MAR 27 2016

Sea Change Church · Adam Stadtmiller · March 27, 2016
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

For everything is risen, he is alive. That was important so that the stain of sin would not be passed down. And that is how sin was passed down. It was passed down through the stain of sin, through our DNA. And so the virgin birth is important because Jesus was implanted into Mary. And that is a miracle. And it's something that we believe. And it is crucial to understanding Christian theology. And it takes an audacity of faith to believe something like that.

Faith is audacious and it's becoming more audacious every single day in this society. And I think the harder it is to believe, the more strident and the more powerful faith becomes. I think people of faith right now are some of the most amazing people, some of the most courageous people in our society. Because we live in a society that says that if you have faith, then you are a fool.

I want to say that I just, if you are a person of faith, that I want to applaud your courage. And we are living in a society, this was a society of faith that they were living in then. But we are now living in a society that is losing its faith. That like R.E.M. said, is losing their religion. And there's no problem with religion as long as it's the right kind of religion.

Because in James, the scripture says that true religion is this. To look out after widows and orphans. So there is such a thing as good religion. But we are in a society that is losing religion. That wants to mock religion. That wants to mock prayer. On and on. And if you are going to be a person of faith, I applaud you. Because it's going to start to cost you something.

But we have found over and over in scripture, as you look at the history of the martyrs, that when faith in Christ especially begins to cost you something, the church is filtered and begins to rise from the ashes. And I believe we are on the stepping stone of a new generation in the church. If you are a believer, the word or the news that the church is dead, I think, is a little premature.

I believe we are rising in and God is filtering the church. And the scripture even says that he'll do that. And so we see Mary, a woman at this time, who an angel appears to her once again, takes an audacity of faith to believe that. But I believe it. And it says that the angel came to her and told her that the Messiah would come. And if you know Messiah, the idea of Messiah back then was going to be someone who would come and rescue Israel.

It would be the idea of Zionism. Zionism is Israel will be restored. The Romans will be kicked out. The King David-like figure will come back and we will rise again. We will set the king on high. And the Jewish nation will persevere. And you have to understand that Mary had that same understanding. It said that she didn't even understand everything that was going on in Jesus' life.

But it says, you know, she would treasure these things. They would treasure these things up in their heart as they watched Jesus grow up. She was a character in a story, a central character in a story. The most famous woman probably in the world. And she was unaware of what God was doing, especially as she stood there at the cross. She sung when she was a young girl.

And Mary said after the angel come, it says, my soul glorifies the Lord. When was the last time your soul glorified the Lord? I want to tell her something. I'm climbing the pulpit again. There I go. Give me a, Dave, will you put me a ladder on here? I'm just going to climb up. Some guys pound their pulpit. I climb on it. The hope of glory is within us, it says in Corinthians.

One of the two books of Corinthians. Not sure which, but I know it says it. I read it a few weeks ago. It says the face of the glory of Christ dwells within us. When was the last time you felt glory within you? I had some difficult thoughts. Hit me in the middle of the night in the last couple weeks. And I remember that scripture. And I said, glory feels a long way away right now.

But I know it exists. And it takes faith to overcome doubt. You see, faith doesn't exist without doubt. Do you get that? When you think, oh, I'm not sure that's right. I'm not sure if I can believe that. That's a good thing. Because if faith doesn't, if doubt doesn't exist, then faith can't jump over it. You see, faith is only faith. It has its definition when it overcomes doubt.

And if you have doubt, good on you, as they would say in Australia. Because now you have the opportunity for faith. But see, faith, once it becomes solidified and overcomes doubt, becomes a substance, it says in Hebrews. It becomes a foregone conclusion. It becomes something that is real. And Mary cries out when the angel had come, because it had come, the faith is rising, and says, my soul glorifies the Lord.

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed. That's true. For the mighty one has done great things for me. Holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him from generation to generation. And you've got to think, as she stood at the cross, she remembered that song.

And she thought, what's happened? What's happened? I don't, it doesn't make any sense. And if you ever had a song in your heart, and then it's 20 years since you sung that song, you've almost forgotten the words of the song of the promise in your heart, and the dreams are dead, and you feel like they're dead. And now you feel like you're on the backside of your dreams, or you reach that place.

And that's the other thing people don't understand who haven't reached their goals. A lot of people, when you reach your goal, what happens when you're on the backside of it? When you've reached it, and you think, is that all that there is? You look at people in society that have reached the top of the goal, and then they end up taking their own life, or something like that.

How do you, how do you, how do you deal? How do you live on the backside of your dreams? There has to be something more important than the dream. What Mary understands, and others find, is that Jesus is the dream. And if you have had your own personal purpose, and your own story, and your own goals, and your own thoughts become the thing in your life that you're worshiping and hoping for, let me help you detoxify yourself, because it'll never satisfy.

To detoxify yourself from your own purpose. That Jesus is the purpose. He's the goal, and he's the thing that we will worship forever in heaven. He is the glory of God that will be revealed to us. So good. So Mary stands there, and the broken dreams have happened. John 19, 25 through 27 says, Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary.

There's seven Marys in the New Testament. And his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, who we know seven demons had come out of her, when Jesus saw his mother there. And I love it, because there's the speck in the hurricane. Because in the midst of the hurricane, he's been beaten. It says, I think it's in Isaiah, one of the prophetic books, that he'd been beaten to the point where you could not recognize him anymore.

Unhuman looking. And there he stands, and he looks to her, and the disciple whom he loved, which is John, which is his best friend, we believe, whom was standing nearby, and he said to her, Woman, here's your son now. And to the disciple, he said, Here's your mother. And from that time on, the disciple, Jesus' best friend, my interpretation, took her into his home.

Powerful. Here's what I like, is that Jesus speaks to her in the midst of the dying, and he restores to her what she was losing. It just didn't look like she thought it was going to look. You see, she was losing a son. And Jesus stops, and she's a speck in the storm at this point. And he says, Woman, because he's God, and it is his mother, but he is God.

And he looks to her, and he says, I want to restore the years that the locusts have eaten. I want to restore the things to you that you have lost. But it might not look like you thought it would look. And are we willing to accept God's plan? And so she says to him, and she gives him back. She gives her back a son. Now what's so interesting, is Jesus had other brothers.

Jesus had other brothers, that she could have gone and lived with. But Jesus looks to his mother, and to his best friend, and he says, John, take her in. And John takes her in. And you know what I love about Mary and her broken dreams? Because you've got to figure, she's got to figure it out. She starts figuring it out. She lands on her feet. And in Acts 1.14, it says they all join together.

As it's talking about the disciples, after Jesus has raised from the dead, and all the disciples come back together. And as I know, this is the last mention of her in the scripture, although there might be another, but I couldn't find another with all my study this week. It says they all joined together constantly in prayer, because they were back to believing.

They were back to faith. They had regathered the troops. And it says, along with the woman, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, with his brothers. You see, Mary ended up on her feet. Mary figured it out. And I want to say, if your dream's been broken, that perhaps God has a different dream for you. Perhaps he wants to be your dream. Perhaps he has something that is more glorious, and something that does not fade, or go away.

The next thing we see is, we see a centurion at the cross, the second story. And this is a story of powerful transformation. The centurion at the cross, some people, I've heard the name was Clavius. There's a whole bunch of different thoughts about this. I want to rely on what the scripture actually tells us about him. But you've seen the movie, the movie Risen, and that talks about the centurion, and the different cohort that was going, and trying to find the body of Jesus.

And as we look at the centurion, who ends up in the Catholic, in the Eastern traditions, going on to become a Christian saint. Did you know that? Saint Longinus was his name, which I found. I didn't even, I didn't know that. Don't be surprised that I didn't know that, but I didn't. What we do know about Saint Longinus, who was supposedly, went on to become a martyr, who died for the name of Jesus, as it is understood, in Christian history.

Once again, we're going to get back to what the scripture actually says, but these are interesting things, and there are historians, and there is history outside of the Bible, that we can look at. But he is one of a trifecta, of Roman centurions, who follow Christ. In Matthew 8, 2, the centurion comes to him, that has the, I think it's the sixth servant.

And he comes, and he says to Jesus, will you heal my servant? You've got to love a guy, who cares so much about his servant, that he goes to Jesus, to see the servant healed. It says in the Proverbs, that a servant that is, that is, that is treated kindly, will eventually become like a son, or like your own child. So that's one of the centurions. And then we have the soldier at the cross, who we'll talk about here in a moment.

He, he made a confession of who Jesus was. And then in Acts, chapter 10, after Jesus has risen from the dead, we have Cornelius, called a God-fearing man. And he was a centurion as well. Paul, when he writes to the Philippians, says years later, and give my greeting to those that are in the household of Caesar. Think about that. The gospel had begun to take root within the army, had begun to take root within the Roman cohort.

We have three centurions who are following God. And then when Paul speaks years later, he writes, and he says that there in, in Philippians 4.22, give my greetings to all that are in the household of Caesar. You see, the gospel is infectious. And it's not just for a certain group of people, but as we're going to see, it's for the entire mankind. It's for all, and when I say that, I mean that in, in, in the most broad sense of mankind, men and women.

And so he's part of a trifecta of centurions. Bet you hadn't seen that. Do you know that? Raise your hand if you knew that. Yeah, one in the back. Nice. Well done. All right. Come finish the message for me. Here's a story about this soldier. He had a group, and this soldier, Longinus, as we'll call him, was in charge of a group of soldiers who watched over Jesus from the time he was handed over from Pilate, and then he went on to beat him, and they called other soldiers around to watch and take part of beating and mocking Jesus.

And then he left that group of soldiers, the entire regiment, or platoon, whatever it was called, and he led Jesus to the cross and was there at the cross. It says, Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. So you've got to imagine Longinus, and his name, or Clavius, however you want to call him.

There's a little bit of a, we'll call him Longinus from this time out. Came, and he gathered all the other soldiers. He said, Come on, come on, we're going to make sport of this. We're going to torture and make sport of this man named Jesus. Come on. And he went, imagine waking him up, because it was early in the morning, and waking everyone up to come and take part of that torture and the enjoyment of that.

Now that's what he was doing. Think of this. And it says that he gathered them around him. Then they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and they twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. Then they put a staff in his right hand, and they knelt in front of him. They mocked him. Hail, King of the Jews. Hail, King of the Jews, they said as they mocked him.

And then they spit on him. And then they took the staff, and they beat him on the head. It says again and again. And they mocked him more, and they took off his robe, and then they put his own clothes on him, and then they led him away to be crucified. Just think of like wolves. Just think about wolves around Jesus. Not just a few of them, but they had gone and woken up the entire cohort to come and to mock Jesus and to beat him.

It's a crazy story. And Longinus was the guy who was leading this. He was leading this thing against Jesus. He'd become so calloused in the Roman world that these things like this, beating another human being to the point where they're unrecognizable. Jesus has already been whipped at that time to the point of death with the cat and nine tails over and over again.

And then you can just keep beating them in front of others. Where's your heart? It says in the end times, people's heart will grow cold. And we see in society today that people's hearts are growing cold. And just, just, that's why we're in a half-staffed nation. And it says, so, so here we are, and it says they mocked him. Here's what we do know about quickly, what we know about him.

He mocked and beat Jesus. He led Jesus to the cross. Think about that. He pushed and Jesus fell down many times. Imagine, put yourself in the story. Make yourself alongside of the Villa de la Rosa. And it says there that he, he led Jesus to the cross. He partook, probably even drove the nails into Jesus. Imagine that. He offered gall. He offered gall.

Now gall, they offered Jesus as poison to drink, or at least, it was at least a drug. Some believe it was a poison that would kill Jesus, and that's why Jesus didn't take it. But he offered that to him. He gambled for his clothing. He also posted a sign, King of the Jews over Jesus' head. And then it's said that he sat and watched as he died. And he's credited with being the soldier to pierce Jesus' side after he had died.

Legend has it, and it's purely legend, it's not in the scripture, that when he pierced him, he had an eye condition, and that he was healed of this eye condition. Once again, legend, not something we want to stick to scripture. Let me read, though, at the end of the story here, because it's a radical transformation. I just told you who this guy was. It says, And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

And at that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. It means that we have access back to God again, because Jesus died on the cross because we are separated from God, and the wrath of God is upon us because of man's sin. And so when Jesus died on the cross, there was a way back, and God's like, thank God my children can come home.

There has to be a recompense for sin, and Jesus paid it, so we don't have to. And it says, At that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks split. The tombs broke open, and bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. the audacity of faith to believe that. It takes a lot of faith. It takes me a lot of faith to believe that.

It does. It's not easy to believe that. But I believe it. Matter of fact, I'll die for it. At least I think I'll die for it. They came out of the tombs after Jesus' resurrection, went into the holy city, and appeared to many people. When the centurion, now this is interesting, when the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus, that means not just the centurion, but all those that were with him, this entire group of five or six or eight guards that were part of this beating and this mocking and pushing him to the cross and driving stakes to his hands and piercing him, okay, when he saw it and those that were with him guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified and exclaimed, surely he was the son of God.

Besides all those other things going, there's one other thing that Longinus did. He was the first person after the death of Christ to confess that Jesus was God. Very interesting that the first person to say that Jesus is God and he goes on in church history to share the message of Jesus in his own city of Cappadocia and was martyred. It is believed that he was martyred and killed for Jesus.

That is entire. So now the Roman cohort is beginning and they confess. Just saying, the one who killed him was the, think about the grace of that. That the one who killed him was the first one to acknowledge that, you know what, I have enough belief. That his entire heart was changed. It was melted in that moment. He saw something that melted his heart and he says yes and he follows Jesus and it is believed he followed him to his death.

I think it's interesting that the first person is not a Jewish man or some patriarchal, you know, society of the Jewish people but the man who had definitely had aided in Christ dying. It is a story of a transformed life. We have the story of unresolved guilt. The story of Judas in the third story. We all know the story of Judas. I have to tell it to you again.

Part of Jesus' closest group. And Jesus, I love that Jesus, one of the things about Jesus, he was the treasurer of the group and he was once again a Zionist. He believed, like Peter did and like Mary did, that, you know, a king coming to Jerusalem and kicking the Romans out was what God was all about. But they didn't understand the story. God has a bigger agenda than making a nation whole again, although he will do that, it says in the scripture.

He cares about your heart. He didn't die on the cross for a piece of land. He died on the cross for the souls that live on this land. And so we see that Judas was in that cohort. He was the treasurer. He believed that Jesus, and when Jesus started to not meet up to his expectations, he became angry. You see, Jesus doesn't always end up being who you think he's going to be.

And I've found that in my life that there's these things that I want Jesus to be a certain way, but he's not a God that you can put in a box. And so we see Judas now who betrays him. And you know the story of his betrayal, and I don't have to go through it, but it says early in the morning because he had gone to the chief priest and he had sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

It says early in the morning all the chief priests and the elders of the people made their plans how to have Jesus executed. So they bound him. They led him away and handed him over to the governor. When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse, and he returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priest and the elders.

I have sinned, he said, for I have betrayed innocent blood. What is that to us, they replied. That's your responsibility. So Judas threw the money into the temple and left, and then he went away and hung himself. Another thing says that after he hung himself that he fell, and it says that his entrails spilled out all over the ground into this field. Here's the thing with Judas.

Judas understood that he sinned. He just went to the wrong place after he did. You see, he had all this guilt. He was hit with shame. And instead of going back to Jesus, which even though the Scripture says that he was, and I don't understand exactly that he was predestined to this, and I wonder if maybe, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different thinking on that, but I wonder if he would have gone back to Jesus like Peter did, because Peter betrayed him too, this other Roman soldier had crucified him, had beat him, and mocked him.

It's hard to get much worse than that. I just wonder if Peter would have done, had known where to go with his guilt. You see, the guilt had become the central narrative of his story. And when guilt becomes the central narrative of our story, it breaks our heart. And we can no longer live. And you see people regularly because of guilt and shame taking their own lives.

He didn't know where to go. And so here's what's so interesting is he takes his sin and his guilt, and he goes to a place that has nothing to offer him. When he goes to them, he says, I have sinned. He's right. He confessed his sin. He just confessed it in the wrong place. And he says, for I've betrayed innocent blood. And this is what they said to him. What's that to us?

Nice answer. When you go to Jesus with your sin, and sin exists in the world, by the way, it is grace to know that sin exists. We live in a world that wants to erase sin. The only sin that exists these days is stealing from somebody that I can see. I was trying to think of it all week. Pedophiles, we all believe that that's sin, or at least wrong. Stealing and murder.

I think that we've kind of narrowed the list down lately. There's like three things. I can only think of three things that would literally be considered sin these days. We've narrowed it down, and we've told human beings that whatever you want to do, as long as you don't hurt somebody else, it's okay. Unfortunately, God's standard's different than ours.

And so to tell the world what sin is, is grace. Because if the world doesn't know, how can they repent? And so we need to continue to share the gospel and what sin is. We don't focus on sin, though. We focus on this. The resurrected cross. That Jesus did something, and so Peter, excuse me, Judas had nowhere to go. He went to the wrong place. And when we come to Jesus with our sin, whatever it is, and if guilt has become the central narrative of your life, you come to Jesus, and it says, we cast our cares on him because he cares about you, you will find a father full of grace.

You will find a savior who died and wants to embrace you. Who says, run to me. And if guilt has become the central narrative of your life, run to Jesus. There's so many other places you can go. We can go to the bottle. We can go to performance. All these other places. And they'll all look you in the eye and say, what does that have to do with me? What does that have to do with us?

The final story, my favorite of the four, I saved it to the last, is Jesus being anointed by a sinful woman. The gospels are a little bit unclear. They call it Mary. It's in the city of Bethany. We know we have a Mary from Bethany, and a lot of people believe it's Mary from Bethany. Other people believe that the woman who anoints Jesus before he dies with a year's worth of wages was Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene is at the cross. She was the first one who Jesus appeared to. This is once again interesting in a Jewish patriarchal society where you'd expect if God's going to do things right, according to the Jewish religion, that he would show up to a man and the man would be the first one to confess and a high-ranking Jewish male. But instead, a soldier's the first one to say that Jesus is God after he dies and the first person that he comes to, that he shows himself to, is a woman, Mary Magdalene, at the tomb.

Interesting how God doesn't quite do things the way that we think that he should and we see an expansion of the gospel here because God wants the gospel to go to all people, but he had to start out with a seed before it could blossom. And so now we see the gospel going to the brokenhearted. We see it going to the Romans. We see it going to the Gentiles. And we see women being elevated in the society.

And Jesus saying, no longer is there that curse and that understanding. And things are being broken forth. And so we see this with Christ. But before Jesus dies, there's this woman. And let me just read the story because some people believe it's Mary Magdalene. Some believe it's Mary Bethany. Some believe it's a composite Mary, which is just a woman named Mary who was a sinful woman.

What do we know by scripture? That she was a woman that had a lot of sin in her life. And the thing about her is she knew where to go. You see, her and Judas have the same issue. We all have the same issue. She knew where to go. And I'm going to read this whole story and then we're going to come in for a landing and be done because it's beautiful. Some people also just quickly believe it might be the woman from John chapter 8 who the woman caught in adultery who Jesus, they were going to stone and Jesus let her go.

I like that story the best. I don't know if it's true, but I like that one the best. It says in Luke 7, when one of the Pharisees, and Jesus even hung out with Pharisees, invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who had lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house.

And so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. It was a year's wages worth of perfume. It was about 12 ounces, I heard. And she stood behind him at his feet weeping is where you would stand. You would stand there behind a teacher like that. And at this time, you have to realize that women were in this very submissive role like still is in some places in the world.

And you would have to stand. You weren't able to touch a man and you had to stand. There was all these rules of protocol and women had to have their hair up and they couldn't let their hair down or it was disgraceful and prostitutes wear their hair down and different things like that. And it says, he went into the city and a woman in that town who lived there in a sinful life knew he was there.

And verse 38, as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. So much remorse. Brokenness. We live in a broken world. Brokenness. Jesus isn't intimidated by brokenness. That's the thing. Then she wiped the tears with her hair and she kissed them and poured perfume on them. So intimate. Like, and you can imagine the scene.

I mean, women don't even put their hair down. And now this woman's crying and she has tears and she's pouring oil and she's wiping and kissing his feet and it seems like this erotic scene almost and that's what the Pharisees were thinking. But you see, when you look at things in the right context and you understand actually what's happening behind the story, it was the last thing from erotic.

It was a broken woman who needed to be healed, who needed to be made restored. And Jesus says, you know what? To hell with protocol. I care about souls and I care about this woman. And I mean that in the best sense. To hell with protocol. Because Jesus will break the rules as he does because the rules are sovereign to him. He wrote them. And he will break them in order like he did.

And he talked many times in the scripture, this is what the Pharisees had a problem with. You're breaking all the rules. Quit loving prostitutes. Quit caring for tax collectors. Quit healing lepers. Stop touching them. Jesus, you're ruining everything. He's willing to ruin everything. Matter of fact, Jesus is willing to be ruined that you can come back to the Father.

This woman knew where to go. And so it's not erotic. It's beautiful. It's the story of the gospel. And it says that, and then he looks at the Pharisee. Because Simon, it says that when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, Jesus is a mind reader, I like this. If this man were a prophet, he would know who was touching him and what kind of woman this is, that she's a sinner.

Jesus answered. I love that. Looks up and answers his thought. He said, Simon, I have something to tell you. Tell me, teacher, he said. He didn't really want to be told, trust me. Two people owed money to a certain money lender. One owed them 500 denarii, another one 50. Neither of them had the money to pay him back. So he forgave the debts of both. Now which of these will love him more?

Simon replied, I suppose the one with the bigger debt forgiven. He says, you've judged correctly. Jesus said, then he turned towards the woman and said to Simon, do you see this woman? I came to your house. You didn't give me any water for my feet, but she came and she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn't give me a kiss, but this woman from the time I entered has not stopped kissing my feet.

You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven as her great love has shown, but whoever has forgiven little loves little. I love that. If you're not a person that forgives, you're not a person that loves according to Jesus. Forgiveness is the way to loving people more. Then Jesus said to her, your sins are forgiven.

The other guests began to say among themselves, who is this that even forgives sins? And Jesus said to the woman, your faith has saved you. Go in peace. There was this huge thing of doubt that said, I can't go to Jesus. He's a well-known teacher. You know, I'm a broken woman. I'm a sinful woman. Simon didn't need to tell anybody that was a sinful woman. She knew.

But over that doubt, she had just enough. There was something about Jesus that allowed her to jump over the doubt, to clear the hurdle of doubt, to come to his feet and say, maybe this is my last hope. And she could have been stoned for doing that. She could have been taken out, cast out of the society, but was willing to take the cost because there was nothing else left.

Her story was broken and she needed a new story. And Jesus offered him one. Her one. And he says, go. We have four stories here today. We have a story of broken dreams, of a mother who lands on her feet and begins to finally understand what was happening. We have a story of powerful transformation. Somebody that beat Jesus and ends up dying for him according to church history.

We have a traitor who didn't know where to go with his guilt and died because of it. And we have a sinful woman and a story of renewed hope. Beautiful stories and each one of them very personal and intimate, God. Now we come to this place, your story. Maybe you followed Jesus as a kid. Doesn't make sense anymore. Faith doesn't make sense anymore. But there's something calling you in your heart that says, my story isn't working.

Maybe you've followed him for a long time and things have grown cold and you need to jump back in. You want to renew that. You're here for a reason today. Like they said on Friday night, either you got dragged in or drugged in, one or the other. But however you got here, there's a window. And just like when I was 12 years old and the man said, do you want to know Jesus?

Do you want to follow him? And I don't know if that's a praying, a prayer. I don't, I mean, I'm not sure everyone in the Bible prayed a prayer. Some people just started walking behind him. He'd say, follow me. They'd say, okay. Next thing they know, you know, 40 years later they'd die for him. I guess the question is, is Jesus attractive enough to like the woman that you'll maybe today overcome that doubt and start following him?

If you bow your head and you have your own business to do with Jesus and I'll let you do it because I don't know all your stories. Just close our eyes and bow our heads and have the worship team come forward during this time. If you want a new story and you want to follow Jesus and even if you don't know what that means but you want to say to Jesus, I want to follow you, just put your hand up.

Yeah, right on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'll know if he's talking to you. You'll know. If there's a window of grace open, step through it. Anyone else? Yeah. We're on the right. Yeah. Just give you a minute to do business with Jesus. Jesus, you're a good God. You just tell him, I want to follow you more. You can just say that even if you are following him. I want to follow you more.

To some Jesus is saying, I want you to rest. Rest. Following me means resting and letting go of striving and letting it all go. Being at peace. If you said you want to follow Jesus today, there's a little card in front of you and they're in the bulletin. Fill that out and let us know. We'll get back to you. Lord Jesus, I bless those that are here today that hear these stories and each one of them is a speck and a storm.

You care about us each deeply. Lord, we love you and we praise you. In Jesus' name, Amen.