APR 24 2022 | Believe S1E1 | Da Truth

Sea Change Church · APR 24 2022 | Believe: Ep 1 - Da Truth
John 14:5-8
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

So, there you go. So, hopefully this will fit. All right. And the tartan for that is preacher tartan. So, that is the pastor tartan. There you go. Yeah, right on. The boss tartan. Right, I've taken up too much time. Right on. Thank you. Hey, what's going on, church? It's Vinny. I'm one of the high school ministry volunteers for Pastor Harry. And today, I'm going to be reading John chapter 14, verses 5 through 8.

Thomas said to him, Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way? Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. Philip said, Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.

The Word of the Lord. Well, my goodness, let me tell you the news. My head's been wet with the midnight dew. I've been down on the bended knee talking to the man from Galilee. He spoke to me as a voice so sweet. I thought I heard the shuffle of angels sweet. He called my name and my heart stood still. When he said, John, go do my will. Go tell that long tongue.

Liar. All right. As you tell, we are back in the gospel series by our gospel trailer. This sermon series is called Believe. It's about the basic foundations to help people come to understanding what Jesus taught and what the Bible teaches, what we as Christians believe. I think apologetics, which meaning understanding how to actually express your faith. C.S. Lewis was great at that, is an art form and it's also a theology and it's something that as a believer you need to be able to understand, especially in a culture that is losing meaning.

I think the Bible and Jesus corner the market on meaning and we're going to be talking about that in this belief. So that's what we're talking about today. And here in this passage, if you do have your Bibles, open up. If not, it'll be on your notes as well. Now, and let's read through this. Now, Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know. Circle, know. The word know.

It should be highlighted there. Lord, we don't know where you are going. So how can we know? Circle, know. Really important. We're going to full stop there. The reason they don't let me read the scripture anymore and they have people like Vinny and everyone else read it is because I can never read a scripture without preaching the scripture. So we've already pre-read it.

But this knowledge is important. The, the, the, I won't say it's a battle, but the discussion about is there absolute truth in the world is an important one. And as believers, moving into this idea of like, well, we don't really know. It's all based on faith. We can't know anything. That is not proper Christian teaching. Christian teaching is you begin with faith and faith gives you a knowledge.

And faith in Hebrews actually becomes a substance. So we have faith in something that we can know. Now, you don't want to be Mr. or Mrs. Bible know it all. But having a few things and standing on the ground, which is not very correct these days, I would say politically correct is kind of an old term. I don't know if it's culturally correct for many people.

To say, no, there is something I actually know. And by knowing something, it inherently gives limiting principles. If, if there is no definition of something, there is no limiting principles. So it's saying that you have knowledge. We'll talk about that in just a second because Thomas wants to know something. And after you make a decision to follow Jesus, you begin to walk in knowledge.

You walk by faith. But as Jesus shows here, I am the way, that's the way, to what? Truth. He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. So we're walking towards truth and we're walking towards life. So by walking the way of faith, you will walk into a knowledge of truth and life. So the first thing in this passage I want to hit as it's believers when you speak to people, don't be afraid to tell people in the most humble way that you can that I believe that God has given the world revelation and knowledge and we can know God, that there are things we can know and we want to be people who don't just walk in, well, whatever is true at the moment.

No, we have some anchors of truth. So that no is really important. Now Jesus answered him in regard to this question by saying, I am what? I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. So you want to circle way, truth, and life. There's a systematic pathway Jesus is giving there. He doesn't say, I am the life, truth, and the way.

He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. He wasn't just doing some rando, whatever comes to his mind. Jesus knows what he's doing and there was a systematic understanding of why that's important. We'll talk about that in just a moment. And then the final thing I want you to circle was no one comes to the Father except through me. That's the destination of everything that we do.

As I drove my daughter to basketball yesterday and we were talking about, you know, she had a game yesterday, it was awesome, and I said, everything you do, every rebound you get, if you're going to be a person of God, we do it all for the Father's glory. Everything is for the Father. The way you love the other opponent, the way everything that we do has a target and has a destination.

That is your purpose. Whatever you do, and what we tend to do is think that the target is our purpose and then somehow God will be in the midst of that or whatever and we're shooting for a purpose, but the target Jesus says in regard to knowledge, something you can know, is the Father. That's your target. And if you want to know anything, if you could trade knowing the Father versus knowing your purpose in life, which would you take?

You see, many believers, especially today, are more concerned about knowing their purpose which is important than they are about knowing God as Father. They would rather know what job they're going to have, who they're going to marry, what they're going to do, all of the things that are going to be in their life that many of which will pass away, but we don't want to know the Father.

And so in the Gospel, when we speak to people, don't undersell the fact that the reason I follow Jesus is that I can know God as Father. That is why. So in your apologetics, as you begin to build how to have conversations, this is one of the primary points. And you can re-listen to this sermon over and over again until you start learning how to share. If you're in conversations with people on a regular basis or you're terrified to get in a conversation because you don't know what to say, it means that you need some discipleship.

You need to be getting to study the Word of God because there are answers and we're going to be talking about some of these answers. Now, you'll see, I believe it's in your notes, you're going to see that I wrote this, that we're living in a world that is becoming increasingly meaningless. We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly meaningless.

And the interesting thing is, as the world moves away from primary definitions of things, the reason they're doing it is to find meaning. And it's interesting that you take meaning from things and then expect to find meaning. The only way to find meaning is to know what something means and it can't have multiple definitions. And so one of the things about truth is truth has limiting principles.

God has limiting principles. And if you're going to know truth, it means that some things are not true. That's just the nature. Aristotle, I believe, has the law of contradictions. You can't have things that contradict themselves. And so we're living in this. You're going to see this throughout our world. Now, I believe that some of these things have become political, but I believe that the major hot-button conversations of our day, it's not really based on politics.

It's based on meaning. The discussion is based on meaning. And as a church, we want to really, I mean, we, and as the church of Christ throughout the world, we really want to understand what meanings are and we want to live into those definitions. So one of the things you're seeing just in our culture is obviously here's some things that are losing meaning.

Gender's losing meaning, right? So you're going to see, and you're all very aware of it, that, you know, it went from one letter to the next letter to the next letter and now there's just a plus because it can basically be anything. Well, if you can be anything, you actually lose meaning. So in the search to define more meaning, you lose meaning. So that one hot-button topic, and I'm not going deep into that today, but it's about meaning.

The reason people are discussing it is because it's about meaning. Family. What is the definition of a family? A family has a definition to it, and a normative family, the one that I think has some of the most benefits, although you have adoptive families that are super important and things like this, are when you have a biological mom and a biological father that are both actively, active participants in a child's life.

Just because they have the biology doesn't mean that they're great parents. You want to have that. And so we're losing the meaning. If you look, I gave a definition a few months ago, that if you look at family, it says any group of people who choose to live together in a unit. Well, by definition, it has no meaning anymore, and so while there are other adopted meanings and things like that, we're losing that.

Sexuality has lost its meaning. It's whomever. It's basically just down to consent and willingness, right? But it's whomever, wherever, whenever. That's what sexuality means, as opposed to the limiting principles where Christianity would say it's in covenant, it has limiting principles. The reason we get married at a wedding on Friday here at 4 p.m., and the reason they got married was to put limiting principles on their wedding.

You're not going to have another spouse or something outside of this limiting principle. It actually defines limiting principles, and people want limiting principles because those things bring freedom and they bring boundaries and stability. So there is this, you know, in meaning. You also see it with an unborn child. If you can have an unborn child have no meaning, it's much easier to dispose of the unborn child.

But if you were to, if you were to state an argument, I've never argued with anybody who was for the disposal of unborn children who said that that being has meaning. And so all of these questions are about meaning. And the reason I bring that up because it's important because as a Christian, as you have conversation, these are the hot-button topics that people are going to pepper you with.

I don't know if you know that. I'm not bringing it up to be controversial. I'm just saying when you begin to speak about Jesus, these are the conversations that are going to be coming up. And as I had a conversation in Mammoth this week with somebody, I said to them, you know, as they began to ask, I said, but what about Jesus? And their whole thing was, well, there was a whole bunch of priests and they molested kids and so I can't go to church anymore.

And I said, okay, fair enough, fair enough. What about Jesus? Have you ever looked into Jesus? Well, no. I said, well, okay. Then there's some watchful dragons that you've allowed to keep you from the question as is Jesus real? Does Jesus exist? And these are things that we need to understand. You need to have an answer for these questions. Now, the sermon premise of this sermon is the core of the gospel.

I want to say this. The core of the gospel is anchored in truth and meaning. Let me tell you a disservice I think we've done. I think a disservice we've done is make the gospel all about salvation, all about Jesus saving you from hell. When I think that limits us, and I don't think the reason God sent his only son was to save you from hell. Why did he send his son?

Because he wants to spend eternity with you. Because he's absolutely enamored with you. Because he loves human beings. He loves his creation. And if we're just selling, which I think is important, if we're just saying you need to turn away from your sin so you can be saved and not spend eternity away from, you know, in hell, then we have undervalued Jesus and his mission and what he's all about.

We've made him a cosmic lifeguard as opposed to a cosmic father who loves you deeply. And as Jesus says here in this passage, whom you can know. When you speak to people about Jesus, you can say to them, the reason I follow Jesus is because I want to know God as father. Because God is so kind and the reason I believe in that is because he is so kind. And so it is a question of meaning.

Jesus says in John 8, 32 that you will know what? The truth. The truth and the meaning and the truth will set you free. C.S. Lewis has an interesting statement about meaning. He says this. It's in your notes. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. Let me read that again. Okay? Really powerful. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

I believe that the future of evangelism, in this culture especially, now this is super important for us as a church. Do not miss this. The future of evangelism is based in truth and meaning. Is based in meaning. That when you start talking to people about Jesus, don't start with the sin. Don't start with, I mean, we've done that for year after year and people have just turned it off.

It starts with meaning. Why do you matter? Or, is it just a random sequence of events? There was a band in the 1980s called the Meat Puppets. And it meant that you're just a meat puppet floating around in the universe and when it all ends, you're just nothing. You're just a piece of meat. You have no meaning. And so, the gospel, let me tell you what the gospel offers.

The gospel of Jesus Christ, not only offers salvation, it offers meaning. I sat in Mammoth this week with, and I was sitting there at a place called the Tamarack Lodge and there was a woman sitting next to me and she couldn't get her computer to work so I helped her and we began a conversation. She was from Australia and we began to talk about meaning and life and all these things and she began to espouse different things and I asked her, I said, well, where she was talking about, she was talking about the, you know, morals, morality and I just asked her a question because I think we need to ask more questions and you need to know the right questions to ask as opposed to always answering.

So, I said, where does meaning come from? She says, meaning comes from whatever a certain culture believes is to be true and I said, so it's random based on the culture. She goes, well, it's like a collective and whatever the knowledge is, is the knowledge that is true. Now, this is opposite of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is saying God is truth and we're leading towards an ultimate truth not based on human knowledge but that was the original sin, right?

You can be like God. You can define truth. You can define your own truth. So, I asked her, I said, where does this meaning come from? And she said, the morals come from. She said, it comes from the collective. I said, like a social contract. She goes, oh, I like that. And I said, well, it's not mine. It's Thomas Hobbes, social contract. But I wanted to steal it because it sounds really good.

And I said, so is all morality that is based in humans agreeing together right? She goes, yes. I said, okay, let's go to Nuremberg, 1939, Nazi Germany. Well, I don't say I have the answers to everything. I don't have the answers to everything. And I said, oh, okay. And I began to say, well, I feel like I don't have the answers to everything either but I do have a few answers.

And when I kept pressing, one, she wasn't prepared for the conversation as many people aren't, as I kept pressing and kindly just asked, well, what about this? Just really inquisitive. I kept getting to places like, well, I don't have the answers to everything. I don't have the answers to everything. Where we ended that conversation was me telling you, you have deep meaning, that you matter, that God knows you and created you.

And I got to tell you, if you want to make the gospel provocative to your friends and your coworkers, don't start with sin. Really important. Because sin takes us away from meaning. Start with meaning. and start understanding and start understanding your own meaning and don't sell out to some purpose being your meaning or if you write your book or sing your song or dance your dance, it is about knowing the Father and you can have knowledge.

And the one thing that I told her is there are things I can know. And I said, you know what, and this was totally culturally inappropriate, right? I said there are things that I know. And I said I can know them and you can know them too. So, we start there with Jesus talking about that. The future of evangelism is based on truth and meaning. It's impossible to have meaning without absolute truth.

Truth by nature must have limits and without limits it's impossible to have meaning. Go back and spend this week with a cup of coffee and read that over and over again and systematically think through that statement and what that means. Let me just break down the C.S. Lewis thing because it's so fascinating. It's so fascinating. His whole premise is this. If the world has no meaning, okay, because I tell people the world has meaning.

It's not just a random, evolutionary sequence of events. It has meaning. If the world had no meaning you would never be able to ask the question does it have meaning because it would be meaningless because everything's meaningless. Because you're in meaninglessness it would never come to your mind that hey, this might be meaningless. What's the meaning of life?

If you live in a meaningless world it doesn't, you would never answer the question. So, let me just read. That's what he meant by that again. If the whole universe has no meaning we should never have found out that it has no meaning. Now, all my people that love scholarly Bible and all that, you know, systematic thinking, they're like, oh, where's this been for the last six weeks?

You know, here we are. So, hope you're enjoying. I see Raul back there. He's taking notes. He's all happy. I knew I'd make you happy today. Go to the verse again. We're going to look at this. Truth and life are found along the way. Now, this is super important. This is, I told you a moment ago that Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Why not the life, the truth, and the way?

Why not the truth, the life, and the way? Why not, you know, why start with the way, the truth, and the life? It's really important. Circle the word way. We're going to get to that as the second point of this. But way takes faith. And the word way represents faith in this equation. I am the way to what? The truth, and the life. I don't want to pre-preach my sermon, but let me read it.

John 14, 5-8. Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you are going. Jesus gave him the bullseye, and it's where you should be going, to the Father. So how can we know the way? Jesus answered, I, I, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Now remember, I am was the statement that God said in the Old Testament. And Moses asked him, who are you? This is early on, because systematically he's building revelation.

The revelation goes from a creative revelation, the creation, to actually knowing who God is, through the law, all the way to Jesus coming in, you know, the revelation, it's progressive revelation, to now, the Holy Spirit, God can live within you, the most ultimate, intimate revelation that you can have. And our sexuality is actually based on that. The reason he gave us sexuality, where man and woman can be together as one flesh, was to be a metaphor to show you that he wants to also be one with you.

And so the reason we hold firm on the truths of human sexuality and the way it's built is because it represents a truth of whom God is or who God is and who he wants to be with us. So there's a progressive revelation. Now in this, Jesus says, and this is why they got mad at him, I am. I am. They would all know that he was talking and when he said I am the first time, it wasn't as, as, as specific of a revelation.

It was like, I is. I'm all of it. I just be. That's who I am. And they understood that. It was such a sacred word for the Jews that they wouldn't even pronounce it. They wouldn't even write it. They had to have an acrostic for it, Y-H-W-H, and if you said it, you could actually be stoned. You could not use the name of God. There was this high holiness. Jesus is giving more revelation here, so he says, I am, and then he says the way, the truth, and the life, and then he gives a destination.

This is a package. He says, I am, this is the original statement, this is God, the way, truth, life, there's a systematic reasoning for that, and it takes you to the Father. This is the passage, and if you're going to understand how to share your faith, you need to understand that road, and that's just one of the many roads that the Bible talks about. So, the first thing I want to say is this.

If you don't, you'll see in your notes, if you don't know where you're going, you'll never know the way. As believers, we need to know where we're going. Okay? So, we're currently waiting for different answers about, you know, college acceptances and all these different things. You're waiting. Waiting is part of the human experience, and we kind of hate to wait, don't we?

We just hate to wait. We just want to know. And in the midst of that understanding, God wants to be there with us in this waiting process, but he also wants us to know the way. And he wants us to know where we're going. So, as a believer, let me tell you this. If you're struggling with what to do, whether you should buy that house, whatever, let me just say it matters, but in compared to knowing God and where the final destination is, it kind of doesn't matter.

I mean, it totally matters because God loves you, right? It like totally matters. He so cares about your college you're going to go to, the restaurant you're going to open, the trip you're going to take. He is so intimately involved in that. I'm the same way. I love doing what my kids get to do things. If you have children, watching them succeed and getting my daughter ready for basketball yesterday.

We got the back, you know, the massage gun. You got to get one of those. Those are legit. I'm doing the massage gun. I'm taping her like she's getting ready for an NBA game. You know what I mean? And it's just, it's so pleasurable as a parent to watch your children just enjoy themselves. And if they succeed, that's really fun as well. It really matters to me.

But in the scheme of things, whether they win the San Diego City League Spring Championship, you know what I mean? Like, like I'm really into it, okay? Like God's really into your thing. But the destination is to know God, to know God as Father. And if you're not going for that, you're going to be constantly frustrated about where your life's going. As long, you got the wrong target.

You see, we can know. It's not a sequence of random events. And so he says that if you don't know where you're going, you'll never know the way. This is a map to the Father. Now, a little bit further on in John, Jesus says, you heard me say that I'm going away and I'm coming back to you. If you love me, you would be glad that I am going where? To the Father.

For the Father is greater than I. So, in the Gospel series, if you don't know Jesus and you're back from Easter, I want to let you know there's a destination. And the destination is not your personal fulfillment. That's not Christian thought. I know we sell a lot of books in Christianity about that. We write a lot of songs about that. And it's somewhat true, but it's not true enough for us to die for it.

The thing we're dying for is to know God as Father. Do you care about knowing God as Father? And knowing that He loves you and cares for you? That's the destination. And the questions of, what am I going to do? Where will I go? Where's my next job? Ah, da, da. So important. I mean, God has the massage gun I bought for that. He's like, I'm totally into that in your life.

But compared to like, just knowing me as Father? That's what I want you to know. So, when you speak to people about Jesus, it's about meaning and it's about knowledge. You do know something. You know God. Jesus didn't die on the cross so you couldn't know God. He wants you to know God. We believe in knowledge. We believe in absolute truth. We believe that you can't have truth without limitations and so on.

The next thing, which I thought was really, really important here, is where faith requires, this is really interesting, faith requires that you must start upon a path before you get, encounter truth in life. Now, what does that mean? Jesus says, I'm the way. You have to start upon the way until you get to the truth and the life part. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Why is this important? Because when you get to heaven, there will be no way. Jesus will just say, I am the truth and I am the life. But there will be no way to heaven. Why? There will be no need for a way because you're already in heaven. The same reason you don't need a compass on the North Pole and that a compass doesn't work on the North Pole. You need a compass in order to begin the journey to the North Pole.

But once you get there, that thing is useless. It actually points in the wrong direction. It goes around in all these different directions and spins and it just doesn't work anymore. You see, we have a faith existence. We don't live in heaven yet, which means there has to be a way to get there. We don't start in the reality of life. We don't start in the reality of truth.

Now, the world right now is saying the exact opposite. What they're saying is, you start with the truth that you define and you will find the way after you define the truth. It's completely opposite. You can't have knowledge without a way to get there because what is knowledge? Knowledge is coming to know something like a math problem. You have to learn it and the only way to learn it is to begin to walk along the way.

Now, this is an incredible limiting principle because Jesus is like, if you're going to know me, you've got to follow me. Well, but I'm not sure I want to follow you yet. I haven't done a background check, Jesus. You know, and it's like, well, no, but if you want to know me, you have to follow me. But I'm not sure I want to follow you and I'm not sure I believe you're the truth and the life.

And he's like, well, if you want to know, you have to follow me. Well, I'm not sure I want to follow. So, the only way to get to truth and life is that you have to take a step of faith. And so, when Jesus says this, it implies the systematic step of walking in the way. Here's a couple scriptures that will just hook you up on this. Write on John 8, 31 and 32.

Jesus says that, to the Jews who had believed, Jesus said, if what? You hold to my teachings, you are really my disciples. Verse 32, look what I said. Then what? You will know the truth and the truth will what? Set you free. You see, if you hold to my teachings. And so, what I said to this woman, I was sitting at the Tamarack, at the lodge there at Tamarack, great little old school lodge up in Mammoth.

I said to her, try following Jesus and see if it's true. Well, I got to find out if it's true before I know. I said, you can't. That isn't how it works. You need to start following because it's faith. We don't start with proving everything. The proof is in the tasting. The proof is in the tasting. And so, I said to her, why don't you take six weeks of your life?

Is it worth enough of the bargain for your life? Take six weeks and read the Bible. You see, what the devil loves to do is point at some failure of some Christian or something in the church. And so, she was bringing up all these things that church had failed. I'm like, ah, okay, they're human beings. Like, I'm so tired of that. What about Jesus? Like, tell me, what do you know about Jesus?

Where did Jesus go? Where was he born? What do you, had no answers. I'm like, well, then don't tell me, don't disregard Jesus. It's like these Christians, disregard Jesus. It's like these Christians, they grew up and they had like, what, four years of Sunday school and then they leave the church and then they come back as 30-year-olds and now they're experts on faith.

It's like you had four years of felt graphs and now you're going to come lecture the church on like why God's not real because of someone's sin at some church or some of these watchful, you're just putting those watchful dragons there, as C.S. Lewis calls them, because you don't really want to taste and see because you want to do what you want to do.

I have a friend, he came up to me, he's a pastor's kid and he's, I'm an atheist, I'm an atheist. And I said, I said, you're not an atheist. His dad's a pastor and the whole thing. I said, he loves this. I said, dude, you're a fake atheist. I'm a fake atheist. I said, you're just rebelling. You're not a fake, because he grew up in the church, I know who he is.

I mean, you're a fake atheist. He goes, you believe that a snake ran around a garden and talked. And I said, true. And you believe that all this was created out of nothing and then after it became inorganic matter, it jumped through aobiogenesis to become life and became alive. Who believes something more weird than that? You have no meaning to your existence.

I said, yes. So I believe that there was a snake in a garden and he talked, but you believe that and that is crazy. Who's crazy now? You're a fake atheist. Now, hang on. My mom's calling me. Hang on. Hey, mom. I'm currently preaching right now. So I'll be at just a minute. I'll see when you get to church, okay? All right, bye. Sorry, mom calls. I got an answer.

Righteousness leads to church. You see what Jesus, yeah, right? I know some truth. All right, we're about done. We're at 1030. We're done. Right? Look at this. This is the beat. You have to walk the way. Tell people this. Say, you've never walked the way. You've never followed Jesus. So how do you know if he's real? Like, get in their face a little bit.

Play a little defense. You play a little offense, I'm saying. You know? Take it to the hole on a kid. I think that's a basketball thing. Take it to the hoop. Sometimes you've got to drive. I told my daughter, you're not, if you don't score, if you don't try to shoot, you're never going to score. I said, you score 10 points tomorrow. I'll give you $100.

I knew my money was safe. Trust me. Halfway through the game, she goes, how many points? I'm like four. And the coach said, you look at your dad one more time. I'm pulling you out of the game. I said, okay. I'm going to give one more verse, and then we're going to be done. In the same way that following God leads to knowing truth in life, following wickedness suppresses it.

You can't follow wickedness and expect to know the truth. Right now, the world is like, do whatever you want. So much of it is wickedness. Some of the things that they're teaching, and they're teaching young people about sexuality or whatever, or drugs and all these different things, it's wickedness. It is of the devil. It is demonic. And we need to stand up for it and be willing to die for it, even if our reputations are on the line and at stake.

This is what he says in Romans 1.18. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress, what? What do they do? They suppress the truth. Why? By their wickedness. You see, when you begin along the way, it will take you to the truth. But if you begin along the way of wickedness, it will suppress the truth.

That's what it says in Romans. And we see that you can't walk in wickedness. You see right now, the scientists are like, why are all the fertility rates going down in men? And why are these fertility things that are happening? And why are all these things happening in the world? And why is the climate, you look at the climate, you know? When I look at the climate, one of the things I say is, you know, I think there's a spiritual component of that.

Granted, there's some carbon dioxide and after the Industrial Revolution, it's a bad deal. I don't deny that if we poison the earth, it's going to be poison and it's going to be unhealthy. But I think the earth, it says in the Old Testament, the earth would spit people out. It would begin to rebel against people because of the way that they sinned.

Because of the way that they sacrificed their children to Molech in the fire. We sacrifice our children here in this country. Thing and thing again. Eventually, the earth, which is connected with God, is just like, whoa. It just had enough. That's what the Bible says. The Bible actually says that. So when I talk to people about climate change, we're off the path right now.

Here's two practical takeaways. You didn't know. Just riffing right now. This week, this week, here's two practical takeaways. Define what you know is true. What do you know is true? What do you know is true? What do you know according to the scripture? What do you know that God is real? You know? Do you know that he loves you? I know God loves me. He's made it true.

He's just, I've walked it so long, I know. He's proven himself. He hasn't given me everything I wanted. But he's proven himself in such a dynamic way to me that I cannot deny it. I've seen others. And then finally, where in your life could more disciplined following lead to a harvest of truth and peace? If you walk in wickedness, you will suppress truth and life in your life.

You will just suppress it. If you want to be involved in porn and smoke marijuana, even though everybody says it's cool now and it's fine, and we've made it like alcohol or do drugs or over drink. You know, I have a problem with drinking. We're not teetotalers here. But if you want to just walk into all those things and unrighteousness, then don't be surprised when you don't know what truth and life are.

Because the path that you walk will lead to the destination and our destination as a father. So two things this week. Define what you know is true. And then ask yourself, where in your life could you be more disciplined following that would lead to a harvest of truth and peace? Let's stand if you would. I want to bless you. We have a prayer team that's going to be here afterwards.

They'll pray for you at the front. If you want prayer, if you want to know about following Jesus, come forward. They will lead you to the father. They'll pray with you and you can start a brand new life. So if you want to do that, take the step to come forward and ask them to pray with you. We also have a next steps table. If you want to know anything, how to get involved, how to get deep roots here at this church, boom.

Outside, that's the place to do it. If you extend your hands, I want to bless you. This is something that we do. Lord Jesus, we bless these people, God, as we speak truth. We bless them with truth and knowledge. I bless them as they seek you this week, that they will come to know you. That they will come to know you, God, and begin to let faith become a reality, Lord Jesus.

Bless them, Lord, and cover them and send them out with life and peace and joy and care, God. Be with them. Let the love of God rain down upon them. And let them be like a fountain, God, and like a tree that is planted next to the streams of your love, as it says in Psalm 1. We bless you in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Amen. Go get a coffee on the way out. We love you. We'll see you next week. Amen. Amen.