surrender, sow, steward.

Well, happy seventh birthday. Some of you, you're like, I didn't know what I walked into today, and that's okay. You're part of the party now and the celebration, you know. Sometimes you just got to crash birthday parties, right? It's amazing.

We're so glad that everyone's here today to celebrate seven years. I really believe that whether this is your first time here or there is one special person that has been here since day one, other than me, whether you have been here five years, two years, or it's your first Sunday, I believe that God has something for you today that he wants to speak to you through the word.

Just for fun, if you were here in 2018 on the first Sunday, can you please stand up? If you came in 2019 or 2020, can you please stand up in the room today? We got a few in the back there. One, I think one's a liar though. One didn't come until like last year. Yeah, we're a little off there. Okay, 2021. Did anyone start coming in 2021? That was our weird year. Probably not. We were in house churches and all the things. But so incredible to see all that God has done in these seven years.

And if you look on this wall here, it says create the culture. We started from the very beginning with this: our mission to say, what does it look like to create the culture of Christ? Culture is all about patterns, customs, beliefs, things that have been passed down for generations. As we continue to be faithful to the Lord in this city in Madison, we realize some unique things. Madison is a transient city. The average person is only here three years.

And so we have made it a mission to say, while people are here, how do we raise up disciples that can go out and create the culture everywhere that they go after that? This map does not represent where people are from, although we're all from all different places from around the world here in this room, but it represents where people have gone in the past seven years from this place to continue to create the culture of Christ every single day, one person, one place at a time.

We're still after that. We recognize that even in five years, I hope that some of you, because some of you have felt the call to stay now and to plant roots, I hope some of you will do that and will say yes to laying down roots in this city for the sake of the gospel. But we also recognize that many of you, you're going to be somewhere completely different five years from now. So what does it look like to continue to create that culture every single day.

And so we are celebrating seven years. The verse that the Lord has put on my heart for this next season of ours that our leadership team was praying about at our retreat this summer is Luke 4:18-19.

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Luke 4:18-19

And now I love this because seven has so much significance that we're going to get into. But what's so significant about this verse is that what Jesus is talking about, the year of the Lord's favor, he's saying, I am the favor here. Like, once you have me, then the anointing is going to come and I'm going to anoint you to go and to set the captives free. We believe that that invitation is for us here today.

Surrender, sow, and steward

In 2018, we started gathering in a nightclub downtown, and it really was a question of who's going to show up and what's going to happen with this thing. A year and a few months later when the pandemic hit and we had to shut down and we just were recording things from my living room. I still remember the apartment I had that year. I didn't put anything on my walls in my bedroom because we recorded every single sermon from my bedroom wall.

Time and time again, the same invitation came: what does it look like to lay down our lives for the sake of the gospel? What does it look like to make way for Jesus to come?

As we step into year seven, I want to talk about this number. This number seven appears over seven hundred times in scripture, and it's often symbolizing this idea of completion and wholeness and perfection. We talked about that even last year, when we were going from year six to seven and the way that we were celebrating this completion. Every seventh day was a Sabbath. It was a time of rest. But what I love is that not only did we see that this number represents a time of rest, but also a time of multiplication and a time of harvest, which to me is so significant. As we continue to surrender, God uses every single seed that was planted to sustain us.

How often do we get so stuck where we don't want to give what's in our hand because we're afraid there won't be enough. But he continues to use everything to sustain us time and time again. So the first thing that we're talking about today is that as we surrender, sow, and steward, God multiplies.

Seven had some significance when it comes to this idea of harvest in the Bible. There were seven weeks after Passover came what they called the Feast of Weeks, Pentecost. So this is when we see the day of Pentecost take place was seven weeks after Passover. This harvest festival was celebrating the first fruits. Every seventh year, we see in the Old Testament that I mentioned it was the Sabbath rest, also not just the seventh day for the people, but the seventh year for the land. The farmers would go out and they would plant and they would till the soil and they would do all the hard work. And then they would give the land a year of rest. They would give the land a year of rest again. This significance of saying sometimes we think in order to see multiplication happen we have to keep working, keep working, keep working. But there's also an invitation for us to surrender and to trust and to let God do what only he can do.

About four years ago I was at a pastor's gathering and I was standing in the back of the room and they had people up in front and people were praying over them. It was one of those times where I don't know if anyone's ever been there, but you're like, I think I should go and receive prayer, but I don't really know. So I'm just going to be cool and stand at the back. And somebody comes from the front and they're like, Hey, I have this word for you. And I was like, ah, dang it. Like I thought I was just going to be chill for a second.

And I didn't know this man at all. He knew nothing about me. He didn't even know, like we were mainly church planters in the room, but he didn't know. And he said, I just see you. When I see you standing there, I see you holding this basket of fruit and it's a diverse basket of fruit and it's overflowing and it's overflowing and it's overflowing and it's feeding people and it's feeding people and there's just this multiplication and your arms are almost tired. So he said, prepare. And he said, find people to come carry it with you because you can't do it alone.

As I've sat with this and I've shared it with our team and I felt like that this was a word for our church community, that the Lord is bringing in the harvest and he's saying, will you be ready to go and to distribute it? Will you be the people that will say yes to not only receiving and feasting on what I came to do, but going and feeding the people around you? When I think about harvest, sometimes we can get selfish with it where we hear harvest and we're like, it's just for us, like the Lord's going to bless me. Harvest is not to be hoarded. It is to be something that flows through our hands so that we can be people that bless nations.

But that takes a posture of surrender. I think of Joseph in Genesis 41. We read the story that there was the seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. God is so strategic in how he works. What I love about this was that after the seven years of abundance came, there was this famine, but they had a strategy in place where they said, so we're not just gonna feast now for seven years, but we're gonna use everything the Lord has given us now to feed the people around us. People were sustained as others said yes to the Holy Spirit strategy and surrendered what was in their hands.

So when I think of this idea of this year of seven, and I just sense the Lord is saying it's this year of abundance, I wanna talk about what I mean by this. Is that it is our calling to steward abundance, not to hold tight to it. That harvest was not meant to be hoarded, but it was meant to be shared. When Joseph was gathering this grain during those seven years of plenty, he didn't know what famine was coming. He didn't know who he was going to be feeding, but he was faithful to steward what he had. Abundance is not about accumulation, but it's about distribution. This is something that I want us to hear today. Everything that the Lord gives us, that he gifts us with, is not for us to just accumulate and to hold on to, but to release back to the Lord and let him do what only he can do.

Living from abundance, not lack

And I'm not just talking about finances here, but I'm talking about this idea of what does it look like for us to be people that we live from a place of abundance and not lack. Psalms 23 is one of the most famous Psalms that we read. A lot of translations, it'll start by saying, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. One of my favorite translations that's closer to the original text says the Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing. I love this because although at the end of the day they mean the same thing, when you think of it, I shall not want, I always interpret that as like anytime I do want I'm messing up and I'm missing the mark. It's like man I'm trying but like I still want these things and I still have desires. But this other wording here of I lack nothing shifts it from a reminder to us that when the Lord is our shepherd, when the Lord is our guide, when we submit to the Lordship of Jesus, we lack nothing. We still have desires. We may be tempted to want things that we know in the end won't fulfill us, but we are rooted and anchored in the truth that Jesus came and Jesus completes us and we lack nothing in Jesus.

We lack nothing in Jesus. As I've been thinking about this, just weeks ago, I was processing just a silly decision about something. One of my friends, another pastor in the area, he said, what if you ask this from a place of abundance and not lack? And it hit me again of how often that I live from a place of lack and not abundance. That I live as this is my last chance, my last meal, my last whatever, and not live from this place of abundance.

When Romans 8:14-17 says:

For those who are led by the spirit of God are children of God. The spirit you receive does not make you slave so you live in fear again. Rather the spirit you received brought you about your adoption to sonship in him we cry Abba father. The spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we also may share in his glory.

Romans 8:14-17

When we say yes to following Jesus, we are adopted into the family of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. We no longer have to live from this place of lack because we are reminded that this is not our home. Yes, we may lack on this side of eternity. We may have things that don't go the way that we planned them to go on this side of eternity, but we are rooted and we are anchored in the reality that if we share in his sufferings, if we take up our cross, that we'll share in his glory and that someday we will receive that inheritance. This is the promise that we have.

So what if we lived from this place of abundance and not lack? What if we didn't just try to accumulate, but we let things flow freely from our hands. No fear of scarcity, no clenching of our fists, no guarding our resources. This is a time for us as those who claim to be followers of Jesus to rise and to say, what does it look like for me to live from a place of saying, I have been anointed by the power of Jesus Christ to proclaim the good news that he came and that he's coming again?

That means that we give freely. That we forgive people freely. That's a tough one. That it's not just yes we give of our finances freely because I think whenever we think of giving we think of that, but also, do you give grace easy? Do you give grace and mercy and forgiveness and all of those things abundantly to people? Do you live as if there's not enough forgiveness to go around. There's not enough mercy and peace to go around. I lack nothing. I lack nothing.

And so the declaration that I want to proclaim over all of us today is that you might be here and you might be able to name all the things that you feel like you lack. All the things that you're like, I want and I long for. Can I remind you that Jesus is the one that completes that. This is not our home, but he promised he's coming again. That as we say yes to him, that we are adopted, we are his sons, we are his daughters, we are his children, that we are sharing in his suffering and we're sharing in his glory. And that is our hope that we cling to. So this, let this be the year of the Lord's favor to live from a place of knowing that the spirit of the Lord is upon you. The harvest is here. The harvest is here and it's overflowing. God is moving in our city. People are hungry for the Lord. We need more people to say Amen to that today. People are hungry and they are longing for people to come and to feed them.

This past Friday I had the honor of going to be with a friend of mine as their church is three years old and they are launching a second location in St. Paul, Minnesota. And yes, we can clap for that. That's exciting. We got a lot of Minnesota people here. We're super excited and we got to go and to pray with them.

And it happens to be where my little brother and sister-in-law go to church as well. And she said something that I was like, I've never said it like that, but I'm going to steal it because it's so good. She said, we proclaim the good news and sometimes we do good things just because they're good things. We've always said here at New Culture church when we talk about like sharing the gospel is that we look and we say, God is not just a, I tell you that I love you type of guy. Yes, God wrote us an entire book to tell us how much he loves us and values us and all this stuff. And then he stepped it up and he sent us Jesus. He's a show and tell type of God. He sent us Jesus to be the example and to lay his life down on the cross and to pay the price for our sins, to be the living example of what it looks like to go and to live abundantly and to give abundantly of himself.

So we don't want to be people that we're just like, okay, we're going to hold up these signs and say, Jesus loves you. Although we want to tell people that with our words, but we want to show people what the gospel looks like. We want to show them what it looks like to be free, to be fed, to be clothed, to be whole.

Over these past seven years, we have spread the good news and we've told people that Jesus loves them, but we've also just done a lot of good things like these are good things and someone should do them.

Celebrating with partnership

And so I want to share for a minute about some of the things that we're doing as we celebrate our birthday. Every year for our birthday we announce our big give initiative which is what we are going to be taking an end of your offering and what it's going to go for. We do this because we recognize like we not the only church in the world. God is moving all over the world and we want to partner with what God is doing to see his kingdom come. We want to pray for those people and we want to participate by giving of what we have to spread the gospel and the good news of Jesus all over the world.

And so on our birthday, we have chosen to say, let this be a season then that we go and we give new life as we celebrate our life of a church to others.

One of the things that I wanted to share that I felt was so just only God could do this is we went back and we looked at in the past seven years, how much has come in through these offerings that we have given to missions. Over the past seven years, our church community has given seventy seven thousand dollars to missions. Seventy seven thousand dollars! And now that's what we've tracked. I know that more of you have given that haven't been through the church funds and more than that, but that is incredible to think about. That is more than ten percent, but we're committed to always giving ten percent. That's way more than that.

Last year we had an offering for eighteen thousand dollars come in towards the end of the year, and we were able to go and support our partnering church plant in Ireland. We were able to go and give to a safe home for women being rescued from sex trafficking in Honduras. We were able to go, and we're going to hear about one of the projects in just a minute here, and help locally in our community to say yes to things like providing Christmas gifts for kids in our neighborhoods, and so much more.

This church has been marked by generosity from day one in more than one way, and we want to continue to live into that. So this year, I want to share with you some of the things that the Lord has put on our hearts to give to.

And what I think is significant as well is long before these past couple weeks and all these scares with the government shutdown and all of these different things happening and people being afraid of losing benefits for food, we've had it on our hearts of saying, how do we be people that say, yes, Lord, like we're going to feed your sheep. We're going to disciple them spiritually, but also physically. Like we're going to feed people. Which is also why we do these meals once a month. It's like, we believe that food is spiritual and we need food.

So this year, here's what we're gonna go to. We have some friends. John and Suzanne have been around our church community. They're often out and about selling their pottery to raise funds and to help fund their ministry that is in Africa. If you ever see them here on a Sunday, say hello and pray for them. Ask how you can pray for them. They have incredible schools in Africa that in a few weeks they're gonna be telling us more about. And they have real significant financial needs this year as they head into that. So we want to give towards that. That's our international initiatives. The Ireland church plant, Living Hope Ireland, which we have given towards paying their rent for their church for several years now and that's been incredible. So we'll also get some videos from them.

Then we got some folks who are going to Thailand in January. For our Thailand team and our missions partners there, when we go, we're gonna be working with church plants in Thailand as well as doing some ministry in youth prisons. And we're going to give towards that.

Then our local initiatives. Our feed our neighbor initiative, which we'll talk about in just a minute. Our neighborhood house partnerships, which Neighborhood House is the community center down the street from us, that we help with their back to school drives and their stocking stuff or things like that.

And what's so significant about these funds that come in is because of the generosity of the people in this room. We had no plans to do anything for back to school this year. Some of you know this, sometimes my big mouth gets me in trouble where the executive director of Neighborhood House said, our donors dropped out. We need two hundred backpacks. And I said, easy, new cultures got it. And then somebody smarter than me did the math. They're like, Abbie, that's like ten thousand dollars. I was like, okay, so maybe we don't got it. Maybe we don't got it.

But we were able to reach out to other churches, people in the neighborhoods, communities, and partner and provide backpacks that they needed for the kids there at Neighborhood House, which is incredible. Care Portal, which works with families that are on just really in a place where we're trying to keep their kids with them and families together. And so providing basic needs like bedding. Recently, we had a story where we were able to purchase bedding. Kayla over here, if you want to wave your hand, she leads our care portal team. So we'll have her sharing in the next couple of weeks as well about how you can practically get involved with that.

And then some of our church initiatives. So last year we did this, we were able to refurnish the living room, which is our space downstairs that we use for different community events and things like that. And this year we are taking part of the offering to go towards our church kind of vision fund as well of recognizing as things come up, how can we be ready and prepared to keep this space open for whatever God is doing?

And so we're gonna be sharing in the next couple of weeks more about all the specific things. But what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to invite Elena to come on up. And she is going to share with us a little bit of some testimonies of what happened last year with some of the funds and then what we are invited to partner with her this year.

Thank you, Abbie. So many fun things going on, right? I am so appreciative of the opportunity to share with you all here. I always love getting to share about what's happening locally and how our church is a part of that.

So I wanted to give an update just on what our big give went to last year and how that's helped what I do. First of all, let me give just a brief introduction of what I do. My name is Elena. I work with Tolarian Behavioral Health, which is a large mental health agency here in Dane County. And I supervise two programs.

One of them is CIT, stands for Community Intervention Team. So we serve individuals. It's community case management. So we have eighty five clients there that all have severe and persistent mental illness and or substance use disorders. Case management encompasses a lot of things. We help them with doctor's appointments. We get them food. We make sure that they have all their basic needs met so that they can work on their recovery.

Along with that, my other program is Enzo Residences, which Emily is a case manager at. So last year, we were able to give funds to build sixty beds and welcome baskets. Last year, we had sixty mattresses and bed frames come in because there's sixty units there. So this building is functioning to house people that were chronically homeless. Chronically homeless individuals all moved into this building. They were given a whole beautiful brand new apartment. We were able to not only build them beds, but also give them a huge welcome basket filled with all of the basic necessities they could need to build a household.

Some people would move in and literally just have a backpack with them. They had no other belongings. Some came from State Street, living there for seven years. These are people that some of them have never had a home before. We were able to welcome them with a gift basket, a handwritten letter saying, welcome home, and giving them their keys to say, we're here to support you. New Culture was a part of that. So I just want to say thank you for those that built beds, assembled welcome baskets.

We are so close to being fully at capacity. We're at fifty two right now.

But yeah. And then I wanted to share our community space too. A lot of you came and helped to build stuff here. Our kitchen was filled with all sorts of boxes. We were able to completely redo our community space.

So I just want to say thank you. Give yourselves a round of applause for that.

So I wanted to invite you into a new opportunity that we have this year. To give some context, last week Governor Evers put out a press release saying that food stamps were going to be ending for everyone that receives benefits here in Wisconsin. Food stamps. It's going to be ending. As of November first, people will not have food stamps because of the government shutdown.

And this is a really heavy weight because there are a lot of individuals that don't have any income whatsoever, and they absolutely depend on these benefits that they're receiving.

So this comes at a really interesting time with Abbie talking about living out of abundance and that we as believers we lack nothing because we have the Lord and we get to give with excitement and with joy even when we don't know that we're going to have enough ourselves.

So I wanted to invite you into this new initiative. Feed our neighbors. Our goal is to provide meal solutions and groceries to over one hundred individuals between my two programs and Neighborhood House. So CIT, Enzo, and then Neighborhood House. Over one hundred individuals who are directly impacted by food insecurity.

As of November first, as of right now with the government still being shut down, there are no benefits coming in November. We don't know if, say the government reopens in a week, we don't know if those are going to be back paid. We don't know if they're going to lose out on their benefits altogether. So it's a really unknown time. Our goal is to help provide meals and groceries for over one hundred individuals.

So that being said, I've created a list of things that over the next week, I would ask that you prayerfully consider donating in the next week. This is a need that's happening right now. November's coming very quickly. And there are so many individuals that we know directly that don't know where their food is going to come from. And so this is an opportunity for us to give out of that abundance and to meet a practical need to feed our neighbors.

So that being said, it is a quick turnaround but as of next Sunday I'm hoping that we can collect these items together so that my case managers can distribute it to our clients. I put together a list of just items that we need. I'll provide this elsewhere too but just so you can see it right here shelf stable items fresh produce microwavable meals and other helpful items like drinks and condiments and toilet paper and hygiene items.

I wanted to point out just a few things though. If you are going to consider donating, a lot of what we typically think is like collecting donations, we often do canned goods. And canned goods aren't totally practical all the time because a lot of people don't have can openers. So I wanted to specifically point out if you're going to bring canned items, make sure that they have the pull top. That's just a logistical thing. But I'll provide this list to you all. If we could partner together, even if you just look in your pantry and I mean, there's like some things that I buy and then I don't use. Like there's so many things that we have, even like shampoo and conditioner. Sometimes I use shampoo and conditioner. I don't like it. And then I just put it back in my closet. Like let's search for those things that we're not using and give them to people who desperately need it.

So that's one of the initiatives. The second initiative that we're hoping to do is community meals. So for the month of November, we're hoping to start weekly community meals at Enzo. So these will be on Monday night starting on November third. And we need about three to four volunteers per night to prepare and serve the meal for approximately fifteen to thirty residents. I'm really unsure of what the turnout will be. Sometimes it's little, sometimes it's big. But if we could get three to four people to just take complete ownership over feeding our neighbors at Enzo that live there, we have that beautiful community space. We have a commercial grade kitchen, so all of it can be done there. We just want to be able to feed our neighbors at least once a week while they're experiencing this food insecurity. And then it also comes at a really special time with Thanksgiving coming up. We were unsure of what we were going to do for Thanksgiving, but this also would fall on the perfect time to be able to provide a Thanksgiving meal.

So if you are interested, on the next slide, I think I have a QR code. So if you would please scan this QR code, this is to sign up to donate items. It has the whole list there that you would need. It also has all of the dates for those community meals. So if you wouldn't mind just signing up for this and like I said it's a very quick turnaround. As of next Sunday if you could bring those items in our office is like a block away so we will take them over and make sure that they're stored well.

But then here's an opportunity. Just three things. If you would shop and search, search your home, pick up a few items from the donation list, bring it back on next Sunday. And then if you wouldn't mind considering just serving, staying after church next week to help store and organize the donations and get them over to the office to make sure that they're stored well. But then also signing up to serve at those community meals.

So yeah, that is I think all that I have. But thank you guys so much for listening. I'm really excited to be able to serve a very practical need. So yeah, I appreciate new cultures, support and all that. So yeah.

And thank you, Elena. That was such a quick turnaround. It was like this week we're texting. We're like, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? So I just want to pray for you. If you'd stretch your hand forward.

God, we just thank you so much for Elena. God, I thank you for Emily and Whitney and all the people that we know that are working right now with those that you love and you cherish and you want to see thrive. And so I thank you. And I just pray right now that in the same way, we're reading the scripture, Lord, we believe that you have anointed them to proclaim the good news and to feed your people, to feed those that need it. And so God, I just pray for just Holy Spirit energy and strategy to continue that we would just see multiplication come even from moments of rest.

And so God, we just surrender all of this to you, trusting that as we surrender and as we steward, that you are multiplying and that you are doing your work in powerful ways, God. And so I thank you for Enzo. I thank you for CIT. I thank you for all of these programs working in our city to help people just have life abundantly and to be fed and to be full and to be sustained.

And God, I also just pray right now for all of us in this room, would you continue to stir our hearts and to show us what we can do. God, knowing that for some of us, we might have abundance of finances or some of us might have abundance of time. Some of us, we might know people that we can invite into this to partner with you. So God, I pray right now, would you just put on our heart what you want us to give, how you want us to serve, how you want us to partner with you and seeing your kingdom come and recognizing that that is what we're doing. That we are partnering with you, Jesus, to see your kingdom come right here in Madison as it is in heaven. So we thank you, God, for the work of Elena and her team and all of those that are out serving. And we just say, Holy Spirit, would you come? We love you, Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen.

All right. So with that, we are going to go ahead into our time of eating and sharing our meal together. But I just want to encourage you guys. Part of the reason that on our birthday we share this is so that you have until December fourteenth, until we are going to take our big give offering. The fund is open now. So some of you, if you're already like, I know what I'm going to give, or I want to give towards the food stuff right away, you can do that. You can go to newculturechurch.com slash give, and the fund is open.

And then also, if you or people you know need food during this time, Neighborhood House Community Center has an open pantry. They also have community meals on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And so you can reach out to one of us on the team. We'll get you connected.

But I just want to pray over our food today as we continue in this time of celebration. So Lord, we just thank you so much for this day. We thank you for the opportunity to come around the table. We thank you for the hands that prepared the meal. And as we share even in this meal, it is again a time of remembrance and celebrating who you are, Jesus, what you have done. And so I just pray, would you help us to be people that live abundantly and give from that place of abundance, all for your name and for your glory. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.