Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Hebrews 10:24-25, emphasizing the importance of growing together as a church community. He highlights the need for believers to spur one another on to love and good works, encouraging participation in small groups and church gatherings. The practical application involves actively engaging with one another to foster relationships that promote spiritual growth and support, ultimately aiming to reflect Christlikeness in their lives.
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What a great day it is to be in the house of the Lord. I know we have a live stream, but it's just something about being here. In the Lord's house, experiencing worship together as a family, experiencing a baptism, it's just a great, great day.
If you have your Bibles, we'll be in Hebrews chapter 10 this morning. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 24 and 25 is where we'll be at today.
I know Scott gave announcements, but I do want to give one last plug for our marriage conference coming up this coming Saturday. It's going to be from 9 to 4. I'm asking couples of all ages. Right now we've got about 22 people that are signed up, which is a great number.
I'm excited about that. I'm so pumped. My guest speaker that's coming in is going to do a great job. But really, this is for every person, whether you've been married a year or whether you've been married 100 years. We can all learn from each other, and we can glean from each other.
The Bible says in Titus, the older men and women should be teaching the younger men and women. So you may be thinking, Pastor James, I've been married 49 years.
My marriage, I mean, it's good. We're going to be fine. Okay, we've got a couple more years left in this world. We're good.
Maybe so, but I've told this to a couple people. I want my marriage to last 49 years, 50 years, 60 years if I live that long. And I want to learn from those older couples who have been married that long how to have my marriage last that long.
And so this is for us. It's for each other.
It's for our church to grow together in a mighty way. I love how it fits perfectly with what we're talking about today. But if you haven't signed up to come, please do. We're going to have plenty of food. My wife's got games for us. We're going to play games. We're going to laugh.
We're going to probably cry over some of the games. We may learn something about you that you've never told anybody. It's going to be a great time. Come this Saturday from 9 to 4.
So if you have your Bibles, we'll stand. We'll read Hebrews chapter 10, verses 24 and 25, and we'll get started today.
The Bible says, And let us consider how to spur one another to love and good works. Let us not forsake the assembly of ourselves together, as is the manner of some.
Prayer and Service Reflection
But let us exhort one another, especially as you see the day approaching. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done.
Lord, I thank you for this service today that we've already experienced, just being able to worship together, being able to see you work in baptism, being able to see you work in our lives.
Lord, the music that was able to be sung, just lift your name and how you're good to us. You're gracious to us, God.
And I pray, Lord, that you would just continue to work as I speak this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. Growing together is our core value number two.
We've opened up last week by saying this statement, and I put it in there. I did have a spelling error. You guys have been around me long enough. I've been really, really good about trying to make sure my spelling has been right.
But my son said, Dad, I was writing down, and one of the words you had up there was not spelled right. Because I wrote it down that way, and I'm thinking, that's not right. So my own son called me out on it, which is fine. It's good.
And so I put this statement there. We exist to make disciples growing together into Christlikeness.
We talked about that last week, what it means to be making disciples, what it means to be growing together, growing disciples, and what it means to be Christlike disciples. We talked through that.
What I love about what we're going through with our core values is I get to preach a week, and then I get to have a week or two of real basic application of what that core value means, how we can apply it to our life.
And so I've really enjoyed this as a personal study for me.
But as I was speaking last week, how many of you have ever been maybe thinking about a new toaster at home, and all of a sudden you open up Facebook, and an ad pops up for a new toaster? Has that ever happened to anybody? All right, yeah, we're there, okay?
And so last week I spoke about, my open illustration was about Steve Jobs, right? So I'm sitting there this week sometime, I don't remember when, and I get an ad about Steve Jobs, okay?
I don't know if AI was trying to help me build the message or not, but it worked well with the thought of growing together.
And so we're going to go back and revisit for a moment the life and legacy of this man who wasn't a believer, but he had some great applications that we can learn. And I mentioned last week in 1986, he got dismissed and fired from his company.
And when he left and was forced out of Apple, Steve Jobs bought a small manufacturing company by the name of Pixar. Anybody heard of the name Pixar before? Movies like Ants, movies like Despicable Me,
The Minions, all these have been made through Pixar. And then, or Illumination, you're right, but it's in that same realm of what it is. And so in 2000, he had the opportunity to relocate the company to an abandoned Del Monte canning food company.
The original plan that the executives came to him, you know, all the brilliant executives that have all the answers to every problem said, all right, Steve, this is what we're going to do. We've got three buildings, and we're going to put all the computer engineers and scientists in this one.
We're going to put the animators in this building, and then we're going to put the executives.
You're going to have an office there, and you're all going to be separated. And he looked at it, and he said this, I don't like it. He said, I hate the idea.
I don't like the three buildings. We're going to go to one vast space with an atrium in the center.
One of the presidents of Pixar said this, the philosophy behind this design is that it's good to put the most important function at the heart of the building. And he said our most important function is interaction with our employees.
That's why Steve put a big empty space in the middle, and he wanted to create an open area for people to always talk to each other.
But the problem was, by just creating an open space didn't mean that people were going to naturally come and talk to each other. So Steve said, I'm going to put things in this space so that people have to come and go there.
He created a space where people would go there for lunch. The people from Pixar that were the animators would have to come, and they would have to collaborate with each other. And John Laster, the chief executive, said this, technology inspires art, and art challenges technology.
And Jobs saw that this problem had to be dealt with. He put the mailbox in this space. He put the meeting rooms in this space, the cafeteria, the coffee bar.
He even took the gift shop and put it in the middle of the building because he said, I have to create a place where things come together. And one person that said, that was the director of the Incredibles and Ratatouille said this, the atrium initially might seem like a wasted space.
But Steve realized that when people run into each other, get this, and make eye contact with each other,
things happen. Even if it came at the expense of convenience, the emphasis of connection has always been a defining trait of Mr. Jobs. He insisted that the best creations occur when people from different fields were connected, especially in the age of intellectual fragmentation.
The man who created the device that we have that connects us can also fragment us in multiple different ways.
And so it's so important, even in the real world, I say the real world, but the business world, the world that sometimes seems so far out of our reach, it's so important that they brought people together and they didn't separate people.
And we as a church must be in the mindset that we're going to bring people together.
I don't quote this guy often, but I'm going to quote Andy Stanley. I don't normally tell who I quote things by, but sometimes people look up who I quote things by, and that's fine, I want you to.
Church Growth and Community
But Andy Stanley, in the later years, he said some things that were very far out of what I believe and where I'm at. But in one of his early books, it's called Deep and Wide, he wrote a statement and he says, the church doesn't happen in rows, but the church happens in circles.
The church happens in small group circles. It happens in home settings. It happens in two or three people that are meeting after church or hanging out at a store.
That's where the church happens, is in circles and in a group setting where we can learn from each other, where we can impact each other, where we make eye contact with each other, where we begin to grow together as disciples into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
And as we look at Hebrews chapter 10, the writer here, who I believe Paul wrote Hebrews, so if I say Paul, that's why,
he gives us some instructions on how we can grow together. The first way is in verse 24.
It says, and let us consider how to spur one another to love and to good works. One of the ways that he tells us here is how we can grow together is by having small groups, by having the ability to come together. He says, let us consider how to spur one another.
By spurring one another, this is one of those one another's in the Bible. We've talked about them a lot, because they're all over the place. It's the, all the writers of the New Testament use this term one another, love one another, encourage one another, spur one another.
It's the thought that, that we're going to power one another, we're going to push one another on, and we're going to encourage that person in a mighty way.
My wife had a, she told me last week, all my sermon was about her. And if she wasn't married to me, I wouldn't have had a sermon last week. And so I've got to continue this thought. My wife, this past week, she signed us up for a date night on Friday. Okay.
It was not my idea of a date night. Okay.
I went along because I'm a good submissive husband, submit to one another. Okay. Another one of those one another's. But she said that the gym she goes to every morning was having a couple's workout session. That was their date night. Okay.
It was not what I envisioned on having a workout session for my date night. I told her on the way there, I said, this is, you can ask her, this is true. I said, there was probably a million other ideas that I could have thought of to have a date night.
And not one of those million ideas would have been, let's go to the gym. But we're there. And somehow I ended up there and we worked out and we got to eat afterwards. So that was always a plus. I got to eat.
And so while we were there in this workout, every station we went to was designed around one another.
It was designed to push the other person, to spur them, to, to push them to be better in what they're doing. And this is the thought of spurring on one another.
It's pushing each other to be the best we possibly can be for the cause of Christ. And Paul, as he says this in Hebrews, he, he says, how can we, through our small groups, how does this look? How does this work?
And Scott mentioned it this morning. It's our first one is we push each other to love.
We push each other to show love toward one another. One translation says, this is a way of inciting one another. Okay.
When we began to spur one another through love, we begin to help those who are hurting. I'm going to label a couple of scriptures here. Second Corinthians eight and nine begins to lay out those who are hurting and how we can love them in their sense of hurting.
Another way we can show love is by having hospitality. It's part of our mission statement to promote hospitality.
I loved how Carrie said this morning in Sunday school, hospitality in the New Testament age was an honor. And a gift.
When someone would have come to you and say, Hey, can you lend me something? They would have taken that as a compliment to be able to help them. And church, we must be a people who are showing hospitality.
Using Spiritual Gifts
We must be a people who are using our spiritual gifts to build up the body of Christ. As Romans 12, five and eight says, we must meet the less visible needs of the church.
When we begin to grow together and we begin to show love, we begin to see the needs of the church that maybe aren't the forefathers, front of the needs, right?
There's some big needs. There's some big things that, that the church is able to help out with. But when we're, we're in small groups and we're together with one another, this can be in Sunday school. This can be in discipleship. That's one-on-one.
When you begin to hang out together, that person may say, you know, I, I didn't mention this in church when we're asking for prayer concerns, but, but my brother, he, he's away from the Lord. I, I just really want us to pray for him.
I want us to, to covet that prayer for one another.
And, and all of a sudden in that little bit of time where you're spending time together in a small group setting, you're able to learn about the less or needs of the church. All needs are big, but these are some of the less visible needs of the church. As Galatians 6, two says,
how we spur one another own. And all of a sudden small groups allow us to connect on a level that we never thought possible. That's why I love our Sunday school.
That's why I love the, the times where we meet and we, we meet together in a smaller area because we're able to really begin to know each other on an intimate level. And that's what Jesus showed. That's what Jesus did on an everyday level with his disciples. disciples. He took 12 men and,
of course, there was more than that, but 12 specific disciples. And he walked through life with them.
He said, hey, you're going to go to the grocery store. Let me go with you. Hey, you're going to your mom's funeral.
Let me go with you. Hey, you're, you're, you're, you're going and you're just walking to someone's house. Hey, why don't we walk and talk together? Because Jesus understood the importance of us growing with each other through love and stimulating one another in a way through worship and praising God.
You won't understand how many times I've been in my office or I've been in someone's house and they'll share something and we'll begin to pray with each other. We'll begin to love one another.
And all of a sudden that time of visiting with that person turns into worshiping God for who he is. Worshiping God for the great things that he's given us.
Praising God through the great things. As it was mentioned again in Sunday school this morning, the, the blessings that we receive.
And, and one of the songs that, that Allie mentioned was just counting our blessings and how we have thousands and millions upon blessings.
And if I were to begin to sit down and think about them, it would take me all day just to go through them. And when we begin to get in a small group setting, we're able to talk through those things. We're able to stimulate one another in love, but also into good works.
Right? In practical terms, this is pushing one another to do things that we wouldn't necessarily do. Right? Well, the things that make us uncomfortable. My wife tells me all the time, she says, James, you are outgoing. You're crazy. You, you be around people. Like, that's like your comfort zone.
It's the opposite for me. Okay? I just don't like being around people. Not she doesn't like being around people. She's a teacher. Okay? But she just says, you know,
it's not my comfort zone just to go and hug someone or go and talk to someone or go and interact with someone like that. But she said, but you doing that, I follow along and I do it with you because you're spurring me on into good works.
She doesn't say that specifically, but that's what she's saying is that I am pushing her to do those things that she necessarily wouldn't do. And in the same way for me, she does that for me.
And so, when we are in community together, this is pushing us to do love and good works. This sets an example for other people. When we do good works, people see those things.
Acts 4, 34, John 13, 13 through 15. The Bible talks about how we are to be an example to the world. When we begin to do these good works, other people will say, hey, why are you doing that? And now you're able to invite others to come along with you.
Hey, hey, we're doing a project this coming week or whatever it may be, and you're able to invite them to come alongside of you to work with you. A time of discipleship where you're able to take a brother or sister that's younger in your faith, and you're able to say, hey,
can we meet on a regular basis to grow together?
Can we meet? Titus 2, 3 through 5 talks about this. I was just mentioning it when we were talking about our marriage conference, where we are able to come together. We're able to encourage one another because it is us teaching those that are younger than us.
Encouragement for Accountability
I challenge us, church, this year, I try to do this often, but I want to challenge us specifically to find someone that you can meet with on a regular basis, that you can have accountability, you can have prayer,
you can have study with, that you're able to encourage that person. That person's able to encourage you.
You know that when something's going on, you can call that person. I've got people like this in this church. I've got people like that outside of this church.
Okay, as a pastor, I've got to vent sometimes. I've got to call another pastor friend and say, hey, did you hear? I just got to tell you, I've got this deacon. His name's Logan.
He just gets on my nerves sometimes. I love Logan, so I can say that. Hey, I just can't, like, I've just got to vent to you a little bit about some things.
Not that I'm bad, not that I'm upset. It's just, we've got to have those people, those outlets that we can go to. And it's so important, church, that we have that in our life, where I know if I call this brother and I talk to him, it's going to stay between me and him.
This is the good works that we are able to encourage one another in the midst of trials and tribulations, where we're able to restore one another, where we have these people in our life that are correcting us, that are showing us the way, that are giving us strength in our life.
It could be family members. The list goes on and on, church, because I'm just trying to help us understand being in this small group, being in a group of believers that are considering one another, loving one another, showing each other good works, and ultimately pushing us to be what more like Christ.
Because that's the ultimate goal of Christianity, is that we get closer and closer to Jesus in every area of our life. Not only does it begin with small groups, he continues on into a larger setting. Verse 25, he begins to say the first part, let us not forsake the assembly of ourselves together.
This is the primary gathering of the believers, the church meeting and teaching and fellowshipping with one another. The main primary gathering is to grow the saints and to reach the lost.
The church comes together on a Sunday morning to be encouraged, to be equipped, to encourage the saints so that we can in turn go out into the world and reach the lost of the world. That's what Jesus did.
He met with his disciples. As he met with his disciples and he began to teach them and train them and encourage them, after a very short period of time, all of a sudden he said, okay,
you go out two by two and go into the world. And go and reach the world and teach the world what I've told you. And they're like, hold on Jesus, we're not ready for that. We like this sitting around and talking with you and you doing miracles.
And Jesus said, no, no, no, that's not the purpose.
The purpose is not just to come, the purpose is to come and then go out and reach the world. And those disciples, just like you and me, would be like, oh, I'm not qualified to do that. I'm not qualified to go out and talk to someone about Jesus.
And I love that Jesus says it doesn't matter. He didn't verbatim say this.
I sort of say this as Jesus would have said this. He doesn't call the qualified.
He qualifies the called. He begins to give us the power through the Holy Spirit to go out and to reach others.
Purpose of the Church
That is the primary purpose of the church is to grow the saints and reach the lost. God's people should want to get together as much as they possibly can. I mentioned this this morning. We were in here talking, but Hebrews 3.13, Acts 2.46, the disciples met every single day.
They had this mindset that after Jesus died and rose again and then ascended, for 40 days, the Bible says they met in an upper room together.
And then after the Holy Ghost came upon them and the day of Pentecost happened and they went out and Peter preached, it says that every single day the church met house to house. They did communion together.
They interacted with each other. Thousands of people were baptized. The church was on mission together every single day of their life.
It wasn't just a Sunday morning service or a Saturday evening service, but it was every single day because they said, I have to get as much as I possibly can from the church.
I have to get as much as I possibly can from the body of believers so that I can be empowered to go out. You see, we cannot fulfill our responsibilities as members of God's family by simply just ducking in and out and coming when it seems convenient to us.
The church has to be a priority for us. It must be a priority for us to come and worship together so that we can grow together. One of these one another commands is best fulfilled in this area through worshiping one another in personal relationships and through these small groups.
And the beautiful thing about this is it looks different in every context. You see, I love having people at my house. I love opening my doors and people coming. I shared this morning with our small group. There's not many times my doors are locked. Okay, you can come to my house
pretty much 90% of the time and you can walk on in by my back door because it's open because I want people to know they can come to me at any time. And people know this. I have former teenagers.
I have former church members. I have people that just come and stop by and hang out because I want to be a person that is for one another and for living on mission together.
It may look different for you. You may say, you know, don't come to my house. I don't want you coming to my house. I don't want you near my house but I'll meet you at a restaurant and we can eat and talk. Okay, this isn't a one prescription fits all.
This is, let's see how it looks in my situation. Let's see how it looks in my specific context and begin to live that out on a practical way.
You see, the ultimate goal of this and my ultimate goal this morning is
because as I was sort of thinking through this, I thought, man, Pastor James, maybe you're a little hard on some things because again, I have to preach this to myself before I can preach it to you guys and I'll begin to write this thought down because oftentimes,
and I've shared this before, I was raised in a very legalistic church background, very legalistic where it was preached through to thrive.
If you're not here Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, if you're not here for bus visitation on Saturday,
if you're not here early in the morning to pray with the pastor, like all these things were given out, then you're just a bad Christian.
And I begin to think, man, I don't want to be that and my whole thought was this, I don't want to heap guilt upon you to force you to be in attendance.
I don't want to say, you know what, if you're not here at this time on a Wednesday night or this time on a Sunday, then you're just not a good Christian. Rather, my hope is this,
that your love for God and your love for his people will give you a great delight in taking every opportunity that you have to gather with the church. Listen to that again.
My ultimate goal is that you would love God so much and you would love his people so much that you would say, all I want to do is be around God's people.
All I want to do is learn from one another and I want to take every opportunity I simply can to just gather with one another and love one another. Ultimately, that's going to cause us to want the church to grow. It's going to want us to go out and to reach other people
Importance of Growing Together
but it begins with our love for God and our love for one another and thus taking every opportunity we can to grow together.
You see, if we're not growing together, the old adage is we're just simply sitting still and moving behind.
Okay, no one joins a team or no one goes out and says, you know what, I'm going to be a part of this team but I'm never going to work out with this team. The team shows up on Monday and they have weight training and you just sort of stay home.
I've got the jersey, I'm on the team but I don't want to do the hard stuff with the team. Team shows up on Tuesday and they have hard practices and they're hitting each other and football, whatever it may be and you just sort of sit there on the sideline.
Now, Friday night comes and you're like, coach, I got my jersey, I'm ready to put me in, coach.
And the coach says, hey, hey, you haven't done the hard things for me to put you in yet. And the same things with the church.
God says, I need you to want to grow together so that when the opportunity comes and that person comes in front of your life, you're able to step out and say, God, I've been preparing for this moment.
I've been preparing for the moment where this person comes to me and they need me to pray with them and now I'm ready, I want to pray with them. This person comes to me and they begin to say, I've got that brother or sister that's lost, I just need that prayer.
You're able to spend time and love and care for them
because that's what this service of the church does. It comes together, together it meets in order for us to go out and to serve one another.
But then he continues on in this verse, in verse 25, he says, let us not forsake the assembly of ourselves together as is the manner of some.
He's saying here that some even in this day were forsaking the assembly. He says again,
but let us exhort one another, another one another in this same passage, especially as you see the day approaching. I'll put it down like this. Again, I'm a literator guy. I like to make things look right. I'll put it down like this. This is socials.
These are the times where we get together and we exhort each other over breaking of bread,
over times of just enjoying fellowship together where we'll have a Sunday afternoon lunch or we'll have a worship night that we've got coming up in March and we'll get together and we'll worship together and we'll sing praises to God and then we'll go and we'll have a time of fellowship together.
This is building up us, one another, exhorting one another around the table. This is lifting up the body of Christ.
In church, I put out a couple of ways like this just practically. This can be here at church. This can be in others' homes.
This can be at the community center. This can be at restaurants. This can be at a concert. This can just simply be in the fellowship hall sitting there and encouraging and exhorting one another. This thought of socializing
with each other and coming together and loving one another is so part of my DNA.
It's so part of who I am and I love it and I love doing life with other people. And we must be so motivated by the eternal and the heavenly perspective that we say, I want to be around people. Look at how he finishes this verse out.
Exhortation as the Day Approaches
especially as you see the day approaching. The closer we get to Jesus' return, the more we should be wanting to be around people who are like us, who are like the church, who are wanting to grow into Christ-likeness. There are a couple of verses here. Romans 13, 11-13. 1 Thessalonians 5, 2. 2 Peter 3, 10-11.
I can go on and on about the church coming together because our reality is not in this world. Our reality is in a future world with Christ one day. And Paul is saying here, as you see the day approaching, exhort one another. By any means necessary,
exhort one another. Come together, love one another, and encourage one another so that we can see Christ's name magnified. It is God's mutual encouragement
by our means of grace. God says, I want to encourage you so that you can go out and see someone who is in need of grace, see someone who is in need of forgiveness, and you're able to say, hey, can I encourage you
today? Can I help you today? Oftentimes, when we'll have socials,
you'll see this from time to time from me. I'll get my food and I like to eat first because, not because I'm hungry, but I like to eat first because I eat fast for one, but as soon as I'm done, I'll tell Allie, all right, I'm done. I'm going to walk around.
And I'll just walk around every table and talk to people and hang out with people because I want to be around people.
I want to be around what's going on in your life and I'll begin to ask just basic questions, what's going on, and just get in the conversation going. And oftentimes, this is on me, I'll spend too much time talking to someone and half the room will have left.
And I look up and I'm like, oh man, I failed. Like I didn't get to talk to that half the room.
And oftentimes, we have this opportunity to share grace and comfort with other people because God has encouraged us and we get to encourage others. Exhort one another.
Oftentimes, I feel like church, we fail in the exhorting area. We're good at encouraging and saying, hey, Stephen, you're doing this wrong. I think you need to do this better. We're really, really good at that.
But oftentimes, we fail in the exhorting of one another and lifting one another up and saying, hey, can I just encourage you today?
Jade walked in today in my office and she's kept this dress a secret all for like two weeks. Her and Allie went shopping and she said, this is my Valentine's Day dress. We take our kids on separate Valentine's Days so I'll take Jade out. We typically get our nails done.
Okay, I'm not too big of a man to get my toes worked on.
And so we'll go out and we'll get our manicures and pedicures done and Allie will take Birdie out and they'll do whatever they decide to do. And she said, I got a special dress just for that date.
She came in today, I mean, beaming ear to ear. Okay, she was excited to show me her dress today because she knew
I was going to encourage her. She knew I was going to say, look at that pretty girl. Okay, and I said that and she got even a big, I didn't know her grin could get bigger but it got bigger. And oftentimes church,
we're so busy in the world and busy in what we're doing, we fail to see those opportunities where that person needs encouragement. They're looking for it, they're asking for it, they're in need of it and we just fail to give the encouragement and they walk away more discouraged than when they came in.
I believe that's why Paul says here that we need to exhort one another because as the day is approaching, it's going to continue to get worse. So how are we exhorting one another when it comes to these areas?
As Terry comes and begins to close us down, I've just got a little challenge for us today.
A little thing, if you'll turn your paper over that you've been taking notes on, I'm going to give us a challenge to maybe write a couple things down and if you don't right now, that's fine. I know for me personally, when I don't do things in the moment,
I sometimes fail to do them later. So I want to challenge us right now. Now, in your mind,
think of three people that maybe the Lord has brought to your mind as I've been preaching this morning. Three people that you need to spur on to love and good deeds, love and good works.
As you begin writing those names down, you begin thinking, okay, this is maybe a son that's an estranged son or maybe my neighbor who's been going through a hard time or maybe even a church member that just hasn't been here in a while that hasn't been around the people of the Lord
and the Lord's brought them to your mind and you begin to write their names down. I want you to also write down five ways that you can encourage them.
Maybe it's a text message, maybe it's a card, maybe it's a phone call, maybe it's a pound cake that you just bake and you take to their house and you say, hey, I was thinking of you, I want to give this to you.
Five different ways that's unique to you that you can encourage and stimulate that believer or that person that's next door.
Maybe it's not even a believer, maybe it's someone who's lost that you can just reach out to
and you can say, hey, I want to show you that I love you, I want to care for you, I want to encourage you in these ways. And then the last thing I want us to think about, you don't have to write this down,
but the question I want to ask is, how are you adding to the body of believers? By taking advantage of every opportunity to meet in fellowship because ultimately our goal should be to grow to be more Christ-like.
And when we take advantage of these opportunities, we grow to be more Christ-like. Maybe you're sitting here this morning and I haven't specifically preached on salvation, but you're saying, Pastor James, you keep talking about this term Christ-likeness, but I don't even know who Christ is, I don't even know who Jesus
Invitation to Accept Christ
is. Well, this Jesus came to die for us. He came to take upon your punishment of sin upon His life to die our death so that we can live forever with Him.
Maybe here this morning you say, Pastor James, I want to make that decision. I've never been baptized and I don't even know what baptism looks like and I don't even know what salvation looks like. That is part of the church is reaching the lost.
And so this morning, maybe you're one of those who just need to come and accept Jesus. Maybe you've never done it, maybe you've been in church 80 years and that's never happened and now is the day as the day of salvation. But ultimately, together church,
we must grow to be more Christ-like. We never have arrived at this and we will only arrive at this when Christ comes back to get His church
and where our bodies will be transformed into a new body. And so our question is, how can we grow to love and good works towards one another?
Father, we love You, we thank You for what You've done. Lord, I'm so thankful we get to grow together.
I'm so thankful for what the church means to me in my life ever since I was a baby. As I shared last week, being brought to church as just an infant, a couple of days old. And how I was
saved in the church, I was called to preach in the church, I was married in the church,
and Lord, I know when I die I'll be buried in the church, Lord, because the church is Your mode to reach the world. Lord, Lord, help us today to encourage one another more, to spur one another on more so that we can grow closer and closer to You.
Lord, help us today as we go into our time of invitation. In Your name we pray. Amen.
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