The gospel of Jesus is an invitation out of restlessness, anxiety, and anger and into a life of meaning and purpose. By His Spirit, there is power over sin, death, and the dominion of darkness.
If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. If you don’t have a Bible, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you; you can grab that. This will be our primary text, and my plan is just to walk us through it. But before we get started, there are two things I want to highlight. One, right now, after at least a decade of prayer, we have finally launched TVC Español, which means over in Suite 288 right now there are a couple of hundred Spanish speakers in a service that is fully in Spanish. They are worshiping, and I’ve got a video that just got sent to me showing them getting after it over there. I kind of want them to sprinkle back in here and bring some of that Latin flair to this joint. So, they’re over there getting after it, and then Jonathan’s going to preach in Spanish. Man, we have been praying for that and working towards it for over a decade, so for it to launch today is a pretty big deal. We’ve asked God to help us engage in this community in all areas, and so they’re over there making that happen, which I think is worthy of celebrating. Now, the second thing I want to do is highlight and thank a group of men and women here who consistently put themselves in harm’s way for our benefit, and that is our parking team and our shuttle drivers. If you’re on our parking team or a shuttle driver, will you please stand up so we can recognize you? Yes, stay standing for a second; I would love to talk to you. Thank you! I don’t know that anyone is told they are number one as consistently as you guys are, and you are often ignored and sometimes treated poorly, yet you just keep coming back to serve us. Whether it’s 106 degrees outside or 20, whether it’s raining or perfect—though in Texas, we only get four perfect Sundays every other year—you have served this body beautifully. If you’re a shuttle driver, thank you. Let me say this: I know the parking lot is a hot mess, and we’re getting there. We’ve gone from shuttling about 200 people to shuttling close to 800 people, so thank you for that. Please keep doing that, or if you can come on Saturday at 4, it would just take the pressure off Sunday mornings. I want to sincerely thank you, men and women. Part of our philosophy here is that people who are far from God are welcome and that people who know the Lord, but are what the Bible would call infants in their faith, are welcomed and wanted here. Sometimes that means you’re on the receiving end of some immature or unbelieving actions, and you’ve absorbed that with grace. I don’t have the personality type to be in the parking lot; I’d have a prison ministry! But you guys have absorbed and served this church beautifully, and so I wanted to publicly thank you for that. Now, I want to pray over you. I just want to pray a blessing over you, and then we’re going to dive into this passage. So let me pray for you. Father, I bless these men and women in the name of Jesus. I don’t know what they’re praying about right now or what’s on their hearts, but Father, will you minister to them in deep ways for their glad service to you among this body? Where there’s weight or concern in their lives, will you meet them there? Will you continue to encourage their hearts? I pray that every time we baptize someone or they witness you breaking through, they would embrace that they’ve been a part of that; that without them, it wouldn’t work here. Thank you for their glad-hearted service to you, even amidst consistently being ignored and treated poorly. We bless them now as a congregation in the name of Jesus. Amen. Thank you, guys! When I was studying for the Beyond series that we preached last year, I was trying to dive into, sociologically, what was happening in our culture. I’m an amateur sociologist; my degrees and training are in theology. Thus, anytime I’m treading in a domain I’m unfamiliar with, I want to be careful, especially with any kind of statistics. I wholeheartedly agree with what Mark Twain said about statistics, and I’ll clean it up for church—he said that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Twain was basically saying you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say. I think that’s a good thing for us to hear in this day and age where there are many social media experts who have no idea what they’re talking about. With that said, I tried to dive into specific places that are as agenda-free as possible, and I found some high-level, I think trustworthy stats as I was getting ready for Beyond. Here are some of those this morning: at least four in ten U.S. adults, that’s 41%, have experienced high levels of psychological distress in the last three to five years.
