Thank you. How's everybody today? You guys awake yet?
Hey, that was actually pretty good! This nine o'clock service, normally I feel like we're all still kind of waking up. Like, I know when I roll up at nine o'clock and, you know, we're singing, usually I'm playing, and it's like trying to wake up. But you guys sounded really good this morning—pretty awake! Thank you.
Let's start today with prayer.
God, thank you so much that we get to meet. Thank you that we get to worship you, and thank you that we get to learn from you. Just help us as we dig into your word a little bit this morning, and as we go about our lives for the rest of this week, help us just to learn what you need us to learn and do what you need us to do. In your name, Jesus, amen.
Well, for those of you who might not know me, I know there's a few new people here today. My name is Pastor Nathan. I'm the online pastor here at Discovery, and Pastor Rick has just finished up a series. So before we start the next one, he asked me to preach next week. Pastor Matt is going to be preaching.
As I was trying to think about what I want to preach about, you know, I always do the same types of things whenever Pastor Rick asks me to preach. He says, you know, "Can you preach on this day?" I get, you know, a month or so notice usually. So I start to pray, and I start to read my Bible, and I start to think about, like, what is God putting on my heart? You know, where is God trying to grow me right now? And is that something that maybe would benefit others as well?
So as I was thinking about this and as I was thinking about what to preach through and read my Bible, I settled on this topic of apathy. As I was thinking about that, I was thinking about it in my own life.
For those of you who don't know, years and years ago, I worked for movie theaters for a really long time. I worked, I don't know, 15 years in the movie theater industry. I did everything, you know, ushering, projectionist, and then management. I ran theaters; I did all this stuff.
So working in movies, one of the things that you have to deal with, and one of the biggest reasons I was glad to get out of that, was working really, really late nights, especially when you have midnight shows and you're doing like inventory after theaters close. Like, you're there until one, two, three a.m. sometimes.
So years ago, I was working late nights at a movie theater, and I'd be driving home in the middle of the night. I noticed something one night up on a light pole. I noticed an owl. I was like, "This is funny because I'm not always out so late at night that I see an owl, being nighttime creatures." But I saw this owl as I was driving home, and I was like, "That's kind of cool."
Over the next, you know, few weeks, I kept seeing the same owl every time I would drive home at night. I'd be like, "Hey, look, there's my little owl buddy!" He'd just be sitting up on this light pole. It was kind of cool. Again, I don't see owls a lot, so seeing one was neat.
Then one night, as I was driving home, he actually took off and started flying next to the car with me. I was like, "This is cool! He recognizes me now too! I've made friends with this guy; he's flying along the car with me to drive home with me."
It was all well and good until all of a sudden, I don't know what came upon him. I don't know what entered his mind, but he dive-bombed into my car. I thought, "Whoa, that's aggressive!" He just slammed right into the windshield of my car and like thumped and rolled off on the side of the road. I was like, "Ah, my friend! I killed him!"
So I pulled over, and I go and I look on the side of the road, and I'm trying to find where this owl was. He was gone by that point, so I guess he was probably fine. He didn't die, I don't think, but I didn't ever see him again. So he was mad at me, I guess. I don't know what happened.
But after that, I noticed something in my car—in my windshield. I had this tiny little chip, this tiny little spot right where his beak hit. I don't know, it was like a little crack, shattered spot in the windshield.
I'm driving, you know, I used to exclusively just drive old Volvos, so this thing was kind of a tank anyway. But as I'm looking at this little crack in the windshield, I'm like, "Huh, that's neat! That's a little reminder of when my little friend slammed into my car."
Over the next couple of days and the weeks and months, as that little chip was there, I noticed something kind of fun. If you've ever had a rock or something hit your windshield, you know what happens. The little crack starts to get a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer, until pretty soon the crack covered my entire windshield of my car.
What started off as this tiny little chip in it ended up becoming this huge crack. I think I eventually had to get the windshield replaced, or I just got rid of the car. I don't remember which way I went with that, but it would have been probably a pretty easy fix right away had I just gone into one of those windshield repair places. They could have taken that chip out right away, but I didn't. I just kind of left it, and it turned into such a big problem.
So it was making me kind of think about just apathy. When we sit and we don't do what we're supposed to do, and we don't care about a problem that we see growing, what starts off really small can end up becoming something really big.
I was thinking about that, you know, with more serious things. When we look into our culture and we look into things that we see around us every day, we see examples of this apathy as well. I was doing some research on this topic, and one of the things that kept popping up whenever I would search about apathy in America, I kept finding people talking about the political apathy in America, which I thought was interesting because it feels like everybody just cares about politics.
But we have been historically pretty low in terms of actual voter turnout. Even in 2020, we had a pretty big increase; it increased only to 62 percent of eligible voters showed up and voted. It might be like, "Well, that's actually pretty good! You know, a little over half of the people who could vote did vote." But it still ranks a 31 out of 49 countries measured in, you know, democratic elections on how many people who can vote actually vote.
But even more than the political apathy that I see, I think more what concerns me, and what can concern all of us, is when we see the spiritual apathy that starts to creep into our society. I know that when I go and I meet people for the first time, if I'm, you know, at a restaurant talking to the waiter or going through a drive-through, we often get asked the first time you meet somebody, "Well, so what do you do?" Right? That's what comes up.
And I'll say, "I'm a pastor." It's so interesting how immediately the tone shifts. Immediately, it's like, "Okay, the interest kind of drops." Even before I was a pastor, back when I worked in it—after the movie theater, I've been all over the place—when I was working in it, that was the same thing. We would be talking with people, and then the topic would go to something spiritual, and immediately the energy would just leave.
The response I would get would be, "That's interesting. You know, good for you, but it's not really my thing." When we were doing one of our recent podcast episodes, we were actually looking at some of these factors in our society, and there was a statistic that really jumped out at me.
They had asked people who are unchurched—this is part of the survey that went to people who had no connection to a church, who didn't attend, didn't really consider themselves in any way a church-going person—and they had asked people like this, "Well, if somebody wanted to tell you about their church, if somebody wanted to give you some of their spiritual experience, would you be interested in that?" They found that about 77 percent of those people said, "No, I wouldn't really be interested in learning more about a church. You know, it's good for them, but it's not something I care about."
So then I started thinking about, what about in the church? Does this apathy extend beyond the unchurched? Does this apathy extend beyond our society and into our churches as well? Are we letting a little crack develop into something more in our own lives?
As I said, Pastor Rick just finished a series through the book of Ephesians. I think we spent about 19 weeks—was the final count—going through the book of Ephesians. It makes me think, well, what do we do with that? Like, we finish that, and we're going to go on to something else. Pastor Rick is, you know, preparing his next sermon. I'm so excited to see where we go, but I wonder what we do with all that knowledge that we just learned, with all of the stuff that we just went through here in the church. What do we do with it?
How do we take that and do more than just say we've learned a little bit more about the book of Ephesians? So today, that's really what I kind of want to talk about. I want to talk about what apathy looks like in our society and how we can do something about that, what it can look like in our church, and what it can even look like in our own lives.
But let's start with looking at our culture. What leads to this? In fact, they've coined a term—you see it up there on the screen right now—apathyism. It's not that they don't believe that God exists; it's not agnostic, where somebody would say, "Well, I just can't know if God exists." It's actually this belief and this mindset that just says, "I don't even really care one way or another if God exists."
As I was researching this topic, I read this really great book called *Apathyism*. It's by a pastor named Kyle Beshears. I've got a copy here if anybody wants to read it if you find it interesting. But he's talking about this topic and what we do about it. His subtitle is *How We Share When They Don't Care*.
As he looks at our culture, as he looks at what we have around us every day, he really pulls out four different factors that lead to this apatheistic mindset. So we're going to go over those real quick.
First, he says that the belief in God in our society is contestable. What he means by that is if you were to go, you know, a thousand years ago to a medieval village, nobody's going to doubt that God exists. They might doubt what God is doing in their lives; they might look at the pain and suffering and the plagues and say, "God, what are you doing?" But there wasn't really an option to be an atheist. There wasn't an option to say, "Well, there is no God."
Fast forward to now, with our kind of post-enlightenment rationalistic society, where you've got all these different things come in, and people can make the case that God doesn't even exist, and they can find their reasons for believing that.
The second thing he said is that belief in God is also diverse. We have so much more available to us. If you want to try to follow God by being a Buddhist, by following Hinduism, by doing New Age spirituality, you can be a Scientologist or go join Christian Science. There's so many different options that it can be overwhelming for somebody who doesn't really already believe in something for them to look at it and say, "There's just so many options, and maybe God isn't even real. Why even bother?"
The third factor that he said is that our status of life is comfortable. I think we can all agree that here in our country, we live a very, very comfortable life. We have air conditioning, we have cars, and we've got like Amazon and DoorDash. We get all of our stuff brought directly to our house, where we sit most of the time in air-conditioned spaces, and we just don't have a lot of problems.
We don't have a lot of stuff that's pulling us to need God because all of our needs are pretty taken care of.
The fourth thing he says is that our status of life is distracted. I think we also all know that this is pretty accurate. We've got a million different things at any given time that we can do. That might be TikTok; it might be 24-hour news TV; it could be anything. We've got books, movies, video games, music—everything in the world that we can look at.
This is really, when I look at these things, I don't just see America; I see Fort Collins, right? This is our city. We are a very well-off city, and if you look at us statistically, we're very unchurched. The vast majority of people in our city do not really care about God.
I think there's an interesting example about this when I look at this. Do you know what jumped into my mind? For me, it was some current events that happened. Because as we look at this, people just don't really care about God. They don't really ask the questions about God because they've got all this—they've got job security and health and comfort and distraction.
Then I look at something that happened recently. I don't know if you guys remember this; it was this thing called COVID, this pandemic that hit us all, right? What happened? All of a sudden, people's jobs were threatened, people's health was threatened, people's social connections were threatened. Like, all of this stuff that distracts us from who God is and from finding out who He is was shown to be the shallowness that it was.
It was shown to be something that couldn't really sustain us, that couldn't really fulfill us. I often wonder, as I look back at that whole time of the pandemic, what an opportunity we had as a church there, right? What a chance we had to say, "Here's who God is! Here's the one thing that won't fail you! Here's the one thing that will fulfill all of what you're actually looking for in all of these other things that you just lost."
I wonder how much of that time we spent—not Discovery, but the church when I talk about this—how much time did we spend arguing internally about silly things that didn't really matter, sitting there like worrying about this or that when we had this opportunity to go out into our community and tell them what really mattered?
So that leads me to the next thing. What do we, again, not here at Discovery—I don't see this here—but when I talk about this, it's because I want us to make sure we don't ever fall into this. But I'm worried when I see apathy starting to creep in, even in our church, when I start to see a complacency because of all those factors—all the distractions and comfort we have—that we sometimes might forget what really matters.
So we're going to jump over real quick to the Book of Revelation today. If you've got your Bibles, there are some under the seats. It's going to be up on the screen, or if you're using the Bible app, it's all there in the notes as well. We've got a million different ways for you to read the Bible today, so follow along with us.
But we're going to go to the Book of Revelation. On a side note, I was actually doing a personal study through Revelation pretty recently, and I was reminded about the word "apocalypse." This is kind of a fun fact; it's not really related to the apathy that we're talking about today, but I was reading about the word "apocalypse" that we refer to, like, apocalyptic in the end of the world and things like that, and how the actual Greek word there—apocalypse, whatever the Greek is, I don't know—but the Greek word there just means like something that is revealed. It just means Revelation; that's where the title of the book comes from. It's not inherently about the end of the world with that term; it's just God revealing something about Himself that was previously hidden. I thought that was kind of cool.
But we're going to go at the very beginning. John is writing these letters to these churches at his time. John is writing to all these different churches in the area about different problems that they're having. I thought it was pretty interesting because I think even though he is writing to these specific churches with these specific circumstances, how much of it can apply in our own lives?
So we're going to look really quickly at two of those churches. The first one is the church in Ephesus. It's going to be in Revelation chapter 2.
John writes, "To the angel of the church in Ephesus write this: The one who holds the seven stars in his right hand, or the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this: I know your deeds and your labor and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil people. You have put those who call themselves apostles to the test, and they are not, and you have found them to be false. You have perseverance and have endured on account of my name and have not become weary. But I have this against you: that you have left your first love. Remember from where you have fallen and repent and do the deeds you did at first, or else I am coming to you, and I will remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent."
We're going to stop right there and talk about this church real quick.
So this church in Ephesus, there are a couple of factors that jumped out at me about the way that they function. The first one is they had no tolerance for evil people. They knew what was right, and they believed what was right, and they didn't put up with things that were not that. They didn't have any tolerance for evil in their midst.
In fact, what they really did was they had a high view of Scripture. What it says there is that they talked to people who were apostles; they put them to the test. Well, how do we test people who are claiming to be from God? We put it against what the Bible says, and we say, "Are you following the Bible or are you not?" So they really had this good sense of Scripture.
But what were they missing? They had forgotten their first love. They had forgotten the why behind why they were doing it. They had all this knowledge; they had all this right theology; they had all the right doctrine. They knew all the things to say, but they forgot what they were doing it for. They forgot their first love of God should be what's propelling this—that all of our knowledge, all of our learning, everything that we're studying in the Bible is there to help us grow in our love and to go out into the world around us.
Let's jump ahead real quick. This is the church in Laodicea. This is Revelation 3, verse 17.
He says, "Because you say, 'I am rich and have become wealthy and have no need of anything,' and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed, and eye salve to apply to your eyes so that you may see. Those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent."
So again, real quick, what do we see in this church? Well, they're rich, and they're self-sufficient. This one really struck home for me again when I look at our city and I look at our community. Again, not that this is what I see in Discovery, but this is what I see—the trap that we could fall into is that in our comfort and our wealth, comparatively speaking, we can forget who we really are.
So that's the church in Laodicea. They're rich; they're self-sufficient, but they don't really think that God is needed. They say, "We have no need of anything." All our needs are already taken care of, so they end up having a very incorrect view of themselves. They think that they've got everything; all their needs are taken care of, but really, they're poor, they're blind, they're wretched.
That's the danger that we run into when we let ourselves become apathetic, when we forget what we're doing this for, when we forget our first love, and when we let all of the material comfort that we have distract us from that.
I think it's pretty interesting, and I think we're all on the same page with this, is that when we look at our church and when we look at what we're doing here, we look at when we meet on a Sunday morning, and why are we meeting every week? We're all, like I said, we're all on the same page. We're not here just to have church, right? We're not here just to get together for an hour and just to meet and feel good about that and then go and forget about it the rest of the week.
I think we're all here because we want to make a difference in our community, and we want to grow closer to God in our own lives.
So that takes us kind of to the last area, which is do we see it in ourselves? You know what? Maybe you don't. Maybe when you look at your own life, and when we examine ourselves, we see passion and fire and excitement for God. But I'll tell you, I'm preaching to myself on this here as well. I know that it can be hard. I know that, again, all of those factors we talked about that hit our society hit ourselves as well, and it can be really difficult to not slide into that at times.
So I think it's always good to take a minute to reflect on ourselves. It's always a good idea to start internally and say, "Where am I?"
As we look at ourselves, I think there are two things to consider—two things I want you to think about as you take a little bit of a self-assessment. The first one might be a little bit harsh-sounding, but it's true. We got to ask this question: Do we actually belong to Jesus?
When I was thinking about this, when I was thinking about what it looks like to self-assess and ask this first question—again, preaching to myself—I’ve been in the church my whole life practically. I've been here at Discovery since it started, and I grew up in a Christian house. So it's really easy to miss this—that we can know all the right things, and we can go and do all the church-type things but miss the real relationship with Jesus.
One of the things—speaking of being a kid and growing up in the church—I used to listen to this radio show called *Adventures in Odyssey*. I don't know if any of you all ever listened to *Adventures in Odyssey*. I loved it! I had a—you know, back then it was cassette tapes. We didn't have anything better than that. So I'd put in the cassette tapes, I'd put them in and, you know, listen to one side. I'd have to get up, turn the tape, put the other one over, and I'd listen to it all the time. I'd play with Legos, listen to Odyssey. I'd go to bed; I'd put on Odyssey. Like, I loved listening to *Adventures in Odyssey*.
It's kind of cool because now my kids listen to it, but of course, we have it on like MP3, and it's on their phone and like all this great stuff. But same idea, same episodes. I'll go back and I'll listen, and I'll be like, "Hey, I remember this episode."
There was a quote in one of those episodes that still sticks in my mind all these years later. I didn't have to go out and think like, "Oh, was there an Odyssey quote that was like..." As soon as I was talking about this, this popped in my mind again because I just listened to it so much.
In this episode that I was thinking of, there's a character who is not a Christian, okay? So he's thinking about it; he's learned about who Jesus is, but he's not decided to follow Him. Everybody else in Odyssey, you know, who are the Christians, or they've been praying for him and talking to him.
But then this one character says something that I thought was pretty interesting to him. She says to this character, "We've given you a very safe and reasonable environment, one that doesn't demand anything of you. It's as if you've been inoculated against Christianity, like the flu. You've been given enough of a dose in order to become immune to it."
You've had just enough Christianity to become immune to its impact. That one hits me really hard every time because, again, how much can that be us? If we're in the church and we're always like, "Have been following God for a long time," how have we ever actually taken that minute to think, "Am I actually following Jesus? Do I have a relationship with my Lord and Savior?"
Because if we don't, the rest of it is just going to be doing church, and you'll kind of miss what really makes it powerful.
The second thing I think it's important to ask—well, okay, maybe we do belong to Jesus; we do have that relationship—but somewhere along the way, we have forgotten our joy. I think this one's real big. It's so easy in this world to forget what it's about, just like He said to the church in Revelation—to forget our first love, to forget who we follow and what He's done with us.
Because here's the thing: when we follow Jesus and when we know who He is and we know what He's done for us, that can't help but bubble up into every other part of our life. That can't help but be something that stands out in a world that doesn't care.
Going back to this book by Pastor Kyle Beshears, *Apathyism*, there was a kind of a longer section of it, but he talks about this, and I thought it was really good. So I'm just going to read this part because I think it speaks perfectly to this exact situation.
He writes this: "We sing the right lyrics. We articulate all the right theological and biblical positions, but our attitudes don't match the glory of the truth we communicate. We can talk all day long about how God created it and sustains us, that He is good, faithful, and able to love us sinners. We can explain how He pardons our sins to the greatest sacrifice of love, the death of His Son, and that by faith in His life, death, and resurrection, we are liberated from the penalty and power of sin.
We can describe how the Holy Spirit indwells us to reshape us in the mold of virtue, righteousness, and holiness. We can explain that God has vowed to resurrect us into a perfect forever life so that we live in a state of hopeful expectations sustained by confidence in God's promise for deliverance at Christ's future return.
So far, so good. That's all good stuff; it's what we believe; it's what we know. But he goes on: 'But how effective is our witness if we share the gospel as if we're describing the IRS tax code? If we aren't underlining the gospel of joy, aren't we undermining it? Doesn't the way we share the gospel communicate something about it? After all, if these things we believe are true, we should be filled with an unconquerable, imperishable joy. That joy should permeate all aspects of our lives, even amid sorrow, grief, and suffering.
So should joy fuel our evangelism, showing apathyism that God is far from irrelevant? Instead of us just telling them so, the kingdom of God expanded through the joy-filled lives of Christians, and today is no different. Joy ought to season our lives and propel us to the lost. Of all the apologetic arguments we can make, none are better than the life of a joy-filled believer. Faith in action ignited by joy is a credible display of the gospel. The way we live says a lot about what we believe and how we feel about those beliefs. If the gospel is the message, then we are the medium.
So when it comes to evangelism, the medium must match the message. He wraps it up by saying this: 'When we have a joyless witness and an apathetic culture, the impression we give is that our faith isn't all that important. Even before we said hello, we've reinforced our neighbor's suspicion that belief in God doesn't satisfy any more or less than anything we've already experienced.'"
That's heavy, and that's a hard thing to hear. That's a hard thing for me to hear, and I'd imagine it'd be a hard thing for all of us to hear because really, what's our point? What's our point here right now as followers of Jesus? Why has God left us here if not to tell others about it as well as we grow closer to Him and as we grow more like Him every day? Part of that is growing the kingdom of God, and that joy and that hope should just flow out of us.
So when it doesn't, it's no wonder that we're met so often with responses of apathy.
So as you start to get close to the end today, what can we do? What can we do about this? How can we change our ideas going forward? Because again, our goal is growing and expanding the kingdom of God, and I look out at our city, and I see so much of it who needs to hear who He is.
So I think the first thing we do is we examine ourselves. We start with those couple considerations. We start by looking internally. It's kind of like when you're on the airplane, and they say if there's an emergency and the oxygen falls out, you put your own mask on, and then you help others.
So we start by looking at ourselves. Start by saying, "Do I have any apathy in my life?" It's like I've got neighbors that I don't even know their names. I want to tell people about God, but I can't even be bothered to walk 10 feet to the person next to me and tell them. That's convicting.
When we think about that, it's like you want to talk to your neighbors, and it's like so often I feel like the churchy answer is going to be, "Well, I just need to invite them to church." I just want to talk to my neighbors, so I invite them to church. But again, that's missing the point. The point isn't to get them to come to a building. The point isn't to just get them invested in different programs and activities here at this building, right? The purpose is to build relationships.
Especially if somebody is just apathetic to God anyway, they're not even asking the questions if God exists. They don't care about going to a church because they just don't see the value of it. But if you're in their lives, if you've invested in them as a person, that changes. They'll start to notice the joy, the difference. As things go good and bad in your own life, the way you respond will look very different than the rest of the world.
So you start with that. You start with yourself. One of the things—this was maybe a year or so ago—I was preaching about what we call the next steps mindset, and I kind of came up with this graphic that I called the next steps timeline. Because that's one of the things here at Discovery that we really want to do is encourage you to take that next step, which could be, you know, sharing a meal with somebody and telling them about who Jesus is or just your life in general.
But this is kind of a generalized view of kind of the path we all take from not knowing anything about who God is to eventually Jesus coming back, which that's the most exciting one. But in the meantime, how can we, as we look at our own lives, take a next step? How can we stop just standing still but step into a direction that we might need to go?
For us here at the church, that might be, like I said, having a meal with a neighbor. It might be finding a way to use the gifts that God has given you here with some of the different things we do at this church. Ultimately, we need to remember that we abide in Jesus, and as we do that, we'll grow more like Him.
So that gets to the next thing: examine the church. Examine here at Discovery. What can we do, or where can we help each other? Because once we remember that we're all here for each other, we're all here to build each other up and to exist in relationship as a way to spur each other on into the life that God has called us to do.
So how can we connect better with each other? That might be joining a small group; that might be volunteering at some of the different things that we do. Like, that might be connecting with our Shine Pantry, which I don't know if you guys know about this. Our Shine Pantry is amazing! We've fed our community every month and just lovingly try to help build people up.
So maybe that's something as a way you can get into just get out and meet the other people. And that leads us to the last thing that we would want to do, which is examine our relationships—the real connection that we have with others that we demonstrate the reality of who God is.
I'm reminded of this verse we are all probably familiar with in 1 Peter, where he writes, "Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, but with gentleness and respect."
Two things really jump out, and I know we always focus on this first part. It's always being ready to make a defense, and this is—I love this! This is, you know, where we get into like apologetics, and I've taught apologetics classes even here at this church, and I love—like, we need to know our stuff. When somebody does get to that point where they ask the question, like, we get them out of that apathy, and they might say, "Well, okay, maybe it's good to ask about God, but I can't trust the Bible." Well, let's talk about why. We've got to be ready; we've got to know what we're talking about and be ready to make that defense.
But I think we sometimes forget the second part. The reason that we're going to be making a defense, the reason that people are going to be asking us these questions is because of the hope that is in us. So we need to look again at our relationships all around us and figure out what we need to do about that.
I just, again, I just think about what we can do in our community as we continue to grow. When we look out and we see so many people who are putting their hope and their trust in all the wrong things—so many people who are just lulled into a sense of apathy and complacency because of all the distractions that we have around us—if we can get fired up and let that joy spill out, I can't even imagine what God will do with that.
So that's my encouragement as we close up today. Let's take this and let's go out into our lives, into our schools, into our jobs, to the grocery store, wherever you are, whoever you're interacting with. How can we take that joy and put it out in the world?
Let's pray.
God, we thank you again for this day. We thank you for what you've done for us. We thank you for saving us. We thank you for dying for us. We thank you for the joy that you give us in every circumstance, in good and bad. We just pray that this week we have opportunities—opportunities to show others about you, to build a relationship—that you give us all somebody that we can invest in, somebody that we can talk to, not with just a goal of some process of getting them to a church, but with the intention of loving them and building a relationship with them.
We ask all this in your name, Jesus, amen.
on Nov 05, 2023
