JUN 21 2026 | The Church S1E4 | Mission

Sea Change Church · The Church · "Mission" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · June 21, 2026
Ephesians 3:7-13
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Music So good morning. You got me there? Am I on? Check, check, check. Yes, yes. Thumbs up back there in the back. Got me? Yes. Thumbs up. If you have your Bibles, open up to Ephesians chapter 3, 7 through 13. I want to continue to be a Bible-carrying church. One, I think you should have, if you can, a church Bible. We go through the ESV. You can have multiple versions of the Scripture. We have a bunch in the bookstore. So get a Bible, bring a bunch of pens, mark it up. We want to be that.

And I also think it's a rad witness when everybody driving by sees all these people walking into church, carrying their Bible. It is the Word of God. We love God's Word and His blessing that comes through it. Before we start, I want to give a word that I feel like the Lord gave me today that some of you, myself included, have been asking the Lord for an answer to some things that you don't know how it's going to turn out.

And you're looking for an answer and some direction. And I feel like the Lord says specifically, and you'll know if it's you or not who have done that, that He wants you to fall in love with His laws, His ways, and follow them in the narrow path. And by doing that, on the things that you know where He's told you this is not for you, if you move into alignment with His laws and His path, those answers are going to happen, and some of those issues are going to be solved.

Some of those can be physical issues, relational issues. So if that's a word for you, you will know it, but the Lord told me to give it. So as we move into that, we're going to be reading out of Ephesians 7, or excuse me, Ephesians 3, 7 through 13. Once again, a meaty passage, right? This is a porterhouse steak, you know what I mean? It's got a New York on one side and filet mignon on the other. This thing is thick. You can spend a lot of time in this.

And we are in the epistles this summer. We're in the book of Ephesians right now. So we'll continue on in Ephesians and Galatians in our next series starting next week called Gifts and Fruit. We're going to be looking about being equipped in the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit. And once again, teaching expositionally through those. So it will be topical in a way that we'll be talking about things that are in the epistles.

But we are moving through every type of biblical literature as a church, Old Testament narrative, New Testament narrative, the wisdom literature, the gospels, the epistles, the prophetic. So you'll be getting a taste of all the different biblical literatures. I won't be staying in Ephesians for 75 weeks. I think everyone gets bored with that. But we will be looking at the entirety of the Bible. Here we are in Ephesians.

Let's start with that if you have it. And hey, if you just recently started bringing your Bible because I've been mentioning it, if you're just a recent Bible bringer, raise your Bible. Anyone. Anyway, let's go. Let's go. All right, great. I'm stoked to have you guys. Everyone else join them. And let's read through that. Verse 7. Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given to me by the working of his power.

Let's say power. That's right. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. Circle, unsearchable riches. And to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden in God, hidden for the ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers, to the authorities in the heavenly places.

This was according to the eternal purpose, which he realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. Incredible passage. And on this Mission Sunday, this is the purpose, the fourth purpose of the church. That is mission. Now that can mean giving sandwiches to the homeless.

But if you look at the foundation upon which the acts that you do in mission, to help the poor, to volunteer at your preschool, kids' preschool, whatever it is, it is built on a deeper foundation, an existential foundation, a power-filled foundation, and upon the work that Christ has accomplished in his eternal purpose. Ephesians talks about the eternal purpose of God. And let me just give you a little spoiler right now.

The eternal purpose of God is not just to change your marriage, not just to put wells in Africa. The eternal purpose of God is to bring the entire cosmos, all the powers and authorities underneath that, in submission to Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. When you go to be a soccer coach in the name of Jesus, you're not just trying to help some kids, you know, learn on their right foot a little bit better, and maybe help them and give them some encouraging words.

You are part of an eternal purpose that is bringing to fruition what Christ has already done, brought the entire cosmos back under his authority, and now it just has to get in alignment. And it is through the church that it says here that that happens. Now, it's easy to say that the church is just the church of God, and there's just people all over and individuals, and that's true. You are the church wherever you are, but the church is organized.

The church is built, as you will see, all these letters are not to, hey, all the Christians anywhere there are. It's to the church in Ephesus, to the church in Rome, to the church in Colossae. It's to the church of the Corinthians. All through, God is speaking to individual congregations that are organized, that are organized to bring about, as it says in this passage, the manifold wisdom of God through the church, to change, basically to change the world through Christ in power.

Well, you can say, and most of you wouldn't say that if you're sitting here, I don't like organized religion. And my argument would be, well, do you like disorganized religion? Because that's the opposite of it. Disorganized. That was pretty funny, I guess. Disorganized religion. Disorganized religion is you at home deciding, well, I don't like that. I'm going to take in this guy's TV show. I might show up to this church for the worship, but after worship's done, I don't like the teacher, so I walk out after the worship.

I'm going to do a little homeless outreach on my own. I might go with this ministry. I'm going to hang out with friends for a Bible study here. And you're just everywhere. And you become the doctor with your own prescription. There's no accountability in that. There's no one who can really call you to account to say, hey, the way you treated so-and-so, whatever, in community. Community is hard. Being in the church is hard, especially if you're going to be involved and not just a pew sitter.

We don't want to have a church that is just here for whatever reasons. People come to church, I've found out, for lots of different reasons. But we want to get unified under this eternal purpose that the entire world and all the authorities, as it says, will know, the demons is who it's speaking about, the angels as well that we will judge as the church, will know that Jesus Christ is Lord through the church. So we see that happening.

Now, there's eight things that are on a quadrant. I want you guys to know who we are. And I have posted these on the back pillars of the church when you walk in, and they will be there for a while. Here's the image right now. There it is. This is the four purposes of the church, and it happens on four different corners. The first thing, and this is the fourth message there, in the bottom right-hand corner, you'll see the mission.

Here's some things. One, we want you to know who you are in Jesus. We want you to have an identity. If you don't know who you are, you will have a false persona, or you will be walking in a lack of power because you don't know who God has called you to be. You'll walk in shame oftentimes, or you can walk in pride. We also have a unity. We want to be unified as a church. And I told you, I confess, that I think we've done a good job preaching the gospel here, but not enough of a good job unifying us all around the same thing.

So it blessed my heart, if I can say it that way, on Tuesday, when Josh sent me the 25 to 30 people that showed up to the Freedom in Christ course on Tuesday night, because I said, we're going to be doing that as a church. And I want to encourage you to get the Neil T. Anderson books, Victory Over the Darkness. We're going to read that this summer. We're going to read the Bondage Breaker. And if you can take that course, it'll start again in the fall.

You can probably still jump in. This Tuesday night was awesome. Mike Power's class on Sunday night is another one. We do Discipleship Essentials. But I want to drive you to places where you know who you are in Jesus, and that's why we're doing it. It's going to change your life. We're going to do that in unity. And then there's maturity. We want to grow in Christ. We don't want to be the same 65-year-old believer that has not grown since we were 35 years old in the faith.

We want to grow. Our marriage is stronger. We want to just become mature. And I said last week that the goal is not heaven. Heaven is the location. The goal, the destination is becoming like Jesus. You can't be in heaven now. We can bring the kingdom of heaven to earth, correct? You can't be there now, but you can become more like Jesus now. And the question is, are you becoming more like Jesus? Here's your big idea for the day.

I'm sorry. It happens on four places. It happens in your heart, in your home, at our church, and to the four corners of the world. So community transformation is what we're going for. We want to see La Jolla, Claremont, Pacific Beach, wherever you all live, we want to see you begin to change your communities. And we're going to begin to organize you, as I'll say at the end of the message, organize you into geographical groups to begin to prayer walk, to begin to care for, to begin to know the people in your neighborhoods, the key places of power and influence in your neighborhood, and begin to send you in there as missionaries of the gospel to bring change to those places.

That's what we're doing. That's why you're here. We're not here to get more, you know, people in the seats. We're not here to say, hey, we had this many people come, and we did all this. We're here to change your life and to change your community. We want you to jump on board with that. And so that happens in four places. You can take that down. Here's the big idea of the message today. The church is not merely doing God's work.

It is God's masterpiece on display, revealing his wisdom, his grace, and his power. We said power to the world. Let's go to verse 10. It's a key verse in verse 10. As I said, this is a meaty passage. But in verse 10, it says, so that, and this is the outworkings, right, of the unsearchable riches of Christ. So that through the church, the manifold, we're going to look at that word in detail, the Greek word there in just a second, wisdom of God might be made known to the ruler's authorities in the heavenly places.

Now, this is really powerful because the church, the local church, the organized local church, and I understand there is a global church. I get that. When God, you know, this is both the global church, but the global church is organized as we see in the scripture. All the letters, you know, the majority of the epistles are written to churches, groups of people living together, doing life together with all the froth and bubble and the ebbs and flows of human relationships.

A lot of people don't like organized church because they don't like what it causes them to have to do is get along with other people. I heard somebody once say, I love the church if it wasn't for the people, right? Just great big buildings, and we're not that, although I appreciate a building. Don't want to be out in the rain like having a building. It is God's wisdom, and so through the local church, God is saying this.

The changing of the world happens through the local church. That's what this says, through the church. Granted, it is global church, but it's through the church. It doesn't say through governments, although governments are important. It doesn't say through business. Although business is important, we want you to be involved in government. We want you to be involved in business. It doesn't say through the educational system.

It doesn't say through entertainment. It doesn't say through media. It gives the church the highest place when it comes to not only changing cities, but declaring to the angels and the demons in the heavenly places and all the world that Jesus Christ is Lord through the power of the gospel that brings change, actual measurable change. That's what we want, measurable change. Now, we want that to start with your identity.

We want measurable change. We want you to know who you are in Jesus, that you are a son of God, that you sit enthroned with God. It says that you sit now with God at the right hand of the Father. And there are things, there is power, and there is influence, and there are privileges that come with sitting at the right hand of God. And I want to challenge you, use whatever computer system you like to use to seek out what it means to sit at the right hand of God and how to walk in that type of authority.

That's your identity. And so we want to see that. Now, when you get those people like yourselves into this understanding of knowing who you are, then you can begin to use those as a tool because identity is a tool. If you don't know who you are, you're not going to be able to walk in the authority and accomplish what God has called you to do. Identity is a tool, and so you have to know who you are. And Paul is speaking about this, and he says, so that, let's go back to, I want to go actually, go back to verse 8, because he gives a precursor here in verse 8 for the so that passage that comes in verse 10.

And circle that so that, because that is like equals on a math problem, right? So he goes, and he says in verse 8, to me, though I am the very least of all the saints, I love the humility, this grace was given to preach, okay, so we're preaching, so to preach to whom? The Gentiles, that's not the Jews, that is everyone who's not a Jew, the unsearchable, unsearchable riches of Christ. Now, circle unsearchable. So that's really key, because in a second, he actually, you know, actually turns that around, because in certain verses, go to verse 9, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.

Now, to bring to light in the ESV, some of your scriptures, if you're using it, and this is why I love having different translations of the Bible. I actually had a book when I was in college, when we had books. There was these things, and they had pages. And so we had libraries. If you were a pastor, you had to have a library, and I would lay all my books out on a giant table, and it took a long time to do, it's a lot quicker now these days.

But I had one that would take like eight different versions of the Bible, King James, New Living, NIV, and it would lay them all out, and I would read through each of them with the Greek, so you can get a better understanding. It says there to bring to light, but some versions say to make plain. Now, I love the fact that he says there's these unsearchable riches of God. They're unsearchable. How could we ever know? That'd be overwhelming, right?

And then it's this mystery of a God. It's a mystery, right? But he says, I'm going to make it plain. I love the fact that we have a Holy Spirit that says reveals the mysteries of God, the hidden things of God, it says, and will make them known to you. We want to know who we are in Christ, but more than that, we want to know who God is, and there's deep mysteries. And the more we are obedient to the things that he calls you to do, he will open up doors of understanding that you will not have when you walk in disobedience.

The Lord also told me, you can take it or leave it, whether I hear from the Lord or not, it'll be proven out if it actually works, that some doors that God wants to open for some of us in this congregation's lives, he wants to open doors, are not going to be opened until we walk in obedience. There are purposes, there are plans that God has for you that he says, no, I love you too much to allow you to do that if you're in disobedience.

Now, don't take that as a word of shame or a word of guilt. It's a word of opportunity, and he speaks to me as well. So I began to ask God, what are those things in my life? Let's go to, continue on there to the so that, verse 10. So that through the church, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. That is a lot more than giving a ham sandwich to someone who's hungry, right?

That is what we were doing. And when you understand the extensive nature of the mission, it changes how you go in to making those sandwiches. Does that make sense? Because as you go out, you are saying to the rulers and the authorities, I am going to bring justice to this situation and write the balance where Satan wants to bring injustice. You are going to bring truth where there is lies. You are going to bring hope where there is despair.

And when we do so, in actions, you actually go and make that sandwich. You go and coach that soccer team. Wherever that God has placed you, as you do that, you are declaring with power and bringing the manifold wisdom of God through the church which you are a part of to change the world and bring measurable change. Now, you might say, hey, come on, Adam. That's, really, we're just making ham sandwiches, bro. And I would lead you to, if you have your notes or your Bible, turn to 2 Corinthians 10, 3 through 5.

Oh, I love the pages turning. I love it. So happy. All right. There it says this. Now, if you're going to challenge this, it says, For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. It's a battle position. For the weapons of our warfare are not flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments, every lofty opinion that raised itself up against the knowledge of God to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.

That is a verse we all, you, that, in the, in your little bat belt that we all wear, right? You got all these little verses that are your core, your cadre, your cache of verses. I have to tell you, that right there has to be in your top 20. That verse right there needs to be in your top 20. Because take this into your marriage, right? For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have what?

Divine power to destroy strongholds. How many of you need some strongholds destroyed in your life? Strongholds of addiction. Strongholds of depression. Strongholds of negative thinking patterns. This is what the Freedom in Christ series is all about that we've been trying to get everyone to go through. And then we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. I love this because we live in a world of foolish arguments and stupid opinions.

It doesn't take many podcast listens to figure that out, right? And I'm really concerned, especially with Gen Z right now, that the majority of the discipleship is coming from YouTube. A lot of it can be good. But this is happening throughout the entire church. The opinions people are bringing me sometimes are so well thought out and so disciplined in their thinking and so ungodly in their nature, it makes me shake. Because we tend to find everything but the word of God and we don't destroy arguments that go against his nature.

And we let lofty opinions, our own included, be raised up against the knowledge of God. There's all this, right now, by the way, there is this massive search for knowledge. Right? All the world's wisdom is available at your fingertips. Woo! How excited are we? And none of the hidden knowledge of God is available with those same tools. The only way to get it is through the Holy Spirit. Now God can use tools to get you to understand it.

But let me tell you one thing that the internet or computers or any form of usage of it will never be able to do is control and dictate what the hidden knowledge of God is and to bring it to your life so that it brings change and that the cosmos is restored because what God is doing through the manifold wisdom of the church. So we can glorify all these amazing tools. They're so powerful. And they are. But you have a tool, just you and your Bible, sitting at the side of a lake, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal to you the hidden wisdom of God is a way powerful, it's a more powerful tool than this.

And if you had a problem, let me just tell you this, if there was a huge problem and two people had to solve the problem, they were Christians and they had the same problem. And one, you said, you're going to get to go use a computer and go figure out and you can ask it anything you want and it will give you these incredible answers. And they're both believers and you take another one and you say, you can go sit with the Lord with a Bible in quiet and seek him.

And I'm not saying God can't use the other, but if I had to bet on one, I'm taking the one by the lake. And we tend to lose out on that because we want the knowledge of the world, the opinions of the world, the arguments of the world, and not the knowledge of God. And not the secret hidden things of God. And so it says that our job as a church, when you make that ham sandwich, when you coach that soccer team, when you go to dinner with your family, our job is to understand the manifold wisdom of God and to release that to those that are around us.

And to walk in that kind of nature and walk in that kind of power. That's a different power. Go to the, I told you we're going to get to manifold wisdom and I've got to hurry here. Manifold wisdom of God. The word is, and I'm really bad, but it's two words actually. It's poly. Poikolos. Poikolos. Harry would be way better at this. He's so good at pronouncing the Greek and I am not. But the word there means many, very diverse and multicolored.

And when Paul is speaking about the manifold, I love the word manifold wisdom. Manifold means different parts, all different types of abilities to displace something in different ways. It is a, the analogy would be also a tapestry. And so when Paul is describing how this happens, he's saying that the church is made up of all you. And every one of you is a unique part of God. There's no one like you. You can never be recreated again.

And God in that is using exactly who you are and the place where he has put you. You are not obsolete to make a difference in the world to be the manifold wisdom of God. Many of you know my mom has been in the hospital. She's been in the hospital for a couple weeks now praying. If you would pray with us that she gets out of the hospital, back home. She was 10 days in ICU, which is, that's a long time to be in ICU, trust me.

And so she's been there. And it's easy as I've been, we've been praying with her and whatever to think like, okay, I'm just here in the hospital bed and I can't get out. Until she invites her nurse who came to church last week. You see, it doesn't matter where you are. Moms, the devil's going to tell you, oh, you had that career. You're raising your kids now. What a waste of time. Huh. Not true. He's going to tell you, oh, your business didn't go to where it should be.

He's going to give you all these different things. And God is saying, hey, it's not about that. It's about you being part of the manifold wisdom of God. That unique piece that I have you placed. The person who is doing the, like I said, the soccer coaching. Or you go to Costco to buy everything for your office. Whatever it is, your job is. That you are part of the manifold wisdom of God in that place. Making a difference and caring about people along the way.

This is the mission of the church. And so if we go to that, you go to verse 1. We'll come in for a landing here in a second. Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given to me by the working of his power. The first thing that we are about is the gospel. Making Jesus known. There is a power in the gospel. And the gospel is very simple. The gospel is the short message that Jesus Christ came, the Son of God, to die for human sin on the cross as an atonement for our wickedness.

That we might be reunited to God. He came back on the, he rose on the third day after being crucified under Pontius Pilate. And we will join him in eternity because of that work on the cross. Now that is a paraphrased version of the cross. But that's the message. That is the grace that we are giving. And what should be on the tip of our tongues in everywhere we go. It is letting that gospel out. So the first thing Paul says, he says, I'm preaching the gospel.

We want you to be people who preach the gospel. Everyone, hey, everyone speaks about something these days. Everyone's speaking their truth, right? I want to encourage you to speak the truth. The gospel, it says in Romans, has power. It has power to give somebody eternal life. Imagine if you just had this, you know, magic ring or something. And if you touch somebody, when you were wearing the ring, you would give them eternal life.

Imagine the power. Imagine the people that would line up at your door. You would touch them. They would have eternal life. That's what the Bible says the gospel is. There is an inherent power in the preaching of the gospel. When you speak the gospel, there is a heavenly power that is attached to it that can bring eternal life to people. And so if we're just Christians, I have a friend, he's a missionary. He calls himself a missionary.

He does a lot of charity work. And he says, but we're non-proselytizing. Let me tell you what that means. They do a bunch of stuff, but they never talk about Jesus. And I was like, bro, it's just charity work, bro. And charity work's good. But as it says in the scripture, it will pass away, right? Any work that was not done in Jesus' name. And when we do things, we want to be sharing the gospel as often as possible. The last two things, he says he's a minister.

He says, I'm a minister of the gospel. What does that mean? It means that you are actually administering. There is an administration of God's power into people's lives. You're bringing them hope. You're bringing them joy. You're bringing them care. Let me tell you, I was in England one time. And I was staying at this church in Reading with a group of high school students. And there was a man. He was homeless. And really, he came in completely.

He was drunk. And he was just dirty. He'd been on the streets. And the pastor had said to me, yeah, he used to go to the church here. But he had this issue with drinking. His wife finally kicked him out. He lost his job. And now he's been on the streets. And I began to talk to him. I didn't really want to talk to him. But we had places to go, whatever. The Lord said, sit down and talk to him. So I sat down. I began to speak to him.

I began to listen to his story. And I said, can I pray for you? Because I thought, I'm going to pray for him. He said, yeah, I'd love you to pray. He was crying and weeping about everything that he had lost. And as I got ready to pray for him, the Lord said, get on your knees and put your forehead on his feet, which was not a great prospect, trust me. He said, put your hand on his feet and put your forehead on his feet.

And begin to, the only word I could say is beg, but I don't think we have to beg God. But I'm going to use that word for how I experienced it. I felt like the Lord said to me, and beg for his soul. And so maybe plea. Plea is a better word. And plea for his soul. I didn't want to do it, right? And so I'm not telling you to do this at Trader Joe's, okay? We were at a church and he was crying and it was, you know. And so I got down and I did it and I put my hand and I began to pray and just pray and ask God for his soul.

And then, you know, and then we finished and nothing really happened. And I was like, okay. And he took off. And a year later, I was talking about coming back to this church and I called the pastor and we were getting ready to hang up. He says, I just got to tell you something. I said, what? He said, the gentleman that you prayed for. I said, oh yeah. He says, he's got sober. He's taken a job here at the church as our janitor.

And he's back with his wife and he's back with his family. And he's coming to church every single week. Now, whether that was because I put my head on his dirty, nasty feet, I don't know. You know what I mean? It was not the best thing in the world. That's something I didn't want to do. But it was one of the times in my life, one, and I miss a lot. I probably miss more than I've made. I did what God told me to do and I ministered to somebody.

And you are going to have the opportunity to minister to somebody this week. The question was, will you will take it? We're going to have to close just as we, I won't go on to the rest of this. But I want to tell you where these eight places and spears of influence happen. The church changes culture when ordinary people, transformed by Jesus, faithfully represent him in every spear of influence. There are about eight main known spheres of influence in the world, right?

And I've listed them there. And I've listed them. The first few are in order. And this is where God begins to change the world and the base. The first is the family. We can't have glorious churches and sullen homes. If your marriage is not in place, fix it. Ask the Lord and listen to the Lord. If your relationship with your children, if your own personal life is not in place, fix it. God will not open doors for you that you're not ready to walk into.

And we want to walk into that. So the family, the church is the second place. Paul says it's through the church, not through the government. It's not through who you vote for. And those are important. And I would love to see some of you in government. But it happens through the church. Then we have education, government, business, media, communications, arts, entertainment, sports, health, science, technology. Where do you fit?

Where do you fit in there? What we want to do as a church is identify where each of you fit. And then we want you to go into that with the identity of who Paul just said you are. And bring meaningful change to that place. I will end with this statement that I wrote down. And it's this. Power, the power of God, is the measurable impact of God's activity in the world. When God's power is present, something changes. Marriages are healed.

Bodies are healed. Minds are healed. Emotions are healed. Addictions are changed. God moves. On that same trip, I'll just finish with this story. On that same trip, we were doing worship in the open is what we called it. We would go and we'd get a circle. We would just begin to worship in public places. And we weren't like doing a show or anything. We would just face each other in a circle and go to a very public place and worship the Lord.

And so we were there and we had gone to this in the middle of a city on a Sunday. And we were going to go to the high street. Well, in England, all the high streets back then were closed on Sunday. So there was nobody there. And we're like, oh, well, there's nobody here to like. So we said, well, we're going to worship anyway. So we got like 20 of our youth group students around. We started worshiping the Lord and calling out the Lord.

And pretty soon there was a pub and some guy comes out with a beer and he looks. And he like comes over and he sits down in the circle with his beer. Just like drinking it up, right? It's 4X lager. This is before IPAs. Thank God I quit drinking before IPAs. I'm glad I didn't have to experience that. I just don't want a lemon beer, bro. Nonetheless, just a separate point. And so pretty soon another person came out. Pretty soon another person came out.

By the time we were done, 30 to 40 people, this is no lie, 30 to 40 people had come out and begun to sit in the circle and sing along with us. Beers in hand, cigarettes, the whole thing. Now that kind of thing happened in many of the, like the Welsh revival, happened in all these revivals where bars would actually have to shut down because people were so changed, addictions were so stopped in their tracks that the entire city would change.

I've got to tell you, churches are too much just wanting to fill their pews so they can go to their nearest church conference and say, wow, we had a lot of people there, and nothing happens in their community. It's only going to, I need to lead it, but you need to do it. I need to lead it, you all need to do it. So when your band plays, you know, at the Casbah, which one of our people, their band is going to be playing at the Casbah, which is cool, I think I'm going to go.

When your band plays at the Casbah, or you're teaching in your classroom, you've got to remember you're there for Jesus. When you're out in the lineup surfing, it ain't about waves, it's about Jesus. When, whatever, you're in that part of society, that's what we're doing. This is the purpose of the church, understood? Amen. Let's stand if you would. Amen. I do understand that messages like this have the effect sometimes of shrinking your church by 20%.

That's fine. But we just want to get after it. We want to do this for Jesus. Amen. Let's extend your hands, if you would, on this Father's Day. And happy Father's Day, dads. I didn't mention it. It's super important to my heart, but bless you, fathers. Let's just take a moment as God just begins to put onto your heart the things he wants to do and change. Lord, we love you. Just tell him how much you love him. I want to obey your commandments.

Make your commandments sweet to me. Make your law. Let me just love your law. David loved your law, and his heart was completely after you. Show us, God, the things that you want to open the doors and the windows of opportunity for us, of kingdom advancement, and what we need to do, Jesus, to know you, to make those things happen. We bless you, and we love you. In Jesus' name, amen. If you need prayer, our prayer team will be here.

We want to pray with you. God bless you guys. See you next week. God bless you guys.