The State of CBC 2026

In Joshua 4, the word of the Lord says, Now it happened when all the nation had completed crossing the

Jordan that the Lord spoke to Joshua saying, take for yourselves 12 men from the people, one man from each tribe, and command them saying, carry for yourselves 12 stones from here out of the middle of the

Jordan from the place where the priest's feet are standing firm and carry them over with you and lay them down in the lodging place where you will lodge tonight.

So Joshua called the 12 men from whom he had appointed from the sons of Israel, one man from each tribe.

And Joshua said to them, cross again before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the

Jordan. And each of you carry a stone on his shoulder according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Israel in order that this would be a sign among you.

So that when your children ask later saying, what do these stones mean to you? Then you shall say to them, because the waters of the

Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the

Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall become a memorial to the sons of Israel forever.

Let's pray. Lord, our faith is a historic faith.

We stand and benefit from the sacrifices and the lives and the lessons of many, many hundreds and thousands of men and women who went before us.

And Lord, you have proven faithful over and over again. You've done it before, you are doing it now, and you will do it again.

Your purposes are sure and your people are held only by your promises and by your faithfulness.

Lord, we pray that your church would be faithful in this coming year, Lord, that we would strive forward, press forward, throwing off the things that weary us so that we would reach the prize that you've set out before us as your people.

Help us to hear, Lord, help us to understand, help us to be challenged, and help us to have feet that are strengthened to walk and to run.

And we will give thanks and sing songs in your name, amen. Psalm 105 says, oh, give thanks to the

Lord, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the peoples. Sing to him, sing praises to him, speak of all his wonders.

Glory in his holy name. Let the heart of those who seek the Lord be glad. Seek the

Lord in his strength, seek his face continually. Remember his wonders which he has done, his marvels and the judgments uttered by his mouth.

I think one of the big failures that we've had in American Christianity is the disability, the lack of ability to look back and to connect where we are today historically to where we've been in the past.

I think that we, in our presentism, we think that we are the smartest generation who's ever lived. We think that we know all of the things and we are lulled into sleep with this line of thought because of technology.

We think that because we can have slippers delivered to our house tomorrow from somewhere in Seattle, that we have reached the pinnacle of human existence.

And yet it doesn't take long. When we read books that were written by authors who were alarmingly young centuries ago, we see that maybe we're not as smart as we think we are.

And what has happened in Christianity is that we largely neglect the lessons that have been learned through history.

And so what I want to set us on a path on, and Corey and I have talked about, is to not be a church disconnected.

What we want to think about in 2026 is to be a church connected.

Connected with our history, connected with each other, connected with other believers, and connected with a mission and a vision.

In order to do that, I want us to look back a little bit. It always reminds me, when we sing the church's one foundation, it always reminds me of the very first month when this body assembled.

The climate control was iffy. There was holes in the walls. The floor was still tilted, that hasn't changed.

And we were printed, we didn't have hymnals yet, so we were printing all the lyrics in bulletins.

And we sang a six verse barn burner of that song. Bart was running out of breath in between the verses.

And it always makes me think back to churches and strong things, they often start in opposition.

They often start very humbly. They start with small things, and it is the constant work of people doing everyday faithful things that make amazing things happen in hindsight.

So who would have thought, who would have thought in the summer of 2023 that a mere year and a half later that this church would plant another church?

And so as we look back in the year 2025, which was our second year of operation, we see that we have a sister church already that went out from us.

And Bart and Bill, who were two leaders, Bart Hodgson was an elder here, and Bill Downing was a deacon here.

And they went across town and started a work in Tawny Town planting Grace Covenant Reformed Baptist Church.

And they are meeting today. And they are an outpost for the gospel in West Springdale.

And they have members who have come from Siloam Springs. And as we look at that, we see a taste, and everything has happened fast here.

You know, it's one of those things where we were driving around, and I was talking to my parents, and we were asking about, what does the

Lord have for us? I think we need to plant. And we would drive by, and we saw this building, and I remember asking

Dad and Mom about it. What's the deal with that? Dad asked some context, and before we know it, we're meeting here with the owners of it, and they say, yeah, you guys can just meet there, right?

You can do whatever you want with it. And so we have a 15 -year lease in this place for $15, and that is from the benevolence of our neighbors, from the benevolence of people who are members of another church who want to see the kingdom of God grow.

Things have happened fast here. There's been a church planted, and as we look, I know that there is a motivation.

There is a desire that more would happen, that there would be more church planted, that there would be more activity going on.

And so that's what I want to largely talk about today. But in looking at the year in review, we completed the gospel in Mark.

I hope that that was as beneficial for you guys as it was for me to see many of our current issues brought into context of the gospel narrative, that ancient work, and we see the glory of the

Lord. We see the horror of spiritual blindness. We see the allure of false religion, and people who think they have it made in their pride that don't know the risen

Lord and the danger of that. And hopefully that spurs us to action as we went into 1 Corinthians, and over the next few months, we'll start to see the problems that can happen in the church.

We've started to see a foretaste of that as what happens when church grows in disunity. That's something that we have to guard against.

We taught through the Second London Baptist Confession, the 1689, and we had good, rousing arguments about bivocational pastors, something else,

I can't remember, but there was a lot about that, about bivocational pastors, like I think three weeks of arguments about that.

And then, I'm gonna tell you, just a spoiler, I know there's gonna be some of that that comes back in the January meeting.

It's one of those things. We learn from the past. We saw in 2025 that what began in 2023 with 16 members grew to 46 members in 2023, or in 2025.

So triple in number. We raised up a new elder, Corey Platt, whose family is growing even as we speak.

We raised up a new deacon, Brady Boone. We were gifted a building in Goshen, and we are still deliberating, trying to decide what to do with that, how to make the best use of it.

There are rumblings of another church that's very friendly to us at Living Hope that might want to plant in the coming months or years, and maybe we can help them with that.

I don't know. Another thing that I wanna leave us with before we go on to focus on the vision is that one of the things that's crazy that's happened, that's amazing that's happened, is that, look, there's been opposition to this.

There's been trouble. There's been friction. But I wanna commend all of you. We've stayed together.

There have been two times that members left the body in 2025.

One was the aforementioned leadership who went to plant Grace Covenant. They left in good standing.

We prayed over them. We were happy they left, because they were leaving to pursue the vision and the mission.

The other two that we lost have moved far away in Missouri, and I'm in still regular contact with Corey and Lindsay, as I know many other people are, and we gladly, sadly, but gladly saw them go, and they are gonna bless any church that they are involved with.

Guys, it takes fortitude. It takes maturity. It takes conviction to stay together.

It's not always easy. It's not easy to live with each other. Think about family dinners, you know, arguments break out.

It's one of those things, and the thing about family is a lot of times we have arguments because there's an underlying belief that we can't leave the table, right?

We're bound by blood. Now, in the church, we are not bound by blood, but we are bound.

We are bound by the bonds of friendship, and we are bound by the love of our

Savior in one faith, and so I commend you guys that many worked through difficulties.

Many worked through friction, through disappointment, and I know that we don't, no one of us has the market cornered by disappointment.

We are going to disappoint each other. The closer we get to each other, the more we're gonna disappoint each other.

This is what it is to live in a world, and I will tell you, the human being who I disappoint the most on this earth is the one who knows me the best.

No, it's not you, Samuel. It's my wife, right? There is gonna be disappointment, and what we have to do is we learn how to grow through that and live together, so I wanna turn the page.

I'm already longer than I thought. I knew it would happen. Here we go. Time to quicken it up. The focus, and we wanna do this every year.

I'm gonna read this from our bylaws. The vision of CBC is this. This is the long form of it, but I'll read fast.

Our vision at Covenant Baptist Church is to be a church that becomes a replicating church. We desire to train and develop qualified men into eldership so that we can joyfully commission and support new churches emphasizing

Northwest Arkansas first, but eventually extending the vision to the ends of the earth. We believe this to be the pattern of the

New Testament apostolic churches who appointed elders and went from city to city starting new churches.

We must be a church who is faithful to God's word, intense in our prayer and discipleship, and dedicated to the mission of discipling the nations.

We believe firmly that the church is the primary method by which God has and will continue to build his kingdom.

That is the vision of Covenant Baptist Church. There's a lot in there. The high points are prayer,

God's word, discipleship, and raising up elders that are called to send them out to extend this.

Titus 1 .5 that I preached over recently says, "'For this reason I left you, Titus, in Crete, "'that you would set in order what remains "'and appoint elders in every city as I directed you.

"'As we look out at Northwest Arkansas, "'it is easy sometimes to get in the doom spiral "'and think, oh man, there's no good churches.'"

Friends, that is folly. There are many good churches in this area. Now, to be sure and to be even -handed, there are many synagogues of Satan around here too.

There are some mediocre churches who still hold to the gospel tenuously. There are some great churches.

There are some good churches, and there are some absolutely awful places that call themselves churches, okay?

Good hint, they identify themselves for us often in our day by flying transgender flags and all kinds of craziness like that.

There is plenty of that, but we should not focus on that. What we should understand is that there is a landscape of Northwest Arkansas with many good churches, but they have many different focuses.

Not every church has to have the focus that we have on the vision that we have. Many churches can be focused on other things.

We have ministry that is needed to the poor, to widows and widowers, to those who are sick, and that is a responsibility of ours to help in that way, but that is not the focus of the church at Covenant Baptist Church.

There are other churches that have that focus, and we are for them. A house divided cannot stand. We are for any church that preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ, that is wanting to go make disciples, and there are many different ways to skin that cat.

So from the outset here at this church in looking at our vision, we have envisioned a guerrilla -style approach to Northwest Arkansas, and that means by forming small, tightly -woven

Reformed churches who look to enhance broader church culture, not barricade ourselves off in islands as is the tendency of Reformed people, right, and we know this, so I don't have to beat that dead horse.

Here's what we want. We have to be tight with our doctrine in the local expression, and we have to be open -handed with secondary and tertiary doctrines that are very important to us, but if we wanna make partnerships outside of these walls, we have to have those things and hold them with the correct perspective and not cut off other

Christians and cut off our nose to spite our face in the greater work. So our style here is intended to be distinctly aggressive.

We wish to take ground and grow through multiplication, not by size, but by replication, multiplication, huddling around leaders who go out and who will grow in their area.

This requires a huge amount of prayer. It requires low overhead because starting church is expensive, and it requires the development of elders, and this is the choke point.

So what are we doing right now? Hopefully, and I would commission you, if you have not been praying to raise up elders, if you have not been praying for the vision and the mission of this church, then

I would encourage you and urge you when you wake up in the morning, before you get on your phone and doom scroll in the morning, say a prayer.

Lord, may the vision of CBC be accomplished this year. Would you raise up elders this year?

Would you help the church to grow this year in discipleship and numbers? One of those prayers, say one every morning.

Put it as a reminder on your phone. Make it beep at you first thing. God desires that his people would pray to him so that we know where the work comes from.

It is not from our effort. We cannot do anything. All of our planning and scheming is in vain if God does not bring the growth and bring the work.

We have said that from the very beginning. Bart and I, from the beginning of this church, we said that we are like people on a boat trying to hold up cloth, hoping the wind is gonna blow in the sails.

And that is the situation. We can't do anything. But the prayer is something that we often neglect and people will hear it denigrated by saying, well, you're just praying.

You're just praying. Praying is the thing, friends. It's the most important thing. And I don't say that as a platitude.

I say that because we believe here that almighty God is pursuing his mission of the

Great Commission. It's his commission. It's his authority that sends us out.

It's by his authority that we talk to others. It's by his power that we are given the ability to do this.

And the way that we access the power of God is through prayer. It's the way all of our forefathers before.

How was Abraham given the covenant? He was asleep. How was Moses given the law?

He was brought up on the mountain and it was given to him as God spoke to him. And on and on and on.

Daniel prayed to the Lord and his answer was given at the end of the night as the

Lord revealed the dream of the great king to Daniel. And his career was made from praying.

In fact, his enemies, they saw Daniel and what they knew and they're trapped to get Daniel later was that they knew that he would pray to the

Lord and that he would not stop praying to the Lord. And so a trap was set. May we be people like Daniel who know that the ultimate power of the

Christian life and the Christian faith is through prayer. It's not a platitude. It is the power of God.

Low overhead is something that we have to discuss and we have to keep thinking about. There are two large expenses in any church.

One of them is paying personnel and the other one is buildings and facilities.

Now, you already heard. We spend very little money on facilities here, right?

And we're gonna talk about the pay in the January meeting but we have to keep overhead low and that is hopefully on a percentage basis because if we wanna plant churches, there has to be resources to be able to do that.

Now, let's talk about the choke point. I don't wanna put heavy burdens on you but I wanna talk about organically what we are looking at and how we get elders here.

And this is a multifaceted battle but first I wanna explain at Covenant Baptist Church what we look at as elders.

Definitions of elders. Here we go. 1 Timothy 5, 17. Elders who lead well are considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor at preaching the word and teaching.

Here at CBC, we conceive internally three types of elders that play out in the life of a church.

We'll go with hierarchy. Type one. Type one elders are the type who labor in preaching and teaching.

These men necessarily carry a very large load because with the pulpit comes the counseling.

That's just the facts of life. The person who is driving the pulpit is going to get a lot of people coming at them to ask them questions, to have the counseling appointments.

Now, here's the thing. If we want to plant other churches, what we're gonna have to have is another type one elder amidst our body and I'll just give you a peek.

Here's what happens. When you have two type one elders, there becomes friction. Here's what we have to have.

Maturity in the friction. When we have a man who wants to preach and labor in the preaching and teaching in this church, there is gonna necessarily be friction between him and myself.

That friction does not have to be bad. What it does is it requires humility from both parts as I give up time in the pulpit so that that man can become practiced and learn what he's doing and then he's going to have to be humble to realize that he's gonna have to go and that is the pathway and that's a good thing.

When we start to have that kind of friction, we know that we're getting close to sending someone out.

A type two elder is one who preaches at regular intervals but they are content in the role with less upfront preaching and with that comes not a judicial lesser hierarchy but a natural lesser hierarchy as the person who is dominating the pulpit is going to have a bigger seat.

It's just the way it works. We currently have a type one and a type two and Corey and I are very content in these roles right now.

What we would like is to have some friction. When two men are content in these roles, it does not cause friction at all.

We're very comfortable. We like meeting. In fact, it scares us on Monday mornings how much we agree with each other.

We have said that often. So Corey has to make up insults to text me on my way home so that we can argue a little bit.

Now what we don't have currently is a type three. These are the type of elders who preach occasionally and are working much fewer hours but they are still vital in the counseling ministry of the church and what we would hope is that type threes and type twos get a taste for what's going on, want to grow in the role and then that friction starts to happen.

Now, why can't we just have these? Why don't, let's do it, right? We start, you're an elder, you're an elder.

Why can't we do that? There is limitation on this and it comes from several different directions. So let's talk about how we can be praying and how we can be getting through this choke on the vision.

There's one limitation first. It is in First Timothy, the same passage. He says, do not lay hands upon anyone hastily and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others.

Keep yourself pure. One of the things that we have to temper here is that the process to raise up elders takes time to observe character.

It takes time to observe doctrinal soundness and it takes time to see if that man has the willingness to sacrifice as an elder must sacrifice.

These men also require internal and external affirmation of the calling. They have to want to be elders and they have to be recognized as being elders.

It's a two -way street. Just feeling the fire in your heart that you want to be an elder, that's all fine and well, that's a good desire, but if it's not affirmed by anyone else, then it's probably a bit of soup you ate the night before and you probably need to temper it with trying to grow in maturity and trying to grow into the office.

So that is a limitation, that it takes time to raise up these men. Another limitation is that we have to have a target -rich environment and this is the thing that we have to know here, right?

In order to fulfill the vision, we do not want, is not our desire to have big buildings and to become a megachurch.

It's not our desire here. You'll never hear us talk that way. However, if you want to raise up men and multiply, that requires a couple of things.

It requires numerical growth, but it also requires a certain kind of growth where men come in and become a target -rich environment, men who want to do ministry, men who want to lead, and it requires a friction of men who also want to go and those who have been here the longest would be the best ones to go, except they're the ones who the most want to stay.

It is a problem, it is a conundrum. The biggest dangers that we have to this work seem to be at odds with each other.

The biggest danger that we have to deal with is complacency and comfort of it can be comfortable once you reach a certain size to come in here and you know the people you know, you talk to the people you talk to, and you're comfortable doing the church thing on Sunday morning.

That is a danger. We have to be uncomfortable. But then the other danger is haste.

It's trying to make something happen out of his season. So how do we overcome these limitations? Well, the first one goes back to the very beginning.

We have to pray specifically that men will be called and that we will have discernment when dealing with these men.

We have to have intensive training, and this is on Corey and I, and this is gonna be an initiative that we're looking into in 2026.

Intensive training for men about how to live the life that elders exhibit.

But listen, this is not gonna be exclusively applied to people that we think might be elders. This is for all men in the church because godly character and doctrinal soundness should define every man in this church.

If every man is elder qualified, think about how blessed and peaceable our families are gonna be, and think about how strong it's gonna be.

The reality of the situation is that we don't need 20 elders in here, right? The reality of the situation is that we need more than we have, but we need men who do other things also and are equipped to do that.

Finally, we have to seek out men of high capacity because that's who's going to be planting, and they have to be men who have a lot of patience because the planting is likely gonna be bivocational.

There's gonna be a lot of stress in it. You can, as a church plant, you can afford to pay a pastor or buy a building, rent a building, usually not both, and you will look at the statistics and it will be that 80 % of church plants fail within the first five years, and the reason for that is financial calamity.

It's because the man gets burnt out or because they can't afford the facilities, and you have to have facilities.

Essentially, a sign outside tells people where to go, okay, and that's the way it works.

So that's enough of that. That is the focus on the vision. Let me blow through the rest of these a little bit more quickly, and I think that's gonna be easy.

Our second focus is on the strength of CBC. So we focus on the vision, we focus on the strength, and then the third thing is we're gonna focus on the health.

The strength of CBC. This is talking about mission readiness. This is talking about our muscles being ready to roll.

First Corinthians 10, 15 through 17 says, I speak as to prudent people. You judge what

I say. Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ?

Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Here's what we can't have. We cannot have a group of people who's on mission, and our picture becomes a bunch of people standing around in a circle looking at each other.

Essentially what we have to have is that we have to have a group of people who are unified together and who are all facing the same direction.

The focus has to be outward, and the strength of any church, the strength of any church, is its unity and commitment to a purpose and a direction.

We have to have unity. And so what we have seen here over the past year is that the back door, the proverbial back door, this is where it's easy for people to come in usually, right, easy to become a member, and then the back door is very large.

The first time somebody gets disgruntled, they just peace out, they're gone. Usually an elder gets up, if they say anything at all, they lie about why they left, and we all just kind of smooth it over and like,

I wonder what happened back then, and then we have a hotbed of gossip, all that stuff happens. Here's what's happened here that we've experienced at CBC.

The back door is shut because of unity, but also because of honesty, right?

If members leave, and understand this, I say this over and over because it is a problem. I was explaining to someone yesterday the phrase immunitizing the eschaton, so I'll make the wizard spell a little bit easier to understand, it's when you become so committed to a certain eschatology that you think that you're going to make that eschatology happen yourself, right, so if I'm post mill,

I think that I'm gonna be able to bring in the kingdom of God with my activity, and it puts things out of bounds, and I have heard someone say that in a reformed church is often what we do is we immunitize church membership, where what we do is we make everything about church membership.

Understand this, we are gathered together for one purpose, to glorify and to praise

Jesus, to worship him, and to be equipped for the mission. This is not a social club, it's not a masonic lodge, it's not a place where we get to crack beers open with each other and talk about our social life, even though some of that happens sometimes, but that's not the purpose, and there is no blood oath to being here.

You have not de facto sinned against God if you leave church membership to go to another church.

Understand that. However, what we do is we are bound together by bonds of commitment, and there are good reasons to leave a church.

There are good reasons. There are several good reasons, and when that happens, we are going to bring you up if we can, and we're gonna pray over you, and we're gonna hug your neck and be thankful that you're going to bless another place.

But what's happened here is that when we guarantee that we are going to talk about why members leave, it closes that back door and builds unity.

We will always, always at this church, we will always attempt to share and bless those who leave membership.

Always. It would be, and what we have to do is because of that, I need you to ask yourself this question,

I need you to be very honest with yourself today. If it would be easy to leave this church relationally, then what we have to understand is there is work to do, and that's both ways.

There's work for you to do, and there's work for us to do. But because you're the one that knows it, the primary or initiation work is on you.

Find someone. Find someone, and if that door gets closed, don't get angry, find someone else.

And if you strike out four or five times, let's talk. Okay, if you strike out three times, let's talk.

If you're getting too frustrated, let's talk. Guys, believe it or not, I am very experienced in dealing with people who are very frustrated.

I am a public school high school teacher, okay? People are quite often frustrated with me, okay?

Or frustrated with each other. Give me a try on that. We have to ask ourselves this in the context of unity.

How are we connecting with each other? Ask yourself this question, who are your people?

Who are your people? Who is the one that you trust? They don't have to be here.

Again, remember the mission here. But if they are here, that can be really good. And I want you to ask when you're thinking about who are your people, what is the strength of this church?

The strength is relationships where we are bound together, facing one direction, fighting together. Not fighting with each other, but fighting together against common enemies.

And that enemy is the work of Satan and sin in the flesh out in the world. Have your people rebuked you or asked any hard questions in recent memory?

Have they pointed out areas where you're blind? If they haven't, they're probably not your people.

And you need to seek intimacy. You have to have someone who tells you that you're not the greatest thing ever.

Really important. If you don't have that, seek it. And when you have someone who does that, don't get angry with them.

Listen, you can accept it or not. They're flawed people too, but you can reason together.

And that is the basis of building these kind of relationships. And what I would love to see here, from the very start we talked about, we don't have small groups.

We do not have like structure for people to get together. But what we do have is a bunch of women in this church who are meeting often, doing things.

And I love to see it. I love to see it. And I saw yesterday a group of people from the church and from Grace get together and move

Angel out. And you love to see that. And friends, I would tell you a huge amount of this is on me and it's on Corey.

We need to have more of that among our men. And we're gonna work on it. We're gonna work on that.

That's a thing that we have to do. You have to have inner people, middle people, and outer people. You have to have people you like to see every once in a while.

You have to have people that are very close to your counsel. You have to have people that could go either way. That is where healthy relationships happen.

See, what we have to understand is when we build these relationships, the back door is shut and we are bound together, looking forward to the mission, then we have to understand that the church membership is the ground force for evangelism, discipleship, and loving the brethren.

We come into this place not to feel comfortable. We come into this place to sing praises to God so that we would be equipped for what we're doing out there.

The work of the church is not in here. The work of the church is out there.

And if we want to accomplish our vision, the way that that happens is by the work that happens out there.

We're equipped in Scripture here. We are bounded together here, but then we go do the work of the ministry.

And the work of the ministry is being together, counseling together, but it is also being aggressive in your sphere.

So let's talk about this. What do we want you to do as church members? One is develop and foster your connections with other churches.

This is the only way it's gonna happen in the near term. If we wanna have partnerships with other churches, leverage your relationships with people in other churches so that they would know what we're doing and we would know what they're doing, and we start with the very simplest, most powerful thing, which is praying for each other.

One of my very best friends is now the lead pastor at Highland Park Assembly of God.

There is a connection there. There is a connection. And we pray for each other.

And I think down the road, we will have our Reformed bona fides a little bit challenged and we will be in an area of discomfort because I envision partnership with him.

I don't know to what level, but we have friends at Living Hope. We have friends in a sister church.

We have people who have benefited us at UBC. We have a friend at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Springdale, right down the road.

We have relationships with those churches. Members, do the opposite of cutting those off, foster them.

They can be something powerful. We need members who lead in the community. This means in business, in education, even potentially in politics.

We need men who are out, who are progressing the work of Christ in their sphere.

Not all of you are gonna be elders. In fact, most of you won't, but what you can be is leaders. And that is not a less holy thing than being pastors.

That is the folly of the church of the last 30 or 40 years we think that the height of holiness is being a pastor.

That's not true. We will be a weak ineffectual church if we give the only end point for people as being church leadership.

That's not the way it is. We need men who are pressing the bounds of Christ in business, in education, in politics.

We need members who submit under the teaching of elders, not for its own sake, but to take this teaching into the home and into their sphere of influence.

It's an important thing to take the teaching and go out with it. Now, this is much easier for you when you have elders that will get your backs and who have

Christian friends walking alongside. Cultivate Christian friendships who will be with you and understand that your elders have your back.

If you're persecuted, if you're outcast for your faith, then we are here to help you, not only with prayer, not only with counseling, not only with brotherhood, and I will call somebody and gripe them out if I have to and call them to rebuke.

I hope not to be tested on this because you will be in a bad position, but if your boss does something that's ungodly to you,

I'll call him. Remind me of this. This is going to be recorded, so if I want to hesitate, you can play my words back and hold me to it, and we will help you financially.

You can be bold. We want you to be bold, and you need to have friends and you need to go out.

The Christian faith is not a solo operation. It never has been and it never will be.

Understand, friends, that the end goal of Christianity was always a kingdom, and this kingdom is brought about by living a life that exemplifies slavery to Christ in every arena.

That's how all the apostles talked, most notably to me in the book of Jude, the brother of Jesus.

He begins that letter by saying, I, Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ.

That was his brother, his earthly brother, a slave of Jesus Christ.

See, the whole kingdom of God, it works paradoxically. We saw that at the beginning of 1

Corinthians 1, that it is through seeming weakness that the God's kingdom grows, and that is the way with us.

As we are slaves to Christ, understanding that he has taken away the sting of death and the victory of death and sin, that we have nothing to fear, and therefore, we can be bold.

So what we have to do in order to be slaves to Christ is we encourage intentional discipleship, hospitality, conversations, questions, and cooperation.

We have to engage the lost with boldness. There are many in here who are doing that. We will see the fruits of that.

God is not mocked. You will reap what you sow, and when you sow evangelism, you are going to reap a harvest of disciples.

Be patient. We should reason with believers with charity and truth. We should have humility without impotence.

Understand the difference. Humility means that we believe we have the strength of argument, so we don't have to get emotional and upset, but we also don't have to be powerless.

Assume the center. We have our doctrines that are tried and true and that we are convicted by, and we preach that way.

If you believe your convictions, there is no room for fear whatsoever, Christian. So this next year, what we're gonna do is we are going to sing together, eat together, learn together, work together, and play together.

Understand that the official gatherings of CBC are never gonna be enough, so you're gonna have to go out and take risk with the relationships, knowing they may not go well, but the effort is worth it because there is nothing wasted, nothing.

God sees every work that you do, and he accounts it for righteousness because it's him who laid out the work for you in the first place.

Ending very quickly here, the health of CBC. So that's the strength. It seemed like the health, right? But the strength of CBC is being together on mission, being bold.

The health of CBC, let's go back to Titus. This is a glorious piece of scripture. It has been in my mind for about two months now.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us that denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great

God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for himself a people of his own possession, zealous for good works.

These things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you.

As we seek to raise up elders, that is a core thing that we have to do at this church. And the health of this church is going to require having a target -rich environment where we have many men of godly character.

We have to strive for that. We have to seek sanctification in our body. And friends, the way that we do that, it is easy, easy to understand, hard to implement, okay?

Sanctification comes by rebuke and honesty. Jake and I were recording a podcast where we were mostly ranting about the end of the last battle a couple weeks ago by Lewis, and one of the things that comes to mind in that podcast is that sanctification, changing, it always comes from getting knocked in the teeth.

We are blind to our sin and still something happens that wakes us up from it. And sometimes,

God, in the best times, what that is is a rebuke from a friend. In the worst times, what it is is the natural consequences of our sin killing us, which they will.

If we want to raise up elders, we have to have sanctified holy men. Men, do you want to be holy?

Yeah? Commit yourself to prayer. Commit yourself to the word of God.

Commit yourself to the body. We have to hold comfort with an open hand.

Many are gonna go from here if this vision is accomplished. Many good men that are gonna hurt.

Bill is one of my good friends. We talk often, and it hurt when

Bill left. I miss him, especially when sound stuff gets wonky. I miss

Bill. He's a professional, but guess what? It's sweeter when we see him now, because he is doing the work of the

Lord, and he is going out. And he did not hold his comfort with a tight fist, but he made an uncomfortable decision and struck out.

May there be more men like Bill. We want that. I have such respect for him. We seek here to impact

Northwest Arkansas. That means that we are going to have to partner with other churches of lesser and greater doctrinal alignment.

That means we're gonna have to have growth in numbers, but with growth in numbers comes growth in opposition.

Understand, friends, that we are gonna back you up, standing against the wiles of the enemy and ungodliness.

And the way we're gonna do that is not by saying be warm and be fed. We are going to use benevolence to bolster our people and to inspire courage to take risks.

We have all things in common, like the church of old. That doesn't mean we're a socialist utopia. It means that we are here about the mission of God and that we pool resources to be able to do the work that God has for us.

Ultimately, I wanna leave us with this. We seek this above all else and really only this.

We seek the approval of our Lord. Every one of you wanna hear one day, well done, good and faithful servant.

Well done. That's what we wanna hear. That is the thing that drives us. And what this requires,

Jesus was explicit. If you wanna hear that, if you wanna be zealous for good works, if you wanna be holy, if you wanna put away lawlessness, this is what it's gonna require.

We do not look either right or left. We keep our eyes straight ahead and our hand on the plow.

There is no room in the kingdom of God for anyone who would turn back and look and say, well, what about my father or my mother?

No, the kingdom of God is about single -minded, zealous devotion to God. Is Jesus not

God? If he is God, then we are to follow him single -mindedly. This is going to require hard work and zeal in the path he has prepared for us.

This requires us to unify, to put away, put away divisions that divide us, put away grudges that make us think ill of another, put away assumptions that make us look at each other in an uncharitable way and look at other churches in an uncharitable way.

We have to put that away. We have to have leaders who are fatherly. We have to have courage in our men and we have to have women who encourage courage.

Finally, we have to be properly ordered. We have to prioritize what the Lord values. We have to minimize the things that would weary us and we have to cast off entirely the sin that enslaves us.

May that be what happens in 2026. Hopefully next January, as we're sitting here and we recount the year 2026, there is no telling what's going to happen in this year.

I'm not a prophet or the son of a prophet, I don't know, but what I hope for and what I hope for the most is that individuals can tell me this is how

I grew in the Lord this year. I was enslaved in this sin and it's gone. I was weary with worldly pursuits and I threw them off, whether that's

X, Facebook, the love of cars, the love of anything, right? If we can throw that off and we can be zealous for good works, that would be a tremendous accomplishment this year.

And then the Lord is gonna give us more than we ask because that's what he does. He lavishes his blessings on his people.