immediately is not to go, Yay. Her immediate response according to Luke verse 29 is this, Mary was greatly troubled at his words. She wonder what kind of greeting this might be. I can t blame her. But angel showed up and said, Rejoice, God s pouring grace upon you. Okay, what exactly does that mean? What are you setting me up for? And the angel said to her, Do not be afraid Mary, you have found favor with God and you ll conceive and give birth to a son and you re to call him Jesus. He will be great and he will

4 be called the Son of the Most High and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacobs s descendants forever, his kingdom will never end. How will this be? Mary asked the angel, Since I m a virgin. And I wanna pause for a moment there. I wanna make sure you understand that Mary is not expressing doubt. Her question is not expressing doubt. Mary s is just asking for details. It s actually very interesting to compare her response to Zechariah. Zechariah s response when he was told about a miraculous pregnancy was, What will be the sign? How can I know this is going to happen? Give me a bit more proof. Mary s not asking for proof. She s not expressing doubt. She s just asking for details. She s not saying, How could this happen? She s not saying, How is this possible? She just says, How will this be? What s the details? Unpack it for me. Tell me how this is gonna take place? And the angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you. So the Holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth, your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she was said to be unable to conceive as in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail. And can we just acknowledge right now that things got messy? Mary asked a very natural question, How is this gonna take place? Give me the details, and it s interesting that if you put yourself at her place you can imagine what the answer was that she was expecting. Because the angel said, You re gonna have a child and he s gonna be from the house and the line of David, she is a young woman who s about to be married to a young man from the line of David so she expected to be having baby soon with a guy from the house in line of David. So when he said you re gonna have a son and he s gonna inherit the throne of his father David she would have very naturally probably thought, You re telling me what my child with Joseph is gonna be like. And she goes, Would you give me the details about this? I m a virgin. Give me some specs, right? And the angel goes, Yeah, yeah. I will. Here you go. You re gonna get pregnant before you get married. It s gonna be God s baby, yeah. Things just got really messy, didn t they? Understand that this announcements being given to a young woman who was living in the midst of a culture that was deadly serious about punishing sexual immorality and I mean that literally. It was entirely possible that Mary could have faced being stoned to death when she was found to be pregnant outside of marriage. It was not at all uncommon in those days. Mary s very life was in danger with this grace that had just been poured into her. At the very least, she could have expected that her family was gonna disown her and that every time she walked down the streets people are gonna look at her with contempt. And I don t wanna be flipping about God s word but try to put yourself in Mary s place and imagine, how would you even explain this to anybody? How would you go to your mom and go, Hi Mum, I m pregnant. And this good Jewish mom, Aah, how could this happen? And Mary s gonna go, Don t worry about it. Don t worry about it. It s God s. Who s gonna buy that? And what has she got for evidence to prove it? How do you know that it s God s? An angel came and told me. You see what I m saying? I mean she doesn t have any recourse, she doesn t have any evidence, she doesn t have any of that proof that Zachariah was looking for. But her story is the right story and so she suddenly is facing an incredibly messy situation. I don t know about you but I think if I were in that place my response would probably have been more along the lines of interesting proposition, Is this still open for debate? Do you have any other candidates you re considering because I think maybe they would be better? Is this an option? Do I have any say in this? Wouldn t that be your response? Being told that God s going to move in a way that was just going to absolutely mess up your life? Listen to Mary s response, verse 38, I am the Lord s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled, and then He left her. Mary doesn t ask about other candidates. She doesn t ask if this is still open to modification if there s any options in this, Mary gets the details. She s basically told, God is about to mess up your life, and her response, Okay. I m God s girl. I m the Lord s

5 servant. I m in. Let s do it. That s incredible. That s incredible. I don t know about you but when I sense God moving me to something, inviting me to get on board with something He s doing, my response no matter how minor is my response is almost always, Okay, slow down. I d like to know a bit more about this. And Mary s being given a grace that will absolutely mess up her life and her response is, Okay. I m all in. I m in. Let s do it. Which makes me ask this question, what did she know that enabled her to say yes to this? What did she know about who God is? What did she know about the way that God works that enabled her to say, I m in no matter how much mess she knew that was gonna lead her to. And I wanna suggest three things to you that I believe she knew and I believe she knew them from God s word. And I say that because a little bit later in this chapter Luke records the song that Mary composed and that song is absolutely brimming with scripture. It s filled from beginning to end with Old Testament references in which tells me that Mary was a woman who knew God s word. And it s from her understanding of God s word and her understanding of how God has been in the past that she was able to trust in God going into the future and these are the things that I think she knew about God that allowed her to say yes. The first one is this she knew that saying yes to God is always less messy than saying no. You hear me? Saying yes to God is always less messy than saying no. I mean, don t get me wrong, saying yes to God is almost always messy but it s never as messy as saying no. And the reason for that is very simple. Blessings flow from God in relationship with them. It is when we are close to God that we are most in the fold of His grace and His mercy and His peace. When God moves, when God says, I m going there, our job is to go, I m sticking close. You turn in that way. Okay, I m going there because when we stay close to God we experience blessing. Yes, God may lead us through messy things but being right behind God, one step behind Him in lockstep with Him that s where we re gonna find peace. That s where we re gonna find mercy. That s where we re gonna find the strength to get through all those messy things but here s the thing when God moves and we got I m not really crazy about that and we take a step back and God keeps moving and we keep letting him get further and further we find ourselves in darker and darker places that get messier and messier and messier. And so when we hesitate to say yes to God because of the mess that He might bring into our lives, we are actually saying yes to a greater mess when we sit still. Saying yes to God is never as messy as saying no and I think Mary understood that. I remember several years ago, really not very many, it just a couple, I found myself facing one of those situations, some of you have heard pieces of this. I had been serving in a church for many years with a senior pastor that I love dearly as a great friend of mine and I had a just an amazing ministry opportunity at this church. They let me go and travel around the world, and do pastor training, and speaking at conferences, and doing things like that. And when I was home they let me lead worship or preach and it was just this fantastic blend of stuff that I got to do and I was working with the senior pastor that I love deeply. But over the years the church had been going through some really difficult things and I had come to suspect that it was probably time for him to step out of that role. I thought God was probably calling him on to something else. And one day I was at a lake in Nebraska. I was out there speaking at a conference and I had a moment by this lake where God spoke to me and you don t understand I don t use that language lightly. God leads me through his word. He leads me through prayer and through wise counsel from others. It s only on very rare occasions that I would say, God spoke to me, but this is one of those occasions. God spoke to me and He said, You need to call your friend and you need to ask him the question, do you believe it s God s will for you to stay in that position?

6 And I remember sitting by the lake going, I don t wanna ask that question, because I couldn t imagine any way that it could go well. I figured if he said, Yes, it s God s will for me to stay here. I was gonna have to say, You know I love you but I don t believe that. So I think I probably need to step out. I ll do it quietly and full support of you but I think I might... which would mean that I would lose that great ministry place in a church that I love dearly had been home for 18 years at that point. And trying to figure out how do I supplement my income? How do I support my family? That was really a messy possibility but on the other side if he said, You know what? No. I don t believe it s God s will for me to be here and if he resigned then I was in the same place. Because they would hire another senior pastor and when that senior pastor got in I knew there was no possible way another senior pastor was gonna come in and look at what I did, and what they paid me to do, to be gone and be there occasionally and go, Yeah that s a good deal. Let s keep that going. I knew he was gonna go, This is crazy and that I knew I was going to lose that ministry in that church in that way and it was getting me back in the same place. How do I go forward? What I do? In other words, I was told to have a conversation with somebody and if I said yes to God I was gonna end up in mess no matter what happened. But I know God and I know although saying yes to God is often messy it is never as messy as saying no. I ve seen it too many times in my own life. I ve seen it too many times in God s word. I ve seen the same messages and scripture that Mary knew and so I said, Yes, and it got messy. I m not gonna lie to you, it got messy. But I know as Mary knew that saying yes to God is never as messy as saying no. Staying close to God is always the right thing. I think the second thing that Mary knew was that sometimes we are the miracle to somebody else s mess. And Mary was not fixated on herself, she was fixated on others. She had another centered mentality and she knew that sometimes God introduces mess into our lives because he wants us to be the miracle to somebody else s mess. Elizabeth had a mess. She had a problem. She couldn t have children and Elizabeth s miraculous pregnancy was a solution to her problem but Mary didn t have that issue, right? Mary didn t have a problem. God introduced mess into her life not as a solution to her problem, but as a solution to other people s problem. God gave her a child who would be the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the whole world and I believe Mary understood that sometimes when God brings us to a place where he s introducing a mess into our lives He s calling us into something that s messy it s because He wants us to be the miracle to somebody else s mess. And as long as we stay fixated on ourselves, as long as we look at the mess and go, Man, I don t want that. That doesn t jive with my plan. That doesn t fit my pathway. That s not what I really wanted in my life right now, we lose out. Mary understood that sometimes we re the miracle to somebody else s mess and so she said, I ll get my eyes off of myself. I ll get my eyes off that incredibly difficult thing that I know is coming with my folks and I know what s coming with my community. I m gonna lift my eyes off of that. I m gonna look out to the needs of God s people and understand that God is calling me to do something that will bless somebody else. And I think the third thing that Mary understood is this. Mary understood that we cannot weigh the costs that we know against the rewards that we cannot even imagine. Listen to that one because it s important. She understood that we cannot weigh the costs that we know against the rewards that we cannot even imagine. She knew what the costs were. She knew how her family was gonna react. She knew how the community would react. She knew she d probably have to leave that town. She knew she d have to deal with the looks of scorn and derision. She knew that she d have to deal with labels being applied to her that were unjust and untrue but fully expected giving her situation. She knew what those costs were. And I imagine in the midst of that she couldn t even begin to imagine how this could turn out well. What could God possibly really be doing through this? She couldn t even imagine the ultimate rewards but she knew that she couldn t weight with the

7 cost she knew against the rewards you couldn t imagine so she said yes. And think about it for a minute, this Mary who brought this child Jesus into the world was the same Mary who was there when they nailed her baby boy to the cross. And I imagine at that moment it was even harder to imagine any good rewards coming but this is the same Mary who was there going to the tomb three days later to find that her child had risen from the dead. To find that her child had been the sacrifice that had taken away the sins of the whole world. To find that her child was the light that broke in the darkness, that drove back darkness around the world that people from every tribe and tongue and every language and nation could now come into the presence of God in conference they were received because their sin was erased. Her child did that. I don t know about you but I get pretty proud of my kids when they do good on a test like, That s my girl. When they do well in some kind of an event right we go, Yeah, that s my boy. I m proud. Mary s child took away the sins of all mankind. That was what her child did. That was what God did. God rewarded her faithfulness. God rewarded her willingness to say yes, by allowing her to see the whole world for all of eternity changed. She could never have imagined that moment the angel said, Here s what s coming, but she knew you cannot weigh the costs that you know against the rewards that you can t even imagine. And I ve seen this. I ask that really messy question and my friend said, You know what? I don t think it s God s will for me to be in this position anymore, and so he resigned. And I went, Man, oh, what I do now? And then the church came and said, Hey would you consider being the interim pastor? And I went, I don t wanna do that. That sounds messy. I m not a senior pastor, that s not what I do. They said, We need you, would you do it for a few months? I said, Okay, yeah but you need to get busy. Find the new senior pastor. And then they came back and they said, Would you consider being a senior pastor? And I went, I don t wanna do that. Like senior pastor job that s messy, there is all kinds of... I don t wanna do that. That s not what I want to do. But they said, Would you pray about it? What were you gonna say, right? Yeah, I ll pray about it, and they kept coming back over several months and over the course of several months God he moved in my heart and led me to the place that I said honestly to my astonishment, Yeah God s calling me to be a senior pastor. Dang it. And then they voted me in and suddenly I was the senior pastor. And I remember thinking well this is messy. That was about two years ago and now I m here. And in that whole thing was part of the process of getting me here. And I want you to hear something and this comes from the absolute bottom of my heart. I m blown away by the opportunity to serve here. I get up every morning and I think, How is it possible that I get to lead at a place like Mission Hills? How is it possible that I ve been given the privilege and the blessing of being able to lead a staff like we have here? The staff here, by the way, they re unbelievable. It is incredible. Every day I interact with the staff I think, How did this happen? How do I get to be part of this? How do I get to shepherd the staff and I hear the stories every single day of the ways that God is using you, not only in this place, but around this community, and around the world? I hear stories of people stepping out in faith and doing incredible things and I just find myself going, How did I get to the place that I get to serve in this way? I ve been rewarded for a faithfulness when I was told and asked a difficult question, and I said yes to that I ve been rewarded in ways I could never have imagined and so I tell you not only from scripture but I tell you from my own experience. When God calls you to say yes you cannot weigh the costs that you know against the rewards you cannot even imagine. You cannot. And at the end of the day, that s what this is all about. That when God invites us to join Him in His work it s always messy but we cannot weigh the cost we know against the rewards that we cannot even imagine because if you look at the cost you know you re gonna say no to what God s inviting you to and you re gonna miss out on things that are greater than you can even wrap your minds around.

8 When God invites us to join him in His work we have to say yes and that s what we ve been wrestling with a leadership team here. I said today is Vision Sunday and it s my job to share a little bit of what we re looking for in 2017 and I want you to understand that at the heart of it that s what we re wrestling with. This idea that God is inviting us to partner with Him and His work, to use us, to accomplish His people s good and to bring Him glory and we realize that what He s calling us to do is gonna be messy. It is but we re not going to count the cost that we know against the rewards we can t even imagine. Let me tell you a few things we sense that God s leading us to, number one is we believe that God is calling us to seek to reach unreached people with the gospel. People who do not know Jesus are going to come to know Jesus because God has planted this church here. We re going to reach unreached people with the gospel and you know what unreached people s lives are messy, not unlike reached people s lives, not unlike Christians lives but there s mess involved in that but that s okay. There s several ways we re going to be looking to do this. One of them is that we re going to be looking to clarify and improve our discipleship process. How many of you feel like you re as much like Jesus now as you re ever gonna get? No? How many of you feel like all need room for improvement, good. Here s a harder question, how many of you feel like you know exactly what the next step is to move towards being like Jesus? How many of you feel like you re not quite sure what the next step is, yeah. We re looking to fix that in We re looking to clarify the discipleship process. Look at all of our ministries and figure out, how do we position them so that we can allow people to go, Where are you in your journey with Jesus? We understand what it s like to be at that place here s the next step. So that everybody who comes in here understands exactly what the next step is on their journey with Jesus. We re looking to hire a discipleship pastor who s gonna be doing a lot of work in that area, we are hoping to do that very early in 2017 because what we wanna do is we wanna coup everybody who calls this place home to be the hands and feet of Jesus outside of these walls. We re not going to reach the unreached people by bringing them into these seats. We re going to reach the unreached people by sending our people out into the world to be Jesus to watching world and that means we got to become more like Jesus, we re going to figure that out. Second thing that we re gonna look to do is we re going to look to launch an online campus in Anybody wonder what an online campus is? Here s the thing we have people all over the world already watching the messages that gets preached here and some of them are doing them in unreached parts of the world. Some of them are doing them in places where they can t get up and go to church because it s illegal. But they re partaking that and we realized, you know what we wanna invite them to be part of the community here in kind of a virtual way and so instead of just packaging the messages we re gonna be looking to do live services where people all over the world or people who are homesick or traveling they can log in and they can actually be part of the service as it s taking place. It s gonna be really, really interesting kind of stuff. Now you may have noticed over the last couple of weeks we ve been doing a little bit more of the video stuff up on here, you see more faces and more live video on the big screens during worship, that s not because we re trying to get flash here, it s because the tech team is rehearsing the live video stuff so that we can help people be involved in this around the world. We re also including this...we re gonna do this we re gonna have an online chat room during these services so there ll be people who will be volunteers and maybe there s something God calls you to get involved in where you can actually engage people who are watching those messages maybe have questions about the gospel or the Bible. I don t know if you ve ever been on an online chat room but they tend to be messy that s okay. Maybe God s going to stir it up in your heart to be part of that. We re going to look to plant a church site hopefully sometime in 2017 or This is not a new

9 vision, if you ve been here for a while, you ve understood that we ve had this triple play vision which involved some multi-site stuffs, some church planting around the area and we re going to be continuing to do that. Hopefully, by the end of 2017 or early in 2018, we re gonna be looking to plant one of those churches, again to reach people in a community that s not currently being reached. It may be that we re going to ask you and God will stir up in you going to be part of that church plant that s something we re gonna do. We re going to look to improve our local outreach ministry. You ve heard stories about what s going on at the life center and God is not done there. And so we re continuing to pour resources into the life center and their work in the Littleton area we re continuing to bring on more partners that we can connect with and work with other churches in the area, we re going to be doing that. We re also going to be looking to expand our global outreach ministries. We ve got something like 40 partners around the world doing ministry and we re going to continue supporting that and find new partners and find new ways for us as a church to be engaged in that work, it s all part of reaching the lost with the gospel and that s the reason that God has planted us here. Second thing we re gonna do, I think it s important you understand this, we re going to build up the capital C Church with something we re calling crazy generosity. When I say capital C Church I mean not just the Mission Hills church, we re one cell in the body. We re gonna look to build up the capital C church with crazy generosity and I ll give you an example. We have an incredible communications team and they come up with these graphic kinds of things, are those not impressive? And here s the reality. Most churches don t have access to that kind of thing, absolutely they deserve a hand. I don t know if you know, but like the videos that get watched, I mean those are high-quality productions and we believe that God uses them in powerful ways here but we also know that there s a lot of churches around the world who don t have access to that kind of thing. And they look at like our Christmas graphic and they go, Man, I wish that we had access to those kinds of graphics, and what we ve realized we need to say is You do. Here they are. We re building a website right now that includes these kinds of things and all of our sermon graphics and it makes them available without the titles and things so they can change the titles. Sometimes we encounter churches that go, I don t even have the graphic design experience to change the titles to make it work at our church, in which case we re gonna go, Yeah you do. We ll do it for you. Tell us what you need. How many of you picked up the women s Christmas devotional? If you haven t, make sure you pick one of those up. I think they ve got some at the welcome center. We got a church out in Washington that sort of saw that kind of thing and went, That s amazing. I sure wish we could have something like that at our church, and we went, Here you go. We repackaged it for them. We re calling that crazy generosity because it doesn t benefit us, right? It doesn t grow Mission Hills but it does bless God s people and we re gonna be looking to do a whole lot more of that kind of stuff as we move forward because we don t believe it s just about us. We believe it s about God. And if God has given us resources here that we can use to bless other people in other churches around the world, that s what we re gonna be involved in, which leads me to one final thing. When I got here I found out that we had an exciting vision statement and some of you can probably recite it, right? What s our vision here? Transformed Lives. And I love that because it s bold. We re not about incremental step. We re about transformation and I realized as I began to understand more and more of this church that I was like 90.1% in love with that message, 90.1 which seems like an odd percentage I realized. But there s 22 letters in it and there s 2 letters that I wasn t in love with, it s the ed at the end of transform. Because I realize, I m not there yet. I m not transformed. I m a whole lot different than I was before Jesus and a whole lot different than I was a year ago but I haven t reached it. Anybody feel like they ve gotten there?

10 How about this? Anybody here feel like they re transforming, that they re in process? What we ve decided as a staff and as a leadership team is that we re gonna mature our vision statement. We re not gonna change it, we re gonna mature it. We re gonna call it Transforming Lives. Because we wanna communicate to people, you know what? You don t have to have this thing figured out. You don t have to arrive at a certain level to be welcome here because we haven t gotten there yet. We re all in the journey together and we wanna invite people to be able to come in and we wanna say, We will walk alongside you. And we re going to partner with God in His work through the Holy Spirit of Transforming Lives. That s gonna be us and it s gonna be a whole lot of people that we don t know yet, that God is gonna bring to us. That s what 2017 is gonna be all about, Transforming Lives. Practically speaking, we need a budget to do that and that s the business part of what we have to do today. And so if you re a member at Mission Hills, by the way, if you re not a member please hear me that doesn t make you any less welcome here. It doesn t make you any less a part of the family here but there are some people who have chosen to go through the membership process which is available to you if you want, ask at the Welcome Center about it. But if you ve gone through that process, if you re an official member here, I m gonna ask you to take this card out of the seats in front of you and at the top it says, Business meeting. We just did the business meeting. Best business meeting ever, right? This is the business we re in Transforming Lives. I ve told you a little bit how we re going to do it and if you re a member here we need you to cast your vote for the elders that we presented to be joining the team. We need to ask you to cast your vote for the 2017 budget and on your way out, to drop those in the boxes but right now would you join me in prayer. God, thank you, for the privilege of serving you at this place. Thank you for the privilege of being part of this community. Thank you that you have been transforming lives here for decades. Thank you that you ve been building this into a place that allows us to have a tremendous impact not only in the community around us but in the world. Thank you that you have filled this place with people that you are transforming and that through them you are looking to transform. So, Lord, we ask that you would unleash as we go into Give us the strength and the courage to say yes to you knowing that it will probably be messy but knowing that we can never weigh the costs that we know against the rewards we cannot even imagine. So that we move into 2017 in faith, trusting that you have done a great work here, and you re just getting started. We thank you in the name of Jesus. Amen.