JUL 19 2026 | Rooted In The Spirit S1E4 | The Epistles: Fruits and Gifts – Your Gift Is an Assignment

Right on. Good morning, Sea Change Church. If you have your Bibles, turn to 1 Peter 4:7-11. I told Phil on the way out that it's give, pray, serve, but the missions guy is going to change it to go. Go, pray, serve works, too. That's kind of the direction we're going. So that's all good. So stoked you guys are here today. Such an honor to have you be here, and as we continue to move forward in this series. It's a summer series on the Epistles. We have eight weeks in the Epistles, and then we're going to be moving into Acts next week. The entire series is going to be formulated into an e-book.

I'm writing it right now, editing it, and you'll see a picture of it right here. It's called "The Church Has Left the Building," and it's going to be about you guys being plan A. And the goal of our church is to equip and send you, to see you go out into the power, in power, in the Spirit's power, to be mature fruit, fruit-filled believers, spirit-filled believers, and believers with their gifts that are going out and making a difference. And so, we did the first four weeks on the purpose of the church. These four weeks are on fruit and gifts. This is the final week of gifts, so you're in week eight.

And then the next week is in the Book of Acts, where we're going to be looking not at the apostles so much, but just regular believers in Acts who made a difference, and how they did that. And so we want to equip you to send you out to be the change in the world. That is kind of coming from some conversations I had with some key members and leaders here at the church about where we're going as a church, and really the desire not to be an attractional model, but a discipleship sending model, where you know the word of God, you know what your gifts are, and you know where you're called to go.

I won't ask you to do it, but in the first service, I ask the congregation if they knew what their spiritual gifts were to raise their hands. About half of the group raised their hands. And then I said, "How many of you, raise your hands again, if you know where God has placed you, where He's called you to go and minister and make a difference?" It was like 20%. Now, I realize that that isn't on you. That's on me as a leader equipping and stewarding you guys here at this church to help you identify those places. And so that's what we're going to be doing in a vision going forward, identifying where has God called you.

Maybe it's into publishing. Maybe you're a teacher. Maybe you're a plumber. Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom. But to take the gift of the Spirit, which is supernatural, and actually change the geography, the terra firma, the spiritual culture of where you are and where you're at. And that's what this passage is about. There is a scripture that God gave me out of Revelations 22, I believe it's 12 or 17, Revelations 22, that says there is a river that runs through the city of God. And God gave me this picture that there is a river that runs out of this church, and you guys are the molecules of that river, to nourish.

And you're going to see that also in Ezekiel. That same imagery is in Ezekiel 47. Ezekiel 47 talks about out of the temple, a river runs out of the temple and into the city. You guys are that river. Well, how can I equate that? Well, in the New Testament, Jesus in John 7:37-38, on the greatest day of the festival, He stood up and He cried out and says, "If anyone is thirsty, come unto me and I will give them water that will lead to eternal life, and it'll be a well springing up within them." That you become that well. You become that watering source. That's also seen in Psalm 1, that talks about that person that is planted, that is being nourished, that bears its fruit in season.

And so our vision in this Church Has Left the Building series is to become a church that has left the building. You guys are here, but we're not measuring our ability or our worth as a church based on how many people come. It's on how many people are engaged. Let me read the passage this week. If you have your Bibles, we want to be a Bible-bringing church. Want to encourage you, we use an English Standard Version Bible. There's a lot of great versions, but this is the Bible that we have, and I encourage you to have a church Bible that you can mark up and put things in the pages and use colors and whatever you want to do.

We sell these in the back if you don't have one. You can probably get one on Amazon as well. But we are in 1 Peter 4:7-11, and let's read this together. "The end of all things is at hand; therefore, be self-controlled, sober-minded for the sake of your prayers." Underline for the sake of your prayers. Verse eight, "Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another. As good stewards," circle the word stewards, really key for today's message, "of God's varied grace." Verse 11, "Whoever speaks as one who speaks the oracles of God, whoever serves as one who is serving through the strength that God supplies in order that," and I want you to underline in order that.

That is the apex of this passage, "that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To Him belong the glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen." The title didn't make it to the series. I forgot to put the title on it. And they got ahold of me and said, "Hey, what's the title?" And so 12 hours later, I got back to them. It was too late, but the title, you can write the title in. It's called Gift Sandwich. And the reason I call it Gift Sandwich is because as you look at the gifts in this passage, and as Peter speaks about the gift, he sandwiches your gifts between serving others And glorifying God.

He sandwiches it between serving others and glorifying God. Now you're going to see, we know that the gifts, there's going to be no gifts in heaven. There's going to be no gift of tongues, there's going to be no gift of helps. There's no gift that will be in heaven. All the fruit will be there. The fruit of the Spirit will be there, but the gifts will be gone, and we know that if the gifts are not employed in your life with Christian maturity, with fruit, without love, agape love, you see that in 1 Corinthians 14, I believe. Without the agape love, it says they become like a clanging gong or a cymbal that means nothing and passes away.

Paul even says in Corinthians that even if he sacrifice-- He has all those gifts. Even if he sacrifices his life to be burned by the flames, that it means nothing if it's not accompanied with love. And so I call this gift sandwich because we are going to equip you to know and understand your gifts so that you can go out for two purposes, which model the two purposes that Jesus said are the two greatest commandments. They tried to trick Jesus again. The Pharisees came up to him and said, "What are the greatest commandment?" He said, "The two greatest commandments are love others and love God." Those are the two things that he said.

And as you see this gift sandwich here, these gifts are between that same teaching of Jesus. So you have been gifted. God wants to employ your gifts, they are supernatural gifts, into the world, but he wants to do it that is sandwiched between Christian character. You're maturing. The fruit of God is in your life. That only happens through abiding. Jesus says the only way to grow fruit is through abiding, to abide in him, and then you do it to allow God to see the glory. One of the things I was interested in this week, this week I was at home and I thought I need some-- I don't want to scroll.

I don't want to give my life to the scrolling gods and worship at the gods of scrolling, no matter how interesting my sourdough algorithm is on how to make great sourdough bread. It is a worthy algorithm that I have, and I'm proud of it. But I'm there too long. And so I began to go to my bookshelf, and for any Gen Z, a book has paper, and paper started in Egypt with papyr-- Okay, so I'll tell you what a book is, and I picked out the book. There was "The Odyssey," there was all these other books I wanted to read, and with the new movie out, I thought maybe I'll just read "The Odyssey" or read some Homer just to see the real version first.

But I came across Victor Frankl's, "Man's Search for Meaning," and it's a fabulous book. He's a psychologist who was in Auschwitz, who survived the Holocaust, and he went on to tell about it. And as I was reading it in the early chapters, he actually talked about the psychology of the masses. And as a church, I've realized that, not just our church, but many churches have an attractional masses model. The goal is to draw a crowd, and oftentimes people and the pastors themselves will measure how worthy the church is in the kingdom if masses show up. Jesus wasn't always into crowds. There'd be a crowd, he'd go hide.

It was like a Jesus thing. He wasn't trying to draw crowds. And crowds, when organized for a right reason, are awesome. We'll talk about that in a moment. But as I read through what Victor Frankl was talking about in the psychology of crowds, I noticed a few things that can happen at churches when we don't employ you in your gifts. And that's the entire reason I'm saying this right now. When we don't employ and send you to make a difference in the world. And then once again, that question is: Do you know your gifts? And we're going to help you find them. And where are you employing your gifts?

Where has God called you to? You walk out in the door every morning and think, "I'm going to this place, and when I get there, I'm going to employ my gift and I'm going to do it for God's glory." That's living the Christian life. The worldly, flesh-full life is, "I'm going out to do what I want to do, how I want to do it, and I hope I get mine during the day, and I walk away satisfied that I kind of furthered myself a little bit in this process." And so these are the things that he said, just three quick things that I thought as I began to think about the church.

First of all, he said crowds can diminish personal responsibility. That is so true. You can have a church-- Disneyland gets crowds every single day, but no one walks in there with personal responsibility of how to make Disneyland better or the world better. It's a magic kingdom. Churches can do that as well. We don't want to do that. We want you to have an individual to feel personal responsibility, that when you come out of here, when you come here, you leave having heard great worship, heard, hopefully, good teaching. We want you to experience all those things, get good coffee, all those different things. But I want you to walk out with a sense of personal responsibility that I need my fruit game to be together, I need to be maturing in Christ, and I need to be employing the gifts that God has given me to change the world where he has sent me.

Without that, it's just a crowd. The second thing he says is emotions can replace meaning. I see a lot of that. I love emotions. I'm going to go to Jesus Culture. I think I'm going to Jesus Culture tonight to hear Chris Quilala. He's a great worship leader from Jesus Culture back in the day, and he's going to be up in Rancho Bernardo. So I think I'm going to try to make it there tonight. And I love that because I love the vibe, I love the jumping. I love putting myself-- I love Pentecostals. You need to have a couple good charismatic and Pentecostals in your friendship network.

Just when the donuts hit the fan, you need somebody that you can go to, and they're going to pour the oil and believe for you. No one with a sickness is going to go to someone who doesn't believe in healing and power. But these emotions sometimes, you can create an emotional experience where people walk out feeling like they've matured in Christ, but they haven't. And I've done that. Have you ever made a decision at church, or when you listen to a worship album or you see a movie, you make a decision, and then by 2:00 in the afternoon, you're like, "Nah," kind of the emotion is gone.

So emotion's great, but we want to move beyond that, and so Peter speaks about here how to do that. And then the other thing is numbers can become a metric of success. We are sitting as a staff, and the reason I'm giving you all this backstory is because this whole sermon series is a vision series about where we're going as a church. So sit tight. We're going to get into the First Peter here in just a second. But we have 2,000 people in our database, about 2,000. Hopefully, you're in it as well. And we've started sitting on Tuesdays now and going through every person's name and saying, "Can anybody identify who they are?

Are they involved? Are they equipped? Where are they serving?" And we're starting to move them. We have identified at the moment 675 of you this quarter that are either tithing Volunteering or coming to a group of one kind or another. That's an awesome group of people if it isn't just showing up. And so what I feel God has called me to do is to organize you guys into an army of God's consolation of love. You might say, "Why would you use army language in the church?" Because the Bible uses it in Ephesians 6, "Put on the full armor of God." But we don't want to send you out there alone.

We want to send you out together. So as we move into this, we are going to be equipping you and sending you to be God's army of love and consolation into the world, whether you are in the hospital, like friends of mine are right now, or going to a doctor's appointment, or coaching a soccer team, or on a college campus, or going to Trader Joe's, or going to your gym class, whatever it is. So here's your big idea for the day. God has entrusted you with a gift or gifts. Use it to serve others and to make Jesus known. God has entrusted you with a gift.

Now, you might not know where that is. I said this Sunday, we're making our own spiritual gifts test. I wrote a book on spiritual gifts, so I have a little bit of understanding on it. And so we're creating our own algorithm on the website where we can take the test, and then we're going to have a class where we're going to go through it. You'll take this quiz. They said we should probably do a shorter one because people don't have an attention span beyond 10 minutes. I said, "Make it 20." I said, "Make it 100," because the people who will fill it out sit there for 20 minutes, and myself, it's hard with our three-second algorithm mindset.

Those are the people I really want to engage with, the ones who are willing to go next level on that. So that'll be out this week or next Sunday to help you do that. But we want you to know what your gift is and use it to make Jesus known. If you go to verse 10, it says in verse 10, "As each has received a gift, use it" why? For yourself? No. "To serve one another as good stewards," once again, circle stewards, "of God's varied grace." I'm getting into a habit right now of when I walk out of the garage in the morning, because is anybody a...

Who's a-- I don't use your front door. I never walk out my front door. Who's a garage person? Just a few of us? I'm always out the garage. Like, I never use the-- The rest of you are front door people? Okay. Well, I don't use the front door. Somebody's like, "I don't even have a garage. That doesn't mean nothing to me." But as I walk out the garage, you can use the front door, I'm asking myself, "Where am I going? What gift does God have me?" I know I have multiple gifts God has given me. Gifts of faith, gifts of encouragement, gifts of knowledge, words of wisdom.

God's given me, for some reason, he's employed different gifts to me in a bunch, probably because I run the church, but I don't want to just use them on Sunday morning. And so I found that I wasn't using my gifts during the week. And so I'm asking myself, when I cross the threshold of, if you can call it that, of my garage, I've been walking out saying, "Okay, I'm going to the skilled nursing facility where my mom's at today. How am I going to use my gift when I'm there with the nurses, with the people? How am I going to as I go to Trader Joe's to pick up whatever?" And so I want to give you that assignment.

There is a threshold, and I want you to make the threshold that you cross really memorable and key in your life. I don't want to say don't definitively, but try to get to the point where every time you cross that threshold where you're leaving your actual property, wherever you live, to go somewhere, to actually think, "What am I taking with me? What am I trying to accomplish? And who am I being called to?" That's what Peter is speaking about here. I would say the same thing when you come home. Sometimes, as a husband, I just want to, from Jerry Maguire, remember Jerry Maguire, the Tom Cruise movie?

The guy says, "My quan." I got to get my quan straight. You know what I'm saying? Maybe you don't remember that movie. And I just got to sit for a second and say, "Jesus, I'm not going to come with all the stuff of my day and just dump it on my wife." I want to let that threshold be important. So the threshold is key. I want to give that to you as a tool. I want you to think through that as you go through it. Your gift and his assignment, and then God sandwiches gifts between his maturity in glory. Go to verse 10 again. Your gift is an assignment.

"As each," everyone gets one, "has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace." You are stewarding this gift that he is giving you to steward one another. There is a lot of talk in the Christian world about what is my purpose, right? And so I'm reading Viktor Frankl, the "Man's Search for Meaning," and there is a search for meaning. I actually think we've overemphasized purpose. We're the first generation, maybe for the last 100 years, unless you were king or royalty or something like that, that can actually ask yourself that question. Very few Christians, for their entire lives, were able to ask themselves the question as a farmer in Ireland 400 years ago, just trying to survive on kelp, and they ate kelp, and trying to get some potatoes to grow, were asking themselves, "What's my purpose?

What am I going to try to do?" You know what they're going to try to do? Eat, right? They're going to try to grow a potato. They're going to hang out with their family and their clan if they're in Scotland. And there's not much thought beyond this. I'm a stat miller. You know what stat miller means? It means I mill grain. That's what my family did. You want to know what my purpose would have been 400 years ago? To mill grain, right? All of a sudden, we have enough wealth where we can ask the question, "Who do I want to be? Where do I want to go?

What can I do?" Maybe I want to live in Europe. Maybe I want to-- And we get really bummed when the thing that we want, that shiny thing that we want, that career that we want, doesn't happen. Let me assure you, you're one of the first generations in human history, if you weren't royalty, that can ask that question of yourself. But now we've made it the apex of everything that we do, and we're so depressed and so upset when we can't do that thing that we feel that we're called to do. The Bible's very clear. God has set before you Good works in advance before the world was created for you to go out and to serve others and to glorify God.

If we do that, your purpose will come and lay at your feet. I have chased my purpose for a long time, and I did for a long time, and I found that it really wasn't fulfilling when I notched off those things that were goals. I'm reading Kelly Slater's book from 2004, I think it is. Not a great book. I'm glad he didn't write another one. But nonetheless, it's just not written well. He's a surfer, you know what I'm saying? I don't know if he's a writer. He had help writing it as well. But it does talk about his six titles. And so I'm listening to it, it's on audio.

And as I'm listening to it, he said, "After my sixth title, I realized I was completely unfulfilled. What does it all mean?" Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, I've mentioned this before, was on stage at the pinnacle of his career at the Rose Bowl. One of you guys actually got back to me last time I preached that and said, "I was actually at that concert." And he said that when he was on stage for Depeche Mode at the height of their career, "Personal Jesus," that whole thing, right? Awesome. He said he asked himself when he was on stage, he realized he was at the height of his career, he would never go any higher, and he went into a deep depression after that.

I know we think that if you do your thing that you want to do, you're going to be fulfilled. Let me tell you, you're not. Jesus has built you, God has built you, that it will never fulfill you. The only thing that's going to fulfill you is Him and His Spirit. And He says, "If you abide in me, that's the only way to produce fruit." We want to be a fruit-producing people. So He has given you this gift, and as we abide, if you take your gift, you walk out the door and say, "How can I do this for other people?" And I know that's so hard, especially in a society where people don't feel fulfilled and they have these things that they want to do.

But the scripture says that He has given you these things to do, and they've been entrusted to you to live as stewards. Go back to verse 10. "As each received a gift, use it." Use it. For what? To serve one another. I will say, I'm regularly asking myself when I'm speaking, what's the purpose? I got to be real honest. 20 years ago, I really got a dopamine rush of like, wow, I get to be in front of people. Every young pastor wants to speak, right? Not everyone, but a lot of them, they just want to speak. They want to be in front of people. And I remember I would get to speak at my old church, and it was a megachurch.

And so they had 9,000 at Easter. It was a ton. I never got to speak at Easter, but they would let me speak, and sometimes there'd be multiple thousands of people there, or I'd speak at a conference or something like that. I got to tell you, I probably liked what I got from it more than what I was trying to accomplish. And I think that's really changed. Even as I'm driving here today, I'm saying, "God, what I say, the oracles of God, I can speak as if they're the oracles of God to you." And His Holy Spirit, supernaturally, has nothing to do with me. He's preaching a different sermon to every single one of you.

The amount of people that come up to me and say, it happened at college group this week, "You said this," I don't even remember. It's like five years ago. I had a guy stop me backstage, one of the team members. He's all, "Hey, I don't know if you remember, but you came up to me and my friends in middle school and you said this to me." And he goes, "I want you to know that's come true, and it's at boom." And I'm like, how do I measure that? I talked about AI and everyone's all like, "AI is so powerful." AI can't do that, bro. God is weaving all of your lives together to go out and make a difference in the world.

And so what He says is He wants you to use it. And so we're going to help you identify your gift, but until then, just abide in Him and at least let people eat the fruit off your tree. And the only way to have fruit is not to focus on the fruit. I said that before. Jesus says, "The only way to have fruit is if you abide in me." And I was doing it backwards. I said this two weeks ago. I was focusing on self-control, gentleness. I'll be really gentle, but then self-control would go down, and it was kind of like a bar graph. Then I was trying to spin all the plates and like, once I get that right, then Jesus is going to like me enough that He'll abide with me, right?

I have to get everything together. I have to become the person Jesus wants to hang out with before He'll hang out with me. Romans 5, "While you were enemies of God, He called you to be His friends." That's one of the songs that Connor wrote. And so yesterday, and I want to encourage you with abiding. Because this is going to help. This is the foundation for everything we're talking about and doing. I want to challenge you to abide. Yesterday, I had to force myself to abide. I went out to the backyard and I sat there for a half hour, and I just tried to focus on being with Jesus.

You know how hard it is to just be with Jesus? I didn't take my Bible. I didn't take a worship album. I just said, "I want to sit with you and I just want to hang out." That's the abiding. And so He says, "Abide and then use that gift." The word He uses is oikonomos, and that's a word to mean steward. Now, let me give you an example of being stewarded. When I was a kid, at 3:00 in the afternoon on Channel 5, "Rawhide" would come on. And I don't know if you remember "Rawhide." If you're probably under 45, you don't. But it was Clint Eastwood's original TV series.

This is a picture of Clint Eastwood right here. Now, I told my wife yesterday, I think Clint Eastwood is the best-looking actor that has ever existed. That's not even a good picture. I was like, it's like a spiritual gift to look that good. And I said to my wife, I said, "Carrie, he's the best looking. He's better looking than Brad Pitt." Brad Pitt's really just different. He has more structure. I don't know. Whatever. I don't need to get that much into my man crush. But I said to Carrie, I said, "He's the best-looking actor ever." She goes, "No, he's not. Paul Newman." I was like, "What?

Paul Newman?" And then I started thinking about maybe she is right. So we're going back and forth. The reason I tell you this is in the TV show, and you can think of all your actors who you think are amazing. In this TV show, if you leave his picture up, he played Rowdy Yates. Rowdy Yates was a cattle hand, and you would have thought he owned all the cattle. But he didn't own the cattle. I think the guy's name was Gil something or other was the owner of the ranch. And Rowdy's job was to take care of the cattle, but he took care of them.

If anybody came and tried to rustle the cattle or take them or steal them, he was there. He was on it. He treated it like it was his own, but he never Accepted it as if it was his own as the owner. The stewardship is that analogy. Maybe you can think of somebody who is a steward, maybe Alfred from Batman. You know what I mean? He's like a steward. Let me tell you what you are. You are a steward. You have been given a gift, and you have been allowed to drive the Ferrari. Alfred never drove the Batmobile. But God has said you can drive the Batmobile, which is really weird that God allows that.

This is a steward who God has called you to be. Each of you has been given that gift. Here's the second one. God sandwiches gifts between maturity and his glory. I've already kind of hit through that a lot. I think it's interesting that Peter places the spiritual gifts between Christian maturity and his glory. I talked about, and I want to say this, though. Why does he do that? Because gifts used for any other reason are dangerous. A gifted church that is not mature and that is not doing it for God becomes a self-centered church, a prideful church, a church that is doing things that will never last in heaven.

Paul says it's just like banging a gong. It'll never translate to making it to heaven. There's actually an interesting verse in scripture, it just come into the top of my head right now, that says anything that you do that is not done for God and by God, it says, will be left behind in this world and will not make it to be remembered in heaven. It says that if you make it through, it'll be as if you make it into heaven, as if escaping through flames, which means you did all this stuff for God, but it's nothing that God cared about that will last into eternity.

When you do things for God's glory, whatever it is, let's say you're an architect and you're building a house or whatever you're doing. It doesn't matter. You're sweeping a floor. You can clean a toilet for Jesus, and the memory of that toilet you cleaned will be remembered in heaven if you did it for his glory. We always think we need this giant platform. But he's called us into that because we're not looking for gifted people. We're looking for stewards who use gifts. Not looking for a bunch of gifted people, and that's one of the things that I've realized is the model of church leadership is to find the most gifted people that you can get, gifted worship leaders, gifted teachers, and have this attractional model when the power is really with you.

Great, we have 500 people show up or 700 or whatever it would be. If you don't go out like a stream, the molecules of the stream that runs from the throne of God to saturate the ground where you live, what are we doing? We can't change a city from the stage. This city is not going to be changed. La Jolla, Bajo, Claremont, PB is not going to be changed because of this stage. It's going to be changed because you decide you want to mature in Jesus, not be baby Christians on milk the rest of your life, that you want to find out what your gifts are, be filled with the Spirit, and then employ those gifts that he might be glorified.

That is a different way to live. So that's the final thing. So I put in the notes there in the bottom, the fruit reveals God's character, but the gifts reveal his power. I want to tell you that I believe that Satan wants you to feel disqualified from doing this. He wants to tell you're not good enough. You need to get your act together. When there's a perfect version of you, then God will want to partner with you. And I brought up Batman a second ago. My favorite superhero is Spider-Man. I really like Spider-Man. Somebody was backstage, and they said, "Well, mine's Batman." And they said, "Because he wasn't a super, he didn't have any superpowers.

He was just a normal human." I said, "No, he was just rich." Maybe he should be taxed. Should we still like Bat-- Okay, I'm sorry . That was pretty funny. And so this idea of Spider-Man, the reason I bring this up, because my favorite Spider-Man, you got Tom Holland, you have all these Spider-Mans. They're not my favorite. My favorite one is Miles Morales. And if you know Miles Morales, Miles Morales is the Spider-Man from the, I think it's "Into the Spider-Verse" or something like that. My daughter made me watch it. I actually loved it. He wears Air Jordans, which is super cool. And the whole movie is based around this one quote.

Where they're trying to decompartmentalize superheroes to say that anyone can be a superhero. So he says, "Anyone can wear the mask. You could wear the mask. If you didn't know that before, I hope you do now." Now, the problem with that is he was bitten by a radioactive spider. And so it's a little bit different. But what I would say when it comes to the Holy Spirit, there's two things that are true. And I'm speaking Gen Z right now, so I apologize. The Holy Spirit is the radioactive spider. And when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, you have a supernatural ability. Our culture is obsessed with the supernatural.

They're obsessed with what they feel is UFOs, with Marvel superhero movies, with all these things that are beyond our experience because our experience is not satisfying us. But the scripture says that you have the ability to walk in the supernatural, and it's available to everyone. The question is, will you employ and use that gift? Because when you use your gift, when you step out, or even the fruit, if you don't know what your gift is yet, we're going to help you with that. But if you just step out, abide, and then walk in the fruit, there is a supernatural that would satisfy the craving of the world to want more because God has given us a law of diminishing returns that anything you go after that is not Him will never satisfy you Sexuality will not satisfy you.

Drugs will not satisfy you. Fame will not satisfy. It'll never satisfy you. There is only one thing that satiates that need, and that is Jesus Christ alone. And that he will lead you to a Father that says, "You are not an orphan. You are not abandoned. I love you. I want to know you. I want to partner with you. I want to be with you." And then let's go change the world. Amen? Amen. Let's stand if you would. Have Chris come forward, and the prayer team. We want to pray for you today. We had a bunch of people come forward for prayer. If you need prayer, prayer is supernatural.

We want to pray for your health. We believe in healing. We are that church that believes in healing. We are the church that believes in the gifts of the Spirit. If you just want an anointing, if you want to be anointed with oil to go out, if you want reconciliation in your family, come forward and ask. It says you do not have in the scripture because you do not what? Ask. Because you do not ask. And to have people pray with you. Where two or more are gathered, it says that his presence is there. We're going to take a moment to abide. Maybe bow your heads and extend your hands if you feel comfortable.

Chris, play. We'll just take a moment to abide and just invite his presence. Walk past the closed door that Satan says is his presence because you're not good enough. You've sinned. We can boldly come to the throne of God according to Hebrews. We walk there in faith. We pray for more gifts. It says, "Ask, eagerly desire spiritual gifts." You can ask him for gifts. I just want right now just for you to picture the place this week you're going to abide with him, away from the idol of scrolling, away from the distractions, a safe place where it's just going to be you and him. Maybe with the Word, maybe with worship, maybe with just silence.

Just picture that place you're going to abide with him today. This week. Picture the threshold that you walk out every single day. Put a marker like the Jews did on the side, the Shema, love the Lord God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. And let that be almost a teleportation into a realm of his power. That it would be a place of rest and serenity within and a place of action and mission on the way out. So I bless your people, Lord God, as we become a church that has left the building, that is leaving the building, Lord Jesus, that has hurts and wounds and anxieties and depressions, Lord, and all these different things, God, that we can walk in you.

And we just pray for your fruit. We abide with you. The fruit will grow when you abide. Love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, self-control. So I bless you. We just pray that you would just anoint this altar now for prayer, for the release of prayers and your angels, and we thank you. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We love you. Go change the world, guys. We'll see you. There's nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing greater than the name of Jesus. All the honor, all the power, all the glory to the name of Jesus.