Welcome to the Bethel Church Sermon of the Week.

We hope you enjoy this message by Pastor Bill Johnson.

For more information about this podcast and other resources, visit bethel.com.

All right, I want you to open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 16.

Last week I had the chance to talk to you and talked about prayer and some things that are pretty critical for us.

And I postponed something that I'm going to begin to try to crack open today.

For those of you that did our study, our small group study, on my book Way of Life,

you will have touched upon this subject in that book.

I think one of the most important books of this era is a book by a dear friend Edso Vosso called

Ecclesia E K-K-K-L-E-S-I-A, Ecclesia.

And it's a profound insight in scripture and a profound strategy for bringing transformation to this world.

In some ways, I feel like it's the most important book of this era, of this particular period

of time.

And he's stirred up some stuff.

We have, I think most of us have grown up in an environment where we knew that the church was not

a building. We knew that church was much bigger and different than that. We knew, I grew up,

my dad saying all the time, the church isn't building, it's not a denomination, it's none of that.

It is actually the people of God that have gathered together in his name.

But there are some very specific things that if we have them in mind as we do life, it changes everything.

For example, the Great Commission, go into all the world, preach the gospel. Did you know that the

active verb in that verse is not go? It's actually to disciple.

The word actually means as you go.

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