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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
John 10:10.
The thief
comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that you may have life
and have it abundantly.
Well, good morning
and welcome to what is a big weekend
in the life of our church.
Because at least for our church calendar,
it's the first weekend
of 2026, the weekend
where we unveil our annual theme.
You know, the rhythm here
is that every January we do a vision
sermon series kind of cast vision
for where we think we're
headed this year as a church,
what we think that God wants to do,
and introduce a theme that will really
be part of all of our teaching
for the calendar year.
And this year, the theme
I'm excited to tell you is More Life.
We take it actually from John 10:10
where Jesus said, I've come
so that they can have life and life
more abundantly.
What we're praying for
and what we believe God wants for us
as a church is for 2026
to be one of the best years in the history
of this church, a year where this place
is infused with more life.
But but not just this church.
We're praying that for your family,
for your marriage,
for your career, for your life, that
that you and I will be able to sit back
in December of this year, look over 2026
and say, wow, I have never been more alive
than I am right now, that my, my,
my life has never been fuller than it is
right now.
We believe that's what God wants for us.
That's what all of our teaching
is going to aim at in 2026.
What we're going to start this morning
by looking at John 10:10.
So if you're here and you have a Bible,
would you take it out and open it to John
chapter ten?
If not the verses I talk about
are going to be on the screen behind me,
but I have three points
I want to use to kind of set up the year
and to help us think about John 10:10,
three points.
Very simple.
I want to talk about a mission statement,
a marketing problem,
and a method for moving forward.
A mission statement, a marketing problem,
and a method for moving forward.
Well, let's start with the first one.
A mission statement.
Now, a mission statement
for any company or
organization is kind of a
a guiding principle.
It makes clear what that company
or organization is all about, what their
why is, and not just why they do things,
but but how they do them.
A great mission statement lets everyone
in the organization or company
know what to say yes to
and what to say no to.
It helps customers to understand
what to expect from that organization.
From that business.
A great mission statement.
Make sure that everyone from the CEO
all the way down to the lowest
rung of the ladder,
know why they came into work that day.
They know what they're participating
in, and I happen to believe
that the best mission
statements are simple.
They're concise.
They're they're a sentence.
In fact, if you're a business owner
or entrepreneur or entrepreneur here
and your mission statement is a paragraph
long, come see me afterwards
for some free consulting. It's too long.
We can't remember it.
In fact,
some of the best companies that you do
business with, some of the best companies
of our generation, have the most simple
and clear mission statements
like, for example, Amazon.
Amazon's mission
statement is to be Earth's most customer
centric organization,
which is why you can go on their website
right now and order something
that will probably end up
on your doorstep tonight,
because they go in to work
every day saying,
how can we make this company
better for the customers?
Nike exists to innovate
and inspire for athletes.
You know, chick fil A exists to steward
what it has for the glory of God.
Apple creates innovative products.
Tesla, is moving the world
towards sustainable energy.
My my point is this great companies
understand this.
When you know what you're about,
you know how to move forward.
You know what to do.
So here's my question for you.
If Jesus had a mission
statement, what would it be?
If we distill Jesus
down, is his why his how?
What?
What he would use to say yes
and what he would use to say no?
His guiding principle?
What would it be?
Now I know some of you
I know will be uncomfortable with that.
You'll say, well, we'll Zach,
Jesus is the son of God.
You can't try to sum him up
in one sentence
and I agree, I agree, I can't,
but he can.
And in fact, that's
what I think he's doing in John 1010.
He's telling us his mission statement.
Let me read it to you, by the way.
He gets it. It's only a sentence. Okay.
But let me read it to you
and see if you read it that way.
John 1010. Here's what he says.
I came that they may have life
and have it abundantly say, here's
why I'm here.
This is why I've come.
I've come to bring life
and to bring it abundantly.
Life and more life.
Jesus is telling us
he's in the production business
and what he produces is life.
More life.
He's telling us that he came
so that everywhere he went, everyone
he talked to, everything he got involved
in, was infused with more life.
He's telling us that if we get involved
with Jesus, if he gets involved
in our marriage,
our marriage will have more life,
our family, more life,
our career, more life.
Whatever area of our lives
Jesus touches, we get more life.
That's who he is.
That's what he is about, is that
when you think of when you think of Jesus.
Probably not.
And I'll tell you why I think that is
in a minute, but probably not.
But it is what he told us to think of.
It's what he told us he was about.
By the way, Jesus isn't being new here.
The Bible says really from front to back
that God is in the life business.
God is producing life and more life.
That's what he's about.
Even in places you're familiar with that
you might have missed it.
Like like for example,
even if you didn't grow up in church,
you don't know much about the Bible.
You know, Psalm 23.
Psalm 23 is read at funerals.
It says,
even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, you know this one.
But listen, it's
okay to read that at funerals.
That's okay.
But it's actually not about dying.
It's about living.
Well, let me read it to you.
And I want you to see if you hear
Jesus's mission statement in Psalm 23.
This is what it says.
The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil.
My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
Now listen,
there is some life after death.
Language there
all live in the house of the Lord forever.
But overwhelmingly
this psalm is about life.
It's about a God who
wants green grass and water and comfort
and security for us.
In fact,
this passage is about God telling us
he envisions his relationship with us
like shepherd and sheep.
And do you know how you know
a shepherd is good at his job?
The sheep are healthy.
They're living even more life.
Incidentally,
when Jesus in John 1010 says, I've come
so that they may have life and life
more abundantly.
John ten is famous for being the passage
in which Jesus calls himself
the good Shepherd.
Is it?
The Bible tells us
that God is in the life business.
He wants more for you.
He wants more life for you.
That's who he is.
That's what he does.
Which of course begs the question,
why is it that
we don't think of him that way?
Because if we're honest, most of us think
if we were to give control of our lives
to God, if we were to do things God's way,
we wouldn't get more.
We would get less,
we wouldn't get more life.
We'd get less. We wouldn't flourish.
We would wither.
It's why we don't do it right,
why we don't give control to God.
Because we don't believe
he's in the production business.
We believe
God is in the reduction business.
And the reason for that,
and this is my second point,
is we have a marketing problem.
You know, it's interesting.
Jesus gives his mission statement
in John ten.
I've come so that they may have life
and life more abundantly.
He also gives Satan's mission
statement in John ten.
Now, now I have to say,
if you didn't grow up in church,
you're not super familiar with the Bible.
You're not going to be, I know,
super comfortable with the idea of Satan,
but the Bible tells us
there's a spiritual entity in the world
who hates God and hates
everything that God loves.
He he wants to undo everything
that God says is good.
He is anti God
and he's working in our world.
And Jesus says, Satan has a mission
statement and Satan gets it.
It's only a sentence.
Here's what he says
John ten Jesus says the thief comes
only to steal and kill and destroy.
That's Satan's mission statement.
I steal, kill and destroy.
But how does he do it?
You can't come up to people like
knock on the door or nowadays, I guess.
Get a call
from your friend and mine. Spam risk.
And you
answer the phone and they go, hey,
we have an exciting opportunity for you.
And you say, okay, what is it?
And they say, we want to steal
and kill and destroy.
Does 2:00 work for you?
Like that won't work, right?
You can't come directly at people
to steal, kill, and destroy.
When we think about Satan,
we tend to think about him
like a cheap horror movie.
The lights go out or flicker.
There's a rumbling in the closet.
There's something under the bed.
But if that's how he came to us,
we would see him coming.
We would marshal our defenses.
We would batten down the hatches.
He can't come direct.
Well, let me ask you this question.
If Satan wanted to destroy the writer of
Psalm 23, how would he do it?
Well, I think the answer is pretty simple.
He would separate him from the shepherd.
I mean, after all, Psalm 23,
the writer says
it's it's the shepherd
who makes sure he has grass and and water.
It's the shepherd
who comforts him and keeps him safe,
who makes sure that he's taken care of.
So if you wanted to steal and kill
and destroy
the writer of Psalm 23,
it's pretty simple.
You have to separate him
from the shepherd.
Well, how would you do that?
Well,
the Bible tells us the way Satan does.
It is he lies about the shepherd.
This goes all the way back to Genesis
chapter three.
God makes Adam and Eve our first parents.
He he rest them in the Garden of Eden,
a Paradise that he's made for them.
The Bible says they're naked
and without shame, which means Eve
looks at Adam and she doesn't compare him
to her high school boyfriend.
That's not a joke.
Adam looks at Eve.
He doesn't compare her to the women he's
seen on the internet.
They're totally free of insecurity.
They have a great marriage.
They have the promise of children.
They have meaning. They have purpose.
They have everything they need.
They live more life.
But when Satan shows up, here's
what he says.
Genesis chapter three, verses
four and five.
It says this.
But the serpent said to the woman,
you will not surely die.
For God knows that when you eat of it,
your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil.
You see, when Satan shows up,
when he says, Eve, Eve, Eve,
God is not for you.
He's against you.
He doesn't want more for you.
He wants less for you. Eve.
This isn't Paradise. This is prison
and you know that.
Why don't you?
I do lives in my head
and it lives in my heart.
You see, when we think about Satan,
we can't think about him as a bizarro god.
We've seen too many comic book movies.
You know, in a comic book movie,
you have to have a hero who's very
powerful, and then you have a bad guy
who's just as powerful.
That's how you build the tension.
You watch the movie,
you don't really know who's going to win.
And so sometimes we think about Satan
because,
you know,
Marvel has taught us to think this way.
We think about him as the evil God.
But Satan is not like God.
He's not everywhere all at once.
He's not all knowing, okay?
He's a created being.
He's evil for sure, powerful for sure,
but he's not God.
Which means if you're Satan
and you want to separate people from God,
sheep from shepherd, and there are 8
billion people on the planet,
he cannot whisper in 8 billion years.
He doesn't have that kind of power.
So what he does
is he takes the lie into our culture
so that our culture, in a million subtle
ways, tells us
biblical sexuality is repression.
Biblical gender identity is patriarchal.
Biblical approaches
to family are old fashioned.
Biblical approaches to career
will keep you from ever getting ahead.
A biblical approach to money
will keep you from all the material
things that will make you happy.
You see, the lie he introduces in Genesis
three is the one our culture propagates.
God is not for you. He's against you.
He does not want more.
He wants less.
If you give him control,
you will not flourish.
You will wither.
Do you know that lie?
That's the thief
who comes to steal and kill and destroy
and knows the way he can do that is you'll
separate you from the God who made you,
from the God who loves you, from the God
who knows what's best for you
so that he can steal and kill and destroy.
If you don't believe me, consider this
we have never been freer than we are
in 2026.
We can do what we want.
We can be who we want.
We can live how we want.
But we have never been more depressed,
never been
more anxious, never been more insecure.
Because detached from the shepherd,
the sheep are vulnerable.
But here's some good news.
You know, Pastor Joe is
one of our pastors.
Here is my mentor.
He says a lot of things
that I think are brilliant,
and I write them down
when he's not looking.
And one of my favorites is
he says that Satan always overplays
his hand, and I think he's right.
And here's what I mean.
1985 Coke is losing
market share to Pepsi, and Coke
has been the number one soda forever.
And Pepsi is starting to rise.
They just signed an ad campaign
with Michael Jackson.
1985 Michael
Jackson is the biggest star on the planet.
They've even
they've even come up with this ingenious
marketing strategy,
which is basically saying,
the only reason you drink Coke
is because it's Coke.
It's not because it's best.
And so they do these blind taste tests
where Pepsi is in one unmarked bottle
and Coke's in another unmarked bottle,
and people are drinking them and going,
I like this one, and it's Pepsi.
It was brilliant.
It was genius.
And Coke was getting scared.
I mean, they were
they were losing and they knew it.
And they began to believe that perhaps,
maybe Pepsi was right.
They had an inferior product.
So they introduced a new product,
a product.
If you lived in the 80s, you know,
it was called New Coke,
which, you know, if you lived in the 80s
or if you watched Stranger Things
or both about.
So Coke introduces New Coke, and the idea
was people don't like the old Coke.
They want something new.
And it was spectacular as a failure.
This is not a joke.
Within 79 days,
Coke had taken it off the shelves.
Like, if you work in the business world,
that's not even a quarter.
Didn't even make it a quarter.
And when they took it off the shelves,
they came out with a new
can of the old Coke called
Coca Cola Classic,
which is the can, you know,
which is basically them going are bad.
I mean, basically, right.
Here's the thing.
People thought they wanted New Coke
and then when they tried it,
they were like, New Coke is the worst.
We want something classic.
I think that's where we are as a culture.
I think we
were told
we could sleep with whoever we wanted
and we've never been more broken.
I think we were told we could identify
however we wanted.
We've never been more confused.
I think we were told to make politics
our our ideology,
our center, and even stop talking
to family members if they disagreed.
And we've never been more lonely.
I think we were told,
you don't even have to leave the house.
You can work from home,
you can get food delivered at home,
you can watch movies at home.
We've never been more isolated.
And if you find yourself thinking men,
new life
is the worst.
Maybe you need something
a little more classic.
And it just so happens
that's the business Jesus,
is that.
Which is my third point
a method for moving forward.
If you want more life, how do you get it?
You know, Jesus says
two powerful things in John 1010.
He says, I, I've come so that they may
have life and life more abundant.
Buried in
that are two pretty profound statements.
One is Jesus says, if you want more life,
he can give it to you.
No problem.
It's what he does.
In fact, he doubles down.
He says, if you want life
even more, life even more than you think,
even more than you can dream of,
even more than you can imagine.
That's what he does.
In other words,
Jesus is saying that if you're 20,
26 ends and you don't have more life, it's
because you didn't want it
because no problem, he can give it to you.
Here's the second thing he's saying.
You'll never get it without him.
It's what he says.
He says, I came
so that they may have life.
The implication of that is if I hadn't
come, they wouldn't have had life.
Let me tell you why he's saying that.
Two steps to more life.
If you want it in 2026,
two steps up to you.
Here's number one.
You have to fire yourself.
There may not be anything more unpopular
to say
to a roomful of Americans than this,
but your family's not the problem.
Your environment is not the problem.
Whoever's in the white House
is not the problem.
I'm not saying all those things
are great. I'm just saying
you're the problem.
I'm the problem.
We have no idea what we're doing
when it comes to sex
or marriage
or children or money or career.
Our lives should be evidence of that.
We have no idea what we're doing,
and everything we touch withers.
We make really lousy God's.
This is what Jesus is teaching us.
It means to become a Christian is
to become so dissatisfied with yourself.
You're looking for a new leader.
Jesus says he's that leader.
And to prove
that he will live a sinless life,
he will go to the cross where he will take
on your sins, come up under the anger
and wrath and judgment of God
the Father as part of their plan
to eradicate your guilt,
eradicate the judgment that's on you.
So the three days later,
when he raises from the dead, he will say,
if you will fire yourself and follow me,
I will lead you to life eternal and life
now, are you ready to fire yourself?
You're ready to follow Jesus.
We're baptizing at the end of the month.
Falls in your court.
Here's the second thing he's saying.
You have to obey him.
But he knows how to get life.
That's what he's saying.
I know how to lead you to life. But.
But to tap into that,
you're going to have to do things his way.
And you've you've grown up in a culture
that has told you that
God is against you, that does things,
everything, the opposite.
So when he tells you how to do sex,
how to do marriage, how to do money,
how to do parenting, how to do career,
it's going to sound crazy to you.
How could it not?
But you'll never
get life unless you lean in.
The problem with that is I.
I know what you're thinking.
It's because it's what I was thinking
this week when I was getting ready.
In fact,
the best way to picture
this is to connect it
to another story in the Bible,
Luke chapter five.
Peter, a disciple, has been fishing.
He's a fisherman.
Which means, of course,
that his father was
a fisherman
and his father's father was a fisherman.
It's a family business.
He's got the right boat,
he's got the right nets.
He knows all the right spots on the lake.
He has all the right techniques.
He's been fishing all night.
He's caught nothing.
And Jesus shows up.
And this is their conversation.
In Luke five, Jesus says this.
And when he had finished speaking,
he hears Jesus.
He said to Simon, That's Peter
put out into the deep
and let down your nets for a catch.
I, I love to imagine Simon here going,
oh, is that what I forgot?
Jesus, just going to lay down the net
because that's how I'd be.
And Simon answered, master,
we toiled all night and took nothing.
Listen.
But at your word
I will let down the nets.
The Bible says they took up so much fish
they couldn't even hardly
get them in the boat.
Here's what I would say.
I know what you're thinking.
I know you're thinking,
but I've tried working on my marriage.
But I've tried putting my family back
together.
I've tried getting control of my finances.
I've tried it, I've tried it,
I've tried it, and I'm tired of trying it.
But here's my challenge.
Did you do it at his word?
Do you know what he says
about sex, about money, about parenting,
about family, about career?
Do you know what
he says? Have you done it?
That's what
2026 is going to be about
for us as a church.
What has Jesus said?
And how can we start doing it?
And when we do, he promises life
even more.
A life
than we can imagine.
Let me pray for us, father God,
what an incredible thing it is,
Jesus that when you came,
you said your mission statement was
to bring life and life more abundantly.
You could have said anything.
You could have said,
I came to bring judgment.
We deserve it.
You could have said,
I came to make sure you feel the guilt
and shame
you should feel for breaking this world.
We deserve that.
You could have said,
I came to find the best and the brightest,
and to start over with them,
and to get rid of the rest of you losers.
We deserve that.
What?
You said I came so that you may have life
and life more abundant.
Defeat.
Jesus, we ask in the power
of your Holy Spirit, the lie of the enemy
that keeps us from you.
Connect your sheep to you,
the Shepherd
that we might really live in Jesus name.
We pray. Amen.