SPEAKER_01 0:00

Thank you for listening to an audio resource from Stanwich Church, located in Greenwich in Stanford, Connecticut. The vision of Stanwich Church is to know Christ and make him known.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

The gospel lesson for today is from Matthew chapter 10, verses 1 through 15. This can be found on page 968 of your Pew Bible. Jesus sends 12 of his disciples to proclaim the kingdom of God to the Jews and to confirm their preaching with signs and wonders according to the authority he has given them. A reading from Matthew chapter 10, beginning with the first verse. And he called to them, his 12 disciples, and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out and to heal every disease and every affliction. The names of the twelve apostles are these: first Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, James, the son of Zabede, and John, his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew, the tax collector, James, the son of Alphaeus, and Theoderis, son Simon the Canadian, and Judas Iscarat, who betrayed him. These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and proclaim as you go, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without pain, give without pay. Acquire no gold, no silver, nor copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, nor tune nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it. But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodium and Gomorrah than for that town. May God add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

It was when I was in college, I gave my life to Christ, and the people around me started to realize that things were a little different. Things were starting to change. I was no longer chasing those temporary happiness band-aids that we put on ourselves just to get through life. And the people around me started to pay attention. I remember I had a really good friend of mine say to me, Oh, so you're like a Christian, Christian. And at first, when she said that, I was thrilled. I was so excited because it meant that something in my life meant that my relationship with Jesus was now visible. And that moment of excitement lasted 30 seconds. Because then all of a sudden, the panic set in. Me. And all of a sudden, that pressure felt daunting. I remember my head was buzzing with thoughts like, what if I mess this up? What if I say the wrong things? What if they ask me a question and I don't know the answer to it? What if I disappoint someone? And most importantly, what if I misrepresent Jesus through my life? It was in that moment that I realized that our faith, following Jesus, isn't always a private, personal thing. In fact, it shouldn't be. Because when we decide to follow Jesus, we become ambassadors of Christ. What this means is that we no longer live just for ourselves, we now represent something greater. We represent Jesus in the rooms we walk into. It means that through our love, our compassion, our forgiveness, that we can actually give people a glimpse of who Jesus is. And maybe just hearing that you're starting to hear the buzz of your mind saying, What if I get this wrong? Here's the encouraging word is being an ambassador of Christ doesn't require our perfection. It doesn't mean that we have everything figured out or we have no more doubts. And that is exactly what the scripture is showing us this morning. You see, Jesus is sending out his disciples. And these disciples don't have everything figured out at this point. But they got sent out, they were walking the walk while they were learning. They weren't experts, they didn't have a theology degree. They were just ordinary people who still had questions and doubts, who, even in the presence of Jesus himself, still misunderstood sometimes. And yet, Jesus sends them to be ambassadors for him. Not because they were fully ready to go, but because the power was never going to come from their talent, their giftings, their ability to speak to crowds, their charisma. It was never gonna come from them. It was always going to come from the one who sent them. And this, ambassadors, is really good news for us. Because if being an ambassador depended on us being perfect, having it all together, not having doubts, none of us would qualify. But yet, as ambassadors, it's our imperfections and the way that we walk, that God wants to use us in the places we find ourselves. He wants to use us to send you out and go. And I thought about this this week as I was preparing for Confirmation Sunday, and I couldn't help but think of our confirmants. Because over the last four months, like Rocco was giving us an insight of, I've had the privilege of being in these conversations that were so rich, so insightful. And there were moments where I just thought, man, if everyone in this church could hear this conversation, there would be such hope for what is to come and what God is doing. They asked the hard questions, they wrestled with things, they pushed back on some of our answers, and they were fully invested in this whole process. The students that you are going to hear from today and all the confirmants that were lined up here, they are our ambassadors. They are the young people that are in their schools, sports teams, in their friend groups that are bringing hope and Jesus to this next generation of Christ followers. So today, yes, we celebrate an impressive group of students that have invested in their faith. Not because Rocco, Craig, or myself has said, just believe it, or their parents have said the same thing, but they've decided to take ownership of their faith and have decided to pursue a life of Christ. Now, before we hear the testimonies, I want to leave our comfortmans with three things. The first is that we are so proud of you. There is something incredible that happens when we say yes to taking a step in our faith. And so we as a church are just excited to see what God's gonna do in each one of your lives from here. The second is that this is not the end. This is not like maturing into a different step of Christianhood where you're like arrived. Um, you are about to embark on the most important journey of your life. Um there'll be times where you see God so clearly, and there's gonna be times where you can't see him as clearly. You're gonna go through joys and sorrows, life's gonna take you a bunch of different ways. Um, but just know that God is always with you. And the third is that you don't walk this road alone. Stanwich Church is always gonna be a home for you. No matter where you head off to, how you stray, we'll always be here for you. And that also means Craig Rocco and myself text us. We're always here for you. Now, without further ado, I'd love to introduce our testimony readers that you'll hear from Sierra Mendoza, Ashley Kearney, John Popescu, and Gela Echele Tupaiahle. Now let's welcome up Sierra.

SPEAKER_03 11:11

But I've come to realize that for a busy high schooler, they often look like the perfect GPA or a social media feed. As I find myself in the midst of the sophomore year grind, I'm learning that while I can get lost in chasing these modern golden calves, God is the only one who can actually give me the peace and purpose I am looking for. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sierra, and I'm a sophomore at Greenwich High School. If you had asked me a year ago what my biggest idols were, I would have probably laughed and said, I don't own these statues. In my head, an idol was something out of Indiana Jones. A golden figure sitting on a pedestal in a dusty cave. But as I began preparing for my confirmation and looking more closely at my own life, I realized that modern idols don't always look like statues. Sometimes they do look like a GPA, a starting position on a varsity team, or the number of notifications on a phone lock screen. In my study, I came across Psalm 106.19, which speaks of the Israelites at Mount Horeb. At Horeb, they made a calf and worshipped an idol cast in metal. It wasn't just that they built a statue, it was the timing that got me. They had just seen miracles. They were literally standing at the foot of the mountain where God spoke to Moses. But because they were anxious, impatient, and bored of the silence, they built something physical to give them a sense of security. As a high school sophomore, I can relate to that anxiety more than I'd like to admit. My life is a game of balancing. My hareb is usually textbooks on a desk at 11 p.m. with my grades, practicing for sports, clubs, and trying to keep up a social life. In those stressed moments, it is so easy to start worshiping the golden calves of modern life. For me, the greatest distraction is the idol of status and success. It's the feeling that if I don't get an A on this test, or if I don't get into the right career paths, my whole future is doomed. I begin to worship my own effort. I start to believe that I'm the one in charge and that my value depends on what I do. Like the Israelites, I'm looking at something cast from metal, a trophy, a letter grade, and giving it the power to dictate my own happiness. But this version is a mirror for me. It reminds me that the Israelites exchange the glory of God for a statue of a cow that eats grass. When I worry about my status or I worry about whether I'll have the good career path in the future, I'm doing the exact same thing. I'm trading the peace of an all-powerful God for a temporary sense of a good reputation. God has used this season of confirmation to teach me how to place Jesus at the center of my life instead of me. When the familiar spike of anxiety hits that sophomore slump weight on my shoulders, I'm learning to pause and ask, am I building a calf right now? Re-centering isn't about me not caring about school or my future anymore. It's about me not worshiping them anymore. It means accepting that I have to work hard, but the results are God's.

SPEAKER_04 16:14

I didn't want to change. In September, I started my new school, and it wasn't immediate, there wasn't a big singular moment, but I started to feel a switch. With faith being a part of the school, I started leaning to this idea of Jesus and Christianity. I started asking questions in theology, paying attention in liturgies, going to focus, and trusting God more and more. I started looking for that connection and I found it. There have definitely been times I struggled at say at your heart, with friendships, academic confidence, and unnecessary pressure I put on myself. My faith would be put to the test. I would ask myself, why would God do this to me? Doesn't He care about me? I sought happiness from grades and approval. The message of Jesus loves me didn't feel like it was happening all the time. And I was relying on myself and not seeing God's plan. For my life first, I have chosen Deuteronomy 31.8, which says, It is the Lord who goes before you. He will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed. This verse encourages me to trust God with my life and to have faith with his plan. In class, we read a book called The Heidelberg Catechism. The first question of the book is, What is your only comfort in life and death? If you were to ask me this before I started confirmation classes, I would have said trying to be a good person. I thought being a good person would let me into heaven when I die. Through class, I learned that good people don't go to heaven, saved people do. The answer the book gives us is that I'm not on my own, but belong body and soul and life and death to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Speaking this here today, I agree that my only comfort is not trying to be kind or a good friend, but my only comfort is Jesus. If you were to tell 10-year-old me everything I've learned over these past few years, she would have probably been very disappointed to hear that giving her sister the bigger half of the cookie didn't really matter. I've grown as a person, as a student, but most importantly, as a Christian. I see things in my life with more thoughtfulness and a what would Jesus do attitude. I try to see things from other people's perspective and I try to understand challenges that people are facing. I try to be a shoulder to lean on. While doing all this, I'm doing it with a different motive than before. Because I know Jesus first shows us love, not because I feel like I have to. My siblings would tell everyone I'm lying, but I promise I'm not. I know that my life isn't perfect, and I know it never will be. But I will try my hardest every day to represent what being a Christian is: showing people love and forgiveness. Jesus will always be there for me. He crafted each one of us with care and with love. He has a purpose for our lives, and I know that his plan won't fail. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Although that year, I would begin to discover much about who I am after my closest and only real friend would leave for boarding school. Along with this, it was the peak of COVID, and the return to real school after months of online classes, with the addition of my social situation, caused me to discover things that would begin to define who I would become for the next couple years of my life. Around that time, I picked up soccer, which would soon become my greatest passion and became a core part of my identity. I would go on to make new friends to fill the gap in my social life that had been opened. This was a pivotal moment in my life, and I don't know who I would be without that year. As I would go through middle school, I continued to try new things and expand my horizons. But the main focus of my life was soccer. It was all I could think about, wanted to talk about, and watched. Despite starting later than most kids, my age, I caught up in skill, and in eighth grade I joined a new team, ready to establish myself as a key player and leader on the field. After my first couple of practices, I quickly realized that I wasn't as good as I thought I was, and that the competition would be a lot tougher than expected. Suddenly I found myself lost because the sport that had defined me had passed me by. I would spend the majority of games on the bench, and I would have to work twice as hard at practice to prove that I should be there. By tying all my worth to how I played and how I was perceived, I lost myself. That spring I heard about Stanwich through my friend Luke, and I figured that I would come see what church was like. On my first Sunday, I went to the youth group and Luke went to his own confirmation class. I was left alone and I sat down in the very back of the room. I felt like I shouldn't have come, and honestly, I just wished I had stayed home. Then Craig came up to me and he said that he hadn't seen me before and asked my name. I told him that my name was John and that I'd come with a friend, but he was in his own class. That first day was a whole new experience for me, but from then on I kept coming and I began to become more and more connected with my faith. I stopped idolizing my performance on the fields, and I felt free from all the worry and stress of playing, and I finally began to have fun again. This is why I selected Romans 8 31 to be my life verse. What then shall we respond to these things? If God is for us, who could be against us? I believe that this verse reflects how there is no problem or worry so great or insommatical. And it cannot be overcome with my faith. And how this and how my relationship with God trumps all sadness and strife I will encounter. These past two years coming to standards have taught me a lot about myself and my faith. I'm now able to deal with hardship and defeat and understand that I am loved and that with Jesus I don't have to equate my work to my own accomplishments, but instead live a life of purpose driven by caring for others instead of myself. Now I feel more fulfilled than ever, knowing that my identity is placed in Jesus, and I know that my journey and my faith is only beginning, and I can't wait for what comes next. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 22:50

Still being placed, I will restore to you the years that the locusts has eaten. I only came across that verse recently. Before that, my life felt like fabric thinning. Not torn, just worn enough to almost fall apart. Like something was taken from me quietly, and I didn't know how to stop it. My name is Skilla. I moved here from Watson three years ago, and I'm currently a freshman at Darien High School. For a long time, I knew I didn't fit. Not almost, not sometimes. I was a dark thread in fabric stitched the same, holding words dressed up as humor, learning to act whole while I wasn't. I felt it in conversations, in the way voices overlapped and moved on without me, in the sound of laughter that I joined but never fully felt part of. So I learned to move carefully, to laugh when I needed to, to say just enough, then go back and replay it all later, like I could taste the moment again and figure where went wrong. I was afraid of losing people, but even more than that, I wondered if I meant to them what they meant to me. So I stayed slightly hidden, not gone, just never fully there. It felt safer that way. Like if I kept parts of myself a distance, it wouldn't hurt as much if no one came close. But it still did. Because even in rooms full of people, I felt it at that distance. Like I was standing where I was supposed to be, but didn't belong. Not a puzzle piece in the wrong position. Just one shaped for a picture no one understood yet. My braids held more than my hair. They held the version of me trying to look like I belonged, even when I felt like I didn't. There are moments I remember quietly. Clearly. My room's quiet amber, the weight of my blanket pressing down, the faint smell of air after a long day, and the silence. Loud enough to hear my own thoughts echo back at me. And slowly, those years passed like pages, those years passed like pages I never fully read. Then there was church, or at least my distance from it. I didn't grow up going, and when I did, it felt long. Like time stretched in a way I couldn't connect to. Like I was sitting in something I wasn't part of. And when I first heard about Jesus, he didn't feel close. Not fake, just distant. A story believed in deeply by others, but never something I could step into. Written, spoken, known, but not yet real to me. So I stayed outside. Then the distance began to thing. I was invited to Youth Group by my best friend Julianne and her family, the Covergers. A place I didn't realize I needed, but one that slowly began to feel like it was holding on to me. Craig and Lauren were part of that too. The way they spoke, it didn't rush anything. It didn't force anything, but stayed. Steady enough that I couldn't ignore it. And slowly something began to shift. Not all at once, not loudly, but quietly. Like light reaching places I thought had already gone dim. Something gentle but unshakable, beginning to rebuild what I didn't realize was still there. It stopped feeling like just words. It felt like Jesus was drawing near. For the first time, I wasn't only hearing about Jesus. I was beginning to notice him. In the way heaviness didn't feel as consuming, and in the way peace showed up without explanation. And in that space, I came across this first. I will restore to you the years the locusts is eaten. And it didn't feel distant. It felt like God was speaking directly into what I thought was lost. Because I had spent so long believing. Those years of fear, those years of overthinking, those years of feeling out of place were just empty spaces in my life. But now I'm starting to see Jesus wasn't absent in them, he was present. Not removing every hard moment, but holding me through them and quietly shaping something I couldn't see at the time. Even when I didn't recognize it, even when I felt completely out of place. And I still feel it sometimes. The overthinking, the distance, the question of where I belong. But it doesn't define me in the same way anymore. Because Jesus is still working, still restoring, still placing what felt broken into something whole. And I was I was never just the piece that didn't fit. I was the one still being placed. And even now, in the quiet moments, when those old thoughts come back, they don't feel empty anymore. Now I know because of Jesus, I'm not outside of it. I'm held and still being placed.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Thank you.org.