There's an enormous difference in saying I'd like church to be convenient. I don't think that's evil.

But I don't ever want you to imagine that we think or want you to think

that God is a convenience in your life because God will never accept that role.

He is the Creator and the sustainer of all things.

We are his creation. The breath that we just exhaled was a gift from him.

Hey guys, this is Alan Jackson Ministries.

You can get the outlines for this episode at Alan Jackson.

dot com slash podcast.

If these messages help build you up or encourage you to be a more fully devoted

Christ follower, leave us one of those five-star ratings. Hopefully that will help others

find out about them as well. Now it's on to Pastor Allen. Be blessed.

Next week kicks off New Year series and there will have guests and visitors and a lot of people reconnecting with church.

I wanted to take this weekend and talk to you just a little bit about Jesus and the church.

You know, why we're here what we do and I

don't mean simply this congregation but church with a capital C that the heart of the

whole initiative is Jesus. Church was his idea we'll see that in a moment.

It wasn't something we dreamt up and then put Jesus' name on the front of.

Church was Jesus idea, but the reason we're together and the reason we're learning to life together is to learn how to cooperate with Jesus more fully

He's the most remarkable person you'll ever know

We gather because we want to learn to honor him, to yield to him, to cooperate with him, to welcome him into our lives, to let his values increasingly become our values,

to let the things that he's longing for become the things that we long for.

The goal of church isn't to get to God to do our bidding, it's that we would increasingly

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