Ministry of the Holy Spirit Part 5

For today I want to ask you a question.

Who is the church service for? Is the church service for the community, just the neighbors who come together? Is the church service for our friendship group to come and be together? Who is the church service for? And I would put forward to you that the church service is for God.

It is for the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is for the worship of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

That's who the church service is for.

So the church is not the community gathered.

The church is the called out assembly.

A community gathering could be about any subject.

It could be about a fundraiser.

It could be about a garden project.

It could be about some other worthy cause, could be the community gathered.

A church is a special thing because it is a called out assembly of people blood-bought by the Lord Jesus Christ who've come together to celebrate and worship that reality.

The church is called out by Jesus for Jesus only.

And the ramifications of how we believe about this will determine how we practice our corporate gathering.

What do you mean by that? If we think that the church service is to make people comfortable who don't know God, then we are missing the purpose of what church service is.

It's never been my goal to make people who don't know God feel comfortable when they come here.

Every great thing has an awkwardity to it in the beginning.

Don't you remember when you were first beginning to have eyes for your spouse? Pretty girl, pretty, interesting, handsome man.

And you begin to feel a little bit awkward.

Awkwardity is a part that leads to an eventual attraction and even love.

When a person comes to church, they should know that there's something different happening here.

Something very different is happening here because we are communing with our Creator God.

And so we should not be bashful about doing church things.

When we were remodeling this platform, one of the questions was, should we put a big video monitor back here as a backdrop that we could change, and it looked like I'm preaching on the beach one day and in the mountains the next, and just have a beautiful background.

And a few wise people came to me, and that was on my mind, to do that, to try to be a little bit more modern.