Best Sermon Ever: Salt and Light

Find Jesus, community, and purpose. https://southeastcc.org (Someone in congregation yells out a “Woo”) Already we got a woo? Nice! Here we go. Hi family. Good to see you all third service. Guess what you get? All the bonus material. Then there's some bonus material for this message. So, we have a long way to go and a very short amount of time to get there. But before we go get started today, I want to give you a couple of celebrations for us. First of all, as of this week, we are officially closing our Restart program. The reason that we're closing it is because the world is reopening and businesses are back functioning again, and things are good. So, I wanted to give you guys just a bit of a celebration if you don't know what Restart is. Restart is a fund that we started a while back as we started to see local businesses struggling and we wanted to respond in a way that was actually helpful. So, what we did was we started a fund that you guys gave to, and we took 100% of that money and put it towards helping local businesses survive through the period of the pandemic. We gave a grand total of $205,944 (Congregation clapping) which is amazing, and we helped 15 different businesses which was also really amazing! (More clapping) I wanted to give you three sections of little thank you notes that people sent that I think really capture what our heart was. Because when you just give people a bunch of money, it’s not always helpful. We wanted to understand and build relationship with them, which is what we were able to do, and find out where they were actually pinched. I'll give you an example why this matters because the PPP money from the government, which was a great thing, was only allowed to be spent for employees, right? Well, the problem was there were a lot of business owners that sold homes or got six months behind on their mortgage because they were paying out of their own pocket to keep their employees paid, but they couldn't actually take that money and pu