Alone Is Not A Plan

Good morning, maybe. Am I on? Hold on, I have to start my watch real quick, because the first time I ever preached, I preached for 52 minutes, and I can promise you, you guys don't want that. If I'm looking at my watch throughout, just know it's that I'm trying to spare you all. So yeah, good morning. I'm not Brandon. I'm going to call myself Brandon 2.0. I'm a little bit younger. Unfortunately, I have a little bit less hair. We do have the same impeccable style. We both really enjoy the short-sleeved button-up, usually from Old Navy, although when I asked my wife this morning, I walked in, I said, "Is this okay?" She had not seen my sermon. She did not know I was going to make that joke, but she goes, "Yes, Brandon Jr." And she also pointed out this one is Tommy Hilfiger, not from Old Navy. I also only have two kidneys. They are both mine, however.

Neither of them are trying to kill me, so I do have that on Brandon. I did clear that joke with Brandon before. A little trigger warning. What we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about community, about being part of the community of God. We were on vacation a couple weeks ago, and we were sitting out on the screened-in porch, and the TV was on. We weren't really watching it, necessarily, but all of a sudden there was this show on called Alone. If you've ever seen the show, so we sort of watched this episode and really kind of got hooked, and we came back and really got into it and watched the full season. But the premise of the show, they take ten survival experts. These people are like, I mean, when I say survival experts, these are like legit survival experts.

They take them out to these super remote locations in Canada or like, you know, Alaska, these like crazy places. It's always cold because, yeah, why not? They drop them off literally by themselves. So they take them to ten separate locations. They're spread out across, you know, hundreds of miles. They don't know where each other are. And the whole idea of the show is it's basically, can you outlast everybody else entirely by yourself? So it's just literally take you into the wilderness, drop you there. You don't know how long other people are lasting. They call it tapping out. You have a satellite phone so you can call and be like, yeah, I'm done. So what's amazing as you watch this show, a couple things. So first off, I really think that all these survival shows are just about making guys like me feel completely inferior.

So when winter rolls around, my wife actually ends up lighting the pilot on our gas fireplace that we literally just like flick the switch because I don't actually know how to do it, so she always has to do it. And I'm watching this show where these men and women just walk out into the middle of a wilderness with a hatchet and like nothing. And then all of a sudden they've got a log cabin with a fireplace and they're like banging rocks together and they've got a fire, right? So I can't do that. It makes me feel horribly inferior. But the whole idea behind this show is this exploring this idea of how long can these people last alone. What's super cool about it, I went back and looked at all the different episodes, like why different people tapped out.

You know, people get frostbite and they tap out. People literally starve. They lose like 30% of their body weight and they end up tapping out. They, the one guy like burned his log cabin down, right? Like he had a log cabin, it caught fire, it burned down. It's like 60 days in and he had to tap out. So these horrible things are happening to these people. They're going through this terrible situation. But what was amazing is the number of them that tapped out, not because of any of those things, not because of any of these horrible things they're going through, but because they just couldn't stand being alone. They missed their spouses. They missed their kids. When Brandon saw that note, he's like, "I'm not really sure that that would necessarily apply to me," and I probably tend to agree with him on that one. They missed just human interaction. So it's really fascinating.

You've got these people that can handle almost any situation, certainly beyond what any of us in this room could probably handle, yet when given this opportunity to test their skills, it's this being alone that they can't really cope with, and so they end up tapping out. The reality is that it shouldn't really surprise us all that much, and that's what we're going to look at today. As a matter of fact, in the beginning stories of the Bible in Genesis, God sort of tells us this right off the bat. So let me just set the stage just a little bit. I always think it's important if we're talking about the Bible, I always think it's really important to understand what you're reading or what you're talking about. I know in my faith journey, understanding the history of the Bible and the history in the Bible has been very helpful for me.

So Brandon talked a little bit a couple weeks ago about Genesis 1 and this account of creation and God resting at the end of it. When you're reading Genesis, a really important thing to keep in mind is that we were not the target audience. I grew up here in Frederick County. I went to Frederick County schools. I learned reading and writing and math and science in Frederick County schools. When I read something, I approach it very much as a Western thinker. I read something and my mind is looking for facts and information, and that's just the way that I've been conditioned to think. Well, Genesis really wasn't written or orally transmitted for people like me that think that way. It was transmitted for people in the Near East, right, who understood poetry and literature and structure of writing and these things.

And so when they would read these stories or hear these stories transmitted, they would just pick up on things that we really will never pick up on. And one of those things in Genesis is the fact that Genesis is really, like we read it and it's this account of creation. We're like, "Cool, that's how God created." An Eastern thinker would read it and understand that it's really about learning the nature of God and about the nature of man and about the nature of the relationship between man and God. That's really what an Eastern thinker would read into it. So in Genesis 1, we read about this account of creation, and God spends three days separating, right? He separates light from darkness. He separates the water above from the water below. And then the water below, he separates into dry land. So three days separating.

Then he spends three days filling those things he just separated, right? So he fills the sky with the stars and the sun and the moon. He fills the birds and the water with fish, and then he fills the land with the animals. So three days separating, three days filling, and then there's this weird little like appendage sticking out, right? That doesn't match up to any of these three days that is talked about, and it's this idea that God rested. So an Eastern thinker would pick up on that immediately and go like, "Man, that's a super important part of this whole story is that there's these three and three that really match up, but there's this other one that doesn't." And so the nature of God is to create, but then God also rests. And we find out at the end of verse 31 that God rests because he looks at his creation and he says, "It's good. Everything is very good. I'm going to stop."

Now what's interesting is it's not in our nature to stop, right? Look all around us. We just keep creating and keep going and keep striving and doing and doing and doing. And Genesis is teaching us like at some point you should just stop because things are good and you should just rest. So we get to the end of Genesis 1, this creation account, and God's resting because he looks and things are very good. But then if you go to Genesis 2, Genesis 2 gives us a little bit of a parallel account, right? A little bit more detail about kind of how God created or sort of some things that happened as God created. And it really gives us some insight into man's special place in God's creation, that man was different. We actually learned that man was made in the image of God, which I've always thought to mean when we walk and talk.

But, spoiler alert, if you go to Genesis 3, guess what? The serpent is walking and talking. So it really must not be that. There's something different. But anyways, that's sort of a digression. So Genesis 2 starts to tell us about this special creation of God called man. So Genesis 1, we end and everything is very good. We get to Genesis 2, and we find out that actually there's something not very good about the creation. In fact, there's a problem. So in Genesis 2, starting in verse 18, we read this. Then the Lord God said, "It is not good for man to be alone." So this sets the stage for this problem. God created, he's got all these things that he created, and he said it's good, and so he rested. But then he's looking at it and he goes, "Ah, man, like it's really, really close, but there's a problem.

Because this special creation that I made, he's alone. And that was never part of my plan for him, for him to be alone." And so God's going to try to fix this problem in his creation, that man's alone. So we read on and we read this. God says, "I'll make a helper who is just right for him." So the Lord God formed from the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and the man chose a name for each one. He gave names to all the livestock, all the birds of the sky, and all the wild animals, but still, there was no helper just right for him. So I always try to like imagine, I mean, what was this like, that God, like Adam, just like sit right there,

and he just goes over here and starts like making some things and brings it to him. He's like, you know, here's a chicken. And Adam's like, "Ah, I don't know, like that's pretty cool, but you know, okay, here's a dog." And Adam's like, "Yeah, he could be my best friend, but it's probably just not right." Or he brings a giraffe and all these super cool things. That's God's first, like I'm just going to start bringing all this stuff to Adam, and he's going to find, like we're going to find him something that's going to make him not alone. But none of it works. So then we go on and we read this. "The Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the Lord God took out one of the man's ribs

and closed up the opening. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man. At last," the man exclaimed, "This one is bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh. She will be called woman because she was taken from man." So we read, "At last, at last everything is finally good because man is not alone." Now we often read this passage and we immediately think marriage, which is certainly a part of this, and it goes on to talk about this is why a man leaves his wife when they become married, but it's more than that. It's that God's special creation was alone. They looked through all of the creation of God, and they didn't find anything. Special creation that was similar to the man, that everything was finally good because man was not alone.

God has always had a plan for us to be connected to people and to be a part of a community. So what I want to talk about this morning is I want to talk about three things that community does for us. And then I want to talk about some steps that we can take that can help us build our community and stay connected to the people around us so that we don't find ourselves alone. So the first thing that community does for us is community actually connects us to God. So we're going to, if you want to flip ahead, we're going to go to Matthew 22:36-40. And we're going to read about this interaction that Jesus had with some Jewish leaders. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to trap him, right? They want him to answer a question incorrectly.

They want to get Jesus arrested. They want to get him out of the way. So they're going to try to ask him this trick question, and this is what they said. "Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?" So Jesus replied this, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important, or like it," your translation might say. "Love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law and all of the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments." So something you've got to think about here is this is an Old Testament question. This is a Jewish leader asking a Jewish rabbi or another Jewish leader this question, like, "What do I need to do to get in this right relationship with God?"

Because under the Old Testament, the way that you connected to God, the way you became in this special relationship with God, is you followed His commands. It's not like now where we are baptized and we, through Jesus and through His death, we get this right relationship with God. This is the Old Testament. The right relationship with God, the connection to God, comes through following the commands. So the real question here is like, of all of those things, and there's a ton of them, some that aren't even in the Bible, these religious leaders would put additional commandments on top of people. Of all of those things that connect us to God, what is the most important thing that connects us to God? Or how do we most become right with God? So Jesus says, well, you love God. That's the first one, right?

But then he says the next thing is like it. And the word that he uses there, and I would butcher it, so I'm not even going to try it, but if you were to look it up, it's the same word that is attributed to Jesus when he tells his parables. The kingdom of God is like a blank. The kingdom of God is like this. The this is like this. In other words, here's this thing you can't understand, but I'm going to put it into words that you can't understand. So here's this concept being connected to God, loving God, that it's kind of hard for us to understand, but I'm going to tell you how you do that. That's what Jesus is saying here. He's answering this rhetorical question, this unasked question. Okay, well, I'm supposed to love God.

Well, how do I love God? How do I connect to God? And Jesus says, well, you love the people that God loves. You love your neighbors. We'll learn later as Jesus is teaching, well, who are my neighbors? And Jesus tells this story. It's like, well, everybody is your neighbors. And it's not just your fellow Jews. It's not just your fellow Christians for us in the 21st century. It's everybody is your neighbor. And then through loving your neighbor and through loving people that God loves, being part of this loving community, you are actually being connected to God. One of the worst, I think most negatively impactful things of the last two years, and really as the government response and organized government response to the last two years, I think has been the isolation, right? Churches were closed. Schools were closed. Kids' sports were shut down.

We weren't even supposed to have people in our homes. I can remember at the beginning of the pandemic, so my wife and I do CrossFit. That's a whole other sermon, believe me. I'm not a vegan. If I was a vegan CrossFitter, I could really talk forever. But we were like scheduled to have some people over at our house from our gym, and it's like, well, I mean, are we worried that the police are going to knock down our door because we're having people in our house, and that isolation that you feel from not being able to be connected to people is just a horrible feeling. I was personally more disconnected from people and more disconnected from God than I have ever been in my life, and my faith suffered, completely suffered. We stopped going to church. I stopped talking to people about God, and it was terrible. In fact, just a few weeks ago,

we were over at Rachel and Brandon's, and it was like we're trying to gather all the kids up and get out because it was it was later than we probably should have stayed, and Brandon and I started getting into a conversation, something about the Bible. I can't even begin to tell you what it was, and Erica and Rachel are sitting there, and I'm pretty sure their eyes both like rolled completely in the back of their heads because we both just started getting going. I don't remember what the conversation was about, but I remember the feeling afterwards. I was like, "Man, that's probably the first time that I've had in the last probably two and a half years any type of like in-depth spiritual conversation with someone." Now the whole time that I wasn't having those, I had my Bible, all right?

I've got the Bible on my phone. I've got it everywhere that I went. The Word of God is literally constantly with me. God was still there. I was still had a relationship with Jesus. I've still got the Holy Spirit. I still got all these things, but what I was missing was that connection to people, and because of that lack of connection to people, my connection to God absolutely suffered. So the second thing that community does for us is that community encourages us. In Hebrews 10, verse 23 through 35, we read this: "Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm. For God can be trusted to keep His promise. Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works, and let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of His return is near."

Now, I didn't grow up in the church. I didn't actually start going to church until I was 16. The only reason I started going to church is that I was dating this girl, and I wanted her to like me, and I wanted her dad to like me. Now, the good thing is she's sitting right over there, so the whole plan worked. So I didn't grow up in the church. I don't really have the youth concept of church, but I had often heard, like from 16 on, I'd heard people quote this verse, and when they quoted this verse, it was always about attendance, right? Like, don't give up the habit of meeting together, as some people have. Like, if you missed church because you had to work, well, don't give up the habit of meeting together. Oh, you know, your kids had sports.

Well, you know, you shouldn't give up the habit of meeting together. Now, in the context of the 21st century, absolutely, that is part of this verse. Part of this verse is that, yes, we should do this. This is a very good and very healthy thing, and we should prioritize this in our lives. But, here's the deal. If that's all that it was, the writer of Hebrews, we don't actually know who it is. I think it's probably Paul. That's another conversation. But, the writer of Hebrews couldn't say, "Make sure you go to church because God's watching, and He's keeping attendance, and you don't want to get to the end of the semester and have, like, a B-," you know? And Peter's standing there at the pearly gates, and he's like, "Ah, really? Like, honestly? The cutoff is like a B, and you're at a B- and you're like, "Peter, man, can you just bump my grade up just a little bit,

and maybe, like, some extra credit or something?" That's not the way that it works, right? If it was supposed to work that way, that's sort of what the verse would say. The verse would just say, "Make sure you're in church because when you die and get to heaven, you want to make sure that you get in and you want to have a good attendance record," right? That's not what it is. The reality is that you can absolutely be in church, and you can be in church every single Sunday. You can be here every Wednesday. You can be here every time the church doors are open, like some people like to sort of like hold over people, and still not be doing what this passage is actually telling us to do. It's not just the attendance that's part of it.

Look at what it's saying. "Hold tightly without wavering." "Motivate one another to acts of love and good works." "Encourage one another." These are active phrases. These are not passive phrases. It's not just attend church, sit in the pew, walk out at the end. You got your attendance mark for the Sunday. These are active things. God does want us to be here. God does want us to be in this community. But if we're not being active in that community, if we're not doing these things, particularly the last one, encouraging one another, then we're not really doing what we're supposed to be doing as part of this community. The call to be part of that community is about so much more than just attendance. It's about taking this active part in each other's constant source of encouragement.

Community connects us to God. Community encourages us. And the third thing that community does is community shares our sorrow. Now, again, not to harp on COVID too much, but one of, for me, like, the lasting images of the last two years is seeing these videos of people who had to, like, bury their parents, and they couldn't actually have a funeral. Or seeing, like, husband and wife who've been married for 60 years, and one of them gets COVID, and they're, like, separated for six months. And we see these videos, and they're, like, happy to come back together. And I watch them, and honestly just wants me to, like, take up arms against the government, to be frank with you. Because I'm like, well, they shouldn't even have been in that situation in the first place, but whatever.

But it's this, like, people going through the worst things they've ever done in their lives, and they have to do it alone. They have just this immense sorrow. They've lost loved ones. They've lost jobs. People lost their jobs because they weren't willing to do certain things, and they're just going through this horrible thing. And it's like, oh, and by the way, you're going through this terrible thing. Now do it alone, all right? Community shares our sorrow. Jesus experienced something very similar where he was going through this incredibly sorrowful experience. So let me just sort of set the stage. He knows that he's about to be betrayed. I don't know really how that works. I don't know if he had, like, visions and he knew exactly how things were going to work. But he knew he was coming to the end of his ministry on earth, and he knew what was getting ready to happen.

And so he's sitting there, and he shares a final Passover meal with his best friends, and we just partook of that meal. That was what he really wanted to do. He sends his guys on. He's like, "Go and prepare the Passover for us. I just want to share this one last meal with you all, because I need this encouragement for what I know that I'm getting ready to go through." And so they share this meal, and at the end of the meal, Judas has gotten up and left. Now, Jesus knows why Judas has gotten up and left. Nobody else really knows, but Jesus knows. So he knows he's been betrayed. He decides that he needs to just go be with his father. He needs to go pray. But he really doesn't want to be fully alone. And so he takes all of his guys with him, right, like his 12, or I guess 11 at this point.

He goes out a little ways, and he's like, "You guys stay here." And then he goes a little bit further, and he takes his three closest friends, Peter, James, and John. And he's like, "You guys come with me." Like, I literally cannot be alone with what I'm getting ready to go through. Luke actually records this and tells us that Jesus sweat blood, right? So Luke is a doctor. I kind of think that's probably why he included this little thing. He's probably nerding out on it a little bit. Like, he knows exactly what happened to Jesus, like, physiologically. And so he writes that. But Jesus is so anguished, he's in so much sorrow, that he literally sweats blood, and he just wants his closest friends with him. In Matthew 26, starting in verse 36, we read this.

Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, "Sit here while I go over there to pray." So that's this bigger group of his friends. Then he took Peter and Zebedee's two sons, James and John, and he became anguished. So he took them a little bit further, and he says, "You guys, like, big groups stay here, little groups stay here, and then I'm going to go over here. Like, I want to be by myself, but I don't want to be completely by myself." And he began to pray. Here he told them, "My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch for me." What he's getting ready to go do is he's going to go ask his dad for a reprieve, right? Like, he knows what's happening. He knows what he's going through, and he's like, "Dad, I know what I got to do,

and I'm willing to do it, and it's going to be terrible, but if there's any other way that this can play out, now's the time to do this." This is the absolute climax of the story. Jesus knows it. He knows that at this point, there's no turning back. Once he gets arrested, everything is downhill from there. Everything is downhill towards the cross. This is his last chance for some kind of different outcome. He is beyond anguish, and that he just wanted his friends. And the reality is that none of us were ever intended to go through these sorrowful times of our lives alone. So community connects us to God. Community encourages us. Community shares our sorrows. And then the big question becomes, how do we become part of that community? So I want to give you sort of three practical things that I think you can do.

And these are not necessarily biblical things. Maybe you'll find this in the Bible. That would be a great Brandon question. You know, for me it's just like, well, if I know that I'm supposed to be part of a community, I know that this is part of God's plan for me, well, how do I become part of that community? Or how do I get connected to it? So I think the first thing that we have to do is we have to get out of our comfort zone. All right? The reality is that community is really, really, really, really, really, really messy. Okay? When we decide that we want to share our lives with people, we have to kind of let our guard down. And it can get really ugly really quick. Okay? And I'm sure all of us probably have stories about times that that's happened to us before.

But here's the deal. If community is supposed to be about us sort of encouraging one another and sharing in sorrow, well, how can we ever really know what our burdens are if we aren't willing to let that guard down and share that with people? You know, you run into people like, "How are things going? Oh, things are great." And in the inside, what you're really saying is like, "Well, honestly, my marriage is in shambles right now. My wife and I are fighting all the time." It's not. All right? She does hit me sometimes, but it's okay. My marriage is in shambles. My finances are a mess. I hate my job. I'm lonely. I'm depressed. My mental health is terrible. I've got health problems. That's what we're thinking. But we've been conditioned to say that the answer is, "Well, I'm good."

We're conditioned to put on that "I'm good" persona, come here to church every Sunday, get our check mark, and then walk out the door, and no one ever knows what we're actually going through. Well, if we're going to be part of this community and we want to share that, we have to be willing to let our guard down. Like, honestly, I'm doing pretty terrible right now, really. Like, I'm super depressed, or I'm super anxious, or I've got this big test coming up, or I've got this, or I've got that, and I really need somebody to pray for me. I really need somebody to be in the garden with me and come with me so they can share in that anguish. Another part of getting out of your comfort zone is that you might be listening to all this and you're thinking,

"Well, I'm an introvert." Okay, I am not an introvert. It's very hard for me to relate to people being introverted because that is not, believe me when I tell you, that is not me, okay? I would venture to guess that is probably some of you sitting in here. Statistically speaking, there are probably quite a few introverts, and you're listening to me, and you're like, "Yeah, I'm probably never going to do all that, so thanks. Thanks for giving me a little more anxiety as I walk out the door and know that I'm not going to do these things." But here's the really good news. I think we have an awesome example in Jesus because I actually think that Jesus was probably an introvert, too, and you say, "Well, that's kind of crazy. Jesus is constantly around people," which is true.

But if you ever study the whole, like, Myers-Briggs, introvert, extrovert thing, what it's really about is, like, where do you get your energy from, right? Like, introverts can be out amongst people. Extroverts can be by themselves, but extroverts get energized by being with people. Introverts get absolutely drained by being with people, okay? Jesus, if you read, oftentimes seems to be very drained when he's had his most people interaction. Matthew 14:13-23. It's not up on the screen, but you all know the story. Jesus goes and he feeds 5,000 people. Like, he's been preaching. It's the end of the day, and his guys are like, "Hey, boss, we should probably send them all home, because they're getting hungry, and it's late, and they've got a long walk." And Jesus is like, "Well, just feed them." They're like, "It's a good one." Jesus is like, "Well, you know, you have the power to feed them." And of course, they don't

believe they have the power, so they steal a kid's lunch. Kind of an interesting part of that story. Poor little guy. He doesn't know what's happening. But take a kid's lunch, right? And then Jesus feeds 5,000 people, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, Jesus, woo!" Right? But then right after that, Jesus is like, "Okay, now people go home. Disciples get in this boat, and you go out there, because I don't want to talk to you anymore. And I'm going to go up on this mountain, and I'm going to pray." Okay? Because he is just absolutely drained at this point. So being an introvert doesn't have to prevent us from getting out of our comfort zone and building this community. It just might mean that maybe it looks a little bit different for you, okay? Maybe it means that you're not going to be that one that just, like,

strikes up the impromptu conversations, but in your closer group of friends and your closer group of community, you can be the one that starts opening up and letting your guard down. Okay? So the first thing is get out of your comfort zone. The second thing is that we have to make it a priority. So this was a couple of years ago, so this was pre-COVID. I was sitting in church one Sunday, and I was playing fantasy football all the time, which is not a good thing for me mentally, so I don't do it anymore. It's not a good thing. But I'm sitting there, and of course, I'm, like, checking my fantasy football team Sunday morning at, like, 10 o'clock, because I got to make sure, is anybody out? Do I need to sub anybody? Whatever. And I just,

literally, it's like God just smacked me on the back of the head. He's like, "This is not what I want you to be doing right now. You're sitting in church. You're surrounded by people." And this was before church, I should clarify, right? Sitting before church, you're surrounded by people, and you are, like, this in your phone playing fantasy football. And I was like, "Oh, man. Like, you're so right. I need to get up, and I need to make, take an initiative to make a priority that I'm going to go and try to connect with someone. I'm going to go and try to start saying hi to someone, be part of a community. We have to make it a priority. Now, the really, really important thing here, this doesn't have to be at church. None of this community has to be at church. It's awesome when it is, but we

all have communities outside of church. We go to work. Our kids do sports and activities. We go grocery shopping. We go walking. We work out. We do different things. We all have a community all around us, and we can be just as intentional in the community around us as we can be in the community here in this building. And both of those things are very, very important, and both of them are very good. So we have to get out of our comfort zone. We have to make it a priority. And the third one is that we have to be very intentional, and we have to seek out opportunities. The reality is that someone in your sphere might need you to be their community. That third one we talked about, about sharing sorrow. They might be going

through something, and they are looking. They are literally screaming for someone to share their sorrow, but if we're not intentional about this, and we're not looking for opportunities to be that for somebody else, we're going to miss them. There's a story in Acts about Philip, and he's walking along the road, and there's this Ethiopian eunuch, and it turns out this guy is actually reading out of one of the scrolls, the scroll of Isaiah, and Philip walks over, talks to the guy, starts teaching him about it, and ends up baptizing the guy, but if Philip hadn't been looking for it, and hadn't been looking for opportunities, and open to the fact that this guy needed something, he would have missed out. Well, about, I guess it's been, I don't know, five years ago or so, back in

2017, we moved, my family and I moved to North Carolina. And what we realized is that when we got down there, we had a very intentional choice to make. We basically knew nobody. We knew like one family, it was the family we sort of moved down there with, and we realized that we had a choice to make. We could either just have this one relationship and probably feel very, very alone down there, or we could be very intentional about seeking out opportunities to build these relationships. Because we made this very intentional choice to build these relationships, it was for me, and I think probably for my wife, she'd tell you the same thing, it was the most alive that my faith has ever been. I was studying my Bible more, I was praying more, I was involved

with the church more. I would see people, they would, "How's it going?" and they'd tell me, "Actually, you know what, I'm going in for surgery next week, like, I'd appreciate some prayers." I would actually, shocker, like, make a note of that, and then the next week I would, like, call that person or text, I'm sorry, I'm a millennial, I don't call, I text, but I would text that person and be like, "Hey, I'm praying for you today." and then a couple days later I'd follow up and I'd be like, "Hey, how did such and such go?" and what's amazing is, like, that's actually sort of what God wants us to do, and in doing that we get connected to people, we build this community, we build these relationships, and our faith becomes stronger, okay? So being part of a community, like

we talked about, it's not a passive thing, it's not going to come natural, it's going to be something that we have to actively try to do. We are not in a culture, we're not in a time in our culture that is encouraging us to get connected to people. We are probably less connected than ever, even though we're more connected, and if we want to really build these lasting connections in this lasting community, we have to make it a priority, we have to seek out opportunities, and we have to be very intentional. So one last idea that I want to leave you with. I'm at 33 minutes, so this probably worked out great. Jesus is walking along with his friends at one point in his ministry, and he turns to them, and he says, he's kind of curious, and he says, "Well,

what are people saying about me? Who do they say that I am?" And they respond, "Well, other people are saying that you might be John the Baptist, come back to life, you might be Elijah, Jeremiah, you might be one of the other prophets." And Jesus is like, "Okay, I get that." He says, "Well, who do you say that I am?" That's like what other people are saying about me. What do you say about me? Or who do you think that I am? And Peter, Peter's always the first one to speak, okay? Peter never has a problem being the first one to speak. In fact, at some point Jesus is like, "Peter, shut up. Like, stop. That was really stupid what you just said. I'm going to put you in time out." Okay? But in this case,

Peter actually got it right, because Peter says, "Well, you're the Messiah." And Jesus looks at him, and he renames him. He says, you know, you're going to be called Peter, right? The rock. And on this rock, I'm going to build my church. And we read this word, "church." And what I will tell you, and I'm certainly not an expert in, like, etymological sources of words, right? But "church" is probably a really bad word for it, okay? Because the word is actually "ekklesia." And I feel like when Matthew is recording this, right, Jesus didn't actually say "church" or "ekklesia." He probably said some Aramaic word. But Matthew's trying to, like, wrap his head around, well, what, Jesus said this word, like, what did he mean when he said this word? And the word that he came

up with when he's writing this is "ekklesia," which was already a word, right? It was just an ancient Greek word that literally meant the assembly, or like a group of people that have been called together for a specific purpose. It was not a church word. So Jesus in his own words said, "This entire thing that I'm building, this whole thing that I'm working on now, this thing that's going to come after me is going to last for 2,000 years after my death, is all about building this assembly of people that are going to come together in my name, believing that I am the Messiah." At the end of the day, that is what we are here for. We are here because we have decided, we've looked at the information that this guy, Jesus, we believe just like Peter

proclaimed that he is the Messiah. And because of that, we've decided that we're going to come together and be part of this community, so we can share our sorrows and we can be part of each other's lives. So that was God's plan from the very beginning. It was never for us to be alone. And Jesus sort of caps this at the end of his ministry, or sort of the beginning of his ministry, saying, "This is the whole thing that I'm building. My dad said it wasn't good for you to be alone, and I have come to build this gathering of people so that you never have to be alone again." So if you are sitting here and you don't have that community, again, it doesn't have to be in the walls of this building. It's awesome if it is.

It can be outside, and it should be outside to some extent in our lives. I would just really, really encourage you this morning, start taking those steps to seek out the opportunities. Look around in your life and find who you can be part of that community for. So I'm going to pray for us, and then Brandon's going to come up and do some announcements, and then we'll close out. So let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you so much for this time that we have every Sunday that we can set aside to come gather together in your name. We thank you for the truth of your word. We thank you that your plan was never for us to be alone, that your plan was to share our lives with other people, and we thank you for the people that we get to share

our lives with. I pray for anybody here that's struggling, anybody here who's going through some things, Lord, I just pray that they know that they're never alone. And if there's people outside of the walls of this building, which obviously there are that are going through similar things, I pray that each one of us here today can go out into our week, go out into our lives, seek out those people, and start building those relationships and building those communities. Father, I pray that none of us here would ever have to truly feel alone, that your plan for us is to be connected, and that we would find that connection. We love you, and God, we praise you. In the name of your Son, Jesus. Amen.