Fierce Church Sermons

When the Wait is ALMOST Over | Year One

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0:00 | 35:26

2026 isn’t just another year.

It’s Year One. 🚀

Last year, we shared a 15-year vision for what God could build through Fierce Church—a place where:
✨ People encounter Jesus in life-changing ways
📈 Leaders are developed and sent
🌎 Innovation reaches people online
✝️ Jesus stays at the center of every strategy

But here’s the tension:
God does not hand big futures to unchanged people.

In Daniel 9, Jerusalem was available to reclaim—but the people hadn’t changed. And Daniel wasn’t celebrating. He was mourning. Praying. Fasting. Asking God for a breakthrough not just in circumstances—but in hearts.

This message isn’t just about church growth.
It’s about personal growth.

Because what’s the use of stepping into a new season if we’re the same people?

✨ In this sermon:
Why vision without repentance leads nowhere
Why spiritual maturity matters more than opportunity
How to prepare your life for the future God wants to give you
Why breakthrough begins with prayer

If this is Year One, then change starts now.

🙏 Take a moment and ask God: What needs to change in me?
💬 Comment “Year One” if you’re committed to growth
🔔 Subscribe as we step into this next chapter together

👉 Watch more messages here:
https://www.youtube.com/@FierceChurch

Let’s not just dream big futures.
Let’s become the people who can carry them. 🔥

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, I think this is going to be really relevant for some folks, whether you are right here in the room or you're watching online or you're listening later on, if you've asked for some big things, if you've asked for God to do some things for you in your life, I think it's really important as we start this particular message to understand this is going to land best on the ears of those who understand that God is a gracious God and loves them, that Jesus Christ is their very best friend, and he not only loves them, but he likes them. That'll help you hear this the right way, okay? Um always, always, always, the backdrop is that Jesus is for you and he wants the greatest things in the world for you. We're gonna read some Old Testament scriptures today, and sometimes you read an Old Testament scripture and it sounds like a prophet is just yelling, and you can think, is he talking to me? Like, is this about me? If the Bible's to me, is the prophet yelling at me right now? Is he just mad at my sin? And that's not the case. Um, those were specific things written to a specific people at a specific time. But I want you to understand today that the the heart of Jesus Christ toward us is there is no condemnation for those that are in Christ. Um, he'd die all over again for you if if he needed to. Um, and so you are welcome in here, you are loved in here by him. We're going into a what I would just call a sequel series. We're going into the sequel of the 15-year vision that we actually started last year. I don't know if y'all remember this. We took about five months, and as a church, we said, we're gonna give our hearts to fasting and prayer, and we're gonna ask God, would you reveal what is your mission for us over the next 15 years? What are the things that you've uniquely equipped us to do that we probably should be doing in order to see your most fruitful church that we could possibly be? And we took that time, and then at the end of that, we did some surveying and we found out from people, hey, what did you feel like the Lord was laying on your heart? And we we talked about this about a year ago. We put all these together and there's some priorities that were laid out. Well, now this is if if we were looking last year for what is the 15-year vision, 2026 is the first year. So this is year one. And I want to just remind you, here's what we said. I've never put it in this uh in this form before, but this is essentially the new fierce vision statement. Here's what we found out. Over the next 15 years, we believe God is calling us to join him in building a church marked by affectionate, Christ-centered, high challenge teaching. Notice a couple things right there. We're gonna pause right there. It's high challenge teaching, meaning, in other words, it's gonna take the Bible at its word. When the Lord's like, hey man, no, I'm serious about this, we're gonna take it seriously. But it's always in a context of it's uh it's from an affectionate God. It's from God who loves us and it's always Christ-centered. That's why we say right on the door doors out there, this is all about Jesus. It's gonna always be all about Jesus for us. And we feel like the Lord's deposited something in us that He's enabled us, anointed us to be able to speak truth in hopefully affectionate ways that are understood, uh, that make the heart of God more clear. Not only that, a culture of audacious prayer and fasting. That's how we started this was audacious prayer and fasting. And that's really what I'm gonna invite you into into the next three weeks. As we start year one, we're gonna go back to prayer and fasting. Now, last year it was about discovery. It was about, hey, what can we find out about what God wants us to do? This year, it's about foundation. It's about saying we want to make sure not only that we ask God for the right things, but that we are the right people as He might do that. Relentless, uh, uh audacious prayer and fasting, a relentless commitment to reaching people in new ways, both in person and through digital mission. It's not new that things change, but it just seems that things are ramping up all the time. Right? So, like, even since COVID, there's been so many new technologies that have been formulated, and we want to be a church. It's an ethic, really. We're saying, hey, whatever comes out next, whatever the new stuff is, after AI or new versions of AI, whatever it is, we're not gonna put our heads in the sand and not and be afraid of it. We're gonna say, we're to leverage this for the kingdom of Jesus Christ. However, however, we can figure that out, we're gonna help people know through that medium Jesus is the master that loves you, that died for you, and is going to have an eternally reigning kingdom. And by the way, you're invited. We're gonna do everything we can to always be flowing with those times to make that message loud and clear so people's ears are there to hear it. By the way, you don't have to wait until I'm actually end of the message all the way before you say, Amen. You can start anytime you want. Um, it works just as well. We'll invest deeply in the next generation. We'll invest deeply in the next generation. We learned last year, and we've always thought this, but it was reconfirmed. God cares about the next generation coming up. And what we want to do is as soon as possible, we want to hand the keys to the younger ones coming up and say, You're not the future church, you're the church right now. And we want to equip you and empower you to get in the game, live for your king, and start as young as possible. We want to identify leadership gifts and get them in the river so that they are doing it as fast as possible. We need to invest money into that. We need to invest volunteer resources in that. But whatever we do, we're going to do that. We're going to make it about the next generation. We're going to raise up a diverse and scalable leadership pipeline and pioneer bold, creative pathways that invite more people to the Feast of Jesus. That leadership pipeline, we've actually already started that. That's there's a V1 that started during January. During January, we've got about 20 new leaders that are going through that. They're being raised up and injected with the fierce DNA. And after that, we're going to have another one, and you might get invited to that, or you can let me know if you want to go to that. But we're going to keep uh engineering this leadership pipeline to get people to the place where they've got their gifts and they're operating in them, and they're doing so in such a way that they're feeling the fulfilled joy of Christ, and they're bringing his kingdom in a way that's effective because that's how we gifted them. That invite pathways that invite more people to the feast of Jesus. However, we do it, we're going to find pathways, but it's not to fierce. It's to the feast of Jesus. That's after we die. That that that's that's the thing in the future. That's where we're good. That's where all this is going, dude. Okay? It's not building a kingdom for us, it's building the kingdom of the Master. And it's not even just we're inviting folks to the feast, though we are, we're also inviting folks to feast on Jesus right here. See, Jesus wants to be our very food and drink. Jesus wants to be, we we we can keep growing in our relationship with the Lord to such a degree that it's like I'm I'm not just like getting principles or ideas. I'm feeding on the person, I'm enjoying the fellowship of Jesus. My heart is ablaze with fire. Every time I hear his word, I feel like I'm closer and closer and closer to him. I'm brimming over and overflowing with rivers of living water. That's where it is to feed on Jesus. And we want to tell everybody far and wide, it's it's not enough. It's not enough to just know what the Bible is or know what a quiet time is or know what a small group is. What is important is feeding on Jesus Himself because that's what your soul was made for. And that's what we're inviting everybody into. Good job on the amen. You're getting better. Let's keep going. But here's the thing: we're not trying to build a brand, we're trying to build a people. We're trying to build that's that's what the church is. It's really a people, it's not just a location, it's the people who are in any location that bow the knee to Jesus Christ. But here's what we're gonna find out if we're gonna have an audacious vision like that, we've got to take some cues. We're gonna take them from Daniel today, and we've got to remember that God does not hand big futures to unchanged people. God does not hand big futures to unchanged people. I don't know if you've asked him for anything medium or big lately, but I just want to encourage you, whatever's going on in your life, it's not just at your church, whatever's going on with you, God does not hand big futures to unchanged people. Sometimes the distance between us and the thing that we're after is not so much it's time or space, it's change. It's change that we embrace on the inside. It's it's ways to which we allow our hearts to be changed by God. So Daniel, Daniel's an old man now. Some of you remember Daniel. He was the guy that that interpreted the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar when he was young. He was the guy that was carted off to Babylon. He was just a young man. The Babylonians had broken in and they uh leveled Jerusalem and they'd taken everybody over to Babylon. And uh Daniel was one of the folks that was there, and he grew up through all this time. He's seen the entire Babylonian army, this just happened in our timeline right now, it fell. It was a superpower of the world, and it fell to the Persians. And so he's seen a governmental change. And now he's an old man, but he's still he's still a public official. And we find him studying the book of Jeremiah. See, you might think of Daniel like, oh, he's a prophet, like he sees angels, and he's probably off in the desert somewhere, like waiting on an angel. No, he's in the library, and he's reviewing the word of God that came through Jeremiah. That's where he's at. And as he's doing this, he's gonna be startled, and you're gonna see he's even gonna be panicked a little bit. Daniel chapter 9, verse 1. It was the first year of the reign of Darius the Mead, the son of Hasuar, uh Ahasuerus. That's really Xerxes. Okay, when we talked about Xerxes in the book of Esther, the husband of Esther, the Greek version of that word of Ahashuarus is Xerxes. I didn't want to have to always say Ahashuarus, so I chose to use Xerxes instead, because that's the translation I saw, so I wouldn't have to say that. But that's who it is, just so you know. This is that's Esther's husband. Okay, so the the offspring of him, who became king of the Babylonians, during the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, learned from reading the Word of God. He didn't just go off any kind of prophetic communications that he had, he was into God's word, as revealed through the prophet Jeremiah the prophet, that Jerusalem must lie desolate for 70 years. Okay, it's been lying desolate now for about 66 years. The year is about 539 BC. It's been about 66 years, which means it's between four and five years away when this time is supposed to be up, when the 70 years will have Evan. Where they're they were exiled, that means that they were forcibly removed from their country and taken into another country. And that was supposed to last for 70 years according to this prophecy from Jeremiah. And now he says, Oh, there's only a little bit of time left in that 70 years. So I turned, verse 3, to the Lord and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting. I also wore rough burlap and sprinkled myself with ashes. Okay, so here's like a he's a governmental guy, right? So this guy would normally, like in our day, he'd wear a suit. Like he's he's he's a guy that has a lot of power, he's a guy that has fine, probably very nice clothes, and yet he puts on mourning clothes. That's what that was. It symbolizes not only that he's mourning, but also humiliation. It's a theological idea that he's brace, he's embracing. He's humbling himself. And we might ask, why is he doing that? Why is he breaking into fasting? I mean, I would think I'm here, oh, the 70 years is almost up. Okay, so pack our bags, right? Like we're almost done here. Is there, you know, I'm gonna go online and try to get some real estate over in Jerusalem and see what I can do. I know this thing is coming to an end. I'm ready to get out. Jail time's almost up. We're about to go. I'm gonna make sure my ride is here when I get out of this place. But that's not what he's doing at all. He's panicked. Why is he panicked? Well, if you're looking at it like a jail sentence, you might think, yeah, he's just he's just gonna get out. But that's not how he's looking at it. He's looking at it as a covenant that was made between God and the people of Israel, which is a relational agreement that has certain stipulations. Okay, and the stipulations, it was a contract, it was a treaty, and it said, Hey, I will keep you in security, I'll keep all your crops going well, and I'll keep you blessed, and no countries are ever gonna be able to invade you as long as you keep following my commands and don't turn aside to follow other gods. As long as you do that, you get to stay in the land. So it's like God is a landlord, and here's here's the contract. You get to stay in in the in the home, in the apartment, in the house as long as you want, unless you have a breach of contract. If you have a breach of contract, you're being evicted. And that's what happened to the Israelites. They were evicted. That would and that was the promise the whole time. That's what would happen, and that's what happened, that's what did happen. Jeremiah prophesied, this is gonna be 70 years that this will take place. And yet, Daniel's concerned. He's torn up about he's praying and fasting, throwing ashes on his head. Let's learn a little bit more, starting in verse 11. He's praying, all Israel has disobeyed your instruction and turned away, refusing to listen to your voice. So now, the solemn curses and judgments written in the law of Moses, he's referring specifically to Deuteronomy 18, which defines all kinds of, here's all the ways God will bless you if you obey, and here's all the curses that will follow. Here's the eviction notice if you don't obey. He says, So now the solemn curses and judgments written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured down on us because of our sin. You have kept your word and done to us and our rulers exactly as you warned. Never has there been such a disaster as happened in Jerusalem. It all came to pass. And so here we are, Daniel, he's got a few years left in exile with all of his people. And he has a warning for us. For those of us who ask for big things, for those of us who feel like I feel like there's only a little bit of distance between this and what I really want. And Daniel has a warning, and it's this when the wait is almost over, number one, fear to not have changed. When the wait is almost over, fear to not have changed. That's what he says in verse 13. Every curse written against us in the law of Moses has come true. Yet, somebody say yet. Yet we have refused to seek mercy from the Lord our God by turning from our sins and recognizing his truth. Therefore, the Lord has brought upon us the disaster that he prepared. The Lord our God was right to do all these things, for we did not obey him. Here's Daniel. And he's looking at the fact that this exile is nearing a close, and he's saying, first of all, God was righteous to do this, to kick us out of the land. That's exactly he's just keeping his word. He's a God of integrity. He's doing exactly what he said he would do. But as he looks at the 70 years almost up and he sees this change coming, he says, uh-oh. Our hearts haven't really changed much at all. We haven't we're not any different than we were. So if, in other words, if we remain unchanged and we go back to the land, God will just reinforce his covenant again and we'll get kicked out again. It doesn't matter if we just go back, it's not just about geographical relocation. There's been no heart renovation. And so, therefore, what's the use of even going back? Because we are yet unchanged as a people. Time served does not necessarily equal a changed heart. And God does not hand big futures to unchanged people. So, what are we doing? Are we asking God for stuff? Are we asking God for the easier route? Are we asking God to come through with the thing that we want? Or are we saying, I do want that God, but it doesn't do it doesn't do any good for me to come out of exile, to come out of a hard place if I haven't been changed while I was in here? It doesn't make any sense to go back. Because I could just get kicked out again. I can be brought into something where my character can't keep me there anyway. We can spend a lot of time praying for a better situation without realizing that no, dude, there's still stuff in us that needs to change. Are we hearing this today? Are we hearing how this is relevant to us? You can you can be ready to come out of jail, but if you didn't have any internal rehabilitation, you might just end up right back where you were. So, in other words, if you're praying to be an influencer to have a lot of influence over people, but you're still living two different lives. I mean, it might even happen, but don't expect God to be upholding that thing. Because that isn't a heart change, that's that's a lack of integrity. If you are maybe one who might be more inclined, you might find yourself you usually are rehearsing other people's sins more than confessing your own. You might find that it's hard to hang on to any kind of reward or blessing for making it through the exile because your character can't keep you there. When the wait is almost over, fear to not have changed. And then number two, turn and plead. Turn and plead, or really make an emotional appeal with prayer and fasting. Verse three, so I turned to the Lord, God, and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting. Daniel said, Lord, we gotta start with me. Now, what I like about this is, dude, Daniel's like one of the he's hard to like pin any sin on. Like, of course he was a sinner, but you think about people like Moses, you think about people like Abraham, you think about people like David, they're their their whole story is riddled with like, and then they did this dumb thing and it was ridiculous. And Daniel's one of these ones that there's really nothing about that. Like he only pretty much, we only have record of him doing mostly the right thing. And yet he owns this with his people. He says, God, let's start with me. Reveal our sin, expose my heart. I need to repent, I need to humble myself. And he goes into fasting. Fasting means we temporarily give up food for the sake of focusing on prayer and really on focusing on drawing near to the Lord. So I showed you this um image probably about a year ago or more. Here's some simplified fasting. What I'm gonna invite us to do over the next three weeks is I'm gonna ask you, if God should lead you, to pick a day or a meal however long you want. I suggest if you're new to it, you start small, you start easier. But you can go into a regular fast, which just means you're gonna fast for the most part from food. You might have juice, you might have broth or something like that, or do a partial fast. This is where you, it's kind of like a healthy diet, like you just get rid of all the junk that you normally would eat. Or a liquid fast. This is pretty much your only consuming liquids. You might do a full fast. I would encourage you don't do a full fast because Moses did it and Jesus did it and they survived, but it's really not good for you. So you should just not and have some juice or have some coffee, like have stuff with it. You could have a sexual fast. Yep. Nothing more to say about that. Um, or you could fast from worldly desires. This is like social media or chocolate or whatever the thing is that you kind of like crave, that's what it'd be a fast of. Really, all you want to do is make sure that you're led by God. You don't have to overdo it, but when you do it, you're adding an element throughout that meal or throughout that day of saying, God, would you come? I'm humbling myself with this. I'm first of all recognizing you are my food, not anything else. Yeah, first and foremost. But second of all, I'm asking for you to reveal what is going on in me that as of yet is unrenovated, that would keep me, even if I got the thing I want, I really can't keep it because I don't have the character formed yet. I'm not broken in that area. So for the next three weeks, we're gonna go into that and I'll explain how we're gonna do that near the end. But here's number three. So turn and plead, and then number three, confess corporately. That means as a group. But we have sinned, verse five, but we have sinned and done wrong. We have rebelled against you and scorned your commands and your regulations. It's so common in our time to not take the blame for anything. You know this, right? It's easy, just whatever you're seeing, whatever you're watching, whatever you're talking to, they're like, it was them. It was their dumb moves, it's their fault. That's why it is that way. Don't look at us, don't look at me. I didn't do it. It's all the boneheaded decisions they made before I got here. But Daniel takes the shame upon himself. He says, No, I was a part of this. Verse 7, Lord, you are right, but as you see, our faces are covered with shame. This is true of all of us, including the people of Judah and Jerusalem and all Israel, scattered near and far, wherever you have driven us, because of our disloyalty to you. Oh Lord, we and our kings, princes, and ancestors are covered with shame because we've sinned against you. Oh my God, lean down and listen to me. Open your eyes and see our despair. What is he despairing of? Not that they're in exile, but that they're in exile unchanged, and there's only like four years left. You know how it feels like when you wake up and you realize I'm supposed to be at work in ten minutes? That's how it feels a little bit to Daniel. He's like, We're almost, I'm almost supposed to be there, and we haven't even started repenting yet. That's where he's at. We make this plea, not because we deserve help. Here it is, and this is why it's so awesome. Not because we deserve help, but because of your mercy. He says, God, um I don't think you should just take us back because the time's up. I'm not saying, God, that, hey, lesson learned now. Now we get it, so let's go ahead and go back there, God. That's not what he's saying. He's not saying, um, hey, we're promising from here on out, though, God, we're gonna be good. He doesn't necessarily think that at all. In fact, he seems to think the opposite. Instead, he says, I'm asking you to do this because you are merciful, because of your great name, for the sake of you and your promise. That's why I'm asking you to give us a broken heart, not because we deserve it. So that maybe falls to us, but can we consider that maybe some of the delays and the difficulties that keep us from getting where we're trying to get are because we have been disloyal to the Lord in different ways. Let me give you some lists of stuff. Let me just point out some things that the New Testament alone says are evil, and that we we don't need to doubt the love of God, we don't have to think worried that He's gonna throw a lightning bolt at us, but he wants us to agree with him. When he says something is evil, we say yes, it is evil. Here's just some things I've got like 70 here, but here I'll just read. Hardness of heart, hatred, lack of forgiveness, self-righteousness, love of the praise of people, sensuality, lustful looking, corrupting talk, divisive speech, boasting, flattery for gain, withholding reconciliation, failure to submit to authority when it's biblical, serving money, legalism, yikes, loving the world, adding to the gospel, cowardice, laziness, favoritism toward people, hoarding wealth, showing partiality, preaching another gospel, abandoning sound doctrine, twisting scripture, all those things are things that if we ask the Lord and many others, he might show us, you're thinking of the big ones, but I'm asking to look in on the little ones, because there might be bacteria that when you expose it to light, this is how it works with UV rays and in hospitals, they'll expose some bacteria to UV rays and it it kills them, it damages their DNA and it dies. That's what we're doing. When we expose ourselves, we open ourselves, we're fasting, we say, God, bring your light, show me, show me what's here that needs to die that I'm not even thinking about. But it goes beyond that. It goes to the church itself because he's repenting for the people of God. And my friends, we want to, over the next three weeks, we're asking God, would you bring conviction to us? Because we're asking for a church-sized vision. We're asking for a church-sized return from exile. We're asking you for big things, but would you expose anything in our church, in the foundation? See, we can build a foundation, but if there's termites in the foundation, that's gonna be some pretty wobbly stuff, man. We want to scour away everything that might wound or damage that foundation so we can keep on building or God can keep on building, and it's blessed and it's not gonna wobble and it's not gonna fall down. What that means is as much as possible, we need to see, God, we repent for the sins of not just our church, but any church. The church in the United States, the church in this time, the church in the world. Let me read some church sins. Are you ready? These are all from the book of Revelation. You remember when Jesus speaks to all these churches in the book of Revelation? These are the kinds of things that he said they were not doing right. And we're a church, so we can probably apply some of them to us. Loss of first love, cultural compromise, false teaching, tolerating false teachers, idolatry, sexual immorality, refusal to repent, spiritual deadness, reputation without reality, incomplete obedience. Incomplete. And Jesus condemns that. Lack of vigilance, lukewarm faith. Is that possible in any church in the United States? Lukewarm faith? I I suppose. Self-sufficiency, spiritual blindness, spiritual poverty, complacency, all these things. We want to take some time individually and then next week and say, God, we repent for the state of the church. We repent for everything that's ever gotten wrong. We repent for the things we've allowed in our time. We repent for the things that maybe have happened here, maybe happened here 20 years ago, but happened anywhere. We want to say, Jesus, we want a heart change. We don't want the church to remain the way it is. We don't want to go back prematurely. We want to be the real thing. Well then something amazing happens before Daniel is even done praying. Verse 21, as I was praying, as I was praying, Gabriel. Gabriel's an angel, he's already seen Gabriel once. Gabriel, whom I'd seen it in the earlier vision, came swiftly to me at the time of the evening sacrifice. Now that's that's kind of like cute, sad, like cool. The evening sacrifice. That's how Daniel is keeping time. There's no evening sacrifice. Jerusalem is a crater. There's no sacrifices happening anywhere. But even though he lives in a pagan land and has lived there most of his life, he's keeping time according to God's timetable. Are we hearing this? So he's like, my culture doesn't matter. Whatever's happening in the timetable of the world that you see around you, whatever they're like, this is important right now. Blessed are those who say, What's really important is what's on heaven's timetable, what's on heaven's clock. That's what I'm thinking about. That's what we want to be concerned about. And that's what Daniel's concerned about. Verse 22, he explained to me, Daniel, I've come here to give you insight and understanding. And that's what we're asking for over the next three weeks. God, give us insight and understanding into our own hearts, into the heart of the state of the church. The moment you begin praying, a command was given. And now I'm here to tell you what it was for you, are very precious to God, so that you can understand the meaning of your vision. And then he busts into a very famous messianic prophecy. A period of 70 sets of Daniel, you're thinking in like the 70-year window, but I've got a wider view than that. That's one little wheel inside a mega watch. I'm gonna expand your view and tell you about 70 sets of seven have been decreed for your people and your holy city to finish, no, listen to this, to finish their rebellion, to put an end to their sin, to atone for their guilt. That's removing some stuff. And then three more to bring in everlasting righteousness, to confirm the prophetic vision, such as when Jesus walked with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and he started with Moses and went all the way through to the prophets, and he taught them how all of this was always about me, and to anoint the most holy place. Daniel's thinking 70 years, and he says, No, no, it's it's much larger than 70 years, it's 490 years, seven times 70, and then there's a few more verses where he gives a few more years in there, and it all leads up to right about the time of you know who, Jesus Christ. Who in history could this possibly be about? To finish their rebellion. That means not just to like squelch it or minimize it, to finish it. It is finished on the cross, to uh to put an end to sin. Not just to get a little better so you can go back into land, no, to put it to end completely. It is bought and paid for, to atone for guilt. That means to make up for it with a sacrifice that is substitutionary, to bring an everlasting righteousness, to confirm the prophetic vision, to anoint the most holy place. These are all about Jesus. And so God is saying through the angel to Daniel, you're thinking in 70 years, dude, you're thinking about relocating back to Jerusalem. Daniel, I'm thinking way bigger than this. I'm thinking of a way cooler plan that requires a much deeper work, and that is the salvation of the very world and the renovation of the heart. That's what God's about. Because he says, See, Daniel, you you see it from your perspective right now. It's true. You are a people that have been in exile, but everybody's in exile. Everybody's in the exile of sin, and they're separated and cut off from their God who loves them. And the only way back, Daniel, it's gonna happen hundreds of years from now. But Jesus Christ is gonna be born, he's gonna walk in every day, he's gonna obey completely. Every place you guys mess up, he's not gonna mess up. And then he's gonna be falsely accused. He's the most innocent person, and the worst thing is gonna happen to him. He's gonna be publicly executed and murdered, and he's gonna bleed all of his blood, and I'm gonna take that and apply it to all the people who will trust me to end sin and make righteousness permanent and confirm the prophetic vision about Jesus. Why? Because just as he said, Daniel, you're very precious to the Lord. My friends, the reason Jesus came was sent by the Father. The Father so loved that he sent his only son. The father looked at you and loved you, and he said, Oh, I know that they're in exile. I know that that sin has kept them away from me, but I so love them, son. I'm sending you to tear down that wall because they're my precious. They're the apple of my eye. Can you receive that today? You are the apple of God's eye, and you have the proof in Jesus Christ and the fact that he fulfilled his mission. So maybe what we need to do as we begin this year one of the 15-year vision is to desire a deeper work. We don't just want stuff from God. We don't just want God to do stuff for us individually or corporately. We want God to do a deeper work. So we want to ask the question. Is it possible that sometimes I'm asking for a solution, but I'm not asking the deeper question that would actually provide the solution? Is it possible that as I'm praying for my life and my church and the world, I'm praying for something easy. Something like, oh, that this is easier on me, God. Thank you. I'm relieved now. Whew, I feel better. How often are we praying for relief? And God says, ask deeper. Ask for the surgery for me to go in and scour out the plaque around your internal organs and get it out. So I can make you who you were made to be, not just someone who's abundantly blessed, but someone who is abundantly blessed on the inside and is all that I envisioned for them to be. Someone who, if you attend Fierce Church or any other church, God has gone down to the foundations and he's removing all the termites so that whatever he builds is strong. And so here's the invitation. For the next three weeks, we're gonna start on week one. And we're gonna ask, God, would you search me? This week I'm asking you to pray. If you're led to fast, to fast. At some point, if you want to fast with the elders tonight, we do it on Wednesdays. So you're welcome to join us. But what we're asking specifically for week one is, God, would you search me? Psalm 139, search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in me and lead me in a way everlasting. God, reveal my hidden sin and my hidden pride and my hidden foolishness. Show it to me. Show me my motives. Show it to me, God. And you never know, God might just come just like that, just like he sent Gabriel. It was like before he was even done praying, I've came to give you understanding. Well, you know, it might take longer than that, but it might be. God loves to be asked this kind of thing, man. He might just answer you that week quickly. And then the next week, cleanse me. First John 1 9. For if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins. Anything that we find down there. He says, I'll forgive it, and I'll purify you from all unrighteousness. And we're gonna confess specifically, not generally, and we're gonna confess for the church. And then week three, we're gonna do it again. Or say, God, would you lead us? Psalm 143, 10. You are my God. Show me what you want me to do, and let your gentle spirit lead me in the right path. Have you wondered at all what does God want you to do? We're gonna go ask, we're gonna go find out, and we're to wait on him, and we're to humble ourselves just like Daniel, because God does not hand big futures to unchanged people. Let's bow our heads. Your plan spans the ages. And like we can't figure out tomorrow afternoon, and you've got these millennia-long plans. You're just so big, and you're so mercifully and intimately involved with each one of us. We're just so thankful for that, God. And while there are places where we still love our sin, we also, like Daniel, oh God, we want heart renovation. We want to love other things, and and you're the only one who can make us do that. And so we're inviting you into this process over the next few weeks, at the very beginning of year one. God, would you clean out and stabilize and strengthen the foundation so we can be a people unto the Lord and we can live for the glory of your praise in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, folks, that's all the time we have, but thank you so much for listening to this sermon. If you got a lot out of this, feel free to share this with somebody who might need it. Also, there's a ton more content on our website, on our YouTube channel, on our Instagram channel, on our TikTok channel. Feel free to check all that kind of a thing out. Also, if you're interested in leadership type stuff, go ahead and check out another podcast or any other blogs or videos or anything over at BibleLeadership.com. And whatever else you do, make sure that you believe God for something big today.