On May 5th, 2024, Rev. Matt Sapp discusses the impact of hospitality and the power of putting teachings into practice. He emphasizes the importance of action over mere contemplation.
00:00 Welcome: Introduction to the impact of hospitality on lives
02:42 Sermon: Doing What Jesus Teaches
14:43 Benediction
Matthew 28:16-20
Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
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- where traditional worship is engaged with excellence.
- and where diverse approaches to Christian faith and theology all find themselves at home under the lordship of Christ.
Want to learn more about Central? Visit our website at centralbaptistnewnan.org or give us a call at 770-683-0610.
[00:00:01]
Tom Freeman:
Good morning, and welcome to Worship at Central Baptist Church. I'm Tom Freeman, and I want to share with you We've raised our daughters here. They were baptized here. Now the story I'm about to tell you is before they were born, before they were even thought about. Okay? We were young. Gabby tells us this story. She lives in she's 26 and lives in Chicago. You know how mister Bill and miss Anita Headley invited you and mom to lunch one Sunday after church when you first visited? Yes, we said. That invitation changed our lives.
How's that? I asked. Well, you started attending central. You both became leaders. You started teaching Sunday school, RAs and GAs and became a deacon. You raised me and Ashley at Central. We developed our faith at Central. It changed our lives. Now, afterwards just like the Headleys did. You see, Anita often made enough lunch to invite guests over after lunch or after church. We were one of many guests they invited over. Little did they know that simple act of hospitality would make such an impact on our lives. After that lunch, our lives became in intertwined with the Headleys.
We became friends with Bill and Anita and their children. After staying with Otis and Gayle Jones when our house burned, burned, Anita told us we were staying with them next. Headley Construction built our new house. Michelle and Bill were together during the attacks of 911. We've shared Wednesday nights and deacons meetings together. Anita and Pam Hembrey started the young married's class we were in then. Now, we're in the old married's class. All of this to say, look at the power of good, old fashioned hospitality. Gabby is right.
The power of hospitality shown by the Headleys and many others did change our lives. And for that, we are grateful.
[00:02:43] Matt Sapp:
When I was in the 2nd grade at Nancy Creek Elementary School up in DeKalb County, we had recess every day. Out behind the school building, there was a black top with a few basketball goals on either end. It was a great place to play Foursquare. And then beyond the black top, there were some woods that went down a slope a little ways and some concrete steps that went down through the middle of those woods to a big open play field, with the remnants of of an overgrown softball field on the far end and some jungle gym equipment beyond what would have been left field on the other end. And in the woods, between the upper blacktop and the lower softball field, where those steps were off to the side, there was a big usually muddy hill.
We used to just slide down it on our backsides. You could be covered from head to toe in Georgia red clay in a matter of seconds and lots of days many of us were. One day during recess we had heard, my friends and I had heard actually, I think we had all seen it on TV together on the mister wizard TV show. Anybody remember watching mister wizard? It's a a science experiment for kids TV show. We'd seen it together on TV. We were talking about it together at recess. We heard that you could use a magnifying glass to start a fire. So 3 so 3 of us were sitting in a circle during recess discussing whether or not that was true. Could you start a fire with just a magnifying glass and the power of the sun?
Well, we knew, all of us did together, that it wasn't always as easy to start a fire in real life as they made it look like on TV. We knew this because we had tried. We had tried rubbing 2 sticks together until our arms felt like they were about to fall off without producing even a single wisp of smoke. In cub scouts we had tried to start fires with just a piece of flint in our pocket knives like our leaders told us to, and we had failed miserably. So if you could use a magnifying glass to start a fire at all, we all agreed that it would not be as easy to do as they made it seem on TV. But lucky for us, at the time, no self respecting second grade boy in the middle 19 eighties was either without a Sherlock Holmes detective kit or a cold war spy kit at home, both of which came with a magnifying glass as an essential item in their respective arsenals.
So the next day at recess, we all came back, each of us armed with a magnifying glass. We got just out of sight of the teachers. Magnifying glass until the sun caught the glass just right to focus a spot on a leaf. That we could just see one focused bright dot on one of the leaves and then we just held it there and waited. And to our absolute delight, it didn't take long at all for the spot on that leaf to begin to turn a darker and darker color until eventually it was black. And then very quickly a hole had burned right through the leaf. And we pulled the glass away quickly, smiling and giggling.
Of course we weren't content to have burned just a small hole in a leaf so we tried it again. This time holding the glass until the edges of the sunburned hole in the leaf started to smoke, first a little and then a lot. And before we knew it we had an honest to goodness fire burning there behind Nancy Creek Elementary School in Dunwoody, Georgia. We quickly put the the fire out before the smoke grew so big that it would give us away and we ran to slide down the mud hill, happy to have succeeded in our mission and feeling as if we had just narrowly escaped burning the entire school down.
Have you ever had to try something for yourself to really believe that it works? Susan Sparks is a pastor at Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City. She's been here to speak before. So when our choir was in New York City just a few weeks ago, some of our group who was up there went to worship with her at her church on Sunday morning. In the sermon she preached the morning they were there, she talked about visiting Dayton, Ohio for a writer's conference. She says that while she was there, while she was in Dayton, Ohio she visited the Wright Brothers Museum there. That's where the Wright Brothers are from. The Wright Brothers Museum is built around their old bicycle shop where they did their early flight designs and calculations and and their first thinking about flying.
Susan said she was particularly interested in going to the Wright Brothers Museum because she is from North Carolina, and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina is the place where the Wright Brothers first flew. So she went into this little museum in Dayton, Ohio and the docent was there to show her around and and tell her the the history of all that they had on display and to tell her the story of the Wright Brothers. She listened to him give his whole spiel. She said it was great. She said it was great until the museum guide said rather grandiosely at the end of his talk, ma'am you are looking at the birthplace of flight.
Susan says there was a there was a long silence during which my rational side was saying to myself, just walk away. Just walk away. But my lesser annoying self was like do it. Do it. Just say what you're thinking. So she says I smiled and said in my best southern accent, well that is so interesting. The birthplace of flight. Because you know I grew up near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where they actually flew the plane. The docent said, yeah, but they thought it up here. To which I replied in a rather condescending tone, she said, yeah but we all know that thinking about it ain't doing it.
We all know that thinking about it ain't doing it. Our sermon today is about doing what Jesus teaches. In worship today we're observing both of our 2 baptist ordinances. As baptists we don't have 7 sacraments, we have 2 ordinances, believers baptism and the Lord's supper. And we don't observe those 2 ordinances simply because they're nice things to do, or because we think their ritual adds to our worship. We observe them very specifically in obedience to a direct demand of Christ. Of the Lord's supper, Christ says, do this and as as often as you do it, do it in remembrance of me, and so we do. And then there's baptism and the great commission. We read it from the waters at the beginning of worship.
Go and make disciples everywhere, baptizing them in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, teaching them everything I have commanded you, teaching them everything I have commanded you. Teaching them everything I have commanded you. And I'll be with you as you do it forever and for always. You can count on me. That's the great commission. Go and make disciples, baptize them, and teach them everything I have commanded you. And we hear that and we say, okay, Jesus. We've got that. Go and make disciples, get more followers. We're Baptists. That's that's right up our alley. We are a missionary people.
We support missionaries all over the world. Go and make disciples, check. Baptize them, No one does baptism like Baptists. But we dunk them all the way under the water, and we make sure they're real believers too before we baptize them. We've got baptism down. Check. And teaching, Teaching people everything you have commanded us? Some of us have been to Sunday school every Sunday for 80 years. We've got Sunday morning Bible study here, and we've got Tuesday morning Bible study here, And we've got Tuesday afternoon bible study here. And we've got Wednesday evening bible study here. We do everything we can to teach and train our children and teenagers here. Teaching is one of the main things we do. We've got that down. Check. And if we were called to live up to that great commission, we would all have earned our halos long ago.
We'd all have robes and crowns waiting on us in heaven, wouldn't we? Accept. Accept that version of the great commission is missing something. Go and make disciples, Jesus says, baptizing them in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, teaching them everything I have commanded you, except that version of the great commission is missing except that version of the great commission is missing 2 words. Look on the back of your worship guide. Baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
Teaching them to obey everything I have actually want us to do this stuff? You actually want us to do what Jesus teaches? In his book Love Does Bob Goff talks about starting bible doing groups. He says he's had enough of Bible study groups. That might actually be one of the better definitions of a church by the way. A Bible doing group. Us. In too many cases though we are like people who have become experts say at basketball by reading a a textbook or an instructional manual. Up to our eyeballs and diagrams and strategies, but we've never grabbed a ball and stepped onto the court. Or people with whole libraries of cookbooks who've never pulled out a mixing bowl, or turned on an oven.
Are we really basketball players? Are we really cooks? Until you take what Jesus teaches and put it into practice, are you really disciples? You could spend all day in a bicycle shop drawing pictures of airplanes. Or binge watching mister wizard TV programs after school. But some things you have to try for yourself. To see if they really work, like the Sermon on the Mount. Because just thinking about it ain't doing it. Depart now in peace, and as you go, may the God who makes all things holy and whole make you holy and whole, Put you together spirit, soul, and body, and keep you fit for the coming of our master, Jesus Christ, in whose name we offer this prayer.
Amen.
Good morning, and welcome to Worship at Central Baptist Church. I'm Tom Freeman, and I want to share with you We've raised our daughters here. They were baptized here. Now the story I'm about to tell you is before they were born, before they were even thought about. Okay? We were young. Gabby tells us this story. She lives in she's 26 and lives in Chicago. You know how mister Bill and miss Anita Headley invited you and mom to lunch one Sunday after church when you first visited? Yes, we said. That invitation changed our lives.
How's that? I asked. Well, you started attending central. You both became leaders. You started teaching Sunday school, RAs and GAs and became a deacon. You raised me and Ashley at Central. We developed our faith at Central. It changed our lives. Now, afterwards just like the Headleys did. You see, Anita often made enough lunch to invite guests over after lunch or after church. We were one of many guests they invited over. Little did they know that simple act of hospitality would make such an impact on our lives. After that lunch, our lives became in intertwined with the Headleys.
We became friends with Bill and Anita and their children. After staying with Otis and Gayle Jones when our house burned, burned, Anita told us we were staying with them next. Headley Construction built our new house. Michelle and Bill were together during the attacks of 911. We've shared Wednesday nights and deacons meetings together. Anita and Pam Hembrey started the young married's class we were in then. Now, we're in the old married's class. All of this to say, look at the power of good, old fashioned hospitality. Gabby is right.
The power of hospitality shown by the Headleys and many others did change our lives. And for that, we are grateful.
[00:02:43] Matt Sapp:
When I was in the 2nd grade at Nancy Creek Elementary School up in DeKalb County, we had recess every day. Out behind the school building, there was a black top with a few basketball goals on either end. It was a great place to play Foursquare. And then beyond the black top, there were some woods that went down a slope a little ways and some concrete steps that went down through the middle of those woods to a big open play field, with the remnants of of an overgrown softball field on the far end and some jungle gym equipment beyond what would have been left field on the other end. And in the woods, between the upper blacktop and the lower softball field, where those steps were off to the side, there was a big usually muddy hill.
We used to just slide down it on our backsides. You could be covered from head to toe in Georgia red clay in a matter of seconds and lots of days many of us were. One day during recess we had heard, my friends and I had heard actually, I think we had all seen it on TV together on the mister wizard TV show. Anybody remember watching mister wizard? It's a a science experiment for kids TV show. We'd seen it together on TV. We were talking about it together at recess. We heard that you could use a magnifying glass to start a fire. So 3 so 3 of us were sitting in a circle during recess discussing whether or not that was true. Could you start a fire with just a magnifying glass and the power of the sun?
Well, we knew, all of us did together, that it wasn't always as easy to start a fire in real life as they made it look like on TV. We knew this because we had tried. We had tried rubbing 2 sticks together until our arms felt like they were about to fall off without producing even a single wisp of smoke. In cub scouts we had tried to start fires with just a piece of flint in our pocket knives like our leaders told us to, and we had failed miserably. So if you could use a magnifying glass to start a fire at all, we all agreed that it would not be as easy to do as they made it seem on TV. But lucky for us, at the time, no self respecting second grade boy in the middle 19 eighties was either without a Sherlock Holmes detective kit or a cold war spy kit at home, both of which came with a magnifying glass as an essential item in their respective arsenals.
So the next day at recess, we all came back, each of us armed with a magnifying glass. We got just out of sight of the teachers. Magnifying glass until the sun caught the glass just right to focus a spot on a leaf. That we could just see one focused bright dot on one of the leaves and then we just held it there and waited. And to our absolute delight, it didn't take long at all for the spot on that leaf to begin to turn a darker and darker color until eventually it was black. And then very quickly a hole had burned right through the leaf. And we pulled the glass away quickly, smiling and giggling.
Of course we weren't content to have burned just a small hole in a leaf so we tried it again. This time holding the glass until the edges of the sunburned hole in the leaf started to smoke, first a little and then a lot. And before we knew it we had an honest to goodness fire burning there behind Nancy Creek Elementary School in Dunwoody, Georgia. We quickly put the the fire out before the smoke grew so big that it would give us away and we ran to slide down the mud hill, happy to have succeeded in our mission and feeling as if we had just narrowly escaped burning the entire school down.
Have you ever had to try something for yourself to really believe that it works? Susan Sparks is a pastor at Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City. She's been here to speak before. So when our choir was in New York City just a few weeks ago, some of our group who was up there went to worship with her at her church on Sunday morning. In the sermon she preached the morning they were there, she talked about visiting Dayton, Ohio for a writer's conference. She says that while she was there, while she was in Dayton, Ohio she visited the Wright Brothers Museum there. That's where the Wright Brothers are from. The Wright Brothers Museum is built around their old bicycle shop where they did their early flight designs and calculations and and their first thinking about flying.
Susan said she was particularly interested in going to the Wright Brothers Museum because she is from North Carolina, and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina is the place where the Wright Brothers first flew. So she went into this little museum in Dayton, Ohio and the docent was there to show her around and and tell her the the history of all that they had on display and to tell her the story of the Wright Brothers. She listened to him give his whole spiel. She said it was great. She said it was great until the museum guide said rather grandiosely at the end of his talk, ma'am you are looking at the birthplace of flight.
Susan says there was a there was a long silence during which my rational side was saying to myself, just walk away. Just walk away. But my lesser annoying self was like do it. Do it. Just say what you're thinking. So she says I smiled and said in my best southern accent, well that is so interesting. The birthplace of flight. Because you know I grew up near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where they actually flew the plane. The docent said, yeah, but they thought it up here. To which I replied in a rather condescending tone, she said, yeah but we all know that thinking about it ain't doing it.
We all know that thinking about it ain't doing it. Our sermon today is about doing what Jesus teaches. In worship today we're observing both of our 2 baptist ordinances. As baptists we don't have 7 sacraments, we have 2 ordinances, believers baptism and the Lord's supper. And we don't observe those 2 ordinances simply because they're nice things to do, or because we think their ritual adds to our worship. We observe them very specifically in obedience to a direct demand of Christ. Of the Lord's supper, Christ says, do this and as as often as you do it, do it in remembrance of me, and so we do. And then there's baptism and the great commission. We read it from the waters at the beginning of worship.
Go and make disciples everywhere, baptizing them in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, teaching them everything I have commanded you, teaching them everything I have commanded you. Teaching them everything I have commanded you. And I'll be with you as you do it forever and for always. You can count on me. That's the great commission. Go and make disciples, baptize them, and teach them everything I have commanded you. And we hear that and we say, okay, Jesus. We've got that. Go and make disciples, get more followers. We're Baptists. That's that's right up our alley. We are a missionary people.
We support missionaries all over the world. Go and make disciples, check. Baptize them, No one does baptism like Baptists. But we dunk them all the way under the water, and we make sure they're real believers too before we baptize them. We've got baptism down. Check. And teaching, Teaching people everything you have commanded us? Some of us have been to Sunday school every Sunday for 80 years. We've got Sunday morning Bible study here, and we've got Tuesday morning Bible study here, And we've got Tuesday afternoon bible study here. And we've got Wednesday evening bible study here. We do everything we can to teach and train our children and teenagers here. Teaching is one of the main things we do. We've got that down. Check. And if we were called to live up to that great commission, we would all have earned our halos long ago.
We'd all have robes and crowns waiting on us in heaven, wouldn't we? Accept. Accept that version of the great commission is missing something. Go and make disciples, Jesus says, baptizing them in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, teaching them everything I have commanded you, except that version of the great commission is missing except that version of the great commission is missing 2 words. Look on the back of your worship guide. Baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
Teaching them to obey everything I have actually want us to do this stuff? You actually want us to do what Jesus teaches? In his book Love Does Bob Goff talks about starting bible doing groups. He says he's had enough of Bible study groups. That might actually be one of the better definitions of a church by the way. A Bible doing group. Us. In too many cases though we are like people who have become experts say at basketball by reading a a textbook or an instructional manual. Up to our eyeballs and diagrams and strategies, but we've never grabbed a ball and stepped onto the court. Or people with whole libraries of cookbooks who've never pulled out a mixing bowl, or turned on an oven.
Are we really basketball players? Are we really cooks? Until you take what Jesus teaches and put it into practice, are you really disciples? You could spend all day in a bicycle shop drawing pictures of airplanes. Or binge watching mister wizard TV programs after school. But some things you have to try for yourself. To see if they really work, like the Sermon on the Mount. Because just thinking about it ain't doing it. Depart now in peace, and as you go, may the God who makes all things holy and whole make you holy and whole, Put you together spirit, soul, and body, and keep you fit for the coming of our master, Jesus Christ, in whose name we offer this prayer.
Amen.
