OCT 27 2024 | Job: Hearing God in the Whirlwind S1E3 | Skin for Skin

Sea Change Church · OCT 27 2024 | Job: Hearing God in the Whirlwind - S1E3: Skin for Skin
Job 2:1-10
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

And the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason. Then Satan answered the Lord and said, Skin for skin, all that a man has he will give for his life.

But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and flesh, and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, he is in your hand, only spare his life. So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes.

Then his wife said to him, Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die. But he said to her, You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this Job did not sin with his lips. This is the word of the Lord. Bibles open up to Job 2, 1 through 10. I've been in the book of Job.

So like I told you last week, we're not going to spend the whole time just looking at the suffering and the question of why. I think there's about 12,000 YouTube videos that you can just go dive deep into. I think it's important. We talked about it week one. But there's some really important structural theological things happening in the book of Job you can miss if we just want to focus on that question.

Some of them were last week in the spiritual warfare piece, and I had someone say, Hey, man, I had to listen to that sermon three times to get it. And I probably would have to re-preach it 20 times before I can go kind of the depth that I wanted to. But we talked about that. And today is another structural piece in regard to having an understanding of why you do what you do.

Now, we're going to try a little something right now. Okay, we're in La Jolla. It's kind of a weird place in regard to where we're located on the map. Everyone, at the count of three, point to where north is. One, two, three. Somebody's like this. No, yeah, exactly. Yeah, right, right. And so, actually, north is there. In La Jolla, it's weird because we kind of like all of a sudden shift the south way.

If you're a surfer, you know that, right, because we always know this is where you come when the south swells or on. What I have found is it's just as difficult sometimes to know what our true north is. Even if you were to try to find north on a map, you would need to look at some of the things that are around you to understand where north is.

Maybe it would be the moss on a tree. It would be where the sun was setting. It would be Orion. It would be some of the constellation. God has given us things in the creative environment that show us where north is. And I don't think he did that by mistake. He did it as a metaphor to show us that to have a true north in our life, we also can look at some certain things.

We can look at the word of God. You can look at the tradition of the church. There's all these different things that we can use. We can use our reason and all these things to find out. What the problem is, is even if you find your true north, which is why you do what you do, right? Not what you do, why you do what you do. It is easy to have a thing called mission drift.

Now, I'm into, I'm really into structural organizational leadership. I just, I love it. And even with loving it as much as I do, I can easily find as a church, as a leader of a church, it's very easy for me to forget why God called me into this. You get excited about perhaps doing new record label stuff or all these other, or a mission in Africa or all these things God opens up.

And all of a sudden, you find yourself somewhere on the map of your own life, and I hope this is translating to your own life, where you're somewhere other than you thought you would be, and you've maybe forgotten who you are, or why you're doing what you're doing. In this scripture, and throughout the entire 30, I believe it's 43 chapters, 38 chapters, a lot of chapters of Job, that you read, you will see that Job has a moral compass, a theological compass, a heart's understanding of who God is, and he doesn't drift from that.

I want to challenge you to read the entire book of Job in one setting before this thing is over, or listen to it. It's probably going to take you about two hours either way, depending on what speed you listen to or whatever, but just to consume the whole book at once. You'll have a completely different understanding of what is going on, because I believe it's one of the most influential books in the Bible.

And so many of you have come up to me this week, probably four to five people, and said, Job's one of my favorite books. And I was like, wow, you know, you're like the hidden Job seeker, you know what I mean? Like, we didn't know you existed, but there you are. I want to talk about this mission drift idea with something that was very special to me in the early 90s.

It's going to evoke some emotions in many of you. Starbucks, okay? If, right, if you were around in the early 90s when Starbucks first showed up, before pink drinks, right, before all the things that they did, it was awesome, okay, if you're a coffee drinker, right, it was this place. And Howard Schultz, who started the organization, had an idea that it is called the third space.

It's not your home, it's not your office, but it's a place where you can come, and it's a middle space to have community and meet and do all these things. And people loved it. They had cupping nights, they call it cupping, which is like a tasting night, where I got invited to because they knew me as a regular customer, and the manager came and said to me, hey, we're having this tasting night, would you, I'm kind of like selling myself out right now about how much coffee I drink, and we want you to come and be a part of this.

And so I showed up, and they had all these different cups out and how they blend and where the coffee comes from, and it was personal, and it was one-on-one, and it was absolutely amazing. They said things like, we will never use flavored syrups in our, we will never have a flavored like coffee. They were, it was just really at the beginning, because we're just about pure beans, we're from Seattle, we're grunge, we're hardcore, and I was into it, right?

It was awesome. And if you followed the journey of Starbucks, as you know, I remember we'd go on mission trips in the early 2000s, it'd be like, oh, there's a Starbucks in Bangkok, and like, yes, there's one, and we'd go to Thailand, and it would be a big thing for our missions group to go to the Starbucks, right? And we'd all go get a coffee, and I had all these mugs that said like Bangkok, all over the world, I was collecting them, until the point where it got so far from who they were called to be, the why of their company, that they've lost the plot.

And you can see that right now, what's happening. They're rebranding, they brought in this new person, and the whole thing. Basically, they call that mission drift. And what has happened is Starbucks has gone from being, at the time, an elite with really good coffee. I don't go there for their coffee anymore, I go there for their sugary drinks.

From an elite company that knew what they were about, okay, to becoming an energy kiosk, an energy drink kiosk. I mean, if you know Starbucks, they've completely lost it. Now they're trying to re-find their way. I give you that analogy, because that can happen to us in the busyness of life, in the chaos of life, where we forget what our why actually is, where we lose that place.

I just want to give you just something that is, I think, an important note. But success is oftentimes the fuel of mission drift. Success. Your family's going well. Your business is going well. You forget why you're doing what you're doing. Let's go back to the scripture. Job, as we're going to see here in this passage, does not forget. Let's look at the main point.

Job's response, and I should say responses. You can put an S behind there, because he had a response in the first text when he talks about God, and he says, you know, I'm naked. I came from my womb, and blessed be the name of the Lord no matter what. And then he says to his wife here, he has this answer here to his wife, where he says, should we accept good things and not bad things?

I put Job's responses show that his identity, his absolute identity, his core, was rooted in God's goodness and majesty and not Job's, and I would put personal circumstances. That Job had an anchor based in who God is, who God was, and who God will be. It was based in God's justice. There was multiple adjectives I could have used there, verbs even, that I could have used there to define the understanding that Job had that rooted him no matter what happened.

He lived in the eye of the storm. And the reason he lived in the eye of the storm is because he had an anchor for his life. He had absolute moral clarity as to the why behind everything that he did, or what you would call the what. If you don't remember the why of what you're doing, the what of what you're doing can become very displaced. And I will say that success is probably more of a poison to understanding your why, or at least causing a fuel for, I would say, you know, mission drift than difficult times.

Difficult times usually bring you back, right? They bring you back to the base core. But oftentimes as we succeed, we kind of lose that. But I wrote this, people who are not rooted in their why, their reason of their life, are easily toppled when the what of their life does not go according to plan. There's two things we're going to talk about today.

One, if you've lost a sense of it, I want you to reclaim your why. And my hope as a, hopefully a spiritual leader, is to have that why be in Jesus. Jesus is the why of everything we do. And we just went away as a, four of us from staff went away, and I just wanted to run some vision by them. And we have a new website coming out. I think it's going to be out in January.

And the first thing you're going to see on that website, it says this, making Jesus known. There's a lot of other good ones you could have used. But the purpose of our church is to make Jesus known, to reveal him to the world locally, hopefully globally, if God opens up other ways for us to do that. And I have just become convinced that the most important four things that we are to do as a church, there's a lot of other fun things we'll do and exciting things, is evangelism, baptism.

We're going to have a baptism of another high school student. High school is just blowing us away when it comes to kids getting baptized. Evangelism, yeah, let's go. Evangelism, baptism, discipleship. We have 21 people in one-on-one discipleship groups right now. We just started that. We've started that again. Evangelism, baptism, discipleship, and then sending you out to where God has called you in the midst of the why of Jesus.

It could be with us going. It could be on your own. Maybe you're a financial director. Maybe you're a nurse. I want you to know your why because that what is going to shift. We see the what shifting in Job's life. So the first one is I want to see if you can reclaim your why. Another one is I think is key because we see the character come in very, just one time here, Job's wife, and she's really discouraging to him.

Obviously, she's all, just curse God and die. Like, right? If you're going to write a bumper sticker to like really discourage people, that's a good one, right? Like if your spouse comes up to you, curse God and die. Whoa, okay. So he's got marital issues going on. We're going to see in the next chapter he's somewhat suicidal, I think. He's saying, I wish I wasn't born.

It would be better if I wasn't alive anymore. Now, he's not going to take his life, but he's in a really difficult place. And I think the second thing that comes out for me besides understanding your why from this passage, and there's a lot, was wounded hearts wound others. And the point is, even if you know your why, if you're wounded, oftentimes you can still hurt people when you understand your why because you're coming from a place of woundedness.

And we'll talk about her in just a second. Let's go to number one, reclaiming your why. I want to read verse four, if you would. We're going to look at Satan here. You're going to see a little bit about Satan again. We're going to understand him a little bit more. It's going to help you as you make decisions, as he offers you things in your life.

Then Satan answered the Lord and said, and this is one of the creepiest verses in the Bible, skin for skin. Like, I was just like, oh, what does that mean? Like, I looked it up. I kept trying to find out, what does that mean? I think I found out. But he says, skin for skin, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and then he will curse you to your face.

What I think is we find about Satan is, first of all, Satan has no context for Job's why. He has no context for someone who puts his understanding of who God is before anything that happens to him. I don't believe that Satan is a person who knows the truth and then tries to attack the truth. I don't think he has the ability to know the truth. I don't believe that Satan, I think that Satan thinks that he's going to defeat Jesus in the end.

I think he's bringing antichrist. People say he's just trying to hurt God. No, I think Satan thinks he's going to win, and I don't think he can understand the truth. And this is why the truth is so powerful, to rebut and rebuke him as he does that. But the first thing is, so he doesn't have an understanding for that. One of the most powerful things you see in this book of Job is just this anchor of a really deep, heartfelt theology.

Now, theology is great, right? But we find that his friends, we're going to get to his friends next week, when they're talking to Job, they're just all theology, right? They're just, this doesn't fit my theology, so it must be wrong, right? They don't have a context for Job who has a theology that isn't just arguments that actually affects his heart.

I love theology. I love religion, when religion is built as a framework to spend time with God and to change the world through things. Religion is just a structure for doing the things you believe in the world. I love religion and theology when it's like that. But it has to be rooted to a heart's understanding of this is who my God is. And that'll put a hedge of protection around you.

That'll give you an understanding that you can live in the eye of the storm. I think God, it says in Romans, that everything that he's created shows his divine nature and his invisible qualities. So when God creates a hurricane and there's an eye there, don't think that was by chance. There's a reason for that. And in the midst of the storms, an understanding of your why, the reason you do, because God is who he says he is, because God loves me, because I am his child, because he is magnificent, because he is omnipotent, because he is omnipresent, because he is just, because he is worthy.

The things that we sing in the worship are those things that anchor us and give us a true north that give us a why. If you've forgotten your why, your what can get really screwed up. You can start doing things for all the wrong reasons. I'm listening to a podcast right now about one of my favorite bands, and they're called New Order. And they come out of Manchester in the late 1970s.

They were actually a band called Joy Division before that became New Order. And as I'm on season two, episode nine of this podcast, and if you do listen to it, there is some salty language. So I'm not encouraging you to listen to it. It's pretty salty, though. If you're from Manchester, it's pretty salty. And at the end of it, they said, after all the success, we lost the reason for why we were doing it.

We lost the love. We got into this to be a post-punk band that was like, you know, forget the system. And before you know it, we're touring with American record labels and all these things are happening. They just lost it. They wanted so bad to go back to the place of purity, of understanding of why they got into it. Because everything that they were doing in 1989 with the Technique album had nothing to do with their post-punk roots.

They had completely lost it. Now, it's okay to shift if God is leading you in that direction. But their answer was to break up as a band at the time because they had just lost it. And maybe some of us have lost that as well. Satan has no context for that kind of understanding of a why. Why will be your anchor? So I just want to ask you, why are you doing what you're doing?

Do you remember why you're married? Do you remember why you became a nurse? Do you remember why you live in the city you live in? I know why I live here. My family lives here and I'm not moving. God's called me. I know why. Because Jesus has given me roots and I can go on and on and on. But when we forget our why, all of a sudden the what of, well, I just want a bigger house.

Oh, I want a job with more prestige. Oh, I'm being successful. Why quit? You know, I'm always impressed by those people at the top of their game. They're like, I'm retiring. I've had enough. I'm like, you know, and they just go because their why has been changed. So that's the first thing. He has no context for that. So I wanted you to rethink your why.

The second one is Satan is completely transactional. In the term, the really creepy term, skin for skin. Like, I'm not sure he said it, but I think he said it that way. I'll creep you like that, right? He is showing that he's basically, what that term means is you've given him health and because you've given him health, he's going to bless you.

But you take away his health. He won't bless you. He will curse you to your face because Satan is transactional. Everything he offers you comes at a price. It's opposite of the gospel. Jesus Christ died on the cross at no cost to you to give you the free gift of grace that we might be saved and be reconciled through the atonement of Jesus' blood on the cross for free.

He offered us all these things for free, but Satan is transactional and Satan doesn't understand anything that doesn't have a bargain attached to it. One of the most popular country songs to cross over, as long as we're in the music genre right now, in the 1980s was, The Devil Went Down to Georgia. He might still be there. Looking for a deal. I won't unpack that one for you.

You know, looking for a soul to steal. He was in a bind. He was way behind and he was willing to make a deal, right? That was Charlie Daniels' band. He wants to make a deal with you. He wants to trade you your integrity for what he will call happiness. He wants to trade your peace for what he would call success. And when you are grounded in your why, that I don't need to chase success because I have success because the king of the universe knows my name and he calls me his son, he calls me his beloved daughter, that I don't need to chase those things because I am rooted in my why.

Now, if you're rooted in your why, you can go do those things, but it's not transactional. It's transformative. Jesus is here to transform you. That's one of the biggest things that I see in regard to that passage in verse 4. Next thing I want to look at is this wounded hearts wound others because I do believe that if we are walking in brokenness, and you can be in Jesus and the whole, you know, be reading your verses and praying.

I've met a lot of godly people. They're very godly. Who wound people on a regular basis because they don't have a context to understand how to help people for the right reasons, perhaps. Maybe they're codependent of these different things. And we see that Job's wife obviously is suffering through a big wound here. Her children have just died, right?

They all, 10 of her children, dead at once. And so if you go to verse 9, let's jump into verse 9 and look at this woundedness because she's coming from a place of woundedness. Then his wife said to him, do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die. But he said to her, you speak like one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?

He didn't say from God, but evil is received. In all of this, Job did not sin with his lips. The first thing we see is this question. I think that one of the most powerful tools Satan has is the question. Adam and Eve, questions. The temptation of Jesus, questions. Talking to God early in this passage, questions. Questions that perhaps could be answered in Scripture and quickly answered.

Look at how quickly Jesus in the temptation just answers because he knows his Scripture. And while there wouldn't have been Scripture in Job's time, there was an oral tradition that came back maybe from Enoch and some of the others that are mentioned earlier in the text where he understood godliness. It says Enoch was a man who walked with God.

Enoch did have some texts that we know of. We won't go too much more into that. But he began to answer out of this place of understanding. And he answered it quickly. I think that Satan is regularly going up to believers and saying, you know, should you do this? Should you know that? And he just asked questions that put people off on these two-week spinners or three-year spinners of trying to decide some of the questions that you were dealing with.

And I think this is true for Christians because this is a ploy of Satan. He will do this to every question. Some of the questions that maybe you have been considering for a long time or are not bearing fruit in your life are from the devil, right? Some of them are from the devil. Now, I believe that we need to look at questions if something comes up to your mind.

But sometimes we get stuck on these questions. Why did this happen? You see people that have maybe had something, you know, tragic in their life and it's 30 years later and they're still on a question that is actually not bringing fruit to their life. It's actually destroying their mental health. It's destroying their emotional health. And it's shipwrecking sometimes their faith in God because Satan just comes up and keeps asking questions that I think on occasion need to be answered with Scripture.

And so be very careful of the questions that you let circulate around your mind. I'm not saying abandon them. I'm not saying minimize important questions. Look at them. But at a certain point you will know if a question is from God or from the enemy because the question will bear fruit. When God asks questions in the Scripture, so oftentimes it bears fruit.

And so we see right here that that's the first thing. Now go to verse 10. But he said to her, you speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God and not receive the evil? In all this he did not sin with his lips. First, I think Job's wife does a few things. One, I do want to be understanding that she's lost 10 of her children.

Okay? She's in a very difficult place. But when she speaks to Job, it isn't that she only offers unsolicited advice. And I'd be very careful offering people unsolicited advice. I'm trying really hard not to do that, especially my wife. That's probably my key training ground. But she doesn't just offer unsolicited advice. She offers her unsolicited pain.

She is a walking wound at this point. And she is spewing out her woundedness. Sometimes God spoke to me about a bunch of things that happened in Africa. I haven't shared them with you yet. Because I need to let the dust settle. I used to get something. I'd just immediately start processing it. And then a month later, people would think that's what I thought.

And I no longer think that anymore. Right? And so I'm praying over these things. It's going to be weeks, months. And I'll see if they continue to grow a seed that has roots before I share with the congregation what I feel God is telling me. Or else you're just whipsawed back and forth upon what's happening in the moment. In the life of Job's wife, she spoke before she was healed.

Now God probably healed her. I know Job's a powerful man praying. I don't know. It doesn't tell anymore about her story. But she speaks out of her woundedness. I want to say few things will break the structure of your why. Even if you know why, then your woundedness. Your woundedness means that sometimes there has been something that has, there's been a trauma in your life.

And we have a thing and we do a thing here called men's skills and women's skills. I want to challenge everybody to be a part of that. We need to continue to grow. And they have a thing called little T trauma, big T trauma. And as I'm going through it right now with a group of men in this and just trying to make myself vulnerable to that. And I'm realizing that I have little T traumas and big T traumas that are unresolved.

That I could easily just say, hey, I know the word of God. I believe in prayer. I believe in faith. And minimize that I need to look at something and see it actually be healed. She offers her unsolicited pain. I put in your notes, Job's wife speaks from her wounds and not her wisdom. From her pain and not her peace. From her brokenness and not her belief.

We want to be a healthy church. One of the words the Lord has given me is resiliency. Resilient minds, resilient emotions, resilient hearts. To create a place where the enemy struggles to control us with depression. Struggles to control us. Not that we're not going to struggle and we're going to go through seasons. I get that. But where it becomes more difficult.

You get stronger and stronger. And you go from being in the storm to getting closer to the eye of the storm. You know the speed of the storm as you get closer to the center gets slower and slower. If you just know anything about physics, the outside of something being whipped around is going to be faster than the inside. Which is strange even though it's going more territory at the same time.

As we get closer, it is going to make us closer to peace. And understand this healing that needs to happen. Here's two practical takeaways that I think are key for today. And I think this is a very practical sermon. The first is, I want to encourage you to sit. We're moving into this fall season. Get a pad of paper. Maybe you're a drawer. I don't know how you do it.

And ruthlessly edit everything in your life that does not correspond to your essential why. Maybe it's just the way you're doing it. The things you're doing. Get back to reclaiming your why. I'll ask you again. Why are you doing the job you're doing? If you know the why of what you're doing. Let's say the why is your why. Your key why is to impact people for the name of Jesus.

That's your why. Okay. Or one of your multiple whys. Maybe there's a cache of whys that you have. But the key why is that you are here to impact people in the name of Jesus. And you want to be a singer. But instead of a singer, you're working. You know, you're doing something else that you don't want to be doing. If you know that why, it doesn't matter if you're the president or a plumber.

Because you can live according to that why. That is one of the reasons as a church, I try not to set goals for our church. One, I find that it's a ceiling. So a lot of people think goals are like, hey, that's a thing I've got to reach for. I've always found them to be a ceiling. I want to live. You know, you get there and then I kind of chill. It's like, oh, we hit our goal.

Good. I can take the next four months off. I have found that we live according to our values. Because I've seen, I've been in the church world especially, especially in the worship world. I was in the worship media world. And so we're trying to do what we're doing a little different than the things I've seen in the past. I have seen spiritual organizations, godly organizations accomplish all of their goals while violating all their values.

You look at the numbers. You look at the charts. You look at the things that are happening. And there's a body count out the back door. If you get to heaven and you never accomplish any of your goals, your song never gets sung. Your dance never gets danced. Your book never gets written or read. Maybe it's written. A lot of us have written books. There's no one read them.

And God says to you, you never accomplish those things, but you lived your values. He will say, well done, good and faithful servant. But the scripture says all those things that we don't do for the right why, it says they will burn up on earth. The scripture actually says it will be burned up and we will escape into heaven as if going through the fire.

I would say my interpretation is smelling like smoke. That's the first one. I want you to look at our why. We need to know why we're doing what we're doing. Get back to Jesus as close as you can get to because Jesus loves me, Jesus saved me, something like that. And then imbibe everything that you have with that why. That's going to change your life, guys.

It's going to change your marriage. It's going to change everything that you do. And it's going to bring up peace that transcends all understanding that isn't based on if you're team one or not. The last one is this. Never stop healing. Never stop growing. It is very easy to get to a place, especially if you're respected and whatever, where we just get stuck.

We are going to grow for eternity. No matter how far you've come on the growth curve, you've got a long way to go. Every so often, have seasons in your life where you're saying, I'm going to look at this. I am going to do something like a men's skills or I'm going to go back to my 12-step or I'm going to go read a book or I'm going to listen to this whole podcast series on healing traumas.

I don't know. Let it be in God. Everything doesn't have to be written by a Christian to be valuable. There are some things. Get healed because your woundedness will attack your why. Your woundedness will attack your why. I've got a video we're going to show real quick. It's really powerful. I saw it on the internet. I don't know the comedian, so I don't know his life.

It was recommended to somebody for me, so I'm not giving a, I don't really know the man as much. But what I saw deeply impacted me for this sermon, and I wanted you to see it. You might know him. I guess he's pretty well known on YouTube. But I think it really talks and shows in a dramatic way what it means like when you know your why and it's different than your what.

Check this out. And I'm just talking to this guy in the audience, and he tells me that he's a musical instructor at a school. So I was like, all right, you're a musical instructor. You know, can you sing? Let me hear you sing a song. So this is what happened at the last episode of Michael Jr.'s Break Time. Check it. So you're a musical director. Yes, sir.

All right, so let me get a couple bars of like Amazing Grace. Can you do the first part of that? Go ahead. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Wow. That bro can sing. You know what I'm saying? All right, all right. Now, once you give me the version as if your uncle just got out of jail, you got shot in the back when you was a kid.

I'm just saying, let me see the hood version real quick. You know which version I'm talking about. Just see if that exists. Let me see what you got. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost. I once was lost. I was lost. But now, right now I'm found. But now, I'm found. I see. Now, come on. Now, come on. Come on. Come on.

Come on. Come on. Come on. Okay. Um. Here's what I want you to catch. The first time I asked him to sing, he knew what he was doing. The second time, he knew why he was doing it. I couldn't say it any better than that, right? I had to show you a two-minute and 40-second video. That's a long video, Adam. Yeah, it gets the point across, right? Some of us are singing that what version, man.

I was very tempted this summer with a bunch of what's, and I got to Africa, and I thought, why am I here? And I've gotten back to why. I filtered it out like that coffee, right, from start. I filtered it out. I filtered it out. I just got it pure. Back to this. Jesus loves me deeply. I love people. I really love people. I want to see people know Jesus and the kingdom of God expanded throughout La Jolla, San Diego, primarily, the United States, and the rest of the world, and that's what I'm about, and that's what I want to be about.

And the rest of this stuff, yeah. That's what I want this church about, and I want us to be a church that lives off the why, right? If your why doesn't correspond to your what, it's time to spend some time with the Lord, amen? Let's stand if you would. I'm going to have the prayer team come forward, and Chris is going to continue to play in the background.

If you need prayer today, please come forward. If you don't know Jesus Christ, and you want to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, we want to pray with you that you will spend eternity with God, but more than that, that you would know God because he knows you. You will know right now in your heart if God is calling your name. Come forward. Our prayer team will pray for you.

They will lead you to Jesus. We will see you baptized, and get on purpose, get discipled, and just go with God. Amen? And the rest of you, if you need prayer, you need prayer. Prayer is powerful. Use our prayer team. Put your prayers in the back. If you extend your hands, I'm going to play a blessing over you. And Chris, you can just start leading, and I just want to pray a blessing.

Lord God, I just want to bless your people, Jesus, as you bring us back to your why, the simplistic why, the essence of who we are. Some of us have drifted, Jesus. We've drifted. We're having just thoughts right now of a little kid in Sunday school. We've come a long way from there, and you've done a lot of great things, but we're no longer at the essence of that little kid from Sunday school, or maybe it was when you were 20, or whatever it was, or what your family really means and what your family is about, as opposed to what your family is doing.

And it's become about scholarships, and soccer, and getting coaches reviews, or whatever that thing is, or your business. No longer your business isn't changing lives. It's filling pockets, maybe, but it's not changing lives. Or you've just gotten burned out in the hospital and forgotten why you're beside people's bedsides. Jesus wants to change that why, because you will sing a different song.

And so I bless you for those that would step into it this week to find a clarity that the Holy Spirit would counsel you of why you are doing what you're doing. I bless you with why, and that why is Jesus Christ. And I send you out now to go make a change in the world. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. If you want prayer, please come forward.

Bless you guys. We'll see you. I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one, I have a good one