Making Room for God

Appleton Gospel Church

Making Room for God: What if Jesus wrote a letter to our church? In his letter to the church in the wealthy city of Laodicea, Jesus strongly warned about being lukewarm in their faith. These Christians were no different than the world around them. But this rebuke was coming from a place of love. "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock." Will they make room for him? Recorded on Sep 1, 2024, on Revelation 3:14-22 by Pastor David Parks. Make Room is a three-part sermon series considering the need to make room 1) for more of God in our lives, 2) for more people in our lives, and 3) for more people in our church. Why? Because more people need good news! More people need the life and love, the freedom and forgiveness, and so much more that is only found in Christ. Our prayer is that in the coming years, many more people will experience the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sermon Transcript For the next three weeks, we’re doing something a little different in our preaching ministry. Normally, our sermon series are based on a book of the Bible (e.g., John or Ephesians or Ruth) or a larger section of Scripture (e.g., Sermon on the Mount). But today, we’re starting a three-week topical series called Make Room to talk about some of the Biblical foundations of our 2030 Vision. But fear not; after this short series, we’ll jump back into a more typical expository series on the book of Exodus (which I’m very excited about!). Now, if we had your email address, you got an email this past week sharing some of our thinking behind this 2030 Vision. But I’ll give you a little more context before we jump into our Scripture passage for today. All the way back in February, after considering whether or not we should try and buy our current building facility, the elder board started developing a long-term ministry plan. We realized that our ministry vision should really come before any questions about a building facility because a building is simply a big, expensive tool to use for the mission/vision of a church. In other words, a building serves the ministry, not the other way around. Plus, over the past year, we saw over 50% growth as a church, and, to be honest, we started to feel some growing pains. Some of our systems and structures that used to work just fine were no longer working as well. We realized that if we failed to pray or plan for the next season of ministry, we would struggle to shepherd people well and would be vulnerable to division or discouragement. So, as a board, we spent months listening to our leaders and the congregation and learning from other pastors and churches. We spent months praying together and talking about who we are as a church, where God is bearing fruit in our ministry, and where we believe God is leading us in the next 5-7 years. This process was very helpful in bringing clarity to what really does seem to be the start of a new season in the life of our church. One of the things that became clear was that we did not feel God was leading us in a dramatically new direction. We don’t need to reinvent ourselves or change our mission, vision, or values. Instead, the phrase that kept coming up was “make room.” We need to make room. But make room for what exactly? Well, as we continued to refine our vision, three areas for making room emerged. We need to make room 1) for more of God in our lives, 2) for more people in our lives, and 3) for more people in our church. Making room is what our 2030 Vision is all about. And this is what we’re going to be talking about today and for the next few weeks. So, we’ll start this mini-series by dropping into Revelation chapter 3, and we’re going to consider a very famous passage where Jesus says he’s standing at the door of our lives, and he’s knocking. He wants to come in, be with us, and have fellowship with us. If you have your Bible/app, please open it to Revelation 3:14. Revelation 3:14 (NIV),