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There is a verse so familiar it has nearly lost its edge. If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land." 2 Chronicles 7:14 We quote it at prayer gatherings. We post it in times of national crisis. And somewhere in the repetition, we've let it become a banner rather than a summons. But read it again slowly. God isn't speaking to the culture. He isn't addressing the government, the media, or the people outside the church. He is speaking to His people. The ones called by His name. The ones who already know Him. The healing of the land begins with the return of the Church. The Neuroscience of Turning Your brain was not designed for stagnation. It was designed for return. Neuroplasticity — the brain's God-given capacity to rewire, reshape, and renew — does not require dramatic transformation overnight. Research consistently shows that one degree of sustained change, repeated over time, creates entirely new neural architecture. A year from now, you are not the same person you are today. The only question is whether the drift is intentional or accidental. This is not a self-help principle. This is how God built you. Clinical & Theological Note Romans 12:2 didn't say be instantly transformed. It said be transformed by the renewing of your mind — an ongoing, present-tense process. The Greek word anakainosis implies a continuous renovation. Not a moment. A direction. 2 Chronicles 7:14 is that direction. Four Movements, One Degree Each. God gives four invitations in this verse. Not a program. Not a 30-day challenge. Four postures of the heart — each one a single degree of return. Humble Yourselves. Not self-contempt. Not performance. Simply the honest acknowledgment that you have drifted — from Him, from others, from the person you were when His love first undid you. Humility is the neurological reset button. It interrupts the default mode network's obsessive self-referential loop and opens the mind to something outside itself. It is, quite literally, the beginning of change. Pray. Not eloquently. Not lengthily. Just back toward Him. Re-establish the connection that has grown quiet. The brain encodes what it rehearses. If anxiety is rehearsed, it grows. If communion is rehearsed, it grows. One degree: five minutes in the morning, spoken aloud, before the noise begins. Seek His Face. Not His hand — what He can give. His face — who He is. This is the difference between a transactional faith and a first-love faith. You know the difference. You felt it once. That hunger, that singular focus, that sense that nothing else quite satisfied. Seek that. Your nervous system was wired for attachment, and it will attach to whatever you consistently turn toward. Turn From Your Wicked Ways. One thing. Not everything at once. The research on behavior change is unambiguous — wholesale transformation fails. Targeted, specific, small pivots succeed. What is the one thing, if turned from, would put you one degree closer to the person God made you to be? Name it. Tell someone. Begin there. A Year From Now One degree doesn't feel like much standing still. But a plane departing Los Angeles one degree off course doesn't land in New York — it lands somewhere in the Atlantic. Direction, sustained over time, determines destination. If you humble yourself today — just today — and do it again tomorrow, your brain will begin to rewire around that posture. If you return to prayer — not perfectly, but persistently — the neural pathways of communion will deepen. If you seek His face in the small moments, the hunger will return. And if you turn — not from everything, but from one thing — you will find yourself, a year from now, standing in a different place than you are standing today. This is not self-improvement. This is sanctification. And God promised to meet it. "He will hear. He will forgive. He will heal." 2 Chronicles 7:14 Not the land first. You first. A Word for Those Who Feel Far Come back. One degree. Today. The healing of our communities begins with the return of His people — one heart, one household, one degree at a time. If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to find their way back.

Neurotheology and the Practice of Presence Whether or not you pray, your brain is doing something when you sit in silence, slow your breathing, and direct your attention toward something larger than yourself. Neuroscientists call it a shift in default mode network activity -- a measurable reorganization of how your brain allocates attention when it moves from reactive processing to something more intentional, more still. Contemplatives have called it communion for centuries. The research and the ancient practice are describing the same phenomenon from opposite ends of the same corridor. That convergence is not an accident. "The question isn't whether silence does something to you. The question is — what are you directing that silence toward?" This post is for anyone who has ever wondered whether prayer is more than wishful thinking — and for those who already know it is, but want to understand more deeply why the architecture of their mind was built for it. PART ONE Your Brain Was Not Built for the Pace You Are Living At The prefrontal cortex — the seat of your capacity for reflection, moral reasoning, long-range planning, and genuine relational attunement — does not function well under chronic stress. It is suppressed by it. When your nervous system is in a sustained state of low-grade threat, your brain's higher functions go offline in measurable ways. You become more reactive, less curious, less capable of the kind of presence that your relationships and your soul require. This is not a character flaw. It is neurobiology. What reverses it is not more effort. It is stillness — specifically, the kind of embodied, attentive, directed stillness that prayer, at its most basic, actually is. When you slow your breathing, quiet external input, and fix your attention on something beyond your own anxiety, you are initiating a parasympathetic state that restores prefrontal access. Your capacity for wisdom literally comes back online. "Be still, and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10 The Hebrew imperative here — raphah — means to release, to let drop, to cease striving. It is not passive. It is an active yielding of the nervous system's grip on control. And the reward is knowledge. Not information. Knowledge — the kind that only comes when the noise goes quiet enough to hear something true. PART TWO WHAT CHANGES IN THE BRAIN DURING PRAYER Neuroimaging studies across the last two decades have documented consistent changes in brain activity during contemplative practice. The parietal lobes — responsible for the felt sense of where "I" end and "other" begins — show decreased activity. The frontal lobes, associated with focused attention and intention, show increased engagement. The amygdala, your brain's threat-detection center, quiets. In the language of interpersonal neurobiology, what you are doing when you pray is moving from a state of autonomic defense into what Dan Siegel calls integration — the coordinated flow of energy and information across differentiated parts of the system. In theological language, you are moving from fragmentation toward wholeness. These are not two descriptions of two different things. They are two languages pointing at the same transformation. "When you genuinely encounter the presence of God, your nervous system is not unaffected. It was designed for exactly this." "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect." Romans 12:2 The word translated "renewing" — anakainōsis — describes a qualitative transformation from the inside out. Not behavior modification. Not willpower. A renovation of the mind's very operating architecture. What Paul is describing in theological terms, neuroscience is now documenting in the language of synaptic change, cortical reorganization, and neuroplasticity. The mechanism was always there. The invitation was always this. PART THREE WHY DISTRACTED PRAYER STILL COUNTS One of the most common confessions I hear in the counseling room — from believers and skeptics alike — is some version of this: I can't quiet my mind. My thoughts won't stop. I don't know if I'm doing it right. Here is what the neuroscience and the theology agree on: the act of returning your attention — of noticing your mind has wandered and bringing it back — is not a failure of prayer. It is the practice of prayer. Every return is a repetition. Every repetition deepens a groove. The brain changes not through one perfect moment of stillness but through the accumulated weight of thousands of imperfect returns. Grace operates the same way. It is not the achievement of stillness that matters most. It is the direction of your face. "Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you." James 4:8 The initiative is yours. The response is His. And your nervous system, designed by the same God who authored that promise, will register the difference over time. THE PRACTICE IS THE POINT A CLOSING WORD YOU WERE MADE FOR THIS KIND OF QUIET The world you are living in is not designed to produce the kind of person you most want to be. Its pace fragments attention. Its demands exhaust the prefrontal resources that make you genuinely present to those you love and to the God who made you. And the solution it offers — more productivity, more distraction, more noise — only accelerates the depletion. Prayer is not an escape from your life. It is the only practice that restores the capacity to actually live it — with clarity, with presence, with a nervous system capable of wisdom instead of only reaction. You were built for communion. Your brain carries the evidence. The question is whether you will make the space for what you were already made to receive. If you are carrying something that silence alone cannot hold — I work with complex presentations where neuroscience and faith meet in the same room.

There is a particular kind of shame that shows up in my office more than almost any other. It sounds like this: “Everyone talks about feeling God’s presence. I don’t feel anything. I must be doing something wrong.” For most of the people who say this to me, the problem isn’t their faith. It’s their nervous system running a prediction it hasn’t updated yet. NOT A SCAR. A MISCALIBRATED ALARM.. For a decade, the dominant popular image of trauma has been that the body stores it — that a wound gets lodged somewhere in the tissue, waiting to be released through the right technique. It’s a compelling picture. It’s also, according to newer work in computational neuroscience, not quite accurate — and it’s drawn real, credible pushback from researchers who’ve taken a closer look at the evidence. The more precise model — and the one I’ve moved toward in my own clinical thinking — comes from predictive processing. Your brain isn’t a passive recorder of experience. It’s constantly generating predictions about what’s about to happen and updating those predictions against incoming information. After trauma, the brain doesn’t file the event away in the body like a scar. It over-weights the danger prediction. It starts assigning excessive confidence to threat, even in rooms that are actually safe, with people who mean no harm, in moments — like prayer, like worship, like stillness — that should feel like refuge. What’s disrupted isn’t tissue. It’s flexibility — the brain’s capacity to fluidly move between different states depending on what a moment actually calls for. Researchers describe this loss of flexibility as a collapse of metastability — the loss of a system’s ability to hold together while still moving freely between states. “In him all things hold together.” Colossians 1:17 I find that image theologically striking. Coherence was never meant to be something we manufacture through effort. It was meant to be sustained. Trauma disrupts that sustaining coherence at the level of the nervous system; it doesn’t touch the deeper truth that all things, including a dysregulated brain, are still held. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive — and it’s also not permanent. Predictions can be updated. That’s the whole basis for healing, and it’s also, not coincidentally, the shape of Lamentations 3:22–23: His mercies are new every morning. Renewal isn’t a technique here. It’s a declared fact about who God is, offered on a daily rhythm — which happens to be exactly the rhythm a stuck prediction needs in order to change. WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS LIKE IT SHOULD This distinction — stored wound versus miscalibrated prediction — isn’t just a technical correction for neuroscience nerds. It changes what we tell people in pain. “Your body is holding onto this” invites people to go looking for the trauma somewhere inside themselves, as if the goal is excavation. “Your brain is still predicting danger” invites something different: retraining. Not digging up a buried thing, but teaching a hypervigilant system, patiently and repeatedly, that this room, this relationship, this moment of prayer, is actually safe enough to update its guess. I’d also gently push back on a popular version of the body-based trauma narrative that can, without meaning to, crowd out the mind and heart — as though healing only happens through sensation and somatic release, and reflection, meaning-making, and relationship are secondary. Scripture never separates the two. We are not bodies with wounds attached, or souls trapped in unreliable flesh. We are integrated — body, mind, and spirit called into the same healing. This is where Dan Allender’s decades of work in narrative-focused trauma care become genuinely useful, even though his lens is theological and relational rather than neurobiological. Allender’s model holds that healing happens as a person re-enters their story in the presence of others who can name both the wound and the goodness still intact underneath it — not excavation, but re-narration, held in relationship. Put in the language of prediction: a stuck threat-forecast doesn’t update through insight alone. It updates through repeated, safe, relationally-held experience — which is exactly what a well-told, well-witnessed story provides the brain. Neuroscience explains why the forecast got stuck. Narrative work, done in safe company, is one of the ways it learns to change. WHERE THIS MEETS THEOLOGY I’ve worked with complex dissociative presentations for over sixteen years, and one thing I want every pastor, every small group leader, and every well-meaning friend to understand: a nervous system stuck in a threat prediction is not a spiritual weakness. It is, more often than not, the last honest trace of a protection that once made total sense. EMDR works, when it works, not because it dislodges something buried in tissue, but because it gives the brain repeated, safe opportunities to update its prediction — to learn, through structured processing, that the danger it keeps forecasting already happened and is not still happening. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” - Psalm 147:3 Stated as something He does, not something conditional on the sufferer getting the technique right. The therapy is the means. The healing itself belongs to Him. I find Scripture strikingly compatible with this reframe more broadly. Psalm 139 says God formed our inward parts, knit us together — He is not surprised by a nervous system that learned to over-predict danger, because He built the very system capable of learning and re-learning in the first place. Philippians 1:6 promises the One who began a good work will carry it to completion — not instantly, not through willpower alone, but through process. Updating a prediction takes repetition. So does sanctification. WHAT ACTUALLY HELPS THE FORECAST CHANGE If trauma is a threat-prediction stuck on repeat, healing is whatever gives the brain safe, repeated evidence that the forecast is wrong. That happens through more paths than any one modality can claim alone — which is itself a clue that the real mechanism is the change in flexibility, not any single technique. Graded, structured exposure — cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure, EMDR — works by walking a person back into the feared material in small enough doses that the brain can update instead of flood. Mindful attention to bodily sensation works the same way, though it has to be titrated carefully; for someone with severe trauma, going straight into the body can overwhelm rather than correct, so the pace matters as much as the practice. Movement and exercise, and simple absorbing, skillful engagement — what researchers call flow — retrain the brain’s capacity to shift states at all, which is often the deeper injury underneath any single symptom. And there’s a gentler entry point worth naming, because not everyone is ready for exposure-based work on day one: self-compassion as a clinical strategy, not just a nice sentiment. Aundi Kolber’s popular framework — “try softer” instead of white-knuckling through — argues that a nervous system in survival mode cannot do its healing work under pressure; safety and gentleness have to come first, because force just re-triggers the very threat response we’re trying to resolve. I’d frame that a little differently than she does — I don’t think the trauma is “stored” in the body waiting for gentleness to release it — but the clinical instinct is sound either way: a hypervigilant system responds to kindness before it responds to willpower. "A Bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out." Isaiah 42:3 And Zephaniah 3:17 goes further — God rejoicing over His people and quieting them with His love, not with pressure. Gentleness isn’t a therapeutic trend here. It’s a description of God, stated as fact, long before anyone had language for nervous systems at all. Underneath all of it is relationship. Curt Thompson’s work on interpersonal neurobiology makes a case I find more clinically precise than most: our nervous systems were built to regulate in connection with other nervous systems, not in isolation. A prediction of danger gets corrected fastest and most durably in the presence of a safe other — a therapist, a spouse, a small group, a church community that can hold the story without flinching. “It is not good for man to be alone.” Genesis 2:18 That’s not a modern therapeutic insight so much as a very old one. It predates the fall entirely — not a response to sin or trauma, but a stated truth about how humans were made, from the very beginning, before anything had gone wrong. And for the reader who has been failed by every human “safe other” available to them, Hebrews 4:15 offers something further still: a High Priest who is not distant from human weakness but was tested in every way as we are. Thompson’s neuroscience explains why co-regulation matters. Scripture supplies the one relationship that can never ultimately fail to provide it. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE PERSON SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU If you are the person reading this whose body won’t cooperate with your desire to feel close to God: you are not spiritually deficient. Your nervous system is still running an old forecast. Now it needs help — patient, repeated, often professionally guided help — learning that safety is possible, so that the forecast can finally change. If you are the pastor, the friend, the spouse: the most spiritually faithful thing you can offer someone in this state is not a better argument for God’s nearness. It’s patience with their pace, and a referral to someone trained to help a stuck prediction find its way back to rest.

David faced fear his whole life, and his only confidence was in God himself. Think about it, a middle-school boy with some scraggly sheep sees a mountain lion or a bear. He's got a club and a slingshot. Wouldn't you be scared? Then he faced nine-foot Goliath. He is a young teenager, who annoyed his brothers. They mocked him. He took a slingshot and five stones and cut off his head. That had to be scary at first. 20-year old David fought in the Israeli army. He was touted as killing 10's of thousands in hand-to-hand combat. That had to be scary. But then he faced a terrifying enemy he never expected, King Saul. When he left Saul, he left behind his best friend and his wife. David fled from Saul for almost a decade (7-10 years). Saul hunted him like an animal to Nob, the place where the tabernacle stood (Psalm 52) where he wanted to seek God's will, grab Goliath's sword and beg for bread for his starving men. He was chased to caves of Adullam, the wilderness of En Gedi, and finally to Philistine territory where he had to pretend to be a madman to gain entry. Psalm 27, a psalm written by David, is an example of Hebrew poetry. Instead of rhyming words, David rhymed thoughts. THE LORD IS MY LIGHT AND MY SALVATION: WHOM SHALL I FEAR? THE LORD IS THE STRENGTH OF MY LIFE: OF WHOM SHALL I BE AFRAID? Light is utilized to see and be aware of one's surroundings amid the darkness.. 186,000 miles per second. One of my dear friends, a Vietnam vet was buried alive, clawing his way out to safety. Andy knew the light promised rescue, air and light. Light brings: Purity, power, direction and hope "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12), He is claiming that deliverance from darkness comes through God. Salvation, as seen in Psalm 27:1, can also be thought of as deliverance. David utilizes three terms to describe God as the Deliverer: light, salvation, and stronghold. If God is David's Deliverer, whom should he fear? Don't you want Jesus to shine His light on you today?

“And beginning with Moses and all the prophets He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the scriptures.” “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for Moses wrote of Me.” “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill the law…” “…the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy…” We sing in one of our Christmas carols “Come Thou long expected Jesus.” The first words from Mary’s lips were, “He raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of David His servant – As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from old . “ Lk 1:69-70 The most dominant theme in the Bible is the person of the Messiah, the Redeemer, the Christ. The Old Testament anticipates Christ. The gospels manifest Him. The book of Acts proclaims Him. The epistles explain Him. Revelation awaits His return. One of the first Sunday School ideas bestowed upon a child is “the New is the Old contained. The Old is the New explained.” It is trite because it is true and oft repeated. In prophecy Christ was anticipated. The Messiah. The Chosen One. The seed of woman who would crush the serpent’s head. (Gen. 3:15) The one who would give rest from the curse. (Gen. 5:29) The seed of Abraham who would bless the nations. (Gen. 12:3) The son of Judah to whom the scepter belonged (Gen. 49:10) The one who like Moses would stand between God and men. (Deut. 18:15-19) The star of the king who would arise from Israel. (Num. 24:17) The Davidic descendant whose kingdom would have no end (2 Sam. 7:12-16) and come forth from Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2) who would be betrayed (Zech. 11:7-14) who would die for man’s sins (Is. 53) who would rise from the dead (Ps. 16:9-10) ascend to Heaven (Ps. 110:1) bring salvation to the Gentile nations (Deut. 32:21) return and judge the world and establish the kingdom of God. (PS. 110:2; Zech. 12:10) He is also seen as pre-incarnate in the “angel of the Lord” who continually appears in the Old Testament to defend, lead and deliver Israel. Whenever he appears he is recognized as God and yet is distinct from God as he speaks to and of God. And yet he disappears after the book of Zechariah and is never seen again as there is no need for a “theophany” or appearance of God since man has an “incarnation” of God, when God enters into humanity and becomes a man and unites himself with man forever. The lesser glory of the angel of the Lord will disappear in the greater glory of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ is also prefigured in the pattern of the Tabernacle and the symbols of the Old Testament worship. Christ is called “Christ our Passover” and “the lamb of God that bears away the sin of the world.” His body is called the parted veil that allows access to God. His sacrifice is called the “mercy seat” that propitiates God’s wrath. He is our high priest that enters within the veil. Rightly does the author of Hebrews call the Old Testament a “copy, shadow and pattern of the good things to come.” Christ is also seen as the purpose of Old Testament law. Its purpose is not to be a final set of rungs of a moral ladder whereby we can gain access to heaven on our own. Rather the law is to show us our sin and drive us to our need of Christ’s salvation. “The law came in that transgression might increase, but where sin increased grace abounded all the more… through Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 5:20 21) “The law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ….” (Gal. 3:24) And Christ also fulfills the Old Testament promises. A prophecy tells of what is coming. Promises tell of why. That of God’s veracity. Paul said, “Christ has become a servant to the circumcision (i.e. Israel) on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers…” (Rom. 15:8) “For as many as are the promises of God, in Him they are yes…”(2 Cor. 1:20) Indeed is Christ called “the Amen.” (Rev. 3:14) “He hath raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of David His servant as He spoke by the mouth of His hold prophets from of old.” Luke 1:69-70 Let all God’s people say, “Amen” to our Incomparable Christ.

Broken relationships are painful. Is there any chance God might change His mind and break up with you? Is there any chance you might do something that would cause God to want to break up with you? Romans 8:31-39 Have you ever received a “Dear John” letter? I have. Dear John letter: Dear John, By the time you read this I’ll be ______. I am sorry for doing this, but ______. I know this might come as a bit of a _____, because I think you are a bit of a _____, and I don’t think we are right for each other. Anyway, I want to date _____. But I still want to be _____. We can totally _____. But please don’t _____ like last time. I won’t even make an issue of the _____ you owe me, or the fact that you _____. So take care of yourself and _____. (Insert your name here) In your wildest dreams could you believe that you could do something that would cause God to send you a Dear John letter? SLIDE: A Marine in Afghanistan recently received a letter from his girlfriend back home: Dear Ricky, I can no longer continue our relationship. The distance between us is just too great. I must admit that since you’ve been gone I have cheated on you twice, and it’s not fair to either of us. I’m sorry. Please return the picture of me that I sent to you. Love, Becky The Marine asked his fellow Marines for any snapshots they could spare of their girlfriends, sisters, ex-girlfriends, aunts, cousins etc. In addition to the picture of Becky, Ricky included all the other pictures of the pretty gals he had collected. There were 57 photos in that envelope….along with this note: Dear Becky, I’m so sorry, but I can’t quite remember who you are. Please take your picture from the pile, and send the rest back to me. Take Care, Ricky Broken relationships are painful. Is there any chance God might change His mind and break up with you? Is there any chance you might do something that would cause God to want to break up with you? SLIDE: KEY VERSE: Romans 8:35: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? The answer revealed in this passage is Nothing! and No one! We are locked into God’s love—securely—forever. READ ROMANS 8:31: What, then, shall we say in response to this? What is “This”? The previous eight chapters of Romans? Review Romans God’s plan for us that spans all eternity? How does He love me? SLIDE:Foreknowledge: What Does It Do To Your Heart To Know That God knew you intimately long before you were born. SLIDE:Predestination: God predestined from the very foundation of the cosmos that everyone would one day be conformed to the image of His Son Jesus Christ. SLIDE: Calling: God calls us to enter into His eternal plan for our lives. SLIDE:Justification: Justification is the gift of worth. SLIDE: Glorification: The “good work” of salvation that God began in us before the foundation of the cosmos will one day culminate in our Christlikeness. SLIDE: ROMANS 8:31: What, then, shall we say in response to this? Answer: SLIDE: Paul’s response: “If God is for me, who can be against me?!!” SLIDE: BLACKBOARD: Will I make it? What about all the years between the believer’s conversion and his consummation? Is there not a possibility that during all trials and tribulations that something will go wrong which will cause him or her to forfeit his salvation? Of course we’ll make it! BLACKBOARD: Agape, philos, eros, storge. Agape recovered to describe God’s divine love for us. Agape is sacrificial and unconditional. Agape never quits. Agape loves the unlovable. Mary Ann Bird writes: I grew up knowing I was different, and I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate, and when I started school, my classmates made it clear to me how I looked to others: a little girl with a misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth, and garbled speech. When schoolmates asked, “What happened to your lip?” I’d tell them I’d fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. Somehow it seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to have been born different. I was convinced that no one outside my family could love me. That was until my second-grade teacher—Mrs. Leonard. Annually we had a hearing test…. We stood against the door and covered one ear. Mrs. Leonard sitting at her desk would whisper, and we would repeat it back if we could hear it—things like “The sky is blue” or “Do you have new shoes?” Finally it was my turn. The next seven words changed my life. Mrs. Leonard whispered, “I wish you were my little girl.” God says to every person deformed by sin, “I wish you were my little girl.” When we receive Christ and we are. If you have yet to receive Christ, today is the day. He will love you forever; you will never receive a Dear John letter from Him. Paul spends the rest of this chapter assuring us. SLIDE: WHO OR WHAT CAN SEPARATE ME FROM GOD’S LOVE? ●SLIDE: NOT GOD: He already has too much invested in me! READ ROMANS 8:31-32: If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Let’s say that tomorrow you get a phone call from Nordstrom’s. Your wife entered a contest and she is the winner of a full-length mink coat. She doesn’t know it so you decide to drive down and surprise her. You walk into the fur department. Okay? And there it is. Wow. It’s got her name on it. You get ready to take it out to the car. But you don’t want to just take the coat out over your shoulder – so you say, “Say, could you slip a bag over it?” Can you imagine Nordstrom’s saying, “No bag. We gave you the coat. That’s all you get, baby.” God has given us the very best that He has, why would he withhold the plastic bag? Who shall separate me from the love of Christ? ●SLIDE: NOT OTHERS: God has already sealed His decision in “concrete”. READ ROMANS 8:33: Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Once we are justified, who is going to bring up some information that God did not have that will cause Him to change His mind about us? Nothing we might do in the future will catch Him by surprise and cause Him to withdraw our relationship. STORY: Dad and Harding Lawrence Lawrence cleaned house. My dad and one other were left. In surgery and newspaper article announcing Dad’s replacement. What a way to find out about it. Replaced by a man from S.A. who was not quite fluent in Spanish. Discovered later that he organized a slush fund for President Nixon. Since Dad oversaw all finances, needed to be removed. Dad was bitter. Yet, said often that best day was day he left. Got out of stress and saved his life. On golf course: When Lawrence is burning in Hell and God tells me to dip my finger in the water and bring him a drop, I am not going to do it.” “Not even a drop.” Well, my dad is a Christian: “Well, maybe a tiny drop.” God will not listen nor respond one way or another to anything my dad has to say about Harding Lawrence. Who shall separate me from the love of Christ? ●SLIDE: NOT GOD: He’s not condemning me; He’s praying for me. READ ROMANS 8:34: Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died-more than that, who was raised to life-is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Jesus is the only one can condemn us eternally. John 3:16-18: “condemned already” But His children are no longer condemned. Write On Slide: The earliest Christian creed: “He was crucified dead and buried; the third day He rose again from the dead; and now sits at the right hand of God; from where He will come to judge the living and the dead. Notice that the first three agree with Paul but the fourth is radically different. In Paul the fourth is different: Jesus is at God’s right hand to intercede for us and to plead our case before God. Tremendous leap: Paul sees Christ, not as the Judge of the creed but as the lover of the souls of men. Jesus is praying for us. Luke 22:31-32: “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. 32 But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” Who shall separate me from the love of Christ? ●SLIDE: NOT THE DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES OF LIFE: Compared to Almighty God, their power is inconsequential. READ ROMANS 8:35-37: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. This is Paul’s life and through Christ he over came them all. READ ROMANS 8:38-39: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Mike Everett’s team: We can’t lose! Who shall separate me from the love of Christ? ●SLIDE: NOT EVEN I: God has no intention of spiritually murdering one of His children—no matter what I do! “But, I can jump out of his hand!” Jesus Christ indwells every believer. No one can jump away from that. If you could, God would have to kill your spirit. Write On Slide: Justified—Repent and forgiven New birth of John 3 Regenerating work of Holy Spirit “Well, I can sin and lose my salvation!” Then the question is, “how much sin?” People are at a loss to answer that question. It wasn’t little sin that got me saved and it is not a lot of sin that can get me lost! It was grace gift given to me as I received and was born into God’s personal family. ●SLIDE: BUT: Some who seem to fall away from God’s grace were never really Christians. ●SLIDE: Confusion: The Parable Of The Wheat And Tares: Matthew 13:24-30: ●Write On Slide: Farmer planted wheat and during the night and enemy sowed tares among the wheat: “… because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.” ●SLIDE: Presumption: The Parable Of The Sheep And The Goats: Matthew 25:31-26: ●Write On Slide: Son of Man comes in glory to separate sheep and goats. Goats on left and sheep on right. Sheep: “Come enjoy the kingdom because I was hungry and naked, etc and you clothed and fed me.” When did we see you naked, hungry, etc.” “In as much as you did it to the least of my brothers you did it to me.” Goats: “Depart into eternal fire prepared for devil and angels because I was hungry and naked, etc and you failed to clothe and feed me.” When did we see you naked, hungry, etc.” “In as much as you did not do it to the least of my brothers you did not do it to me.” “Depart from me I never knew you.” ●SLIDE: Abortion: The Parable Of The Soils: Matthew 13:1-23: ●Write On Slide: Hard pathway eater by the birds: Rocky: no soil, sprang up quickly, hot sun, withered because of no roots Thorns: choked the plant Good soil: produced a crop, 100, 60, 30 fold. Matthew 7:16: “By their fruit you will recognize them.” ●SLIDE: GOD WOULD NEVER SEND US A “DEAR JOHN LETTER. “Backsliders” may look like they have fallen away, but they have not. Backsliders eventually return. Jeremiah 3:22: “Return, faithless people; I will cure you of backsliding.” “Yes, we will come to you, for you are the LORD our God.” He is committed because of His love to draw wandering sheep back into His fold. Even if we commit spiritual adultery against Him, His love will not allow Him to divorce us. ●SLIDE: ●MEDITATION: I want to lead us through a meditation picturing the heart of the real God. Romans 8:33-34: Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died– more than that, who was raised to life– is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. “Who can bring charge against God’s elect?” The answer to most of us is “anyone who wants to—and we have their names!” God answers the question with “God.” The only person who can bring charge against us is God! And He has already settled our case. “Who can condemn you?” For most of us the answer is “anyone can—stand in line.” Paul says, “No, only Christ can. He is the only one. And look the only one who can is the one Who died for you and rose again for you now lives to intercede for you. He is praying for you. Imagine entering the court room. Room is filled with your accusers—those who condemn you, judge you, criticize you, disappointed with you—folks you have never been able to please. Bailiff: “All rise!” The Judge walks in, it is Jesus Christ. Imagine him the way you imagine him. He has long flowing robes, bearded face, sandaled feet. Rather then going to the bench, picture Him coming to you and kneeling down on the floor beside you. Picture Him putting His arm around you—He is not inspecting you, He is accepting you—He is not disappointed in you, He is affirming you, supporting you and inviting you to pray. Picture His nail-pierced hands and feet as his arms are around you. “Who shall bring charge against God’s elect?” Only Jesus Christ and he has died, raised and is living now, praying for you—interceding for you. He is not distant from you, He is kneeling right beside you. He whispers, “Where are your accusers? You look up. The room is empty. He whispers, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” May God seal this picture of the interceding Jesus, arms around me, praying for me. May he seal this deeply into my heart. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” PRAY

Devotional by Skip Heitzig If someone's been found guilty of murder and given a life sentence, but dies while serving that sentence, will the justice system continue to enforce that judgment? No; the convicted person is no longer subject to that penalty. They're dead—they've been released from the sentence they were required to serve. One of my favorite verses is Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Jesus died on the cross. And because I have faith in Him, I died with Him. Because I've died, the law has no power. If I am crucified with Christ, I'm dead to the law that condemned me. I'm free in Christ. I don't have to serve my sentence. Paul continued in verse 21: "I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain." So many people will say their friends or family members didn't want anything to do with God. But then I hear this at the funeral: "He was so sincere, and such a good person. God must have forgiven him." If you're saved by your sincerity or your religiosity, Jesus' death on the cross was pointless. All God needed to do is send Him down to teach people to love each other, pat babies on the head, and heal a few people. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will" (Matthew 26:39). There is no other way except the cross. And we want to make much of it, because if righteousness comes through works, Christ suffered and died in vain. That's why we boast in it. I know many churches today don't mention the blood and don't mention the cross. But Paul said, "God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Galatians 6:14). We want to make much of that because we "do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain" (2:21). He conquered death by His resurrection. The work He did on the cross is done. Are you still trying your best to make sure you deserve it? It's time to give it up. If you're honest with yourself, you know you could never be good enough—even on your best day. Here's the point: You don't have to be good enough. So stop striving and start abiding. Start living in the freedom He paid for with His life. He's already served your sentence. That is the gospel of grace. A false religion, a cult, will say you have to give your life for your god. The gospel says your God gave His life for you. As simply as that, we have been made right. We have been justified. May we make much of the cross!

Since the fall of man, the sacrificial lamb represents the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, Jesus. Portraits of Christ in the Old Testament – Lesson 1 Typology – The Lamb of God “Are you telling me your God is a carnivore?” said Sanjay. “No, absolutely not, God is not a carnivore or an herbivore,” Gloria said fast. How did Sanjay reach this conclusion? Quickly, Gloria backtracked trying to discover where their Bible study had made a wrong turn. When Gloria and her husband befriended a college student from India, she dreamed of a day when she might share a Bible study with him. Years later, after many holidays and family dinners her dream was now a reality, but she had not fully appreciated Sanjay’s Hindu background as they began the story of Cain and Abel. And, his conclusions about God’s acceptance of Abel’s sacrifice were definitely obscuring the true message of the gospel. Without a clear understanding that God is prophesying through the story of Cain and Abel, we too will draw the wrong conclusions from this passage. The story of Cain and Abel is an example of Old Testament typology. Typology is the study of types or pictures of Jesus which foreshadow the coming of Christ in human history. Cain and Abel’s story in Genesis 4:1-10 is the first portrayal of a lamb in the Old Testament. In John chapter 1, John the Baptist calls Jesus “the Lamb of God” and with this pronouncement he identifies a portrait of Christ first introduced in the Old Testament. Why did God choose a lamb as a metaphor to picture Jesus? Animals usually adopted as a symbol for a group to rally around are picked because they are ferocious in some way and will look intimidating or menacing to an enemy. Nobody picks a lamb. For example, both Mexico and the United States use an eagle as part of their symbolism. Other groups have chosen lions, tigers, bears, and even sharks. So, why was God choosing a lamb? Look again at John the Baptist’s words in John 1:29, “…Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” When lambs appear in the Bible, they are usually in a story of sacrifice. Sheep are docile animals that have been domesticated from early times, but John isn’t just referencing sheep. Specifically, he speaks of a lamb, a baby sheep. Lambs are playful, helpless, innocent, pure, and willing to be led to the slaughter. Jesus is gentle and does not force his will on anyone. A lamb, then, is a perfect picture to illustrate Jesus’ mission and his character. He would go to the cross willingly, live a sinless life and lay down his life for the sins of humanity. As one of my professors used to remind us, “If we would follow Jesus, we must remember we are following a lamb.” In Genesis 4:1-10, God accepted Abel’s sacrifice, but rejected Cain’s. Abel, a shepherd, brought a first-born lamb from his herd to be sacrificed to God, but Cain, a farmer, brought a sacrifice from the produce of the land. God accepted Abel’s sacrifice because it pointed to Jesus. If you want to understand the portrait of the Lamb, you must see God is prophesying through this story. In Hebrews 11:4, the writer wrote this, “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.” How was Abel’s choice of a sacrifice an example of faith? In Luke 11:51, Jesus references Abel as a prophet who along with other prophets gave their lives to proclaim God’s truth. So, God must have told Abel what sacrifice to use. Abel’s obedience then becomes an example of faith. He worshipped God through the only way which was acceptable to God; God designed worship to be done through the blood of the lamb. Scripture does not say how God endorsed Abel’s sacrifice, but theologians have speculated by examining other passages where God approved of a sacrifice. In Genesis 15:7-21, God provides the fire for the sacrifice which Abram made to him. Additional Bible passages record God himself supplied the fire during the offering at the dedication of the tabernacle in the wilderness (Lev. 9:22-24), during the dedication of Solomon’s temple (2Chron. 7:1-3), and during Elijah’s battle with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (1 Kings 18:24, 36-39). Whatever method God chose, he made it clear that Abel’s offering was accepted and Cain’s was not. Not only does God use the events of this sacrifice to prophecy, but in the next lamb snapshot we learn that God alone can provide our sacrifice. If you want to understand the portrait of the Lamb, you must see God alone provides our sacrifice through this story. In Genesis 22, we find the story when God tested Abraham’s devotion by asking him to sacrifice his only son Isaac on Mt. Moriah. Isaac was the son of the promise God had given to Abraham. Yet, Hebrews 11:19 records Abraham trusted God as he climbed Mt. Moriah reasoning that God could raise Isaac from the dead. While on that mountain, God miraculously provides a ram for Abraham, so Isaac could be spared after he saw Abraham’s willingness to obey God’s call no matter the cost. Listen to the angel of the Lord’s words to Abraham in Genesis 22:11b-13a, “‘…Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns...” Did you catch the parallels between Jesus’ sacrifice and this story? The ram God provided to save Isaac’s life is literally wearing a crown of thorns. In Genesis 22, God provided a ram, so Abraham would not lose his only son of the promise, Isaac. At Golgotha, though, God would give his one and only son as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of the entire world. Abraham’s son was saved while God’s only son was slain. We cannot in our strength provide a sacrifice good enough to meet the demands of a holy God (Rev. 1:5b). Without God’s plans of deliverance and Jesus’ willingness to go to the cross, we cannot be set free from our sin (John 10:17-18). When God provided the ram caught in the thicket, he was foreshadowing Christ’s sacrificial death for the sins of the world. Lastly, in Exodus 12 there is one more Old Testament event we need to examine to fully see the importance of the Lamb’s typology. If you want to understand the portrait of the Lamb, you must see God is protecting through this story. This episode is an example of a community’s shared faith in the power of the Lamb’s blood. In this piece of history from the Exodus, we find the final plague sent to Egypt, when God executed his judgments against the gods of Egypt (Ex. 12:12). To protect the Israelites from the Destroyer of the first born, the lambs not only were slain, but their blood was poured into a basin and sprinkled over the door post and lintels of their homes. When God saw the blood, he passed over the houses under the protection of the blood of the lamb. Like the Passover Lamb, Jesus’ blood is our only means of deliverance from God’s future judgment and wrath, and it also speaks of our need for personal application (Heb. 9:22). Many of us have a theological understanding that Jesus is the Lamb of God, but we have never applied his blood to our lives. We possess head knowledge, but not real heart knowledge. His sacrifice will not spiritually protect us without a personal faith in the power of Christ’s work on the cross. Nothing but physically applying the blood of the lamb to their homes could defend the Israelites from the death marching on Egypt. Those who mistakenly trusted in the palace’s shields were helpless to protect even the son of Pharaoh from the terror of that night. Likewise, our only hope is trusting in the power of Jesus’ blood sacrifice. The picture of the Lamb is one of the greatest portraits of Christ in the entire word of God. It is a metaphor illustrating God’s mercy embedded in the pages of Genesis and found all the way through to the book of Revelation. In Christ, God did for us what we were helpless to do for ourselves. Jesus’ sacrifice restored our broken relationship with God when he willingly paid the ultimate price for our sins. Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who was slain before the foundation of the world (Rev.13:8). If you want to understand the portrait of the Lamb, you must see God is prophesying about Jesus’ coming (Gen. 4:1-10), providing the way of salvation (Gen. 22), and protecting us under the blood (Ex. 12) through this Old Testament portrait. Before engaging in these questions stop and ask God to speak to you and then begin. 1) God’s long-range plans to rescue humanity are quite surprising in their depth and detail. What would change if you believed God’s plans for your life were that long range? 2) Scriptures teach we come to God through Jesus’ sacrifice and not our own attempts at good works (John 14:6). What might change if you believed God prescribes the way we come to him? 3) Many people believe Jesus is the Lamb of God, but have not personally applied his blood to their lives. If Israel had only shed the lamb’s blood, but had not applied it to the door post and lintels of their homes, the Destroyer of the first born would not have passed over their abodes. The spiritual protection of God is found under Jesus’ blood (Rev. 12:11). Have you personally applied the blood of Christ to your life?

Encountered by the Spirit John Beeson 1 Corinthians 2 So I don't know if anyone else had the troubling experience in your childhood of growing up in a sugarless cereal home. Anyone else subnavigating that trauma? Yeah, yeah. Cheerios, Grape Nuts, Wheaties, and none of this. I remember as a kid, you know, watching the proliferation of ads for sugared cereals on tv, and, man, it was just like a whole other kingdom, right? These happy people eating from you on happy charms. They're magically delicious. I mean, it really did seem magical, that other side of childhood, right? The magical life of sugared cereals. And then I. I had the opportunity to taste frosted Lucky Charms. It was not magical. These marshmallows that I thought would be the size of my hand were tiny little things I thought would be fluffy and, well, marshmallowy. And they tasted closer to cardboard than to marshmallows. You know, it's funny, right? Like, so true about our life and our world. The promises of magic, of the supernatural, of the spiritual experiences in this world so often fall flat like lucky charms. We're going to navigate today the reality of an invitation into a spiritual life. And it's not the kind of spiritual life that the world, the world offers. You see that the spiritual life of the world, a natural spirituality, if we could call it that, is maybe pushed up, created by, by their own longings and desires for something magical, and yet falls flat. 30% of Americans today consult astrology, tarot cards, etc. You could, you could Google this. It's. Those are not scientifically verified. In fact, they've been found to be false. To the extent that there is spirituality in those types of things, it is not a spirituality of God. And then you have people reacting against that. A more scientific mindset, a naturalistic mindset. I. What, what is, is. That's all that is in the world. A world shut off from the supernatural. A world that looks at the rainbow and says, yeah, that's not magic, my friend. That's called refraction. Right? It happens in the world of religion, of Christianity too. You have certain types of churches that seem to gin up an experience, a spiritual experience, but then you peel back the layers and it's. It's false. Unfortunately, there have been churches that have been found to fraud people on this. Churches that claim that there's holy dust clouds of God coming down, only to be discovered that they put literally gold glitter in the ductwork. Churches that fake healings, false, fake spirituality. And there's churches that are so afraid of that spiritual world, so buttoned up that heaven Forbid you experience a single emotion in a service churches of legalism and of tradition and of starched colors. We've been walking through this sermon series called Good News in the Real world. And in 1 Corinthians 2 today, as we navigate the book of First Corinthians, we're going to see that Paul tells us there is a true spiritual experience that God has for us, that God has created us to be spiritual beings and God, the Holy Spirit, desires to encounter us. You are meant to to encounter the Holy Spirit of God. And that's an invitation for both sides, whatever side you are on. For some of us it's going to require setting down a woo woo lucky charm spirituality. For others of us, it's going to be opening the door to something spiritual. When we've tried to shut that all down in our lives, our spirits were designed to encounter the Holy Spirit of God. Designed. In this series, Paul's about to get to issues that are facing the church and he pauses at the beginning to say, but before we get to any issues, before we try and tackle those, you have to be we looked at this a couple weeks ago. You have to be focused on Jesus Christ last week. You cannot trust simply in knowledge, in the wisdom of the world today. Specifically, you have to have to be in harmony with, led by the Holy Spirit of God. It's the only way. So let's go to the passage 1 Corinthians chapter 2, beginning just in the first couple verses. And I when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. When I came to you, I, I wasn't preaching with fancy words. I wasn't preaching to you with, with great oratory gifts. I came with simplicity because I wanted you to meet Jesus. Jesus, not simply intellectual truth or my speech. Jesus, that is who you need. Now there's a truth in this passage that will unfold as it goes. To the extent that we say Jesus is here, or we're in the presence of Jesus, or we hear God whisper to us or speak to us or guide us in all of those things. What we really mean is the Holy Spirit. Anytime we feel God directing us, we feel the presence of God. We feel Jesus with us. It is Jesus and the Father who are with us through the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Paul continues, he says, and I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom but in demonstration of the spirit and of power. That your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. I did not come to you with, with convincing words of wisdom that were going to convince you of truth. I came in weakness. That you would have the spirit of God inside of you, changing you from the inside. Now it's not that Paul is against knowledge, against study. We're to love God with all of our mind as well of all of our heart. You see, there's truth that goes past the mind's ability. There's truth that goes deeper than our ability to comprehend. I, I don't understand. I, I, I look at all of creation. Sometimes I simplify it down to little things I like, like fruit. I don't know how a watermelon grows from a watermelon seed. You can study, you can look it up and no one knows. The best answers in the world come down to some miracle that happens and out comes a watermelon. I don't get how a kiwi, you cut open a kiwi. A kiwi is beautiful. You look at the kiwi, just, it looks like this star exploding from the inside and that all these little dots or seeds make another kiwi. I don't get an orange, for lack of a better word. A collection of, of all kinds of little small pouches of orange juice that are gathered together in a tight cluster and sealed in a, in a little shell and then put together in this circle all around these shells. And how that causes a seed to grow into another tree, I don't know. I don't know. I can study. And yet you still come down to a miracle of God somewhere in the midst and life begins. Paul saying there's truth that is deeper than human ability to comprehend or study. And if we're going to get to these issues, one truth. We have to get down. We have to, we have to come allowing our spirit to be in touch with the Holy Spirit or we'll never be able to enter that truth. Our spirits were designed to encounter the Holy Spirit. It's true Christianity is not anti intellectual, but it, it invites us to this, this place of, of recognition. There's a, there's a stopping point of our intellect. It's like trying to explain color to a colorblind person. I was looking at some of these mysteries this week. Scientists say that much of our universe is made of dark energy and yet can't fully explain what Dark energy is. I remember as a high school student taking chemistry and learning that an electron is a wave and a particle, and my mind melted. How could it be there? There are deeper truths of this world that we can plumb as human beings. But the Spirit of God is meant to meet us and illumine our minds, illumine our hearts in understanding. Paul continues down in verse 10 he says this. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the Spirit of that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. So packed in those two little verses are these incredible depths of understanding in who God is and who we are. We are, if you want to use the $5 words of theology and anthropology. And they point all the way back to the beginning of the story. Paul, I mean Greg last week took us back to the beginning of Genesis. I want to do that again. Genesis one, it's the very first book of the Bible. Speaking of the creation, Chapter one, verse two speaks of this triune God, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God in three persons, and specifically of the work of the Spirit in creation. Listen to Genesis 1:2. The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. The Spirit of God is the part of God that reaches, extends out to creation, that manifests God to his creation. From the beginning is acting the Spirit like a dove over her brood, over her, over her chicklets. God hovers in his Spirit, draws near to his creation in his spirit. And so it continues to be God. The Spirit encounters us. And how does God encounter us? In our spirit. We were created by God to have a means of encountering God, the Spirit. We see that in Genesis 2 as God creates Adam. We hear this Genesis 2 7. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature. Now our English translations are using that word breath. It's the Hebrew word ruach. R U A C H is our transliteration. Can you say that? Ruach, Ruach, ruach. It's the same word for breath and for spirit. When we say spirit, we're also saying breath. And so the. There's this profound reality that God has made human beings as dust, as material, and then breathed in, spirited into them. We human beings are material plus spirit. We are spiritual Beings. We are material and spiritual beings. God has breathed his breath into us from the very beginning. The very creation of human beings made in the image of God were made so that our spirit was made to encounter the spirit of the living God. You hear it spoken today as a popular phrase. I'm spiritual, but I want nothing to do with God or with church. Now, it's true that human beings have a spirit in them. It's true that there is a spiritual realm and nature in all the world. So that in culture, in art, in music, there is a spirit to things. But our spirits were designed to connect with the Holy Spirit, with God himself. We see it as the passage continues to unfold. Pay attention to how the word spirit is capitalized or left with a small S. For we have a spirit, small S. There is a spirit of the world, small S. There's a spirit in music and culture, small S. Even if you connect that to the demonic of a spiritual realm, it is small S, capital S, meaning God. Passage continues in verse 12. Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, small S, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit of God, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. If we are Christians, we connect to God spiritually and the Spirit opens our eyes to be able to see God. In fact, it continues, verse 14. The natural person, that's a. A person without the Spirit of God. There's still a spirit, but not the Spirit of God. A natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. A natural person can't understand God, the glory of God, the splendor of God, not without the Spirit of God touching them from the inside. It's why if we're sharing Jesus with somebody and we get frustrated, we share and we share and we share and they just don't get it. The answer in that equation is not that we have to be more creative in order to convince them of the truth. The answer to that equation is that we must pray God. Take the scales off and let them see. Make them new on the inside. Help them feel your presence. We are designed to connect with the Holy Spirit. Now we might. We might hear that and think, well, do I have the Holy Spirit? Do I have the supernatural power of God, the third Person of the Trinity, making me new on the inside? Do I have The Holy Spirit. And the answer to that question, if you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit, whether you're aware of it or not. If you are a Christian, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit in you. Salvation and receiving the Holy Spirit are not two separate things. They are the same thing. You receive the Holy Spirit when you become a Christian. So a passage that spells this out pretty clearly is in Romans, chapter 8, verse 9. It says, you, however, talking of Christians. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit capital S. If in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. If you have the Spirit of Jesus Christ inside of you, you are a Christian. If you do not have the Holy Spirit inside of you, you're not. So if you, if you've surrendered your life to Christ, you have the Holy Spirit in you, you might say, well, okay, but then how, how do I get filled with the Spirit? How do I walk in the Spirit? How do I connect more in the Spirit? We could go through like a 12 week series just on that. Maybe we will someday. One verse that probably helps solve that more than any other is in Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 18. It introduced a passage that simply says this. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery. But be filled with the Spirit. Don't get drunk with wine, but be. Get drunk with the Holy Spirit. Don't get drunk with wine, but go into your pantry, grab a bottle of the Holy Spirit and drink away. And get drunk on the Holy Spirit. You said, fantastic. But I don't have a bottle of the Holy Spirit in my pantry. How, how, how would I get drunk on the Holy Spirit? And the passage itself gives us four concrete answers to that, four participles. Right after. Get drunk with the Holy Spirit. Be filled with the Holy Spirit. That answers that first is he is. Greet one another with psalms. Greet one another with psalms with the Word of God. This word is tethered to the Holy Spirit. And while it's possible to approach it from just an earthly wisdom point of view, this word is God, breathed Ruach. God spirited. It is tethered to the Holy Spirit. You want to get filled with the Holy Spirit? Come to the Word of God, Surrender to the Spirit and let him fill you. Greet one another. Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs making melody to God in your heart. I would say, how do you, how do you get filled with the Holy Spirit in the Word of God? And in singing Worship to God. There's a reason that in our worship services we go to the Scripture every single week. Why? Because it is tethered to the Spirit of God. There is a reason why when we gather for worship, we. We worship in song and we sing to God. Why? Because God inhabits the worship of his people. He inhabits the praise of his people. We can interact with the Holy Spirit in His Word. We interact with the Holy Spirit in song. In Ephesians, chapter 5, in that passage he says, greet one another. Then with psalms, hymns, spiritual songs. Giving thanks. A third means giving thanks. Gratitude. Come and be filled with the Spirit and the Word of God. In worshiping him in music and in gratitude, just reflect on all the favor God has shown over you in life. And in gratitude you meet the Holy Spirit. And the last one that he gives us an example of in the passages, in submitting to one another, we don't think of it in the gathered community of God's people. As we set aside our preferences and we submit to others mutually, we find the Holy Spirit of God, who Father, Son and Holy Spirit have beautifully submitted to each other for all eternity. So he says, come and be filled with the Holy Spirit in the Word, in worship, in gratitude, in the mutual submission of the body of Christ. Do you hear what Paul's saying to us? Listen. There's a false spirituality in this world, a lower case S spirituality, a lucky charms, magically delicious spirituality in this world. I'm not talking about that. Talking about the Holy Spirit encountering you, the real thing. Now, if any of you are like me, this was a convicting week for me as I sat in the scriptures and prepared for this. I'm a guy who's more comfortable, like neck above. That's safe zone for me. You get below the neck and feelings and emotions, like it's less comfortable for me. Talking about being drunk, in the spirit, filled with a spirit. These are things that even parts of me has like caution flags against. There is abuse there, there's abuse there. But there is a real spiritual encounter that you were made for. And if you shut down that world because of cynicism, because of self protection, because you're more comfortable with a faith that's lived up in your mind and not impacting your heart, you are missing out on what God has made you for. I was convicted. I was listening to a series of podcasts about just kind of some of the work that appears to be happening, especially in America, but around the world as well. A kind of a fresh work of God in 2024, May of 2024, there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a small little college campus called Asbury in Wilmore, Kentucky. Started all with a. Just a regular chapel service. This is a Christian college, regular chapel service, mandatory attendance. The guy who preached at that chapel service, his name is Zach Mere Crebs. He actually said it was a dud, texted his wife. That was a stinker. After he preached. And the Spirit of God showed up. And people began to linger afterward. And then more and more began to join as the Spirit of God was poured out in repentance and in worship in his people. And for 16 days around the clock, people gathered in worship in repentance, and the work of God was poured out. Now, I'll just confess as I even, like as I heard about this as it was happening. And there's just this cynic in me that like, has questions about those types of things. And I'm not here to tell you what is and isn't authentic in terms of the work of the Spirit of God. That's. That's not my job. That's for. That's for God to tell. But I'll share. Even just this week, as I was listening to that pastor who preached that stinker of a sermon where in the Spirit of God showed up. He gave testimony to some of the work of God there. And it began to convict me of my own cynicism to the work of the Spirit. I want to share one story with you that he shared. This is Zach Meerkrebs. He shares this story. We had this basketball, basketball player who's kind of bad news. And he was pretty much still on our campus because he was really good at basketball Christian College. And he just sat there in that room for days. He wasn't a believer, but he sat in that room for days because his girlfriend was a believer. And he ends up giving his life to the Lord. And he walks out of the room and he runs into a man in a wheelchair with some tumors that you could see around his face. And he goes back, he grabs his girlfriend because he had seen others in that space praying for healing. He was like, well, now I'm a believer. I can pray for him. And he prays for this guy. And this guy was healed. Tumors visibly disappear. This is a basketball player who'd known Jesus for 30 minutes. Why did God work through him? And then this is Pastor Zach Mercre's answer. Because he didn't know any better. And so many of us know better. I don't Know, if that's you, that can be me, I know better. And so I live in a world that's protected from this scary place where the Spirit of God can actually show up and encounter us because of a cynicism in my heart, because I've sealed off my spirit from the spirit of the living God who longs to encounter me and who longs to encounter you. We were made to encounter the Spirit in the Book of Acts. There's three circumstances in which there are disciples of Jesus and of John the Baptist, disciples who did not know about the Holy Spirit. They weren't in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost. And so while they believed in Jesus and they were followers of Jesus, they didn't know about the Holy Spirit. And the apostles would come in contact with these groups of people, and they say, have you received the Holy Spirit? They said, well, we don't know what that even means. I was like that a little bit. So when I became a Christian, I was 15 years old, and I grew up for those years of high school in a really solid discipling church. It was a puritan church, and Puritan churches have lots and lots of godly strengths. The movement of the Holy Spirit is not one of those strengths. If you want to get grounded in the word of God and learn to trust and obey God, appear it in church is fantastic. If you want to learn to surrender to the Holy Spirit, to have the Holy Spirit guide your mind and your heart, not so much. So I grow up through high school learning about God. I was a Christian. I had the Holy Spirit inside of me. I just really wasn't aware of what that meant. And I go to college, and in college I was a part of a very charismatic campus ministry out of a church in Fort Collins. And I would say it was not that doctrinally grounded. It was. That was not his strength. It had Holy Spirit stuff going on. In fact, it had abuses of Holy Spirit stuff, like, all over the place as a regular part of worship. And I'm not. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'll say I learned for the first time about really the existence of the Holy Spirit, about the third person, the Trinity, and how there was supernatural power available to work in me and that I could partner with that by surrendering to that, by coming under that, by welcoming that, and it changed my life. There's an invitation here. Do you hear it? Paul is instructing the Corinthian Church, and they have all kinds of issues and they have all kinds of issues, by the way, with the Holy Spirit. But before he gets to the issues, say, we've got to set everything aside. There's not a chance we can go into this fairly. If we try to understand, if we try to go in with our own strength, our own minds, our own ability to study our own knowledge of God's word from a human perspective, there isn't a chance. We have got to be surrendered to the Holy Spirit. And there's an invitation here for you and me to go beyond the measures of a natural world, to surrender, to live with the Holy Spirit. Today we usually close our sermons here at New Life with application. How do we take this into our lives? Instead, today we want to close with three invitations to prayer, three prayers to pray. As we step out of this sermon, we're going to actually create space after the sermon as we, even before we go into worship, to respond in those prayers. And they're prayers we also want us to take into our weeks. This week, the first prayer is simply this. Spirit, would you open my eyes? Spirit, would you open my eyes? Maybe you're in that place where you're like, yeah, I believe in Jesus. I believe this is the word of God. I believe in this stuff, but I've never stepped into it. I've never given my heart. I've never met the Spirit. Spirit to Spirit, would you pray? Spirit, would you open my eyes? There's an invitation there, even for repentance. Spirit, forgive me, God, forgive me for the way in which I've depended on myself. I've shut you off. I've created this religious life without you. Spirit, would you open my eyes? Second prayer is this. Spirit, would you keep me in step with you? Would you keep me in step with you? Over in Galatians, Paul has a similar passage to Ephesians. Ephesians, he talks about it being filled with the Spirit. In Galatians, he talks about it being in step with the Spirit. Here's what he Sundays. In Galatians 5:25, Paul says this. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. That is to say, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, if you've given your your life to him, if you've entrusted yourself to him, then what is it to be connected with the Spirit of God in your life so that you're living in step with him, you're listening to him, engaged with him. Greg's already given some of those footholds. Over in Ephesians 5, listening to the Spirit of God in his word, in worship, in gratitude, in submission, connected to the community of God. Maybe there's one of those in your life that you're out of step with, that you're like, yeah, not that one. I'm not going there. I'm, I'm going to cordon that one off. I'm going to protect myself, remain in control of that area. There's probably repentance there for a lot of us today. God, forgive me for the ways in which I have not been in step with you. Forgive me for the ways in which I've tried to do this life on my own. Second prayer, Spirit, would you keep me in step with you, Spirit? Would you open my eyes, Spirit, Would you keep me in step? A third prayer, Spirit, would you open the eyes of the one I love? Maybe it's a spouse, a friend, son or daughter, parents, neighbor, brother or sister at Christ, you know, someone, and they, they. I don't know. I've known people, for them singing, like engaging in worship is this which not only pushes away singing, it pushes away the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit's inviting us in, he's saying, I want you to experience. I want to be in you. I want to flow through you. I want you to grow with me in your mind, in your heart. So perhaps we're praying for ourselves to have our eyes opened more. Perhaps it's a prayer for ourselves to keep in step with, be filled with. Perhaps it's a prayer for someone else. Now, at the close of every service, we always open up the altar and say, if you're in need of prayer, would like someone to come alongside, you know, please come down. And, you know, our norm is maybe a dozen people or something like that come down. Because we're not really a come down church. Back to strengths and weaknesses. We're not a, we're a, hey, God will meet me right here. Not moving very much. Fine. He might meet me in my car on my way home in the safest environment. I know. But we're going to perfectly kind of open up the altar more to a type of an altar call this morning. Maybe the Holy Spirit is nudging you. Say, I want, I want more of you, Holy Spirit. I want to surrender to you, Holy Spirit. Open my eyes. Help me keep in step. Open the eyes of a loved one. And so we're going to have a time as we close, where we're going to have a few minutes of just quiet music. And I would invite you to come forward. You might say, well, can the Holy Spirit meet me in my chair just as much as if I come forward. Maybe, but he's nudging you. Respond. Don't let it slip by. Respond. There. There is power in responding to him, in moving to him, in bowing down before him, in receiving. So I would invite you to come forward. Just have a time of prayer for more of the Holy Spirit in your life. After a few minutes of quiet, the music will turn into our closing song. And so if you'd like someone to pray with you, prayer team will be up here. Just give a nod or glance. Someone will be glad to pray with you, for you, over you. If you'd like just private space to kneel down and pray, please come, let's pray. Lord, I. I pray over myself and over us. Corporately, you, Holy Spirit. You are God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We want more of you. Want to surrender to you. Would you immerse us deeper into your presence? Propel us deeper into you. Consume us. Heart, soul, mind, strength, all that we are. That as spiritual beings, we might live this day in a continual encounter with you, Holy Spirit. So I ask that you would anoint this time of prayer, that you would draw us as a whole family deeper into your presence. For more of you, for your glory and for our good. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Psalm 32 and 51 are twin poems that describe David's prayer of brokenness and repentance. Psalm 32 paints a portrait of his emotional pain and how he became healed in the arms of his Heavenly Father.

Jesus assured His mother at the wedding feast that there’s always enough when He is in charge. Do you trust Christ’s provision in your own life? Here’s how you can. Fear of Running Out: Jesus and the Wedding Feast Steven Furtick I don't struggle with the Fear Of Missing Out more like for me the fear of running out. That's more what I deal with. I'm a pretty lazy person, I'm pretty boring, I'm not lazy about the things that matter, but somebody's like, "You know, there's a lunar eclipse tonight", and I'm like "eh somebody'll take a picture". You know what time is it at? 10:45? I'll check it out tomorrow. It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It'll be on YouTube. You know, that's kinda my thing I'm fine to miss out. But Fear Of Running Out — F.O.R.O. — F.O.M.O. not so much, F.O.R.O., fear of running out, I think about all the time. I guess because my fear in life is not having what I'm supposed to have and people show up expecting something that I can't give. Even in church I'm always so nervous that I won't be able to get my energy up to the level that I need to get it to, to connect with you because sometimes you come in with very low energy, I'm just being honest, but I know you need a gourmet meal from the Word of God and I don't wanna hand you a cheese sandwich in a Styrofoam box. You know I don't want you to show up with a FEMA tent when you're expecting a villa, but I'm scared of this I'm scared of running out all the time. I'm constantly scared like my creativity is gonna run out because I need creativity to do what I do and even in writing sermons you're kind of saying the same things over and over again sometimes and even though the Bible has a lot of interesting stories and letters I'm scared like one time maybe I'm open my bible and I won't be able to find a sermon. You know and sometimes it gets late in the week and I'm so scared of running out when we write worship songs I'm always like how many different ways can we say, "God, you're good. I trust you"? You know there's different ways I'm not saying that God is simple I'm just saying sometimes I'm like, "Can we write another song, can preach"? I'm scared of running out of time. I always feel like I don't have enough time, always feel like I'm gonna run out of time raising my kids. I'm scared to death that I won't get everything instilled in them in the time they're in my house and then they will end up on a therapist couch $250 an hour because something I didn't teach them or Abby is gonna marry some jerk because maybe I didn't teach her what a man should be like because I don't know how to fix cars and so, she never saw me fix cars she's gonna end up you know on the corner. I'm scared about this stuff. I'm scared like that they're gonna leave — I know it's dark, right? — and I'm scared I'm gonna send my kids out and they're not gonna have what they need for the world because I ran out of time to give it to 'em. I'm scared that I'm gonna run out of money. I'm more scared now that I'm gonna run out of money then I was when I was 22, and we didn't have any money. I can't figure out how the more we got of it, the more I started to depend on it and now it consumes more of your time. You think you'll get to an amount of money where you will no longer be scared of running out? All money is gonna do is create more obligations, all more money is gonna do is create a bigger lifestyle and now you will need more money to create the lifestyle so you really won't lose the fear of running out it will just be on a larger scale and you'll have more to lose. I'm so scared of running out. F.O.M.O. not so much, Fro-yo? Never liked the stuff. F.O.R.O.? So when they got there and they didn't have it, I was like, "John 2". The fear of running out. What if I don't have what they need, what if I can't be who they need? Any new parents? Any new parents? You don't; you don't have what those kids need; it's gonna have to come from God. Please, believe me. Did you figure this out yet? Have you already got the baby or you're expecting or what? Yeah over there any kids you just came here to get a break is this your date? It's a good way to do a date, by the way. Free childcare. You gotta understand, this was the first sign, Jesus did way more signs than John puts in his gospel and he uses the word 'sign', not 'miracle', because he believes it's pointing to something deeper. That's what a sign does. That's why that says "Exit" because of the door. The sign is worthless if that's just a wall. It's pointing to something. And when you see things in Scripture a lot of times you're gonna see it on a natural level, but then it's gonna point to something beneath the surface like life does. Like there are things going on in your life right now that are trying to point you to something deeper there are things you're experiencing in your life right now, but the surface is not the story. There is a deeper meaning for it. And so John says in his gospel that if he were to write down everything that Jesus did he said, "The world would not have room for the books that would be written". This was before Wikipedia. Now you can put it all out there, but at the time, he said, "If I wrote it all down, I'll run out of room". So he chose the number seven, it's the number that represents completion in the Bible, and it's the days of the week, the world was created in seven days, it's a symbolic number in the Bible, seven is all over the Bible. He uses the number seven and he puts in the Bible seven signs that Jesus performed to point to who He was. Everything that God does for you is to point to who He wants to be to you and if you only live at the level of what He does for you, but miss what He is trying to point to that He wants to be to you, you can receive resource from the Lord without revelation of the Lord who gave the resource. And if your attachment is to the resource, then you will always run out at some point. If your attachment is to the Revelation you will always know who He is and so whatever you need he can be because he is The Great I Am. Shout about it for 5 seconds so I can move on. Seven signs he says I'm going to give you seven. The second sign that Jesus did in John's gospel is, when He, in John 4, He healed a royal official's son, in John 5, He healed a man at the pool of Bethesda who'd been lame for 38 years and was waiting for the angel to stir up the water, but Jesus came on the scene and said, "You don't have to wait for somebody to stir up the water, the Living Water has come to you and since you can't move in your sitting by this pool I'm gonna bring to you what you could not get for yourself". He flipped the flow. He flipped the flow. I can preach this series for another year and not exhaust all the times that Jesus flipped the flow. In fact in John 6 this was the fourth sign that Jesus recorded in John's gospel. Jesus was looking at some hungry people and a little boy had a Styrofoam box with a cheese sandwich and Jesus... fish and loaves, but I modernized it. Jesus took it and blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them, and they went from hungry to full, they went from hungry to I can't eat another bite. They went from hungry to, "Would you like to see the dessert menu"? "No, I'm full". That was the sign in John 6. In John 6 Jesus also walked out on water to His disciples. He had sent them to the other side, but they encountered a storm and what was really most important wasn't what was on the other side, but what they went through to get there because when they went through the storm and gave Him an opportunity to reveal who He was in a way that they could have seen if they didn't go through the storm. So He's trying to get us to see, "You see the sign"? — He's trying to get you to see that the storm points to something that is deeper than what you can see on the surface, to show you that the power of God on the inside of you is greater than the wind that blows against you. He gives 'em a sign. In John 9 He heals a man born blind. The man didn't do anything to be blind, his parents didn't do anything to make him blind, Jesus said this was to reveal the glory of God. He is using something that the man can't see to show the men something that physical eyes cannot detect. It's a sign He's trying to show something deeper until John 11 when He shows the ultimate sign that foreshadows the very work that He came to do when He shows up at Lazarus house late after Lazarus has died misses His healing appointment and tells him come out of the Tomb because He had to show them: "You've seen Me as a Healer, but now it's time for a deeper expression of your understanding of me because even when I don't show up when you want me to show up in your life I already have in mind what I'm gonna do. And even if they wrapped you in grave clothes and buried you, if you have the faith to come forth I can still speak a word that will bring you out of any situation, because I am the resurrection and the life". Somebody, shout, "God, gimme a sign"! Just wanted a sign so Jesus gave 'em a sign. So what was the first one? Those were the six, but the first one was... and I know some of you already know. Some of you really, really, really, know your Bible and when I said John 2, you were like, "Water into wine"! And you're right, but if you would have shouted it out it would have ruined my setup because you already know, but you know sometimes we have the curse of knowledge and we think we know something and we do know it at the surface, but why did Jesus turn water into wine? And I'm gonna show you. This is so powerful. God, I'm excited. I haven't had this much fun preaching in a long time as I'm having today. I think it's the denim. Holly said I don't wear enough color up here so. I like black it's slimming. Dark colors, dark colors. Now go back to John 2:1 somebody shout, "flip it". Jesus shows up on the third day at a wedding which took place in Cana in Galilee. This is a small place, not necessarily an important place, but nevertheless Jesus's mother was there at a wedding and Jesus and His disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone the miracle started. You missed it. When they ran out of what they brought, when they ran out of what they planned for. Which to us would not be the biggest deal, you know, you run out of wine at a wedding and it's probably a good thing because you got crazy family members and when they drink too much they start fightin' anyway and one of 'em ends up in jail, but in this culture it was the epitome of dishonor to invite a guest and to not be able to provide. And this wedding was not a... you know how we do wedding and it's like 40 minutes and then a reception, this was more like the Fyre Festival; It was supposed to last a week, the weeding would last a week, and everybody showed up expecting that at whatever point they showed up at the wedding there would still be something to drink. You know, to show up at a wedding and there to be no wine, it was actually recorded that if the groom who is responsible to make sure that the wedding went off right, if he did not provide everything that necessity required, he could be sued by his mother-in-law. You thought you had family drama right? But Jesus shows up at the wedding and they run out of wine. Now I don't wanna skip over this what have you run out of? What are you running out of right now? What are you constantly afraid of running out of? Is it wisdom? Is it peace? Is it ideas? Are you out of ideas for how to fix a relationship? Are you out of ideas for how to reach a level of success that you thought you would have been at 4 years ago? What are you running out of? What have you run out of? The worst thing is to run out of gas when you're the one driving. The worst thing is for people to show up to your kitchen and all you have is cheese and bread. The worst thing is when you know that people expect something of you. Because some of you, you're the life of the party. Some of you you're the strong one. Some of you you're the one that the people come to with their problems and they don't know you are sick of being the place where they dump their crap. You got your own sewage and they keep backing up and dumping more on you and they don't even know how close you are to quitting and you're running out. And that's why I like this 'cause you don't have to say it out loud, I'll say it for you. Everybody in here is running out of something. Not wine, how 'bout joy? How 'bout how you haven't been happy in a long time? How 'bout that? The last time I was up here I preached on joy, did you hear that sermon? Sounds like it meant a lot to you praise the Lord. Why do I do this?! Were you here when I preached on joy? Well since wine represents joy I thought it'd be good to stay in this flow, but Jesus comes to the wedding and He's a guest, but He's about to provide what the host could not provide. Why? he did not come to demand righteousness. He came to provide righteousness. He flipped the flow. The first thing Jesus did was to take away the shame of a couple who had run out of what they were unable to provide. That's the first thing He does when He comes in your life. He doesn't just expose your shame, he doesn't just come to condemn you, he doesn't just come to point out everything that's wrong with you. He says, "I didn't come just to show you your shame; I came to take it away. Look the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world". I'm happy about it. I need the Lord in my life 'cause I'm so scared I'm gonna run out, and yet the Bible says that Jesus didn't do anything about it, he let it run out. He let it run out. He let it happen like He often will do, until watch this, "When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to Him..." You gotta imagine: the wine's really important, at the wedding, this is not the first person who has discovered that it's gone. They probably had many discussions and there's probably been a lot of finger-pointing. That's one thing on that documentary I watched, everybody was saying it was everybody's fault. Everybody was pointing, everybody was pointing at somebody else, "Well, we didn't know, we didn't know, we didn't know," How did you not know? That's what we wanted to know is how did you not know, but Jesus's mother knew something. Rather she knew someone. And she did something interesting. She didn't go to the wedding planner, she didn't go to the couple, Jesus's mother when the wine was gone, Jesus's mother... "Mary, did you know"? Yes, she knew. She didn't know what to do, but she knew who to go to. I'mma preach this message today, I'm coming for it today, 'cause you don't know what to do right now, right? But if you know who to go to... And see a lot of the reason you've been running out, it's because you've been running around to people who don't have what you need. They don't have it, they can't give it, they've got their own stuff, they're running dry too, but if you go to the Man From Galilee, if you go to the One Whose Name is Life... She came to Jesus and said, "they have no more wine". She didn't tell Him about the solution she just told Him the need. She just told Him what He already knew. I promise you He already knew. Wow do I know He already knew? Because He was the Word from the beginning. If He spoke the grapes onto the vine, He certainly knew that they didn't bring enough. He knew, I know He knew because in John 6 when He turned the little boy's value pack, Chick-fil-A value pack, when He turned it into a buffet, all-you-can-eat buffet He asked Philip, "What are we gonna do about this"? And Philip was an accountant so Philip was like, "if we did... can't do it". But the Bible says, give me John 6:6, I know I didn't use it in the last one, but I wanna use it 'cause these people want it they really, really want it, these people are hungry, these people want the Word of God. "He asked this only to test him, for He already knew..." He already knew what He was gonna do. How cool is that? You mean I'm coming before God praying a lot of times and I'm like... like, I'm God's administrative assistant you know? Like, "Lord, just reminding you about that appointment you missed last week when I asked you to help me with the thing and I told you to fix 'em and you didn't fix 'em so just putting it back on your calendar if you get around to it, Lord, and then this other thing over here bah-bah-bah..." And, lately, I've been praying like this. "You already know, I know you know, I know you know". That's why Mary went to Jesus even though it wasn't His job he was just a guest at the wedding, but she knew what was in Him because He had been in her and when Christ is in you and you are in Christ you already know. How many of you already know that God will do it, you just don't know how? That's all Mary knew. Mary did you know. Maybe like "Yeah, I knew He would, but I didn't know how He would. I didn't know how". But see every need in your life is pointing you to a deeper source. Every sign that John recorded was pointing to something deeper. Every need that you experience in your life is pointing you to a deeper place in God that you can access. A deeper place of strength, a deeper place of confidence, a deeper place of help, a deeper place of relationship, a deeper place of the penance. Everything is pointing to something deeper. So when she said, "they have no more wine," Jesus responded. And I don't recommend this as like something to say to your mom or your wife, John 2:4: "Woman, why do you involve Me"? That's not like a great marriage seminar love languages verse, but she didn't tell Jesus the need to inform Him like we do. She didn't pray like a ritual in, "God bless me today is a go to the thing and after the thing and God just let me go through my list and worry about it and say that I'm praying, but really all I'm doing is worrying out loud with my eyes closed". She wasn't doing it to inform Him, she was doing it to involve Him 'cause she knew if He gets involved I don't know what He'll do, but I know who He is. Now I'mma need you to shout, right now, if you know who He is. Come on Blakeney, don't be quiet I know you love the lord. I need you to shout right now if you know who He is. I know who to go to — I lift my eyes to the hills. And His mother watched this, his mother goes to Him, He says to His mother, "Woman," — I'mma start talking to Holly, "Woman"! "Help 'em with their homework"! "Woman, why do you involve Me"? That's my favorite verse this year. I'm gonna use that a lot this year. "Woman, why do you involve Me"? Jesus replied, "My hour has not yet come". He's talkin' about the cross, but she needs Him to do something right now. Some of us have things that we need God to do now. We really do we need Him now. Yeah, I'm goin' to heaven when I die, and yeah, there's a white horse that I read about in the book of Revelation, but how 'bout now? And so watch what she does. She doesn't argue, she doesn't convince, she doesn't beg, in fact she doesn't talk to Jesus anymore; she turns away from Jesus points to the people who are working at the wedding and verse 5 she, "said to the servants, 'Do whatever He tells you.'" 'Cause if you start moving in faith He's gonna do something. I don't know what He didn't tell me, I don't know the details, I don't know the plan I wasn't the wedding planner, this isn't even my party, but if you start moving, if you'll start obeying, if you'll take a step you're gonna see something. And she said, "Do whatever He tells you". Now, I know what you're thinking. I already know, I already know. I already know what you're thinking. "I would, if I knew what He wanted me to do". But sometimes the way God speaks, it's like, the Lord was saying to me the other day, because I was praying about "I don't know whether to do this or that", and I know you have situations that are nuanced, and I really don't like preaching that doesn't respect nuance. I really think in some ways it's misleading to say, "You know, it's just simple: Do whatever He tells you to do," because sometimes I don't know what that is. Sometimes, I don't know if I should take the job and make a little more money, but it's gonna put me away from my family more, but I need to be here for my kids, but I also need to be able to send them to college in four years and I need to be able to provide for them. So, I'm kind of caught between, I don't really know what He wants me to do, because I can't find a Bible verse about whether I should live in Atlanta or Charlotte, you know? But let me just tell you something: There's traffic in both cities, and there's problems in both cities, and there's ups and downs to both cities. "Where am I going to go to college"? I see a Wingate shirt over there. "Where am I gonna go to college"? You know, you can live for the Lord at Wingate or at Wofford. You can live for the Lord either place. It's not as important. I mean, go where the scholarship money is. Or if there's no scholarship money, go... But it's more important what kind of friends you make the first week of college than it is whether it's Wingate or Wofford. Can I preach a little bit? So, the Lord was speaking to me, I was like, "If I knew what to do, I would do it". And God said, "If you would do what you knew..." See the flip? You see the flip? Because I'm waiting for new information from God, and God is like, "Alright, what do you already know"? I'm speaking to somebody today who has run out and you don't know what to do, and you don't have the wisdom, and you don't have the experience, and you don't have the "I don't know, I didn't..." You know, it's really hard to do something you don't have a context for. But if you would do what you knew... What do you already know? I mean, I know for one that gratitude is the gateway to joy. So much so that I bought a journal and put it by my bed. It's a gratitude journal. It's orange like everything else in this church, and like God's favorite team, the Clemson Tigers whom He has anointed with the fresh oil of yet another national championship for the glory of His name His kingdom come. Some of y'all look like you hate me right now. But I found out the gratitude journal doesn't bless me if I don't open it and write in it. And I already know that, but I haven't touch it in seven months, and it's got dust on it. And then I'm gonna go to God at some point praying that He'll help me to feel joy, but I already knew what to do. I didn't do it. I've got 17 books on my Kindle that I bought last year that I read one chapter of. I probably don't need to buy another book this year, and you might not either. I'm serious. I'mma preach until it's so quiet that you think this is Elevation Presbyterian Episcopalian Cemetery Service. Look at me. You know enough right now; I promise you do. I promise you do. You know enough right now to be physically fit. I'm just saying. You might not need Men's Fitness with Hugh Jackman's workout to do some push-ups and to take less calories. But we're addicted to knowledge. We're addicted to "if I knew what to do... if I knew... if I could do this diet over here, and I heard about this and this celebrity diet, and I gotta do this thing. I heard about this kombucha, if I drink that, then my gut will be healed". You know, you already know. Touch somebody and say, "You already know". You know push-ups, you know sit-ups. You already know. Get a trainer if you want, but the trainer will not transform you. If you know what to do and you do what you know, you will know what to do. Come on. God, I don't need You to clarify; I need You to give me courage to do what I knew that I didn't do last time. I knew I needed to humble myself, I knew I needed... Some of us know exactly what we need to do, but we don't wanna do it, so we wanna pile more knowledge on top of the last thing that we didn't do that He gave us to do. I'm preaching, Mom. They might not come back next week, but I'm preaching. I'm preaching. Because there's three things that Jesus points to, and I want to give this to you, because I believe that God already knows. Somebody say, "He already knows" "I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you". But there's something that you don't know, that you can't know, it is not in the knowing, but in the doing, that the miracle happens. Praise God. You feel this word, man? It might be just for you. God might've gave me this message just for you, I don't doubt it. He's that good. Do you believe that? That He would put this in me just for you? I do. So, I was noticing the details because His mother said, "Do whatever He tells you to do; and don't do what everybody else tells you to do, because you'll spend all your energy doing what everybody else tells you to do, and then not have the strength to do the thing God called you to do. Saying yes to everything else but what God gave you to do. Do whatever He tells you to do". And listen, so Jesus, He wasn't reluctant to get involved, He just needed their involvement. And He tells them to do something. Look at it in verse 6. It says, "Nearby stood six stone water jars", what kind of jars? Stone water jars, "the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing", they were common, they were there for a common purpose: "each holding from twenty to thirty gallons", they were big. That's a big gall, In fact, by the time they did what He said in verse 7, Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water"; so they filled them to the brim...", which would have made 1.000 bottles of wine. More than they needed; because He's a God of more than enough. He is a God of more than enough. It's not that He doesn't have it; it's that we're so busy pointing to what's not there, that we miss what is. And that's why we've gotta flip the flow. And the Bible says that "Not even knowing what would happen when they did it," because they needed wine, but He points to water. He doesn't point to what they need, He points to what they have. And then He told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.' They did so". They did it; they just did it. They had a Nike mentality, they just did it. Swoosh. I'm looking for a sponsorship, I'm just trying to work this in. I'm trying to get us some money for the expansion program. "They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine". Now he tasted the product, but he did not understand the process. He didn't know, he did not realize where it had come from, though the servants knew. Touch somebody, say, "You already know". You know who knows what God is doing in the earth today? Those who serve Him. Not just those who come and sip, but those who serve. Those who involve. I wanna thank God for every volunteer in this church, for everybody who serves something today, for every e-Group leader in this church. I thank God for you, because you already know that it's more blessed to give than receive. Not those who sit, but those who serve. That's who God blesses the most. Amen. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said", "You flipped the flow because everybody brings out the choice wine first, and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink". That's the way the world works. It's good for a little while, and then it runs out. He said, "You did it different. It got better and better, and sweeter and sweeter". I've come to tell you, your best days are not behind you; God is not like that. He didn't let you run out because He left you; He let it run out so He could give you something better than what you brought to the party to begin with. Yeah. "You flipped the flow. You have saved," verse 10, "the best until now". But how did He do it? How did He do it? Because everything you're running out of in your life today is in Jesus. It's in Him. But there's three things that I wanna show you and we'll go. Quickly, quickly, quickly. Number one: It's not gonna be in the places you expect, it's gonna be number one: nearby. It's not gonna be by you moving to a new situation or thinking that your solution is out there somewhere. It's not gonna be distant, it's gonna be nearby. Verse six, where were the stone water jars? Pay attention to the details. Nearby. Where is the help that God has given you for the shortage in your life? It's nearby. It's nearby. The reason we don't see what's nearby is because when something is close, we see it as common. These were stone jars made of earth. They were leak-proof so that they wouldn't be ceremonially unclean, but there was nothing gold-plated about them. These were not iced out jars. That's not what made them special, what was special what was inside. But they didn't have to go... you know, Jesus right here could've been like the disciples. "Go to town, you've gotta get some wine". But the thing about Cana is it's in the middle of nowhere, so they can't go get anything, so they have to use something nearby. I wonder what's nearby that if you pour yourself into it, God can flow again through your life? It's nearby. It's so close. Like remember, they all came in the party and washed their hands, so the miracle was in something that they had already walked by to get to the party. The miracle is in something that you're walking by every day. It's in a Bible-reading plan that you already started but you've just quit it, and you can't pick it back up. The wisdom that you need might be in the wife that you chose to do life with six years ago, but you don't wanna listen to her because she's nearby. So, I will see men go to conferences to learn how to be a better man, but they won't even listen to their own wife because they don't wanna be humble. I'm telling you, it's nearby. It's not out there, that's not where the provision is. It's not somewhere out there, it's nearby. It's gonna be so close, you'll miss it if you're not careful. It's gonna be so close, I'm telling you, it's something that you're walking by right now. You've been praying for it, it's an orange gratitude journal that's right there on your bed, it's an exercise plan that you already know to do, it's gonna be nearby and it's gonna be normal. That's the second thing: It's gonna be normal. It's not gonna feel so supernatural, it's gonna feel natural. And then it's gonna be super. But you can't wait for something special; you've got to embrace something normal. We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the Excellency and the power might be from God and not from us. It's coming through something normal. It's gonna be normal. It's gonna be habits, it's gonna be discipline, it's gonna be normal. God, use me. Go home and have dinner with your family. It's gonna be normal, it's not gonna be exciting. It's not gonna be sexy, it's not gonna be Instagram models in bikinis on the beach. It's gonna be normal. It's gonna be normal. Tell somebody, "It's gonna be normal". Tell them, "It's gonna be natural, but it's gonna be super". When God gets done with normal, what happens on the inside of what looks normal on the outside, God is doing something in me. And I wonder what you've been walking by because it looks normal. You don't even notice it, because it's nearby and it's normal and it's now. Jesus said, "Now". Verse eight: "Now". Everybody say, "Now". Not after I've explained it to you, now. He didn't tell them, "Now when you draw it out, it's gonna start to turn purple. Like when you stir the Kool-Aid in the... it's gonna be a fermentation process and the molecular structure is going to... let me draw it up for you, guys". And says, "Okay everybody, come on in, come on in, guys". Now, I know you don't know what I'm going to do, but I already know. I know you don't know why I'm telling you to do this, but I know. I know you don't know why I'm telling you to forgive, but I know what I wanna do that I can't do in your life if you have a clogged heart. So, do it now, now, now". Faith is the substance of things hoped for. And Jesus never points to what's next without dealing with what's now. Now, draw it out. Now. I could imagine: He could've gone around the whole party: "You should've planned better, and you should've known better..." But He didn't do any of that, because He didn't point to what they should've done. It doesn't do any good. He points to what is now. Now. Even though you've run, even though you could've done better. I'mma tell you, you could've done a better job. You need to fire your wedding planner. I hope you didn't give her too much of a deposit, be-cause she really screwed this up. But now. That's actually what Mary and Martha said to Jesus when He showed up for Lazarus. "If You would've been here, our brother would not have died". But even now. I feel the power of "Now" on this word today. Now, now, now, now, now, now. Because the truth is, you might be running out of time. And Jesus only had three years on earth. Isn't it crazy? Think about this, I'm almost done. Y'all got like five more minutes or I'm out of time. I don't know how to receive that tepid encouragement. I guess go if you need to go, I'mma talk to who wants to hear this last part. I just study too much to get up here and let a clock tell me when to quit; because I know what it feels like to be empty; I've been there in my own life, just dry, and empty, and "ah, if another person asks me if... I don't even wanna do it. I don't..." But there's something significant not only about what Jesus did, — water into wine, the law into the spirit, we can preach about that, we will one day — that He did it in a ceremonial jar, and it was an idea, the fact that the ceremonial washings of Moses for not being replaced by the blood that would be shed — that's all in there. It's the signs, pointing to a lot. But why did He do it in Cana? Why did He show His glory in Cana? And to understand this, we need to meet Nathaniel, because Nathaniel was a disciple who came to Jesus. Guess who brought him, by the way? Phillip: The one who Jesus said, "Where are we gonna get the bread from"? but He already knew. I promise you, He already knows, but He's just trying to make sure that you know where it comes from. "And Philip brought Nathaniel to Jesus," pick it up in 45, "Philip found Nathaniel and told him, 'We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and about whom the prophets also wrote Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph'". There were 456 different expectations of the Jewish Messiah. And Philip was doing the math, you know? "Carry the one," just like it was, and he said, "I think this is Him. I think so. I'm not sure, but I think. Come see". And Nathaniel starts trying to figure it out based on what he can understand. He's like, "Did you say 'Nazareth'? You said 'Nazareth'? 'Moncks Corner'"? See, I'm used to being from a place that people don't respect when you say the name of it. "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there"? And Nathaniel asked the question, and Philip said, "I can't answer that, but You can come see". Now watch this: This is where it gets good. "When Jesus saw Nathaniel," I always preach John 2 thinking that verse 1 is where it started. "On the third day, Jesus went to Cana," but it started before that. When Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching, He said of him, "Hear truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit". Now Nathaniel was kind of creeped out. Verse 48, he said, "How do you know me? We haven't met, how do yo know"? He said, "I know what's in you". He said, "But you don't know me". He said, "But I know what's in you". One time, when Elijah was little, he would walk around the house. How old was he? Two, three? He'd walk around the house going, "How do you know my name, how do you know my name". I think he heard it on a TV show. And I thought that was so bizarre. He'd walk up to me and Holly, "How do you know my name? How do you know my name"? I said, "Cause I made you, 'cause I gave you your name. I know who you are, I know what's in you". Jesus looks at Nathaniel, and He knows what's in him because Nathaniel came from him. Now watch this, this is so important: for everybody who spend a lot of time feeling like that's what's against you is greater than what's in you, I want you to know that God already knows what's against you, and He already knows what's in you. I said He already knows what's against you, and He already knows what's in you. He said, "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Phillip called you". And Nathaniel said, "You saw me? Rabbi, you are the son of God, you are the King of Israel, you hadn't even met me yet and you saw me before I was called? You mean you saw me in this situation before I was even in it? You saw me in this dry place, before it even stopped raining? You saw me in this dumb decision, You saw me in this divorce? You saw me in this low place"? He says, "Yeah, I saw you. I wouldn't've put you in it if I didn't put it in you. You've got it in you and you will not run out and it will not run out and it will not run out, you will accomplish your purpose. You will fulfill. You will complete your assignment. It is in you". I love Jesus. He said, "You believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that". And then they went to Cana so Jesus could show Nathaniel what He just told Him. I am the One Who flips the flow. I am the One, come on get happy, who gets grace for shame. I am the One who turns rejection into blessing. I am the Resurrection, I am the Life, your struggle is sign, your set back is a sign, your secrets are a sign, God is with you, it is in you, release a shout of praise in the place. I said, "Release a shout of praise in the place". And you will not run out. You will not run out. You might not have any wine, but if you have the One who can stir the water, you will never lack, you will make it and you will achieve it, in Jesus name!

The foundation of our faith completely rests on Jesus. Just as a building cannot stand without a cornerstone, you and I cannot truly understand who we are without giving our hearts to Jesus.