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Last week we spent a lot of time talking about pitfalls. They are roads that look right on this quest to live a life that matters. A pitfall is a road that looks right, but it eventually will turn our hearts back on themselves in selfishness. In that conversation, we talked about our dangerous desire to be needed, our dangerous desire to be noticed, and our dangerous desire to be in control. We did what we've been doing this whole series, spending a lot of time doing the deep work that forms our soul, having conversations like understanding our significance and then counting the cost. It's going to cost you something to live a life that matters, and then learning to check your motives when you do. Because you can be willing to count the cost, but be motivated to do the right things for all the wrong reasons, which we talked a lot about that last week. But here's the thing about interior work when you're working on soul work. It was never meant to be the ultimate destination. It was meant to be the foundation of a life that is lived in a way that impacts other people. Because we're not monks living in monasteries closed off to the rest of the world. We live among people been planted by God in those relationships to be sought and light, his word says, to those people, to this world in those relationships. So the very purpose of us focusing on the transformation of our interior lives is so that we are formed into the kind of people that our life enriches the lives of other people that we're in relationship with. So today, the quest is really going to make a shift from that deep interior work to now what that deep interior work is all for, we're going to start focusing outward. Unless you recently started attending North Place, you've heard us use a life-defining phrase all year long. It's been our 2026 theme: give honor, add value to everybody, everywhere, all the time. Not just to the people that think like me, or to the people that agree with me, or to the people that look like me. Everybody, everywhere, all the time. Because every single human being bears the image of God. And as image bearers, every human being possesses an intrinsic value and a dignity that we as the people of God are expected to acknowledge and protect in everybody, everywhere, all the time. That's why giving honor and adding value is not just a slogan. When you consistently show up for people with grace and generosity, skill and genuine care, something happens in those relationships that you can't manufacture. People start trusting you. And trust is not a small thing. I would say that trust is the most scarce commodity in our culture right now. And because it's so scarce, it makes it the most powerful currency in our world today. Trust turns ordinary relationships into opportunities for something eternal. Paul says it this way in Colossians chapter 4. We're going to read two segments of chapter 4, looking at them at different moments, but they're a part of the same conversation. We're going to come back and connect them. Verse 5 and 6, Paul says, Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt. Paul says, There are two things that are supposed to make up the witness of Christ in your life. Two things that make up Christian witness: the way you act and your conversation. Your witness is comprised of both how you live and your speech, the conversation that comes out of your mouth. To frame the conversation today, I'm going to introduce you a word that Paul keeps using. He uses it at the fourth chapter of Colossians and in four other places. There are five times Paul uses this Greek word thyra, which is our English word for door. Five times he uses it in his the Pauline epistles in his writings. And there's a pattern that emerges when you keep reading Paul talk about these doors. There's a pattern that emerges. 1 Corinthians 16, verse 9, Paul says, A great door for effective work has been opened to me, and there are many who oppose me. 2 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 12. I went to Troaz to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me. Colossians chapter 4, this is the same passage we read from verse 5 and 6 a minute ago. This is verse 3, right above that. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ for which I am in chains. He wrote Colossians from a prison cell. The next one we're going to read was actually written by Luke, but it is in reference to Paul and his ministry. And Luke is actually quoting something or telling us something that he heard Paul say. Acts 14, verse 27. On arriving there, they, Paul and Barnabas, gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. As you read through all these references to open doors in Paul's life and ministry, a pattern emerges. First, God is the one who always opens the door. Paul is never the subject of that sentence. He's the one that walks through the door God opens, or Paul is waiting on God to open a door, or Paul is asking for believers to pray that God would open a door, but Paul is never the one forcing the door open. There's a second thing that emerges here. An open door is never proof that it's going to be easy. Look at 1 Corinthians 16, 9 again. He said, A great door has opened, and there are many who oppose me. In the same breath, there is a divinely open door and great opposition. A lot of us assume that resistance means we've misread the situation, that if God were really in it, that it would go smoothly. But Paul kind of assumes the opposite, as if the size of the open door and the size of the fight are correlated. Third, Paul walked away from an open door. This is really interesting to me because in Troas, we read about that just a minute ago, there was an open door for him. He said in Troaz, the Lord opened the door for him, but Paul didn't walk through that door because his friend Titus wasn't there. And the scripture said Paul didn't have peace about it. And it shows us that Paul valued a person over an opportunity. Here's what it says again, 2 Corinthians 2.12. Now, when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no peace of mind because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I said goodbye to them and went on to Macedonia. Now here's what this means: it means that every open door is not an obligation. And this is relieving to me as somebody who is like trying to give my life to serve people. There are opportunities around me all the time. So every open door is not an obligation. And in this case, Paul was valuing a relationship in front of him more than an opportunity in front of him. Go back to that Colossians 4 passage, the one where Paul tells us what our witness is made of, verse 5 and 6 of chapter 4, in the way you act and then in your conversation, the way you live your life and in the way you talk. That's what derives your Christian witness. I don't want you to miss what we read in verse 3 above that. Two verses above that, Paul is telling the Colossians from his prison cell to pray that God would open doors. But then he tells them to live wisely toward outsiders, full of grace, seasoned with salt. The same paragraph. Pray for the open door. But notice this. Then he says, live in such a way that when that door gets open, you're somebody worth letting in. Paul's letter to the Corinthians is one of his to the Colossians here in Colossians. This is one of his prison epistles. He wrote seven letters from a prison cell, and he's actually trying to pastor the people of Colossae from this prison cell, and he only asked them for two things. Number one, pray that God would open doors. And number two, be the kind of people that when God opens the door, you're worthy of the opportunity that God provides. You don't get to decide when the door opens, you only get to decide what kind of person is standing there when God opens the door. Here's what I've noticed. It's the one big reason that most Christians don't spend a lot of time praying for open doors to have spiritual conversations or minister to other people. Or when God does open a door, they don't walk through the door. Here's the big reason: they don't feel equipped, they don't feel prepared, they don't feel capable. They've convinced themselves that they're empty-handed. Because somewhere along the way, we decided that the people that God opens doors for are the highly gifted people that have something impressive to offer. They've got an outgoing personality, they have a platform and some influence, or they're really good with words. And since you don't think you have any of that, you quietly excuse yourself from the whole thing. It's not that you resist a message like this, you just assume a message like this is for somebody else. And if that's you, and I would say it probably is a lot of you listening to me right now, I encourage you to stay with me because the next part is for you. In Exodus chapter 4, this is that famous burning bush moment where God literally transforms Moses' life at the burning bush. He's standing there having this conversation with God, Moses is listing every reason why he is the wrong man for what God is asking him to do. And if you go back and read chapter 3 and chapter 4, God doesn't argue with all of the limitations. He gives Moses no objections to the limitations that Moses throws out there. He just changes the subject. Chapter 3 is a list of reasons why Moses can't do it. He doesn't speak well, all those things. Chapter 4 begins this way the Lord said to him, What is that in your hand? He said, A staff. Moses answers that question with one word, a staff. It's a shepherd's stick. Now you have to understand, Moses grew up in the royal Egyptian court. He was considered royalty, but now, since he has fled Egypt, he thought his life had fallen apart. He's on the backside of a desert in Midian, and he's come to the place where he's a lowly shepherd, and this staff was just the simple tool of his dirty job. It is not a symbol of some grand calling. If anything, this staff was a souvenir in Moses' life that represented 40 years of what he probably felt like was a wasted season of his life. But this staff is the only thing God asked him about. Here's what you can't miss. Notice the different way the staff is referred to at the beginning of this conversation and at the end of this conversation, before the encounter with God and after the encounter with God. In verse 2, at the very beginning here, it is simply referred to as a staff. A few verses later, listen to this in verse 20, and Moses took the staff of God in his hands. Same object in the same hands, but after his encounter with God, when Moses surrenders a simple stick to God, a staff becomes the staff of God. And here's what's remarkable. Scripture keeps calling it that from here on out. 40 years later at Rephedim, Moses is standing holding the staff of God in his hands. Exodus 17, verse 9, this is 40 years later, tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands. This is what you have to see. Nothing happened to the staff. Something happened to who was holding it. The only thing that encountered between verse 2 and verse 20 is that Moses obeyed God. He threw the staff down. He did what God said. He surrendered the staff to God and watched the staff become something he couldn't control. And then Moses picked it back up on God's terms instead of his terms. And that's when it went from being just a staff to the staff of God. It was just a stick as long as it was belonging to Moses. But it became the staff of God when Moses surrendered it. Every single person listening to me right now is holding on to something. Not something you need to go acquire. There is something already in your hand. You possess a skill. Maybe you're good at setting a table and hosting people and you have a hospitality gift, or maybe there's a story you don't really tell because you don't think it's your life story, but you don't really think anybody would be interested or willing to listen. Maybe you're in a season of life where you have a little extra free time and some margin in your schedule. Maybe you've got a network of people who already trust you for reasons that have nothing to do with church. You have a lot of earned relational equity with those people. But the reason those things feel so unimportant to us or unimpressive to us or underwhelming to us, they feel like just a staff, a shepherd's staff. The reason is because we've never let them leave our hands and surrender them to God. God didn't give Moses a better tool. Moses' staff became the staff of God. You will never understand the power of what is already in your hands until you're willing to surrender it to God and his agenda in the world. This last Friday, all of our minds were focused on the 25th anniversary of 9-11, and I always have bitter, sweet emotions on that day. For sure, I relive all of the emotional things that I went through watching the unhorrors of that day unfold. But at the same time, just four years later, on September the 11th, 2005, Haley and I were elected to serve as your pastors. So for the last 21 years, now there have been some really good emotions associated with what was a tragic day. It's this mix of emotions. And over the last 21 years, you've heard me repeat a lot of phrases that are a part of my vocabulary, a part of my life, and the culture of my life. And one of those phrases I keep repeating is this: an embodied apologetic. I say that quite often. That's what we're supposed to live, an embodied apologetic. Apologetics is just a defense of the faith. It's a reasoned case for what we say we believe. But an embodied apologetic isn't an argument that you make with your mouth. It's not a verbal debate. An embodied apologetic is a defense of the faith that is made with your actual life. It's putting flesh on what you believe. It's being the hands and feet of Jesus. It's being Jesus with skin on. Earlier we were talking about Serve Day coming up on October the 10th. Serve Day, you'll often hear me say, this is our chance to present an embodied apologetic for our faith. The love of Christ compels us, and it is an when we serve, it is an embodied apologetic. The apostle Peter wrote this. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. Every class that I've ever taken on Christian apologetics, or every book that I've ever read on Christian apologetics, begins with 1 Peter 3:15. Because we usually quote this verse as the command to be prepared to debate or to verbally reason with others about what we believe, about our faith. But there's an assumption that is hiding in that command that most of us overlook. To be able to do what Peter says, to give an answer for the faith that is in you, the assumption is somebody ask. You were living in such a way that they were asking about the difference in your life, and you were prepared to give an answer. To give an answer, somebody's got to ask. So Peter is picturing people living here when he writes this, people that are living in such a way that the others in their life eventually want an explanation because something about them doesn't make full sense apart from the gospel. Their hope is strange, their generosity is irrational, their forgiveness is unexpected, their peace doesn't match their circumstances, and their love is reaching to people that can never pay them back. The way they live their life is creating curiosity about Jesus. And when that happens, Peter said, You better be ready to give an answer for the hope that you have. He says basically the same thing in chapter two. He says, Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. They will see your honorable behavior and they will give honor to God. Our life doesn't make the gospel true. The gospel is already true, but our lives will either clarify the gospel or contradict the gospel in the lives of others that are watching us and our witness. Are you clarifying the gospel by the way you live your life, or are you contradicting the gospel by the way you live your life? Four people that are trying to make decisions about following Jesus. Imagine the power of somebody in your life saying something like this. I don't really understand everything you believe about Jesus yet, but I know what I see happening in you since you've made the decision to follow him and I want to know more. That's an open door. That is an opportunity for you to be prepared to give an answer for the hope that you have. Now, here is a question that every one of us need to be asking today. It is a very sober question. Does the way I live make anybody curious about the God I follow? We need to sit with that. You need to think about that. Does the way I live my life, is it making anybody curious about the God I follow? Or I'm just like everybody else in my circle that really doesn't go to church and doesn't follow Jesus. From the beginning of this series, the anchor verse for this whole conversation has been some of the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, where he says, You, talking to us as his followers, you are the light of the world. And then two verses later, he says, Go let your light shine before others so they see your good deeds and they glorify your Father which is in heaven. He says, when he says, you are light, he's saying you have value. Like you, you are light, you are valuable. Then, because of that, I want you to go shine that light. I want you to go add that value in the lives of other people through what you do, through adding value, so they will glorify the Father. Here's where this gets sticky for a lot of Christian people. And this is one thing that keeps coming up in the conversations that I have with people who don't go to church, people that are not believers, and I will, if when we have that kind of close relationship, I will ask them honest questions. What are the hurdles? What are your hindrances? What do you not like? What are we doing wrong? And this keeps coming up is these when when these this this one thing has kind of turned a lot of people away from God. Giving honor and adding value cannot become your strategy to persuade people. Adding value to another person and living a life worthy of the gospel can earn trust that opens doors for meaningful conversations about faith. But adding value to another person can never be a bait and switch strategy where I'm just serving you so I can convince you to believe what I believe. That's not real love, that's manipulation. The business world actually gave us a simple equation to help us tell the difference of whether or not we're motivated by real love or whether we're motivated by manipulation. In a book called The Trusted Advisor, the authors propose a formula that's been used in business schools and corporate training for some time now. Here's the equation: trust equals credibility plus reliability plus intimacy. Those three things create trust. But notice at the end of that equation, it's all divided by self-orientation. Credibility means you know what you're talking about. Reliability means you do what you say you'll do. Intimacy means it is safe to tell you things. If you're credible, reliable, and trustworthy, intimate enough that people can trust you with their life, their information, that builds trust. But notice the trust that is built by those three things is divided by how much of it is about you and your agenda. So just sit with that for a minute, because the Bible tells us that our hearts, which means our motives, are deceitfully wicked, and we can be doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. So listen carefully. Self-orientation in a relationship does not just subtract a little bit from trust. It completely divides it. You can be the most competent person, the most reliable person, the warmest person relationally, but if you have an agenda, every good thing about you gets cut down by how much it is about you and your agenda. And here's the trap. You can't be left self-focused by trying not to be self-focused, because trying to appear less self-focused is, in a sense, a form of self-focus. So here is a question that will help us diagnose whether our hearts are motivated by real love or manipulation. If I knew for certain this person would never come to Christ, would I still show up for them? Am I just loving them, loving them, I guess you could say conditionally and serving them because I need a box checked and try to lead somebody into prayer. And, you know, I call those people that are not really, they're not interested in the person of the relationship. They just want to convert. I call those people Rambos. You know, they're just out there trying to get another notch in their battle belt. Um they don't really, they care about converts, they don't really care about people. Paul cared about people, Jesus cared about people, and it authentically built bridges that opened doors where Peter says they want to know more, and they ask, and and you answer, you be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you. That is the kind of love that was modeled by our Savior. He loved his life so much he sacrificed his life for you, giving you an opportunity for eternal life. But in the end, you still have free will. You still have a choice. And he doesn't quit loving you if you don't choose him. He fed. Jesus fed and served people that came back. He healed people that never said thank you. He even washed the feet of a man who was already on his way to sell him out. He loved people without an agenda. Let me show you what this looks like. When Jesus people love like Jesus loves. AD 260, right after, 260 years after the life of Christ, a plague swept through the city of Alexandria. It's a northern city in Egypt. It was a part of the Roman Empire. A bishop named Dionysus described what he witnessed Christians doing during the horrors of that plague. He wrote that they nursed the sick, they stayed with the dying, and cost many of them their own lives, but they refused to leave. Everybody else was fleeing the city, trying to get out of the plague. They were abandoning their own families, they were throwing the half-dead into the streets, the dead were left unburied, but the Jesus people stayed and they served and they loved. Years later, an emperor named Julian was trying hard. Because of that kind of love and embodied apologetic, Christianity took root and grew all throughout the Roman Empire. By the time Julian comes along, he's trying to push Christianity back out and re-establish paganism in the empire. And he writes a letter to one of his own pagan priests and he admits in frustration why his efforts weren't working. He says, quote, it is disgraceful that the impious Galileans, his reference to Christians, support not only their own poor but ours as well, while our people received no assistance from us. You can't miss that. The emperor that was trying to destroy the Christian faith is telling us why it spread. Not because we were good at debating or arguing verbally, but because when the city was dying, they were the ones who stayed and served. That is an embodied apologetic at the scale of an entire empire. So here's the order: Faithfulness builds trust, trust creates permission, and permission opens doors. I had a conversation a few years ago that illustrates this perfectly. I was with a small group of pastors eating dinner at a table with John Maxwell. John served for more than 30 years as a local church pastor before he became the well-known writer and speaker and leadership expert that he is today. And as I've gotten to know John, I would say he's probably the one of the greatest gospel conversationalists that I know. He has personally led thousands of people to Jesus in regular, everyday, ordinary conversations. Many of those are people that you and I would consider kind of closed off because they're highly successful. They're celebrities or they're corporate leaders or political leaders from around the world. And when I asked John at that conversation, how is this so natural to you? Why are you so at ease having conversations about Jesus with these people? And he went on to explain that because he had spent years developing trust in the relationship and that God used that earned trust in order to open doors. And then he just started talking off the cuff. And I've got my phone out and I'm taking notes as fast as I can type. Literally, I took these statements right out of my notes he said that night at dinner. He said, Brian, you have to be interested in them and their world. Paul said, I became all things to all men that I might win some, which means he entered their world and tried to experience things from their perspective, and it earned trust and opened doors. John went on to say, you can't add value to people you devalue. And you can't just value the people that share your values. He said, This is what I've learned from going from a pastor to a corporate coach. The church is really good at valuing people that agree with them. But there's not a lot of value for the people that outspokenly don't. But you can't just value the people that share your values. Jesus didn't value just the people that shared his values. It's all about how you see people. It's perspective. If you see a person as weak, you're gonna try to help them. If you see them as broken, you're gonna try to fix them. If you see them as valuable, you're gonna serve them. And then he said, when you consistently add value to people, you become invaluable to those people. Which points back to the statement faithfulness builds trust, trust creates permission, permission opens doors, which is why all year long we have been saying all we need to do is give honor, add value to everybody, everywhere, all the time. Now let me give you a couple questions I think that can help help you as you carry this out and sit with this, think about it, work on it in your groups or in your own personal devotion. Who are the people in your life who don't know Jesus but they do trust you? Begin to pray, God, like Paul did for an open door. Pray, God, will you let the trust that we've established in this relationship with this family member, this coworker, this neighbor, let that trust be a bridge that leads us into meaningful conversations about you and about eternity. And the way I live my life and the conversations I have around them, may they begin to get curious about you. And I then be prepared, like Peter asked, to give an answer to the hope that was in me. Let the trust, the relational equity, build a bridge. Open the door, Lord, open the door. But it leads to the second question. If you can't think of anybody where that applies in your life, that second question, or do you only fill your life with people who agree with you? Jesus didn't. You know, it was funny when when we were talking, I asked John, what's the difference in you know, being a pastor all those years and then now doing what you do? And and he said, Brian, I used to spend all my life with Christian people. Now most of my life I'm spending with people that are not Christians. And he said, This is what I learned. I'm gonna spend eternity with Christians. I don't have very much longer with these people. And I need to leverage the time that I have and serve them, add value and live in such a way they start asking questions about John, why are you this way? And they then I can introduce them to my best friend that changed my life. Here's a very simple question you can ask yourself today. What does what do people consistently thank you for? And I know that sounds really simple, but what I'm trying to do is get you down to the basic thing, to point you to that thing that you're looking at in your life that really is a gift from God in your life, that you're saying it's just a staff, it's not that important, it's just a stick. Maybe, maybe you're really good at hospitality, maybe you're a barnabas, you're just a natural encourager of people. I mean, those things are incredible, but they're they they feel unimpressive to you compared to other people. But that those little things are the things once surrendered to God that become the staff of God, that little stick that you don't value when you give it to him, he uses that little thing to make a difference in other people's life. You don't have to wait until you're handed something new, you're already holding it in your life. So, what is the staff in your life that needs to become the staff of God? And one question that can help you find that is what are people often thanking me for? Just think on that for a little bit and see where it leads you today. Here's what would be a shame. I'm talking to Christian people about how to really love people that are not Christians. What would be a shame is if you're in this room today and you're not a follower of Jesus and you're listening to me talk about loving you and then not give you an opportunity to meet Jesus. I don't want to do that today. I realize there are a lot of things in your life you may not understand, you may not know. Um, I talk to people all the time, and I start talking about Jesus, and they were like, Yeah, this Noah thing, or or yeah, this thing, and they start bringing up all these Old Testament. I'm like, look, what you believe about Noah, we'll get we can talk about that, but what you believe about Noah isn't gonna determine where you spend eternity. What you believe about Jesus is gonna determine where you spend eternity. You gotta get the Jesus thing right. And there are a lot of people that don't have an issue with Jesus, and if you're sitting here today and there's a lot of stuff you're seeking, you're trying to get worked out. My question to you is what are you gonna do with Jesus? And if your heart of hearts you really believe he is who he says he is, your heart of hearts, you you really think I could follow him, then start there. Start with surrender to him, give him your life and watch what happens. All the rest of that stuff will take care of itself. Would you stand with me across the room today and and um across our campus family? I'm gonna ask our prayer teams if they would to come and make themselves available at every campus to pray for you. And I'll just tell you, these altars are open for any need that you have. We were praying just in the last service, and people were coming forward to testify of miracles that happened from last week when they came forward to pray. So don't miss the opportunity for us to carry each other's burdens to the Lord in prayer. That's what this is about. But if you're that person that says, I need, I need to surrender my life to Jesus, you can do that right here today. The people at the front of this room, our greatest joy is to pray that prayer of surrender. And what's incredible, we're having baptism next week. Perfect timing to go public with your faith. So, Lord, I just pray today that you would take your word, search our hearts, fill us with love, that we're not those alienating people that are more interested in a strategy than we are the people right in front of us. May we genuinely love people, and may our genuine love just to love, build bridges, raise questions, that makes people curious about you, and then with integrity and authenticity, we can be prepared to give an answer for the hope that is in us. I pray, Lord, you'll bless them and keep them. That you'll make your face shine down upon them, that you will be gracious to them, that you'll turn your countenance their direction today, and you will give them peace. In Jesus' name. Amen. These altars are open today. God bless you.