- Well hey everybody, man I just wanna welcome you to Highlands today. I get to kick off one of my favorite series all year long, we call it Love One and it leads us up to our Love Week, which I'm gonna challenge you to put on your calendar today and participate with us. So today, let me welcome our Bluefield location. It was great to see some of you guys last week. Up in Marion, we're so grateful for you. Down in Bristol. Hey, you guys are rocking it. We're so thankful for all you're doing in the community. And right here in Abingdon, we are grateful for all of you as well. Many of you today are watching on TV and online, we're thankful for you and we wanna include you by all means in helping us serve our communities. So maybe you're new to Highlands. I know last week I met a couple of new folks who came to our Abingdon location. And here's our mission, it's based off of the great commandment and the great commission that Jesus gave, it never changes. And basically we believe that when you experience life with Jesus, your life is gonna be so much better. So we want every person in our community, in our region, and around the world to experience life with Jesus. However, a vision God gives for a specific period and visions change. So if you're new and you don't know our vision, we've been in one, that we're completing at the end of 2022, for about four years. And I wanna give you a little history about our vision. We believe that God was calling us to make a difference in the people's lives around us, locally and regionally and literally around the world. And so we believe that God was calling us to serve our community. We believe that God wanted us to be effective in reaching and training leaders in our local regions. So we started a regional network of pastors and churches and HF College where ministry leaders can be trained and get actually accredited education. And we also believe that God wanted us to plant or to launch new locations, that would be much like Highlands in our network, going forward presenting the gospel of Jesus Christ. So today I wanna talk to you about how we arrived at this vision of making a difference. And then at the end of this year, we're gonna celebrate all God's done. He's done far more, which is what his word says, that we ever believe that he would do. I remember, as we were asking God to give us direction as a church four years ago, sort of end of 2018, it became a fairly in-depth process. And basically we were meeting with church members, we shared surveys with you, we wanted your feedback. We met with a lot of ministry and local leaders and business leaders, community leaders. I was meeting with town mayors, first responders, our medical community, school administrators. I mean, many of our staff were out making these meetings. All these nonprofits that we have, we wanted to see what they were doing. And we just met with a host of people. And our leadership honestly spent countless hours in meetings trying to get a feel on how we could serve our community. And then we just decide, we need to fast and we need to pray. Because as you're trying to discern what God wants you to do as a church, and you know this is a vision that you're gonna have for a number of years, we truly wanted to hear from God on how our church could best serve our communities. And we were raising resources, but hey, we knew our resources would be limited. And we had no idea back in 2018 that we were headed into a world pandemic. I mean God knew, but we sure didn't know. And one of the things that we determined early on from feedback from all these different meetings was this, and I want you to look at this, I put it on the screen. We realized that faithfulness in ministry isn't just about keeping the doors of the church open, hoping that people would walk in. That was sort of the method that was used for the many, many years in the beginning of our church. It was just that we're gonna create something and hopefully it's gonna be attractive enough that lost people and people outside of the faith will just wanna come through the doors on a weekend service and find Jesus. And we realized that culture was changing, so we knew that we were in for a massive change. And what we determined is that faithfulness means that we have to find ways to take the good news of the gospel to them. Whether they're in another neighborhood, whether they're in another subculture, they have a different language, they're in a different country. Whatever it was, we accepted the call, we discerned this was God's voice. And we were gonna go forward in a missional movement from our church. And there were things that we did to really help us see that this was God leading us. When you think about it, I think random acts of kindness are great. But honestly, we envisioned our church becoming this indispensable partner in the community where we would love on people and care about people. And in essence, we would sort of earn the right, if you will, to share how Jesus had changed our life. And although we're located in a Bible-Belt town in all of our locations, this is true across Southwest Virginia and Upper East Tennessee. Here's what I want you to know, almost 70% of our community is not connected to any church at all. Think about it guys, 70%. To be blunt with all of you that are here today and watching on TV or online, most people don't care that we exist and they're not interested at all in what we do. So these dynamics tempted us to assume what people needed, these most perceived needs, and we would try to reach those and we'd call it a win. We felt like, oh, that's really not what God was calling us to do. We knew, when we fasted and prayed and sought him, he was calling us to do much more. So I go back at the end of 2018, it's probably sometime in the fourth quarter, I had this fateful meeting with the Bristol City Mayor at the time, a guy by the name of Bill Hartley whom I had met a little bit earlier. And I call up Bill and I asked him to have lunch with me. And we sat down together in a popular diner located in the heart of our community. And we were surrounded by neighbors from every walk of life. We all were enjoying our club sandwiches and sweet tea. In this little diner, there was a bunch of televisions with different sporting events. And in the conversation I asked Bill, hey, how can a church like ours serve your city? How can we do that? And at the time, the city of Bristol was going through sort of a difficult time. They had lots of issues going on, some debt and such. And as I sat there and I'm hearing this guy's heart, I realize this guy truly loves, I mean, he cares for the community in which he's the mayor. But when I ask him how our church could serve the city, just to be honest with you, I could tell he was a little suspicious of my ask. And I could sort of see the cogs turning and I think he was saying, you know, what this guy's angle? I don't know him, first meeting. Was I just another guy maybe trying to make a deal, some kind of blind self-serving platform that I was trying to create for myself or our church? What did I really want from him in return? And I just tried to assure him, hey, our agenda is simply to help. We just wanna come and serve alongside you. We'd raised a little money, we wanted to use it to serve the city of Bristol without any fanfare. And I wanted to hear his heart on how we could do that. And as we ended the conversation, he gave me some great possibilities. We discovered, actually in that conversation, when we were talking about beautification projects we could do for the city and sports leagues that needed help. And then he sort of talked to me about the fire services and the police services. And one of the things that we were able to provide from that first meeting was a tourniquet that the police department had requested, but funding was tight and they were unable to get it. And so I actually knew that we had an ER doc who attended Highlands, who actually had a tourniquet company. He was in the military and he developed this tourniquet company. And so I call him and I say, hey here's a local need, could you help us meet that need? And his company donated these tourniquets to these first responders. Police officers are usually the first to arrive on the scene of an accident. And officers who were trained in this tourniquet use could use it to stop bleeding and potentially save lives. It was a perfect way in which we could serve our community, it's a huge win right from the get go. So we were excited to partner with these men and women who serve and protect our cities and our towns. We went back to Abingdon, had the same conversations. In Marion, Pastor Dave and Pastor Robbie and Pastor Brad had the same conversations with leaders in Bluefield and Marion, it was just awesome. So that original conversation with Bill led to so many other opportunities. That little diner meeting led to actually hundreds of conversations in all of our locations with community leaders across all of our entire region. And it allowed our church to go back and this vision of making a difference. We've been able because of you to make a difference in tens of thousands of individual people's lives. You, you served and developed similar relationships with police departments and fire departments and first responders all across our region. And as our congregation prioritized honoring and helping these civil servants, our segments of our city, other segments began to trust us as well. We're a multi-site church, or one church in multiple locations. And every one of our multi-sites are also near schools, or colleges and universities. So we begin to try to do the same thing with our educational community. And we reached out to school principals and college administrators with the same question I asked in that first meeting, how can our church serve you? Now we didn't press too hard and schools particularly, they can be very slow to trust churches. No principal, regardless of his or her faith background, wants to be a separation of church and state news story. So you just have to earn the trust. Trust actually takes proven action over time. But what our church did, and I'm so proud of you guys, is we began serving in simple ways. We started painting buildings and mulching landscapes and delivering meals to the teachers, donating teacher supplies, writing thank you notes to the faculty. And it just became something that we did in several communities. We did the same thing in the medical community because during the pandemic, these were our essential workers. They were in over their heads many times. And we as a church wrote thousands of thank you notes to our medical community, and we're very grateful for them. And today, we have great relationships with so many organizations in all of our communities around our sites. When you think about it, it's the way of Jesus, it really is. Our partnership with our community agencies continues to grow, and our communities are beginning to truly believe that our church is for our communities. We're for our towns and cities. As the next step in our commitment to honor our communities, we decided that we wanted all of you to be involved. And so at the beginning of this vision, we introduced a concept we call Love Week, where we take one week out of the year usually at the beginning of the Summer. And we ask every one of you, I mean, all of you to actually serve your community in some way. Now the reason I'm talking about it today is because our love week this year, here's the date, I want you to put it on your calendar, starts on Sunday, June the 5th and it goes through June the 11th. So you're gonna be hearing, at the end of the message today, all the opportunities that we have for you. And yet, I think God's gonna speak to you by his Spirit. And some of you, you're gonna do things in your neighborhood, you're gonna do things at your workplace. You're gonna gather a few friends, and I just want you to go love one. Just go love one person, go care about one person. So during Love Week, we ask you to go out. We ask you to seek to build genuine friendships and just be responsive to community specific needs. And God, man, you'll find that it's so much better truly to give than receive. Now you might ask, well I'm busy, why in the world would you do a love week? Well that's a great question, I'm glad you ask it. Let me give you the reason, because this is the way the church advances the kingdom of Jesus. The kingdom of God is advanced when people in our communities place their faith in Jesus as Lord. Now honestly, that's our ultimate desire, right? We want lost people to find Jesus so they can experience life with Jesus. It's our ultimate motivation. But here's the deal, when you study the life of Jesus, Jesus proves his ability to care for souls by caring about the success of others. I mean think about this, all the stories, all the parables. When Jesus goes into small communities, or he goes into big cities, what did he do? He walked slowly, Jesus made friends, never in a hurry. He discovered the needs they had. And you know what Jesus did? He gave them real help. And when he didn't heal or he didn't do some miracle, you know what he did every time? He spoke hope into people's lives. Not everyone he helped followed him, but many did. And they moved from death to life forever. So as we serve our communities and as we speak hope, we know not everybody we serve, they're not gonna follow Jesus. But man, we really trust and pray that many will. And what I've learned in four years is that many of the people who call Highlands home today, you were one of those that were served. You were one of those that were loved while we've been sharing this vision all across our region these last four years. In the same way, our opportunity to impact people begins with our willingness, just like Jesus, to invest in them. So I just wanna start by you introduce yourself to somebody that you don't know. Go and make friends with somebody that maybe looks different than you, that maybe even has a different job than you have, works at a different place. But hey, just start making some friendships and learn to love people who are different and give them a reason to trust you. Celebrate their wins and see God open up new doors for the gospel. So as I wrap my part up, over these years, I think I've come to three conclusions, three ways that we can partner with our communities during Love Week. After four years, all right, we got a lot of data now on this on how it really works well. I'm gonna give you three things. Here's something that we all can do, all right, all three of these. Here's the first one, I think we have to focus on friendship, focus on friendships. As church leaders, or as church members, we're all conditioned to prioritize relationships that will directly benefit our churches. And that's the way it's been forever in the church. And while that approach may produce some measure of progress, it makes outsiders often feel like they're projects rather than friends. Hey, these folks aren't projects. Jesus loves everybody, and we at Highlands, that's our goal as well. We don't want people to feel like they're projects. We wanna go out in our communities and we wanna build friends, we wanna have friendships. Early on we determined to build genuine friendships, actually caused us to focus on caring for people. Enjoying other people's company, sharing interests and hobbies, and working together on common goals. So the first thing I want you to think about is just go and build some genuine friendships. Just be authentic and God is gonna honor that. Here's the second thing, let your actions do the talking. I talked a little bit about the book of James, James is the brother of Jesus. And basically James says, hey it's good to talk a good game. It's great to know and understand all the scripture, that's awesome. But hey, if we don't put it into action, we're failing the commission of Jesus. We can come to the church and huddle up and we can have our Bible studies. And that's awesome, that's great. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I'm just saying it doesn't stop there. We take what we learn and Jesus moves us into action and moves us out into the community. So our actions are really the piece that does the talking about our faith. Honestly, people are not gonna trust you till they know they can trust you. It's sort of redundant, but it's true. Trust cannot be assumed, it has to be earned. And it just takes time. It requires consistent, sacrificial, other-centered action. We have lots of political leaders, we have educators and business owners and neighbors, and we appreciate so much of what they do, all the insight and all the encouragement. And we can give them empathy, but here's the deal guys, they need our help. For our communities to get stronger, all these leaders in the community need the help of the local church. And when the local church rolls up our sleeves and we show up to serve because we just care about our communities, you know what happens? We earn trust and it builds a culture where the kingdom of God is truly respected. And we can begin to have some authentic spiritual conversations. Here's the last thing, let others set the agenda. Often we go out and we wanna set the agenda. But most of the time I share scripture, in the beginning of my message today and I'm gonna share at the end of the message. I want you to see this was a tactic of Jesus. And you remember Jesus is on his way to Jericho in Mark 10, and he comes up on this guy who was a blind beggar. Now Jesus, he knew this guy, he knew everything about him. But this is the conversation in verse 51. Jesus says, what do you want me to do for you, duh, right? Bartimaeus immediately answered, I wanna see, I wanna see. And Jesus gave him exactly what he wanted. So when we go out into the community during Love Week or anytime we serve, we always ask our community leaders, what do you want to make our communities better places to live and raise a family? It's their agenda, it's not ours. We're there to serve. And then we do everything we can to help them be successful. We commit time, we commit money, we commit people to serve others. Because success in our communities, it's a win for every one of us. So today, as I close my part, I've asked some of our key staff people to come and those who help us get all the projects in our Love Week for our opportunities. And you're gonna hear from them in just a second, because I want you to begin thinking about it. I think when they share these opportunities, the Holy Spirit's gonna speak to you about one. And if we don't have one covered and the Holy Spirit speaks to you then hey, let us know because we wanna partner with you in how God's working with you as well. You may be here today and you may have never trusted Jesus Christ. Now why are you waiting on? All right, why are you waiting on? And it is the best, greatest decision you'll ever make. You need a savior, and Jesus loved you so much that he left the splendor of heaven and he came and he was beaten and falsely accused and died on an old, rugged cross so that your sins, your mistakes could be completely paid for. A debt you could never pay. Hey, how in the world do you resist a love like that? If that's you, I want you to pray with me right now. Would you pray with me? Jesus, I need you. I know we're talking about serving the community, but the Holy Spirit today has convicted me. I know I'm lost, I'm headed in the wrong direction. I made mistakes, Jesus come into my life right now and forgive me and save me. I surrender my life to you and ask you to be a part, allow me to be a part of your forever family. He will, he wants that for you. And if you made that decision, you're watching on TV or online, hey right now just click that little raised hand button. We celebrate with you. If you're at one of our in person locations, let somebody know on your way out. We're gonna help you, come along beside you, and just help you in your new journey. Lord as we get ready for Love Week, may you call us to serve the communities in which we live. We ask you'll do that in Jesus' name, amen.