SIN IS SERIOUS

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 (0:20)

Good to be with you. Hey, if you got your Rooted book, go ahead and grab that. We got extras in the back if you need one as we dive in. Just coming up, I just want to share, next Sunday is what we're calling Advanced Commitment Night. Those that have been a part of this journey, if you're new, you're just figuring things out. You're like, what is this church about? We get in here a little bit of it. But if you're a part of our community, if you're a pace setter, a leader serving, next Sunday is a big deal. Evening is where we believe leaders go first, and we're going to do that together. And so you can scan the QR code to this slide, Advanced Commitment Night. Next slide. There we go. And go ahead and hope that you join us there. You got to hear a little bit of how Awakening began. I thought I'd give you a little bit of the backstory as we begin.

So my wife and I, when we started out in full-time ministry, we took a job, a youth pastor job in Atlanta, Georgia. We were there for three years. It was there that we saw a bit of the dark, broken side of church. So, you know, integral leadership issues with the leaders, mishandling the funds. I'm so grateful for how our leadership does that with transparency of holding what we do here. Even as we ended our time there, they withheld over a month's salary from us. Now, yeah, we had a mortgage there. You could actually buy a house there. And it was $160,000. But we had a mortgage there, two small kids, and moving. And all of a sudden, I had no idea how we're going to pay for any of it. You know, and at the same time, so I was like, I saw this car, we were going to sell it, and it's going to want to sell it for $5,000. And go, OK, that's awesome. You know, that'll provide for it. And then God tapped us on his shoulder and said, you know what? There's a family in your youth group that has four teenagers, and they don't have a lot. Why don't you give them the car? I was like, that's not a very good idea, because that's how I was going to play for the moving expenses, all these sort of things. And we said, OK, here we go. So we gave them that car literally a week before we moved back here to San Jose to work at Westgate Church. A courier shows up at our door, knocks on the door, hands me an envelope, I sign for it, and I open the letter, and it says, I heard you're moving out of the area, sad to see you go. And it's from a guy I met once, like a year ago. Sad to see you go. Heard you could use some moving around money. And in it was a check for $5,000. Like the exact amounts. And what I love is like all the way back in that moment when we, you know, that God like developed our hearts, like when we have almost nothing, we were able to trust him with everything because we've discovered over the years, so many stories of how God has shown up and provided that we experience the God who's able and when we trust him beyond our own ability. Well, we moved to back here, we start at Westgate Church 2007, 19 years ago. And we start this little ministry for college young adults called Awakening, September 2007 And as we start this ministry, we had about 30 college A's that were showing up and we had explosive growth right from the beginning. It went from 30 down to six. Didn't say which direction. Yeah, it went the wrong direction. Think about this, we had a full band and like six people. It was so awkward, you know, and we'd kind of circle up, hey, what's going on? So, you know, September, October, November, December, I was like, why even meet? Let's take a couple months off, regroup, reset. And during that time, I remember one morning, I was in my office over at West Gate, and like the Holy Spirit of God just put this prompting as I was spending time with Jesus, like, hey, you got some unforgiveness and some bitterness in your heart towards the leadership at your previous church. And there's like that wrestling, right? I'm like, yeah, I have every reason, like the way they acted and responded, they withheld over a month's salary. Like we had two small kids, we had a three month old, come on, God. You know, that was my argument with him. He's like, yeah, you need to own your junk. Like they haven't owned theirs.