Well, good morning, good morning.
This on there we go. Blessings, honey guys this
morning, excited to, to be here. What a joy to, to worship in
this house this morning. Being at both services and just
seeing the, the strength of the team here in the warmth of the
body is just pretty remarkable. So thank you guys for having me.
A special thanks to Pastor Kurt and Jace for, for allowing me to
come and share with you guys today.
I was thinking during, during worship, Psalm 133 says, oh, how
pleasing and beautiful it is when God's people dwell together
in unity. And then it goes through and
starts talking about the, the dew.
It's like blessing from above, the dew from Mount Hermon on to
Mount Zion. Then it starts going through the
oil that's poured out on the, the crown and down the the robe
and garments of Erin. And it's this blessing from
above, down below. And I was just thinking about
all the snow that you guys have gotten.
You guys have blessed us down in lower Michigan with the
abundance of rivers and, and water.
So I feel like even as you guys have been worshiping up here,
we've been communing together through weather down South and
yeah, we're, we're happy to be here.
I came today with a, a pastoral word and kind of a theological
lens to hand over to you guys. As I was listening and praying
with the Lord, I just, I really felt like primarily I want to
come and just shepherd hearts, offer a, a pastoral
encouragement. But then secondarily, I'm, I'm
both a pastor and theologian. So I also want to give you a
theological lens in which will help to shepherd your heart
moving forward. Sometimes we could think of
theology as the the dead and dusty books, but the way that I
see theology is actually it's listening to the God who speaks
to us. Our God is a self revealing God.
And sometimes getting a, a theological word gives us lenses
in which we can understand the common threads that go through
scripture. And I want to give you a common
thread. In fact, I hope that both the,
the question I give to you today and then the theological lens
that I give to today would haunt you as you go forward in, in all
the best ways, in the right ways of haunting, in the way that
Christ kind of haunts our consciousness when we hear his,
his parables and we go, what is that?
What does that mean? That's a good question that that
we can't get away from. And I, I kind of want these
things to just linger with you today.
So if you would join me in prayer, stand with me.
We're going to pray as we go through.
If you can. If you can't, it's all right.
And I like to to kind of embody our movements of prayer.
So if you could put your hand over your heart, Lord Jesus,
Father, Son, Holy Spirit, we recognize your presence here
today. We welcome your presence here
today. We long for your presence here
today. Would you help us to have eyes
to see what it is that you were doing in our midst?
Would you help us have eyes to see what you're doing in our
life? And by your Spirit, would you
equip us to be able to walk this out with you to participate in
what you're doing. I love putting my, my hand over
my heart when I pray and stay in this posture of prayer because
hopefully you, you can feel your heart beating inside of your
chest. And I, I just want to give you
an encouragement that, that Christ, especially in, in that
great outpouring of his Holy Spirit has put his life within
us. And now as you feel your heart
beating, you can realize that Christ is as intimately present
as your beating heart. You don't have to do anything to
muster up His presence. We simply turn in a tune and set
our awareness on where He is with us, what He is doing, a
myriad of things, and then we get to participate with that.
And that's today's message. So Lord, we thank you for it.
When you say Jesus thank you in Jesus mighty name, Amen.
You can take a seat. Sorry.
Give me one second. If I don't have my coffee, I'm
going to start losing my voice. This is my wife by the way, my
sleeping son Isaac. It actually worked out better.
Second service, first service. He was like running circles
around and up and down the aisle and which is also beautiful, but
sleeping child is peaceful. If you didn't get a handout in
the way and I encourage you to to grab one in the back.
They're made available. There's going to be hopefully
we'll get to a a larger portion of Romans that we're going to
read and to have it in front of you will help you to to stay
pressed in and alert. So the the pastoral word that I
I want to offer over to you. What I couldn't get away from is
this question, what if the very circumstances that you find
yourself in right here and now in your life, both highs and
lows, the pain points of your week, that maybe you've been
crying out to the Lord, you've been asking for Him to do
something in the circumstances. What if those circumstances are
the very place that God wants to actively form Christ into our
life, to actively massage the very life of Christ into our our
being, the fabric of our being, which hopefully by the end of
the service is that if that's foreign language to you, by the
end of the service, it's going to be very, very comfortable
language 'cause we're going to see it in the the writings of
Paul. It's in the Scriptures all over
the place. As I do my studies over the last
eight years, I've been digging in deep to the early church, the
ancient church, the 1st 500 years of the church.
Guys like funny names, Irenaeus and Athanasius and Maximus the
Confessor, awesome names. I wish we would bring some of
those back today. In fact, I tried naming my first
son after Athanasius and Maximus the Confessor, but my wife
wasn't having it. So he ended up being Samuel.
But as I go into the early church and as I think through
the, the lens in which I, I kind of was raised in, in a
evangelical context, I often thought of what happened last
week, the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I thought of it as you know, Christ is the, it's the great
exchange. He takes our sin, He offers us
forgiveness and sets us up in a beautiful way to receive
resurrection life to come. And the early church would say,
yes, all of that is is a part of it.
But the early church pressed it even deeper.
The early church moved it from a center in ourselves to a center
in Christ. And then everything was Christ
working it out from the inside out.
Christ didn't just take our sin, He took our very life.
He doesn't just give us forgiveness, He gives us his
very life. It's beautiful in Christ.
We've been. We've been united to God in his
person, and now he offers us up his very life.
This is how the church was talking for ages and ages and
ages. But as we get to our kind of
modern postmodern, individualized context, we
sometimes miss some of this language.
We don't know what to do with it.
It feels really odd to us. What does it mean that we are
united to Christ? What does it mean that he gives
us his own life when all of the world right now is telling us
you get to define you. So just go and exhort yourself
to work that out. And sometimes we can hear the
Christian message through the the individualized message.
And we, well, I've even heard preachers preach this.
This is what Jesus done, now what are you going to do for
him? This is what Christ has done on
your behalf. Now what are you going to do on
his behalf? In the early church that was
absolutely foreign. The early church didn't go what
are you going to do with Jesus? Because they didn't have a
picture of an absent Christ. When Christ ascends to the right
hand of the Father, it's not his escape from this world I love.
The Easter tide is not just a single day of Easter.
It's actually 50 days Easter going all the way up to
Pentecost with the ascension 40 days in.
So you have Easter, 40 days ascension, 10 more days
Pentecost, 3 distinct moments, one unified movement of God in
the resurrection. Christ is bodily raised,
defeating sin and death, putting it to the side and bringing
forth victorious newness of life.
But he's not done yet. He does 40 days of exhorting his
people on the Kingdom of God, and then he ascends.
And again, this is not his great escape.
He's not jet packing out of all the turmoil saying hey, hold on
tight, I'll be back. The ascension language is from
the Old Testament. Kings would ascend to their
throne, the high priest would ascend into the Holy of Holies.
That's what Christ is doing. He's not inactive.
In fact he is at rest, extremely active.
Just like when God creates all of creation and it says He rests
on the 7th day, you realize that even in His rest He was still
holding all things together by the power of His Word.
So as Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, He's
not on vacation, He's not in retirement, He is active and
present, says He ever lives to make intercession on our behalf.
He so desperately desires to put His life into us that 10 days
after the Ascension, He pours out His very spirit, His life to
go to the depths of our being and to work all of what He's
accomplished for us and secured for us from the inside out.
So what if the very circumstances that you find
yourself in is a very place that God by his Spirit is working the
life of Christ into your life. I'm in pastoral care and do
spiritual direction and I sit down with people on a a frequent
basis. And as I'm as I'm sitting and as
people are opening up and talking about the deep
wrestlings and desires and questions of their heart, more
often than not, it sounds like God's will is somewhere outside
those doors. But I'm not experiencing it
right here now. A lot of young adults go, I, I
know I have a calling on my life.
God has called me to do this thing, but I'm not in it right
now. So I can't be in God's will
until I'm in it out there somewhere when I get that job,
when I get that spouse, when I get fill in the blank or the
other side of it is I just don't understand where God is in this
because it's just pain and it feels like hell and turmoil.
That's the great benefit of of what Christ going to the cross.
So many things that Christ going to the cross did on our behalf.
One of them is Christ took up our entire life, the entire
human condition and plumbed the depths on the cross of human
despair, abandonment, brokenness, fear, turmoil,
experienced it all and then fills it with the life of God
that there's there's no further place we can fall that Christ
has not already gone to meet us there and to draw us up into
himself to put his very life within us.
That's good news on the cross amongst all the other things
that the cross is a picture of the cross is meeting us in the
pits of our despair and calling out, I'm still active to make
you more like me. I went there to meet you there
to give you my life and remove you from there.
Does that make sense? As I as I popped up from early
church studies and I go where is this in the scriptures, I
started reading again through this lens and started seeing
Paul been talking about this the whole time.
I just didn't know how to see it.
Listen with me Colossians, Colossians one since they're
sorry, Colossians 3, one and three.
Since then you have been raised with Christ.
Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the
right hand of the Father. Set your minds on things above,
not on things of this earth, for you have died, and your life is
now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life
returns, you also shall return with Him in glory.
Have you ever contemplated on this?
Have you ever meditated on this? This is really strange to our
individualistic culture, that I'm no longer trying to make
myself, that Christ has given me his own life, that it's no
longer, as Paul says in Galatians 220, I that live, but
Christ that live in me. Can we say with Paul that I have
been crucified with Christ Jesus, that my old man has been
put to death? So now the life I live, well,
it's actually Christ who's living in me in the life I live
in this flesh. I now live by the faith of the
Son of God who gave himself for me.
Realize this is a big shift. This isn't Christ did this for
you. So now what are you going to do
on your on his behalf? This is Christ did this for you
and it is now doing it in you and will never leave you or
forsake you. He's going to see what He has
started to its completion. He is the author and perfector
of our faith. Hebrews tells us so on your
sheets. What Christ did in His life and
ministry not only dealt with our sin, it reached to the very core
of what it means to be human. Christ took up our lives so He
could give us His very life. Our life has been united to
Christ's life. What has happened to Him has
happened to us and is being worked out in us by His Spirit.
That's important by His Spirit. Philippians 2 Paul says, Work
out your salvation with fear and trembling continues on, for it
is God who is at work in you. We're not left to our own
devices. This isn't just, hey, go on and
try and muster this up. This is, hey, Christ has done
everything on your behalf. Will you recognize what He's
doing right now and cooperate and participate with it?
Can we have eyes to see what He's doing in our midst here and
now in the pain points of life? Sometimes we desire that the
circumstances are going to change.
Sometimes they will, sometimes they won't for some time.
What the Lord desires is that we would change in the midst of
them, that He would form to the depths of our being the very
image and likeness of His Son. You see this God's supreme will
and calling for your life is that you would receive and be
conformed to the very life and likeness of His Son by the Holy
Spirit. Romans 829.
We love when we have trials to, to quote Romans 828, and it's a
beautiful, beautiful passage that God is working all things
together for those who love him, right?
And we we grab hold of that, but sometimes we fail to read on to
see what the good God is working out for those who love him.
He continues on and Paul says for those whom he foreknew and
also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son in order
that Christ might be the first born among many brethren.
Galatians 419. Paul's talking to Glacia and and
he's, he's bursting at the seams.
He says, my children, for whom I am again in the anguish of
childbirth, until Christ be formed in you.
We tend to picture the will of God as the things we do and the
places we go. But if we're not able to do the
things or go the places again, then the will of God is separate
in somewhere outside the doors. We got to go hunting it down.
Maybe we need another worship service.
Maybe we need another prayer time.
Maybe we need a. But the brilliant thing is, and
what Christ has done for us and what He has secured for us and
what He has placed in us by His living spirit means there is no
circumstance I could be in that I'm not touching the will of
God. If I would have eyes to see what
Christ is actively doing, if I would submit my life over for
Him to form His life on the inside of me, and then guess
what? Situations start changing
because I'm walking in newness of life.
In fact, if you've anything like me, there's many times where it
took the awakening of, Oh yeah, this is what Christ is doing.
Wait, I was misreading my circumstances because I'm pretty
large, knucklehead. And I start to experience
humility. I start to realize, man, the
argument that I might have been having with my wife, I was the
one who is wrong. I wanted God to change her.
And he's going, Nick, Nick, Nick, open up your eyes.
Will you see what I'm doing with you?
Can I transform you into my image and likeness?
And will you trust that I'm doing the same thing with your
wife? Right.
The Co worker at work, the boss at work, the sibling, the
parent, all of these different movements.
Will you? Will you cooperate with me?
Will you have eyes to see what it is that I'm doing in your
midst so that you can carry forth my life into the midst of
what you're experiencing? There's not a single movement in
our life that is not touching the will of God if we would just
be active and present to what He's doing.
We so want God to move and the things around us, and He will.
He cares about those things. He is a good Father.
He takes our needs and our desires to heart.
But man, He wants to translate our heart into the heart of
Christ. He wants to put His love into
the depths of our being. So that way, even if the
circumstances don't change, we do and we walk in a new way.
There's not a single moment within your life that God isn't
intimately present in actively working out the very life of
Christ offered over to you by His Spirit.
OK, one moment I need to remember when I need to be done
by. Awesome, good, I'm a talker.
I can just keep going. We could be here all day, but I
won't. I'll be mindful of the the
timeline. Hopefully this is, this is good
news for you. Hopefully you're, you're feeling
the, the weight being brushed off of your shoulders.
Because if it's about me seeing what Jesus has done and me going
out and trying to muster it up and doing it on my own cord, I'm
going to walk in turmoil. I'm going to have a lot of
anxiety coming in. I found last year at a a thrift
store a little Pennant cross that on one side I had a
beautiful cross and then on the backside it said Christ is
counting on me. Realize the weight that that
thing would have hanging on your your neck.
That is not the gospel. The gospel is not Christ is
counting on you. The gospel is.
We can count and rely on Christ who is actively at work in our
life even today. That as I go out into the world,
He's there with me and I get to learn how to walk in step with
his Spirit. Paul's two favorite phrases #1
in all of Paul's literature is in Christos, in the the Greek,
in Christ, that we are united to Christ, that our life is now in
Christ. You will see it all throughout.
That's why I'm saying I want this to haunt you.
That as you go into his prison letters, you go there it is.
I have eyes to see because it's all over.
The other one is walking by the Spirit in step of the Spirit,
the life in the Spirit, the the gifts of the Spirit.
Like Paul is talking about this life that Christ has secured for
us that we are in and then the life that Christ has deposited
us into us in the Holy Spirit. It's all throughout and he's
inviting us into this journey of going.
Would you have eyes to see what the Lord is working in your
life? One of my favorite stories from
the Old Testament is Elijah and his his servant.
Elijah, his Elijah's servant are being surrounded in encampment
by all these these armies of the nations around them.
And Elijah's servant is outside and he's looking around and his
knees are shaking because they're being surrounded by some
pretty aggressive armies. And Elijah says to him, hey, you
have no need to worry. Those who are with us are
greater than those who are against us.
Elisha's servants looking at him going, those who are with us, do
you have a mouse in your pocket? Like what's going on here?
So Elisha prays a simple prayer. Lord, would you give him eyes to
see? Would you open up his eyes to be
able to see your hand at work? And the scriptures say that his
eyes are enlightened, scales fall off, he looks around, and
whereas before he just saw the armies of the earth on the
mountaintops, he saw the Angel armies that were in camping
around, that those who were with him were greater than those who
were against him. And all of a sudden, shaking
knees became steady. This is what the Spirit is
inviting us into. Would you have eyes to see on
your sheet I give you just a couple questions that we could
bring into our our daily prayers versus you know, it's good to
pray that situations change the prayers of righteous people
avail much and we have a crowd of righteous people in here.
You should be praying over these things.
Absolutely. We pray over the city.
We pray over circumstances, but I invite you to invite some
prayers of Lord. What are you doing down at the
the bottom. It's in bold on the first page.
Lord, what are you doing here? A really good prayer.
When I get home from work and I'm I'm stressed out from just
an exhausting day of work. You guys have been there and my
2 toddlers want to jump on me and it's like over stimulating
and all of a sudden I'm about to break.
As a a father, I could pause and go, oh Lord, what are you doing
here? Where are you in this midst?
Would you give me eyes to see? One of the beautiful things that
the Lord constantly tells me about my boys is I just hear the
Lord's invitation. Let the children come to me.
He had this, this grace to allow the children to be children to
to sleep and snore over on the side.
It's a beautiful thing. I love it, the sweet little Coos
and snores of a A2 year old. Let the children come to me.
I can cooperate with that. That gives me peace.
I can now I could participate with the the Lord allowing my
children to be children and I can receive them as they are.
Lord, what are you doing in me? Well, most of the time it's
crucifying my need for tidiness. I could tidy things up after
they go down to bed, but He starts to do this in me and I
can receive His movements. I could learn to participate
with them. I don't always do it well.
I don't always pause and ask and sometimes I break.
I love you, buddy. Those movements when I I feel
misunderstood and I want to justify myself.
I want to prove myself. I'm about to step back into my
old way and doing it on my own accord.
I could pause and say, Lord, what are you doing?
Speaking life into you? I'm encouraging you on who you
are, that the world might misrepresent you, but you have
been perfectly represented in Christ before the Father.
Would you receive that here and now?
Somebody cuts you off on the highway, right?
You want to bless them with a specific finger?
You pause, Lord, what are you doing right now?
These are things, these are ways that that all of a sudden now
I'm participating and cooperating with the will of
God. And now every moment becomes
opportunity to pray and receive from God above, from Christ who
is seated at the right hand of the Father as am I.
Ephesians 2 says You also are seated in heavenly places with
Christ Jesus. So my life is rooted there.
So then he could put his life into me here and now instead of,
you know, saluting the the guy who just cut me off.
I bless him, give him the right away and maybe I move over to
the slow lane and I no longer have to be the fast one.
Anyway, he starts to work Christ into me at a young guy, I'll
just call him Adam for the sake of the the story who would come
in and I was on office duty for the day and I sit down with him
and his world was just it felt like it was in shambles.
He had just wrecked his car the week before his his relationship
was up in in turmoil. His he was living back home with
his parents that was in turmoil. And after, after sitting and
hearing his story for a bit, I just asked him the question,
where do you think God might be in the midst of all this?
And at first he didn't have an answer.
And, and he had talked about a story how three years prior he
had actually died of a pretty serious drug overdose.
And he said in the story, he said, Siri saved my life.
I had to call out to Siri to get the, the ambulance there.
And then when they got there, I was dead on the spot and they
had to resuscitate me and bring me back.
And I, I brought the story back up and I so it, the thing that
we could rest assured on is that Christ is active in every moment
of our life. There's not a single moment of
our life that has not been touched by the life of Christ.
So why don't we just ask the Lord, Lord, where were you in
that situation? Because his great praise was
that Siri saved him. And all of a sudden he gets into
this prayer and he gets a revelation of it wasn't Siri
that saved me. This is the hand of the Lord
intervening on my behalf, leading me and guiding me.
He said it was actually after that that I had the wake up call
and realized that I needed to return to the faith that I left
when I was a child. The Lord is all over it, drawing
him in. Now the Lord didn't cause the
the incident, but man did He use the incident to bring him to the
place that he was. And once he saw Christ's
activity and presence there, as we went back into prayer for the
situations that he was in, he started to see the hand of God
already at work. And that was no longer him
trying to hold his life together.
It was actually Christ who was upholding in him.
We live and move and have our being.
And now he got to see the hand of God and just walk in step
with it. Again, the weight off the
shoulders. He left my office an hour and a
half after coming in with severe anxiety, talking 1,000,000 miles
a second. He left with peace, Shalom.
And we continued to walk over the next six months and see as
the Lord was just showing up for him and showing him, here's my
hand in your life. Will you bless my hand?
Will you learn to cooperate with the Spirit, to walk in step with
the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the
flesh. Paul says in Galatians 5.
But you will bear forth good fruit, Lovejoy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.
Lord, what are you doing here? Lord, what are you doing in me
and how might I receive and participate in your presence and
activity? Originally, when I was sitting
down, I was I was building out. I want to do this movement with
you guys. I, I'd heard from the Lord what,
what I should deliver and I was going to do a Romans 8 study and
as a theologian, you sit down, you start writing and after one
evening I, I wake up the next morning, I open it up and
realize it was 13 pages long. I cannot do that to you guys.
But sometimes the, the beautiful thing.
Some people like to critique the message and I I I give you the
the movement that it is a paraphrase, but Eugene Peterson
was a pastor and a theologian, also a a language scholar.
And I think one moment while I readjust there we go.
Sometimes I open up the message and the way that Eugene has
unpacked the original language for us to put it in such
theological movements, but such relational and easily acceptable
terms is just brilliant. And the other night I opened up
to Romans 8 and I wrote it out of the message and just realized
I just want to close our service out and read this over you
realizing that this is this is Paul's language for us today.
And with all that we just talked about in mind, I hope you'll
start to see where some of these movements are really starting to
come out. And then as you go through
Paul's letters again, I pray this haunts you.
I pray you can't help but to see that Christ is giving us his
life through and through and through, and it's piercing us to
our core. Something grand and mysterious
is happening, if we would have eyes to see.
So if you have your sheets, this is on your sheet.
They will put it up on the screen.
It is a lot of reading, but if you would bear with me.
Romans 8 with the arrival of Jesus the Messiah, that fateful
dilemma is resolved, The dilemma of wrestling with ourselves,
trying to do it on their own accord.
Romans 6-7 number and eight, those who have entered into
Christ's being here for us no longer have to live under a
continuous low lying black cloud getting here.
See what Eugene is doing amazing movements crisis.
Emmanuel, God with us in his ascent to the right hand of the
Father. He is not now God not with us.
He is still God here with us now, the spirit of life or
sorry, we don't have to live under a continuous low lying
black cloud. A new power is in operation.
The spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has
magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a faded
lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
God went for the jugular when He sent His own Son.
He didn't deal with the problem as something remote or
unimportant in His son Jesus. He personally took on the human
condition. Enter the disordered mass of
struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all.
The law code re weakened as it always was by fractured human
nature could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin
instead of a deep healing of it. And now with the log code asked
for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of
redoubling down on our own efforts, simply embrace what the
Spirit is doing in US. Those who think they could do it
on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral
muscles, but never get around to exercising it in real life.
Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is
in them, living and breathing God.
Obsession with self in these matters as a dead end.
Attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious,
free life. Focusing on the self is the
opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in
self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than
God. That person ignores who God is
and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being
ignored. But if God himself has taken up
residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of
yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not
welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit
of Christ won't know what we're talking about.
But you who welcome him, in whom he dwells, even though you still
experience all the limitations of sin, even though you yourself
experience life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it,
that if the alive and present God who raised Jesus from the
dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he
did in Christ, bringing you alive to himself.
When God lives and breathes in you, and he does as surely as he
did in Jesus, you are delivered from that dead life with his
Spirit living in you. Your body will be as alive as
Christ. He's talking about the alive and
reigning Christ today, this resurrection or so.
Don't you see that you don't owe this old do it yourself life 1
Red sent. There's nothing in it for us,
nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it
a decent burial and get on with your new life.
God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and
places to go. He will lead you.
This resurrection life you received from God is not timid,
not a grave tending life. It is adventurously expectant,
greeting God with childlike. What's next, Papa?
God's Spirit touches our spirit, confirms who we really are.
We know who He is, we know who we are, Father and children, and
we know we are going to get what is coming to us.
An unbelievable inheritance, Christ himself.
We go through exactly what Christ goes through.
If we go through hard times with them, then we're certainly going
to go through the good times with them.
How magnificent, How magnificent.
God doesn't leave us to our own devices.
He places his very life to the depths of our being.
And now we get to learn what it looks like to walk in step with
that. And part of that looks like just
the awareness of going God, what are you doing today?
How might I participate with it? I'm going to continue on.
We're going to skip a portion. Romans 8 is just beautiful.
Started to talk about the Spirit and what the Spirit's doing in
you and groans of of prayer that when we don't know what to pray,
the Spirit prays on our behalf. Like it's there through and
through. But he closes out, at least in
this portion. He decided from the outset to
shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as
the life of His Son. The sun stands first in the line
of humanity He restored. We see the original intended
shape of our lives there in Him. After God made that decision of
what His children should be like, He followed it up by
calling people by name. After He called them by name, He
set them on a solid basis with Him.
And then after getting them established, He stayed with them
to the end, gloriously completing what He had begun.
This is gloriously good news, friends, and I'm here to tell
you from the Lord today that it's true.
It's available and present. So I have a quick invitation to
give to you is if you would close your eyes and just turn
your awareness to the Lord, you might say, Lord, you are here,
what are you doing right now? Gone
and you listen and you wait. Jesus says, my sheep hear my
voice, the voice of another. They will not follow.
Hearing God is the most natural thing for the human condition in
Christ. Lord, what are you doing?
You might take that circumstance that you found as a pain point
this week and you might hold it up before the Lord, and you just
say, Lord, what are you doing there?
What are you doing in this circumstance?
And Lord, what are you doing in me?
What are you working out in me? She helped me to see.
And how might I participate in what it is that you are at work
doing? I trust the Lord is making His
activity and presence known to many in here and I I trust that
He's going to continue to do so. As you go out into the world
from here, if you have not received Christ Jesus as your
Lord and Savior, then I could tell you confidently that I know
what he is doing in this moment. He is working to soften your
heart for reception of his life in your life.
And it's simple. Ask the the entire church
family, would you would you pray with us, with anybody who who is
not also taking this step and put your faith in Christ.
Join in with us today. This is a marking moment in your
life as you're learning what it looks like to participate in
Christ's movement on your behalf.
And would you guys out loud say, Lord Jesus, I receive you, You
are God, you are Lord, and I am not.
That's good news. I receive it.
Ioffer you my old life, my old ways, my old rhythms, habits.
Would you help me to put them to death and would you help me to
receive your new life that you're placing in me?
Well, Father, I thank you. I thank you for each and every
person in here today. God, I know that you are
intimately present and at work in their lives.
And Father, I pray that as they go forward, You would give them
eyes to see, ears to hear, a spirit of wisdom and revelation
to be able to pick up on what You are actively doing on the
landscape of their circumstances, their life
circumstances, in their relational capacities, God.
And they would be able to see and bless your hand at work and
participate in what it is that You are doing.
I bless them. If you would stand, I have a
benediction to speak over you. I'll start this way and then
we'll go into the the standard blessing.
But you are one in whom Christ dwells and delights.
You are living in the all powerful, unshakable Kingdom of
the triune God of grace. His Kingdom is not in need.
It's not in lack, and it's not in turmoil, and neither are you.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May He make His face to shine upon you and He surprised you
with His grace, favour and mercies.
As you go into your week and walk this message out, Go and be
the church. God bless you guys.
Thank you.