LIFE IS SHORT

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Welcome to the Awakening Church Podcast. We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ. Thanks for tuning in.

Ryan (0:19)

Would you mind just lifting up your guidebook? Would you bring it up there if you need a new one, or if you need one, you never had one, there should be one on a seat next to you. This is our guidebook for the next six weeks. It's got everything in it you need, our sermon notes, devotional, small group curriculum. We spent money on this, use it. Thank you so much. And I've been loving to hear how you've been using it, by the way, because I've been hearing, like, diving into the devotional and then bringing it here and how small groups are using it. It's really exciting. So this is really fun. Now, if you're new and you're going like, Rooted, okay, what is Rooted? And why do we have this real fancy, nice guidebook? Well, let me share that with you. Here's what Rooted is. Rooted is two things. Rooted is a season of deepening our faith and preparing a ministry home for the mission God has entrusted to us. It's two parts. First, it's a six week teaching series through Psalm 90 Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses, the great leader and liberator of Israel. Moses knew what it was like to lead people on the move toward a future home, setting up, tearing down, wandering through the wilderness, consistent and constant change, living with uncertainty about what tomorrow would bring. And in Psalm 90, we discover six foundational truths for a deeply rooted life. And rooted is also a two year generosity initiative to raise $5 million towards securing and preparing a permanent ministry home for Awakening. And as we begin, I want to draw your attention to a couple pages in the guidebook, if you have them, to answer a few kind of top questions that come to mind when we're talking about rooted. The first is, like you see that $5 million, like how in the world will we get there? And so would you flip to page 109 109 has this gift chart here, and there's nothing for us to do with this today. I'm not asking you to do anything, so just relax for a second. One, what this is, is I think this is an incredibly helpful tool. One, for us to see how together we can do more together than we ever could apart. It's not about equal gifts, it's about equal sacrifice. What we wanna see is 100% participation of those who call Awakening Home to help us move to a future home. The other is that it really allows you to see, okay, what part can I play? When I see this, immediately in my mind, I draw to a number and I'm like, oh, I think that's about where we could land. And the invitation asks us, just begin to pray, God, what part do you want me to play in this? One of the things that is a part of this, that's gonna be, I think, pretty significant is because we have such a large tech base. In fact, I've met so many Apple employees. I know there's a lot of others, but we seem to have a lot of Apple employees. But most people don't know that you can actually give stock directly to Awakening, a major way that compensation is given in the values through stock, and you can do that. In fact, next week, Jesse Lounsbury, he's the treasurer of Awakening Church on our leadership council. He's a CPA, financial advisor and planner, and he'll be doing a Q&A on all that right after our services, because that's a significant way that makes... I'm not a tax guy, but I guess it's the most efficient tax way to give and have impact as well. So that's a big, big deal. Now, the question, I think, outside of that is why? Okay, Ryan, thank you very much, but why are we stepping into this rooted season? We said this last week, that it's time to move from a potted church to a planted church. You know, we get that, okay, this plant isn't designed to live forever in this pot. It won't become all that's intended to be, that God intended this tree to be in a pot. It needs to be planted. But honestly, Ryan, well, why do we need to be planted? Why can't we stay here forever? And real simply, we can't stay here forever because, well, this isn't a forever solution. This is a high school, it's forever a high school right now, but not a church. So, if you would turn with me to page nine, I believe it's page nine, let me make sure, yeah. Page nine, and let's just cover, I wanna talk about why now, why we're talking about this in a few big areas. The first is just Sunday limits. Shared, temporary, and changing rooms make it difficult to create consistency, consistent Sunday environments where people belong and grow and find their place. You may not know this, and you can go to the next slide, that a team shows up every Saturday at 9 a.m. to set up this space and the other spaces. Sometimes we don't have it at 9 a.m., and sometimes they're setting up at 9 p.m., from 9 until 11 p.m. Then another team shows up on Sunday morning for our production, for our cafe, for other spaces at 7 a.m. to prepare this space. It takes an incredible amount of work to do that. And then we tear it all down after that. Actually, also at 9 a.m. on Sundays, we pray together, we pause and pray. So if you want to show up at 9 a.m., we'd love to have you join us and pray together. You'll notice all to create a space where people can have, I'm gonna move this over, it's like right in my stuff. There we go. For people to have a life-changing encounter with Jesus. And every single week, we deal with different things. I don't know if you noticed that the men's bathroom's closed this week right over there. Yeah, yeah. Now, if you're a man, you noticed it maybe. And we were told originally that it was gonna be just a week, and now they're saying through the end of the year. Yeah, now you want a building. Right? Over the summer, we didn't have access to the gym to do our kids' rooms, and we made adjustments. These things are happening consistently. We're constantly adjusting to create space. It takes a dedicated crew, rain or shine, hot or cold, week after week, to create a space for people to have a life-changing encounter with God. Some people have heard this like, but one of the great parts about it, Ryan, is because we're doing this, and our whole church gets to serve. And that's why we're staying here. I said, well, that's fantastic. I would love for our whole church to serve. And we have a lot of our church that serves. Actually encouraging, 55 percent of you on our survey serves, and that is so exciting. And in this temporary setup space that we're at, we actually need more people to help be able to create a space for people to have a life changing encounter with God. And I want to take a moment for all those that set up and tear down. We'd love to have more linger space after this service, so we could hang out and just help people walk with Jesus. Can we just thank those people that serve in such a significant way?