JAN 18 2026 | Proverbs: Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World S4E3 | Filtered Desire

Sea Change Church · JAN 18 2026 | Proverbs S4E3 - Filtered Desire
Ecclesiastes 1:8
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

And so I pray your blessing and favor on our congregation here, that you, Holy Spirit, will work in our hearts to step up and to be engaged, to go out and to volunteer and to give, whether that's to give financially or to give in prayer or to give in going. We ask that you will move in our midst and encourage us and challenge us. And we pray this in your awesome name, Lord Jesus.

Amen. Ecclesiastes. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Chapter 1, verse 8. All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. And chapter 2, verses 10 and 11. And whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil.

And this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had expended in doing it. And behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. This is the word of the Lord. I was a man, the me, the l n. I was a man, the m. I was a man, the the a- I was a man, the a- I was a man, the a- I was a man, the a- a- a- Thank you.

I'm beside her desire, desire. Ready? I'm a fear, desire, desire. I'm beside her desire, desire, desire. Well, good morning. If you have your Bibles, open up to Ecclesiastes 1, 8, and 2, desire. That's what we're talking about today. And if you have your notes, if you're online, you can download them on the homepage. You can go find them there. The key word for today is desire.

And we're coming to Ecclesiastes. You might be asking yourself, why Ecclesiastes? We're in the Proverbs series, right? Well, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written by the same guy, Solomon. Now, Proverbs has a few other Proverbs that are written, but mostly it was by Solomon. And both of them are considered the wisdom literature. We are going through every type of biblical narrative, every type of biblical genre over a year.

We start with the Proverbs. We're going to be going in next to Genesis with a little bit of a break. I'm going to do three weeks on healing out of Matthew chapter 8. Just the Lord has been speaking about doing something on healing. So starting in February, we'll do three weeks out of Matthew 8 on healing. And we saw our first healing of the year in the first service, which was awesome.

A friend of mine's had COVID with no smell or taste for about 14 months. And Wednesday, I was just, not that I'm the guy, but we've just been pressing in. And he hadn't been getting healed. And I was just pressing in. And I spent about 10, 15 minutes just leaning in like, Lord, come on. Like, these promises are true or they're not? You know, he needs to be able to, he was just telling me, if you eat, you don't even know if you're, you know, eat something that's bad for you.

You can't smell it or taste it. It's not a good thing, right? So I was like two in the morning. And then this morning, he came up to me and he's just like, hey, Wednesday. Came back Wednesday. I was like, let's go. Let's go. So I'm considering that. I'm going to say, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to downgrade it. I'm going to say that's the first healing.

A lot of people were praying for him. Maybe I punted it over the line. I don't know. But a part of the team. But a lot of you, a lot of you all need healing. With that, back to Ecclesiastes, we're looking at Solomon and the Solomonic understanding of desire. What does it mean to have desire? And what does desire look like when it's framed up in the right measure?

The wind can blow in any direction, but sailors know how to harness the wind and bend it to their will. To go the way in which they perceive is correct or on a right tack. Solomon was a man who, at the end of his life, and we'll look at his financial and, you know, pedigree here and some of the things that he had in the moment. He was a man that had everything.

Said he was the wisest man ever. He didn't always live according to that wisdom. Said he was the wisest man ever. And he's probably the wealthiest person of all time. But we do know this, that he could do whatever he wanted. There was no one that could check his desire except himself. And what is interesting about the book of Ecclesiastes is it has, for its opening thesis, this idea of him saying, Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.

Now, most of us want everything that we want. To get everything you desire sounds like paradise. But we know that Solomon, at the end, said meaningless, meaningless. And he comes at the end of the story and he says this, he ends Ecclesiastes with the conclusion of the matter. I won't say what that is at the moment because I'd be giving it away.

But he's looking that all the things that he desired didn't fulfill him. In 1960, there was a Twilight Zone episode in season one. It was episode 28 or 30. And it was called A Nice Place to Visit. Now, if you grew up in the 70s in California, KTLA on the rabbit ears. He had the TV. And we would get KTLA from Los Angeles. We'd come down the coast.

And every day at noon, if you remember, they had the hour. Greg's, went to Patrick Henry, I see you. Greg and I were sitting the same age. We were probably watching the same episodes. For an hour, they would play two episodes of The Twilight Zone. And one time, there was one about Rocky Valentine. And Rocky Valentine was a bank robber. And he jumped over the wall at the bank.

And the coppers were there, right? Because it's 1960. So they're coppers, right? And the coppers said, stop. And he said, no. And he ran. And they shot him. And the next thing you know, he wakes up. And he's in heaven, right? And he's like, wow. It's beautiful. He's like, this is like the Ritz Carlton. It's amazing. It's amazing. I can't believe I made it to heaven.

This is awesome. And the guy comes up. And it's Pip. And Pip is his little chauffeur and kind of his concierge. And he says, anything you want. It's all available to you. You can have whatever you want. He says, oh, OK. Well, then I'd like to go to the track. They go to the track. Bets on every horse race. Wins every race. Says, oh, that's amazing. He's so stoked.

He says, I want to go have a couple drinks. Meet some ladies. Goes to the bar. Not a lady doesn't think he is the most. They're just begging to buy him drinks. Like most beautiful women. Just throwing themselves at him. And he's just living it up. Just loving it. Goes and shoots some pool. Hits the rack. Every ball goes into the entire corner. Pretty soon after the second commercial, after the Geico commercial.

I don't think they had Geico in the 1970s. But he comes back to Pip. He goes, Pip, I've got to talk to you. I've got to talk to you. This is miserable. Like absolutely miserable. There's no fun. What's the purpose of life? Like there's no challenge. I can't live like this. This is horrible. And he says, you know, I think I want to go to the, I know this is amazing.

I think I want to try the other place. Pip says, this is the other place. I thought, wow. Is that not true? How many of us have gone after our desires and ended up in a somewhere that felt like the other place? Starts in high school, right? Just having a good time. It's Friday night. Getting loose. 26 still having a good time. 32 is starting to affect your marriage.

45 and on and on. And we see Solomon here with unchecked desires. Let's get right into the scripture now to Ecclesiastes 1.8. We see what he says. All things are full of weariness. First of all, I want you to circle all things. Not some things, all things. A man, don't leave yourself out, women, cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied, circle satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

We're going to exegete. We're going to break that verse down in just a second. But here's your big idea. This is the thesis for this message. Christ does not deny desire or desires. Rather, he harnesses them around his kingdom. There is an anti-desire movement that happened multiple times throughout Christianity or Christendom where you just have to purge yourself from every single desire.

What Christ does is he doesn't say that. Christ says you must harness your desires like a sailor harnesses the wind around my heart. Solomon was a man who was totally blessed and went after everything that was in his heart. He didn't deny anything that was in his heart. But David was known as a man who was after God's heart, right? And we're going to see this with Jesus.

Jesus, they said he was a man that was full of wine and feasting and hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. Jesus could have a good time, always within the bounds of nothing that would be considered sinful. But that was one of the things on Jesus. But at the same time, Jesus was content with nothing. He was content being out in the desert.

He could live in the tension of those two places. Two points today. One, desire is not a flaw. It's in our design. We were designed that way. It's part of our divine imprint. Desire is part of the divine imprint. Two, sin didn't create desire. It just inverted the order. Sin doesn't create. Satan has zero ability to create. He's never created anything.

He has no creation in him. He creates mischief. But all Satan ever does is take something that is good and have you over throttle on it. He tries to invert it to his will. There's no desire, as we'll see, that within God's context and done within his way is wrong. So sin didn't create desire. It inverted the order. Let's go to number one. Desire is not a flaw.

It's in our design. It's part of our divine imprint. Back to Ecclesiastes 1.8. All things are full of weariness. Interesting thing to say. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing and the ear filled with hearing. The second part I really want to focus on because this is really key when it comes to our desires. God has made you with a ravenous desire to be filled.

He also made you that there's only one thing that can fulfill that desire. Him. He made us with an appetite. He made us with that. And so you see what happens with Solomon is Solomon obviously is walking away from God. He ended up debauching the things of God. He actually, even though he was the wisest person of all time and the wealthiest person of all time to this day, if you add up his, we'll talk about that in just a second, he ended up doing all these things.

He ended up worshiping at false idols and sacrificing to false gods. And God said, I'm going to rip the kingdom from your hand. And he does. But God says, I'm not going to do it in your lifetime, Solomon. And I'm going to tell you why. Not because of you. Because of your son, David. I mean, excuse me. Because of your father, David, who was a man after my heart.

So, as you know the story, right after Solomon dies, his son takes over Rehoboam and the kingdom is completely destroyed. Then we see that. But he is saying this one thing. He's saying the eye is never satisfied and the ear never filled. Filled. Satisfaction and filling. These are words that Jesus uses in some form or another on a regular basis. Jesus' whole ministry, his whole message was, I have come to give you life and give it to you, what, more abundantly.

I have come that you might be filled with the Spirit. He has come to bring you satisfaction in your life. He has come to do all the things that the world promises but can't. Now, Solomon knows because he went after it. He went after every single one of these things. And in the end, he said it will never be satisfied. Let me tell you something about any desire you have.

Unless God is somehow connected to it, inculcated into that desire, where God is the first thing and the desire is the second, you will never be satisfied. It will never satisfy you. Nothing. It will satisfy you for a moment. You win that championship, mmm, feels good. Want another one. You get that thing that you want, you need more. One of the great, one of the, I think the things that has surprised me the most as a pastor, and I mentioned this about a month ago, is the people who have accomplished the most have a precipice that is probably seems even greater than the one that people who haven't been able to accomplish the things that they wanted to.

And that precipice is what next? I mean, what do you do next when you're Michael Jordan? No, I'm serious. Like, what's next? Where do you find fulfillment in life when you're named the person who has done that? And I have been with so many people who I've been sitting with, and there is this sense of emptiness. They look back at all the things they've done, and they try to make themselves feel like it mattered.

And in a lot of ways, it does matter. But unless God is attached to that, it's going to do what Solomon says. You're never going to stop wanting. There's always going to be, your eye will never see enough. Have you ever been in the neighborhood where somebody built the ugliest home in the neighborhood, but they spent the most money on it, right?

They build this, like, there's a lot of it going on here in La Jolla, a whole lot, right? The cottages were nice, guys. The 1,200, thank you. The 1,200-square-foot cottages were nice. I like them. Don't need 52,000 square feet. And then they finish, and they live there for what? A year, less? They move. Go do another one. Because the eye is never satisfied.

What is interesting, I'm going to give you, this is not in your notes. Write this down out of Psalm. Psalm kind of gives away the message here. Psalm 37.4 talks about how to have those desires, back to the idea of desires, the things that you want. There's nothing wrong with those. Met. 37.4 in Psalm. It says, delight yourself in the Lord. I see you.

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will what? Give you the desires of your heart. That's not inverted. Delight yourself in the Lord. You know what's interesting? So many of us, myself included, don't know what it even looks like to be delighted in the Lord. I like myself some Chick-fil-A sauce. Okay? I don't like Chick-fil-A all the time. It's good.

It's good chicken. Fine. I'm a KFC guy. Grew up KFC in the 70s, right? When I get some Chick-fil-A sauce, I am delighted. I put it on ice cream. Is there anything? Dip a pickle in it. I don't care. Is there anything? I got chips. It's hard to find something that doesn't go, maybe not ice cream, that doesn't go with Chick-fil-A sauce, right? Delighted. You know, being delighted in the Lord sometimes seems more difficult to me than being delighted with a packet of Chick-fil-A sauce.

I just, quick question. When was the last time you were like delighted? Do we know what it feels like to be delighted in the Lord? If you don't, one of the things you want to say is, God, let me find my delight in you. Let me enjoy you where you're looking forward to spending time with God. The only way to do that is to sow seeds into that. It's a different message.

But if you want the desires of your heart, you're going to see that God wants to be your delight first, and then he will give you those desires. I said desire's not bad. We had desire before the fall, Genesis 3.6. It's in your notes. If you have your word as well, turn to Genesis 3.6. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight, there's that word, to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired, circle desire, to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

The first thing we see is that the, we see that she had desire, that desire was something that we were made with. One of the things the enemy wants to do, Satan wants to do, is put a thought in your head, maybe an inverted desire, and then blame you for having the thought, and then making you feel bad that you had the thought, right? Like, oh, I'm going to think up this thing.

I'm going to tell them that they should want this, and then when they think it, because I'm going to give them the thought, then I'm going to accuse them of wickedness, okay, for wanting that thing. There's nothing wrong with desire. Any desire that comes across your mind, right, now we don't want to entertain desires, right? We don't want to, oh, Satan, you know what?

That's a great idea. Let me think about it for 45 minutes before I go out and do it. That's not what we're talking about. But desire is part of you, and the question is, how do you harness desire, and how do we not invert it? What she did here was she said, what was, she looked at it, she desired, it said it would make one wise, and she wanted something that was good.

She wanted wisdom. And then the devil comes, the devil comes in chapter three, four, and five, he says, but when the serpent said to the woman, you surely won't die, for God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be open, and you will be like God. Now, he wasn't saying what Jesus said, we're supposed to be like God, right? Like him, in a way, an image in his created image.

What Satan was saying, he wanted to invert it. He always take a little, he'll take a little bit of the truth, a little bit of the goodness, and then he just mess it up a little bit, right? Because he can't create anything, he just has to mess stuff up. So every desire you have, at its root, has a godly desire attached to it, but it gets inverted. So he said to her, you can be like God.

And what he was saying is, you can be God. You see the subtle shift there? You can be like God, or you can be God, then lying to her that she's not gonna die. I would say desire itself is morally neutral, and appetite is a gift. Your appetites are a gift. Now, once again, in the puritanical Christianity, obviously we're not entertaining these desires, but every appetite you have is tied to a way that God has made you to be.

The question is, can I suppress my appetites? You know, like it said, we don't wanna live according to our stomach. I think a few weeks ago, I gave that, the Hebrew word, I think it was baton, baton, if I'm not pronouncing it correctly. My Hebrew pronunciation is not always great, but it means that you're living according to the desires of the flesh, the desires of the stomach.

We wanna live according to the desires of the spirit, and the spirit will have desires that are contrary to the desires of the flesh. But there's nothing wrong with these desires. They're actually morally neutral. We see two places in Scripture I'm gonna give you where we have desires. One, Philippians 1.23, I'm hard pressed between the two. My desire, Paul having desire, to depart and be with Christ, for that's far better.

Paul got to the end of his life, and all he wanted to do was be with Jesus. Got to the end of his life. All he wanted to do was to be with Jesus. He would say, if I, God, please take me because these Corinthians are killing me. I can't handle it. I can't handle running these churches. And he gives this resume of how he was beaten down and scorned and hit with sticks and shipwrecked.

And he has this one, there's this one resume he gives of all the ways that he had to suffer for Jesus. He had this desire to be with God. That was his number one desire. I have a hard time doing that. I got so many desires. Every morning I wake up in the morning with desires. Right? It's a song. Desire. I just got desire. Got to do it. To filter that desire is key.

You ever try to make coffee? If you're a big coffee drinker, if you're an addicted coffee drinker like me, I get it. Pray for me. Have you ever been on a trip and you don't have the supplies and you try to make your coffee without a filter? It's strong. Take your sip. It's in your teeth. You got, you know, two o'clock in the afternoon you're still getting pieces.

You know, how important is a little paper filter? The word of God, prayer, wisdom, asking God is that filter of your desires. When I ask you with your desires, why do you want what you want? Number, second verse here, Pesach of Thessalonians 2.17. But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time in person, not in heart, not in heart, we endeavored more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face.

Let me tell you something I found out about desires. The more I try to make God my number one desire and desire what he wants, the less I desire the things that I used to want. It's really weird. He's, I'll give you the desires of your heart and you end up doing it and then all of a sudden you're like, you know Jesus, I don't really need that thing anymore.

That thing that I wanted. And what I have found about people who go after the desires of God's heart is they end up following the first two and greatest commandments that Jesus talks about. The most important thing that they come to find are God and other people. Let me just read this from the notes. When you watch the most faithful people in the New Testament, you don't see their desire disappear.

You see them shift. The hunger for status, comfort, accumulation fades and a deeper longing for God and loving others takes its place. I talk about my mom a lot. She's my, like an absolute hero to me and I know I talk about her from the pulpit a lot and my kids and whatever but these are the people I'm surrounded by and my mom is one of my favorite people.

And one day I was talking to my mom and I said, Mom, you know, you're getting a little bit older. You know, we have things. It was funny. She said something really funny the other day. I was having lunch with her and she's 94 and she goes, I was just 85 yesterday. I'm like, just 85 yesterday? Like who says that? Like, doesn't that just seem funny? Like 85 is old, you know what I mean?

Older. And then you say, I was just 85 yesterday and now I'm 95. I can't believe it. Like I'd say like I'm just 15 yesterday nonetheless. I thought that was funny. And I said, Mom, we gotta get you some hobbies. She said, I don't know. I don't know. I gotta get some, I don't know about hobbies. I said, we can go, you know, get some shuffleboard going or whatever.

She goes, you know, my hobby, I said, what's your hobbies, Mom? She goes, people. I like people. People are my hobby. I thought, oh, that's so good. Like, I'm not even close to that. I like, I wanna play basketball. I got all these other hobbies. She just wants to love people. And I find that when we make God our primary desire, you're gonna find this need to have all the things you desire, it kind of fades.

And the thing that becomes most important is God and other people. The next thing, the final, the second point, final point here is, sin didn't create desire. It inverted the order. Ecclesiastes 2.10. This is Solomon. And whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep them. I did not keep it from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil.

And this was my reward for my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil that had been expended in doing it. And behold, all was vanity and a striving after the wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun. See, for Solomon, he had a problem. He had a problem. He had more money than anyone ever. He had more relationships than probably anyone ever.

But enough was not enough. And enough actually could not satisfy him in any way. And so, one of the things we find out, if you were to look at Solomon today, I just looked it up. Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. He's got 750 billion. It's a fair amount of money, all right? Fair amount of money. You can get a few things done with that. Solomon could buy him four times over.

Solomon in today's money was four trillion dollars. He did three billion a year in just gold revenue, okay? Just gold revenue. He owned, which is actually the true measurements of what the Holy Land should be, from the Mediterranean all the way to Iraq to the Euphrates River up into Turkey all the way down into Saudi Arabia and obviously the current Holy Land as well.

Through that, he had revenue every single year of like a half trillion dollars. Besides the money, right? Now, I'm just setting up the point that he said he had whatever he wanted when he wanted it, right? Besides the money, he had 700 wives, okay? And 300 concubines or maybe I'm inverting it, getting it wrong. Maybe it was 300 wives and 700 concubines. I don't know, it's a lot of women, right?

It's a lot of women and I know this isn't politically correct but he did write these proverbs, right? That were like, hey, it's better to live on the corner of a roof than with a nagging wife. I'm like, well, why'd you marry 700 of them? Nagging husband's a problem too. I see you ladies. No, I'm not, you know. He wrote another one. Said better, better to, you know, he says, a woman who is constantly complaining is like a dripping, like a roof that will not stop dripping.

I'm like, hey man, you did it to yourself, my man, you know what I'm saying? Once again, husbands can be annoying as well so once again, I see you. I know that that's not politically correct today but that's what he said. He had everything he wanted. As many women as he wanted. God said one thing to him. There's this, in 1 Kings or 2 Kings, there's, I think it's 1 or 2 Kings, it might be in the Chronicles, I didn't, it's kind of off the top of my head.

But there's this verse and it says, right here, it says, and the kingdom was firmly established in Solomon's hand because they were trying to kill him, right? It was firmly established in Solomon's hand and right before it, it said, the only thing, I'm gonna give you everything, Solomon, the only thing I don't want you to do, you can't take any foreign wives.

And then there's a verse that says, the kingdom was firmly established in Solomon's hand and the very next verse says, and Solomon went to Egypt and took for himself a wife from the daughters of the Pharaoh. Immediately, immediately does the one thing because it'll never absolutely fulfill you. He had this problem, he had this issue, he had everything inverted.

Here's the gospel answer, the gospel, because we wanna make sure that Jesus is in every time we're preaching and we find the gospel of Jesus. Jesus explicitly says that fulfillment only comes when we let go of the other desires and make him and his kingdom our only true ambition. Matthew 6.33, you heard it in the tub, right? From Jack. Jack, but seek ye first.

I didn't know you were gonna say that today, Jack. Seek ye first, first, first, the kingdom of God and what? His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. Man, that is a caveat though, right? Seek first the kingdom, the kingdom. Seek Jesus, but he has got a kingdom of God and his righteousness and then everything else will be added unto you. So here's three practical takeaways.

Number one is this. It's the third week in a row. I've said it, but it popped up on my radar as I've prepared. Check your wanter. What do you desire? Desire didn't really sound good, so I had to say wanter again. What do you want? Do you even know what you want? A lot of us just live according to our gut, like in the momentary want. What do you really want?

What do you want for your marriage? What do you want for your health? What do you want for your kids? What do you want for your finances? I'm not just saying the shiny thing that you just saw. What does your heart actually desire? What do you really, really, really want? Deep down, go one level and then go another level and then go to the next layer in the strata.

Deep down to find out what you really want. Most people never take enough time to know what they truly want. Every year I go away and I make four categories. First category, every year I write it down. I put things I know I want. Peace, joy, to do this, whatever. I put things I know I want. Second, things I know I don't want. Chaos, divorce, just a whole list.

I know I don't want this. I have another one, things I'm not sure I want. That's a great category. A lot of us, we feel guilty about not, I'm not sure I want to keep running marathons, but you feel guilty because you're a runner, right? But you just can't put it in that category, right? And then the final one, things I enjoy. Those four categories every single year help me in that quadrilateral.

And then I ask myself, the next thing I would say is check your wanter. Ask yourself this, make a list of five things you know God wants. The scarcity, the paucity of believers who would probably say they have, other than like basic biblical things, you know, he wants you to pray, but actually have any idea on the radar of what God wants. I mean, I want to ask you to raise your hand.

Do you have any idea what God wants for San Diego? Let's go closer. Do you have any idea what God wants for your neighborhood? Just your street. Let's go closer. Do you have any idea what God wants for the neighbors that are three closest to you, like three doors away? Do you even know their name? Like, I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty. I'm just saying to have an idea of asking the Lord, what are five things that you want, God?

What do you want from me? What do you want for my city? What do you want from the world? What do you want for the high school my daughter goes to? What do you want? What are you doing? And then, like Abraham Lincoln said, I want to be on the side of what God wants. I'm not asking him to be on the side of what I want. I want to desire the things he wants. That takes some time.

And then finally, I would say, prioritize relationships over stuff. Stuff. It can be good stuff. I just, I'm not telling you to be codependent Ken, right? No offense to any of the Ken's in the crowd. You know, I can't do anything without temperature taking everyone around me. I'm not saying that. But just prioritize people. Just love people. When you go in to get your coffee, realize that there's a human being on the other side of the counter.

When you're playing in a match and you're just, you know, crushing them with, you know, 23 pointers in a game, realize that after the game there's people who matter, you know? Prioritize relationships over stuff. How's your stuff? Right? And then, the final thing, I'm gonna have Chris come forward and the team because we're gonna sing. Augustine of Hippo had this, when it came to desire and how to do this.

And we're, we have one more message before we're out of the harbor, right? We're taking our ship out of the harbor. You should be in the open sea by now or, I don't know, maybe you're not as we head into 2026. Augustine of Hippo, one of the early doctors of the church, first couple hundred years, of the church, he had this saying and it's super simple and this is almost verbatim.

Now, Augustine of Hippo said this, when it comes to finding God's purpose for your life and your desires, he said, love God and then go do what you want. What do you mean go do what I want? It assumes that if you are loving God, you're not gonna be doing anything that violates that relationship. So I wanna, I wanna give you a permission structure right now because some of you have some things that you want to do and you're holding off on it and you're waiting for one reason or another.

I wanna give you, first of all, present, commit it to the Lord. It said, remember last week, I think it's in Proverbs 3, commit your plans to the Lord. 16, Proverbs 16. Commit your plans to the Lord and he will cause them to succeed. I wanna tell you, get the God thing right. Present it to him, sacrifice it to him. Obviously, if it's sinful, you're not gonna do it and then just go do it.

There's some things some of you have been waiting for. Go do it. Start working towards it. Dedicate it to the Lord. He will cause it to succeed and maybe he needs to give you the energy to do it, the resource to do it. You will be surprised that when we get in alignment with God and you step up, that he will give you the energy and the resource and the ability to do those things that you didn't think you had the ability, resources, or the open windows to do.

But we need to commit it unto the Lord. So I pray that this week will be a week of initiation for you. Initiate the things with the Lord and then initiate those plans that he might establish them like anchors and footholds for the purpose and prosperity of his kingdom in your life. Amen? Stand if you would. Let's worship the Lord. Holy, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty who was and is and is to come.

With all creation I sing praise to the King and I will adore you. Let's sing holy, holy. Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty who was and is and is to come. With all creation I sing praise to the King of kings. You are my everything and I will adore you. Jesus we will adore you. We will adore you. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty who was and is and is to come.

With all creation I sing praise to the King of kings. You are my everything and I will adore you. We have our prayer team come forward. We want to pray for you today. We're going to be moving into a season of healing in the church. You want to see more and more healing. The season of Lent the 40 days before Easter starts 30 days from today. Quick. If you need the Lord I've been just soaking in prayer for healing for people at this church and people that have been going through things and when I do that he kind of gives me thoughts sometimes and they might be right they might be wrong but maybe to come forward for prayer and some of the things he said some people are having issues with their stomach just in their digestion and things come forward for prayer.

Someone has a problem with their foot come forward for prayer. Someone has a problem with their hands. Migraines were there as well. Someone has a heart issue as well. Could be things I didn't mention. Anxiety was another one that came up and I just began to pray over the congregation. We want to see you healed. We believe in a healing God, right? And we want to see we saw our first healing of the year.

We're praying for many more. We want this to be a cancer-free church, a divorce-free church, an anxiety-free church, a depression-free church. And yeah, and see that happen here. So, we're going to do that together. We're going to lean into that together as a church during this healing time. We're going to have a wall in the back to pray for people, but it's when we all gather for that, right?

So, I'm going to bless you and then afterwards, you come up for prayer. If you don't have a relationship with Jesus, come to know Jesus. If I'm like Jack, he was sitting there, just heard the message. If you heard the message, come forward. We're going to lead you to Jesus. We're going to baptize you like him and see you walk in eternity with Jesus Christ because he is our true norm.

And so, if you extend your hands, I want to bless you. Lord Jesus, I bless your people. Lord, just see the issue of sexuality as well. And I pray, God, that there would be, those things would be made right. I see a bunch of that. And I just pray that that would be made right, that you would make things in alignment with you, that everything is committed to you and dedicated unto you.

We just dedicate. And there's some of you that feel like you haven't been able to dedicate certain things. And once you dedicate it, he'll let you know whether it's received and how to receive it and how to be blessed. So we give that to you. I bless your people now with purpose, with finding our North Star, the heart of Jesus, that we can have your heart.

We want to be a Jesus, we want to send our church to make Jesus known. That you would let us know what you want, that we would care about what you want. And that this idea of initiation, God wants to initiate in 2026 with you, initiate these things. But he wants to drive. He wants to be in charge. And only in that will you find fulfillment. I pray for a deep fulfillment for you, a deep contentment for you, and just a joy that comes with the satisfaction of the abundant life in Jesus.

We bless you now and we send you out to be an army of God's love and consolation. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We love you. Come forward for prayer. Amen.