From God's Heart to Your Hands | Firm Foundation

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Join us as Gabe Kolstad brings us a message about going from God's heart to your hands. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, everybody. Happy Sunday and happy Father's Day to all the dads. Yeah? All right. We're so glad that you're here with us on Father's Day. Of course, we're celebrating the ultimate father, our Father in heaven today. And I hope that if you today are connected to the Lord, that you give him all of the praise and the glory that he is due. I hope that if there's a moment in your life today where you're seeking and you're searching and you're just not sure what your relationship is with God, that today you'll discover the God of the universe as your father. He's the best father, he's the perfect father. I love that we got to sing about him this morning. And we're going to talk about him all through this message today. I want to ask you a question before you get all ready for note taken today. I want to ask you a question, and that is what words have changed your life? Because words change lives, right? Somebody says to you, I love you. That's a game changer, right? Somebody says to you, you missed a spot. That could be a game changer too, right? Somebody says to you, I'm pregnant. You're hired. I forgive you. I mean, words, they carry weight, right? Words change our lives. And what we know is that the the creator of the universe wanted to speak. What if the creator of the universe wanted to speak and he wanted to get you a message? The creator, just think about this for a second. What if the creator of the universe wanted to get you a message? That would be the ultimate battle of all time, wouldn't it? He's gonna move heaven and earth, he's gonna work through history, he's gonna do everything he can to get you a message of his love, of his grace, of his truth. And the question I think that we're gonna tackle today in the in the series that we're in called Firm Foundation, by the way, this is a great time to take your notes out now. So grab your notes if you didn't already do that. And I want you to know that you're gonna need to uh be ready for this note sheet. There's white space on there on purpose today, and you're gonna probably gonna fill up more of it than normal. I'm gonna go 100 miles an hour. I just gotta warn you, this is gonna be a full time of passion, and I hope in you know that you'll be curious and I hope that you'll learn. My my real prayer all week has been as we look at the Word of God, that's our topic today, as we look at the Word of God, I hope that you leave here with more confidence, with great confidence in your faith. Because the God of the universe wanted to speak to you. The question that much of the world has, and sometimes you might have, is did he succeed? Do I have the actual message of God? And the world is asking this question. A lot of Christians are asking this question. A lot of your friends are asking this question. Some of you are asking this question. Did God succeed? Is this really the message? So we're gonna look at today that as the topic, how we got the word of God, the fact that it went from his heart to your hands. That's the message title. There was a game that was played in 2012 called the Global Gossip Game. The Global Gossip Game was uh a game that involved 237 people, seven languages, 26 hours, and it went from Australia to Alaska. The goal was it started out as a library at a library, and they were gonna say something, and then they were gonna see what it turned into as it moved down and whether it stayed the same or not. And it started out, the the saying that everybody was supposed to say started out at a library in Australia, and they said, This is a quote from Plato Life must be lived as play. So that's the beginning message. Then 237 people, seven languages, 26 hours, and a world away, it went through all that, and it turned out as this. It starts out, life must be lived as play. It turned out he bites snails. That's what happened to that. That's real. That actually happened. That's a real thing. How does that happen? Life must be lived as play, and then he bites snails. You know, and like here's what a lot of people are asking is is that what happened with the Bible? What even is this? I mean, is this real? Because I hear about some contradictions and I disagree with some stuff in there, and I don't want to accept some stuff in there, so maybe I could, you know, is it the same as the global gossip game? The Bible's even harder. It was written on three continents over 1500 years by 40 authors, multiple languages, no printing press, no copy and paste, no internet, no social media, no AI. How sure are you that this is the message of God? I'm gonna spend the next few minutes sharing what I've learned through my lifetime of study on this subject, and I hope that we can gain more confidence. I want to talk about how the Bible is God's heart in your hand. I want to talk about how we got the Bible. So get your pens ready. You ready? Okay, put your thinking caps on. Everybody, put a thinking cap on your neighbor. Just real quick, just put a thinking cap on your neighbor, like it is time for us to get serious. All right, we're gonna do this. Number one, how did we get the Bible? One, God breathed it. He breathed it. That's what the Bible says. God breathed it like He breathed it. It was this personal communication from the being of God. He breathed his word. Some of you might have, maybe you grew up around church, maybe you were taught some of the Bible when you're growing up, maybe you know something else that God breathed. He breathed life into Adam and Eve in the very beginning, right? Isn't this interesting? The same concept of what created Adam and Eve is the same concept that gave us God's word. Breathed it. It was so personal, it was part of Him coming to us. And I think it's so important for us on this Father's Day to recognize that's the gift of a Father, right? It's the gift of going, I love you. I want you to know me. I want you to know truth. I want you to be assured of how I work. I want you to know your direction in life. I mean, he's breathing out this love and this loving truth to us as a good, good father. Why did God breathe this? Because he wanted to reach you. You. He wanted to reach you. He was speaking through ordinary people, but it was his message coming through. And it says in 2 Timothy chapter 3, verse 16, all scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and training in righteousness. I mean, the apostle Paul says it's all useful. It's not just a book to be laid on a shelf, and you know, many, many of us grew up in in a home where maybe there was one of those family Bibles. You ever seen those big bad boys? You know, and and and they're they're they're, I guess you could open them once in a while, maybe like for Christmas or something, but pretty much they're a decoration, right? Nobody like takes that to church or to a coffee shop, you know. It's like a decoration. And it's it's a symbol, it's it's a symbol, but it the word of God was not meant to just be a symbol, it was meant to be a life-changing, daily, feasting, you know, thing where we're receiving this breathed-out message of God, and it's and it's useful to teach us, to rebuke us. Who likes that? Right? No. But do we need it ever? Yeah, all the time. It's useful to correct us. Thank God for correction. Correction keeps you from disaster, and then training in righteousness. We know that scholars would say people who build their lives on the Bible believe at least three things about it. One is that it's inspired. That's what we just talked about. Inspired by is from God Himself. Secondly, it's inerrant, that it is absolutely in its original transmission without error. There were there were no errors in the original transmission of Scripture. None. So you could look at the whole thing and go, it's flawless. It says in Proverbs chapter 30, verse 5, every word of God is pure. And so that's the second thing. And another one is infallibility. It's infallible, it's incapable of leading you astray. So people who build their lives on scripture take a whole different approach to scripture. And what I want to challenge you to do today is not to just believe me, but to do your own work. Uh to do your own work, that you'd be a person who goes, I believe the Bible because I've looked into what's behind it. I'm gonna give you some tools today, some ideas, I'm gonna talk about some stuff. I hope to open some boxes that you need to go look at today. Um, but this has to be you, right? If you want to build your life on scripture, you can't go like when my mom said, This was God's word. Or my dad said this was God's word. You have to go, I'm convinced that this is God's word. Because our world will push on this, right? And if you can't answer the question, you're probably gonna be talked out of it. And I think we all got to be ready. Second way, okay, so first thing happens, God breathed it. Secondly, messengers recorded it. I'm telling you, like in a timeline, how we got the Bible. God breathed it, messengers recorded it. They they they actually got the message and wrote it down. Human personalities, 40 different authors. Moses was one of them, Joshua was one of them, Luke was one of them, Paul, Peter. I mean, you could go down the list. These people had personalities, and you could see it even in their writings. Like Peter sounds like Peter, and Paul sounds like Paul. You know, and and you can see that in Scripture. But it came with divine authority. So it was human personality's divine authority. They did not have to give up their personalities in order to transmit the word of God. Isn't that reassuring to you? If you think that you have to somehow change your personality to serve God, he's going, no, no, I can use you. I want to use the redeemed you, I want to use the new you, but I can use you with your extroverted personality and with your need for variety and with whatever else you come with, God's able to use you. And I find great comfort in that, actually. It says in 2 Peter chapter 1, knowing this, first of all, Peter goes, first of all, this is so important that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. Did you get that? No prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. It's not like Peter's like, well, I think what God was probably saying was this, I'm just gonna write it down. That's not what happened. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The process was that God breathed a message. The Holy Spirit carried that to a person and enabled them to record God's message. That's that is the whole doctrine of inspiration. That is what happened, and it's how we got the Bible. And you know, you could look at this and go, well, isn't that how Shakespeare got his stuff? And I would say, hard? No. Uh Shakespeare's stuff is great, I love it. But the Bible sets itself up against all other communication. And if you read the Bible for what it is, it's gonna say, you you treat this in it, this is its own category. It is its own category of communication that God wants us to revere, but mostly to obey, right? And uh, while I love all the other stuff, I'm a big reader, I love it. Um, it's this is unique. So messengers actually wrote down the message. They use things like uh papyrus or vellum, you know. I mean, think about this in the in the first communication we have from God, um, what was that? That would have been the Ten Commandments, right? The first written communication from God. And Moses was up on this mountain, and God took his finger, this is what the scripture says, his finger, and he etched in stone the Ten Commandments. So Moses didn't write that down, God wrote that down. This is different because now it says that God spoke through the Spirit to the messengers, and they wrote it down. And they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So they had this unbelievable responsibility, didn't they? I'm not sure I'd want that responsibility to record the enduring and forever eternal word of God, but they were so privileged to do that. So God breathed it, messengers recorded it. Here's the third thing. The the church recognized it. The church recognized it. The way that scripture got from a scroll, a single scroll that Peter, as an example, might have written down the words for, um, to now where we're going, this is part of scripture, is that somebody had to evaluate these different writings. Again, 40 authors, 1500 years, 66 books. The church did not give the Bible authority, they recognized it. The Bible already had authority. The 66 books of Scripture already had authority, they recognized it, but it wasn't instantaneous. I'll tell you something that by the 400, by about 400 BC, the Old Testament had already been recognized and widely, widely, widely universally accepted, 39 Old Testament books to the Bible, Genesis through Malachi. And so that was done by the time 400 BC happened. And then, of course, 400 years later, Jesus is born, he dies, he raises from the dead, he commissions the disciples, they go out living the gospel and they start recording the message of God as he's breathing it now to them. And so then we have 27 books of the New Testament. But that took some time for the church to recognize. It was about 400 AD by the time the New Testament, they called it the canon, the Old Testament canon or the body of work, and the New Testament body of work was done about 400 AD. So it took time. Why did it take so much time? Because there were lots of writings that had to be evaluated, and some didn't make the cut. There are other traditions of faith that might have a different collection of scriptures. And the reason why they didn't make it into what's considered the Orthodox canon of Scripture is because there were criteria for these things. I want to read you something that Peter says. He said in 2 Peter 3.16, he's talking about Paul. Okay, he's talking about Paul's letters, and he says, his letters contain some things that are hard to understand. I have to pause there and just kind of chuckle for a second. Peter said, Paul is confusing. That's just kind of funny. Because if you've ever read the Bible and you're like, I'm not sure I get this. Peter's like, yeah, me too. You know, and that sounds just like Peter if you know, if you know the scripture. He goes, some things that are hard to stand, which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do the other scriptures, underline other scriptures. Peter's going, Paul's writings are scripture to their own destruction. He said they they ignore them or they pervert them to their own destruction. But he he's basically modeling what then happened over the next 400 years, where the councils of the church met universally, globally, and they were evaluating these writings to go, what is actual scripture and what's just inspirational writing? And there had to be a difference. And so they actually used, by the way, they used four criteria. I'm gonna give them to you. If you're the note taker, type, write this down. They were apostolic, which meant that they came from an apostle or a close associate of an apostle. The point here is that these people were closely connected to the source. And so they they weren't guessing, they weren't assuming, they weren't recreating things. They were there and they were transmitting that. They were apostolic, they were universally accepted. That was the second one. So the whole church across the world agreed on these 66 books. The whole church across the world. Of course, at that time the known world was smaller and they didn't have the internet. So they're talking horseback and foot councils over hundreds of years, meticulous. They were three, they were life-changing. The writings were life-changing, they were producing fruit and life change. We see that this is a power that God's word has, right? We talked about this a couple weeks ago. The power of God's word is the power to change your life. And the fourth one is they were consistent with the rest of Scripture. So they would look at maybe a writing that didn't make the cut, and they'd say, here's the thing: the whole rest of scripture goes this direction, and this one comes off and takes this hard right turn. It's not consistent. And so you have with the 66 books of scripture that they've been recognized by the church. And it took a long time and it was painstaking, and there were people, you know, that gave their lives to this because it was so important. How did we get the Bible? Well, first of all, God breathed it, messengers recorded it, the church recognized it. Here's the fourth one. Scribes copied it. Scribes copied it. I'm saying this because, like, if you anybody ever been to Krispy Kreme when that line is going and the hot now sign is on? Okay, and you may have never seen a donut produced before that, right? That might be your first exposure to this is how they make a donut, right? This thing squeezes out some dough, it pops in the grease, it floats along like this, your mouth is watering, you know, and it's like, and then it and then it flops off that thing, and then it's like, oh my gosh, then the gl have you ever seen the baptism of a donut before? It's incredible, right? And now you know, like you know how a donut was produced. This is why we're doing this, because maybe you don't know how you got the Bible. Scribes copied it. Generation after generation, listen, refused to let God's voice disappear. Why? You. For you. Because God wanted to reach you. Because God loves you. Because he wanted to make sure that you knew that he's a good, good father. They want to make sure that you get the message that you receive Jesus as your Savior, that you build your life on his truth, that you know that he's coming back for you. It's for you. This is why scribes copied it. They were so passionate. Listen, they were so passionate, they did this one letter at a time. I don't mean one New Testament letter at a time, I mean one alphabetical letter at a time, is how the scripture was copied. It was a rule. They had to do it this way. There was somebody supervising behind their back. They were allowed to write one letter at a time. Okay, next letter is Z. Or Z, if you're from Canada, right? Okay. How did I do? Okay, go on. The next letter is. That's how they did this. You know what happened? If they were two-thirds of the way through a scroll and they made a mistake, they couldn't scratch it out. Throw the whole thing away and start over again. That's how we got the Bible. It was so meticulous. There's an example of copying in 2 Kings 22. It says, Shaphan the scribe also told the king, saying, Hilkiah the Kohen has given me a scroll. Then Shaphan read it before the king. So this is the time in Israel's history when they lost the scrolls. How far off track did they have to be to just completely not even know where the Bible was? It could be an indication, right, of a spiritual condition. What place does the Bible have in your heart? Here's good news. Did you know, anybody in here a Bible app user, the Bible app on your phone? Did you know that a billion plus people have already downloaded the Bible app? That's unbelievable. They say we are the most scripture-connected generation in history. Wow. Let's don't take it for granted. People died for this. They gave their whole lives for this. God worked and refused. He's relentless. He's relentless. He wants to reach you. And it's sitting right here in our hands. In fact, Melissa and I, we got to go someplace uh interesting a couple years ago. We went to Israel. Before the war started, we went to Israel. And um we we we heard all about the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we get to go to this museum in Jerusalem where they had the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we got to look at all these copies. Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 by a young shepherd who was just walking his sheep in a canyon. He throws rocks up into these caves just for fun, and he hears this big clank. And so he's like, What was that? He actually climbs up in there and he sees there's this piece of pottery that was holding all these scrolls that he broke. Well, these scrolls were the Dead Sea Scrolls. They dated back to before the time of Jesus. And they they collected all these scrolls and they evaluated them. And you know what they found? They found not that everything had changed so much since they had originally written down these words. They found that they were exactly the same. I mean, that's 2,000 years. This is how careful these scribes were in copying, like meticulous. These people cared deeply and they were supervised very ruthlessly. And that's why we can be so confident. You something about the New Testament manuscripts. This is this is a mind blower to me. Okay, this is like my passion, so I'm sorry if you're bored, but this is so exciting. Um, okay, check this out. If you wonder how how reliable the Bible is, they have these things called manuscripts. That's that's the scrolls, etc. And I'm just in comparison, I want you to see uh Tacitus. Okay, Tacitus is the historian, and 36 copies of Tacitus's original manuscripts, not original, but copies of his original work that are still manuscripts, 36 are in existence today. However, nobody argues the historicity of Tacitus. Nobody. Okay? That's just interesting, isn't it? Herodotus, another historian, 106 copies of his works are available in manuscript form. How about Plato? Does anybody argue that Plato existed? No. Does anybody ever say, well, I'm not sure that Plato really said that? No. If he wrote it down, they said it. 238 copies. And then there is the Iliad of Homer. Uh considered the gold standard of literature, the gold standard of historicity. 1900 copies of Homer's works are in existence today. Still, um, what's interesting, put that graphic back up for one second, check out the New Testament. We have 5,856 complete manuscripts of the New Testament. And the difference here is that they were dated from an average of 125 AD. That's close enough where people were still alive who were part of the action of the New Testament church. I mean, that's so close that there were people that remembered the stories that they're reading. The earliest manuscripts of the others are so much later, it's not even funny. I mean, this doesn't even compare, it's not in the same universe of reliability as everything else. The Bible is so much more reliable than every other piece of literature that's ever been produced, that you can build your life on it. And that I think is what we we have to decide. And I want you to decide, do you believe that? Do you believe that? If you believe it, do you obey it? That's the question we all have to wrestle with. Number five. Scholars translated it. Scholars translated it. You might notice that as I'm walking you through this message today, that I'm using different translations of the Bible. And I've called them out on the notes with initials. N I V. The next one's gonna be C E V. They stand for things. You can see this on the Bible app, but C E V stands for Contemporary English Version. There's different translations because different people needed the message. I mean, in fact, every translation represents someone who believed that needed to hear the message. I've got different translations up here. I've got a German Bible right here. It's not the whole Bible, it's actually just a New Testament. I've got a Norwegian Bible that came from my great-grandfather. And it says Biblin on the front. I mean, I can't read a single word in this thing. I've got a Swahili Bible from Kenya. And I've got an old King James Bible here. And, you know, why there are different translations is because everybody needs to hear the Bible in their own language. Now the Bible wasn't written in English or Swahili or Norwegian. It was written in Hebrew for most of the Old Testament, and then Aramaic for a part of it, and then Koine Greek for the New Testament. So the Bible was written in different languages, so of course, God wants you to hear it in your own language, so people had to go to work translating it. And what we see even in Acts chapter 17 is an example of translation, Paul says, and he gives us the power to live, to move, and to be who we are. We are his children, just as some of your poets have said. Paul is now translating the work of a poet. He's even now somebody's translated that translation, and we could read it in English. Because God wants you to get the message. Everyone deserves to hear in their own language. Melissa and I got a chance to go to Mexico in 2019 as a part of a mission trip to see one of our global partners, Debbie Melbourne in Topek, Najarit, Mexico. And that's about a few hours from the Huichol Indian tribes that they've been working with for decades. We got to go see these Huichol Indian tribes. It took us a little bit to get there. We drove an hour to the lake where we got on a boat and we took an hour boat ride. And then we got off the boat and we hiked an hour up the hill to this village where we, you know, it was like these people are totally disconnected from modern life. We get to this village and we see this canopy tent with 12 people under it. And I said, What's that? What are they doing? And they said, Oh, they're in Bible college. I was like, Bible college? Really? They said, Yeah, we've been working on translating the Bible into their language for the last 40 years, and we just celebrated the completion of the Bible in the Kuial language. Crazy, right? What'd they do? They went bananas. They're like, let's start a Bible college, let's plant churches, let's get the message to everybody. Now there are 76 church plants out of that work. Crazy, right? What's interesting is they didn't even have a written language before these people started translating the Bible into their language. They had to go into that tribe, codify their language, teach them how to read and write their own language, and then go to work on translating the Bible. It took 40 years. Aren't you glad somebody took the time to translate the Bible into English so that you can read it? It wasn't just magic, it was blood, sweat, and tears. And we are so blessed. Let me sum up what I've been saying before I start to close this message. I want you to see the whole journey, okay? So here's how we got the Bible in one graphic. God breathed it, messengers recorded it, the church recognized it, scribes copied it, scholars translated it, and you can trust it. I think the Bible is one of God's greatest gifts to you and me. And by the way, some of you might be sitting here going, like, ah, I wish I could study some more of this stuff for myself because I I like this, but I don't know if I'd be able to answer some of these questions on my own, and I really want to get to that point. There's something that we're doing that's called the Bible Challenge. And I want to invite you to take it. You can do that by just texting the word Bible to the word five to the number 503-905-9067. So text Bible to 503-905-9067. Let's leave that up on the screen for a minute. And uh what's gonna happen is you're gonna get seven daily texts with short videos and some homework. And if you're into that kind of thing, you'll get more information on everything we've been talking about. And you're gonna get the graphic that I just showed you to just so that you can have that maybe on your phone or on your computer, just to reference, all right? Here's the sixth thing that I want you to know. And I I just said it. You can trust it. You can trust it. Man, you can trust the Bible, you can trust it with your life. You could make your life decisions based on what the Bible says. I I love the passage from Proverbs. From Proverbs 3. Proverbs 3, 5, and 6. This is so good. This was my mother-in-law who passed away. This was her favorite verse, Melissa's mom. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Man, I mean, I've I've I've gone to that. I can't even tell you how many times. You get up against uh a hard decision or just a discouraging day, and you're like, I don't know what to do. And you just go, hmm, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Oh wow, I don't have to have all the information, I don't have to have all the answers. Wait, God could work even in my limitations? Yeah, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't depend on your own understanding. Thank God, because I don't have any sometimes. Seek His will in all you do, and He'll show you what path to take. You can trust that. Like you can take that to the bank. You could live your life on that. That's why the Bible is so special. Why do historians, even non-Christian historians, take the New Testament so seriously? They do it because of the early date of the of the of the copies that we have. They do that because of the eyewitnesses that wrote down the message of God. They do that because of the thousands and thousands of manuscripts that we have. If you go to all of the manuscripts, there's 33,000. It's crazy. It's nothing like any other written information that's ever happened in the world. Unbelievable. And they do that because of the consistency of the message. Do you know the whole message from start to finish in the Bible is about Jesus, this amazing lover of our soul. And we see that. We see that so clearly. Luke says this in Luke chapter 1. He said, I'm writing for you. He's writing to a guy named Theophilus, but pretend he's talking to you. I'm writing to you, mighty lover of God, an orderly account of what Jesus accomplished and fulfilled among us. It is appropriate for me to write this. For he also appeared to me so that I would reassure you beyond any shadow of a doubt the reliability of all you've been taught of him. Wow. What if you had that kind of confidence like going to work tomorrow beyond a shadow of a doubt the reliability of everything you've learned about God through his word? What if you had that confidence of like, no, I know that I can trust this? And I could like make my decisions based on this. I could be unpopular and not care because I know that God's gonna bless me. Yeah. Um, does that answer every question that we might have? No. There's still debates, right? There's still things we gotta figure out. There's gonna be some questions that you you take with you into eternity. Finally, you get to ask the Lord and you're gonna find out. That's we all that's called faith, right? There's this tension that we live in. Like, boy, I wish I had all the answers. I don't. You know what I have? I have enough, I have enough to believe. I have enough to believe, I have enough to obey. Think about this. Kings died, empires collapsed, languages disappeared, wars were fought, people were imprisoned, missionaries crossed oceans, scribes wore out their eyesight, printers risked their lives, reformers were burned, parents secretly taught children. Generation after generation after generation, God kept speaking. Because he refused to lose his voice before it reached you. Because he loves you. From God's heart to your hands. Neil, I think the only question is how do we get this into your heart? How do we get it from God's heart to your heart? Because he can get it into your hands, but he's left the rest to you. Will you allow this to become something that you integrate into your life, that you believe, that you begin obeying, that you put at the center of your heart? That's that's the only way it's gonna make a difference. Otherwise, it's just just a book. There's a guy named George Mueller, who was a missionary, but actually he was a thief and a liar before he was changed by the Lord. He ended up starting a hundred schools in Bristol, England. He ended up serving 10,000 little kids, orphans. He ended up writing down 50,000 answered prayer requests. 50,000. Some of them he said most of them were immediate. Like he would pray and there would be this immediate answer. He wrote these down. 50,000 of those things. And he said, I don't have any money. I don't have any power. I only have God's promises. Apparently that's enough. Apparently that's enough. I just thought it'd be good if we'd pause and pray together for the Lord to just press his word into our hearts. That we get to celebrate you as our Father. And we pray that today as we as we hold your actual words, that you would give us a love for this communication, that we would honor you by believing, that we would honor you by obeying what you've asked us to do and what you've shown us, that we would build our lives on your truth. Lord, I pray for those who today are struggling with belief. They've got doubts. Maybe they were in a university that kind of went a whole different direction and planted all kinds of seeds of doubts and made them believe that nothing that they've learned was ever true. I pray that you would, Lord, show up in a very, very real way for them today. Thank you that you still show up, that you still answer prayers, that your Holy Spirit is still here. And I pray that if somebody's here today and they've had just a real gap in their relationship with you, maybe they maybe they've wandered away from your word because they made a mistake or they were disappointed by somebody else's mistake. So they stopped looking at it like Israel. They lost the word. It was just such a, it was just such an indication of their spiritual condition. Lord, I pray that you would put this word right back at the center for us. As a church, as we get ready for a new season of expansion, continuing to reach people in our community, I pray that we would never lose sight of your word as the guiding force, as the north star for us, individually and as a church. Lord, I pray for the person who's here online or here in person right now that doesn't yet know you as their Savior. They've never taken to heart the words of John chapter 3, verse 16, for this is how God loved the world. He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his world son into the world, not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. Lord, I pray for those who are ready to say yes to you. And if you're here and you've never said yes to Jesus and you don't know how you would answer the question, Are you a child of God? The beautiful news is that Jesus said, if anyone receives me, I'm gonna give them the power to become the children of God. He said, just receive. So I want to ask you to open your heart, to say yes to Jesus right now, online and in person. You can just tell them this, Jesus, I give you my life. Thank you for saving me. I believe in you, your life, your death on the cross, and your resurrection. Forgive me of my sins. Fill me with your Holy Spirit, lead me and teach me to follow you. I ask it in Jesus' name.