Home Away From Home

Hello, Salt Church. How are you doing today? Good to see you this morning. Wow, standing—that song was playing, you know, as we were transitioning, it's like standing in the light makes my heart come alive. Isn't that so true?

That when we gather together, in the name of Jesus, our hearts come alive, come alive. And that's kind of what I want to talk about today as we enter into the next installment of our series, Dawn is Coming. Before we do that, I want to remind you, if you're new with us, please do connect with our Welcome Center after church today and fill out one of those connection cards, those digital connection cards, or you can do a manual one if you would like—thank you, thank you—if you would like, just a great way to connect with our church. Also, I do want to tell you, we have—we are relaunching Lunch with Leon this week—next weekend. So, if you want to have lunch with me, come on out and have lunch with me next weekend, right after church.

Time and location will be determined, since we're in a new area. We usually do it at Gino's Pizza, but we're going to figure that out. But go ahead and register online. You can do that on our website, or you can—if you have the Church Center app, you can download that. I think—do we have a visual for our Church Center app, Lisa Marie?

I don't know if we have that up there today. If not, that's fine. But our Church Center app can be downloaded, and you can find out about all of our events and things going on. By the way, you that are online—I don't mean to leave you out today—will y'all give a good hand to our Church Online today? Still got a lot of people out there tuning in today with our Church Online.

We're so thankful that you've been able to connect with us today, and we hope that you're back with us very soon. We would love to see you back at church. We do have plenty of social distancing going on here, and there's plenty of seats around for you to come back to church. So if you feel comfortable, come on back. But if you don't, we understand.

Continue to connect with us online. Fill out that check-in card. Let us know you're here. And you also can fill out a digital connection card and connect with us online. We'd love to see you and hear from you.

But yeah, so you can download that app, and you can connect with us with Lunch with Leon this week. And I'm excited to share more with you about the Church and how you can get involved. And if you're just kicking the tires, that's okay. There's lots of great churches around here to attend, and we are certainly kingdom-minded. But we are in a series called Dawn is Coming, and we are hitting 1 Peter 2, 1 through 12 today.

And if you have an opportunity, or you already have downloaded the Bible app, you can go to your phone and download the Bible app, and we have an event available there for you. I'm not sure if we have that. Okay. I'm not sure if we have the graphic that we created this week. Elise Marie, do we have that graphic to download the church center, the events thing?

Okay. All right, all right. That didn't get to the right place. Okay. All right.

Great. So, you can go to the Bible app. You can click on More, click on Events, find Salt Church, and then you'll see our notes there available for you, because we're not handing out physical notes right now. So, that's available for you as you follow along. Let's go ahead and hit Scripture here, beginning with verse 1 in chapter 2.

It says, Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Oh, man. Pastor, what are we talking about today? Sounds like one of those sin messages, right? Are you ready?

Like newborn babies crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation. Now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to Him, the living stone, rejected by humans, but chosen by God and precious to Him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. But you are a chosen people. Can I give a hand clap?

Can I get a hand clap for that? You are a chosen people. How many of you believe that? You are a chosen people. You are a royal priesthood.

You are priests. You are a holy nation. You are God's, get this, special possession, that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light. Can you give praise for that this morning? Amen?

I want to hear this house roar with victory this morning. Can you give praise to Jesus because He's called us out of darkness into His wonderful light. This morning, we can gather together consuming that and just eating that up, right? Amen. Once you were not a people, but you are now a people of God.

Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. And dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war on your souls. Live such good lives among the pagans, those who are not believers, that though they accuse you of wrongdoing or doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits. And the church says, Amen. This is the word of the Lord.

So I'm calling this message home away from home. I also thought about calling it a taste of heaven. And that's what I want to get to today. I remember the first time I lived away from home or I transitioned out of a parent home and I went to college. And it was quite an experience to have that college experience, you know.

You move from having your own room to having a really small room with someone else. Y'all get me there? And then you have this bed and I'm, you know, 6'1", so you got this little bed and my feet are hanging off the top bunk because the roommate I had was so on it. He was there way before me and he claimed the bed before I did. So I had the top bunk and my feet were hanging off the edge of the bed there because it was too small for me.

And then, you know, I was used to having a bathroom right near me. So, you know, I had three sisters, so I kind of was challenged in that already, you know, trying to get up early enough to get to the bathroom before they woke up. Right? But I had a—instead of having a bathroom right there near me, it was down the hallway, and it was a community bathroom, and it was kind of funny, every morning you would wake up to the sound of flip-flops, you know, going down the hallway, you know, trying to get to the shower before everybody else. People would wake up really early to try to get there, and that was my alarm clock a lot of mornings, you know, just heading to that shower.

And everybody had to wear flip-flops because you didn't know what was going on in that shower, okay? I'm not going to go any further with this, but you can kind of fill in the gaps, right, of what was going on. And it was just an interesting time. And food-wise, you had a little refrigerator, you know, it was about this high, and you bought—usually you lived off a diet of party pizzas and ramen noodles that you heated up in the microwave. Brett Cooper, that was up here a few weeks ago, he was there with me my freshman year in college, and we had something called noodle time where we would get together and make our ramen noodles.

And we'd get so tired of ramen noodles that we'd try to figure out other ways of eating it, so we started eating it dry and pouring, you know, the stuff on top of it. And maybe it would taste a little better if I do it that way. Of course, that didn't really work. And, you know, you go to the cafeteria, and a lot of times I didn't make it to breakfast, although breakfast is like my favorite meal in college, you just don't make it ever to breakfast. So you try to do whatever you can to stay alive, you know, and eat.

And you're young, so you eat all the time, right? So your diet consists of this junky food all the time. And then you have those little ice trays, you know, and they're like this big. I'm copying Jimmy Fallon here, by the way. He did a little stand-up about this, but it was so funny.

But you have these little, little, little, and you wait like hours just for one little piece of ice, you know? And you're like, oh, there's a piece of, hey, welcome to my room. You want a piece of, and you get tweezers, you know? And you're kind of like, hey, yeah, you want some ice? And here's a little soda.

It was definitely a different type of environment, for sure, just setting up a home away from home. It certainly was different. But one of the joys of being in college, one of the highlights of being there was when you got invited by a friend that was local in the area to the family's home. And you got to go into that home, and you get to sit at the table, and there's a smell and aroma in the house that kind of reminds you of being home with your family, right? And you walk in, and you sit down, and you actually get a good meal, and you sit down on the couch, have a cup of coffee afterwards, and you get to sit on the couch so you're not worried that there's something in it, you know, because there's so many guys in a dorm that, you know.

So you have that taste of home, that feeling of home, that warmth of home, and that was one of the highlights. When I was doing some ministry in Africa, I had an opportunity to go there and minister, but I had to share a room with this guy, and he was a great guy, man of God. He was about 20-something years older than me, and he was a little bit bigger than I was. And we walked into the little room that we were sharing together, and we discovered that there was one small double bed that we had to share. And not only that, he had a problem with sleep apnea, and he couldn't bring his machine with him to a country, you know, overseas.

It's just impossible to take that with you, especially to a third-world country. You wouldn't be able to use it anyway. Anyway, so needless to say, and also with the time change of Africa, needless to say, I was having a lot of issues, right? I was not sleeping. I couldn't even—my little place on the bed, you know, he was like—he would throw his arm over and lay his leg out in his sleep.

And, you know, chainsaws are going off, you know, all night. And I'm not getting any sleep, so I go over, and I make me a pallet on this little tile floor and just lay there, and very, very uncomfortable. But it was better than having a chainsaw in my face all night. And he's a great guy, by the way, if he's listening to this. Man, I'm sorry to throw you under the bus.

I'm not mentioning your name right now. But it was quite an experience. But then the missionaries that we were working with heard that I was sleeping on this tile floor and invited me into their home the last few nights we were there. And I'm telling you, oh, my gosh. I never felt a bed so comfortable in my life as that bed.

I was like, who—where did y'all get this bed? It was like a king-size bed, and you sunk in it. And I don't know if it was because I was sleeping on the floor for days on end, but it definitely was a light. Like, it was home away from home. It made me feel like home.

It made me feel like I was home. And I think—I find it interesting, like, camping trips, right? We go camping, and we were at a bonfire last night. It kind of gave me the feeling of camping, you know, because I haven't been camping in quite a few years because I have little ones and just the things that life kind of put at you. But I love camping, but I find it interesting that we work, you know, 40-something days out of the year, and then we go off, and we pretend to be homeless for a few days, you know, using our vacation.

We pretend to be homeless, right? I mean, what is that about? And then we don't only do that. We go, and we try to grab everything we possibly can. We pull it all together to try to make it feel like home, right?

So we spend hours and hours—and that's not the point of camping. The point of camping is actually sleeping in a sleeping bag, right? I mean, like, under the stars in this small tent, and now we're purchasing Winnebaga's and huge, big buses so that we can kind of bring home to where we are. And some of you are like, where are you going with this, Leon? You're talking about camping.

You're going all over the place about these things. Well, what Peter is trying to get to here in this passage is that heaven is our home. But we have a temporary home away from home. Much like camping, we're setting up a semi-permanent area. As believers, we're thinking of heaven, heaven which will be our home, but right now we've set up a temporary residence.

This is our home away from home. And Peter starts out by saying, I urge you, I beg you. It's a way of him saying, I beg you, I urge you to live as exiles and foreigners in this world. Other versions call it sojourners or pilgrims. We live as pilgrims.

We live as strangers, or we live as resident aliens in this world. That's what he's saying here. This is not your home. This is a temporary home. See, Peter wants us to see that if we are Christ's followers, dawn is coming.

We are going to be home. But for now, we are going to be home. Our in-between homes, so we're setting up our places, we're setting up our jobs, we're setting up our lives, we're setting up everything with the hopes of being in heaven. So he's telling us to keep our eyes on heaven. Don't ever get your eyes off of heaven and your hearts off of heaven.

Don't pull away from that because that's your home and you need to be living now with the hopes of heaven, but experiencing heaven now in our life. Because it all goes back to the end that we can have all the stuff, we can have the biggest Winnebaga in the business, right? We can take it camping with us, we can have this big fancy thing that we spend over $200,000 for, but at the end of the day, you have the biggest Winnebaga in the graveyard is not a very lofty dream, right? It really isn't. We can have everything in this life.

So what he's trying to tell us is that our treasure is not here. Our treasure is in heaven, and in order to experience joy in darkness, we have to keep our hearts and our thoughts and our minds on heaven. Heaven awaits us. Dawn is coming. The light of life is coming.

It's coming, guys, but we have to keep our hearts in heaven, but we also have to live here with hope. And he's sharing that with us here. I think it's interesting that he uses the word resident alien. What is a resident alien, or what is a sojourner, or what have you? It's a person who sets up temporary resident in an area, but it's not their home country, right?

I think about my uncle who's British. He's actually a minister, pastor in Wilmington, North Carolina, but very, very British. He's lived here his entire life almost. He moved here for college and just never went home, met my dad's sister, and decided he wanted—went back and was a missionary in England for a little while with a church here, and came back home. He's got his American citizenship.

He loves America. He loves, loves, loves America. He would never want to move back to England because he just loves it here so much, but he's still English. He's very proud of being English, and we pick on him on the holidays, especially Fourth of July. That's just a fun day for Uncle Paul.

We just give him a hard time. We won the war. Y'all couldn't get us. We were a pretty hard group to tackle, but he kind of laughs about it. But any time we mention anything about the queen, or he hears anything about the queen and the monarchy, this proudness comes in his heart.

Like, it lights up. He loves his queen. He loves the royal family. There's something special. Although he's here, he works here, his residence is here.

In fact, his citizenship in a worldly sense is here. His first citizenship is there, so he still has his heart set on the homeland. He still thinks about the homeland. He's still got all that stuff in him that's from the homeland, and that's just an example of who we are. We're living here.

We've even got our citizenship here, right, on this earth, but our real citizenship, our homebound citizenship is somewhere else, and that's heaven. We are just resident aliens living here, and we have a home away from home. How do we experience home away from home? You're going to love this. How do we get a taste of heaven right here at this moment?

It's called this. What we're doing right now is our home away from home. This is where we get a taste of heaven, being with the people of God, entering in worship with the people of God. And Peter talks about these living stones, these living stones. There was a paper written by a student of Harvard School of Design.

He was doing his Master's of Architect thesis. His name was Kyle Dugdale, and that's all I know about Kyle Dugdale, that he was just a student at Harvard. But he had this incredible paper about the role of architecture, what it played in the fall, like with Adam and Eve, and when they were driven out of the garden. Because that was the beginning of architecture right there. When the fall took place, people started roaming and going out and building cities and creating places for people to live.

And his idea is that it was our defense mechanism for losing access to the presence of God. That's the way we do it, by building structures and building buildings. So when we go back to Genesis and we see the Tower of Babel, what was happening there? The people were coming together to try to build a structure, an architectural structure, to connect with God. Because they had lost the presence of God, and it was the only way that they could cover what they had.

And here's what he wrote in his thesis. He says, Architecture has struggled to mitigate the effects of the fall, but the city is a poor substitute for the Garden of Eden. Architecture performs, at best, the role of a fig leaf covering humanity's exposure. In the end, it is perhaps not so much a cure as it is an expression of humanity's homesickness. We are homesick because this is not our home.

We long, there's a longing, there's a yearning inside of all of us that wants to connect with our Creator. There's a longing inside of us that wants to connect with Him, that yearns for something more, and that's the presence of God. And you can go all across the world. You can look at these big buildings. We love to look at architecture, don't we?

Especially the old churches, the thousands of years old churches that you can go in Europe and you can walk around. We stand at all at those things. Wow, how did they build this beautiful structure that just stood here for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. It's just amazing that these things are still here. This is awesome, you know.

But ultimately, what we're looking at is cold stones, right? Because what was happening, living stones built that. Living stones gathered together at one time in that, right? And we are called living stones. In fact, He says we are building a house.

He goes back to that analogy of a house where we are building an organism where we get to experience the life-giving message of Jesus Christ, the life-giving blood of Jesus Christ, and He the cornerstone in which we build that foundation upon. I feel like I'm doing pretty good here, but you guys aren't responding. Come on, give me some excitement here. So I want to give you five benefits of the kingdom of God or the church, the benefits of being planted in the house of God, okay? And this, I think, is more significant than ever before because we are in a pandemic, right?

And a lot of us are having to worship from home. Some of you are listening right now from home. Many of you are listening right now. Many of you are going to listen to this later on in the week, and you're experiencing isolation, right? You're experiencing some loneliness.

You're experiencing something that you don't get when you're with people. I don't care how introverted you are. There is something in us, and that leads me to my first point, we need a place to belong. We need a place to belong. Isn't that what we crave, belonging?

Isn't that what inside of us, you know, when you were on the playground when you were a kid and it get picked for the kickball team, or you got left out of the baseball team? They sat you on the bench because you weren't that good, and you're just not good enough for the team. And you had that hurt inside of you, even as a young child, what that meant to you and how that felt. And we have this fear. There's a lot of people that have fears, right?

We have fears of, you know, there's arachnophobia, you know, fears of spiders and claustrophobia, being in tight places. My wife has a fear of bugs like you would not believe it comes straight from hell because she will scream across the house, you know, at one little bug crawling through the thing. It drives me crazy. I'm rolling my eyes. I know I should be more sensitive, but it's a bug, you know?

And she's like, go kill that thing. She acts like it's a demon in there, you know? Like, ah, it's a bug. I don't like snakes, you know? If a snake's ever in my house, I'm going to call one of you guys out to come out and get it.

I mean, I'll just be honest with you. I, I, even these little green cute snakes are supposedly that you guys like. I just don't like snakes. I never like snakes. It's hard for me.

But there's a fear I think everybody has, and that's the fear of being invisible. A fear of being invisible that no one would see us. That, that if we're hurting, or we're sad, or we're in a place of darkness, that, that, that we would not be seen, or we would not be heard, or something people would just not know. Um, this series was, was inspired a lot from, uh, Levi Lusko, a pastor in Montana. And, uh, he lost his child, his five-year-old child to asthma, asthma attack.

Um, and, uh, he, uh, um, just had a tremendously hard time. He wrote a book called Through the Eyes of a Lion, talking about the eyes of his daughter, and the eyes of heaven. And, uh, very powerful read. Um, and I, I'd choke up just thinking about what he was going through losing his child at, uh, just, you know, literally a few days before he, before he was going to preach to Christmas, his, his 10 Christmas services, you know, at his fast-growing church. And, uh, they took off to, to Seattle to do some healing, you know, and Seattle just seemed like a, a sad place to be able to be sad, right?

Some of you lived in Seattle. I think, Chris, you guys, uh, the barns, y'all can't, y'all lived in Seattle for a while, so you, you know, kind of what that means when I talk about this. But, uh, but living in, uh, uh, being there, he, he, he went to a local, uh, coffee house, and he was just so sad, and so, just in a really, really sad place, just thinking about his child and thinking about God, just didn't really know even how to articulate the scripture, what that meant, and, and couldn't make any, any, couldn't get any understanding of anything, trying to have devotion, you know, couldn't even do that. And he said, he sat there, and he looked across the room at, at other people, and he thought, and God brought us his thoughts, says, nobody here really knows how sad I am. On the outside, it might look like I'm, I'm, I'm good.

I'm okay. And then he kind of turned it around. He thought, how many people have sat across from me, or beside me, or over from me, and I never knew how sad they were. As sad as I'm feeling right now, there are people that I have come, come in contact on a regular basis as, as sad, that, probably as sad, if not worse than what I am now, and I wouldn't have even known it. People are going through stuff, and this is a place where you can come, and you can belong.

And if you're sad, and you're hurting, and if you're in pain, this is a place where you can come, and we will care for you. We will pray for you. We will be with you. We will walk you through it. We are, we are here.

It's, it's living, it's, it's, it's, it's, we're stacked stone upon stone, and it's a living, breathing organism. And I just want to tell you, if you're experiencing that today, did you know you were knitted in your mother's womb? That, that we are a place, a living, breathing place that represents the cornerstone of Jesus Christ, the one who thinks about you and loves you and, and died for you. This is a place where we are not invisible, and it allows us to be a part. If you, let me just say this, if you allow us to be a part of your life, that's the key there.

It's a place where you can receive healing. It's a place where you can see, receive hope if, and that's your place if you take that step into allowing people to be a part of your life. The second thing is, it's not only a place where we belong, it's a place where we can grow. And let me just deal with this for a few minutes. First Peter says, and, and, and verse 2 of chapter 2, like newborn babies crave pure spiritual milk so that you may, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.

Craving pure spiritual milk. I think that's interesting there. I think about my child when he was really young, Max, my first experience having a child, and, and, and he would cry, you know, when he was hungry. He would whine. He was a bit selfish about it, but he was hungry, right?

Right? I mean, but, but he would grab that bottle, and he almost yanked it out of your hand, and pull it up to his face, just like he was dying. And we just fed him an hour ago, right? So he's like, he's like so hungry. And that's what Paul, Peter's saying here.

He's like, listen, you, you gotta have this spiritual craving, this milk, this spiritual craving, because, you know, babies, when they're, they're cute when they're selfish, but it's not so cute when you're 30 years old and plus, right? It's not very cute to be selfish. And so, so he says, we need to get rid of this stuff. And he starts speaking about the sin, and, and, and the stuff in our lives that we need to get rid of it, not just get rid of it, get rid of it all. He says, every kind of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, and envy, as you find it, set it aside.

As it comes to you, start getting rid of it. We gotta get it all out of us, and you need to declare war against sin. That's what he's saying here. And in first, first Peter 11, he says, dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your souls. So life isn't a game.

Life is warfare. Life isn't a game. You need to be prepared for war. You need to play as if the enemy is coming after you, and he's got a strategic plan. Let me tell you something about Satan, because people put little horns on Satan and make him, oh, he's so funny.

He's so cute. He's not cute at all. He's smart. He's deceptive. He says he wants to steal you.

He wants to steal your eyes. Not only does he want to do that, he wants to kill you. He wants to kill you. He wants to really take away everything that you love. And he not only wants to do that, he wants to destroy you.

He wants to wipe you off the face of this planet because he knows he hasn't won. He has not won the war. The war is already won, and he's going to do everything he can. And he's smart, and he's deceptive, and he's not going to play fair. He's not going to play fair with you.

He's going to use everything he can against you. He's going to cause you to stumble. He's going to use every trick in the book. He knows every trick in the book. And he wants to destroy your family.

He wants to destroy your marriage. He wants to destroy your children. He wants to do everything he can to hurt you. This is not, la, la, la, la, la, la, yeah, ooh, look, look, he's a little cartoon character floating around on clouds on your shoulder. That's not, I know that sounded a little crazy there, but this devil, this Satan, the adversary, the forces that are around us are very real, and they're going to use it.

So we don't play games. So to set aside, you need to sit beside. You need to be seated beside. And that's what it means by these living stones that Peter's talking about. Like living stones, you are built into a spiritual house.

We don't grow alone. We need each other. We need others to help us grow, to correct us, to talk to us, because it says iron sharpens our, Psalms 27 says, iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another, right? And we need each other to sharpen us and help us, and we need somebody to confess. We need to get this stuff out.

We need to be just honest with each other. Just put it out there. Look, look, I'm really sorry I didn't show up Sunday, that last Sunday to help you. I know you counted on me. You know, I was supposed to be here on the setup team, and I didn't show up at that.

You know, just an example. You know, just, I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when you really needed me most. I'm sorry that I didn't show up to Salt Group last week when you, when you, when I said I was going to bring, you know, the steaks, and I decided I just didn't want to bring steaks, and I don't want to be around anybody. You know, you know, little things like that, but it gets much bigger than that. You've got to lay aside all that selfishness, all that deceit, all that sinfulness, and that only comes when we are together in a living, breathing organism called the church.

It does not work. You do not grow alone. You cannot grow alone. It's impossible to grow alone. We have to be with each other.

This is growth. We've got to put some things out there on the line to get better. And I'm convinced of this, and I was thinking about this the other day, that a lot of people don't come to church, right? We, we, we know that. That's not something to convince.

There's a lot of people, even if they say they're believers that don't come to church, but I'm convinced of this. Here's the reason why they don't want to come and gather together. They just don't want people to find out about their stuff. It's really what it comes down to. It's not that they don't enjoy the service.

They don't enjoy being around people. Maybe they have some hangups about some of the service. Maybe it's too loud. Maybe it's too soft. Maybe the preacher preaches this way or preacher preaches that way.

I know there's a lot of complaints about a lot of different things because everybody has their style of worship. But ultimately, I think people stay away from church and use excuses in front and put masks on so they don't have to reveal their stuff. And I think, and here's what I want you to know. If that's you, if you're here today and you're like, you know what? I've just stayed out of church because I don't want to let, I don't want people digging.

I don't want people digging. Okay, first of all, that's a lie from Satan because he's convinced you that we dig. Like when you're coming in, I wonder what that person was up to last week. That sinner. Oh my, yeah.

Don't put on that mask. You know, that's, so here's what I want to say. No one is digging around trying to know your stuff. We don't care. Okay, we just care that you're here.

We care that you're here. We care that you're here to love, to be with us so that we can love you. The second thing is everyone has stuff, and it's not unique. Okay? I mean, I got stuff.

You got stuff. We all got junk in the trunk, right? We're hiding it. We're locking it up. We're not telling anybody.

Some of you read that wrong. You're all, you said junk in the trunk. You said junk in the trunk. Okay. Right?

It's not unique. We're not surprised when you confess that it's something horribly wrong. You know, like something you want to hide from the pastor, hide from the people in church. I thought this was so funny about church, right? We just think we've got to come in and let me make sure I'm perfect, you know, because I don't want people to find out about my stuff, right?

I mean, it's so, like, backwards, right? And then the last thing is if you don't get your stuff out, your stuff will eventually get you. Because if you want to stay where you are, if you don't want to grow, if you don't want to get to where you need to be, if you don't want to experience life, just stay where you are. Just stay isolated. Stay.

Don't grow. That's fine. Another thing, growth is about you eating, okay? You crave milk like the urgency of a baby. We have to eat to grow.

Look what Jeremiah 15, 16 says, Your words were found, and I ate them, and your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart. So when we hear things like this, when we get together and we're learning about the word together, and I'm exploring it, even preparing it for you, God's just feeding me, and then I'm feeding you, and we're growing together. But it's not just what you eat. It's who you eat it with. It's not just what you eat.

You've got to do it with people. It's like being at a table, and you're the only one there. It's always a little awkward when you're alone eating, right? I mean, and what are we doing? We're usually eating hard, eating fast, eating, you know, just throwing things around.

It's a little unpleasant, right, when we're eating along, because usually we're in front of a TV, or we're in a place somewhere, and we're looking around. I don't want everybody, you know, like I'm alone. I've got to get somewhere, you know, whatever it might be. But it's who you eat it with. But Martin Lloyd-Jones was a famous British preacher that passed away not too long ago, but he had a very successful ministry from, you know, early days.

And for a long time, he wouldn't even allow his stuff to be recorded, his messages to be recorded. Eventually, he got there, you know, when the recording thing started coming along. People were, you know, putting out cassette tapes, if you know what those are. And that was kind of the big ministry in that day. Okay, but at first, he wasn't into that, because he said this, and I think it makes a lot of sense.

You can never get out of a message alone what you can get out of it together. And that's so true. Yeah, you can get fed, you know, in the car driving down the road in the podcast, but there's something special about you being here with other people right now. Amen? And there's just something special about that.

There's something powerful about that, that you can look at each other. Amen. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Oh, man, that really hit me.

Did that hit you? Yeah, it hit me. We need to talk about that. Yeah, wow, that's powerful. Oh yeah, God, yeah.

God is on, you know, we get together and it creates something in us. It does something in us. There's power in presence. I say that word all the time, that sentence all the time. There is very, a very powerful thing when we are present together in worship.

Thirdly, it's a place where, and this kind of tags to that, it's a place to be a part of something bigger than yourself, right? You can never, ever, ever do alone what we can do together as a church. It's impossible. We can do infinitely more as a church than we can on our own. You can go out and do nice things and do nice gestures.

That's great. And God can use you on your own, but you'll never be able to do it at the level that you can with the church. Think about it, the way we're able to give, the way we're able to do, the way we're able to go out and affect our community and our city and our culture and as we grow and as we become more. This is why you should be inviting people in the fold and into the family, right? Because the more we have, the more we can do, and the more powerful we can change the world, right?

I mean, we can do it in a powerful way because we need each other. We have gifts. We bring them all to the table. This person has this gift, that gift, and we do it together, and it's all through the Bible. We never see people doing it alone.

The apostles didn't do it alone. Well, I want to do it alone. Well, Peter didn't do it alone. Paul didn't do it alone. Nobody did it alone.

Peter was consulting with Paul. Paul was consulting with Peter. They were together. They would walk out in twos. Jesus sent them out in twos.

And then he called the church. Jesus built a church, a force together, and we've seen some of the greatest things happen in our culture. Throughout history, some of the greatest organizations have been formed through the church, and it wasn't just one person. Let me just take Billy Graham for an instant. Do you think Billy Graham just went out there and says, I'm going to do this on my own?

No, he had people. He had a vision, but people came around him as a team, and different people came together. Well, I can do this. I can lead worship. I can speak on this.

I can do this. I can organize events. Billy Graham couldn't organize an event to save his life when he started off. He was a great preacher, but he had people that could organize events and put things together because they were presenting the gospel, and they were all coming together as one people, powerfully changing a culture and powerfully changing the world. And we will never be able to do what God has called us to do unless we're a part of something.

Let me just say this. We will never be able to do what we're capable of doing because we won't have the stones. Some of you said, he just said stones. Did he just say stones? Did he say we don't have the stones?

We will not have the stones to do what we need to do if we are not living stones working together. Peter? Because Jesus said, upon this rock, upon this stone, I will build my church. And right before he said that, he said, Peter, I don't call you Simon anymore. Reed, I call you Peter, a rock, a living rock, and I'm going to transform you into some powerful force for this world.

And upon me, upon the cornerstone, you are going to build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Can I get an amen for that? His enemy cannot prevail against the church. The gates of hell will not prevail because we become like whatever we come to. And if we come to the rock, we become rocks.

We can be cold stones or we can be rocks. The next thing is, and quickly, it's a place to make sense of rejection. He says it was a rejected stone. Peter talks about a rejected stone, rejected by man, but chosen by God and precious to him. I think it's interesting that we can always go, you know, when people say, I feel so isolated or I feel rejected.

We can, we always use the, well, Jesus was rejected, right? It's a go-to, right? Jesus was rejected. Oh, I feel depressed. Well, Jesus was depressed.

I mean, I feel so betrayed. Well, Jesus was betrayed. I mean, you can always go to Jesus, right? And it's true because he was the stone that was rejected. And when we think of Jesus being rejected, it makes it a lot easier for us to know if we are rejected that we always have somebody who was greater than us that was rejected.

Think about it. William Baker said this, rejection is much easier to cope with when you remember the greatest person that ever lived was rejected. So when you were rejected from that ball team when you were a kid and all that, you know, and that's still living with you. That's still living with me, by the way. You know, I got, I didn't make the cut.

You know, that's, that's hard. But you can make sense of rejection. This is a place where you can make sense of rejection. You can come here and you can ugly cry all you want to and we won't care, right? So you could just, just, just cry.

I had a friend, a guy here the other day, he says, every time I come in here, I'm just crying all over the place. You're probably looking at me. I said, no, dude, I don't care. Just cry it out because this is a place where you can cry. This is a place where you can make sense of rejection.

It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. This is where the healing takes place because you're getting a taste of what heaven's going to be like. You're getting tastes of heaven.

We ain't scared. And it's a place, finally, it's a place to welcome others. It's a place to welcome others. My last point. There's this thing called the turn.

I kind of, I kind of borrowed this from somebody else. They were talking about the turn. And have you ever been in a building? I used to work in a building that was about 10 stories. It was one of my first jobs.

And you'd have to take an elevator up to your, to your office every day. And, and it's funny, you walk to the elevator, you walk, you walk in and, and you hit the button and you're kind of like anxious because you're wondering, okay, how many people are going to be in this elevator? And what are they going to think of me when I try to walk in this elevator and it's like 20 or 30 people in here? Right? Right?

And then you hit the button and it opens up and, and you're like, there's only two people. But if there's 30 people, you're like, oh, and they're kind of looking at you and they're thinking in the back of their head, I'm sure, oh, this idiot, he's going to come in here and take up room and get all over and get in here. So you're like, like walking in, excuse me, I'm sorry, excuse me. You know, you kind of walk in and you turn and, and you're trying to get in place. And then what do you do?

What do you do? You know, all those people are kind of looking at you. This idiot is sitting on top of me here. What do you do? You turn.

You make the turn. You're in, you make the turn and you become one of them. And then you go down to the next floor and then all of a sudden you're like them, right? You're like, oh gosh, what does this person think? You know, like I've been here for a whole floor, you know, like, like, do they think they, they can come into here?

You know, so what am I trying to say here? Like, never forget your turn when you see. Somebody else climbing into the elevator to get their turn. We can never forget that we once were, just a floor ago, just ten foot before you walked into the elevator, you were there, you needed grace, you needed hope, you were hurting, you were lost, you were in a dark place, and never let us be a church that says, oh, no, no, no, no, stay out of my seat, I don't want to make—no, we're going to make room for everybody we possibly can. If I get people coming to me, you know, somebody took my space, I'm going to like, well, good for you then, you need to learn something, you need to grow, okay?

Because this is not about you, it's about the kingdom of God, and we will do everything short of sin to reach people for Christ, amen? We want to do that, and we want to make room for everybody. The Passion Translation says this, live honorable lives as you mix with unbelievers, even though they accuse you of being evildoers, for they will see your beautiful works, and have reason to glorify God in the day he visits. What does that mean? That it doesn't matter what evildoers say.

When they say evildoers, they're meaning those outside the church, and those in the church we're working and building the church and doing—and he's just like, you know, let's live in a way where people see us, and they might talk about us. They might say, oh, yeah, that Pastor Leon, he's all about money, and he's just trying to, you know, do this and do that and trying to live—you know, he's not really legit, whatever it might be. They might say, oh, yeah, yeah, that religion, yeah, we don't believe in religion. We don't believe, you know, Christianity. Look at the Salem Witch Trials.

Look at the Crusades. They're going to say all those things, right? Constantine did this and did that, and, you know, they're going to pull things out of history, and they're going to talk about us, but he says, no, no, no, we're not worried about that. They can have a lot of—a lot of things they believe about us, and a lot of things they may know about us, but ultimately, in the end, it's about how we live and how we act towards others, the beautiful work that we do, and they have a reason to glorify God in the day he visits us, meaning that the day he visits us, the day we enter into heaven, when that dawn day comes with us, we will be able to stand before God, and God will look at us and say, well done, my good and faithful servant. You know what you did?

Because you made beautiful works in that light. Jim over here saw you, and he was the one that was talking about how bad religion was and how bad the Crusades were and how bad—but he saw your life, and he saw how you live and the beautiful works, and how your church was doing this, and how you were—you know, he saw that, and you did something in his life, and now he's in heaven. He's experiencing dawn with you. Let them see your beautiful works. What's going to make a difference is the work you do.

So what are we going to do? We're going to abstain from evil, but not shame the evildoers. We are going to be resident aliens, but respectful aliens, right? We're going to love people. And next week, I'm going to talk about how to live a beautiful life.

In fact, the rest of the series is kind of aiming to—this is like a linchpin to the rest of the series, so you don't want to back out right now, okay? The first three weeks now has just been this dealing with darkness and how to get it and how to aim for dawn and all this other stuff. But now we're going to talk about how, through the rest of Scripture, the rest of the book of 1 Peter, he's talking about how to live this beautiful life. So we want to be here for that. So let me say this.

We all become living stones, and this is in closing. We all become living stones because it was made possible by the one who was struck by a stone. This is going to be my closing statement today, and I hope this really gets through to you and really touches you. Go back to Exodus, and you'll see that God called Moses to strike the rock, right? And that rock produced—you know, the children of Israel was thirsty.

And he struck the rock with his staff and water flowed out of it. See, that was a type. What you don't see there—you see, yeah, water flew out of the rock. It was a miracle. It was all this other stuff God provided for the people that—for children of Israel.

But what you're really seeing is a struck rock and water flowed out of it. And what we see here is Jesus is that rock, and he was struck. And because he was struck, water flowed from him. It was life-giving water. He was bruised.

He was crushed. We are healed. We are healed because of what Jesus done. Our transgressions are taken away. And it really is about nothing else but that very thing, that very point in time where Jesus said, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.

And by the end of that moment, he says, it is finished. The sin has been covered. The transgression has been covered. The rock was struck. And it's all about—it really just starts with that living—the living stone, Jesus Christ, the cornerstone.

He wants and needs a relationship with you. He wants a relationship. He doesn't need a relationship with you. He wants a relationship with you. You need that relationship with him.

It isn't about what I do or what I accomplish. It really is about making Jesus your friend. He is our hope. And if you haven't said yes to Jesus, or maybe you don't know where you would go if you left this place today and you didn't make it home. If that's you, I want to give you an opportunity to know Jesus today.

With all heads bowed and all eyes closed, this is your opportunity. Don't hold back. Don't wait. This is your time. This is your time in this moment.

The Spirit's pulling you towards him. You've been wanting to make this decision for a long time to make him a friend of yours, to make him a personal Savior of your life. So just pray this with me. Father, in the name of Jesus, I believe that you are the Son of God. Father, in the name of Jesus, I believe that you are the Son of God.

That you died on the cross for my sin. Come into my life and come into my heart. I surrender. I surrender to you today. Come into my life.

Transform me. I don't want to live the same way anymore. I've tried it other ways. It doesn't work. No path worked except the path that you have for me, Lord.

So today, I fall on my knees. My heart is laid before you. Have it all. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Amen. If you gave your heart to Jesus today, give a hand clap to Jesus just for His salvation. And if you gave your life to Jesus, please do let us know. You can connect with our Welcome Center if you want to let somebody know there and fill out something. You can always go online and fill out a digital card and just check.

I made a decision for Jesus today, and we've got some things for you to take the next step. We want to help you grow in Christ as a church. Get plugged in, and God's getting ready to do some amazing things in your life. Thank you so much. I look forward to next week as we talk about the beautiful things that God has for His children.

God has for His children. God has for His children. Thank you.