Hello everyone. We are so glad that you're with us. Today on Pastor Rick's Daily Hope,

Rick brings an inspiring new series called What Does It Really Mean to Follow Jesus to a close?

Now in this powerful teaching, Rick dives into God's Word to explore how we grow spiritually, represent Christ to the world,

and find our place in God's family through the church. It's a fresh look at discipleship,

purpose, and the life-changing power of spiritual community. And now, here's the final part of a

message called, We are members of God's family.

Now, we believe in the temple courts, but we really believe in the house to house, because the cells are the

foundation of the body. Your body is not made up of one giant cell.

Your body is made up of thousands, even millions, of little cells.

And in the body of Christ, our body, the body of Christ called Saddleback,

is made up of 4,000 little cells that meet during the week in homes that meet on that basis

where we help and we serve and we care for each other. Now what I want to do in the last

couple minutes this morning is I want us to look at what makes a healthy small group.

Because about 95% of you are in a small group and there are seven marks

of a healthy group and they're covered here in this passage in Acts chapter 2 and let me set

this up I recently brought about an autobiography by Sir Edmund Hillary to read. Everybody know who he is?

Sir Edmund Hillary was the first guy to scale Mount Everest. And it's a fascinating book.

And actually, I bought it on eBay and it was autographed by him. So it was kind of cool. If you want it, nah, nah, nah. In this book,

it's called High Adventure, and it's a terrific story of how he climbed Mount Everest. And Sir

Edmund Hillary says, it would be foolish to attempt to climb Mount Everest by yourself. You can't do it without a small group.

He said, you just can't do it by yourself.

It would be suicidal to try to attempt to hit the peak by yourself.

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