I want to invite you to turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 9, and I hope you brought your Bibles with you this morning. We'll be looking at a handful of, of passages of, of scripture. and we'll begin in Acts chapter 9 as we talk about gospel community. having grown up in a, Christian home, I'm grateful grateful to God, for many things.
with regard to my parents, but one of the greatest. Of the things on that list of things I'm grateful for with regard to my parents. is their example of commitment to the local church. My dad was in the Marines for 20 years and so we lived as I was growing up in 6 different states and in 10 different houses.
and yeah whenever we moved from one place to another, the first thing my parents would do was look for, a local church, and once they found the church, they would be all in like right away. I remember moving, our family moving to Albany, Georgia, where my dad got stationed when I was 9 years of age and shortly thereafter. our family attended a church startup, called Circle Baptist Church. for the very first time, and it was a small church that met in, if my memory serves me correct, an auto workers union building, and the service for that morning, our first Sunday there began with the pastor coming to the pulpit and saying, our piano player is sick this morning and we don't have anyone to play the piano.
Is there anyone here who can play the piano for us? Well my mom raised her hand and long story short, she played the piano for the congregation as they sang that morning on our very first Sunday at this church and after that service my parents as we got in the car said to us kids, this is our new church home. And it was and they were all in and that church, as with the other churches became the hub of our life as a family every church that my parents were a part of whether that church was in Texas or Florida or South Carolina or Georgia or Indiana, they embraced that church as family. And I have to tell you that none of those churches were perfect, by any stretch of the imagination....
