Room to Grow

Call to Worship

To all who are weary and in need of rest

To all who are mourning and longing for comfort

To all who fail and desire strength

To all who sin and need a Savior

We at Moraga Valley open wide our arms

With a welcome from Jesus Christ.

He is the ally to the guilty and failing

He is the comfort to those who are mourning

He is the joy of our hearts

And He is the friend of sinners

So Come, worship Him with us.

Scripture Reading

Psalm 18:19 NIV

He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.

Ashley Chan, Scripture Reader

Pray After Scripture Reading

Introduction of Jaimie and Daniel Bigelow

Welcoming Daniel and Jaimie Bigelow. Daniel as our Next Generation Minister. It’s our hope to serve them as they faithfully serve us. Three questions:

What’s your biggest excitement about Moraga Valley?

Why do you love students?

How can we pray for you?

Let’s pray for you both right now as you step into this next season with us. Pray.

Introduction of Sermon

Good morning! So glad that you’ve joined us this morning. For those of you who may not know, my name is Brandon Morrow, and I get to sere as the Lead Pastor, and one of the pastors who preaches regularly. So glad that you joined us this morning. Our Mission and Vision here at Moraga Valley is that we see a vibrant and diverse community that joyfully surrenders all of life to making disciples for the glory of Jesus — and I am so glad that you joined us for that this morning!

This morning I want to spend our time in a beautiful verse that I hope will give us a window into what we’re asking God to do in the next year. If you don’t have your Bible open already, please open up with me to Psalm 18. I’m going to be drawing our attention to verse 19 for the majority of our time together this morning.

I’ve decided to approach this year in regards to a theme. It’s a subject or a recurring thought that feels like a word that so defines where I feel like the Lord is taking us over this next year.

Let me read Psalm 18:19 and then I’ll describe our theme word for the year.

Psalm 18:19 NIV

He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.

The theme for 2024-2025 ministry year is: spaciousness.

This is the place that David has been brought to as a direct result of the God who loves Him and rescued Him.

Spaciousness is the freedom that comes from God’s rescue. When you have been rescued, you are no longer confined by fear or sin or shame — and now we can fully experience God’s delight in you, and you can then extend that delight to others.

Spaciousness is the gospel’s invitation to live joyful, playful lives… it is the invitation for the church to trust God.

Spaciousness reminds us that there’s room to grow for Moraga Valley, that we are not quite the church that God wants us to be, but it’s also the reminder that nothing is standing in the way of becoming that.

I’m excited to dive a little deeper in Psalm 18 this morning, and see how God could use this beautiful little scripture.

Psalm 18 is considered a royal Psalm, it’s a song of military victory, and we know this because we see this exact same Psalm, or announcement of worship, in 2 Samuel 22 — it’s David’s announcement of victory.

Psalm 18 has a unique flow:

Psalm 18 Begins with Worship, giving thanks to God, but quickly introduces a Need. (NEED)

David needs rescue from Saul, and those who are out to get Him.

But by the fourth verse, David moves to an announcement of how God rescued him. (RESCUE)

And after verse 19, it’s 30 straight verses of why God is worthy of worship. (WORSHIP)

Doesn’t this kind of mirror our own spiritual journeys? Experiencing God’s rescue will always lead to praise and worship from our hearts.

Here’s what I’m assuming this morning:

Moraga Valley will always live in response to what God has done.

And what God has done is that He has rescued the world from their greatest need, the reality of sin, through Jesus Christ — and our lives are then lived in response to what Jesus has done.

For David, his experience, in verse 19, is being brought into what he calls “a spacious place,” — spaciousness is the location of the redeemed life.

Spaciousness here is set against what was previously confining to David, namely the threat of his enemies. In verses 4 and 5, David says, Psalm 18:4-5

Psalm 18:4–5 NIV

The cords of death entangled me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me; the snares of death confronted me.

But God’s deliverance is anything but confining… it is no longer an entangling, overwhelming, suffocating confrontation… David says rescue is a “spacious place.”

This is is what we experience in Christ. Sin is defined as chains, a death penalty, it’s bondage, it’s slavery, it’s darkness, it’s a lie, a treacherous place to live, — but in Christ we have freedom, we have truth, we experience the light. We have been unchained.

Rescue is a circumstance defining event. Nothing pales in comparison to what you’ve received in your freedom.

This isn’t a new concept either, this has been what the scripture has been pointing us to in terms of what Jesus would do. Take for example, what the prophet Isaiah said Jesus would do in Isaiah 61:1

Isaiah 61:1 (NIV)

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,

because the Lord has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,

Spaciousness is when you’ve learned that you now have everything when you had nothing before. Spaciousness is seeing what is broken repaired by God. Spaciousness is when we step into the light after living in darkness for far too long.

Anybody who has been crippled by anxiety, depression, addiction, broken relationships — can attest to the kind of freedom you experience when you no longer live under the thumb of that oppression.

Christians, and people in general, have the hardest time accepting this.

We have one of two responses:

(Two Responses to God’s Rescue)

Why me?

or

Not me.

Sin thrives in falsehood, so sin will do everything in its power to keep itself away from the truth. But David in verse 19 gives the response that answers the two objections to God’s rescue, “Why Me? and “Not me.”

Here’s what David says, “He rescued me because He delighted in me.”

Why me? Because He delights in me.

Why you? Because He delights in you.

Not me. The Lord’s response is, “I delight in you.”

One of my favorite ways to remember this comes from the book The Shack, where the Character that plays God the Father says to the main character, “I am especially fond of you.”

Fondness is not a category that we have for God’s affection for us. Delight is not a word that we have in our back pocket when we try to remember how the Lord feels about us.

Think about it…

Think about how we talk about God and His feeling for us.

We say something dumb or mildly sacrilegious and we go, “Ooops! Don’t strike me down!”

Or, we slip up in our speech, and we point up towards the sky and we go, “Sorry Big Guy!”

We’ve relegated God to some “man upstairs,” who is too distant, too serious, too proper for people like us. We think of delight as a term for children’s stories.

Here’s what Pastor Dane Ortlund has to say about this:

“Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it. We are the cool and calculating ones, not he. He is open-armed. We stiff-arm. Our naturally decaffeinated views of God’s heart might feel right because we’re being stern with ourselves, not letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Such sternness feels appropriately morally serious. But this deflecting of God’s yearning heart does not reflect Scripture’s testimony about how God feels toward his own.”

How does God feel about us? What motivates Him to rescue us?

He delights in you.

God loves you.

And… much to our surprise…

He likes you.

He is especially fond of you.

For whatever reason, this hasn’t stuck in the church. We’ve been repeating these things for hundreds of years. We’ve probably heard a blessing like the Aaronic Blessing from Numbers 6:23-26

Numbers 6:23–26 NIV

“Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘This is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them: “ ‘ “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” ’

Jim Wilder, in his book, The Other Half of Church, says, “This blessing expresses a joy that can be paraphrased, “May you feel the joy of God’s face shining on you because He is happy to be with you!”

God delights when you live free, spacious, lives. His children living in freedom puts a big smile on His face.

I’ve always struggled with this idea. When somebody has said, “The Lord loves to smile on you,” I just get the heebie-geebies, I don’t know why, it just has always sounded weird to me.

That was until I started to learn about delight, until I started to understand the joy that God has in me.

Think of it like this… you’ve got a small kid, maybe an infant, and each time you walk into a room and you smile at them, what do they do? They smile back. It’s why baby smiles and giggles are the most powerful force known to man. This is all learned from them. Their developing brains are responding to our delight in them.

God is not some cosmic kill joy rolling His eyes at you in the sky. His expression to us is that He is so eager to be with us.

The greatest enemy to our delight, in entering the spaciousness that God has rescued us for, is our unbelief.

It doesn’t make what He’s done any less true, or any less believable… Grace feels foolish. It feels foolish because we have believed that we are a waste of what God could spend His time on.

Except… except that’s what He has planned to do for all eternity. God has always had the eternal plan to delight in you.

That could change your life.

As I said earlier, “Moraga Valley will always live in response to what God has done.”

It’s time for us to step into the spaciousness that God has given us through Jesus Christ.

Spaciousness should remind us that there’s plenty of room to grow, here.

Here’s what I want to see over the next 12 months at Moraga Valley:

I want us to make room for the Next Generation.

I want it to be propelled by the surrender of this generation.

After the first of the year, we will be stepping into a church-wide generosity initiative that will help us focus on the Next Generation. (CHURCH-WIDE GENEROSITY INITIATIVE)

We will be announcing large scale capital projects that will lead to the renovation of our worship center, and other key locations on our campus, like our Fireside and Fellowship Hall — and making our campus more family friendly. (UPDATED FACILITIES)

We will be announcing plans to help meet the mental health needs of our community… and students and their families in Moraga are largely under resourced due to a lack of available services. (COMMUNITY SERVICES)

We will be exploring new ways for Moraga Valley to be the non-ignorable presence of Jesus in our community through various forms of hospitality. Our community is hungry for relationship, how can we make watering holes for our community to gather and experience friendship with one another? (NEW MINISTRY)

We will be asking you to partner with us spiritually, financially, and relationally to make all of those happen.

This is all while we are doubling down on providing the best discipleship experiences for children, students, and their families.

We are excited to begin our new ministry year with the hiring of Daniel Bigelow, who will be leading our Middle School and High School efforts.

We have recently decided to pause our Thursday Night Live programming for Elementary students, because we want to provide exceptional experiences for kids on Sunday mornings. This very morning your kids have been welcomed into worship and learning with new songs, new lessons, and new activities for your kids. For all of those who are serving this morning and who will serve in the weeks to come, we say Thank You!

We’re asking you to consider how you’ll plan to serve, give, and pray for our Children’s and Student ministries over the next year.

We need adults who want to leave an impact through serving and volunteering.

We need the financial resources to reach families.

And we need you to pray for a move of God in our community for the Next Generation.

We’re also boldly stepping into some other new things for this year too that I want to tell you about.

We are relaunching our Men’s Ministry efforts with a new day and a new time because we want to reach more men in our community. More information will follow this Sunday!

We have multiple avenues for our Women to connect in community and in their spiritual growth through Mom’s Connect and Women of the Word. Make it a serious task to invite a woman in your life to show up on August 28 to our Women’s Kick Off event.

We are planning to reach our community through Alpha, a 10-week evangelism course designed for you to invite someone to. Alpha starts on Monday, September 16, but we want to invite you to a special Alpha Preview Evening for our church on Monday, August 26.

And we are equipping believers on how to have spiritual conversations through Discovery Bible Studies, led by Gordon Lewis. I’ve heard it for over the last 10 years that the number one barrier to people inviting others in their life to know Jesus is because they don’t know how. We want to teach and equip you on how to do that this year.

We are making room, a spacious place, for those who are not here with us - yet.

Because many in our community are still confined, and overwhelmed, and anxious and they have not heard of Jesus and His joy for them and their lives.

Here’s what I want to invite us to this morning as we step into this next season. I want our whole church to commit to praying with me for the next 21 Days.

PRAYER CHALLENGE

We want to invite you into our 21 Days of Prayer Text Challenge.

I want you to pull your phone out and do one of two things:

Scan the QR Code

Or text 21days to the number on the screen.

21days is all one word, no spaces, without the quotation marks.

And each day, for the next 21 Days, you’ll receive a scripture to read and a prayer prompt that will help guide your prayer time.

We don’t want you to just pray randomly, though. We want you to pray specifically. We’re asking that for the next 21 Days you’ll commit to praying for one person, who doesn’t know of the spacious places that God has for them.

At the end of those 21 Days we’re going to gather an hour before our Sunday Service, on Sunday, September 8, at 8:30 in the morning to pray together as a church.

September 8

8:30 AM - All Church Prayer

9:00 AM - You’re invited to attend Team Pre-Service Prayer

9:30 AM - Sunday Worship Service

Thank you for committing to praying with us, and thank you for walking with us in this next season. We love you and we believe our future is incredibly bright.