Grace and peace to you this week. We gathered online this past Sunday, and wherever you watched from, your kitchen table, your car, or a hospital chair somewhere across the country, you were part of this house. One church, two campuses, one family. I mean that every time I say it.
I want to say something I don’t say often enough. I am grateful for you.
Some of you almost didn’t log on Sunday, because the message was about family and you weren’t sure your heart could take it. You showed up anyway. That took something. And I know what some of you are carrying into this week. A diagnosis you haven’t told anybody about. A child who isn’t speaking to you. A marriage quieter than it used to be. A name you haven’t been able to say out loud. You are not carrying it alone, and you are not carrying it unnoticed. I pray for this house by name, and that includes you.
This past Sunday we went to Week 2 of WHO’S IN YOUR BOAT, and this one had people sitting very still.
The Person Hurting You Might Share Your Name.
The name lights up your phone and your stomach drops before you answer. Not a stranger. Somebody who was at your baptism, your graduation, your worst year. Behavior you’d end a friendship over, you excuse at the dinner table.
Somewhere in childhood a real command quietly got rewritten. Honor your father and mother became obey your father and mother. Forever. No limits. Those are two different words, and the gap between them is your whole life.
Then look at Jacob. Laban worked him twenty years and changed his wages ten times. His brother Esau planned to kill him. His deepest wounds all shared his last name.
“Then the Lord said to Jacob, Return to the land of your father and grandfather and to your relatives there, and I will be with you.” (Genesis 31:3, NLT)
God told him to go. The distance was not rebellion. It was the instruction. And Jacob doesn’t get free and whole under Laban’s thumb. He gets there after he leaves.
Write this down: Honor was never a synonym for access.
Your one job this week is simple and hard. Name one family relationship where honor has meant unlimited access, and decide one clear limit before the next time you talk. Not “I’ll try to be stronger.” Something specific. The call ends at twenty minutes. I don’t loan the money this time. Then hold it without a speech and without an apology.
Watch the Replay
Missed Sunday, or want to hear it again? Watch the full message here:
👈 Watch “The Person Hurting You Might Share Your Name” on YouTube
Go deeper: Unlocking The Boat
A sermon gives you forty minutes. This gives you the week.
Unlocking The Boat is the study guide for this series. It’s built for the part nobody sees, the Tuesday night when the name comes back up and you have to decide all over again what you’re going to hold. Work through the reflection questions the message didn’t have time for, sit with the scripture behind each week, and write down the one limit you’re actually deciding. Use it alone with coffee. Use it with your spouse. Bring it to your small group and go around the room.
👈 Unlocking The Boat
This Sunday: You Reap Whoever You Keep
Week 2 was the family you were born into. Week 3 is the ones you invited in.
You keep praying for a different harvest while protecting the people planting the weeds. It’s 11:47 on a Tuesday night, their name lights up your screen, and you’ve rehearsed the same conversation in the shower for three years. Nothing has changed except your blood pressure. You call it loyalty. Your body calls it something else.
Paul says you will always harvest what you plant. Read it again. He doesn’t say you harvest what you intended. He says you harvest what was planted, and the people closest to you are planting every single day, whether you notice the crop or not.
“Don’t be misled: You cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant.” (Galatians 6:7, NLT)
Some storms don’t leave until certain people do. Sunday we name the boat and decide who still has planting rights.
If somebody in your life has been loyal to a relationship that keeps producing thorns, bring them.
Sunday, August 2 · 10:30 AM CT
In person: Mars Hill Anywhere, McCook, IL
Online: YouTube
Plan your visit: marshillchicago.org
Thank you for holding this house up
I don’t say this enough. Thank you.
Being a hybrid church means we’re doing two things at once. We gather in person in McCook, and we open the doors online to people who may never walk through a physical building but still need a place to belong. Neither campus is the overflow of the other. Both are real, staffed, streamed, prayed over, and followed up on.
That takes prayer, and it takes provision. Your continued prayers cover this ministry. Your continued giving keeps both campuses running so nobody gets left on the shore.
If Mars Hill has carried something for you, would you help us keep carrying it for the next person who dreads the phone call and answers it anyway?
👈 Give here · or text MHGIVE to 33777
Here’s where I’ll leave you this week. There’s a boat with your name on it, and you keep leaving the shore to go bail water out of somebody else’s flood, just because you share a name with them.
You can love them from the boat. You can pray for them from the boat. You just don’t have to drown with them to prove you’re family.
Get in. And this time, decide who gets a seat.
Pastor Clarence E. Stowers, Jr.
P.S. Before you see them or talk to them again this week, decide the one limit out loud to God, and hold it when they push. You’ll set it Sunday. They’ll test it by Wednesday. Holding it is where the freedom lives.
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