Battle Cry, Week Two

1. Read James 4:1-10. What hit you most from this passage and the sermon today?
2. Are you introverted or extroverted? What are some challenges you face specific to your personality that you're realizing need to be overcome to go deeper in community?
3. What are some ways we experience the love of God through other people?
4. Discuss a time when you've had a specific need met or received guidance where God used another person to provide it. 5 .How do your unmet desires or selfishness affect the community, even if they are hidden?

Prayer + Practice:

Pray this week about what barriers keep you from going deeper into community and ask God to remove them. What next step could you take to go deeper into community.

Good morning. Great to see you fall break. You guys all look so rested and happy.

We're going to take communion today. As you can see, it's set up. And so we'll explain that when we get to.

When we get to that part, we'll explain how that goes. So don't worry. So we are working our way through James and have gotten to the heart of it. What we would consider James, I think, would consider the center of the life of faith or wise living and all that God is doing in you and through you, really, for relational harmony. So at the end of chapter three, you remember James sort of gets us to this picture of peacemakers who sow in peace.

This is a relational term, so you sow into relationship as a relational person, and out of it comes all this wonderful harvest of righteousness. Okay, so that was where we started. And then we go from this piece to immediately. Let's see, I think it's right here into this war zone. So we've gone from this piece that James has this vision of to a war zone.

And by that, I mean there's just a lot of social relational conflict.

And we said there's a couple of ways to destroy community, two big ways, which in his book on sin says it's just basically two ways to sin. You just avoid. You can avoid it or you can invade it. You can evade it, stay out of community, or you can invade it where you wreak havoc. You know, at the end of the day, there's just disastrous results.

You could see this text is giving those to us. So sin is the vandalism of shalom. Platinga says, how do you destroy the peace that God wanted us to have? You just get into all this self centered relational havoc amongst each other. And so if you evade it, then you kind of go AWOL.

And the idea is that you're still self centered because you're just above community, you're just above the mess. People are problems, and I'm too good for them, and so I just stay out of it. And he says, that's very lazy, and it's cowardice.

Worse to say, I don't even need it.

Or you invade it where you make it all about you when you're in community, and you have all kind of problems there because you put yourself above others. So there's a couple ways that we wreak havoc. Now, I do want to say something because there's been some honest conversation, and it's the reason why we're sitting in this war zone. If you're a guest, and you're wondering why we've read the same scripture for three weeks in a row. You're like, is that the only text they read?

Every Sunday. Now, it's just taken us a long time to work through it, and there will be at least one more reading of that text next week because we're not finishing it today.

But we have had some really honest conversations, so I think it's a good idea that we are sitting in this.

Like, some of you have shared with me that community causes you a lot of anxiety.

And you're like, the reason I have always come to church and been a part of church, but I never get into communities because it's not really that I feel like I'm above it or I don't feel like. Like I wouldn't need it. But I'm a quiet person. I'm an introvert, maybe severely introverted. And you have many times in your life experienced social awkwardness that you cause, and you don't want to be the socially awkward person in the community.

Well, I mean, I just want to say I get that.

I feel the same exact way. I'm an introvert. I married an extrovert, if you want to know what one is.

I know I'm not an extrovert.

My mom used to go down the neighborhood to make friends for me.

Okay. Hey, I have a really great kid over there. He's never going to come talk to you, but you ought to go talk to him. So I know what it's like to have that anxiety.

But David Brooks said something, and I don't want to let you off the hook, introverts. Because remember what David Brooks said in his how to know a person. In that book, how to know a person. He says, there's two ways you can. You can be selfish.

Egotistically. You just make everything about you, your opinions, your ways, your beliefs, your experiences, are all the priority in your life. Or you can be anxious about how you come across. And when you enter a space in a community, all you can think about is what you're going to say next, how everybody sees you. And that can be self centered, too.

And that the way to come out of that anxiety is to approach community and say, how can I be a blessing to the people that I'm around instead of worrying about how they're going to affect me? So, listen, I can tell you right now, extroverts in community can be a pain in the neck. They can. So can introverts. We're all having to figure out how to get along with one another.

And that is hard to do, and we both need help. The introvert has to come out, the extrovert has to hide a little bit, but none of us are off the hook. So I just want to say that, even though I do relate. Did you just read, did you just hear the text in one Peter five that came up on the screen? Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and in due time he'll exalt you.

That's the same thing James says when we finally get to it, you believe. Trust me when I say he says it. But then the next verse cast all your anxiety on him for he cares for you. You don't think you ought to pray about social anxiety? That's one of the, that's one of the things you gotta cast on him.

God, I'm giving you my social anxiety now.

I wanted to show you something that, because, remember, I keep saying this, we keep talking about community because it just doesn't matter wherever you are. So I wanted to take you to a text that I just decided to throw in here this morning. This is the end of Romans. This is Romans 15. Gentile church that's got jews in it and they're having a hard time getting along.

This is what Paul says to them.

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak. And so you have the strong and the weak and not to please ourselves. Now, the strong and the weak have all kinds of differences, ethnic, cultural, spiritual, that you will learn in romans 15 if you continue to read about all the problems. He's just talking about the problems. What about strong personality and a weak personality?

A weak spiritual faith or a strong spiritual faith or very staunch cultural beliefs and practices that other people may not share with you. How do you get along? Well, you're not supposed to please yourself, whichever category you're in. So the weak can't look at the strong and say, you guys are intolerant, and the strong can't look at the weak and go, well, you guys need to shape up.

Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. This is how you think about other people in community, not how we build you up.

And Paul's not done and he's going to give you the illustration. Here's the illustration. Here's the big reason why Christ didn't please himself. You say, well, I thought that was about the crucifixion. And he went to the cross.

Yes, he went to the cross so that he could save my soul? No, not just to save your soul. He didn't please himself. And then he quotes psalm 69 nine. It says, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.

In other words, all your problems. I took on me. Jesus Paul put psalm 69 nine on the lips of Jesus. Hey, strong and weak get along. I realized that they're going to be hard to deal with, and weak will be hard to deal with for certain reasons.

Strong will be hard to deal with for certain reasons. But this is what I did. I took everybody's problems on me. But whatever was written in the former days, now he just says, basically apply the Old Testament text. It was written for our instruction.

Look that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. So whatever is going on here, encouragement and endurance come through the bearing of one another's weaknesses.

So may the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may be with one voice, glorify God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. So what do we do? We welcome one another.

The best thing that could ever be said about Hillside is that when we are together in smaller groups for whatever thing we're doing, we put up with each other. Well, because you'll walk into community, and one day, hopefully, hopefully one day in a church, you'll walk in and go, I know I'm a mess. I can't believe these people will put up with me, but they do.

We'll just be doing exactly what Jesus told us to do. Scott McKnight has a book called community. That is atonement, which is essentially what Paul is saying right here. In romans 15, Christ died on the cross not to please himself, but to please others. There was a reconciliation part of the atonement, which is what he's saying.

Relationality is inherent in the gospel. Atonement is reconciliation with God and others. When we take communion, we go to that table, not just for our own forgiveness, not just about ourselves, but about each other.

Now, here's what all that means, that whatever God is doing inside, whatever God is doing in you, whatever transformation is happening in you, it's so that you will be better at relationships.

This is so important to grasp, and it's not something I've always grasped, and it's certainly not something I've mastered, by no means.

But whatever he's doing in you will absolutely affect the community.

Remember, we said all spiritual practice leads to relationship, any self control. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and life together. Talking about community, he says any act of self control on your part will service the whole community. When you control yourself, you bless the community. But any sin or thought in thought, indeed, no matter how personal or secret, always inflicts injury on the community.

So here's the best way to sum up what we've been saying for a few weeks now. What God is doing in me makes me better at relationships, and relating better and loving better turns me into what God wants me to be, which means community is kind of the goal of what God's doing in me. It's also the means by which God does it in you.

You need community to be shaped the way God wants you to be shaped.

And when you are shaped the way God wants you to be shaped, you will be better at relating in community. Do you see how that works? They just work together. You see it right here, and you see it every. It's all over in the New Testament.

So I have to begin, as Paul's gonna, or James is gonna say, I have to begin to see myself less and less in individual terms, and less and less is the center of everything. And that's what the gospel does, essentially. Now think about this, and I just want you to see the logic of this, because the way my mind works is I tend to have to see the logic of something in order for it to really click in my brain. Show me the logic of it. So here's the logic.

If I'm not the center of everything, that makes me a better relator.

It's not just that God's trying to isolate me and make me less self centered. This just doesn't even work. You don't even know you're self centered if you're not in community.

You don't even know what it means to not be self centered if you're not in community, because there's no mirror up to yourself to point it out. So there's no way God could transform you into a person unless he puts other people in your life that are constantly reflecting back to you what you could be or what you're not or what you are. We got to have that in our lives. That's why we need it.

So that's very much the logic.

We've been saying that community is at the center of all reality because it's trinity.

Cs Lewis says, for in self giving, if anywhere we touch a rhythm, not only of all creation, but of all being, where the eternal God himself, before anything else existed, was relational and then sacrificed so that we could be part of that community. And so he says, in the problem of pain, from the highest to the lowest, from the highest to the lowest, God himself and us, self exists to be abdicated. And by that abdication becomes the more truly selfdeveloped. You become more of what you're supposed to be when you become less self centered to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, more abdication, and forever. This is not a heavenly law which we can escape.

You can't escape this law.

So all reality came out of relationship and community. Guess where it's headed. Back to relation, relationship and community. Read revelation 21 and 22 again. See where it's all headed.

Same place.

And by the way, it's worth just mentioning again about heaven and hell, because when you get to revelation 21 and 22, you start to see who ends up where and how, and you just become the kind of person who can survive heaven because you've become less selfish. There's no selfishness going on in heaven, or you become more hellish, which is selfish. So you don't necessarily get consigned to a good place or a bad place. You become the kind of person who can survive in one of those environments. Only you either become what God wants you to or you do not.

And so cs Lewis says this, heaven summons you away from yourself. So people that are drawn to heaven are drawn away from themselves. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, then you go to hell. That's what hell is. It is hellish to be self centered, where you say, I don't need anyone, I don't desire anyone.

It's just a lonely place. And that's why he also says the doors of hell are locked from the inside. It's not that you wouldn't want out. It's that you can't take the first step out of selfishness to get out, because that's what hell is. It locks you in to yourself.

That's the characteristic of lost souls, is the rejection of everything, that it's not simply themselves.

So it's very deadly and very dangerous because you're becoming a kind of person. And in Christ, the gospel offers you the opportunity to become everything God wanted you to become, which is less about you.

So when we get to chapter four, when we go from this big piece back into this, this war zone again, like this, fighting in this, it turns out we have within us, we're armed sort of inwardly with weapons to take each other's lives. We spent last week talking about all the ways we take each other's lives big ways and small ways out of selfishness. And the word James uses is where we get our word hedonism.

And so it's the first war crime. You just take lives. Then we said, james does something very unique here. You desire and you don't have, so you murder, you cover it. You can't obtain, so you fight and you quarrel.

And then we said this, you don't have because you don't ask. And now James is going to shift, almost a seamless shift right into the external conflict. That leads to the sort of the observation that the problem is within you. It's not the community problem, it's within you. And then that means there's a spiritual problem, too.

And that's where you don't have because you don't ask. Then if we want to finish it, you don't have because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it. So here comes now the spiritual relationship to the problem. And so there's a couple of things that we need to observe about what James is doing here, and I don't want us to miss it.

First thing I want to do is establish the link between the relationships that you have in community and this in the relationship that you have with God, because that's what he's about to bring up in the next few verses, which will really, really open your eyes, and open your eyes in radical ways, which we'll look at next week. I just want to show you that community problems actually, your relational problems, are actually signaling some spiritual pathology. There's a spiritual breakdown, too.

So look, you do the same thing you do in community. You either evade community or you invade community. Same thing spiritually. You either avoid, you don't ask, you don't go to God, you evade. Or he says you do ask, but you do it selfishly.

That's the invade. So the way I am selfishly in community, I am that way with God. And if I'm that way with God, I'm that way with you. They are related. This is really profound, the way James pokes at this.

How many more ways can you say these two are interrelated? You can't have some healthy, wonderful spiritual dynamic with God and it not affect community.

And you can't have a dynamic in community and it not be very similar to how you relate to God. I'm going to prove that to you here in a second. Again, let's think about the logic. So you can either evade God or you can approach him selfishly, just like you do. Community.

I'm not gonna go into community. Not gonna talk to God. I'm gonna go into community. I'm gonna wreak havoc with my selfishness. I'm gonna relate to God the same way, selfishly.

So here's how you might wanna say what I think James is saying here. I'm not listening to God, and I'm not listening to you either, ever been there, by the way. I'm not listening to him and I'm not listening to you. James says there's a relationship between those. I'm not going to listen to you and I'm not going to listen to God.

You think if you're not listening to the people around you and in community that you're listening to God? I will tell you, Hillside, be very careful with that. No, God and I have this special thing, and he talks to me, but I'm not listening to you. What could you possibly convey to me about God that I can't just get with God by myself?

Oh, this is really important. It is really important right here. So I'm going to stop for a second just to dive into this point, because you can't say that anymore. So I'm going to take you to first, John. We went to romans first to show this.

Now I'm going to take you to one, John, because I think it's the clearest you'll ever see it, ever. And I've already alluded to these verses. They are worth seeing again. So let's talk about this for a second. Let's look at the verses first, and I want to point out a couple of observations.

We know that we have passed out of death into life. How do we know that?

Because we love. And listen, every time you see the word love, just put the word relate in there, because all love is relate. Well, I can love without people. No, you can't.

You can't be selfless without people in your life, and you can't love without people in your life. Impossible to do. So just say relate. How do I know? We've passed from death into life?

We relate. Whoever does not relate abides in death and everything that relating means. All of the aggravations of relating is love. Everyone who hates chooses not to relate.

There's our word again that James uses. You're just a murderer. You're just a life taker. Every way you take life in relationships is all this means. Every way you take life.

And you know that no life taker has eternal life in him. See, this is why you don't end up in eternity with God, because you've become the kind of person who can't, who can't handle eternal reality. It's just not in you.

Powerful. Powerful. By this we know relating he laid down. There it is again. What Jesus did for us on the cross was not just for us.

It was so that we'd be better at relating. Do you see that? I'm not trying to jam something down your throat. I just want you to see it. And so we ought to do the same for our brothers.

Well, if Jesus did it to us, who are we supposed to do it for? Each other.

So let us love one another, loved ones. Let us love. Let us relate to one another. For relating is from God. And whoever relates has been born of God and knows God.

If you don't relate, you don't know him.

Anyone who does not relate does not know God, because God is a relator.

And if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. So I want to give you. This is the diagram of love. This is the diagram of love. The Trinity opens up, gives love to human, to us, each of us, and out of us.

Now that love flows this direction, it's got a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension. Whatever love God is showing to us, it's designed to come out of us and go that direction, out to other people.

There's no other way around it. Dallas Willard has a great statement, and I really love this. There are few one way streets in the kingdom.

You go through the New Testament and you talk about the one way street just between me and God and God and me. It's not a one way street. It's a two way street. The one way street is the idea that, well, I can get things from God, and that's all I need. I don't need.

I don't need any. Nothing needs to come out of me. It just all needs to come to me from God. But I don't have any obligations. God can love me to the highest mountain, and I have no obligations to love anybody else.

That is not true. What does he say about forgiveness? You forgive others and I'll. That's a two way street.

That's a two way street. That's just one. But you go everywhere in scripture and you'll find you just saw it in first John, where God says, I loved you, and now you're supposed to love. That's a two way street, not a one way street.

Now, it gets better than that.

So God loves us, and then we love, and then look at this. And this is just the most profound thing you'll ever hear on this. If God relates to us like that, then we ought to relate to one another like that.

And then listen to this. No one's ever seen God. How arrogant of you to talk about a love relationship that you have with God and you've never seen him.

But if we relate to one another, that's how we connect to God, by relating to one another. And then his love, the love of a person we can't see, is perfected or manifested or shown to be in us. How do we know this God, who loves us that we can't see, loves us. How do we know that? Well, we start loving other people.

That's how we know. And then his love, which is in us, gets perfected. That's you being transformed into being less selfish. And then you start to show that to other people. That's how you know his love is in there.

His love can't be perfected in you unless it comes out to other people. So I don't know what it is we're imagining that God's doing in us if it isn't coming through us to other people.

That's a child's imagination trick.

That's not really spiritual. So let's look at this. If anyone says, I relate to God and doesn't relate to his brother, he's a liar. He cannot be correct, for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen God is telling you how to love a God you cannot see.

How do you tangibly love a God? You can't see, you tangibly love others. And all of a sudden, the way you love God is manifested when you actually love other people. That's what he's saying here. That is.

That is remarkable.

And so what you have here is a lot of the love we get from God is shown to us by one another. Like when you love me, I feel loved by God. When I love you, you feel loved by God. That's how it works.

And we just sang about it, you know, we sang about, my father has it.

My father has it. Yeah, well, I can't see him. How am I going to get it? When was the last time God showed up at your door, gave you exactly what you needed in that moment? Came in a package from Amazon.

My father has it. Your father does have it. And guess how he gets it to you? Through somebody in the community. That's how he gets it to you.

I marched the young adults up here who want to go to St. Lucia, for a mission trip. I marched them up here last week and said, some of them need resources.

They've been praying, they've been thinking, they've been working hard. They've been doing a lot of things to get resources to go on this trip, and quite a few of them haven't been able to get it all. All I did was tell you, I want you to know last week it all came in.

You say, God, how do you do that? I do it through the people. My father has it, and he'll give it to me through you, or he'll give it to me to give to you. That's how community works. All the things that we want from God.

Now you think about it, there are times I wish God listen, John is pointing out a very, very frustrating thing about relating to God on this earth. We can't see him and we can't have a real live one on one conversation in that sense. And sometimes what we need from God, sometimes it's vague, it's not always crystal clear. So where do we get our guidance from? How does God expect to guide and direct us a lot of the time?

Of course, his spirit can do things, and it does plenty of things inside us. But when it becomes tangible, visible, manifests itself, is when you give me guidance. And it comes through you, or I give you guidance. It comes through me or help and support or forgiveness.

We have to forgive each other. Isn't God's forgiveness enough? Evidently not.

He does not want us to live on a one way street where we only get forgiven by him. No, we have to show that forgiveness to others. You need my forgiveness, and I need your forgiveness. Not just God's. God makes his forgiveness tangible to me, through you.

When I screw up and you still love me, that's just how it's manifested. It's how he rebukes us. It's how we grow.

It's being in community with one another.

I asked our small group a couple weeks ago, how has community changed you? Well, we went through a number of lists. There's some people in our group who are risk takers. There are some people in our group who are just extremely disciplined. There are some people in our group who are very good at caring, some people very good at giving.

Some are servants, like down to the bottom of their feet. They'll do anything for you. Some of them know a lot. And when you walk into a group like that, you get a little bit of all of it. And you walk in there and you say, you know, I know God would like me to be a little bit more generous, and he'd like me to be a little bit better servant, and he would like me to be a little bit more forgiving, and he would like me to be a little bit more of a risk taker.

Where do you think he's going to press on all those buttons with you better than in community when you're sitting around with people who do it better than you or who challenge you? In fact, when we went around the room, most people said, just being with you guys helps me see things in my life that I could be doing that I didn't even know I could do until I saw them in you.

I didn't even know I could do it until I saw him in you.

And God awakens certain ways to grow in you through other people. It's just how he chooses to do it. And this is why I love something else that CS Lewis alluded to in one of his works where he says, you know, you get around a bunch of people, look at this room right here, and if you were to spend just two minutes a day with every person in this room, you'd go, wow, I cannot believe how everybody in this room relates to God a little bit differently than I do. And I can't believe that God is so big that we can all relate to him differently, and it's all okay.

God is so big that I couldn't possibly, all by myself, come to know all the wonderful things about him without you. Having you helps me learn things about God I could have never learned by myself in a room.

And it helps me realize God is so much bigger than I see him. Do you know how important it is that God is bigger than how you see him? You cannot know that without other people who know and love him, too.

So there's a link between.

There's a definite link, I'll put it here, between the fighting and the inward selfishness and then the spiritual, because James is going to say, hey, you got all this relational issues going on. Let me show you how that spiritually affects you, because it does.

And James says, you don't have because you do not ask. Well, let's put it here. You don't have because you don't ask, and you ask, and you do not receive because you ask wrongly and spend it on your passions. This is an incredible thought, because whatever this, whatever James is saying here, it's the answer to the war within you and the relational conflict. This is it, that relational conflict.

You've got a spiritual problem, too. And James is about to get to it here. And let me just say something. For James, asking is, how is the, is the whole dynamic in James mind of how you relate to God? For James, it's all about asking.

I don't know how you would describe one way to say, this is how you relate to God. This is the dynamic of the spiritual life. For James, it's asking. Remember, right at the beginning of the book, right at the beginning of the book, you're going through hard times, and you don't know which end is up, and you're dying on the vine. And James says, if any of you lacks wisdom, what do you do?

You ask, this is more than prayer. It's more than prayer. Has to include prayer. You're talking to God about something. You're requesting something from God.

But here's what James would say in his asking. You got a spiritual problem. What's your asking? Life like?

You going through conflict. You're going through issues. You got personal problems. You're in the middle of a storm. What you're asking, what's the asking?

Quality of your life. Oh, you got relational conflict.

What's the asking? Quality of your life. This is a, and I want you to know I'm learning what he's saying here, just like you are. It's startling me, just like I, you. I didn't even know I was supposed to ask about this.

I didn't even know.

James is saying, the central posture and practice of a person who follows Christ, who loves God, who has faith and wants to live a wise life, is asking. Life is substantial, and so we have to explore this a little bit, because coming to God with the problem reveals humility and trust. I got to know that I'm needy. Askers are humble, and they have to trust because they know they don't have the answer in themselves. And so for James, which he's about to talk about humility in the next few verses, this is what humility looks like in the life of the believer.

And so I think James would put it almost like this, because I think you could, you could only relate to God and only ask him about things you need. You could do that and see, that's what we're talking about. Is this about me and God? Is it a one way street where it's just me and God? Or is it really a two way street where I get blessed and then it goes out this way?

And so what happens is the asker, the asker finds himself in the center, needing things from God that rather than use them on himself. He knows he can deliver to somebody else. That's his posture. So an asker is a relator because he's not wanting to spend it on. This is an interesting word.

It's this idea of squander.

It takes the whole spiritual life and puts it in categories like commercial terms or economic terms, and says something along the lines of, you want to just. You just want to spend it on yourself.

And I think James would even ask this question, what in the world are you asking for if there's nobody else in your life to worry about? Askers have to worry about other people. I have to be concerned about what I get from God because it's the resource I need to give it to somebody else. So God would. I think James would say, you either don't ask because you have no intention of getting anything out to anybody, or you do ask, but you only are thinking of yourself like we have just some me, you know, God saying just you and me is all there is no God is saying.

Askers know that they have to figure out how to care for other people.

What kind of asking do I do? And is it very self consumed? So let me tell you this. If you're in a community with people and you're close to them, and you know them and they know you, you will soon learn that they need things from you, and you will soon learn that they need things, that you've got to figure out how to get to them, and you've got to come to God, and you start to find out that they have serious issues and problems, and pretty soon your needs and issues aren't the same. I can tell you that in our small group, you know, our small group leader sends a list of the prayer requests that we have as a group.

And I will tell you for a long time, you know, I have prayer requests. Who needs prayer requests? That's all we do. We sit around here and pray all day and dug a duggaduga duggada. Let's do more in a small group than pray.

Dagga duggadugga duggadag. I've done all that. Here's what happens when you start to care about people. Their problems become yours. You ask on their behalf.

You're not just asking for your problems. You leave small group. You leave our small group, and you drive away, not even remembering what the heck they were praying for you about, because you're praying for them.

All of a sudden. It's not about me. It's not a self centered spiritual life. It's one that's focused on other people. Even in my prayer life, James says the kind of askers who care about people, and it shows up in their prayer life.

If you're not in community, what are you asking him for?

When was the last time you would say that a good majority of the things that you cared about in life had to do with what other people needed?

This is what James means by being. By asking. It's a whole dynamic of the spiritual life that is focused on other people.

Maybe what I don't have, what I need is to be the kind of person who can relate well to this person. I'm not sure what it is I don't have, but I can tell you that if you're in community, you're worried about what you do or do not have as it relates to other people.

Now we're gonna have to stop here. Yeah. Oh, we were gonna do communion. Oh, my lord in heaven. I may have just.

Are you gonna hate me? If we have to wait for communion? Could we do communion next week? Will you guys be okay with it? I'm very sorry about that.

I feel selfish.

I feel very selfish over that.

But I think it could be very powerful if we wait to get to the table. Forgive me for that.

All right. I don't know. You got enough to just ponder for a little while because we wrapped this up. We went too long. We're digging ourselves a hole here.

All right, let me just close this in prayer, then. Wait a. Where's my servers at? I saw my servers. Are you okay with me?

You worked so hard to make this ready. I want you to know I love you guys, and I'm very sorry, lord. From every angle, we are realizing we need to be better at relating.

None of us are perfect at it.

Sometimes that keeps us from connecting with people.

We worry about how we come across. We worry about being liked or loved. Lots of concerns.

I guess James is saying, I want that you want us to bring those concerns to you, because if we do that, somehow in that dynamic of coming to you, we'll figure out what it is that we can give to other people, and then something will change in us, and it will change in others as well.

Forgive us for any kind of self centeredness that keeps us from relating. Well, something's really lost with you, and we're going to learn what that is in Jesus name.