Acts: Lower vs Upper Room

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 Good morning everyone. My name is Trey. If we haven’t met before, I just want to say to you guys, Passion Creek, I love you and God loves you. And it’s been such a great week ministering to people. We also, totally revamped the gym. We painted 32 doors to the glory of God this week.

And so it was a long week. And, uh, and the fun part is you won’t see any of those doors cause we don’t gather over there, but that’s fine. Please turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter two, as we continue through our study in the book of Acts. So I’ve spent my whole life in church and probably because I’m Baptist, I’ve only received one prophetic.

Call or warning over my life. It was actually my junior year in college at California Baptist University The class was biblical counseling and it was a hard class because it was one day a week and because of that it was a three Our class, and the professor was famous for two things. He felt the pain of three hours more than us.

And so one thing he got easily persuaded to show like B level, low budget Christian films. And so in that class we would randomly watch movies all the time, but also he was very famous because at the end of every class he ever taught at the end of the semester, he would give a prophecy over each and every student.

And so the end of the semester came, that class finally arrived, I showed up early, I was excited. What is the prophetic call over my life? And of course he starts on the other side of the room, only making me more anxious and thinking, what if he spends two hours on that side of the room and gives up and doesn’t come to me and tell me about my life.

He finally got to our table. I still think it’s the funniest thing ever. My best friend, he looks at my best friend, pauses, says his name out loud, and then moves on. And so I always joke with him like, sorry man, you shouldn’t be in ministry. Like, you have nothing on your life. He does. But um, he’s in California doing ministry.

But just straight up switched and went to me and he said, Trey, And then he goes on and on. He says, you have an anointing over your life to pastor and to preach the word. He said a couple other nice things, but that’s not what stuck out. He then went on to say, Trey, you will face the temptation to define success according to the American version of church.

He slowed down even more and he says, think long and hard about what Jesus said when he said, What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul? Moved on to the next guy. I’m thinking, okay, for the next few days, kind of thinking through why was I the only one that got a warning?

Everyone else got a blessing. I got a warning. So maybe you’re like shifting in your seat. Like I need, I picked the wrong church this morning. Um, but I was thinking it through. And, uh, honestly, my. immature, you know, I wasn’t very long in my spiritual formation. I was worried if he didn’t like me or not. And all those kinds of things went into my head.

But as the years go by, I really appreciate that warning. Because the reality is, especially in the modern era, we have figured out how to grow a church without looking anything like the book of Acts. And I think that’s to our detriment. To put it bluntly, we’ve discovered the formula to growing a church.

Without growing a soul. And the damage is all around us. Just take a look online and you will see Christians deconstructing their faith, people leaving the church. You’ll see pastors sadly leaving in droves before they get to retirement age because of things like moral failures or heresy or just plain burnout.

And as I think more and more about the design of church today, I think this design has made this failure a feature and not just a bug. To do church is to get exhausted and to leave. And so Acts, we are hoping becomes this guide for us as a church to be a biblical church. And one concept in ecclesiology, that’s the 10 word today.

Ecclesiology just means the study of church. One concept in ecclesiology that I find really helpful is this distinction between the upper and lower room. So the upper room is actually a driving force to the book of Acts. If you look at Acts 1 13. Which we preached on a couple weeks ago. We see the saints gather into the upper room, which the person should read it and realize Jesus was what?

In the upper room with his disciples before he went and got crucified. And now the saints are again in the upper room praying for the Spirit of God to come before they go out and do Acts 2, before revival comes. There’s something significant. The upper room is the driving force behind everything the church does.

And so anytime you see references, especially throughout the book of Acts about praying and breaking bread together. Often this would be done literally in an upper room, but anytime you have an upper room, there is necessarily what a lower room. A lower room, in ecclesiological terms, is the things that the visitors come and see.

It’s the things that make newcomers want to check out your church. It’s why we spend so much time and effort making this not look like a cafeteria, right? The lower room is where anybody’s invited to come and maybe hear about Jesus for the first time. And so again, we do all we can to make the lower room a better place.

But here’s the warning you’ll see all throughout Acts, and we want to remind ourselves As we go through this series, the church loses its power when it forsakes the upper room to put in words that are familiar at Passion Creek. The lower room is for attenders. Praise the Lord. But the upper room is for disciples, and the question is, when church is all about the lower room, what is the result?

You lose the power. Where does all of our focus go to? Where does the budget go to? If everything is about the lower room. Will Mancini in his book, Future Church, gives a really helpful critique. What I appreciate about him, and I want to make sure you hear my tone here today as well, the lower room is not inherently evil, but he recognizes, he points out when attenders are looking for a church, here’s the expectations, here’s what they want the lower room to be.

Number one is to have the pastor, to have a perfect personality. These are magnetic teachers. This is the kind of church where you don’t say the church name, you say the pastor’s name. Why they, you know, I go to so and so’s church. This person has a magnetic personality. And I was at my barber this week.

You got to get fresh every once in a while. And I was talking to him and, uh, and he said, and he’s literally never met my dad. If you don’t know, my father’s a pastor also in this area. And he literally said, he said, Trey, you’re a good guy, but like, I think your dad’s cooler than you. That’s about right. One day I’ll be cool enough.

But some people just have the blessing of a magnetic personality. Right? And that sometimes is what grows a church. Also, people are looking for perfect people. These are like Instagram worthy people, front and center. Some churches, sadly, make sure you have a certain look. Or if not, you’re not allowed on stage again.

This is kind of a this. I’m kind of describing the worst version of American church. But some of these things again aren’t bad in of themselves. Other people, when they’re looking to find a church, they’re looking for the perfect program. So they want all the right options for every person in their family, and they want a multiplicity of options.

And of course, We’re praying for something kind of close to this. It’s a perfect place, like a beautiful building that doesn’t smell like a cafeteria, amen? But don’t say amen too loud. Um, on the perfect street corner, really close to your house and everything is super nice. Again, I will say this one more time, none of these are inherently bad or evil.

The problem is that it only keeps you in the lower room. What about the upper room? What about the power of God? What happens to the church? And I think we have the answer to this. What happens to the church when it puts all of its energy into drawing people in, while giving little to no attention, drawing people up?

That kind of church may gain the whole world, but it will lose its soul. And friends, we want to have soul at our church. Amen. And speaking of that, if everybody can stand with me in the reading of Scripture to honor God with our mind, our heart, and our body. We’re in Acts chapter 2 starting in verse 42 all the way to the end of chapter 2.

The Word of God says, They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, this is a sense of reverence and fear of the Lord, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. Now all the believers were together.

and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed to the, uh, distributed the proceeds to all as any had need. Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.

This will run out soon, as you know, they will get persecuted. But in the moment, the favor is wonderful. And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. Come Holy Spirit. Teach us and form us according to your word. In Jesus name. Amen. You may be seated. I’m so excited to preach again.

It’s been a couple of weeks. I haven’t been here. Alright, just before verse 42. We learned last week, Pastor Brandon did an incredible job. The gospel was declared, the fire that used to, in the Old Testament, you couldn’t get near it. Now it’s resting on us because of the ultimate Passover lamb, King Jesus.

The gospel is declared. The people are pierced to the heart. They say, how do we respond? Peter says, repent and believe, be baptized. And so there’s this huge baptism service. 3000 people were added together. Incredible. But now starting in verse 42 is the kind of a harder part. They have to learn how to do life.

together. Luke, he is a physician, he is a historian, and he is very particular. What we have to notice in verse 42, he lays out for us the four marks, not of a lower room, but of the upper room church. And they’re much different than probably what you and I are prone to. Emphasize today. So point one, personality may draw people in, but the teaching of scripture is what draws people up.

Look at verse 42 again. It says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching. Verse 46, every day they devoted themselves. This word devoted has, first of all, it’s written in the tense where it’s constant. So it’s not like one day they devoted. It is a ever present, ever going, perfect active. I think it’s what it’s called.

Always doing devotion. And one commentary defined devotion here is to attach oneself at the hip. So they were devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple. And the temple would be a lot like this. They would preach the word of God and teach and sing together. And so they were attached to this teaching like you’re attached to somebody at the hip.

And, and, and honestly, this is one of my favorite things of us meeting at this school. When I was in junior high, I went here in seventh grade and the spirit of God just grabbed me. I think it’s because I had no friends. I was introverted. I didn’t know anybody. So I just fell in love with my Bible and I was attached to it at the hip.

Anytime I finished math before the bell rang, I read my scriptures. over and over. And that’s something that we do as the people of God. But we have to remember here in verse 42, the apostles teaching, what is this referring to? If you remember during and all of Acts, Acts is a beautiful book because it really shows a lot of the beginning journey of the church.

But we have to know, especially at Acts two, most of new Testament hasn’t been written yet. In fact, some argue, none of the new Testament has been written yet because even the gospels came a little bit later after this. And so what are they learning from? Right? And so it’s really important for them to listen to the Apostles teaching.

Right, because the apostles were the ones who were given the gift, who have this word of knowledge. This is why you see, uh, in verse, um, in verse 43, these apostles were doing wonders and signs. Why? These wonders and signs pointed, God gave them this gift to point to their authority. Saying, look, don’t listen to all these other false teachers.

Listen to the people who I am backing up through wonders and signs. Now this, this sparks the debate, does the spirit still give us, give us gifts today? We’re going to talk about that as we continue to go through the book of Acts. But what we do know is there were special manifestations of wonders and signs at a continual basis so that we constantly be reminded these are the people to listen to and those false teachers we need to ignore.

But what were they teaching? Probably, it was the Old Testament. in light of Jesus. So Jesus shows how he is the ultimate fulfillment of the Old Testament. So these people were gathering together, learning from the Old Testament, but not just that. Probably because this was an oral culture. They were reminding each other of the sayings of Jesus.

They would probably recite the Sermon on the Mount and then kind of wrestle with that as a community. And also the final conversations Jesus has with his disciples in the upper room. They’re probably mulling over those things. Things and talking about it over and over, and if we want to be an upper room church, we continue this tradition by faithfully hearing and doing the word of God.

This is why we gather around the Bible and not around my latest opinion. Amen. It is the word of God that sustains us and hear me. We actually encountered this during soccer camp this week, which is fine, but one of our biggest lies in the culture is this belief that teaching scripture is indoctrination.

But everything else is neutral. It’s simply not the case. Anytime you teach anybody anything, you are teaching a doctrine. Nothing’s neutral. Right? Every book we read, every story we hear, every movie we watch, every song that we sing, we can get a little crazy, but it is making assumptions about a whole lot of things about our sexuality, how we were created, who created us, the value of a human, what we were made to do, our identity, what it means to be happy.

Everything is indoctrinating you. The question is, are you picking the right thing giving you doctrine? And we would say the Word of God is the lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. Amen? And so this is why we realize we are unintentionally being formed by all sorts of lowercase t truths, I say in quotes.

So we need to go to capital T truth and remind ourselves of the truth of God’s Word even when it doesn’t feel like it should be right. Amen. N. T. Wright for the win, he talks about this in Acts 2. 42, he says, Where no attention is given to teaching and to constant, lifelong Christian learning, people quickly revert to the worldview or mindset of the surrounding culture, and end up with their minds shaped by whichever social pressures are most persuasive, with Jesus somewhere around as a pale influence or memory.

Friends, do we have social pressures today that are contradicting Scripture? Just a few, right? Absolutely. And here’s what us as a church, we need to remember. Personality, how, how creative or fun the pastor is, can’t hold a candle to the persuasion of the enemy of what they’re hearing all week. But the Word of God, compared?

to the world. The Word of God trumps all, and if we become students of this Word, we can determine we don’t have to be influenced by the prevailing thoughts and pressures. In fact, we will see social pressures, we’ll see it with compassion, and think, man, you just don’t know the truth, but let me show you the truth because it’s the truth that sets you free.

Right? That’s what gives us that confidence. But we have to constantly give ourself a diet of the Word of God. I’ll say one more thing. In the upper rim, we know if our God always agrees with us, all we are serving is a deified version of ourselves. In other words, if you read the Bible and you’re never offended, you should read it again.

This is what the Word of God does. So, in the upper room, I’m trying to lay a case here. According to Luke, I mean, according to Luke in Acts 2. 42, there are four key markers to the upper room. Now, the scriptures we believe are sufficient. They are incredible. But, does just teaching the Bible create an upper room church?

No. Right? We need a few more items. Next point. People may draw people in. Next point. But the community of Jesus draws people up.

People may draw people in. It’s great. We love our hospitality team. We’re trying to make it a big deal. We want the right music out there. We’re trying to set the tone so you want to come back. But That’s all fun and games, but community where we’re doing life on life, where we learn about each other’s failures and we still forgive each other and we help each other in need.

That is what draws people up into kingdom living. That has always been the design in the book of Acts. Look with me in verse 42 again, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the next is to the fellowship. You’ll see 44. Now, all the believers were together and held all things in common. If you’re reading this in Greek, uh, fellowship and common have similar words here.

This is koinonia is fellowship. Koinonia, the root word of koinonia is fellowship. common. So the Bible, he’s saying they were a group of people that held things in common. And then he just says, and again, verse 44, they held all things in common. How do they do that? They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all as any had need.

Every commentary I read this, uh, this week, I’ll just say it too. This isn’t saying communism is the way to go, right? This is saying we, as a church, we take care of each other. This is what we do, uh, and the evidence of that by us being generous and giving our things, which again we’ll talk about in August.

So mark that on your calendar. We’re going to be talking about generosity. In verse, uh, let’s look at verse 46. Every day they devote themselves to meeting together In the temple and broke bread from house to house. Notice this fellowship. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts. Everybody says Amen, right?

This is what we’re trying to do in our Formed by Hospitality series. Here’s what’s amazing about the Spirit of God. He unites us over mutual love. Held all things in common. What do we hold in common? We hold in common the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we hold in common all of our possessions.

What’s mine is yours. What’s yours is mine. What is that phrase? Mi casa es su casa. Right Alex? Did I nail it? Okay. Okay. Mi casa es su casa. This is the Christian way of living, right? But you’ll notice this. Community today is often not based off mutual love, but what? Mutual hate. It’s kind of fun to make those friends, right?

Like some of my best friends, we became friends because we both hate the Lakers. It’s a good thing. He may not like the Suns. I forgive them, but at least you don’t like the Lakers, right? I’ll stop with that. It’s a Laker fans are like almost done with me. Cause I’ve mentioned that like four times in the last eight weeks.

I’m not bitter. Okay. So. We have to see, though, what God does is he puts a community together according to mutual love. David Brooks, I quote this often. It’s such a great line. I think it’s in his book, Second Mountain. He says the following. He compares tribalism with community. He says, tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community.

It certainly does bind people together, but it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, Is connection based on mutual hatred? How much tribalism do we see today? We have an opportunity to combat that by being an actual genuine community, gathering together more by what we’re for than what we are against.

Although, let’s be clear, we have to be against some things and we talk about that often here at our church. Now, the theme for our church for all of 2024 is how to make friends and love other people. It’s a lot harder than it seems, especially when you’re not in school anymore. Amen? So, the first steps to creating fellowship are Remember this from January?

Our number one, proximity, and number two, vulnerability. And we see both of those in this text. First, they shared proximity. By what? It says, every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple and broke bread from house to house. What is this doing? They’re getting together every single day.

Sometimes at the temple, this is a more formal gathering. There’s more of a large crowd worshiping together, praying together, hearing testimonies, hearing the Word of God together. That’s what we’re doing right now. But then you have at a house, a more intimate fellowship. It’s a small group, or we call it together group, where they break bread together.

They pray together and they discuss the truths and promises of God together. And here’s what’s so crucial. Friends, we have to be together more. We believe in a church around a stage and around a table. And if you want this koinonia, this fellowship, honestly, a lot of it, love is spelt T I M E, right? It’s about getting together.

But also you’ll see in verse 45, they not only shared proximity constantly, and that developed this community that Jesus was looking for, but they also shared their deepest vulnerabilities. Again, verse 45, they sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all as any had need. How did they meet so many needs?

People were vulnerable enough to share their needs. What did we say in January? Relationships will only be valuable when you are willing to get vulnerable. Hidden in this text is a group of people saying, I’m not gonna lie anymore. I am who I am. Here are my needs and the Lord meets them through his people.

I need, I just miss preaching, but I need to move faster. Okay, now this is what the upper room church does. And to be honest, I’ve seen this at Passion Creek and it’s wonderful, but again, Is this all we need for a spirit filled upper room? I think most people would say yes, but I think the text is saying no.

Consistent teaching of scripture and constant fellowship of believers around a stage and around a table. Incredible start. But you’ll notice if you follow Jesus long enough, you’ll still notice there’s something missing in your life. You need to go from milk to milk. To meet, and I think it’s these next two that are part of that prescription.

Verse 42, again, they devoted themselves, the apostles teaching, we covered that, to the fellowship, we covered that. Now, to the breaking of bread. Verse 46, we see how they broke bread. They were in the temple, but then broke bread from house to house, and they ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts.

Listen, programs may draw people in, but the practices of Jesus draw people up. This is a callback to week one of our hospitality series. What’s breaking bread mean? It’s one of the five words we use to talk about communion. What are all the five? It’s, it’s, it’s Anybody remember any of them? Love feast.

It’s always the favorite one that we talk about. Amen. To the glory of God. We don’t call it that here. Just, you know, reasons. Uh, breaking of bread. Lord’s Supper, I heard. Communion. And then for the more religious type, Eucharist. Amen. Okay. These are the five different ways. So we believe, most scholars think, when it talks about breaking bread in the New Testament, It’s likely it meant an actual Lord’s Supper, but then it continued to be an actual full meal.

And this is what we’re trying to do with our church as we focus on hospitality. Now here’s what’s, hospitality is like one of the main focuses in 42 through 47. How do I know that? Back in the day, they didn’t have the Gutenberg Press, so you couldn’t bold or highlight or underline anything. How would you know something was important in the Bible?

They said it again and again. Three times in first 42 to 47, Luke is mentioning eating, getting together, breaking bread. What is Luke trying to say? Guys, this is really important. How did the church grow and expand to the glory of God and become an upper room church? They ate together on a constant basis.

So breaking bread is just one of the many practices. The church is called to do. If you’re a new here at our church, we love, we are obsessed with the practices of Jesus. All that means is we believe Jesus lived the perfect life and not only are we supposed to just receive him as our savior, but we’re also see his life as a rabbi.

And so Whatever way he lived, we need to do it too. So if he was in solitude a lot, we go to solitude a lot. If he was, hospitality was a main focus of his. Hospitality is a main focus of ours. It’s simply an action we do with our bodies that really calls us to remember the grace of Jesus in our lives. And these are all these practices are.

So, some people would call spiritual disciplines, I think that term is loaded, so that’s why we just say practices. But hear me, the practices do not earn us God’s love, but they do churn us to God’s love. And I just learned this week from Victoria, I say turn weird. I know it’s turn. I’ve been saying churn, y’all think I’ve been making butter this whole time.

It’s turn, turn. All week I’ve been practicing and I still messed it up. Okay, so, here’s what we’re trying to do as an upper room church here at Passion Creek. Turn, turn, turn. Okay. We have found the grace of God being so evident in the life of our church. When we just take one practice, we focus on it all together for like a long time, three months, and we do it together over and over.

And the idea is we do it repetitively enough where it becomes an automatic response. I love James’s story. It’s now become a part of their schedule. They even have a night of the week. It’s Thursday night. Right. It becomes this natural muscle. We believe that Jesus follower is the one who sees those practices and is slowly training to put all of those into their life.

And that’s why we do formed by jesus dot com. Last year we did sabbath scripture simplicity. This year we’re looking at hospitality. Peacemaking is next. Here’s what we mean by that. It’s one thing to learn. We should just operate from rest. Yeah, we should, we should be restful people. It’s another as a community.

This is why I think we need community. It’s another to say, okay, guys, we’re going to keep practicing Sabbath together. And as we do this for 24 hours, once a week, we will become people of rest. You see the difference between hearing a sermon, talking about it in your group, how rest should be a thing and never doing anything.

You’re not going to be restful. What about truth? Yeah. We should get together. Rah, rah, rah. God’s, you know, God’s word is the truth. That’s great to learn. It’s another to say, and I’m going to read his scriptures every day to not where I, I want to get to the point where I’m not just thinking about scripture.

I am thinking scripture. That’s truth. It’s what we’re doing now. It’s one thing to say and declare to the world. We as Christians, we love our neighbor. We love everybody. That’s a great lesson. But you know what we’re trying to do? We’re trying to say, okay, great, and we’re going to actually walk that out by putting in my calendar this week to have a saint, a stranger, and a sinner over constantly at my house, showing them the love of God.

It’s one thing to say, this is what we believe. It’s another thing to say, and this is how we behave. That doesn’t earn us salvation. It turns us to God’s love. I think that’s wrong. I think churn is the right way to do it, but whatever. Okay. I think we’re starting to get a holistic vision of the upper room.

Consistent teaching of the word of God. We’re doing that right now. You should do it throughout your life. Constant fellowship around a stage and around a table and carefully following the ways of Jesus by embodying the life he lived through the practices. But woe to us if we skip the fourth mark of an upper room.

The fourth mark is this place may draw people in. But the spirit of God is what draws people up in the upper room. And I pray we are. This is a church. The saints. No, we don’t pray before the work. Prayer is the work because that’s when God works. We are stepping into the book of Acts. Me and Pastor Caleb, it was great.

It was a great moment last year where we both kind of at the same time said we should do acts. And so we were like, okay, this is what we’re going to do. And one reason I think we’ve made a lot of progress in our church with teaching community and practice. If I’m going to be honest, I think there’s a lot our church can learn about interacting with the Holy Spirit.

It’s kind of like a Baptist thing. We kind of keep trying to figure that one out. And so, and, and don’t hear me wrong, my vision of what our church is going to become, we’re not here yet and that’s okay, we’re all training, we’re all taking baby steps, but in my vision of what God is calling us to this year as we submit to the scriptures and the book of Acts is to become both charismatic and contemplative.

Now I don’t mean that theologically, wholesale, we’re going to talk a lot about that, but here’s what I mean, I love my charismatic brothers and sisters because when they approach the sanctuary. They have the expectation to encounter the living power of God. They believe something can happen right now, and I love that.

They believe there’s something powerful about worship. It’s not just a warm up to the word, right? And so I think we need to approach the sanctuary with that kind of expectation. Write this down. I think we block the Holy Spirit when we walk with a hopeless spirit. And I’m hoping as we, as we study acts and we learn about how these people were a people of prayer, they weren’t hopeless.

They were hopeful because they believed in the word of God. I think we need to be reminded first Timothy two four says God wants everyone to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. I want to challenge you even maybe during worship or even right now, if you have an empty seat next to you, just put your hand on it and pray and ask God for a name, someone you know, someone, a neighbor, a family member.

Let’s expect God to bring that person into the room in the next two weeks. Let’s expect God to do a miraculous thing in that person’s life and they come to Easter and they’re saved and get baptized. I don’t know if we have enough expectations. And this side of the room has a lot more hands, uh, seats to touch than that side, alright?

So y’all get to work. Um, but we block the Holy Spirit when we’re not walking in expectancy. And I think the upper room church, they just believe that God meant what he said he was gonna do. But also contemplative. Contemplative brothers and sisters who I’ve been drawn to, especially of recent years, they, they, you know, the charismatics love to approach the sanctuary, but the contemplative, they love to enter into solitude with expectation to encounter the loving presence of God.

I want us to be the kind of people that can just sit in silence and be okay with that and know that God moves when we finally sit still and know that he is God and we are not. That’s good. They become a people that know this truth, that we block the Holy Spirit when we walk in a hurried spirit. What if we became more contemplative?

What if we followed the upper room example in Acts 2 42? And we slow down our lives, which typically means churning down the noise, looking for interruptions. I just love how the Holy Spirit moves. Sometimes it’s loud and there’s a group of people and we’re shouting and other times it’s a whisper. And the people we’re trying to create, we are the type of people who see him in both environments.

And so we actually want to invite you first Saturday prayer gatherings. It’s every first Saturday of the month. So it’ll be April 6th. We, we want this. I am declaring, I want this to be the best prayer gathering we’ve had. Saturday at 9am we just meet right here and we just pray for God’s mercy and his grace and his power and his love for 30 minutes.

Last month, none of y’all came. I was kind of sad and I realized the custodian locked all the doors. So you literally couldn’t come in, which is pretty amazing. So we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again. But look, this is the kind of church we’re trying to create. Do you see like, it’s so easy to get sucked into the lower room.

Oh, Trey needs to have a better personality. I know I’m trying, right? We need a better place. We need better people. And it’s so easy to get caught up in this lower room. We want the lower room. Good. But man, the powers in the upper room, the powers in the scriptures, it’s in fellowship where we’re, we don’t leave each other.

We love each other and endure each other’s shortcomings. We pray together. We practice this stuff together and stumble along the way and we call on God saying, God, this is your church. It’s not our own. Isn’t that good? Like I want us to be a learning church that sits under the scripture, a loving church that cares for those around us, a liturgical church that has these rhythms and practices to become more like him and a living church where you come into this room, there’s something different because the spirit of God is here.

So in your groups this week, you’re going to study Acts 2 together, and you’re going to go another layer deeper because hospitality is mentioned three times. We wrote kind of this practice for you to engage in when it comes to hospitality, and I hope that you take up that challenge. But before we close, I want us to sit with the Holy Spirit and bring before him this simple question.

God, what are you inviting me further into?

Just right now in your seat. Is it teaching? Is it understanding the word more? Is it community? Is it joining a group or, or not, not leaving people but staying connected? Is it practice? Is it maybe trying hospitality or Sabbath or one of these for the first time? Or is it to slow down and just to engage with the spirit?