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[WW] What Will We Create? · The Wesley Word

0:00
SPEAKER_00: The Wesley Word is a production of the Clemson Wesley Foundation.
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SPEAKER_00: For more information about Clemson Wesley, check out our website or follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Until next time, get out there and love your neighbor.
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SPEAKER_00: Holy and gracious God, we give you thanks for this evening, for the chance to come and to dine with friends, old and new, to lift up our voices in song and praise as we make a joyful noise to you.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: God be with us during this time of worship.
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SPEAKER_00: May it be pleasing to you.
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SPEAKER_00: I pray, O God, that you might speak through me or despite me, but in some way might we have a word today.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: We ask all this in Christ's holy name.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: How many times have you passed a construction site today?
0:48
SPEAKER_00: How many times have you done that?
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Right?
0:50
SPEAKER_00: I packed at least five, right?
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Um I played golf yesterday with Coleman.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: There's construction going on at the Walker Course.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: They're still trying to put that stuff in.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a new parking garage happening on campus, right?
1:01
SPEAKER_00: They're building a hospital soon.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: There's two buildings going up.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: You can't walk to Wesley anymore without walking through literally a construction site for probably the next year.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: They promised me it'll be ready in the fall of 24, right?
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Or still not happening, right?
1:14
SPEAKER_00: They decided two weeks ago to dig everything up, right?
1:16
SPEAKER_00: But construction is happening all around us, right?
1:19
SPEAKER_00: And I'm answering questions and I'm asking questions, like, oh, what's what's going in there?
1:23
SPEAKER_00: What's what's what's being built there?
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:25
SPEAKER_00: Just two weeks ago, I stood on top of our hill and I looked out in the city engineer.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Nathan's become my best friend because I'm hitting him up, like, yo, what's happening here?
1:31
SPEAKER_00: What's happening here?
1:32
SPEAKER_00: And he painted the picture for out here, which by the way, by next August, double cross fingers, hopefully, pray to God, we'll see.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: This is gonna be nice, right?
1:39
SPEAKER_00: They're building like a little building on the side, and this is gonna be pedestrian and not drive-thru.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: They have a little Edison light bulbs.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: Look, just stick with us until next August.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be great.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: If not, we're going to protest at Nathan's office, right?
1:49
SPEAKER_00: Nathan with an N.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna hit him up, right?
1:52
SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot of stuff that's happening here, a lot of stuff that's going on.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's fitting in a way, although I wish it was done outside, that we are literally worshiping this year in a construction zone.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: When we gather together weekly for worship, or you gather together weekly for a small group, we are kind of in the midst of a construction zone.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: They're still laying water lines, like literally a U-shaped, they're building a moat around our building right now, right?
2:17
SPEAKER_00: That's what they're doing.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: But it's fitting that we do this, we come to worship because we as a people are called to be creative people.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: It is in our DNA to be a people that are about creating things.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: May Ruth did a great job of reading our scripture this morning, and I got put onto it this summer.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have no Genesis one, but I was talking with another campus minister friend of mine over the summer.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: He was like, Yeah, I was reading this book by this guy named Andy Crouch, and he did this talk one time, and he was talking about there's four chapters in the Bible that almost everybody ignores.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, well, dude, what four chapters of that?
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Like somewhere in the Old Testament, something you know, tucked around.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: See, there's four chapters that we tend to ignore as Christians.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: He says the first two chapters in Genesis and the last two chapters in Revelation.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: He says, Too often as Christians, we quickly want to jump to Genesis 3, right?
3:06
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about sin and all the stuff that goes on.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: We talk about the fire later on in Revelation, but a reminder that in the beginning, in the very beginning, and on our first day of worship here in this new school year, we are reminded that we serve a God.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: We worship a God that is a creator God, that is a God about making things.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: And in the in those chat, in those verses that Mary Ruth read, right, um, they didn't have, when they were writing the Bible back then, they weren't like texting, like putting bold or emphasis or crazy things that come across your screen, like, wow, right?
3:40
SPEAKER_00: They didn't do that.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: They were like their paper was slim, you know, they had to be careful on how many tablets they're chiseling into and that kind of stuff.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: And so when they when the writers repeat things, it's not because they messed up and autocorrected, right?
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, like it was for emphasis.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: It was for emphasis.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: The first five days they kind of go through quick, right?
4:00
SPEAKER_00: It's like God created the heavens and the earth, God created light, God created this, God created that, real quick.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Just give me the cliff notes, let's move on.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: And then they start taking up more of the page, right?
4:09
SPEAKER_00: And twice, twice we see in Genesis 1, hearing that we're gonna make humankind and we're gonna give them dominion over the land and over the animals, right?
4:19
SPEAKER_00: Twice we're gonna do that.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: Now we're not about dominating, we're getting into that, right?
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And then four times in just those few verses, just four times in those few verses, we see the language of let us make humankind in our image.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Let us make humankind in our likeness, right?
4:35
SPEAKER_00: To be repeated four times in just a couple of verses is a huge deal in scripture.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: That should send off flags as you're studying scripture, right?
4:42
SPEAKER_00: See it once, like, all right, you see it twice, like, oh, whoa, something's going on.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: Four times, God's like, get it through, right?
4:48
SPEAKER_00: He said, I'm creating humankind in my image.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm creating them in my likeness.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: And that means many things, and it doesn't mean that we're like little mini gods running around, right?
4:57
SPEAKER_00: That's that's what we're not getting to.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: But it should mean that we are taking on some of the characteristics of God.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: And when we look in Genesis, when we start at the very beginning, we look at two of those chapters that Andy Crouch would argue that sometimes we ignore too often, we see very much that in the beginning, in the beginning, God created.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: And surely, in some way, in some way, we must be called to join that creative character of the maker and to join in that.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: And so I want to talk a little bit about creation and what that might look like and talk about what we might be about creating this year here at Clemson Wesley and what you might be about creating on your own.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: Four quick things about creation.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, if I talk too fast or start mumbling or get that cage of mumble out, just so Steve, can't hear you, talk to me, right?
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh, creation brings about something out of nothing, right?
5:47
SPEAKER_00: It brings about something out of nothing.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew word there, barra, is something that's only used for God there, right?
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Because God starts creating all this stuff out of nothing, uh, makes it happen, right?
5:57
SPEAKER_00: And as we begin creating things, when I say creating things, I'm not talking about let's make a nice little pot, right?
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, or let's, you know, cut it out of a little snowflake, but like creating the world around us, help creating culture that we're kind of embedded in, right?
6:10
SPEAKER_00: We as humans, God creates something out of nothing.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: We as humans don't necessarily do that.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: We create out of the materials that we're given, right?
6:17
SPEAKER_00: We're also like, we got that image of God in us.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: And so it also means when we seek to create sort of the culture around us, when we help to create the world that we live in, in some ways, though, we can dream to make the impossible possible.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: Because we worship a God that can make things out of nothing.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: And so there may be something here that we're like, this world ain't right.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what's up.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: We can begin to pray and say, God, help us make something here that it's not the way it is.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: We don't have the stuff, we don't have the means, but we believe in a God that is bigger than that, and we can dream God-sized visions and begin to create things, maybe sometimes out of nothing.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Think about our football team, kind of like there.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: I like a lot of football analogies, big fans happening this week.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna dominate some LSU.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: That's my whole family, LSU guys.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
6:58
SPEAKER_00: This week, sorry, Clemson, right?
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you think about it, like even Dabbo, when he first got here, the Tigers were not that great, y'all.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: We was bad, right?
7:06
SPEAKER_00: We were real bad, right?
7:08
SPEAKER_00: And he didn't have to create something out of nothing, but he had to begin to cast a vision, right?
7:11
SPEAKER_00: And to say, this is what we want to be about, this is who we're gonna be about.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: And he got just a couple good players along the way, right?
7:17
SPEAKER_00: And they would get a little bit better and get a little bit closer, and he kept casting that same vision until eventually, oh Tampa loved it.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: Happiest day, no, happiest top four of my life.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: Top four.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: Look, I'm just saying that individual moment and that, mmm, I want to run from all right.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: Moving on, all right.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Creation would create something out of nothing, all right?
7:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, creation is also relational, right?
7:40
SPEAKER_00: We don't just create things when we think about creating cultures, we're talking about here tonight, like creating the world around us, right?
7:45
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't just happen in a vacuum.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: When God created, right?
7:49
SPEAKER_00: He talks about humankind being created.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: That was on the sixth day, if we look at that passage, right?
7:54
SPEAKER_00: We had to have light first, we had some land to walk on, right?
7:57
SPEAKER_00: All these things, creation is relational.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: As we create a culture, as we create a world around us, it affects other people around us and we build on things that they built as well.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Creation requires some cultivation.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: You can't just show up and things happen, right?
8:10
SPEAKER_00: There's some planning that goes in place, a little bit of order.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: I really hope the city has a plan here.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Like some days I'm like, y'all ain't got a plan.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: Y'all just smoking something in the office and come out doing some stuff, right?
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, but uh that from the podcast tomorrow.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: But we'll see, you know, what's what's happening.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: But that cultivation is required.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: And then last thing about creation, before we talk about briefly about Genesis 2, and this is important as we think about being a people of faith in the world that we're creating around us.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: If you look at Genesis 1, creation should lead to celebration, right?
8:42
SPEAKER_00: When God created something, he would stop and say, Oh, that's good.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: Light, yeah, that's good.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: Animals, that's good.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Humankind, wow, I did a good job there, right?
8:56
SPEAKER_00: And so what we're creating as a people of faith, as we create the world around us, as we interact with other people, right?
9:03
SPEAKER_00: It should lead to celebration.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: It should, our interactions with other people as a big group of faith and even as individual followers, should lead people leave people thinking, wow, that's good.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: I can get down with that, God.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: But the way that we interact in the world as a people of faith collectively and as individuals, people leave us and are like, oh, that feels slimy.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: That's no good.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: I feel hurt, I feel unseen, that really sucks.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: Maybe when you look about what it is that we're creating, maybe what we're creating in that moment is not of God, but of ourselves.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: It should require celebration.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: It requires something that is creating things that are about um things that don't leave us feeling dirty and slimy, but instead goodness, right?
9:56
SPEAKER_00: The goodness.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: So quickly looking at Genesis 2.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: That's Genesis 1, right?
10:00
SPEAKER_00: I like Andy Crouch put this.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: I was reading his book all summer.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, this is awesome.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: Um he talks about how the first chapter, if that is this beautiful, majestic account, full sweeping, big wide angle shots of soaring vistas and all this good stuff.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 2, God's like, all right, y'all, it's time to get your hands dirty, right?
10:19
SPEAKER_00: It's time to get your hands dirty.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: All right, chapter 2, here we go.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Verse 7.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord God formed a man.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: Don't listen to my fingers, that's just me talking.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: All right.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: He reached in there, breathed into his nostrils, right?
10:33
SPEAKER_00: This is like dirty dirt stuff, right?
10:35
SPEAKER_00: Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living being.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord God planted them in the garden of Eden, right?
10:42
SPEAKER_00: We see this idea of getting dirty, having to get into as we're creating, right?
10:48
SPEAKER_00: It's not something that we can do in a clean way.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: As people of faith, we are planted in a garden.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: The wilderness is nice to visit, theme parks are nice to visit, but we're called to spend our time in the garden.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: A place where we can cultivate, a place where we can do things, where we can get our hands dirty, right?
11:05
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes in a garden, there's that big hill right there, back there, y'all.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: We got some rocks there for the first.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm in year 13 now as campus minister for the first 12, 11 years, right?
11:17
unknown: I hated that hill.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: Right?
11:20
SPEAKER_00: It didn't have rocks, it had weeds.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: And I would go through and I'd talk some students in to help me with that, and we'd like pull them, we mow them down, all this kind of stuff, and you would just leave it there.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: I'd like try to kill it as much as I could, round up, plant new stuff, and stuff would just like just start coming back.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: There's a constant, constant need to be weeding and all this sort of stuff, right?
11:36
SPEAKER_00: As you think about as the beginning of school, what it is that we're trying to cultivate, what is it that we're trying to create in your own gardens, right?
11:42
SPEAKER_00: For some of you, this is your first time away from home.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: You have new freedoms, right?
11:47
SPEAKER_00: That you might decide what kind of seeds you're gonna be planting.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: You're in new places for the first time.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: You gotta think about what seeds you're gonna be planting, new rhythms of life, new demands on your time and energy, new opportunities.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Every day when you wake up, I see this a lot.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: It is a lot.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: Every day, there's an opportunity to cultivate the garden, your surroundings that you're placed in, right?
12:07
SPEAKER_00: And if you're not careful, things can kind of seeds come in, whether you put them there or not, things start to creep up here and there.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: My point tonight is that our gardens are constantly growing, seeds are coming, whether we're trying to plant them or not.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's us, sometimes a random bird just comes, poops, and boom, we've got a seed there, right?
12:22
SPEAKER_00: But the question for us tonight is are you willing to take active ownership?
12:27
SPEAKER_00: Active ownership in God's garden, the place that God has planted you?
12:31
SPEAKER_00: And if so, what will you create and what will you cultivate?
12:36
SPEAKER_00: This is week one, and I briefly want to talk about three ways that Clemson Wesley planned, three, three sort of pillars of our garden that we try to strive for here.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: We don't always get it right, but this is who we try to be.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: And I try to do this on the first night, so that if you're this your first time, you're like, oh, I can buy into that.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Or you're like, that's whack, I gotta get out of here.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's whack, but maybe you do.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: We'll see.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: The first thing that we're gonna do is the first pillar, and this is hugely, hugely important.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be planting seeds of hospitality and community.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: If we get nothing else right this week, this year, we want to be a place that is a welcoming community.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: We strive to be a place where all are welcome and treated like family from day one, right?
13:15
SPEAKER_00: Whether you've been here forever or you just walked in like, hmm, chicken, I'm in, right?
13:19
SPEAKER_00: You are a part of Clemson Wesley.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: You are a part of this family.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but my family, Julius Airbus kind of gone like, sometimes they're great, and sometimes I'm like, oh man, right?
13:32
SPEAKER_00: My own family.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: They're living, I got 18 people coming this weekend.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be a time, right?
13:36
SPEAKER_00: But we love them.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: And we have differences of opinion.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: We vote differently, we think differently, we like different foods.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: We're kind of all over the place, but we're united in who we are as a family.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: And at Clemson Wesley, we are gonna be a place where you can know each other, and we want you to be known.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: We want you to know and be known.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: We want you to be who you are, your full self, your whole self.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: And that means maybe you were on fire for Jesus and you're like, I can't wait, I'm here, praise and worship, let's go.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're like, I'm not sure about this whole Jesus dude.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm just here for the food.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: You are welcome here as well, and everybody in between.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: You are each and every one of you, and myself included, have been created in the image of God.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: You are welcome here.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: That's a hard thing to do.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: It'd be really easy to create a campus ministry where everybody thought alike, everybody looked alike, worshiped alike, but we strive to be a place where we can have some diversity and character and different conversations, whether you're left, right, in the middle, like again, you're on fire or not.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: We come together as one.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna be building spread seeds of hospitality and community.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna create plants and seeds of discipleship, right?
14:40
SPEAKER_00: We want you to be welcome, but we also want you to grow.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: We want you to grow in your faith, right?
14:44
SPEAKER_00: And often talk about this, and this is important for especially Christians that have been around for a while.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Being busy, busyness is not discipleship.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes, for like, man, I go to Wesley on Wednesdays, I go to uh FCA on Thursdays, I go to church on Sunday.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure if crew meets on Tuesday or when they meet, but we kind of do everything all the time.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm in six different Bible studies, and I never have a time to breathe, never have time for God to talk to me.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm just go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Busyness is not discipleship.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: We're going to plant seeds of discipleship, of being intentional, of asking those questions: how am I growing and how am I becoming more like Jesus?
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Am I willing to become more like Jesus?
15:26
SPEAKER_00: Discipleship is not busyness, but it does require intentionality.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Very, very, very rarely do you just stumble into discipleship.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: Do you just stumble into growth?
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Right?
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you have big moments, Paul's like, boom, wow, wow, light, right?
15:39
SPEAKER_00: But oftentimes it's little, little intentionalities day by day making things happen.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: I like to tell folks if you want to be intentional, right?
15:47
SPEAKER_00: You need to set a time and make a plan if you want to grow in your discipleship, right?
15:52
SPEAKER_00: You're never gonna just be like, ah, maybe I'll go to a small group today, right?
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Like find a small group.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: We have some great ones at Wesley.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Other campus ministries have some great ones as well.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe somebody in your hall, you drive with, and you're like, hey, we're gonna get together and do a small group.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: Somewhere, somehow, set a time and make a plan to focus on your discipleship.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Whether that's one-on-one, on your own, or in a small group, set a time, make a plan, be intentional as we grow in our faith.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: So it'll be a place of belonging.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be a place of discipleship, and we're also gonna plant seeds of service and love, right?
16:27
SPEAKER_00: If you think about the greatest commandment that Jesus gave, right?
16:30
SPEAKER_00: It was not, hey, be sure that you have your fire insurance card so you don't burn in hell, right?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't make sure you have a personal relationship with me.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: What did Jesus say, right?
16:38
SPEAKER_00: Right?
16:39
SPEAKER_00: Love God and love your neighbor with all that you have and all that you are, essentially, right?
16:42
SPEAKER_00: We are people about love.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: We are people about certain, yes, I want you to have a personal relationship with God.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: Don't go home and it's like, oh my mom, you ain't gonna believe this.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: That pastor's crazy.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: I want you to have a personal relationship with Jesus.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: But out of that should come a service and love, right?
16:54
SPEAKER_00: We should be known by our love.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna create opportunities to serve, right?
17:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's more than just worship attendance, it's more than be able to speak Christian ease, right?
17:03
SPEAKER_00: It's about loving, right?
17:05
SPEAKER_00: It's not loving our neighbor so complicated.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: We want to plant seeds of love.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk next week a little bit about like if Jesus was serious, what that what that looks like in that.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: We're planting seeds of hospitality and belonging, planting seeds of discipleship, and planting seeds of service and love.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: I was on a retreat yesterday.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: If you were around me, I complained a lot about having to go on it.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh here's our church retreat.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: And they gave us this nice little play-doh, right?
17:36
SPEAKER_00: And um, this is how creative I am, y'all.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: Uh everybody's making these nice fancy things, and I'm just kind of squeezing it, right?
17:43
SPEAKER_00: A little stress ball.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when we think about creating, we think of like nice play-doh or even like kind of neat, neat clay that we might mold into sort of fresh start, we can make what we want.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: But the truth is when we look around the gardens of ourselves or our world, oftentimes, sometimes we start from a place of hurt, or we start from a place of confusion, or we gotta clean up mess that maybe we caused or someone else caused, right?
18:06
SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes creating and creating the world around us easy as starting brand new, right?
18:12
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we have to dig into the dirt, we have to clear out first and get into what it is that we're trying to be about.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: What will you create this semester as Clemson Wesley and as individuals?
18:24
SPEAKER_00: What will your garden look like?
18:27
SPEAKER_00: Is it within our image?
18:28
SPEAKER_00: It's within our image to create.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: We're always creating the question is what will it be?
18:34
SPEAKER_00: Every week at worship we're gonna try to create, every week at small group we're gonna try to create, we're gonna be a place where you're known, where we're trying to challenge you in your faith, we want you to grow.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: And lastly, the why here, God has invited you to join God in growing God's garden.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Right?
18:50
SPEAKER_00: To plant, to cultivate, to be creative in the world around us, and to not create it in our own image, but to create it in the image of the one who bears fruit like love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Let us pray.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: Holy and gracious God, again, we thank you for this evening, for this time to gather, for new friends and old friends.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: God, whatever our gardens may look like, we are thankful for the places that you've placed us in.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: We pray for your strength, we pray for your grace, we pray for your mercy.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: Lord, as we seek to be a people that create a place of welcome, a place of hospitality, radical hospitality, a place of service, growth, and love.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: God, you know our own situations, and we are grateful that you were already at work.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Lord, continue to pour out your love and grace upon us.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: We ask all this in Christ's holy name.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Wesley World.