I fall with the water's dawn, with the solid ground,
Run through the beaches, drown and storm.
When light from the Lord once danced the beach,
When thieves are still, but shining scenes,
When clouds don't turn, night all in all,
Here in the love of Christ our Spare.
In Christ alone, who took on flesh,
The most of God in hell despair,
These gifts of love and righteousness,
Sparks of the ones He came to save,
Till on that cross, as Jesus died,
The breath of God was satisfied,
For every sin on Him was made,
Here in the death of Christ our name.
And hither up His body lay,
Light of the world, by darkness slain,
In grousing waters, in glorious day,
Up from the quick He rose again.
I will call upon the Lord,
Who is worthy to be praised,
I shall not be stashed,
For my love is deep, from my enemies,
I will call upon the Lord.
The Lord living, and blessed be the rock,
And let the God of my salvation be exalted.
The Lord living, and blessed be the rock,
And let the God of my salvation be exalted.
I will call upon the Lord,
Who is worthy to be praised,
I shall not be stashed,
For my love is deep, from my enemies,
I will call upon the Lord.
The Lord living, and blessed be the rock,
And let the God of my salvation be exalted.
The Lord living, and blessed be the rock,
And let the God of my salvation be exalted.
The last of all my soul,
Oh my soul,
Worship His holy name.
Sing like never before,
Oh my soul,
I worship your holy name.
The sun comes up,
It's a new day dawning,
It's time to sing our song again,
Whatever may pass,
And whatever lies before me,
Let me be singing when the evening comes.
The best of all my soul,
Oh my soul,
Worship His holy name.
Sing like never before,
Oh my soul,
I worship your holy name.
You're rich in love,
And you're strong to anger,
Your name is sweet,
And your heart is kind,
For all your goodness I will keep on singing,
Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find.
The best of all my soul,
Oh my soul,
Worship His holy name.
Sing like never before,
Oh my soul,
I worship your holy name.
And on that day,
When my strength is failing,
I will keep on singing when the evening comes.
Enjoy!
I have fallen to my knees,
As I sing a lullaby of pain.
I'm feeling broken,
In my melody.
As I sing to help the tears go away,
Then I remember the pledge you made to me.
I know you're always there,
To hear my every prayer inside,
I'm pleading to the promise of a lifetime.
I hear the words you say,
To never walk away from me,
And to leave behind the promise of a lifetime.
Will you help me fall apart?
Pick me up and take me in your arms,
I'll find my way back from the storm,
As you show me I'll grow through the change.
I still remember the pledge you made to me,
I know you're always there,
To hear my every prayer inside,
I'm pleading to the promise of a lifetime.
I hear the words you say,
To never walk away from me,
And to leave behind the promise of a lifetime.
I am holding on to the hope,
I have it inside.
With you I will say,
Through every day,
Putting my understanding aside.
And I am confident,
To know you're always there,
To hear my every prayer inside,
I'm pleading to the promise of a lifetime.
I hear the words you say,
To never walk away from me,
And to leave behind the promise of a lifetime.
I know you're always there,
To hear my every prayer inside,
I'm pleading to the promise of a lifetime.
Looking back at me,
I know that you can see my heart,
It's open to the promise of a lifetime.
When I was younger, much younger,
about nine or so, a little older than Ariana,
about Zayden's age,
my parents took my brother and I on a vacation.
Our vacation started by going south down 75,
and we stopped at a variety of places.
We went to Gatlingburg, Tennessee.
It wasn't the first time that we'd been there, visited there.
It was a beautiful town.
It's been reconstructed now because they had a bad fire,
but it's still a beautiful town.
And it's right in the Smoky Mountains.
They call them Smoky Mountains because they're hazy and gray
when you look at them from a distance.
And from there we went down into Georgia and then west,
kind of along the Gulf of Mexico.
We stopped and saw the Gulf of Mexico once,
and then kind of north and west through Kansas and so on,
and into the northern part of Texas.
While we were in like Wyoming or something,
it came time that our long vacation was going to come to an end.
As we traveled, we traveled in the back of a pickup truck.
My dad and my mom would ride in the front.
My brother and I would ride in the back,
and they had built a kind of a bunk, a two-person bunk,
across the top where the cap was,
and we had carpeting on the bottom,
and we rode back there all the time, no seatbelts.
There were no such things as airbags.
In fact, I'm not even sure if that truck had seatbelts
for the people riding in the front of it.
This was back in the day.
And it came time for my dad to go back to work,
and we were pretty far away,
and they really didn't want to go back to work,
and so he called up his boss and he says,
hey, can I take two more weeks of my vacation?
And if he took two more weeks of his vacation,
they would do what's called shutdown.
He worked in the Dana plant, and they would shutdown,
and he would get not just the two more weeks of vacation,
but he would miss shutdown,
and then they would be shutdown for another two weeks after that.
So you have a whole other month off.
And so in the end, we traveled for six weeks,
all the way, a big loop around.
We went through Yellowstone National Park,
saw Old Faithful, and I got down on my knee
and fed chipmunks little bits of grain out of my hand
outside Old Faithful.
Old Faithful is the geyser that erupts at the same time
they can predict it when it erupts,
and it can predict water and steam up in the air.
It was a crazy vacation.
And I saw amazing things.
Ben Franklin said, be careful about traveling.
He said, in fact, if you can avoid it, don't ever do it,
because everywhere you ever go will always look better than home.
And I had that experience growing up
because my parents took us on trips and so on.
We saw a lot of things. I was not a Christian.
And so I remember thinking, man, I want to live in Gatlinburg
when I grow up, and then going to Texas.
I want to live in Texas when I grow up.
I want to live in Wyoming when I grow up.
And thinking all these places that I had seen,
I wanted to live there because they were all so much better.
On another trip later, I was sitting in a restaurant,
Pizza Hut of all things, with my dad in Gatlinburg.
And I told him I wanted to live in Gatlinburg when I grew up.
And he said, well, here's something you need to be aware of, son.
And I said, what's that?
And he said, when you visit a place
and you see all the cool things, you realize if you live there,
that's not the reality of what there is like.
And he said, well, you're going to be eating here.
You're going to be working in this pizza.
You're eating here. You brought the money.
You're buying the pizza. You're eating here and enjoying the pizza.
You're going to go walk the trails and ride the horses
and the things that you can do in Gatlinburg.
He said, but if you were living here, you'd be making the pizzas.
Or you'd be fixing the cars.
Or you'd be living your normal everyday life.
It's not like it is for a vacation.
And I took that to heart, but I always kind of just,
every trip we ever took, I said, well, I think I would like to live there.
It would be really cool to live there.
It's pretty or it's dry. Phoenix is dry.
And Smokey Mountains are big and kind of green and blue and wet and cool
most of the year and things like that.
Then I got saved.
And I began to think about how one day I'm going to pass away.
I'm going to go somewhere else.
And I don't know. I've never visited heaven.
I don't know exactly what that's like.
But I can tell you that now when I travel
and I experience something that's really cool
and God shows me something or God speaks to me,
it's all really about where I'm going to go then.
And then when I'm here and things go wrong,
like there's lies or treachery or somebody cusses me out,
or somebody steals from me or things like that,
I remember those are reminders that going there then
is going to be something amazing.
This is not our home.
And as I was thinking about this this week,
I realized that a lot of times as things are going on,
we kind of get fascinated by the things of this life
and we forget some of the most basic and important concepts of Christianity.
It is wonderful to be able to visit the Smoky Mountains.
It is beautiful to be able to go out and see the huge canyons of the southwest.
But God is the God that made all of that.
And He made your spouse. He made your friends.
He made your kids. He made your job.
He made your talents. He made your hobbies.
He made everything that we do here that's any good.
And if we start thinking that something of this life is good
and kind of worshiping it or thinking how good it is,
we miss out on some key things.
And so the sermon that we're going to have today,
some of it will seem like, yeah, I kind of already knew that.
And it's okay.
But we're going to talk a little bit about how to put it into practice
and make sure, check ourselves by Scripture,
that we are indeed putting into practice these few things for this coming year.
This could be the year that God does so many amazing things.
And could we say that about 2024?
Because God did so many amazing things in 2024.
But that year has passed.
Could we say it about 2020?
Because God did so many amazing things in 2020,
even though everybody was griping about 2020 and the COVID pandemic and everything.
But God did so many amazing things in 2020.
And we could say it about every year past.
But we don't have those years to make any decisions about or how we're going to live.
We have this year. We have 2025.
So as we look at the sermon today, if you go, yeah, I kind of already knew that.
You're just saying it in different words.
I want you to check yourself and make sure if you already knew that,
are you already doing what lines up with that?
That's what the sermon is about.
So the first of those things is a concept, is a doctrinal concept called eminence and imminence.
Okay?
Eminence means something is big, overarching, far away,
not right here right now, but maybe in control.
God is like that. God is holy and perfect.
We'll talk a little bit about that out through Scripture in one second.
Imminence is when something is near to you and affecting you right now.
So when you go to work and they say in a month or two months,
we may have layoffs or the schedule is going to change.
You have to work a lot more hours or you think, well, my birthday is a couple months away
and we're going to go do this special for my birthday.
That's eminence. It's far away.
You kind of got to react to it.
You want to be prepared for it, right?
Like if you're going to spend 500 bucks to go on a trip at your birthday time,
you got to get that money together.
Otherwise, you're going to be debt financing it, right?
If that's even possible. So that's eminence.
You got to kind of prepare for it.
But the truth is it really isn't here.
And then there's eminence. It's right here right now.
You go to work and they say the plant is closing.
You have no job as of tomorrow.
Or they say your wife says to you, look, you said this and I'm really upset with you.
Or your friend won't talk to you anymore because of something you did you didn't even mean to do.
That's eminence. You've got to deal with it right now.
There's a difference between eminence and eminence.
Listen to what Isaiah wrote.
This is chapter 55. You can go there in your Bibles if you want.
It's Isaiah 55 beginning in verse 6.
Praise the Lord.
And this is what Isaiah wrote.
Really he spoke it and then it was recorded.
Almost everything in that book you'll see he was speaking out loud to everyone else.
But there are some kind of like in prose but not so much.
So Isaiah said this. He said, seek the Lord while he may be found.
Call upon him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way.
In other words, that's the thing that you do that you continually do
that God would not want you to do.
And you keep doing them anyway. Stop it!
Let the wicked forsake his way.
And the unrighteous man his thoughts.
And let him return to the Lord.
Stop doing those things and instead repent.
Return to God and he will have compassion on him.
And to our God for he will abundantly pardon.
So here is the Gospel in the Old Testament.
The Gospel as written by Isaiah.
If you will repent and turn to God.
God will have compassion on you.
And he will pardon you for the things that you've done.
Even wickedness which is the things that you did repeatedly knowing you should not do them.
So if you'll just turn from that way of living and turn to God's way.
He will have forgiveness and compassion awaiting you.
Why? Because he already knew what Jesus was going to do.
Everybody that ever got saved a hundred years, a thousand years, five thousand years before Jesus was born.
Got saved through Jesus.
They just didn't know it was Jesus.
They just knew there was a way that God was going to make to have compassion on them.
We're now in verse eight.
He says this.
He says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts.
Nor are your ways my ways declares the Lord.
In other words, God is eminent.
You can try to think like God.
You can hone your skills a lot of ways through spiritual disciplines.
And try to think like God.
But you'll never be God.
And the truth is no matter all you would want to do.
You would build a ladder.
Climb a tree house and stack another one on top.
Go to the top of the very highest skyscraper in the world.
And then from there take a rocket ship up as high as you'll never get to God.
No matter what works or things that you do.
Because God's eminence, his thoughts, the way he thinks, the way he acts, the things he does.
Why God hung the stars in the sky the way he did is beyond us.
Why God wrote in DNA in every cell of every living organism exactly how to replicate.
Why he chose to do it that way.
That is beyond us.
For my thoughts, he says, are not your thoughts.
Nor are your ways my ways.
But notice back at the beginning in verse 6 that we read.
Call upon him while he is near.
That's eminence.
Near.
He's right here right now.
God is omnipresent.
Which means he is everywhere that he wants to be.
So he is far away, it says.
And also nearby.
A little further.
Verse 9 says.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways.
That's eminence.
He is far away.
And my thoughts, then your thoughts.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there without watering the earth,
and making it bare and sprout.
Bare means to grow up things and sprout means to start a new plant.
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater.
Verse 11.
So will my word be which goes forth from my mouth.
It will not return to me empty without accomplishing what I desire.
And without succeeding in the matter in which I sent it.
And so here it is that God is both eminent and imminent.
And the crossover point at which we can understand God's eminence and imminence is what?
It is his word.
It is the teaching that comes out of his mouth.
So for us that is easily the Bible.
And in the Bible you can see a pattern, a pointed to way that God speaks.
The way that God thinks and acts.
And we can learn something about that eminence.
Something about that far away-ness of God.
When I say God is holy and he is just, and I think about what that means for me and the things that I have done wrong,
that's a problem.
The truth is if God would just simply judge me for the sins that I have committed in my life,
I would rot or rather burn in hell for an eternity.
That is a simple fact.
And a person can deny that for their whole life and still wind up there for their whole eternity.
Because it's a fact.
You can deny that gravity will pull you to the earth when you jump off of a small hill in your yard or off of a tree a six foot drop.
But if you deny that gravity will pull you to the earth when you jump off a skyscraper,
you're not going to catch yourself.
You're not going to bounce.
You're not going to have time to go, oh wait, I think I screwed up here.
Gravity did pull me down.
Down I go.
And if you deny gravity, it still exists and the same is true with heaven and hell.
And so if you deny hell your whole life, you'll still wind up there for an eternity.
When I think about God's holiness and his justice, that is what God must do.
In God's eminence, in his faraway nature, because he is so different from us,
we've had a couple of conversations over the last two weeks about culture in my family with Ariana,
because she's running afoul of different cultures of the students in her school.
And they treat her badly in her own mind.
She's being persecuted by people that she would be perfectly friendly to
because her culture is Christian and theirs is definitely not.
And for other reasons as well.
And she's getting upset.
She's like, I'm having a hard time not being mad at them.
I have three, four, five times they persecute me.
I have a hard time not being mad at what happens and what they're doing and so on.
And so we've had a lot of conversations about culture.
And the truth is, if you move from here to, I don't know, Turkey or Japan, you get there.
They live a completely different way.
Their culture is completely different.
Do you know that in the United States of America, you live in a food desert
if you can't walk a mile to a grocery store to buy food at a reasonable price?
Walk a mile.
Now, let's be really realistic.
In this room, how many of us have walked a mile to the grocery store in the last year?
I see two, three, four, five.
That's a long way.
So the rest of us are going like, why would you walk a mile to the grocery store?
Now, those of you who raised your hands, you had your reasons.
It's part of your culture maybe.
You're going like, well, I'm exercising.
I need to do that because I don't got a car.
I don't got nobody to take me.
You have reasons.
The rest of us are going to walk a mile to the grocery store.
See, that's an aspect of culture.
And if I would stand up here as a preacher and say, well, the Lord says no one should ever walk a mile to the grocery store,
then all of those of you walking by the grocery store, you'd be wrestling with them.
You'd be like, how can you say that?
That doesn't make any sense.
See, the gospel is not culturally oriented.
The gospel does not change culture inherently unless the culture contains sin.
So now, for example, if you live from a murder culture, let's say you were back, back with Hillbilly from Iowa or something,
then some small town where nobody's been forever and there were 30 or 40 of you there,
you developed a murder culture, which is completely illegal in the U.S.
I understand that.
But you developed this culture that if you kill somebody, you get to keep everything that they have.
Then you come to Toledo.
You try to practice your culture.
You're going to wind up picked up by the cops or whatever.
You might even murder a few police officers, et cetera.
And pretty soon you're going to realize your culture is not accepted here.
If you get to heaven and you go to heaven, you say, I'm going to live the way I lived on earth,
your culture is not going to be accepted there.
God's eminence is that he is holy and just and completely different.
His thoughts and his ways are above us.
Yet his eminence is with us and in us in the person Jesus Christ and in his Holy Spirit
who comes and takes up residence in us when we are saved.
This is the problem with going on in sin and doing things wrong after you become saved
and wickedly doing the thing over and over again that you know that God doesn't want you to do
because the Holy Spirit is now with you.
So you're literally dragging the Holy Spirit of God through that experience
where you're doing something you should not do.
So we've had a couple of conversations recently about culture in our family
and what we're realizing is we don't have to change somebody else's culture.
The Kingdom of God has its own culture and if anything we should be changing our culture
or letting God change our culture to match the culture of the Kingdom of God.
We should be becoming more like Jesus doing the things that we see God doing.
And God says, his word will not come back.
Boy, Jesus is the living word of God and here is the written word of God
and neither one of these things properly addressed will fail to affect you.
But if you don't read your Bible you're not going to be affected by your Bible.
Not even the verses that you memorized years ago when they talked you into it by offering a piece of candy.
That's not going to affect you because you're not going to think about them.
You're not going to focus on what God wants to change in you.
You're just going to focus on the things that are right in front of you.
Everybody's going to deal with the problems that they have today.
Who said what to me? What bill do I have to pay? And so on.
And that is a culture but it is a culture of this world.
The eminence of God reminds us we will eventually come into his presence
and when we do something had better be right.
Or you'll be judged and spend eternity away from him.
The eminence of God reminds us that he is right here with us now
doing all the things that we are doing whether he likes it or not.
You understand? You feel like God kind of pulls back from you.
You feel like sometimes you can't hear his voice.
Maybe it's because you're doing things that essentially would chase him away.
Now he's not going to let you go. He's not actually going to leave.
He's both eminent, far away, and also eminent with you.
And if you are following the Lord, he's never going to leave you nor forsake you.
So say if Jesus in the book of Matthew, but that is attached to doing the things that God is doing.
And so you're going to feel like God is not present when you're doing the things that God would never do.
Eminence and eminence of God.
And as we take that into 2025, we need to realize when you go home, God goes with you.
It doesn't matter whether you address what I said here today or not.
And you can take as much as you can of what God is saying through me
or what you're getting out of the scripture or whatever in this room
and put it to work in your life.
And then in a week or three weeks, if you forget it, and you forget that God is both eminent and eminent,
then you'll find yourself tempted, distracted, walking into doing things that you know God would never do.
And so doing, you're basically fist palming, slapping God in the forehead saying,
God, I don't need you imminently, I only need you eminently.
I only need a God who created everything, gives everything, saves souls for anybody who comes to Him freely.
That's the God I need. I don't need a God that's right here.
But did we not see that God is both there and here at the same time?
God is a God who is eminent and eminent.
Paul said this in Acts 17 before the era of Areopagus.
He said, Man of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.
So listen, you're here in church today. You wanted to be here.
I hope you came because you wanted to be here. You worshiped God.
I hope you came and worshiped God.
If you went through what we just went through and worshiped as a body
and you couldn't bring yourself to worship, then probably there is a heart condition.
Because I totally forgot y'all were in the room for a few minutes while I was worshiping.
And I was with the Lord here in the front row.
By the way, if you're having trouble doing that, move to the front row.
If you're thinking about the people sitting next to you, your spouse, your friend, whatever, your phone,
put your phone away, leave your phone on the back row and then come to the front row.
Because then all you can see is the people who are singing.
And you don't want to focus on them because you know that they don't want you to worship them.
They are just trying to lead you to worship God.
So then all you have left to focus on is God.
And so if you could go through what we just went through and not worship the Lord, oh my goodness,
you are religious in all respects. Good for you. Praise God for that.
But this is what Paul says in verse 23.
For while I was passing through the examining and examining the objects of your worship,
in other words your chairs, your instruments, you know, they had statues and idols and all these things,
he said, I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God.
Now is there a problem with that?
If you're in this room and you've not become a Christian, not become a follower of the Lord,
that's not a problem that you don't know God.
It's not a problem. Actually, it's the only thing you have going for you right now in this moment.
If you're here and you've not actually accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior,
what you have going for you is that you realize that God is eminent and you want Him.
You're trying to figure out what that looks like to be eminent with Him, to be present.
So you're looking for God, you're searching for God. That's good.
In fact, Paul's about to say that if you do that, God will do something in return.
So he saw them with an altar, that means an object of worship toward an unknown God,
and it says, therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you,
the God who made the world and all things in it, that's an eminent God.
Since He is Lord of heaven and earth, that's an eminent God.
Does not dwell in temples made with hands, that's an eminent God.
Nor is He served by human hands, He's too eminent for that.
As though He needed anything.
Since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things, that's all God's amazing eminence.
And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,
and having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,
that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him,
though He is not far from each one of us. That's an eminent God.
If God seems far away from you, if you're worshiping a God that you don't know today,
you start at Jesus, accept Jesus as Lord, and God will make Himself obvious to you.
He will be eminent, He will be with you.
Verse 28, For in Him we live and move and exist, that's an eminent God.
As even some of your own poets have said, for we also are His children.
We have the right to call ourselves the children of God because Jesus Christ died to bring us into the family.
29 says, being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone,
an image formed by the art and thought of man. What are people doing when they think money is God?
What are people doing when they try to make little gold statues and worship that,
or set up an altar in the front of the room that's got 40 different things and glowing candles and gold and silver and what costs $30,000?
What are they trying to do? They're trying to bring God to eminence.
They're trying to bring God down to something that they control, something that they handle,
something they can contact when they want to.
In light of the fact that the funeral is upcoming, nobody in my family had a phone number for my aunt and my uncle,
who were my dad's brother and sister. Can you imagine?
They were eminent. Everybody knew that they were out there.
We're like, we've got to contact my aunt and my uncle about my dad dying. We've got to do that.
And so we reached out to somebody, happens to be my uncle's ex-wife, and asked her, do you have a number?
She said, no, he's out there, but I don't have a number for him.
But my kids, the kids that she had with him, they have his number.
She reached out to them. They gave her his number. She gave me his number.
I gave my brother and my mom his number.
You see, what we did was, my uncle was eminent. He was out there and we knew that. He was far away.
And we brought him eminent by going through somebody who eminently knew him.
That's what you could do right now in this place.
You could go through somebody who eminently knows God, and you might be thinking, I'm talking about me, but I'm not.
I do eminently know him, but my eminent relationship with him is colored by my culture, by who I am, the way I think, the way I act, the way I have been, the fact of what I have seen and what I have not seen.
But the eminence of Jesus, now Jesus can bring you to God.
You don't need me for that. You need Jesus.
You don't need anybody else in this room, not your parent or somebody else, your youth leader or your teacher from class.
You need Jesus. Jesus came. He is God in the flesh, was God in the flesh, and now is God eminent.
He is Immanuel, God with us. That means God eminent.
Being then the children of God, we ought not to live, not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, see God knew that people didn't know previously.
He overlooked it. God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent.
Basically, he's saying, yes, I have been an eminent God, but now I am an imminent God and I will be from now on.
So turn to me or else. That's it. There is no other way. You turn to me now.
Now I have killed my own son by the hands of sinful men.
And if I have done that for you, you had better turn to me now or there is no alternative.
And this because he has fixed the day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead.
God is eminent and imminent and he's proved it. And if you will dismiss him after that, you've got a problem, a problem that will last you for an eternity.
I told you I traveled. Never got to the Grand Canyon. We were actually in Arizona once as a kid. We went through there, but we never went to the Grand Canyon.
So I always kind of wanted to see it. So we took the girls and Aaron and I can't remember Arden. Yeah, I think Arden too.
We took all of them and we went in a van and we went south and we stopped in Tennessee and we went across Kansas and whatever.
We were heading to the Grand Canyon. It's further than it looks on a map. I mean I know you know it's far away, but it's far away. It took us a long time and we didn't get there.
Instead we went to Moab, Utah, which is kind of like the northern eastern. It's sort of like in the chain of the Grand Canyon.
And there, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, which was not the Grand Canyon, it was grand to us. It was Golden Arches Park standing there, a thing they call like high point.
I could look and see the edge of the canyon on the other side. How many miles away it was? Let me take a guess. Just give me a number.
How many miles away do you think the canyon edge on the other side was? He says five. He says ten. No, it wasn't a thousand. That's a big number.
225 miles. And most people will never see that distance ever in their life. You cannot see that distance normally.
Standing on the ground out here where we are and looking at the horizon, that is three miles away.
The curvature of the earth curves away. You cannot see further. Now if there's something tall just beyond it, like a tall building or a mountain, you can see that much further.
But just looking at the ground, it's roughly three miles away in this part of the world. Different parts of the world are different.
But there, standing at the edge, it was not because the curvature of the earth was different. It was because there was nothing in between.
The ground went down and away thousands of feet. And then you're looking across that and you can see. I took a picture with my cell phone. And guess what it saw?
Nothing. The cell phone couldn't take a picture. There was not enough light coming to the cell phone to take a picture of the ground that far away.
I could take a picture of the canyon below me, but it couldn't take a picture of the ground over there.
God is too mighty to be captured in pictures on your cell phone. God is too mighty to be captured in your imagination because He is eminent.
He created everything. Nothing that's ever been created ever completely encapsulated the person that created it.
No painting, no poetry, no song, no all of creation, not all the Megavir. If you could know everything that exists all at once, you would know a fraction of who God is.
He's eminent. He's well beyond that. I once said in a block party on mainstream, I said, God could take the whole universe and put it in His hand like this and wash it with a little bit of dish soap.
And clean it all up if you wanted to. Now do you know that God can do that?
If you do, it's only through Jesus Christ because your mind is stretched just thinking that all the planets and all the stars and all the space in between and all the trees and every atom that exists.
Not now, but ever since God said let there be light and ever will. All at one time He could take all of that and put it in His hand.
You can't even imagine that. You can't imagine what happened 100 years ago. We thought we were all like, oh gosh, the pandemic. Everybody's dying.
That has happened two times in the past where as many people as died in the COVID pandemic died in the world already. It's already been done.
We were all like, oh, this is terrible. This has never been seen before. Nothing under the sun has never been seen before.
It's all about how you react and what you do with what you know. As much as you know, and if you keep increasing what you know, you will have more to react to.
But the bottom line is God is eminent like that. He's too big. I didn't get to see the Grand Canyon with my kids.
So when Sherry and I went on our 20th wedding anniversary trip, we were determined to see the Grand Canyon.
We went to a free pastor and spouse retreat down in Phoenix, Arizona and from there drove up to a little town on old Route 66 and from there caught a train to the edge of the Grand Canyon.
We stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon. I looked over there. I thought, man, it's a big hole in the ground. I could see the other side plain of sand.
I picked up my cell phone and I took a picture. Came out perfectly clear. It was not 200 plus miles away. It was maybe 10 or 15 miles away.
It's big and the canyon goes on in both directions. It's really, really far. It's huge. We thought, well, we want the Grand Canyon to be imminent though.
We really want it to be imminent. So we're going to hike down into the Grand Canyon. We started hiking down and back and forth on this gravel, sandy trail.
We're thinking like we've got to get back up there by 415, 430 because we'll miss our train. We'll have to get another hotel here. It'll be really expensive.
We don't want that. So we're hiking down and it's hot outside. We're all the way down. We're debating with ourselves just exactly how imminent we want the Grand Canyon to be, just exactly how close we want to get to be to actually see the bottom.
We're hoping we can get pretty far down and eventually down there we can see a way station and the way station was one quarter of the way down.
We're hoping to hike as far as the way station because they have fresh water down there and go to the bathroom and whatever. None of that's on this trail.
We're hiking down and down and back and forth and back and forth and we hike for got to be about two, two and a half hours.
And we're going like, okay, now going back up is going to be slower. Going back up is going to be harder.
So exactly how much we've got to hike all the way down here. How much difficulty are we going to have getting back up to the train?
And every step we're debating with ourselves, can we go to a little more eminence? Can we get a little closer? Can we get closer to the bottom?
It's clear now we'll never get to the bottom. Not happening today. But how far can we go? Can we get to the way station?
And you know, we never did make it to the way station. We had to turn back and then we got back up the top.
Absolutely exhausted, sucking down water like crazy. Got on the train with about 15 minutes to spare and the train rolled out and took us back to town.
You can do all the work you want to try to make God eminent in your life. And you will fail, fail, fail.
But here's what will never fail. The living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The written Word of God, His Word that we can study.
We're talking about Bible intake for this six months. I'm telling you, you need this. You need this to be personal with the Lord.
You need this to be with God. You need this to be the person that God has made you to be.
The second point, that's the first one. The second point for 2025 that we want to think about is that God's plans unfolding today.
The things that God are doing today, they are His plans of yesterday.
Now I know that God is eternal. That means that God exists already. When you walk into heaven, God is already there waiting.
So if you don't go for 10 years, 20 years, or 50 years yet, you don't go for 100 years yet. He's already there in that moment. He already sees you walking in.
He is present in all moments of time. Now you can argue with me doctrinally about that if you want at another time, but the bottom line is this is our God.
Is it hard to understand? Yes. It's hard to understand that He is both eminent and imminent.
Far away and far above everything and bigger than everything and bigger than we can understand and yet imminent and personal with us.
That's a hard thing to understand, but the word says it clearly. Also, God has a plan for your life.
For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.
God says He's got a plan for you. He personally has a plan for you. It's a good plan.
Now ultimately it is that you'll be in heaven for eternity, but even between now and then it's a good plan.
Had I not hoped that I would see the blessing of the Lord in this lifetime, I would have lost hope, David said.
You can know that God has a good plan for you. Bless you.
And the plan that is ongoing today, the thing that's unfolding today, which could include something bad.
You could have disease, illness, hurt, financial ruin, a breakup, a lost job. The bad things of today, lose a father, lose a mother.
Those bad things, they are part of the plan that God laid out for you in the past.
And we got here because God directed it here. This is what He says in Isaiah 37.
He says, Have you not heard long ago I did it from ancient times I planned it?
Now I have brought it to pass, that you should turn fortified cities into ruinous heaps.
In other words, the things that will stand against you when you know that what's going on right now in your life,
that what you're doing right now, the choices that you're making right now are in line with the plans that God has for you.
And that He is unfolding something amazing, something great that you can expect that God is going to do something.
And what is He doing? What is His goal? He's setting you up as a victor.
He's setting you up as a winner. He's setting you up as an overcomer.
He's setting you up to be greater than that which you will face so that you can tear it down,
tear it to shreds and walk over top of its ruined corpse into glory.
Will you face death? Will you face disease? Will you face pain?
Will you face broken relationships and lost financial situations and everything else in your lifetime? Absolutely.
And what is your status? What is your point? You go on Facebook, here's my status.
People put, I'm struck today. I'm hurt today. I'm falling apart today. Is that your status?
No. You are riding in glory today. You are an ultimate victory today.
You are overcoming the sting that's coming against you today.
Anybody remember Muhammad Ali? Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee?
Until the end when he began to struggle, nobody could touch him.
Nobody can touch you either.
In your immanence with God, the God of the universe is delivering power and capability into your life.
It isn't power and capability to make everything turn out exactly the way your human flesh might want it to be.
It's power and capability to run roughshod over top of anything that comes against you.
Do you not realize he says, long ago I did it from ancient times I planned it, now I have brought it to pass.
God saw you as a twinkle in your great, great, great, great, great, can I go on, grandfather's eye.
You were a twinkle one day in Noah's eye.
Probably sipped a little wine and thought I'm going to go lay with my wife and make Kishon in a few thousand years.
And God saw it then and then said, and I will send Jesus to die on the cross so that Kishon will become a mighty warrior
overcoming anything that stands against him. Watch this.
You know the little kids, they're in a play or in a sporting event and they're like, come watch me.
Come see what I can do. Watch me shoot. Watch me tackle. Watch me sing. Come watch me. See what I can do.
God is imminent like that. He wants you to come watch him and see what he can do and more.
See what you can do. But you're doubting, not just doubting God.
That'd be bad enough, a man who doubts says nothing.
But also doubting yourself. Because God has made in you a creator.
And when necessary, a destroyer.
These plans that unfold in our lives, say good, bad, ugly, whatever they are, they are God's good plans for us yesterday.
You say, well how could God ever plan me losing a job?
And when I lose that job, God's going like, that's going to be the good plan for you.
Because God knows better. God knows life is not about a job or health or even your money or your talents
or what somebody says or does to you. It's about his imminence in you. God died to give you his presence.
And when things of this life interfere with that, God removes them and teaches you to become a remover.
Psalm 33, 11 says, the counsel of the Lord stands forever.
What God has planned and determined, the way he has set it up, that's not going to not go that way.
You can fret a few more, whine, throw a fit, kick the car door, put your fist through a drywall, tear it up, burn it up, blow it up.
But today is part of God's plan for you. So all you're doing when you behave that way, all you're doing when you curse the God of the universe
is cursing the God of the universe. This day, what God is doing in you, as bad as it might seem to you in the moment,
this day is part of God's good plan for you. God doesn't fail. God's counsel doesn't fall apart.
What God planned to do is not going to come to ruin. Rather, what the enemy does is going to come to ruin.
And you're going to deal the cards. You're going to live for Jesus in 2025 and run roughshod over every opposition.
You're going to doubt whether or not you can get baptized, preach the gospel, teach a Bible study, share with a friend at work,
share with a friend at school, stand up for Jesus, wear your cross in front of people that you know hate God.
You're going to doubt whether you can do that. And God's going to say, oh, you can do it.
Not only can you do it, when you do it, a light will shine that will push back the darkness in a way that you have not yet seen.
God says, my counsel stands forever. The plans of my heart stand from generation to generation.
The last point that we desperately need for 2025, at least for today, is that God wants us to want what he wants.
God wants us to want what he wants. We've all got desires. Everybody wants better, tastes better.
You know, like you eat something and one thing tastes good. You eat something else and it tastes bad.
You go like, I'm going to eat the thing that tastes good. I'm not going to eat the thing that tastes bad.
We all have wants and desires. We basically know how to respond to them.
Your culture kind of dictates the decisions that you'll make and that kind of thing. But basically, you want it.
So, you know, if this thing is medicine or vitamins or is a good healthy food, maybe like asparagus,
and this thing over here is like a bloody red steak or a piece of chocolate cake, you know, if you eat three or four of these, it's really not good for you.
If you eat three or four of these, you could eat like 50 of these and it'd be good. And the more you eat, it's better within reason. Right?
And so we have the ability to deny our own desires, to say, I'm not going to eat too much bloody red steak or too much chocolate cake.
Instead, I'm going to eat me some asparagus and broccoli and cauliflower and beans. Right?
I'm going to eat some things that will be good. I'm going to take my vitamins and my supplements. I'm going to drink my water.
I'm going to get my rest. I'm going to study my Bible. I'm going to preach the gospel. I'm going to live for the Lord even when it's inconvenient.
We have the ability to turn away from our own desires in the flesh and do the things that God wants. And that's what God wants for us.
In fact, Jesus instructed the disciples in the disciples prayer to pray at something like this. He said, Our Father in heaven. Oh, that's eminent.
Hallowed be our name, your name. That's eminent. Your kingdom come. That's a begging for eminence. Right?
Your will be done. That's what we're supposed to be praying. But a lot of times, that's not what we're praying.
Give me better taste. Give me more collection. Let me consume more. Let me look a little bit, just enough like the world to win a lot of friends and influence people.
But the truth is, when you are in Christ, you can do what nobody else can do. You can be trained to do what nobody else can do.
Because nobody else is exactly you. We are equal because we're unique. So we're supposed to say to God, OK, God, give us today what we need.
Give us our daily bread. Your will be done here like it is there. Your will be done imminently like it is imminently.
Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us.
We look at who hurt us, who did wrong, and we forgive them. And we say, God, forgive us like we have forgiven them.
If you have a hard time praying, forgive us like we have forgiven them. Because you know you have not forgiven them, you might want to get your cart behind your horse and start doing some forgiving.
And then when you do some forgiving and pronouncing the forgiveness of God to people, then you'll be able to pray in earnest, forgive us as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
It says, lead us not into temptation. What is temptation? It's the opportunity to work your will instead of God's will.
To do what you want instead of what God wants in your flesh, in your mind, in your desires, in your dreams.
But we're asking God daily and saying, OK, Lord, please don't put us in those situations.
Lead us not into that situation where we would choose to do what we want over what you want. He says, but deliver us from evil.
Now, let's be super clear about this. This is what we're praying. And God says, deliver us from evil when he talks about us being tempted.
Right? And so if you're tempted to do what you should not do, that's evil. It's not you doing evil, it's the world's evil.
Right? The world is doing evil to you, tempting you to do what you should not do.
And then when you choose to do what temptation leads you to do, then that becomes evil that you have done.
And we need to be delivered from that. We need to want what God wants. That's what God wants from us.
He desires for us eminently and imminently that we would desire his will on the earth.
Because the kingdom, the power, and the glory are his. They're not yours. They're not mine. We're not going to claim them.
Now, the beauty of it is that he, in some sense, shares those things with us, but he doesn't have to.
He is eminent, but he chooses to be eminent. And therefore, is both.
That brings us to our conclusion, but I'll go back over them for those who are note takers in the room,
and probably more importantly, for those who are not note takers in the room, so you will not forget.
The first one is that God is both eminent, that means he's far away and above all and can never be fully grasped,
and eminent, that means he's right here in us all the time, for those of us who have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
And Jesus is eminent with God the Father, and so if you have not accepted Jesus, do that and become eminent with God.
Secondly, God's plans unfolding today are the good plans that he promised from yesterday,
even when they don't look that way or feel that way or even when you think you don't want it to be the way it is.
And then third, God wants us to want what he wants.
So what that all comes together then is in kind of like one thing.
God is an active God. God is doing things, changing things.
He's creating even now, and he wants to know, are you in?
Are you willing to join in with that? Are you going to be part of that?
In the Great Commission it says, go ye therefore, and it ends with,
and lo, I shall be with you even unto the end of the age.
And in the middle is baptizing them and teaching them all things that I've taught you.
We're supposed to do the things that God is doing and do it.
So I have kids, my boys were playing baseball, and they wanted to be good,
because if you're playing a sport you want to be good.
And so they come to me and they said, will you come up in the yard and throw the ball?
And I'm like, yeah, let's do it. I throw the ball.
Hit him some rounders, throw him a little line drive, throw the ball, something like that.
Now I'm getting better at baseball as they're getting better at baseball,
because we're doing it together.
God is an evangelist. God is a servant. God is a lover. God is kind and gentle.
God is faithful for sure. He is patient for sure.
What does this sound like? It sounds like the fruit of the Holy Spirit that God creates in us,
and the Holy Spirit lives in us. Why? Because the Holy Spirit lives in us.
He is in us doing what He does, being who He is, living out the culture of Heaven,
of the Kingdom of God. And God wants us to do the same.
He's saying, this is what I'm about. This is what I'm doing. Will you come and live with me?
Will you come and live in me? Will you want and do the things that I want and am doing?
He's spreading the Gospel, telling people there's a new covenant.
There's a way that you can be saved.
Now in Jesus people can believe and receive salvation.
The new covenant is essentially the New Testament. It's very clearly laid out.
He said to the disciples, and it carried over as a command to us,
that you will be my witnesses. Power will come upon you.
Power. Why power? Because you're smart, because you're strong, because you're capable, creative.
You may be all of those things or none of those things, depending on who we're talking about.
You may be something else. But God is powerful.
And if you are imminent with God, then you are imminent with power.
And the power that comes upon you is the power to do what?
In that case, Acts 1-8, it's very clear, to be his witnesses.
They would wait until the power of God came upon them to be his witnesses.
And the Greek word there is martyrs. Essentially it's martyro, which is martyrs.
So you will die, which points to Jesus saying, deny yourself.
Take up your cross daily and follow after me.
Ephesians 5-29 says, For no man ever yet hated his own flesh.
You shouldn't hate yourself. It's not healthy to do that.
But rather he nourisheth it and cheriseth it, even as the Lord the Church.
That's what I want you to see. God nourishes and cherishes the Church.
God takes care of us as his people. If you are searching for your nourishment somewhere else.
If you feel good or feel better when people have a good opinion of you.
Or when you eat certain foods. Or when you behave a certain way.
Then you are not getting your nourishment and your cherishing from God.
And you need to repent. Because we now live in the day that repentance is the only way.
You turn to God and he will provide. And if he does not, you will be continually searching, seeking, looking for that everywhere else.
And you will never find it or you will find it for periods of times.
And ultimately after death you will never find it for eternity.
You need God imminently. And to have God imminently, he lives in you.
And to know that he is imminent, you need to be about the things that he is about.
Doing the things that he is doing.
We are called the body of Christ. And as if the body, if as the body we stop working.
Then his presence in the world in a way that people can see it die off.
I will not get to experience my dad in this world again.
And some of you feel that same pain about loved ones that you have met.
I ask you, dare you, are you willing that the God of the universe should die off of the earth among men?
No. Never let it be.
Rather let men who are his true temple always walk in Christ.
Let us represent him. Let us show the example of what it means to allow God to work through us.
And to overcome obstacles. Cherishing and relishing the opportunity to suffer like they did in Acts 4.
Oh, they praised God and gave him glory that they were allowed to suffer like Jesus.
Should you want to suffer? No. You want what God wants for you.
And if God deems that you should suffer, then you suffer not only willingly but rejoicingly.
Half the suffering that we do, we do because we are pursuing things that we cannot have.
That God does not intend for us.
But if you will just pursue what God wants for you, then you will be his body and presence on the earth.
You will live where we once were dead in our transgressions and sins. You will live.
That's sad that people would allow God's presence on the earth to die off.
And it should be mourned. But there is hope. Hope in repentance.
We turn to him, deny ourselves again today, take up our crosses again today,
and follow after him going forth as his body and working in the world as he is working, letting him work through us.
A couple of illustrations and we're done.
The first one is WWJD. Does anybody remember WWJD?
Does anybody remember where it comes from?
So it grew up in the church. Like it was a really big thing.
And it is a Christian written story. It was written by a man with the last name Sheldon.
The interesting thing about that book is when it went to the Library of Congress to be permanently recorded, copyrighted,
two pages were misprinted which broke the copyright.
And companies all over the world, so in Europe and Italy and all over the world, reprinted the book.
And it became the third most printed and bought and read book in the world after the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress.
The Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress, and In His Steps. That's the name of the book.
If you can't afford to get a copy of it, you want to read it, I'll buy one for you.
It's not not expensing if I'm on the internet for three or four bucks because the copyright was broken.
And in the first year, two million copies were printed, bought, sold, and read in one year.
Now that's unheard of until social media and electronics and like that now happens all the time.
Ten million in a month is common enough.
But back then it was unheard of. It was a printed paper book, not an electronic book. That didn't exist.
It was traveling around the world by email. It was printed in dozens of countries and bought and read by everybody, passed around.
In that story, a church was challenged and some people stayed after the service.
And they said, well, I'm going to do everything that I do first asking the question, what would Jesus do?
And then the rest of the story of what happened when they said, I'm going to do everything I do first asking, what would Jesus do in that circumstance?
And it starts to unfold. They make really like the one guy runs a newspaper. He decides that Jesus would not print a newspaper on Sunday because that requires people to work on Sunday.
It gives people paper to read on Sunday. You got to go buy the paper. You've got to deliver the paper.
So his business, the main part of his paper business was coming in on Sunday.
And they all told him, if you do that, you'll destroy your company. You'll go bankrupt.
And he said, but Jesus wouldn't do it. So I'm not going to do it. And he quit printing the paper on Sundays.
And after that, his paper prospered in a crazy way and he did very well.
But in the meantime, everybody in the industry was telling him he's nuts.
So it's a great book. And what would Jesus do comes out of that book. It's the only place that anybody had ever thought of it.
And it was prospered all over the world. But what I'm telling you today is based on what we just read.
What would Jesus do is not sufficient. And we're not even doing it.
We don't even go so far as to ask ourselves always, would Jesus do what I'm about to do?
But it's just not enough. The question, what would Jesus do, assumes that you can make a decision the way God would make the decision.
And that's probably not true. Because you're going to make it in your culture, making your limited mindset.
Know not enough about God to do it. You're taking the authority yourself and saying, do I think Jesus would do this?
Okay, well then I'm going to do it. And I'll say to you, it's better than nothing.
It's better than what most people are doing. But it's not what God would give us.
Now, Blackaby wrote a study called Experiencing God. And in Blackaby's study Experiencing God, he said, here's what you do.
See where God is at work and then go and join him in it.
I submit to you in that day, now tens of millions of copies later, that revolutionized Christianity.
And everybody said, well that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to look for God at work and I'm going to go do what it is that God is doing.
And that's good. And I submit to you that based on what we just read, it's not enough.
It's better than what most people are doing. Because we say, oh I see God at work there.
I go join in. I donate. I serve. I give. Whatever. That's better.
And a lot of people are like, hey God's at work there. Cool. That's good for them over there.
I'm going to see if I can get God to work over here in my life to do this thing that I want.
That's what most people are doing. I'm going to work a little harder, make a little more money so that I got more money later.
Yep, they're okay. Clearly they're okay because what's going on over there.
If God's at work over there, then they don't need my money. They don't need my service. They don't need anything.
I'm going to work over here and try to get this one bolstered. That's what most people do.
But black would be said, see where God is working. Then join him in it.
But I submit to you based on what we have just studied, that's not enough. It's not enough.
So WWJD, which most people don't even get that far, is not enough.
And where is God at work and where should I go join him in it, that's not enough.
So what would be enough based on what we just said? Well, nothing less than we have an eminent and imminent God who has a plan for us.
And he's carrying it out today in our lives, despite whether we like it or not.
He's carrying it out right now. And we must want what he wants.
We have to submit ourselves to him and go, okay, this is clearly what God wants.
And so yes, you can ask yourself, would Jesus do this? So Jesus says, no, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to do this. And you say, okay, Jesus, let's do that. Whatever it is.
Jesus says, suffer, let's suffer. Jesus says, pay, let's pay. He says, give, let's give.
He says, be patient. That person's trying to hurt you, but you don't have to let them do it.
Then we'd be patient, love them, despite the fact they're trying to hurt us, we don't have to let them do it.
It's not what would Jesus do or Jesus doing something over there, but it's a realisation that Jesus is doing something right here.
Right here, right now, and now, and now, and now.
And if the pastor just stood here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and said, Jesus is doing it now, that would always be true.
And so every time we say, well, we're going to go do this, and don't take into account that that means Jesus is in us going to do that, we've missed the vote.
When we say, what would Jesus do? Clearly, you're not doing what Jesus is doing, because Jesus doesn't say what would Jesus do.
Right? He never thinks about what he would do. He knows what he is going to do, and he is actively doing it, carrying out the plans of the Father.
So he looks at God, and he says, I am doing what God is doing. You say, well, Jesus, what would you do in my situation with my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my brother, my spouse, my whatever, my doctor, my medical, what would you do?
Jesus already knows what he's going to do. All you have to do is realise he's imminently in you, and do what he is doing, which will result in you overcoming every barrier that you face.
And you can claim the promise that God says, see, did I not say, see, have I not been doing it?
God started working your salvation, winning your friends and family to Christ before you or they were ever born.
God started teaching you to overcome hardship and difficulty, mourning and loss before you were ever born.
He's always been doing it. He's doing it now, and if you have to wonder, then actually you're in doubt. And he who doubts shouldn't think he has anything.
Following the commands of Scripture falls short. God says, do this, go do that.
By the time you, if you're reading something in the Bible, and you hear God say, go do what you just read, it's probable you're in sin and you need to repent.
So that makes sense. God told me something, that's awesome. God loves me, God's imminent, he's working in me.
So how can it be that by the time I read it, I'm already in sin?
Because if you had to read it to know that you're supposed to do it, you already missed the boat, baby. You already should have been doing it.
So God says to you, thou shalt not lie, and you catch yourself lying, you're like, oh, I shouldn't have been lying, I repent and turn back to God.
God says, go share the gospel, and you go, yeah, I really need to do that more, and you go on the next day and don't do it, and the next day and don't do it, and the next day and don't do it.
See, we're walking in sin and we need to repent and turn to God and let God do in us what God is already actively doing.
God is a God doing things, and if you're a follower of that God, you will be doing things.
You will deny yourself daily, take up your cross, and follow after him.
And the one who tries to keep his life will lose it, and the one who tries to submit his life completely to God and give up his life will retain it.
Our identity has been changed. We are now the body of Christ.
What you do, Jesus does. You are the body of Christ.
In Galatians 5 verse 2, Paul tells the Galatians if they would go and get circumcised, which is what people are trying to teach them to do, that Christ would be of no benefit to them.
If you get up from here and go and try to follow a set of rules or directions, or you hear, well one thing I heard Pastor Dan say today, I'm just going to do that from now on.
It's going to be a thing for my life from now on. Christ will be of no benefit to you whatsoever.
You must allow him to be present in you. You start by saying, God, I'm willing. Come, live in me, lead my life.
And then every day, just do what God is doing. What's it going to take to do that?
Well, you're going to grow, you're going to know, you're going to learn, your culture is going to change, you're going to become a better person in a lot of ways.
You're going to suffer because that's on the road. You're going to moan and groan, and every time you do, that is God's remembrance to you that this is not your home.
Where are you going? If you're going home to be with your Father, ultimately, then the way you live this life will reflect that you're ultimately going home to be with your Father.
That's what Jesus did. And if we believe in him, we ought to walk as he walked.
I ask the praise team to come forward and lead us in Jesus' name. Amen.
Thank you very much. This concludes our services.