DEC 18 2022 | Isaiah: Messiah | Ep. 6: Ruin to Redemption

Sea Change Church · DEC 18 2022 | Isaiah’S Messiah | Ep. 6: Ruin to Redemption
Isaiah 53:9-10
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

By oppression and judgment, he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living. For the transgression of my people, he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death. Though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer.

And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days. And the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong.

Because he poured out his life unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. The word of the Lord. The word of the Lord. Right on. Hey, welcome to La Jolla Christian Fellowship. I'm Pastor Adam Stattmiller, lead pastor. If you've missed me, or even if you haven't missed me for the last two weeks, we've been in Scotland, had an incredible time with our sister church over there.

It is nice. Hi, I see you in the back there. I see that hand. It is nice to preach to the home crowd again. It was a little bit like an away game, but here we are preaching to you. If you have Bibles, open up to Isaiah 53. We are in the penultimate message before we finish this series on Christmas Eve. Looking at a Jesus whom many people don't set up as the image of Jesus that they resonate on upon their hearts, right?

So for me, when I made a decision to follow Jesus, I liked Jesus. Jesus was like my bro, right? We were like pals. We were hanging out. I had no understanding of so many other elements of his majesty, his destiny, all who he was. But what I needed was someone who could come alongside me and just be my bro. I didn't need God the Father telling me what to do, pointing his finger at me at the time.

That was just how I saw it. Holy Spirit, that freaked me out a little bit. So just some Jesus is what I need. I just need some Jesus. God has taken me on an incredible journey through all of the parts of that trinity and gotten a lot more comfortable with all those other elements. But with Jesus here, we see a suffering servant. We see the gift that needed to be broken before it could be opened.

We'll talk about that on Christmas Eve. Invite your friends to Christmas Eve and invite them even for the precursor tonight. Got an incredible event tonight at the Rec Center. Please show up. Let people who have kids know, snow, all kinds of stuff. And like Joe said, it's your giving that allowed that to happen. It's absolutely your giving for this outreach.

So if you have your Bible, we're going to go to verse 9, Isaiah 53. And we're going to look at a key word in there. Verse 9, let me read it. He was assigned. Circle the word assigned. A grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death. So how can that be? Two things happen in there. Though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Now the word that stuck out to me that I'm really going to pivot on in today's verse is the word assigned. And there's this sense that sometimes there's an assignment to our life. We've been assigned to something that we don't want. We end up somewhere we don't want to be. And we have no way to change that assignment, right? You came from a certain type of family.

You've ended up in a certain type of job. You've whatever the thing may be. And there's a sense of this assignment, right? That word really captured me. I found it in different translations. But in the New Testament, I only found that word seven times in the New Testament. I don't remember the exact number, but it was, you know, three to four times more in the Old Testament.

This understanding of assignment. Now I don't know if you heard this week. Maybe you saw the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie that's coming out, Dial of Destiny. They're actually computerizing, like, Harrison's face, I heard, to make him a little bit younger or something. I don't know what they're doing with him. I think he looks fine as he is.

But as I was watching, I was so happy. I don't know about you, but in 1980 or 81, I think it was, when I was a kid, a lot of you remember me. I'm kind of dating myself right now. I went to when we still had, like, one theater with one movie in it in the Mesa. Jim, you know that theater in the Mesa across from the Little League Baseball where we played.

And I saw Indiana Jones, and it just bent my mind. Like, as a 12-year-old, it was just this incredibly action-filled movie. As this new movie, though, is about destiny. It's about the Dial of Destiny. And I started thinking about the idea of destiny. And is destiny a thing? Is destiny a thing, or can destiny be dialed in a different direction, right?

What we see here is Jesus has an assignment. And my question was, by whom? Who is assigning anything to Jesus? He's God, right? And the question to me is, who assigns anything to me? If I'm a child of God, can anything actually be assigned to me without the Father allowing that assignment? Or can that assignment be dialed in a different direction?

Can the thing that we think, the path that we're headed on, does God have the ability to come in and bend that assignment? What I think we see here in this passage, especially in the juxtapositions, the things that are different in the passage, is the assignment bending of Christ. The destiny bending of Christ. You see that he's with the wicked, but he's also with the rich.

How can that be? There's all these things that seem contradictory, but they're not. We're going to look at those today, and we're going to look at this idea that Jesus redeems broken destinies. Right? If there is a part of your life that's been broken, and there's no one in here that has not had a part of their life that has not been broken. And sometimes we see the broken thing on the ground, and we just assume that it's broken.

We don't try to fix the thing that is broken, or we feel like we have no power over that. Let me give you a biblical truth. God is overlord. He is supreme over all destiny. And the eternal destiny, which we see on the cross, can actually be changed. But can he change the things in our lives today? That's what we want to look at. So maybe think about that broken thing in your life, or maybe you're not there in that place at the moment, but there's somebody else who has something broken.

We're going to see some people, we're going to see one person in particular, who comes in, and it is an assignment bender. They partner with Jesus in changing assignments, with changing destinies through the power of God. And so the main idea that I have here is the gift of redemption. We're talking about redemption. Redeeming destinies, redeeming broken stories is another way to say it.

The gift of redemption will always be wrapped in a paper of suffering and brokenness. Now hear that out. The gift of redemption, this changing of destinies, that there's been a brokenness, will always be wrapped in a paper of suffering and brokenness. This is because without suffering and brokenness, there is nothing which can be redeemed. Meaning this, that redemption is always making something better than what it was.

We had these, I think they were called blue stamp or green stamp things when I was a kid. And you would go, there was these stamp centers, and you would collect these stamps. I know I'm not remembering the exact name, but we would collect all these stamps. You could go get a bike. Like you'd collect all these stamps off like little things, and you'd go to the store, and it was like the green stamp store or blue stamp.

And whatever it is, you remember what it is. And we would go there, and you would have this whole book, kind of like a bingo card, and I would go take my stamps. I'd go get a bike or a baseball glove. I mean, come on, let's go. You know what I'm saying? So they had these things. I was always redeeming something less for something that was better.

In our marriage, if your marriage is less, let me assure you that God wants to bend that destiny. It's not destiny. It's always going to be this way. This person will never change. Maybe I'll never change. God can come in through the power of Jesus, and if he can redeem your eternity, he can bend the destiny of whatever that is. Your relationship with your child, relationship with your family, whatever that thing is.

The gift of redemption will always be wrapped in a paper of suffering and brokenness. This is why Jesus needed to be broken. One of the main, the main analogy that I'm going to use on Christmas Eve, on Saturday night, is going to be the gift, the broken gift. The gift of Jesus needed to be broken, and I'm going to answer why that is. And the reason is, I'll give you a little spoiler alert.

It's because without suffering and brokenness, there is nothing which can be redeemed. Because you can't redeem something that's perfect. You can only redeem the brokenness, and God wants to redeem your brokenness. So one of the things as I read through this, I guess this is just a little sidebar. I think it is in your notes. I was thinking, it's so unfair, right?

Like, I'm looking at Jesus and how unfair it is that he had to go through all of them. I mean, this scripture is really tragic. The story of Jesus is not comedy, it's tragedy. And the reason being is because he had never done anything wrong. And you hear people say all the time, and I spoke with someone this last week over in one of the British Isles where I was.

I was in all the countries except for Wales. And when I was there, somebody said, well, life's not fair. And the idea that came to me was this, neither is grace. Grace is not fair either. Grace is when you get something you don't deserve. It says, while we were yet sinners in Romans 5a. While we were sinning, God came to us and he redeemed us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

That's not fair. Yeah. So if the thing is, well, my destiny's been unfair. Things unfair have happened in my life. Let me say that that redemption of that broken story that God can do just because he loves you, and because of what Christ did on the cross, the broken Jesus that we picture here is not fair either. But God wants to give you the grace that's not fair because it is impossible to have grace that is fair.

Grace is never fair. Grace is always giving something, just like suffering, that redeems something that's broken and redeems something that isn't deserved. So grace is unmerited favor. Verse 9, he was assigned, so circle that word again. I have circled it twice. A grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death. My question was this, by whom?

Whom assigns Jesus? Have you been assigned? Someone's spoken a word over you? I don't know if I was here or last week when I was preaching in Scotland. I remember I had a friend in college and a guy I really, really looked up to. He helped me change my life around, really came and spoke truth to me, spoke hard words to me. And I remember one day when I was talking to him, I was trying to be a leader, and it was like six months after I'd rededicated my life to Christ.

And I'd kind of messed up with something, and he came up to me, and he goes, you know what? You're never going to be a leader. You just don't have what it takes to be a leader. You know, you don't have what it takes. And it's so funny. It's, I don't know, 30 years later, right? And that word still stings, right? Even though, like, you're not all here because, you know what I mean?

We don't have the ability to, like, help gather people. That's what leadership is, gather people through influence. And I can look around at all the things that God has led, and you can look at all the victory and everything else. And at the same part, there's this part of me of, like, I've got to prove that wrong. Like, I still, 40 years, 30 years later, from if somebody said some offhanded thing in college to me, right?

And I'm like, I've got to prove that wrong. Has someone ever assigned you something? Has someone ever spoke a word over you? You'll never be this. You'll never be that. They spoke a curse over you. The word, it says, our words bring life and death. Jesus was assigned, it said, a grave with the wicked. Well, first of all, he was assigned. But once again, what's the point of this message?

That Jesus reassigns. That Jesus reassigns. And you know what? Maybe he was right. Maybe at that point, maybe, I think, maybe the cards weren't looking good for my leadership ability at that point. Maybe he was speaking truth at that point. And maybe God came in and redeemed that. Or in your story as well, that assignment. We see that, who was he assigned?

Well, first of all, Pilate, the Romans assigned him a death, right? They said, you are going to die. They assigned him death. But we know that through the cross, Jesus took what? Victory over death. John 19, 16. Finally, Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified. So the soldiers took charge of Jesus. Jesus was assigned to death. But in John 10, 18, which is nine chapters earlier.

So if you read the beginning of the story, Jesus said something about assignments. And assignments of death. Because I was binge listening to the book of John this week. I don't know if you do any binge listening. I was cleaning the house. And I was going to listen to some podcasts. And I thought, you know what? I'm just going to listen to the whole book of John.

I made it halfway through. I made it through like 13 chapters. Just went to Bible Gateway. Started binge listening. I didn't realize how many times in John, they're just trying to kill Jesus. Run him off a cliff. Stone him. Like, they have a bounty on Jesus. They are trying to assign him death. And so nine chapters earlier, before the Romans assigned him, right, actually to death, it says in John 10, 18, he said, no one takes my life from me.

He says, I'm going to lay it down on my own accord. I have authority to lay it down. And I have the authority to take it up again. This command I receive from my father. You see, he only took assignments from the father. And he has the power over life and death. And no one can take from him what is truly his. He laid his life down. Do you feel like you've been assigned a place with the wicked?

A place of death? Has someone spoke those words over to you? Are you in a relationship that feels dead, that's been assigned to the grave? Do you have friends that are in that position? Jesus has the authority to change that. And if you are a child of God, the redemption of the cross can redeem all things. It says in the scripture that he not only redeems you, he redeems the entire cosmos.

Jesus didn't just come to redeem humankind. Which he did. He came to redeem the entire cosmos. He's doing a cosmological work of changing. And if he can redeem the cosmos, he can redeem your life. He can redeem that problem that is so big. It's interesting that as I read through this, I looked at this assignment. I found assignments three times out of the five times in the New Testament.

Three of the times were in the books of Corinthians. And I thought, okay, maybe there's a little theme going on here. I found two verses. They're not going to be on. I put them in last night so you won't see them up on the screen. But I want to read these about what it means when you've been assigned somewhere. You're in your assignment. What do you do when you're in an assignment that doesn't work for you at the moment?

Are you in an assignment that doesn't quite work? Something's happened in your life. All of a sudden you're assigned. Life has assigned you. Something has assigned you. You're working. You're grinding. But you haven't made it to that next spot. Here's what it says in Corinthians. Really powerful about this idea of assignment. Once again, main point, God is the bender of destiny in assignments, right?

1 Corinthians 7, 17. Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them. Just as God called them, this is the rule I lay down in all the churches. He's all, wherever you are, it might change in the future. But wherever you are, live like a believer. How easy is it to be like, wow, when I get to my real destiny, then I'm going to be a Christian.

When I get rich, I'm going to start giving money away to people and really helping people. When this happens, then I'm going to be the best husband ever. When I get the house, we're going to have the family we always... Live now. Life is here now. Live in it now. He says, this is what I lay down. Whatever assignment you're in, don't let it change the way you live.

Don't let it change the way in which you live. There is meaning. The other time I found in 2 Corinthians 10, 13. These are good verses. You can chew on this. Thanks for all the amens, Eden. That's helping me. I appreciate that. You're sitting at the front today. She's got her daughter helping her read the verse next time. So if you want to see a really cute girl, you come in and watch her read the verses next time.

2 Corinthians 10, 13. We, however, will not boast beyond proper limits, but we will confine our boasting to the sphere of service God himself has assigned to us. A sphere that includes you. So he's talking about his sphere of influence. Wherever you are, even if it's in an assignment you don't want, you have the ability to influence that sphere.

But sometimes we're so frustrated with our assignment, we don't like it, that we're scrubbing the floors or doing the things. I was an associate pastor for 12 years when I thought I should have been king of the world. You know, I thought I was Leonardo DiCaprio. Just up the front there. Or maybe that was Kate Winslet. I don't know what he was doing.

Seriously. And I finally, I was like 10 or 12 years. I was an associate pastor. And I'm like, oh, but I had these visions of glory. I was going to, you know, when I was back in seminary, I was going to change the world. I was going to, if you, I'm so tired of young pastors saying, I'm going to do church different. If I hear that one more time. Like, I was going to do it different.

Wait till they taste our sauce. When they get the secret sauce at my church, boom, we're going to do it. He said, just show influence. Just influence your sphere. Are you influencing your sphere? Yesterday, my daughter, who's on the basketball team, and by the way, they're in a tournament right now. We won our first two games. I think we're going to make it to the championship on Wednesday.

By a point differential of 104 to 27, we play some Wicked D. Pretty solid. It was the other way last year, so I don't feel bad about it at all. So we might be playing at Mission Bay. Maybe you'll get a text to come and see that. She went and got a whole bunch of socks for all the girls. She's team captain with another girl at our school. The four of the five starters go to our church, which is awesome.

I know, right? So we've got to go support them, come up for a game. And she went and got a bunch of socks. And she's being a team leader. And so she put candy in there and took socks to all the teams. You know, went to Marshalls, $1.18 a pair of socks. You know, you can get some good socks at Marshalls right now. So wherever you are, you know what I'm saying?

Last year, she was on the bench. On the bench last year. And she was just like, I'm just, and it was hard. She didn't know the game that well, the whole thing. And I just, I've been so impressed. You know, I talk about my kids a lot. I am very proud. I want to boast within limits. Like he just said right there, where's your spear? What are the socks that you were getting?

Where's the little piece of candy? Where's the thing that you were doing? You might not want to be there in your horrible marriage. It's a spear of influence. Start doing the right thing. You know? It's funny. My wife and I had a disagreement this week. And the temptation in a disagreement is, I'm going to shut it all down. You know what I mean? There's going to be, I'm not going to make no coffee.

I'm not going to carry the groceries. It's all, well, shutting it down. We're shutting the whole marriage down right now until this argument is solved. Seriously, we do that right? And I'm like, why can't you just have a disagreement about this and still make the coffee? Still take the trash out. Still be cool. Still be civil. Why can't you just, oh, shutting it down.

We're mad. All right. Just be normal. We're supposed to talk about it. She's in Yosemite with my other daughter right now. We're supposed to talk about it. I don't remember what we were arguing about. I was like, what were we arguing about? I don't remember. The thing is, it's like in that sphere of influence, right? So you're there. You know, we see this destiny bender.

We see someone stepping into becoming a destiny bender in the next verse. If you go to this word grave, we're moving on from assignment now to grave. It says he was assigned a grave with the wicked. Jesus was assigned a grave so that you don't have to. We're going to talk about why he was assigned that grave. And then we're going to talk about Joseph of Arimathea, who partnered with God to be a destiny bender, who changed his sphere of influence.

Okay? That's where we're going right now on this. Jesus was assigned a grave, and he was assigned death. Satan wants to speak death over you. Wants to speak death over your grandchildren. Wants to speak death over our culture. Wants to speak death over... Death, death, death everywhere you go. We want to speak life. And so the first thing, Jesus was assigned a grave.

He wasn't going to stay in that grave, was he? Just going to be rumbling, getting ready to blow. The Romans left bodies, if you didn't know that, to decompose upon their crosses. So one of the things the Romans did was Jesus wasn't even going to get a grave. They would just let them decompose on the cross. It would be like a little warning to anybody else who went by.

And they would just do it along the side of the road. As you came into a city, they would have all the crosses up. So as you walk in, it's like, all right, I'm not going to mess around here. You know what I'm saying? And so they would do that. But Jesus was assigned a grave because of prophecy. And so even the Romans have all this power, right? You would think you're going to go against the government?

What are you going to do? Like go take his body down from the cross? No, you're going to leave it up there. You're not going to mess with the government. Because they just crucified him. They're going to crucify you next. So don't take any risk and don't try to change any destinies. That's what the Romans did. The Jews wanted it left like that. Why?

Because the Jews saw that if you weren't buried, if you weren't buried, that was a curse. If the Jews understood that unburied bodies were considered a curse, go to Jeremiah 733 in your notes. The dead bodies of the people will be food for the birds of the sky and beasts of the earth, and no one will frighten them away. It talks about many times in the Old Testament that bodies need to be prepared for death.

They needed to be prepared for sheol or they would not have a rest. And actually the word grave here in the Hebrew means sheol. It doesn't mean that he's going to be in a grave. It means that he is going to be in the place of the dead. He's going to be in the place of the dead with them. So it is a grave, and they assigned him. And so what the Jews wanted to do was never allow him to get to sheol, that place, or the bosom of Abraham sometimes they would call it, a juxtapose, a place of rest.

They believed that if Jesus was left on the cross, if the Romans did the work, that he would never be at rest. And they loved that. They wanted him to not be at rest. But a guy by the name of Joseph of Arimathea came in, and he said, I want a partner to be a destiny bender. I want to come in with God, take the power of God, and I want to use the authority of the cross to change the sphere of influence here.

Mark 1543 in your notes. Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the council. So influence, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, waiting patiently, went what? Meekly? Boldly to Pilate and ask for the body of Jesus. See in a moment where he took that body. When he did show up, though, he showed up with the anointing amount of fragrances of frankincense and myrrh and the fragrances that would say, this is a king on berry.

So when he rocked up, when he rolled up, Joseph of Arimathea, he came with Nicodemus, by the way, who came out of night. So remember, it was Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Nicodemus ain't in the night no more. He's out in the boldness and the light. He came, they said, hey, we got these kings. Now, are you going to go to the leader of the government and with all this, you know, anointing that shows that you believe that Jesus was a king, and say, can we please have that body?

And are you expecting destiny to be bent in your favor? Well, if you're working upon a divine order where God is calling you to something and Christ has called you into a dark place and a dark time, into a place of death and a place of decomposition, where the birds would come and they would eat the bodies, as it said in Jeremiah there, but you know God has called you and you believe that destiny can be changed.

You believe that that, and the authority of Jesus Christ, that your destiny can be bent. It says he was a sign. Go to the next one as we come in for a landing with the wicked and the rich. That's showing Jesus reaches out in all directions. The wicked, the rich, the people who seem like they're good, even though the Bible says there is no one that is good, not even one.

Every single person, it says that he was a sign. And so there's these incredible things, these nuances that are happening on the cross that there's wicked, there's people that have been falsely accused, but then he ends up in a rich man's tomb. And whose tomb was that? It's Joseph of Arimathea's. You see, Joseph took the body of Jesus and put it in his tomb.

Now, that's a message right there of Jesus taking the place of your death. You see, there's been a place that has been prepared for your death. Satan has it. But when we allow Jesus to come in and fulfill that tomb of our life, that literal tomb, this is the literal tomb, to fill that Jesus literally takes the place of Joseph of Arimathea, his death.

I want to say, Jesus can take the place in your death. He can fix your marriage. He can fix your business. He can fix your city. He can fix your life. He can fix your health. He can fix it all because he's a destiny bender. But he's looking for people that are willing to change destiny with him. Had a conversation with a kid yesterday and they were asking me about worth.

How do we know how worthy we are? I said, we're worthy because we're a children. We have worth because we're children of God. You prove your worth by living a life that's worthy. So you can have worth, but if you just go live against, away from God's destiny for you, that's not worthy. So you can prove your worthiness. You can't prove your worth because you have worth because you're a child of God.

But you prove your worth by living a life that is worthy. It says in the wicked and the rich here, just before we end, Mark 15, 27, they crucified two rebels with him, one on his right and one on his left. And maybe you've been a rebel. Jesus reaches out to you too. He understands the death of a rebel. He understands being affected in that way. In Matthew 27, 59 through 60, this is the part that hits, right?

This hits. When Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and he laid it in his new tomb, which had been hewn out of rock. And he rolled a large stone against the door and then he departed. You see, he put Jesus in the place of his death and to where the dead things go. He put a stone over. He says, Jesus, you take care of that.

And then he went out to claim victory in the rest of his life and then he just departed. We want to hang out at our tomb, don't we? Oh, I'm a victim. I'm a victim. Oh, it's horrible. Oh, you get a, there's a lot of people that want to be in that play with you. If you want to be in the victim play, you're going to have a whole bunch of people. You'll get a crowd.

It's not hard to draw a crowd around victimhood these days, right? You know what is hard to draw a crowd around? Victory. A lot of people don't want to live in victory. It's a lot easier because right now, if you're a victim, you're getting a ton of accolades. But you live in a society full of victims, you're going to get conquered by somebody who's a victor.

I want to say, God wants to call you into victory, but it's not victory of domination. It's a victory of peace. It's a victory of love. It's a victory of hope. It's a victory of resurrection of dead things. That's what God is calling you into. And this is what Joseph understood. Do you understand that? Here's the takeaway. What the enemy meant for evil, God has turned to good for the saving of many lives.

That's out of Genesis 15, 50, 20. Comes out of the life of Joseph, comes out of the book of Genesis. We're going to be jumping back into Genesis in the new year. I can't wait to get back to Abraham. Let me just read that out of Genesis 50, 20. You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

Boom. Lifesavers, right? That's what you're called to be. You're going to step up and be it? I want to step up and want to be a lifesaver. I want to have an influence in my life. Some of you have massive influence. I was at an event Friday afternoon. Some people from our church. Big influence. I looked around at the people at that meeting, at that party.

I was like, goodness gracious, there's a lot of people from La Jolla here, and everyone knows who they are. These people have influence, and they use the influence to change the world. I see that in little things. I see coaches here. I see coaches. I see people work for the homeless. I see people with caps. You guys are amazing. Some of you need to jump on that bus.

Been living in the grave. Just staring in the grave. What's in there? What's in there? Like, you know, we're going to find out on Easter. Hey, quit looking in here. Jesus ain't here no more. He's risen. Now go follow him. Do you want victory? Do you want victimhood? Do you want destiny? Do you want to bend that destiny? God can bend your destiny. I just want to keep preaching.

I'm going to stop. I feel good. As I'm preaching, I'm like, ah, let's go. Run to a wall. Back home game. All right, stand up. We're going to bless you. We're going to go. Yeah, you ready to go? You should have seen him in Scotland looking at me. They was like, who's this guy? I will. I'll send a text out. Yeah, I will. I was reminded, hey, we're going to have a, if you guys want to come to the game, I'll send you a text out.

That'd be fun. We'll have a good time. See some destiny get changed as we win the championship. Stand your hands. I want to bless you all. Lord Jesus, I want to bless you, God. I want to bless these people. It says, whom you bless, they will be blessed. You give us the power to bless. So I bless you with words of life. I bless your destiny and to change destiny because God has a destiny of eternality for you, of hope and love.

A father who looks in your eyes face to face, who says, I love you, who says, you are good. You are worthy. I want to see your life change. I want to see your sphere of influence, no matter where you are, to be changed, to live in the power of God's power and positive love and hope for us. We bless you with God's goodness in this Christmas season to let that manger come alive and love the gift of Jesus.

And God, we ask that you would bless our event tonight, bring safety to our event. Let a ton of people come out to La Jolla. Let them just love the snow and the animals and all the fun stuff and let them know that Jesus Christ is alive and we're going to change this city because we're going to bend the destiny of this city in the direction of the true north, which is Jesus Christ.

Amen? If you need prayer, come on forward. We love you. We'll see you afterwards. See you tonight. Amen.