Luke 5:1–11. Jesus embodies and exemplifies purposeful, personal, relational, and intentional redemptive strategy. He was a recruiter of sorts. He was recruiting men and women from their old lives, their old ways, their old jobs and occupations, and old purposes to a new way, life, purpose, and identity. This world-wide strategy was kicked off with two words: “Follow Me.”  What was Jesus up to? Who was he about? Simply and clearly, Jesus was about disciples! Jesus started discipling the unregenerate; he discipled men and women to faith, so they could be discipled for evangelism. So, we take our cues from Him and when we do, He promises to do something in us. When disciples are discipled in following Jesus, they will inevitably disciple others.

Mark 9:33–37 No Christian gets to say, “Children, that's not my thing. I’ll let the others take care of the kids.” Jesus’s response to that is to say, “If you can’t receive children, you cannot receive me.” Far from being a guilt trip to move us to receive children, Jesus promises here is that when we do receive these little ones, we will get more of God. But we must take time to think and pray about what it really means to receive children in Jesus’s name.

Ephesians 4:11–16. Discipleship is essentially this, “I’m just a beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” Discipling someone else means that I’m trying to help them grow in their faith and to move a bit further down the road toward living a life that points to Jesus.

John 6:1-15. We have been going through our Table Rock priorities, and today, we are talking about compassion. We have defined Mutual Care, which we talked about previously, as the church caring for each other. Now we are going to talk about Compassion, which extends the church’s reach into the community. We want to serve others in such a way that as they receive the gifts, they feel the call, not to love the gift, but to love the giver of all great gifts—Christ. 

2 Timothy 2:1-7. We have been going through our nine priorities—aspects and callings of our faith that we see come up again and again in Scripture—and today, we will talk about Discipleship. This morning as we look at discipleship, we are going to use this passage in 2 Timothy 2, that actually doesn’t use the word disciple or discipleship, to help us as we discuss discipleship. We will also look at the rest of Scripture to help describe what this thing that we call discipleship really is, and 2 Timothy has some helpful aspects that we often overlook. 

And I pray you leave this morning loving these four points about disciples and discipleship:

• Being a disciple is your identity.

• Disciples pursue joy

• Disciples replicate and grow

• Disciples persevere

James 2:14–26. The main point of this sermon is that God calls his people to care for one another, and he promises he will make it happen.

Psalm 95. Those who rejoice in, revere, and follow God today will rest in his presence forever. This psalm can be split into 2 major sections, Verses 1–7 and verses 8–11. There are three points to this sermon: 1) the nature of our worship, 2) the object of or reason for our worship, and 3) the obstacle to worship. 

Matthew 28:16–20. In part 1 of our Loving All Peoples sermons, we focused on what unifies all of us as those God has chosen—we are all sinners. We are called to love all people as Jesus did—being willing to dine with the tax collectors and sinners of our area in order that they might know Jesus who came to save them. And if last week was about the unity we have as people in Jesus, this week we are going to look at the diversity. God saves individuals. Again, and again we see God use all these different “peoples” to his own glory. Through the diversity of his people, God reveals the breadth of his own glory as he uses individuals to demonstrate his love and creativity. Like a multi-faceted diamond, God’s glory reflects in multi-colored variety through his diverse people.

Mark 2:15–17. At first it may seem odd to link a sermon on our priority of “Loving All Peoples” to sin, but I believe it is crucial to understanding this concept. This passage pushes us to realize that there is a common ground to all the peoples that God loves. And we see most clearly that we are all found to be sinners.

2 Timothy 1:8-14. So what does witness mean? In our everyday use of the word, the definition is, “one who sees and can provide an account.” We who call Jesus our savior and trust in His finished work on the cross have seen the good news and can give an account of its power in our lives. Our witness is our day-to-day functioning as believers, our daily living out of the gospel.

1 Timothy 1:1–13. Christian leaders cherish, embody, and defend the truth that Jesus plus nothing equals everything. Paul’s opening command, in a letter that is largely about leadership, is that Timothy stay and confront those who would want to add to sound Christian doctrine. This is why I summarized Paul’s charge to Timothy as a call for Christian leaders to love, and therefore defend, that Jesus plus nothing equals everything. Jesus is the entire equation. These other people wanted to add some genealogies as part of the key truths, but Paul’s response is that if you do, you are swerving from the truth. 

Luke 11:1-13. Jesus has much to teach us about prayer in these verses. In particular, Jesus wants us to pray to the Father as his blood bought children. Jesus arrives at that take away by providing us with a model for prayer in verses 1 to 4. He also motivates us to pray in verses 5 to 8 and 11 to 13. And third, sandwiched between Jesus’s motivations for prayer, he mandates that we pray in verses 9 and 10.

Revelation 5:6–10. Today we are starting our new series on Priorities. These are topics that we see come up again and again in Scripture and have a specific call on our lives. We want to make sure that we, as Table Rock Church, see these, love these, and heed what God is saying throughout Scripture about these topics. This morning we are going to look at the priority of ‘spreading’ and God’s call on us to take part in his great mission of spreading a joy and passion for his glory across this entire earth.

Matthew 22:34–40. Today, we are going to focus on Matthew 22 and how that links to our mission as Table Rock Church. What God is working in us is a heart that loves him with everything and overflows in love for our neighbor—especially as we share with them our love for God and our salvation in Jesus Christ. We love that Scripture reminds us of these aspects of our faith. Praise God that he throws reminders in front of us that reawaken our hearts to our love for him! And as the forgetful people that we are, we want to try to keep these truths in front of us. So, we put it into a statement—a phrase that we use to remind us who we are in God and our passion to see this statement in Matthew 22 lived out. So here at Table Rock Church, our mission statement is this: We exist to spread a passion for the glory of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.