Transcript

Morning. Welcome to everybody. Welcome to everybody. This is the east gate. Welcome to the gathering place on the other side.

If you guys have managed to stop singing enough to actually join us this time. Ha ha ha. Otherwise you won't hear me making fun of you. Anyway. Welcome to anybody that's watching us online, whether you're live streaming right now on this Sunday morning at 11:00 clock or whether it's like Tuesday at 4:30 or whatever.

Welcome. Welcome, welcome to everybody. We, we always appreciate having you guys here. I'm not the normal pastor if you're new here, if this is your first time here. Not normal pastor.

Get ready, buckle up, here we go. I'm Adam. I bring a bit of youthfulness that our normal pastor doesn't. Got him made it three sentences in. Already throwing old man jokes at pg.

I really, I do appreciate the opportunity that Pastor Gary does. Trust me, when he is away, it's always good for even pastors sometimes got to get away from y' all and reset and just sort of get right with God again. And so he's taken a little vacation to kind of just relax a little bit. Hopefully if you've ever met him, you know, he's not relaxing. You know, he's planning something and doing something and scheming something.

So. But I always, I'm part of the preaching team that's here. I'm always grateful to have the opportunity to come in and fill in help wherever I can fill in to help. That's what I'm here for. So we are actually starting a new sermon series and this one's going to be, I think, six weeks.

And Jonathan, Pastor Jonathan from the Rocky Mount campus, kind of dreamt this one up and so I get to introduce it. I don't know what to think about though. So the series is called Built different. And I don't know what to think about them having me be the guy to kick off the series called Built Different. I don't know if that was accidental or so this idea of built different, it's this phrase that gets used if you're in my English majors.

It's going to drive you nuts that it doesn't have an ly at the end. Yes, it is an adjective, but we're in North Carolina, so we don't say the ly at the end. We're built different. Or if you got the Eastern accent that I have, Eastern Carolina accent, we turn the R and the E the other way. So it's built different.

Built different. So the idea, this phrase, built different, it's used now to kind of describe somebody that operates at, like, a unique or a very exceptionally high level. Have you ever heard it? You know, somebody is built different? The idea, it's permeated through time.

Like, it gets said a different way. If you're a millennial, you might remember somebody being a beast. Y' all remember when somebody was a beast. Dude's a beast. Same thing.

He's built different. He's a beast. The same. The boomers might have said, he's a rare breed. She's a rare breed.

A rare breed of person. I do note as a Gen Xer here that they left Gen Xers off this list, so that's typical. We just kind of got lost in the wash. We go all the way back to Shakespeare, who says, from a different mold. But we can't put a Gen X version of this in here. Okay, that's fine.

No, that's cool. We'll go all the way back to Elizabethan ye olde times and. Yeah, that's fine. So this idea of somebody built different, you probably have some version of this already in your head. So I trained some of the guys at the gym.

So, like, in martial arts, combat sports, and that kind of stuff, those dudes are built different. Like. Like there's something a little off about them. They're a little, like, when they walk in, you can just see they've got a drive that's different. They've got, like a something.

They're just built different. And so you probably know somebody like this in your life. You might be this person in your life that people look at, and it's like, he's a different thing. He's a different animal. She's a different.

She's unique. There's nobody else like her. So that might be you. You definitely probably know this idea. But the idea behind this is that we as Christians ought be built different than the rest of the world.

That if we're in a crowd, the crowd should look different than us. That we in our daily life should have people looking at us going, that dude's built different. There's something. There's something about her that's different. And so that's the idea of getting back to that, getting to that idea.

And we're going to do that through the lens of Romans 12. 1, 2. So that's going to be our series theme for the whole series. So Romans 12, if you want to earmark it, you're going to. We're going to be coming back to this every week for the next Couple of weeks.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. God bless the reading of his Word. So this overall theme, we're going to break it down into some little chunks. And so because I'm getting the first bit of it, and apparently they feel like I can only handle three words at a time, we're only going to handle the first little part of it, to present your body.

So we're actually going to handle this in two different parts. The whole context is to present your body as a living sacrifice. But we're actually going to drill down even more. We're going to take that in two pieces. So next week we'll talk about what it means to be a living sacrifice.

This week we're just going to the simplest three words. Present your bodies. So that's what we're dealing with this week. There is this gap that happens. So we are.

Everybody in the room has a body, right? Okay. Raise your hand if you don't.

So we all have bodies. We are made of bodies. We are in this world, but we are not of this world, if you've ever heard that phrase. So there is this disconnect between our living bodies and the spirit, the desire of our spirit. The desire of our spirit, though, isn't really visible to the outside world.

So we have these bodies. And that is, these are our tools to use to shine God's light into the world. And we have to use these, otherwise nobody would see them. But we have this disconnect. Paul actually writes In Romans, chapter 7, verse 15, I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Does that resonate with you at all? It resonates with me in a profound way. But it perfectly illustrates this disconnect that a lot of people outside of a church identify. Like church hypocrisy.

It's not really hypocrisy. It's actually just an illustration of this disconnect. It's an illustration of we are a church building full of flawed people. And there's this disconnect between the thing that my spirit wants and sometimes even the thing that my mind wants and what I do with my body.

Paul writes, it Very eloquently. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. It's our sin nature. Unfortunately, there's coming a day we're going to be able to bridge this gap. But right now we got to walk the world in this broken way where there's this disconnect between what our spirit wants and our body.

But I think it's good that we have to, because there's a lot of broken people that don't have that reconciliation with God, that need to see us walking right next to Him. But when we walk next to him, we shouldn't be ordinary. If we're living for God, we should be built different.

So that's what we're going to get into in Luke chapter nine, Verses 23 through 25 is what we're going through today. And he said to all, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. And whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?

God bless the reading of His Word. Amen.

So in chapter nine, Jesus is teaching us how we can come to him by completely surrendering our lives for his sake. We can do that. What would that look like in this text? We're going to get three conditions. You're going to see them right up front.

The first one is deny yourself. Deny yourself. Now, this one's a funky one, so we're going to get into it. But I do want to say that all of these next conditions are all in my brain. They're all focused through the lens of verses 24 and 25.

So even though verse 24 and 25 come after the three conditions that we're going to talk about, I want to look at all of them through that lens of 24 and 25. For whoever would save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world or loses or forfeits himself? So at the beginning of this, it says he said to all.

He said to all. So who is all? So contextually, in the Bible, he was speaking to Peter just before this. In the paragraph before, he was talking directly to Peter. But here he says talking to all.

So we know that he's talking to more than just Peter. And in fact, this all is actually a very large all. This isn't just his 12 guys, this is a big mass of people. So he's talking to Peter. He's also talking to his 12 guys.

He's also talking to this big crowd of people, which, if you zoom out, includes all of us. So this is a message that he's giving to us specifically. He's chosen me specifically to tell Peter this piece of information to you specifically. He's given this instruction to, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. So this idea of coming after him.

So this is. We have fortunately been given a society that doesn't string people up next to the road anymore.

Say what you want about America, we got some rough stuff going on, but we at least don't hang people from, like, the telephone poles and stuff anymore. We got. We've. We've matured enough that we get away from that. Jesus and his guys lived in a culture where they're still doing that.

So this idea of come after me, this is a big wait because Jesus is telling them first, if you want to come after me, you got to know where we're going. You should know where we're going. This is an important lesson for them to have. And we're going to get into that in a minute when we start talking about, take up your cross. But for right now, for whoever would save his life will lose it.

Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. This is a big. This is a culture where being a Christian very specifically, at this point in time, you could lose your life for being a Christian in this area. And so this idea of, there's lots of ways you could lose your life.

Christ here is saying, if you lose it for my sake, you'll save it. So as we go through this world with our bodies doing the stuff that we do in this world, even if it condemns us to death, if we do that for Christ's sake, we've gained life. Does that make sense? So that lens is very important to me because otherwise, this first condition of deny yourself is kind of a sort of just a negative nothing.

We can deny ourselves for all kinds of stuff, for all kinds of reasons, but deny ourselves for his sake gives us something to build into. We're going to get into that a little bit. But I just. I wanted to point out that verses 24 and 25 really frame these conditions. So right now we're talking about denying yourself.

Let him deny himself. So in First Corinthians, verse 6, chapter 6, sorry, verse 19 and 20, you are not your own for you were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body. This is the reason to deny myself, because myself is. We kind of think of it in terms of denying a desire.

It's bigger than that. Like it can be deny a desire. It can be to deny an impulse. If some of you met me, I have trouble denying my impulses. Sometimes it's a character flaw.

I can work on it. Sometimes my impulses get carried, carried away. But it's more than just to deny that. It's actually to take it even a step farther and to say. To say that what?

That outside of the Creator, God, who's created me and given me worth, there is no self, there is no myself. I can't. I can't by my own power give my life worth, my self worth. I can't enforce the value of it, but God can.

That you're not just here haphazardly by accident. God specifically crafted you. He made you and he gave you worth. How much worth? He gave us equal worth to him.

All the worth. He loves us so much that he made the sacrifice. Jesus loves us so much that he laid his life down for us to trade us, to give us that trade, because that's the worth that he sees in us. So outside of that, any self that I build up, I can't defend and I shouldn't really want to, because the worth, that self that God has given me is so much greater than any little sandcastle kingdom that I've built. And so we spend a lot of time on this Earth doing earthly things, which is fine.

We're on Earth, we ought to be doing earthly things, but we end up building kingdoms out of paper.

We end up losing ourselves to the things that we're trying to do, to the things we're trying to create.

And it gets very easy for us to start to identify. As a leader of a department or as a police officer or as a teacher. I'm first and foremost a father, a dad, a family man.

We build these idols of ourself and it removes our ability to be filled by the real self, the creation that God has made.

And so then we end up walking around the world and we kind of look like the same as everybody else who's also built sandcastles.

And then the tide comes and washes them away.

So first and foremost, to open our heart, we have to redefine what self even is.

We have to get rid of the thing we thought it was.

And so we're not just denying the things that my body wants to do or denying the impulse of what I want to do next. But really to even reframe, who even am I? Because first and foremost, I'm a child of God. First and foremost, I'm bought and paid for. I'm a soldier in his army, first and foremost.

And in knowing that it's fine to have a good job. You ought to be good parents. You ought to be a good spouse. You ought to be a good sibling. You ought to be kind to your parents.

You ought to be a good police officer. I appreciate police officers quite a lot. They're crazy people that run towards bullets when I'm running away from them. I appreciate y'. All.

I know y' all catch some. Catch some flak. I appreciate you. But first and foremost, you are not a teacher. First and foremost, you are not a nurse.

First and foremost, you are a child of God. You are bought and paid for.

You have infinite worth because an infinite God has given you worth. That's who yourself is. So this first condition to deny ourself, that's what it's talking about. Romans 14. For none of us lives for himself, and no one dies for himself.

If we live, we live for the Lord. And if we die, we die for the Lord. We are fortunate to be able to come to this room and sit in broad daylight, worship the Creator God, the loving God, without fear of death. That's not true even today in this world.

But I pray that even in a culture where worshiping my God could result in my death, then I'll die worshiping God.

To do that, I have to get rid of my earthly fear.

We have to get rid of that fear of being ostracized at work. Because I don't want to be known as the Jesus guy. Why in the world would I not want to be known as the Jesus guy? Like Jesus, the guy that traded me life for my death. That guy.

I want to be associated with that guy. I gotta get myself out of the way.

Philippians 2. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interest of others. Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus.

Do nothing from selfish ambition. Selfish ambition is important. Ambition's okay. Wanting to do better is okay. Wanting to progress through higher levels of your workplace, that's okay.

It's not a bad thing. If you've achieved a high level of financial success.

The question would be, what are we doing with that? First and foremost, I'M a child of God. Secondarily to that, I'm super rich. Not me, that'd be dope if I was also super rich. But I like the first one more.

I'm happy with the first part. I'm a child of God.

So this idea of self, it's like if you're married, you know, you're part of a tandem now. You're not just making decisions for you anymore. If you have kids, you definitely know you rarely are making decisions for you anymore. It's always an us. It's that same idea is I'm not.

This body is not my own. And what I do with it is ought be in the name of God. I ought be built different. But in order to be able to reflect his light, I've got to get out of my own way. I've got to get out of his way that he can work.

So that's the condition. One, deny yourself. You are not your own. You are bought and paid for. You are a child of God and you are loved.

So take a minute and just take inventory of, of your life and see if there is an area where you go, ooh, I put that one. I put that one ahead. It's easy to do if you're coaching a sport, if your kids are playing some kind of like, especially like travel, league ball or whatever. My daughter, when she started, she was like this big and she wanted to learn, like be a competitive swimmer, she learned to swim. And we went and talked to the coach and he's like, yeah, every weekday at 3:30 to 5:30, like every weekday, two hours a day, every day.

He's like, yeah, what it takes, like, not for my kid. She could just swim for fun. Like we just throw her in a pond. She could just swim. She doesn't have to.

But sometimes we do fall into that, right? And so sometimes that little, that worldly creep can sneak up on us. And all of a sudden I'm working 80 hours a week. That's all I'm doing. I got no time for church.

I got no time for community group. I got no time for God. I got no time to do anything with my body. In the name of God, let's lose our worldly self so that we can get to the second condition. Take up your cross daily.

Take up your cross daily. Now this part, I kind of touched on it a minute ago. This part is a little different for us because he was specifically like his imagery. He's literally talking to some guys, knowing, and he's already told them, yo, they're gonna kill me. If you want to follow me, if you want to come after me, know where we're going.

I'm getting hung up.

And if you want to come after me, you're getting hung up.

You'll know. Historically, or you might not know, but you could probably guess historically, overwhelmingly, his guys got martyred.

Not all of them got crucified. Specifically, Peter did. He got crucified in a wacky way. You can look that one up. But this idea still applies to us.

Even though, even though we're not in a worldly sense, ideally going to be threatened with crucifixion, the world still crucifies you in some kind of small way. And just know that if you're gonna follow after Jesus, the world's coming after you, the enemy's coming after you. He's gonna put a target on your back.

Acts20 But I do not account my life of any value, nor as precious to myself. If only I may finish my course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.

Finish my course is interesting language here. It gives me this idea of a long race, a marathon race. Not like a 40 yard dash sprint race, but like a marathon. 28.6 miles. Is that what it is?

28 point miles? I'm not going to run. That's too far. I don't need to know the distance of a marathon. I'm not running a marathon.

But if you've ever run long distance at all, you know that, that last mile, way worse than that first mile. And I think that we as Christians can sometimes forget that Jesus asks us to take up our cross daily if we've been running the race for a long time. Some of you, I'm looking out there, have been running the race a little longer than me. Why am I shooting at all the old guys today? This is all old guys.

We don't have any old women in the church. I'm aware of this. All old dudes. But sometimes we get into this idea of living our worldly life.

We forget that we're tasked every day. Pick up that cross. If you want to walk after me, know where we're going, Know where we're going.

And if you survive today, say a prayer of thanks. And when you wake up in the morning, say a prayer of praise. Pick up your cross. We got to work. You know where we're going.

Luke22.

This one is fascinating to me. Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. This is Jesus Talking just before his crucifixion, just before he very literally is going to pick up his cross.

If you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. Here's why I think this is a fascinating prayer, is because Jesus has the same feelings sometimes I have. God, I don't want to do this. This is hard, man.

This is rough. I don't want to be the Jesus guy in the break room at work that's not gonna have any friends.

I don't want to talk to people in the. Lying at the grocery store. Do any of you still go to the grocery store? I still actually go into the grocery store. I know a lot of people now just, like, drive up and people just, like, throw bags of cabbage or whatever in the back of your car.

I'm not that guy. I gotta see it. I want to see all the colors and touch it. I don't want to talk to the guy behind me. Pray with the guy behind me in the checkout line.

I'm the. That's weird. That's not what normal people do. But I'm built different. We ought to be built different.

We shouldn't look like what the rest of them look like.

And so in this case, Jesus. Jesus, like the Jesus, like capital, all letters. Jesus says, dad, if you would, we could do a different way.

But not what I want. I want what you want, even if it's not what I want.

That's the hardest thing about faith. I think it's the hardest thing for people to kind of wrap their head around because it kind of just sounds like you're brainwashed. But I always challenge people. If your religious beliefs, if the instructions you get from God, if all of it lines up with exactly how you think the world should work, you're dealing with a flawed God because you're messed up. So this idea of God always doing what I want him to do always put me on the path I want him to be on.

Wanting the world to be a particular way that I think it should be. Always, always, always shouldn't be true. Otherwise, he's as cracked as I am. But he's not. He's perfect.

And so I know in that moment, I don't know what you're doing, God, but let's do it.

This idea of carrying your cross, it gets used incorrectly in, like, normal vernacular. People talk about, like, it's my burden to bear, it's my cross to bear. You might have heard that before. And they kind of use it in, like a. Like a.

They Got like a medical condition or whatever. Like one leg's shorter than the other leg and they're just like, it's my cross the bear. I walk in circles or whatever. Like it's, it's, it gets used. Like, I've got, you know, my mother in law, she.

My cross the bear, she's, she's from a different mold. My mother in law is awesome, by the way. So any of you that have to deal with that, na, na, na, na, My family's awesome. Mandy's mom's dope. But you've heard it used like that, right?

Boss is crazy. It's my. But it's my cross to bear. We think about it like that, but this is not that. This is not a thing we've been saddled with.

I'll do what Jesus wants my cross to bear. It's not that daily I will take up my cross.

He's walking, I'm walking. He's burdened, I'm burdened. I'm burdened because he's burdened me. And if he hasn't burdened me, if he hasn't burdened you, check in on condition one. It's entirely possible that you're already fooled up on burdens of your own and there's no space in your backpack.

But if you emptied out that backpack and made space for God. All right, let's do it, God. God's got some burdens for you, but with him, the weight is light.

So Pastor Jonathan, the Rocky Mount, he had this cool, like, visual illustration in his brain where this idea of a surrendered life being built different, following after Jesus. It kind of has three motions to it. It's got a down motion, it's got a plateau motion, and it's got an up motion. Makes a little smiley face, I guess. So the down is empty.

Get rid of. Deny myself unburdened. And in that plateau, daily take up my cross, get ready for work. And then that leads to the upswing, which is the third condition. Follow Jesus.

Follow Jesus, he says, follow me.

This idea in verse 24. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will save it for my sake. That part is important. We can deny ourselves all kinds of stuff.

Athletes deny themselves cake just to shave off a couple of milliseconds off of how fast they run. We can deny ourselves my police guys that are out there. You guys deny yourselves the safety net of safety.

That's crazy. But I'm glad you do it. But, you know, you probably don't Think of it that way, is that soldiers deny themselves the comfort of safety. So we deny ourselves stuff all the time. In the end, if I only deny myself so that I can run a little faster, what's it worth?

But if I deny myself that I can follow Jesus. If I deny myself for his sake, then I'm serving His kingdom, and his kingdom is the kingdom. And I don't know if you guys have skipped to the end of the book. He wins. His kingdom's coming, and that's going to be the kingdom.

And so if I'm building sandcastles outside of his kingdom, his kingdom's paving over my sandcastles, man.

And so in this, we're not just emptying ourselves to be Zen. We're not just emptying ourselves to be free of the world's burdens. We're emptying ourselves that we can have the opportunity to take up our cross daily and follow Jesus. First Peter for this you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. We're called to sacrifice for other people.

Bad news. We're called to sacrifice for other people. We're called to give our time to other people. We're called to give our treasures to other people. We're called to serve using our talents for other people.

We're called to do that. You have to mow your yard because otherwise you look like a schlubby house. But it's when you mow your neighbor's yard that people really start to take notice.

I can go out and buy $100 worth of stuff at the Dollar Tree. Probably only get 50 things. Is that what the exchange rate is now at? The dollar tree is $. But if I buy $100 worth of stuff and give it to somebody else, they're going to notice that part, right?

So this idea that we are working towards you have been called because Christ also suffered for you. Jesus suffered for me. Jesus died for me.

And because of that I have to suffer for other people. He's still suffering for him, but I'm the tangible thing they can see. That's the important bit of presenting my body, is that only through my physical work is there evidence of his work in my heart.

Luke9. Yet another said, I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home. Jesus said to him, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. This one gets in some people's way sometimes.

This one comes after there's like. There's like a sequence of like 4 back to back to back parts where Jesus goes, you want to follow me? Okay. And then the person is like, I'll follow you. And Jesus is like, let's go.

And they say, hang on, I gotta do a thing. And he's like, that's not following me.

This one, though, is tricky. They seem reasonable. They seem like reasonable asks, right? So this guy is not, like, the ask seems pretty normal. First, let me say farewell to those at my home.

We kind of could side with this guy. Like, Jesus is kind of being unreasonable. And so there's got to be more to it. Either Jesus is unreasonable guy, or there's more to it than this. I think there's more to it than that.

And what I see him saying here is, I'm walking this way. If you're looking that way, you can't follow me.

If we're working, you can't plow a straight line. I had somebody give me this illustration after the first service. The first service didn't get this one. This is bonus content for you guys, like, and subscribe.

So the way in the ye olde times, the way they plow fields straight, they didn't have, like, GPS tracking, like, all the cool tractors and stuff that we have now where you just, like, hit the button and then it goes off and you go get some tea and come back and your field plowed. That's not how it really works. I know farmers, I know y' all actually do a lot of work. They would just stare at a point way off in the distance, and they look at that point, they wouldn't worry about this. Because if you look down here, it's like this.

Is this the same idea? If you want to plow a straight line, you gotta come to me, man. If you're worried about what's happening behind you, you can't see where I'm going to follow me. So it's not.

It's not a time issue in this illustration. It's a heart issue. Your heart's not with me. Your heart's back home.

That's what we're kind of talking about with this is. In some cases, a thing that is good in our life becomes more important than following Jesus, and then it becomes bad in our life. And this illustration uses that perfectly, where having a home and having lots of family at your home, that's a good thing. That seems like a good thing. But the minute that's more important than following Jesus.

Jesus is like, that's not what following me is.

It's not. You get to do it on your own time. When you feel like it, we gotta go. I need you working now.

Love one another as I have loved you.

That's one of his commands to us. He says, love how I love, Give how I gave.

Pray how I pray. You want to follow me? Live how I live.

Go in the spots that are uncomfortable, Go in the spots that are going to get you in trouble.

Jesus is pointing, you know where we're going. There's this idea of.

These three conditions being met. We chose conditions because if you have a checklist, Jesus is saying, if you would follow after me, if you would come after me. So what does it look like if we have a checklist? If any of the three of these checkboxes aren't checked, we're missing a piece. So take a quick inventory in your life, wherever it is, whatever it might be.

Are any of these conditions not checked right now?

Is there something bigger in your life that prevents you from talking about God, from following God?

Deny yourself?

Is there something. Maybe it's just I'm awful at time, bad at time. So like sometimes I'll like, you know, bedtime or whatever and I'm like, alright, just give me 15 minutes. And then it's like Tuesday and I'm like, what happened to. So I'm terrible at time.

So maybe it's something for you. As simple as that. Just, man, days keep going by and I just forgot to pick up my cross.

Maybe that's the condition where you're struggling. Or maybe it's God, I want to follow you. I'm just not.

We want Jesus to be our Savior, but we struggle with making him our Lord. We struggle with making him our leader.

That's the disconnect.

But if we can find these three conditions, if we can put whichever one we're short on, a little extra prayer, a little extra effort, a little extra focus, that's what it looks like to come after Jesus. I'm not important, Jesus, you are. Tell me what we're doing today, Jesus. I want to do your thing. Get me through it, Jesus.

Amen.

Let's pray. Father God, thank you for today. Thank you for the opportunity to come here and worship you not only in safety but in comfort. Thank you for the blessing that that is. But help us to be a church that would worship you in discomfort, that would worship you in danger.

Father God, thank you for the opportunity to sit at your feet and worship. You are worthy of worship. Thank you for being a God that's So big that you are worthy of worship. And thank you for being a God that's so incredibly loving that no matter how big you are, that you never forgot little old me. And that you know the names written on every person in here, your specific name for them.

Thank you for loving us enough. That you made a way for us to get to you. Regardless of how far we run from you, regardless of how broken we are.

Jesus, thank you for being a willing sacrifice for me, for little old me. That you were willing to trade your perfection for my imperfection and that you make my imperfection perfect.

And if you're hearing this right now, maybe you don't know God at all. You say, how can I follow God? I don't even know God.

You do.

He's right there beside you. He's been there beside you.

If you want to follow God, it's very, very easy. It's an incredible blessing that we've been given.

It's just a simple prayer like this. Father God, I'm a sinner. I've sinned against you. I've turned away from you. I've run my own race.

I've served my own self. But I don't want to do that anymore. I love you and I know you love me. I know, Jesus, you sacrificed your life for me. And then in that sacrifice you died for me.

And in your all power you conquered death to raise again. And you offer me that same resurrection. Father God, I want that.

I want you in my life, Jesus. I accept your trade. I accept your sacrifice as my own sacrifice.

Help me to follow you.

If you pray that prayer, Congratulations. Welcome to the family. It's time to get to work. Father God, help us to be a family that works for you.

Maybe if we've been a child of yours for a long time, but we've forgotten to take up our cross daily. Daily. Father God, help me to take up my cross daily, right now for the rest of the day. Help me to do the work. Give me the work.

Father God, when I wake up tomorrow, help me to take up my cross. Give me the work. Give me the strength. Give me the direction.

Father God, thank you for the opportunity to speak your words.

I just ask that all of the words that ever come out of my mouth are always your words. That this last 40 odd minutes is not the exception, but it is the rule.

And I pray that we will be a church, that you'll empower us and that you'll make us fearless. And that you'll make us a family united in your name. And that we, as a church, you will send out to do your work. That we, as a church, will take up your cross daily. That we, as a church, will follow you.

And that we, as individuals will deny ourselves. That we, as individuals will take up our cross daily. We, as individuals will follow you. Father God, we love you. Amen.