Hey South, and this fall has already been a really exciting season for our church. As we continue to step into what's next, we want to keep creating simple ways for all of us to grow in our faith. That's why we're launching a new podcast called The Cutting Room Floor. Each week, one of our teachers is going to sit down with a host and just unpack some of what got left behind, literally on the cutting room floor from the weekend.

Might be a verse we didn't have time to cover, a story we didn't have time to share, or a thought we just wanted to develop further.

So whether you're driving to work, leading a group, or just looking to take another step, we hope this gives you a simple way to keep growing.

You don't need to subscribe to anything new.

The cutting room floor will show up in the same Southam podcast feed you already follow, or you can just head over to

southend dot church forward slash podcasts, and we can't wait to share it with you on September

the 24th. See you then. In 2010, we had a female skunk burrow under our house and deliver six baby skunks.

And every evening, they would bless us by releasing their scent outside of the house.

And it would make its way into the house.

And it would literally wake us up.

And we couldn't open the windows.

We couldn't open the doors because the smell outside.

It was worse than the smell inside. Trapped, physically trapped in our house. And so one morning, during that chaos,

I had to catch a flight to Atlanta. And we get off the ground and I unzip my backpack, which was at my

feet. And this smell of skunk waffs up and hits me in the face. It was like I had a baby skunk in my backpack. And I'm seated next to this very well-dressed, dignified businesswoman. I'll never forget it. She said, we're 30,000 feet in the air. And I think I smell a skunk. And I was like, and she turned and looked at me, and I just pointed at the guy next,

and it was like Pepe Lapeue over here.

It's him.

Well, today, the elephant in the room or the skunk in the backpack that we need to confront

is the pervasive unhealth and dysfunction that we're now seeing in the American church. So if you have your

Bible with you, please open it to Matthew chapter 23. If you picked up a blue Bible on your way in,

you'll see the page numbers on the screen behind me that you can follow along with. But I want to

set it up this way. The book of Matthew is a unique book in the Bible because it's structured

...