To Serve Our Community | The Time Is Now | Pastor Adam Bishop

And let me tell you what can happen very easily to any church, our church. We have to be very careful about this. What can happen is that the ministries that were in originally intended and designed for people before long, you kinda forget about that and you actually start to make them the focus rather than the people that they were designed to reach. That's what happens in the story. The priest and the Levi, y'all, they are trained in ministry. These are ministry leaders of the day. They're trained in ministry and they missed the ministry that God had for them that day, which was a hurting person. [00:28:19] (32 seconds)  #PeopleNotPrograms

And if we're not careful, we can let the same thing happen that we get so focused about what we're doing that we forget who we're actually doing it for. So so let's right size this. Let's clarify this. What does that look like here at New Hope? So let's kinda revisit our mission, our purpose statement. The point of this ministry, New Hope Church, is to reach people with the hope of Jesus, teach them to follow God's word, and release them as lights into the world. That's been the focus of this ministry now since the start of this church in 2002, but let's just right size this for a second. The focus is people. [00:28:51] (38 seconds)  #PrioritizePeople

Do you love the people in your community? Do the people here's a good question. Do the people in your community know you? The sad truth for most churches is if they were removed from their communities, the community would never notice or care because there was never a great impact being made by that church in its local community. [00:31:44] (21 seconds)  #KnowYourNeighbors

``Faith isn't measured by what we know about Jesus. I hope that you learn more about Jesus, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say otherwise, I teach the Bible for a living. But if our knowledge of Jesus doesn't lead to us loving like Jesus, I would question the Jesus that we're learning about. Knowledge isn't measured by what we obtain, it's measured by what we apply and the people in our community who don't know God are not impressed by what we know about Jesus, but they can't get over someone loving them like Jesus. [00:32:50] (28 seconds)  #LoveOverKnowledge

That the people who needed Jesus, he was quick to go meet them right where they were at. He loved them just the way they were and it was that love and that acceptance that motivated them to recognize there might be something different about the life I'm living. What if he's calling us to do the same church? What if he's calling us to meet people right where they are? Voting differently than us, I know, unbelievable. Having different opinions than us, different interests than us, different lifestyles than us and we meet them right where that and we show them the love of Jesus. [00:33:59] (33 seconds)  #MeetPeopleWhereTheyAre

Then on that day, was in a classroom of tenth grade students teaching a character lesson that I had written with some other student pastors earlier that year, and the administrators came around to all of the rooms and said, would you guys be willing just to stay for the rest of the day to help our students process what they're going through? Of course, we said, absolutely. And what I learned that day was oftentimes when there's a tragedy in a community, a church wants to then go to the tragedy and try to provide hope and care for those who are hurting, but sometimes what's more helpful is to have already been there before the tragedy occurred. [00:43:32] (33 seconds)  #BeThereBeforeTragedy

God has a whole other plan in store for them and he's gonna use New Hope Church. New Hope Church isn't the point, not trying to point people to New Hope Church, we're pointing people to Jesus. And God's gonna use New Hope Church to point that college student who the Lord's not even on their radar, gonna use us to point them to Jesus and then they're gonna walk into whatever field of life God's gonna call them to. They'll be here for three, four or five years, some of them maybe a little longer, but they're gonna be here. They're gonna get their degree, God's gonna call them on and and the kingdom impact. We have the long view in mind that the season that they were here, [00:53:03] (32 seconds)  #PointToJesus

So when Jesus finishes telling this amazing parable, he comes back to the expert in the law and he says, which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? I mean, that's a pretty obvious question. The expert in the law replied, the one who had mercy on him. Here's the whole point of the story, Jesus told him, go and do likewise. The point of the Good Samaritan isn't even the Good Samaritan, the point is the expert in the law. That Jesus is trying to get him to do what the Good Samaritan did and and if we read the story and we're inspired by the story, we love the story, we think it's a great story and we don't do anything about the story, we're no better than the expert in the law who tried to trip up Jesus. [00:54:27] (43 seconds)  #GoAndDoLikewise