Community

Well, grab your message notes that look like this, and here's what I wanna talk about this morning. While we were on vacation, Lori and I were in the car one day, and she plays me this sermon from a pastor in a church up in Portland, Oregon, John Mark Comer at Bridgestown Church, and I was riveted. He challenged me. I couldn't get his message out of my head, all vacation long, thanks a lot, wife. But you know what, it really set me, I would say, in a new direction and a healthier direction spiritually, and I think it might do the same thing for you, and I wanna quote extensively from him, especially in my intro.

He starts with this. The journalist Sebastian Jünger in his book, "Tribe," tells the story of an odd phenomenon in American history. In the 1700s, up and down the Eastern seaboard, of course, you had primarily two groups of people living side by side. You had the indigenous people, the Native Americans, who were living at that time the same way, pretty much, that they had lived for centuries, and then you had the colonists, mostly white Europeans who were living at that time at what was probably the apex of Western civilization. And then something interesting started to happen.

A number of colonists began to defect, to go and live among the indigenous people. The odd thing is, and here's what Jünger points out in his book, the traffic only went one way. We have no records, zero records, of indigenous people of their own free will coming to live with the colonists. Benjamin Franklin noted this in a letter to a friend in 1753. He was writing about some colonists that he personally knew who had been captured by indigenous people in a raid, and then later were rescued by the colonists and brought back into the colony. Quote, "Though ransomed by their friends and treated with all imaginable tenderness, yet in a short time, they became disgusted with our manner of life, and they took the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods."

Why? Take a look at this, another one of the colonists in a book that he wrote, partly about this phenomenon, in 1782, so this isn't just like modern people reading this back into this. This is somebody writing this while it was happening. And his language here is not quite PC today, but listen to what he's saying. Thousands of Europeans are now Indians. In other words, living as Indians. And we have no examples of aborigines from choice becoming European. Why? Listen to his interpretation. There must be, in their social bond, something singularly captivating and far superior from anything to be boasted of among us.

So something in their social bond. What could it have been? What did the American colonies not have that the indigenous people did have that was so appealing? Well, even way back then, people noticed a trait in American DNA, in American culture, that people are still talking about today. Famously, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville, he was an author who traveled throughout America way back then, and he observed a lot of interesting things, but among them was this. He said, extremist individualism is the defining American trait. Even way back then. Now, he liked it. He thought our extremist individualism was part of our genius as a nation, but he said it has a dark side. Quote, "If left unchecked, it will spell the abolition of humanity."

And apparently, what people found so appealing about indigenous culture was the opposite of this extremist individualism. The indigenous people had community. The opposite of extremist individualism. They had family ties. They had village ties that even back then, in the mid to late 1700s, Americans were finding lacking in our culture. Now, social scientists say that for many years, the extremist individualism trait in Western culture was kept in check by basically how hard life was. We kind of had to band together just in order to survive, and that kind of kept individualism in check.

For example, there was a famous World War II study of the London Blitz in 1940 and 1941 that found this bizarre thing. The depression rate in London actually went down during the Nazi bombardment. And when it was all over, people were safe again, it went right back up to previous levels, which seems bizarre, but the speculation is that during the Nazi bombing of London, there was a sense of community that brought all of London together. The hardship created a bond, but when times got better, the bond disappeared.

So what's happening to us now? Well, sociologists say that since about World War II, extremist individualism has basically been running wild in the Western world, partly because times have been so good. And there has been, watch this, a corresponding decline in community. For example, church attendance in America has been cut in half since 1950. And it's easy to see that stat and go, "Oh, churches are failing," but it's not just church. Robert Putnam is a professor at Harvard University who wrote a very famous book called Bowling Alone. And it's a little bit old now, but it's still the groundbreaking book that first observed this. And he said, "It's not just church attendance that's in decline in America and in Europe, it's any and all forms of face-to-face community."

That's why it's called Bowling Alone. I mean, show of hands, how many of you are in a bowling league? Can I just see a show of hands? Go ahead and raise your hand. We have one, two, two of us. This used to be a thing. Everybody used to do it. Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, everybody. I saw it on TV. But it's not just bowling, it's things like the Moose Lodge, the Elks Lodge, service clubs, even political organizations. Actually, participation is all drastically down. And he says in this book that America, especially America, is taking that extremist individualism to a new extreme. So communities just being devastated.

Consequently, the rate of loneliness here has doubled since the 1980s. I was listening to NPR this past week and they reported a study over half of Americans say, "No one knows me well." Over half, most of us say, "You know what? Actually, no one really knows me. No one." And look, I couldn't believe this stat. Look at this. Only 8% say they had had a conversation with a neighbor in the last year. 8%?! That just blows my mind. And this is a big problem because loneliness kills. One study found it's worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day to your health, to be kind of pathologically lonely. It has a greater impact on your health than obesity. Multiple studies have tied it to heart disease, stroke, dementia, immune disorders, anxiety.

So loneliness is bad for you and loneliness is actually really bad for society. Ironically, individualism leads to loneliness 'cause we all cocoon. And then loneliness in a weird way leads to tribalism. Tribalism is what columnist David Brooks called the dark twin of community. Community is based on mutual love. Tribalism is based on mutual hate. Community is based on what we're for. Tribalism is based on what we're against. Community is about generosity and sharing resources. Tribalism is about a zero sum battle for scarce resources and it's kind of kill or be killed.

One author said, listen to this, the tragic paradox of hyper individualism is that what began as ecstatic liberation ends up as a war of tribe against tribe that crushes the individuals it sought to free. So welcome to church everyone. That's the bad news, right? Now here's the good news. The Bible says God sets the lonely in families. He leads out the prisoners with singing but the rebellious live in a sun scorched land. God sees kind of the hyper individualist living in the sun scorched land of loneliness and he says, let me set you in families, a new community that I'm going to create to provide for this basic need of humankind, right?

And what I wanna do today is to see how God does that. Because I gotta be honest, I've been thinking about this on my vacation and come to the uncomfortable conclusion that real community is at a very weak point in my own life and maybe you will find that it is for you. Now I wanna look at how God solves this from scripture and why we still resist it and how we can get it in our lives. How he does it, why we resist it and how we can get it. And for our purposes today, here's how I wanted to define community, close relationships where I'm known and cared for and grow.

And I wanna challenge you as you listen today to ask yourself a hard question too. Ask yourself, am I really in experiencing close relationships where I am known and cared for, unconditionally loved and where I'm challenged too to really grow? Are you currently experiencing that? This morning I wanna walk through just a few of the many Bible passages that show how important this is to God. Like for example, when Jesus shows up to start really a world changing movement, one of the very first things he does is he creates a community. He says, hey you follow me, you, you follow me, follow me. Almost on day one he starts to gather a community and look at the kind of community he puts together.

Matthew 10:2–4, this is like his small group. These are the names of the 12 apostles. First Simon who's called Peter and his brother Andrew, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas Iscariot, you're going, well, just a list of names. That's not a very inspiring piece of scripture. Let me just make three observations about this. And you can jot these down in your notes if you want. Three quick observations about the community Jesus started here.

First, and this seems obvious, Jesus lived in community. He wasn't just some hermit up on a mountain top somewhere even though he probably could have been and still been the most amazing person ever. He chooses to live in community. Like the first thing he does is start a small group. Second, the call to follow him was a call to join his community, right? He doesn't just say, everybody, everybody gather around, gather around, let me give you some super inspiring content, really memorable parables, little little sayings here. All right, now good luck, go apply. Go be a peace down hermit somewhere on a mountain top. Now he says, let's do this life thing, this Christian life thing, let's do it together.

And then third, people called to his community were natural enemies. And this is really fascinating. People called to his community were actually natural enemies. Look back at this verse. There's drama tucked into this list of names. The only two people whose occupations are mentioned are Matthew the what? And Simon the what? Now, if you know anything about first century politics in Palestine, you know you could not possibly have found two people further apart politically. And Matthew's mentioning this because he's like, it was incredible because tax collectors were full on 110% collaborators with the Romans. I don't know if you know this, but in those days, the way tax collecting worked was you bought a franchise from the Roman government to have that business. It's kind of like being a franchisee of McDonald's or something.

Matthew, the tax collector, he bought a franchise from the Romans. He was the official representative of the Roman corporate world, all right? And Simon was a zealot. The zealots were people who believed in by any means possible overthrowing the Roman government. I mean, you could not have found two people more, can you imagine the dinner conversations? This would have been like inviting your college age niece who still wears her Bernie Sanders for president t-shirt all the time and your uncle who always wears his Make America Great Again baseball cap to Thanksgiving dinner and deliberately seating them next to each other just to see what sparks would fly. This is that times a thousand.

I love this old engraving of Jesus calling disciples. He's going, you over on the left, follow me, you on the right, follow me, and they're both going, what, with him? And this is what happened, but you understand, this was not a mistake Jesus made because he didn't know his culture. This is Jesus deliberately going, from the start, I want my movement to be like this because no other community has ever been like this. And this is something America's thirsting for right now. We're all becoming aware of just how divided we are by class and race and demographics, and we're thirsting for this.

Okay, if that kind of community is what Jesus did, what he called us to, what he designed the Christian church to be like, how come this is so rare today? Even in churches. Why don't we really have this kind of vibrant community? Well, there's two ways that we misunderstand community. First, in our culture, we mistake connectivity for community, right? We mistake like internet connectivity, email, texting, social media for community. I just heard last night that there are now 2.4 billion people connected to Facebook. Almost two and a half billion. So we're more connected than ever, yet all the studies show we are lonelier than ever.

So just last weekend, this article was in the paper. Look at this. Headline, "The lonely burden of today's teenage girls" subtitle amid our vast experiment with social media, many American girls are becoming more anxious, solitary, and risk-averse. This was a national study done by UCLA. Teenage girls reported the highest levels of loneliness on record ever. Article says, "Today's teen girls are more connected via social media, yet also more solitary, less likely to date, less likely to go out to shop, less likely to see friends in person, less likely to go out to the movies than any previous generations of teens on record." Because we mistake connectivity for community.

So what's kind of the cure for this? There's a really interesting book that came out recently called "The Reclaiming Conversation, the Power of Talk in a Digital Age," written by Sherry Turkle. And in this book, she says, "Face-to-face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. That's where we develop the capacity for empathy. It's where we experience the joy of being heard and understood." We mistake this connectivity for that kind of real face-to-face community. And then second, we mistake chemistry for community. And what I mean by chemistry is that connection you feel.

When you meet somebody who is like you, and you meet somebody who likes the same stuff that you like, you know what I'm talking about? That spark. C.S. Lewis, I think, said that the essence of all friendship is the phrase, "You too?" Right? When you experience it, there's chemistry. For example, from my own life, Dan Kimball is one of the pastors at Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz. And I feel like Dan and I have a ton of chemistry because we like the same stuff. And we're about the same age. One time, Dan and I were talking, and for some reason, I don't even know why I dared admit this to him, but maybe I sensed a kindred spirit, and I said, "You know what? I love old 1960s era comic books. Like, not to collect, but actually just to buy old ones to read. I really like that." And Dan goes, "Me too."

And I said, "Well, yeah." And I'm starting to nerd out, kind of putting out feelers here. And I go, "You know, my favorite artist was Jack Kirby." And he goes, "Me too!" I said, "Now, I also, another artist I really loved was Neil Adams." He goes, "That's my second favorite artist too!" I said, "You know, before I was a pastor, I was a rock DJ in the '80s." He said, "I was a rock drummer in the '80s!" I said, "One of my favorite bands, in fact, I met him in person, was the Stray Cats." He goes, "Stray Cats are my favorite band!" And it went on, and not only are we both pastors, we're both pastors in Santa Cruz, one of the weirdest places on earth to be a pastor. And we're almost the same age, so a ton of natural, kind of pop culture chemistry, right?

But I wouldn't call him a part of my community. Because Dan and I have never really done life together, right? In fact, it's kind of a running gag, honestly. We keep saying, "Hey, let's hang out more!" 'Cause we have so much in common, and it seems like something always pops up, and we never do, and about a year ago, Dan says, "You know, since you apparently won't hang out with me, I'm gonna make a paper René, and cut him out, and I'm just gonna take him with me wherever I go, and now he texts me pictures of his paper René hanging out with him." You wanna see some of these? These are just the ones I've gotten like in the last three months. Here's paper René with Dan on vacation with Dan.

At staff meetings with Dan, when Dan speaks at other churches. Last week, Dan went to see the Rolling Stones in San Jose, and paper René was with him at the concert, having fun, you know? So Dan and I have a ton of chemistry, right? I love Dan. We have so much in common. He's so funny, but we don't really live in community. On the other hand, I think of people here at Twin Lakes. I could give you dozens of examples, but like Paul and Nelda Barton, many of you know them. An older couple here at Twin Lakes. Paul was on staff here for 50 years. I'm almost positive that neither Paul nor Nelda know who Jack Kirby is, or listen to the Stray Cats, or whatever, be caught dead at a Rolling Stones concert, but I would literally do anything for them that they asked me to, anything. And I truly believe they would do the same thing for me.

Why? We have lived in community at this church for over a quarter of a century now. And we've walked through some real tragedies together. Now, nothing is wrong with chemistry. I hope you have friends with whom you have chemistry. What I'm saying is it's easy to mistake chemistry for true community, and to leave all your relationships just at that level, right? And I'm also saying it is actually possible to have deep communion with people with whom you don't really have a lot of pop culture chemistry with. It's kind of like this Venn diagram. In church, you have people from different groups that might not have a ton of, in common, at different ages, different cultures, but there is overlap in Jesus.

And this is important because, you know, Christian community is not the same as any other kind of community, is it? It isn't. We don't get together here because it's nice to be with other people who think exactly the same way we do, can sort of reaffirm your own prejudices or whatever. That's not it at all. As Jesus showed by his choice of disciples from the very beginning, this was meant to be a group of extremely diverse people who find common ground in the one thing. I can't think of anything else that can truly transcend culture like the love of God for us in Christ can transcend every culture. And this isn't just a dream, I see it every weekend here.

I see people who I happen to know are Democrats, are Republicans, are Independents, who are citizens, who are not citizens, old, young, rich, poor, homeless, CEOs, Spanish speakers, English speakers, Tagalog speakers, German speakers, but we overlap on Jesus. I look out, I see Jose Santian from Mexico. Adrian's parents were Korean and Colombian. I see Emma Aniong, Emma's from Uganda. I see Leonard Dewick, Leonard's from Canada. And you know, Ugandans and Canadians just do not get along, just kidding about that, but they all overlap on Jesus. You know, we have a home fellowship here that meets regularly of Filipino believers, and we have a home group of Jewish believers, opposite sides of the world, different cultures, different languages, but they overlap on Jesus.

Now, you may say, well, what do you mean overlap on Jesus? It means that despite all the other things that we may not have in common, what we believe to our core is that the whole Bible is this grand story of how God longs to touch us, longs to be in relationship with us, but that connection got broken by sin. And so God didn't wait for us. God actually initiated and came down to us in person to reconnect in Christ. And in some way that we may never fully understand, Christ paid for the sin debt that caused that separation on the cross in order to restore our relationship with God by his grace alone.

But God doesn't force us into a relationship because that's not how relationships work, ever. He gives us the choice to enter in. And when we do, we find relationship with God, and we find all our other relationships changing, and we look at somebody who is from a totally different culture, and we say, you know, I really love Jesus, and they go, me too. And there's community and there's chemistry even on that level, and it can be beautiful. Now, if this is also beautiful, then why do we still fear community? Why do we resist it? In fact, I'll get very personal, why do I? I gotta be honest with you, I am not a natural community guy. I am an extrovert, but I also don't like getting too close to people. I'd rather be around a group of 1,000 people than be in a group of 12 people.

Small groups kinda freak me out just a little bit, and I know I'm not alone here. I just saw a brand new survey yesterday of American Christians, and they asked them, do you think that community relationships in the church are important to your spiritual growth? Only 19% agreed. 81% are like, no, no, don't wanna go there, why? Why do we fear it if God created us to be in community? Well, three reasons I can think of in my own life. First, that own American individualism, right? And really, the deal breaker here is commitment. If I like commit to a small group every week, what if some better opera comes along on some Tuesday, right?

But here's the thing, the Bible talks many, many times about how there are two aspects of a healthy spiritual life that require commitment from you. If you really wanna turbocharge your spiritual growth, and that's the spiritual growth rather, and that's the solitary life and community life. And watch this, if you look at the rhythms of the life of Jesus, he kinda zigzags between these two all through the gospels. He's got this balance in the mornings, he'll go find a quiet place, then he comes back to be with his guys in the afternoon. But I think if you looked at our lives, they'd look more like this. We are afraid of real quiet, we never really unplug. But we're also afraid of real intimate community, we're so individualistic, we're afraid to go for the deep dive into either one.

Second reason, idealism. And what I mean by idealism is we think, when I get into a church small group, they're all gonna be these beautiful people, they're always super loving, no body odor, they'll see everything my enlightened way. And when the people in my church or my small group turn out to be inconsistent and smelly and moody and say things that I'm offended by, we get disillusioned and we leave. And listen, this unattainable idealism about what church is supposed to be like is one of the biggest reasons that people bail on church and on church small groups especially. But it's like never getting married because you're waiting for the perfect flawless match made in heaven, waiting for the unicorn, and always finding fault with everybody who's just human.

Don't trade the beautiful real for some unattainable ideal. Don't trade the beautiful real for some unattainable ideal. And then the third reason is intimidation. Really being in real authentic community can be intimidating and I understand that it is for some of you because you've been deeply hurt by a past abusive church experience and I'm so sorry that you went through that, that's terrible. But for many of us, we don't have that in our background, I don't, and it's still scary to imagine being in a group where you risk being honest, laying open your real self. What if I'm so comfortable in my group and grow to love these people and then I kind of admit, you know, this one thing that the Bible teaches, I've got problems with that.

Or I admit, you know, this one thing I know Christians shouldn't be doing, I kind of struggle with that. Or I admit, you know, this person, I'm not supposed to have anger, but I'm super angry at this person and I admit something that's like unspiritual or unbiblical, then everybody's gonna reject me, that kind of scares me, but here's the thing, we all need to have that place of total honesty that we can go to. That's how we grow. A lot of the reasons I think people don't grow in churches is because we're willing to share our goodness but not our badness, so to speak. But if you really go, 'cause everybody struggles, everybody goes through times of faith where they're just like so happy and they feel such harmony with God and they just are praising God for his blessings and times where they're like, I don't know if a loving, all-powerful God ever exists, my life stinks, everybody goes through those extremes, everybody.

And what happens when you're in a group is it kind of balances out. Some people are at a strong point in their faith, some people are struggling, and when you're honest, that's how you grow. And that leads right to the final point, why we need community and how we can get it. First, community grows me. In fact, there's two essentials to spiritual growth that can happen only in community, you can't get these anywhere else, than a small, intimate community group like a small group or a friendship group, you can't get these just coming to church services, and that's vulnerability and accountability. When you have a place where you can be really vulnerable and also get help, get accountability, amazing things happen.

You know what? This is why 12-step recovery groups are probably the place where the greatest life transformation happens, because people can be totally honest, but they can also receive honest help. And when that takes place over time, in an authentic place of community, truly sacred things happen. Look at these verses from Ephesians 2. This is so beautiful. Paul says, "Consequently, because of what Jesus did on the cross, you're no longer foreigners and strangers." He's talking to Jews and Greeks, he's like, "You people had nothing in common." But now guess, look at the overlap, look at what's happening. "Now you're fellow citizens with God's people and you're members of his household." Household was another word for family. He's saying the church was never meant to just be one big content delivery system. It's a family.

Now watch this. You're part of a family built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. We base what we do here on Jesus and the teachings of the apostles and prophets, that's the New Testament and the Old Testament, and watch what happens to us. "In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord, and in him you too are being built together to become," he uses the word become twice, "a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit." Paul is saying, look up here if you've gotten distracted, Paul's saying that when you have real honest community, first it's like, wow, it's like a family, but then over time, you become something even more profoundly beautiful.

What happens in that small group becomes something so beautiful. The only equivalent experience that we have for it is it's like a temple. It's like a place where God dwells. Earlier this year, Jim Jocelyn and I, one of the pastors here, and I called up a family in this church that had just gone through a terrible tragedy, and I said, how are you? And they said, well, we honestly, we don't know where we'd be without the support of our small group. They've been great. And Jim and I said, that's wonderful. Can we put you on the meal train here? Oh, thanks so much for thinking of us, but we got more than enough meals from our friends in our small group.

Well, can we come over and visit? We love it. You guys are always welcome, but we just want you to know we have been so embraced by the people in our small group. They came over as soon as they heard about it. They sat with us. They didn't even talk, just put their arms around us, prayed for us, wept with us. They'd been there for us. It's been beautiful. And the conversation went on this way, and when I put down the phone, I realized something sacred is happening. There's something holy, and here's the thing that as a pastor struck me, I didn't have to organize it. I had nothing to do with it.

In fact, the longer I'm a pastor, the more I realize I don't have to kind of scheme your spiritual growth. All I have to do is preach the word of the apostles and prophets and focus on Jesus Christ, as Paul says here, and then provide environments where community can happen, and then God's Holy Spirit of the long haul just does the rest. Community grows me, and community grows the kingdom, the kingdom of God. I'm gonna skip John 17 there in your notes. I'm gonna get to it, I promise, in one of the daily video devotions that are starting up again, by the way, this week. But look at the last verse in your notes.

This is how the Bible describes the early church in Acts 2. Every day they continued to meet together at the temple courts, and they broke bread in their homes. They had both large group and small group experiences every week in their lives. Do you? And they ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people, and watch this, and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. I don't think that's unrelated. When they lived in true community, they couldn't keep the people away, and it can happen again, because people are starving for community.

So let's do it, let's turbo charge it at Twin Lakes Church this fall. How are we gonna do that? Here's a big first step we can all take. Today, please consider, prayerfully consider, signing up for a small group. These are groups of six to 12 people, usually, that meet in homes every week. They're gonna start in a couple of weeks as we get into the David series. We're gonna be doing this Chasing David series together on the life of David, which is so interesting. I encourage you to get a book, they're available outside. What happens is you read a chapter a week, that chapter syncs precisely with the sermon for that week, and then in the back of the book, there's small group questions that tie into those, and the reason that we do it this way is so that nobody's gonna worry about looking like an idiot in their small group if they don't really know the Bible very well.

You see, that's one of the things, one of the most common refrains I hear from people to go, I don't wanna be in a small group, why, I'm gonna be embarrassed, 'cause I'm not gonna know the answer to the questions, I don't know the Bible. You won't be surprised by the questions, they're all in the book. You won't be surprised by content, it's all in the book, and you're all gonna be hearing it in sermons. This is why we do it so everybody's on equal footing. And all the proceeds from the book go right to the church, by the way, not a dime goes to me. So grab the book, sign up to be in a small group, they're at the tables, outside, on the patio.

Now, these groups only last eight weeks, and I know that eight weeks won't magically create deep community here, but it all starts somewhere. So let's take the first step together. Now, if you're thinking, can I start a new group, can I do this with my family, with my neighbors? Of course, in fact, we encourage it. Just talk to Jim or Jennifer outside today, or go to TLC.org/smallgroups, or fill this out, that's in your bulletin, to register. That way, you're gonna get all the freebies that we send out to small group leaders to help them.

The bottom line is this, real community is counter-cultural, it is messy, it's not easy, it's inconvenient, it's intimidating, but it is essential to spiritual formation. There are ways you grow in community that you would never otherwise grow. So let's do it together. Would you pray with me? Let's bow our heads together. When our heads bowed, the first step to being a part of God's community is to receive Jesus' offer when he comes along. He says, "Hey, follow me." So if you haven't yet, I invite you to tell him in your heart, "Lord, I wanna follow you through life. I don't fully understand it, I got tons of questions, but I know that's okay, 'cause you'll help me grow."

Now, others here have already made that commitment, but like me, this summer, you're realizing you have not actually really been in community, and that's okay too. God will help you grow in that too, because that's his will for your life. So pray with me, "Lord, bless us this fall as we seek to get into community, help me to commit to being part of true community somehow in my life, and Lord, especially bless everybody here who feels that loneliness that is a big pathology in our culture." I pray, God, that they would find the community they seek here, that they would know how much they're loved by you, and that they would experience the truth of this verse, God sets the lonely in families. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.