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It's hard to believe we're at the end of this, but eight weeks ago we started a quest, not an adventure, a quest. Remember, we said that an adventure is essentially a there and back again story. If you go on an adventure, you go, you leave the familiar, you have some new experiences, but eventually you're gonna come home from that adventure, and everything's just gonna return to normal. And we didn't want this to be an adventure. We wanted it to be a quest. A quest is different. An adventure is something you choose. A quest chooses you. There's a summons that comes, there's a call that interrupts your life, something larger than your comfort, something larger than your plans, something larger than maybe what you even understand lays hold of you. And then once you answer the call, the summons, there is no going back to life as it was before, ever. And that's what this call to follow Jesus is. It is a it is a quest. That's what this last eight weeks have been: a divine summoning to go on a quest to live a life that matters. And Jesus' summons, his invitation to come follow me, isn't just an invitation to repeat a sinner's prayer. It is an invitation to live an entirely different kind of life, to live a life that matters by making an impact on the lives of those around us. And over the last eight weeks, thousands of you have said yes to that quest. Almost 70% of our average weekend attendance has been in a small group during this series. And if you don't understand typical church dynamics, that may not be a big deal to you. But if you do understand typical church dynamics, that number is pretty astounding. Because we're not talking about a few dozen people here. We're talking about thousands of people who haven't just shown up to church on Sunday and then go home. They've sat in living rooms and coffee shops and break rooms and in college dorms with their guides open, with other people gathered in community, actually doing the work to become more like Jesus. And that's not a casual interest. That's the proof of spiritual hunger. And from what I've heard in some of these testimonies over the last couple months, this hasn't just been about learning new information for you. This has been about deep spiritual formation for so many of us. It's not just people showing up in an event called church. It's it's those of you that have opened your homes and you've led groups and you've invested in relationships. This is what we call discipleship. And today we're at the last part of the quest. We're in the final chapter of this particular season of the quest. In the very beginning, we started by asking, does my life matter? Today, we end by asking something very different. What will matter because of the way I live my life? That's a legacy question. Most of us have been to enough funerals to knowledgeably answer that question. At a funeral, nobody stands up and reads off the tally of net worth or the square footage of the house or the title on the office door or the make and model of the cars in the driveway. At a funeral, we hear things like she always called on my birthday. He taught me how to change a tire and never once made me feel stupid. She took me in when I had nowhere to go. Or he just kept showing up. A funeral is the one place where everybody finally agrees on what actually matters. People. And when we gather to honor the life of someone who has died, the stories that we tell about them at the visitations or family gatherings or in the eulogy, those stories are usually all about how that person's life added value to us and to the world. Which ought to tell us a life that adds value to others doesn't end when that life does. We have a word that describes that kind of lasting impact. Legacy. Legacy is what happens when the value God puts in you gets deposited into people, purposes, and the work of his kingdom in a way that keeps going long after you're gone. But here's the irony. If I ask everybody listening to me right now if people mattered more than possessions, I would dare say 100% of everybody is going to say yes. Nobody's going to argue with that. But there is a stark contrast in what we say we believe and where we actually give our best hours to. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote something a few years back, and he put this in a sobering way. He said, he framed this conversation between two things: resume virtues versus eulogy virtues. When we talk about resume virtues, he's talking about the skills that you need in life to get ahead, advance your career. Those are resume virtues. But when he talks about eulogy virtues, he's talking about the things that people are going to remember about you when you're gone, the things that will be said about you at your funeral: kindness, integrity, love, courage, selflessness, honesty, faithfulness, those are eulogy virtues. And here's the point almost everybody agrees eulogy virtues matter more. But almost everyone spends their lives building more on the resume virtues anyway. We train for the resume virtues because our culture incentivizes them. Very few people are living with intentionality about the virtues they would want expressed at their eulogy. We spend an enormous amount of our life building things that we can't keep. Things that aren't going to last beyond the grave. The job gets our best energy. The phone holds our attention hostage. Ambition drives us. Then one day, somebody's supposed to stand up at our funeral and try to describe whatever was left over after the world and the culture and those perishable things got the best of us. And if they were truly honest, most people aren't at the funeral, but if somebody was truly honest about most of us, the eulogy would read, they were tired, distracted, always half-listening. They were physically present on occasion, but never really there. Jesus confronts our cultural obsession with our resume virtues when he says in Matthew chapter 6, do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That last line, verse 21, is a directional statement. Jesus doesn't say where what you treasure is gonna follow your heart. He says your heart is gonna follow what you treasure. Your heart is going to follow whatever you keep making deposits into. And that should change everything about how we live our lives. It doesn't mean we should sit around waiting on the warm, fuzzy feelings before we act and do the right thing. Jesus is saying we can keep making the right choices and the right deposits and investing in the right things, even when we don't feel it, and our heart will eventually catch up to whatever it is we have committed to treasure. Nobody wakes up every day and purposely chooses to invest their lives in things that Jesus says moss and rust and decay will eventually destroy. Nobody gets up and says, I want to give my life to something that's gonna perish. We drift in that direction because the things that rust and decay, the things that have little to no eternal value, those things make the most noise in our life. They are the ones that make the most urgent demands on our life and our time, all while people get overlooked. Your inbox is filled with messages that demand an answer today. Your kid doesn't send a demand. They just sit quietly and eventually just stop asking. The deadline at work won't stop announcing itself, but a friend that's drifting away in relationship with you, rarely does that friend send a notice. So the treasures we're investing in that will eventually rust, those things keep winning in our life by default, one ordinary day at a time. An Australian palliative care nurse, basically what we would call a hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware, spent years sitting with the dying. And a few years ago, she posted something online that went viral. She posted the things that she most commonly heard from her dying patients. It went viral, and it has become a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Listen to the pattern here. She writes these. I wish, this is what she kept hearing. Things like, I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier. Nobody's dying regrets were about one catastrophic decision. Their regrets were all patterns that developed over time, working too much, losing touch, never expressing what they felt. Most people don't lessen or weaken their legacy all at once. They lose it going with the cultural flow, chasing the wrong things, and investing in what moths and rust can destroy. Listen carefully. People are the only part of this life that will actually last for eternity. People. Everything else Jesus refers to in his list in Matthew 6, it has an expiration date. And he's trying to help us understand houses get sold, companies get bought, trophies end up in a cardboard box in somebody's garage. But the soul of a person sitting across from you at dinner tonight will exist 10,000 years from now. C.S. Lewis said it better than anybody since Jesus. In a sermon Lewis preached at Oxford in 1941, he said, There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal. And their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals with whom we we joke with and work with, marry, snub, and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. Everybody is going to spend eternity somewhere, which is why investing in people is the only investment that never ends. That's why when Paul was being forced to deal with the end of his own life, he saw the faces of the people that he had impacted, not any of his degrees. He was highly educated, not any of his accomplishments. And he actually told the believers in the church at Thessalonica, he wrote to them and said, For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy. When Paul thinks about standing in front of Jesus, he doesn't picture all the dangerous miles that he traveled or all of these things that he's written that are going to show up in the Bible one day. He pictures a group of ordinary people in a church in Thessalonica, people's lives that he's impacted, they're going to be the crown that he glories in when he stands in the presence of Jesus. But here's what we have to understand. We don't always get to see the impact of the investment that we make in other people's lives. The fruit of that investment may be born in ways we never get to see, or it may not be born until we are actually leave this earth. The kid you've been investing in most of their life may never come back and say thank you. The person that you're praying with to come to faith may not surrender their life to Jesus while you're still alive to see it. But listen, people aren't the ones keeping the most important record. Listen to what the writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 6. God is not unjust, he will not forget your work. Listen to this, and the love you have shown him as you helped his people and continue to help them. Don't miss the ultimate landing place of your love for people. God says, I won't forget it when you love people and you help people, because when you do, you're ultimately loving me. God counts what you do for them as something you're doing for him personally. When people forget, God promises to remember. No investment in a human soul is ever lost, including the ones you may not live long enough to see pay off. There's this beautiful moment in Scripture that illustrates this perfectly, and it may be one of the clearest images in the Bible about a legacy life. We miss it because the story ends with this dramatic miracle, and because most of the time when this story is read or told, the focus is always on the visible miracle. In Acts 9, Peter raises a woman from her deathbed, and that's what it gets everybody's attention. That's usually why this passage is read. But I want you to listen to the words leading up to the miracle. These are the things that happened prior to the miracle. Acts 9, verse 36. In Joppa, there was a disciple named Tabitha in Greek. Her name is Dorcas. She was always doing good and helping the poor. About that time she became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. I mean, that's her biography. That's all we know. Just a couple sentences. She had a reputation for serving those in need. She gets sick, she dies, and the believers sin for Peter, who is in the town next next town over. And it says in verse 39, Peter went with them, so they get Peter. He comes back, he arrived and was taken upstairs to the room where Tabithor Dorcas was. It says, All the widows, listen to this, all the widows stood around him. This is the scene he's greeted with when he walks into her room. All the widows stood around him crying, showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them. So the next verse that you read records the miracle, but let's just stop right here. Peter walks into where this body is, and he's greeted with a room full of widows, some of the most vulnerable and poorest people in their entire society, and they are tearfully holding up clothes to the apostle Peter in remembrance, saying, She gave this to me. Her legacy wasn't what was left in her account or in her closet. It was what she had given away that was now on their back. To get the significance of what the gift to these widows would have been in that day and time, you have to understand something about this era of the ancient world. And it's the reason Jesus mentioned moths when he's talking about things that decay and investing in the wrong kind of treasures in Matthew 6. When Jesus lists the treasures that don't last, his first example is cloth. Because when he talks about moth and vermin destroy, he's talking about fine linen and clothing. That's not a random detail. In the ancient world, investing in fine cloth was a way of storing wealth. It was the equivalent of a savings account. Today people invest in stocks or they invest in crypto or they put money in a money market. This was the ancient world. One of the ways to store wealth was in cloth. You can track it in scripture. Joseph gave Benjamin five sets of clothes as a gift of real value. Achan steals a beautiful robe alongside the silver and gold. Gehazi asked Naaman for silver and two sets of clothing as his payoff. James warns the rich that their clothes are literally been eaten by moth. Their wealth is being destroyed by moths. Cloth was a valued piece of a person's investment portfolio. And when Jesus refers to moths destroying cloth, he is using that cultural reality as a picture of how earthly treasures are susceptible to decay. But because she understood the teachings of Jesus, the wealth didn't sit in her closet. She turned it into robes for widows who had nothing. An earthly treasure that Jesus said moths could destroy became an eternal treasure when Dorcas invested it in people. That's the words of Jesus being lived out. And that is a legacy kind of life. The Apostle Paul, in several of his New Testament letters, gives us this beautiful theology of legacy. That's a well-known verse. We quote that quite often. It's most often read at funerals because it captures the reality that for a Christ follower, our best days are still in front of us, that being with Jesus for eternity is better than anything this life has to offer. But here's the problem. When we read this verse, we usually stop right there. Verse 21. But there's a context. Paul doesn't stop with verse 21. There's another verse and verse after that. When he says, what he says in the next few verses powerfully illustrates how adding value, living a life that matters, is the essence of what it means to live a legacy, to leave a legacy that impacts people for eternity. Remember, okay, we're going to start reading in verse 22. Remember, to live is Christ, to die is gang. Verse 21. Verse 22, if I am to go on living in this body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet, what shall I choose? I do not know. I am torn between the two. I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far, but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith. Paul has this full view of heaven. I mean, heaven is fully in view for him, and he calls that journey toward heaven where he's going better by far. And the only reason he gives for wanting to stay on earth is other people's progress. He's completely unafraid to die. He's actually anticipating what's on the other side of death. But he sees every extra day as a gift he has been given to add value to somebody else's life. That flips this whole conversation about legacy around. Legacy is not just a question about what will I leave when I die. It's a question about why am I still here? Everybody wants to know how much how much time I have left. No, no. What am I going to do with what I have left? With very little time left to live, awaiting his execution at the hands of the Roman Empire. Paul grabs one more incredible image that captures the essence of living for a legacy. He says to Timothy, in 2 Timothy 4, for I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. When Paul says he's being poured out like a drink offering, he's actually referring to a practice of wine being emptied from a cup onto an altar as the final part of a sacrificial offering. Being poured out is sacrifice language. And once something is poured out like that, you can't get it back. You can't gather it up in the cup again. It's gone completely. It is completely sacrificed or given. That's how Paul is describing the end of his own life. This isn't something that is being taken away from me. I have been giving my life, being poured out for God as a drink offering willingly. I have made this the decision of my life. That's the essence of the message of living in such a way that leaves an eternal legacy in that one image of being poured out. Most people spend their lives focused on consumption. Paul spent his life being poured out for the cause of Christ and for the sake of others. Most of the time, when somebody's standing up talking about legacy, our mind immediately starts thinking inheritance as if those are the same thing because our minds immediately go to the material things that people are going to leave behind. That's what we think about when we think about legacy, the things that'll be divided up after you're gone. And we often call that a person's estate. That's why people spend so much time while they're still alive doing what is known as estate planning. So there'll be less squabbling and fighting, and things will be more clear when they're gone. Well, I want us to peek in on what may be the closest thing to estate planning that Jesus ever did. It's just two verses, and it all unfolds at the foot of the cross. In John 19, it says this when the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. Let's not tear it, they said to one another, let's decide by lot who will get it. That's everything he owned. The possessions of the most important life ever lived got divided up in a dice game by Roman soldiers. So that's unfolding at the foot of the cross. But it's kind of like a movie. John, the writer, basically, there's something else happening at that same moment while they're having this dice game to basically divide up Jesus' estate. The camera pans over to something that is happening exactly at the same time. John describes this scene in verse 26. When Jesus saw his mother there and the disciples, whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, Woman, here is your son, and to the disciple, here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. Here's what's important. While the soldiers were interested in dividing his belongings, Jesus was taking care of his people. In the final moments of his life, the only estate planning Jesus did was to make sure the people that he loved would go on caring for each other. People are the legacy. The souls of people are the only thing you can invest in that are going to last for eternity. Several times through the years, I've heard my friend John Maxwell talk about one of the most meaningful, life-defining gifts that he ever received. When he was a young pastor, his assistant was named Eileen. She was much older than him, and she got him a book for Christmas. And when he opened the package, the outside of the book, the title of the book was The Greatest Story Ever Told. And John said the title piqued my curiosity, and I couldn't wait to open the book and find out about this greatest story ever told. But then he said, When I opened the book, every page in the book was blank, except the first page. Eileen had written him a note, a personal note, that said, John, your life is before you. You fill these pages with your dreams, your passions, with your desires, with your hopes. You write the words in this book and make it the greatest story ever told. Now, none of us is being handed an actual physical copy of a book with nothing but blank pages today, but every one of us is still breathing. We still have life left to live, which means every one of us still have some pages left in our book. Your legacy isn't written at your funeral. The funeral just reveals what you've been writing in your life every day you have lived. So don't settle for having your story read. Start writing it. Start living a legacy kind of life because you're living for things that matter for eternity. The souls of people, the causes of Christ. You're adding value to others. The real question is not how many pages do I have left? Because I just want to know how much longer am I going to be on the earth. The real question is, what am I going to write on the pages that I do have left? Every ordinary act of faithfulness is another sentence. Every meaningful conversation, every investment into another person's life, every person that you love, every time you give instead of consume, you are writing a legacy story with your life. Now, to help you get started writing a different story, I want to give you a challenge. This challenge is actually in your guides this week. At the end of every week in this guide that we've been following for eight weeks, there is a very practical way to apply the principles to your life. Every week we have a start challenge, a standard challenge, and then a stretch challenge. So if you kind of need some baby steps to apply this, it's the start. If you're you've been on this journey a little while and you're mature enough to be challenged at a higher level, then you go to the standard challenge. But like if you really want to stretch yourself, the stretch challenge is the most demanding. And this week's stretch challenge in your guide is a challenge to write your own eulogy. Like what would you want said about you at the end of it all? Begin with the end in mind. Sit down and write your own eulogy. Martin Luther King Jr. did that on February the 4th, 1968, in a sermon that he preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, he said this, quote, every now and then I think about my own death and think about my own funeral. I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. He didn't ask them to mention the Nobel Prize. He asked them to mention that he added value to the lives of other people. And just two months later, on April the 9th, 1968, they were back in that same building for his funeral, and they played the clip of that sermon when he basically preached his own eulogy. I would encourage you to take some time to write out yours. And then make the decision to go live in a way that will make that eulogy true. We said a minute ago, the series started with the question: what is mattering? Do I matter? How do I live in such a way that my life experiences significance, purpose? Do I matter? But the series is ending with a very different question. What will matter because of the way I live my life? That's a legacy question. Who's stronger because you invested in them? Who knows Jesus because you helped point the way? Who believes they are valuable because you treated them like they were? You can spend your life or you can invest your life. Both of them are gonna cost you everything by the time it's over, but only one of them is going to leave a legacy and keep multiplying long after you're gone. Most people just spend their lives. But a few people who understand kingdom stuff actually invest their life. Possessions are eventually gonna change hands, titles are gonna disappear, achievements are gonna become old news. Even the things we spend decades of our life building are actually gonna belong to somebody else. But what you pour into people is gonna continue long after you. Listen, legacy is the accumulated result of a life that consistently adds value. And that's what we've been challenged to do all year long. Give honor, add value to everybody, everywhere, all the time. That's a legacy life. Stand with me, if you would, across this campus and all of our campus family. And I'm gonna ask the prayer team if they would to make themselves available to serve you today. And as they come, let me just say that legacy life starts with surrender to Jesus. And you've been coming to church for a little while, but you've never made that step of faith. Let me challenge you. The greatest joy and honor of our life after a service like this for our prayer team and for our staff is to pray with somebody who wants to surrender their life to Jesus. That's how a legacy life, an eternal life, actually begins. But then the bulk of this is go live it when you leave. If you need prayer for anything going on, we would love to help bear your burdens today. We believe in miracles that happen when we pray, and we would love to serve you today, and we're here for you. Father, I pray you'll bless them and keep them, that you'll make your face shine down on them, that you'll be gracious to them, that you'll turn your countenance their direction today, and you'll give them peace. And God, a little special prayer today. As we gather in the last week of this series, I pray abundant blessings over every leader, every host that has opened their home, every person that has attended. May there be this sweet culmination of community in this last week of gathering and some something deep that happens as we choose to make decisions so that we live in such a way that our life keeps rippling for eternity because of the impact we've made on other people. Help us be people that invest our lives, not just spend them. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen and amen. These altars are open today. God bless you.