SPEAKER_00: How's everybody today?
SPEAKER_00: Hey, great to see y'all.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all uh we had a good crowd today.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all y'all heard I was gonna miss again, and so you felt it was safe to come, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's what I get right there.
SPEAKER_00: That's good.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, I appreciate uh Matt and Dave filling in for me.
SPEAKER_00: It's always great when they fill in, and it's always a blessing for y'all to tell me how great they are, right?
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for that.
SPEAKER_00: No, we do appreciate them, and it's fun the Chaffee campus.
SPEAKER_00: Uh boy, we've had a great start out there.
SPEAKER_00: Praise the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're averaging a hundred or more.
SPEAKER_00: Uh last week was 94.
SPEAKER_00: Lots of people return visitors.
SPEAKER_00: We've had uh multiple folks join over this week, and we've got other meetings this week with folks we're meeting with, so it's been really fun.
SPEAKER_00: And uh people have asked me about the preaching and load and all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I've told them, look, we we got more than enough preachers here with Dave and Matt around, and and I can always go to a number of our Sunday school teachers.
SPEAKER_00: We got some great Sunday school teachers as well, so it's uh it's really good, and uh so we're really set up well to handle it, and everybody's been great, and uh visitors are having a really good time, I think, and a great spirit there, and great service here on Sunday, and a lot of visitors were following up here as well.
SPEAKER_00: So it's really wonderful.
SPEAKER_00: I think we baptized three weeks in a row, uh, four out of five, I believe.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're working on another baptism in two weeks, and a few other folks are discussing, and so it God is really good to see him doing things at church.
SPEAKER_00: So, and he's good on Tuesdays, right?
SPEAKER_00: So let me pray for us and we'll get started.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for today.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for these men, a chance for us to be together and encourage each other on a Tuesday, uh kind of approaching the midpoint of the week, and just a great time for us to come together and build each other up and encourage each other.
SPEAKER_00: So we pray you'll bless our time together today, that you will teach us from your word.
SPEAKER_00: We pray, Father, that you will bless those who prepared lunch for us.
SPEAKER_00: We are so grateful for what they do and how they make it an enjoyable part of our Tuesday time together.
SPEAKER_00: Bless us now as we now come to your word.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you for Jesus' salvation in his name, what that means to us today, in his name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: And everybody said, Amen.
SPEAKER_00: So, uh, this is kind of what I want to talk about today.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of something that God laid on my heart this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I've just been kind of percolating over some issues the last couple of weeks, and uh just society kind of issues and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: And uh it's interesting, I'm not a TikTok guy, and I'm really not a social media guy much.
SPEAKER_00: But my daughter has gotten me on TikTok just for this reason.
SPEAKER_00: She has uh been doing this deal where she sells toys, so she does these little videos with our grandson, Killy, and he's 21 months, and so you'll get these toys and they'll play with them, and she'll talk about this is what they learn and this is how it helps them learn and that kind of a deal.
SPEAKER_00: And so she's really been kind of hitting it pretty well.
SPEAKER_00: She's got a lot of people following her, and I get on there because I get to watch him do stuff, right?
SPEAKER_00: So I'm on there as granddad.
SPEAKER_00: Now, she also's teaching me these things.
SPEAKER_00: So you get on there, and she's the only person I follow on TikTok.
SPEAKER_00: So I've just got one thing that I follow, and I'm still not even sure how to navigate it very well.
SPEAKER_00: So I follow her and I'm hitting like because I'm trying to support what she's doing, and she'll say, Dad, you have to watch all the way to the end of the video before you hit like so that it influences the algorithm.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, okay.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm watching her little thing, and then she's got these makeup videos.
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I'm just not watching your makeup videos.
SPEAKER_00: Like, just get over it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm watching my grandson.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm watching him on there.
SPEAKER_00: But what happens is the algorithm, I don't know how it picks what it sends to you, but it sends you all these strange, weird things, right?
SPEAKER_00: So here I am, I'm watching Toys for Toddlers.
SPEAKER_00: That's the only thing I'm feeding into the algorithm, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's the only thing I'm here to like.
SPEAKER_00: And I get somehow it knows I'm a pastor or something, I have no idea, but I get all this whole steady stream of videos the last two mornings.
SPEAKER_00: I have my quiet time, I work on my sermon.
SPEAKER_00: I'm uh I start at about 5 or 5.15 every morning, and I'm working through all that for a couple hours, and then I'll take a minute just to detox and kind of like like my grandson's videos.
SPEAKER_00: The last two days I've been getting all this stuff about deconstructing your faith.
SPEAKER_00: And it's just flooding this stuff, and it's everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: And if you are familiar with that, what is it's like the cool term that people try to give to basically disbelieving Jesus and Scripture, and they call it deconstructing their faith because what happens is they're mad about something their parents made them do, or they're mad about something that they went to church with, or they've just found out, oh, you know, I'd like to go do drugs or sleep with my boyfriend or some kind of a deal, and then they deconstruct their faith.
SPEAKER_00: They go back and they reunpack things in Scripture to try to justify what they want to do.
SPEAKER_00: Does it make sense?
SPEAKER_00: If you've heard of this deconstructing your faith, it's a big movement, it's kind of a watchword that, you know, Gen Zers and millennials think is cool or whatever, and it makes it sound intellectual.
SPEAKER_00: And this morning there was this whole run of pastors and pastors' wives and all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's like, really?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they'll say stuff and it's just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they say ridiculous things.
SPEAKER_00: And why don't you just be honest and say you reject Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can't make it up and make it your own thing.
SPEAKER_00: It is what it is, right?
SPEAKER_00: Scripture is what it is.
SPEAKER_00: And they'll even bootstrap all these weird historical arguments, like I heard some guy say Paul didn't write the letters to Timothy or something, and they get all this, and you're like, that's just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: I had one pastor who came on, he his intro is he's an expert in scripture and he's got all these degrees, and he unpacks scripture, so I'm gonna talk to you about this.
SPEAKER_00: And then he said, the Jewish people have always read the first three chapters of Genesis as an allegory.
SPEAKER_00: The Jewish people have.
SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, the ones that rejected Jesus, the ones that hung him on the cross and said he was a heretic, you mean the Jewish faith that doesn't believe in the New Testament and doesn't believe Jesus and doesn't believe the prophet is identified and all that.
SPEAKER_00: You're talking about that, you're talking about that's where we're getting our interpretive theology from, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like we love our Jewish people, and the Bible tells us we're to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and all that, but uh, and praise the Lord for peace that's you know, costages come home and all that.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm like, really, you're interpreting the New Testament and you're going to do it by people who are not followers of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Like, what are, like, did you just hear that for a minute?
SPEAKER_00: But I'm telling you, they are all on there proud of their videos, and they were all on there talking about it, and it is a movement all around.
SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about Charlie Kirk, one of the things that Charlie Kirk was doing was attacking that whole deconstruction movement, right?
SPEAKER_00: So I'm I've been working over this, praying over this for a few weeks, and just the last two days, I've just been inundated with these things, and I'm thinking, okay, there's nothing about me liking toddler toys that should make those come up on my feet.
SPEAKER_00: God must want me to deal with that somehow.
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're doing today.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to talk to you about just a minute.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we live in this information age, and there is so much information like that.
SPEAKER_00: Even if you don't have a grandson or a great-grandson on TikTok, that stuff is everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: It's just all over everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: It's being inundated.
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot like Paul told Timothy, there will be a day when people pile up for themselves preachers who just tickle their ears and tell them what they want to hear.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's almost like we're really seeing that play itself out.
SPEAKER_00: So, what I want to talk about is navigating the false information age.
SPEAKER_00: There is so much false information out there.
SPEAKER_00: If you ever look at anything, Facebook, Instagram, any of that, everything is AI generated and all of it's bogus.
SPEAKER_00: Like none of it's true.
SPEAKER_00: I had a video come up that um, here's all the coaches that were fired.
SPEAKER_00: And none of the ones on that list have been fired.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, this is ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: One of them was the the guy at Notre Dame.
SPEAKER_00: Like, Notre Dame, why are they firing in their ranked?
SPEAKER_00: Why would they?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: All this stuff, and you're just inundated with all of it.
SPEAKER_00: AI is a mess.
SPEAKER_00: I know everybody's investing in it, and all that kind of stuff is a mess.
SPEAKER_00: You Google stuff on AI and it comes up with all these weird answers and all that.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just a we live in a time where all of this information is flowing and nobody has a grid or a process to evaluate all of that, and how do I understand and stick with truth?
SPEAKER_00: And so as I was praying through that, I kept coming back to this passage of scripture in 1 John.
SPEAKER_00: And we have it on the screen.
SPEAKER_00: If you have a sheet in front of you, you have that.
SPEAKER_00: What he's been talking about here is exactly that how to evaluate our faith.
SPEAKER_00: So if you go through the first part of this chapter, if you're a follower of Christ, you'll love the light, hate the darkness.
SPEAKER_00: If you're a follower of Christ, you'll love your brother, you won't hate people.
SPEAKER_00: If you're a follower of Christ, you'll keep the commands of Scripture, you'll not disobey the commands of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So he has been trying to create a way for us to evaluate and understand where we are in our faith journey and where we are in our walk.
SPEAKER_00: Then he explains that the Holy Spirit has been given to you as an anointing that guides you, protects you, and teaches you.
SPEAKER_00: And so now I'm just going to pick up this little section right here in the context of the overall chapter.
SPEAKER_00: What you have heard from the beginning must remain in you.
SPEAKER_00: And that's where he's been talking about scripture and if you're obeying scripture and what you've been heard as teaching in readings of scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the context of this passage.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to take it out of context.
SPEAKER_00: I just didn't want you to be here for four hours, right?
SPEAKER_00: So here's what he says: if what you have heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And this is the promise that he himself made to us, eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: I have written these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.
SPEAKER_00: That is what we're seeing in this false information age.
SPEAKER_00: All of these people coming up with their own theories about what they want to see and how it's supposed to happen and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: So he's telling us this is how you survive and navigate a false information time.
SPEAKER_00: So he says, the anointing you receive from him remains in you, and that's the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And that chapter, if you read through there, that is the Holy Spirit He's referring to.
SPEAKER_00: The anointing you receive from Him remains in you, and you don't need anyone to teach you.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, his anointing teaches you about all things and is true and is not a lie, just as He has taught you, remain in Him.
SPEAKER_00: So He's telling us this is how we remain in our faith, how we not fall away, how we not get deceived by people who are trying to deceive us, how we even understand truth.
SPEAKER_00: When the Holy Spirit speaks to us, what He says is truth.
SPEAKER_00: He is speaking truth to us.
SPEAKER_00: So let me just kind of give you a couple of things here to think about.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it'll help you process some of this.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, the dangers of the information age.
SPEAKER_00: It is dangerous when all of this information is flooding at us and everyone acts like an expert or a act like their opinion is grounded in experiences that matter or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: All of these preachers I'm seeing, they're coming on telling me about their degrees and they're studying and they're all this kind of business, and then it's just a mess.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it what they're saying what they're saying doesn't even make sense.
SPEAKER_00: If like you step back from your narcissistic sort of construct that you've got to prove what you want to prove, if you just step back with an objective ear and listen to that for 30 seconds, what you're saying is dumb.
SPEAKER_00: It's not even intelligent, right?
SPEAKER_00: But you got this narcissistic, this is the way I want, and so I'm gonna drive scripture through this thing.
SPEAKER_00: And so you got all these people telling you this stuff, and and John warns about that.
SPEAKER_00: There are people trying to deceive you.
SPEAKER_00: We saw that right here in the scripture.
SPEAKER_00: He talks repeatedly about remaining in the Son and in the Father, that there is a danger for us if we are not engaged on purpose, intentionally, in a committed fashion in the Word of God, listening to the Holy Spirit teach us through our scripture as we're studying, what's going to happen is we're going to be susceptible to all this nonsense.
SPEAKER_00: And it is flooding everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: And now what you get, there are, even if you're not watching it, all the people around you are watching it, and they all got opinions and they want to talk about it, and so all this stuff just flows at us all the time.
SPEAKER_00: And so there is a real danger in a time like this when there is so much information coming at us.
SPEAKER_00: We have a tendency to just start dealing with the information rather than vetting the information, what's true about it, is this true, and processing all of that.
SPEAKER_00: And so they're telling us now our ability to provide information is doubling in a matter of months.
SPEAKER_00: Like literally, it's doubling in a matter of months.
SPEAKER_00: And AI has dramatically sped up the process.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not knocking AI, it's fine, I get technology and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: But what's happening is all AI does is a major souped-up search engine, and it goes out into the information that is out there in the universe already, and it pulls from all that and it synthesizes that with its artificial, you know, its programmed brain, and then once it synthesizes it, it hands it back to you.
SPEAKER_00: It does not have any filter to determine if the information that it pulled from was good or bad.
SPEAKER_00: There's no filter to determine, there's no way for it to know that it pulled false information or good information, it just pulled stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a lot of ways to use it in workplace and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00: If you have a database of information and it's this huge database of information, customer information, customer behaviors, all kinds of stuff like that, you can send an AI search engine into this universe and it will pull an incredible amount of information in a matter of seconds.
SPEAKER_00: So there's all kinds of cool, you know, uses of it.
SPEAKER_00: But when you just get on Google and Google lets it fly, and what you get back, you have no idea what it pulled from.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's just all kinds of danger in this stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Television is horrible, the junk that they like they don't know anything on any of that.
SPEAKER_00: And we're consuming this information, and it's just an incredibly dangerous time.
SPEAKER_00: It is so easy for something like the concept of deconstructing your faith to become a cultural movement that people think is cool and really gives them a hook to go, well, the Bible says that, but I don't like that.
SPEAKER_00: I want to do what I want to do, so now I found a way to rationalize it and justify it in my head.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says in the book of Jeremiah the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
SPEAKER_00: And when God speaks, he doesn't search for words.
SPEAKER_00: Last time I looked, lying, deceitfulness is a form of wickedness, right?
SPEAKER_00: So why does God repeat it?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's redundant to say the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, is it not?
SPEAKER_00: So I think God is trying to communicate something in that.
SPEAKER_00: He is communicating that the deceitfulness of the heart, the capacity for us to self-rationalize what we want to do and lie to ourselves to justify something that we want, is the leading indicator of the deceitfulness of the heart, the wickedness of the heart.
SPEAKER_00: And we see that, and you you play that out in society and you watch people construct these things in their minds.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's it's just unbelievable.
SPEAKER_00: There's a book that came out a few years ago in this deconstruction movement that people thought was wonderful or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: It's called Jesus and Walmart.
SPEAKER_00: Has anyone heard of this book?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus and Walmart.
SPEAKER_00: And the whole premise of it is how Walmart is a Christian organization, and Christians have adopted into Walmart, and we've used the success of Walmart and our love for Walmart to wed to our Christian whatever, and now we've turned Christianity into a consumer thing.
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, you know, I was an interim pastor in Bentonville, and what the church people in Bentonville told me was how liberal and woke Walmart is corporately.
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm not really sure, like, how do you get that book out of all?
SPEAKER_00: I'm not, I don't really understand this kind of a deal, you know, and so you get all this, and the people are just they're just dumping all this garbage, and you're like, what brain would come up with this idiotic kind of a thing?
SPEAKER_00: You get this idea now of Christian nationalism, y'all heard that?
SPEAKER_00: Like, you can't get anybody to tell you what that is.
SPEAKER_00: There's not a definition of that, but everybody's railing about it on television.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, you don't even know what that is.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that doesn't even make sense.
SPEAKER_00: That's like a nonsense.
SPEAKER_00: Well, this is what Christian nationalists think, and then they'll look, I'm like, I don't know a Christian anywhere that thinks that.
SPEAKER_00: Like, we're we have a pretty normal church.
SPEAKER_00: We have friends at several other normal churches in town.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know anybody that thinks that.
SPEAKER_00: Like, where did you come up with that stupid idea?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: But it is being flushed at us all the time.
SPEAKER_00: It's being flushed at your children, at your grandchildren, the people that you work with, and so it's really important that we not lose sight of how dangerous all that false information is.
SPEAKER_00: Not that we walk around afraid or whatever kind of thing, but we have to understand and have to have a filter to process what we're seeing and hearing.
SPEAKER_00: We have to have a way to do that.
SPEAKER_00: And scripture clearly warns God wants us to remain in Him.
SPEAKER_00: He wants us to walk with Him, He wants us to stay protected.
SPEAKER_00: He has provided us with tools in our spiritual walk for the purpose of remaining.
SPEAKER_00: That means we've got to pay attention to what would keep us from remaining.
SPEAKER_00: And then be focused on how to remain, which brings us to that next point.
SPEAKER_00: The discipline that protects us.
SPEAKER_00: It is the discipline that protects us.
SPEAKER_00: Now here's what he talks about.
SPEAKER_00: What you have heard from the beginning, verse 24, must remain in you.
SPEAKER_00: If what you have heard from the beginning remains in you, if it does, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And so he is talking about this remaining idea.
SPEAKER_00: It's the same kind of idea that John described in the teaching of Jesus in John 15, when he says, Abide in me, I and you, and you will bear much fruit.
SPEAKER_00: It's that same picture of walking with Jesus, of being in a relationship with him, and being consistent in that.
SPEAKER_00: This idea of remaining means I have planted myself in this.
SPEAKER_00: I am intentionally digging roots and staying in this relationship in a discipline that keeps me focused on Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It keeps me open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: I am taking the word of God, what you have heard from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot do this without the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons that this deconstruction movement is attacking the word of God, the veracity of the word of God, the truth of the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: They're attacking it like some guy wrote it and made an error, or this is not in it, or that shouldn't have been.
SPEAKER_00: All these different attacks on the word of God is because the Bible says Jesus told us you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
SPEAKER_00: And the truth is the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says by itself, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God will last forever.
SPEAKER_00: All scripture is given by inspiration of God.
SPEAKER_00: And it's profitable for all these aspects of remaining.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's a reason that the attack is always against the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: And so he says, What you've heard from me, you have built into your life this discipline of the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's just so vital, and it is so easy to get pulled away or distracted.
SPEAKER_00: Or it is so easy to turn it into a simplified version of how we need to be engaging.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Now I love devotional books.
SPEAKER_00: I love them.
SPEAKER_00: I use them, I move in and out of them and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: But the Christian life is more than just I read a page, have a cup of coffee, say a quick prayer, and then I'm on about my day.
SPEAKER_00: That's not remaining.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not even the purpose of why someone writes a devotion book.
SPEAKER_00: It's not to make it simple or water it down.
SPEAKER_00: It is an equipping matter, right?
SPEAKER_00: So when you use them, you should be engaged with the word and use it as a tool.
SPEAKER_00: And so what we want to do is think through what does it mean to remain in what we've heard.
SPEAKER_00: We want to be engaged in the word in a way that I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It's a yeah, it's just a child alert.
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad all of our phones have that.
SPEAKER_00: That's kind of cool, right?
SPEAKER_00: It is kind of cool.
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
SPEAKER_00: No, we get those regularly.
SPEAKER_00: We do, and that's good.
SPEAKER_00: Church, we also, you see, we mine went off too.
SPEAKER_00: We do that because we take care of kids, right?
SPEAKER_00: So we want to do that.
SPEAKER_00: So it's good.
SPEAKER_00: So that idea of remaining in the word, it begins with the word and then it goes to the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's more than we just read it and we go about it.
SPEAKER_00: It is a surrender to the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: He references the anointed one.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at the scripture, I've written these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.
SPEAKER_00: Dangers of the information age.
SPEAKER_00: The anointing you received from him remains in you, and you don't need anyone to teach you.
SPEAKER_00: It's a little dangerous for the pastor to be telling people, you don't need me.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: But you really don't.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you have the Holy Spirit, you have the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Like, here we go.
SPEAKER_00: Here, that's the beauty of being a follower of Christ and being in a relationship with Him.
SPEAKER_00: This is all you need right here: the Word of God and the Holy Spirit speaking to you.
SPEAKER_00: So it is the process, the discipline of surrendering ourselves to the Holy Spirit and saying, okay, Lord, here I want you to teach me and guide me in this and listening to what he's telling us.
SPEAKER_00: That is the picture of remaining.
SPEAKER_00: When he says remain, I have planted myself at the feet of the Lord with his word, and I'm listening and hearing.
SPEAKER_00: That's what remaining is.
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, it's in the development that empowers us.
SPEAKER_00: There is a promise in this scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 25.
SPEAKER_00: This is the promise that he himself made to us eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: Look at the next one.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 27, His anointing teaches you about all things and is true and as and is not a lie, just as he has taught you, remain in him.
SPEAKER_00: Look at what he says in verse 24.
SPEAKER_00: If what you have heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father.
SPEAKER_00: When we are engaged with Him, literally what happens is He transforms us into the image of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He is literally changing our character in this picture.
SPEAKER_00: We talk about that a lot here, but what that means is as that development occurs, he has sealed the remaining into the fruit of your spiritual growth.
SPEAKER_00: Literally, the more I grow to become like Jesus, the closer I get to Jesus, the deeper his connection and holding on to me and all of that happens.
SPEAKER_00: The more he transforms my heart and my mind to become like Jesus and to be engaged with him, the more I get stuck deeper in him and are closer to him, and it even gets stronger in its ceiling of my remaining.
SPEAKER_00: That makes sense?
SPEAKER_00: You think about uh last week when I was in Memphis, uh, when I missed you guys, I was with my mom, but I was also with a friend.
SPEAKER_00: There were four of us who were running buddies in high school, and we were at each other's houses and all that.
SPEAKER_00: So we knew each other's dads and all that.
SPEAKER_00: One of the guys, his dad, um, my, or one of the guys, uh, my dad hired him, the my friend whose father passed away, we were there for a funeral service.
SPEAKER_00: Um, he he was the dad that treated us like grown-ups, even though we were punk 16-year-old boys, right?
SPEAKER_00: He his mission was for us to view ourselves as young men and to grow up to be young men.
SPEAKER_00: And so Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Baird was that guy that he talked to us like we belonged.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he treated us like men, he shook hands with us like men, you know, that kind of a deal.
SPEAKER_00: You know, my dad called his son all the time, and so he was kind of a father figure in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Baird, he his role, what he decided was he's gonna treat us all like men and let us know we're supposed to be men and be like men.
SPEAKER_00: So he's great, we had great, these four guys were great friends.
SPEAKER_00: We spent some time together.
SPEAKER_00: Richard, whose father died, um, Richard is a worship pastor in West Tennessee.
SPEAKER_00: Just a great experience.
SPEAKER_00: And uh in this process, God puts us in a place where we are growing and he is engaging all these things around us.
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm here with these guys and we're reminiscing, and I'm just remembering.
SPEAKER_00: Richard is talking about his father's faith and how much he loved the Lord, and I'm thinking, in my whole life, God has been weaving these people together in my life.
SPEAKER_00: And he's just, it's just incredible to see how he works and does all that.
SPEAKER_00: And then I'm thinking about our relationships in this deal.
SPEAKER_00: And so uh Richard is a worship pastor in West Tennessee.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Edwin is a police officer in West Tennessee, a county uh state patrolman.
SPEAKER_00: Walter is a PhD level chemist in Johnson City, Tennessee, which is all the way on the far end on the other side of Gatlinburg.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm a pastor in Fort Smith on the other side of Arkansas.
SPEAKER_00: We haven't lived in the same city in decades, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so when you're apart, your relationships separate.
SPEAKER_00: When you're apart, what does your kid look like?
SPEAKER_00: Walter, where's your son?
SPEAKER_00: Edwin, where are your kids?
SPEAKER_00: What are they doing?
SPEAKER_00: How many grandkids do you have again?
SPEAKER_00: When you're not engaged like that, it's hard to keep those relationships.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the beauty of it.
SPEAKER_00: Because of the bonding we have as basically brothers from a different mother, in 20 minutes, we were re-engaged.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all with me?
SPEAKER_00: You got people laying out in your life, right?
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so when you're not engaged with Jesus, there is a separation.
SPEAKER_00: Walter, where are your sons?
SPEAKER_00: Richard, how many grandkids do you have again?
SPEAKER_00: Edwin, when did your mom die?
SPEAKER_00: You get separated if you're not engaged.
SPEAKER_00: But the beauty of what Jesus does in promising us eternal life in the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is that He never gives up on us and He is always tugging at the relationship.
SPEAKER_00: He is always building the relationship.
SPEAKER_00: He is always pulling at us, He is always investing us, He is always talking to us, He is always trying to get our attention, He is always at work around us.
SPEAKER_00: And if you have been pulled away from Jesus a little bit, the remaining thing, you haven't quite been there, here's what happens.
SPEAKER_00: Because of the blood of Jesus and the relationship he's created, in 20 minutes you can be reconnected again.
SPEAKER_00: Because he never stops working.
SPEAKER_00: The development process never stops in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: He is always at work.
SPEAKER_00: He is always trying to engage us, he never lets us go.
SPEAKER_00: And when we stay engaged in that relationship, it just gets deeper and better and sweeter and closer.
SPEAKER_00: And when you are remaining in him, you realize he is never going to let me go.
SPEAKER_00: And this development process in my life, it literally empowers how I go through this disinformation age, and I go through it with truth, I go through it with understanding, I go through it with the ability to impact other people to come and see what Jesus does in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: It gives us the ability not just to filter the false information, but defeat it with truth because we own it and we live it.
SPEAKER_00: Let me pray for you.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for today.
SPEAKER_00: I thank you for John, his earthly friendship of Jesus and support of him, his commitment to you as a preacher, as a disciple, as allowing himself to be used to write these scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: I thank you for the Holy Spirit that wrote this and told John what to write and took his experiences of having walked with Jesus and the truth of the Holy Spirit, that anointing of the Holy Spirit in his life, and you used him to write this scripture to us that in 2025 could not be more applicable to us.
SPEAKER_00: Just it's mind-boggling to know that you can look down the quarters of time because of who you are, and you can write something in that day and time that speaks so directly to the time that we live in.
SPEAKER_00: I just want to thank you for the incredible beauty of your word, the power of your word.
SPEAKER_00: I want to thank you for the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit that's in every one of us when we give our lives to you.
SPEAKER_00: And how He guides us and teaches us and helps us to remain.
SPEAKER_00: And I thank you that you never let us go.
SPEAKER_00: Even if we try to wander, you draw us back.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we love you.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you.
SPEAKER_00: I pray you encourage these men with your word.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody sit?
SPEAKER_00: Great to see you guys today.