Speaker 1: Good morning, good to see all of you.
Speaker 1: My name is Randy and I'm so glad if you're a guest today, especially for the first time, and I've met some of you this morning.
Speaker 1: We are more than excited to see you and we're always blessed that you're here with us.
Speaker 1: We believe that everybody who is in the room today or watching online out there is here for a divine purpose.
Speaker 1: Maybe, if only for today, there's some reason that we all are together here today, so we're glad that you're here and out there.
Speaker 1: Thank you for viewing.
Speaker 1: A lot of you are unable to be in your place of worship or a place of worship wherever you are, and so a quick welcome to you.
Speaker 1: Also, and specifically, I just want to give a shout out to two people in Fountain Inn, south Carolina, mark and Kimberly.
Speaker 1: We're so glad that you watch every week and hope you'll continue.
Speaker 1: And for all of you out there, there's a host that you've already met and also he will conclude the service together.
Speaker 1: So he's there to help you and to handle any prayer requests, follow those along or any next step decisions you make.
Speaker 1: And here in the room we will have an invitation time in just a few minutes and that's your invitation.
Speaker 1: Jesus constantly was coming up to people and saying, just simply, follow me.
Speaker 1: Right, and that's our symbolic way of honoring His Spirit, inviting us to follow Him.
Speaker 1: And so today, as you just saw, is a little kickoff to a series that will lead us right up to a very important day.
Speaker 1: Did you know that there's only seven weeks, 49 days, until Easter?
Speaker 1: And it will be here?
Speaker 1: And it is a big deal around here, as it should be, and we're already excited about that.
Speaker 1: So now we can be in the mode of, as we say, building and bringing those relationships to come with us on Easter Sunday morning.
Speaker 1: Heard some big plans last week.
Speaker 1: So Easter we always have three worship services to create enough space for everyone, and then after that the plan is to go, of course, to stay with the three services there and shout out to everybody up in the balcony how y'all doing up there Ran into a couple of my friends up there and they got an early start.
Speaker 1: They thought it started today.
Speaker 1: So they got here for the 8.15 service this morning.
Speaker 1: So they'll be well-practiced by you know.
Speaker 1: Seven weeks seven weeks for now, I guess.
Speaker 1: So open your Bibles to the book of James in the back of the New Testament.
Speaker 1: Back of the New Testament, james was the half-brother of Jesus, so if anybody knew a thing or two about following Christ, I would think it would be one of his own brothers.
Speaker 1: Right, and he's a very straightforward.
Speaker 1: He writes a lot like a guy in the Old Testament by the name of Solomon, very direct.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Solomon, can I tell you a quick story?
Speaker 1: It's Italian, 950 BC roughly.
Speaker 1: Solomon is the king, newly appointed king.
Speaker 1: What happened right before that, in the transfer of authority from David, his father, to him?
Speaker 1: Another son of David, adonijah, decided I see an opening, I'm going to take it, I'm going to seize the throne.
Speaker 1: And he does, and he pronounces himself king and he has a large following already.
Speaker 1: David steps in at that point and says no, my choice, because he was God's choice, is Solomon.
Speaker 1: I will anoint him king, I will put my crown on his head and recognize him.
Speaker 1: So the vast majority of the masses turned and go right back to Solomon Adonijah, who fancied himself as the second David.
Speaker 1: He was handsome, like his dad, he was dashing, he was bold.
Speaker 1: He realizes uh-oh, I'm now in big trouble.
Speaker 1: In those days, if you had a rival going on and you step onto the throne, you quickly eliminated the rival, even if it was a brother of yours or a relative, and so that was his expectation.
Speaker 1: Solomon, in a very unprecedented move, allows him to live as he will promise to not create any more problems and not try to revolt again contrary to the throne.
Speaker 1: Adonijah promises, and so he basically is telling him you'll have it made, you'll be still part of the royal family, you'll take advantage of all the protection and all the blessings of being a part of the royalty if you behave Well in one of the most knuckleheaded decisions in the whole Old Testament, guess what?
Speaker 1: Adonijah thinks?
Speaker 1: He's smart, he's going up against the smartest man in the world and somehow he thinks I'm going to outsmart Solomon, my brother.
Speaker 1: And he goes to Solomon's mom and says I've noticed a servant girl of my father when he was still living and she's like not married.
Speaker 1: Would you ask the king to allow me to marry her?
Speaker 1: He goes innocently to Solomon and Solomon says that's it.
Speaker 1: Don't you see what he's doing?
Speaker 1: He's once again aligning himself as the preferred of David by taking her his servant.
Speaker 1: And he's got to go now.
Speaker 1: And with that Adonijah loses his life.
Speaker 1: This is he sabotaged his own welfare in his life.
Speaker 1: Why is it that we in lesser ways reject what is best for us?
Speaker 1: We all have that capacity, don't we?
Speaker 1: You all could probably think back to a time in your past, as, like I, knew full well that this was not the best plan for me, and I did it anyway.
Speaker 1: So, 950 years later, jesus comes along and he has the same invitation to all of us.
Speaker 1: If you'll just submit, if you'll just surrender your life to my atoning grace and the resurrection of what that symbolizes and the gift of freedom in me, that's what's best for you, the plan is best for you you'll be part of royalty.
Speaker 1: If you just stay aligned with where we are headed, it will go well with you.
Speaker 1: And we fail time after time after time after time.
Speaker 1: Well, the core of all of that, let me just say very succinctly today, is the matter of prayer.
Speaker 1: Prayer is surrender.
Speaker 1: That's how we're going to define it today In verse 7, we're going to read 7 through 10 of James 4, describes that in, I think, a very brilliant but a very direct way.
Speaker 1: If prayer is all about surrender, how much time do I and you spend on the essential quality of prayer?
Speaker 1: And that is just a relationship, basically, between a heavenly Father and His earthly child.
Speaker 1: That's the presence being in each other's presence, and so that's where we'll launch into this, before we do what's going on.
Speaker 1: He starts off with the context, and a great read would be later today or this week, read all of James 4.
Speaker 1: But in James 4, 2 and 3, he basically cuts right to the chase and he says hey, here's your problem.
Speaker 1: A lot of you guys are really in misery right now.
Speaker 1: You're not.
Speaker 1: Things are not going well with you.
Speaker 1: You're unhappy, you're backbiting each other, there's conflict among you.
Speaker 1: You know what your problem is You're not praying, and when you pray, you're asking for the wrong thing.
Speaker 1: No wonder, no wonder.
Speaker 1: And then he gets around to addressing it in verse 7.
Speaker 1: So why don't we today, as people, always choose what's best for us, knowing at least in part what is best for us?
Speaker 1: Why has every generation been the same way?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to give you three reasons right out of the Scripture.
Speaker 1: The first is in verse 7, and that is our enemy is too powerful.
Speaker 1: When we decide I got it from here, I think, lord, I can take it the rest of the way.
Speaker 1: That's the first recipe for danger right there, because we have this enemy.
Speaker 1: Look at verse 7.
Speaker 1: Submit yourselves then to God.
Speaker 1: Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Speaker 1: Resist, sending them for surrender, that means come under his authority, no questions asked.
Speaker 1: And then he says resist the devil.
Speaker 1: Literally y'all.
Speaker 1: In the Greek that word had to do with draw the line.
Speaker 1: That's what Solomon did in 950 BC.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 1: Got to draw the line right here.
Speaker 1: How many parents in the room A few of you, a lot of you.
Speaker 1: Some of you don't even want to admit you're a parent, right?
Speaker 1: Have you not ever said that in some way to a child of yours?
Speaker 1: That's it, boom, I'm drawing the line right here.
Speaker 1: We all have, we all should have, that.
Speaker 1: This is where I have to step in, this is where it ends, and if we do that clearly and early against our enemy, our adversary, the better off we'll be.
Speaker 1: Because what he say here and remember promises are really.
Speaker 1: They come true.
Speaker 1: In the Bible.
Speaker 1: We resist the devil.
Speaker 1: What happens with him?
Speaker 1: He flees, and our vernacular that means he runs like somebody's chasing him.
Speaker 1: Because that's what the case is.
Speaker 1: He runs and the Holy Spirit is making sure that he gets out of town.
Speaker 1: Now he'll be back.
Speaker 1: We all know that.
Speaker 1: But when we do this on a continual basis, we don't deal with him near as much and we're not influenced by him near as much.
Speaker 1: Now, honesty, check here time, don't?
Speaker 1: We spend a significant amount of time actually reversing the order?
Speaker 1: We resist the Lord and we submit to the devil.
Speaker 1: Now we don't realize that that's him.
Speaker 1: We don't realize that you know we're being influenced by a third party like that, but we are, we're being set up.
Speaker 1: Verse 7 through 10 of James 4 is a great manual, if you will, a great instruction guide for repentance.
Speaker 1: So let me clarify that word right now.
Speaker 1: Repentance is a vital, it's a necessary discipline of following Christ.
Speaker 1: The seven transformational habits are just another way of saying we all need spiritual formation.
Speaker 1: We all need spiritual disciplines in our life to make us more mature and more like the image of Jesus, because we're wanting to be more pleasing to him.
Speaker 1: We will not ever be successful doing that if we don't learn how to, on a very regular basis, come to repentance.
Speaker 1: That means to agree with God that what we are about or are like, or thinking or attitude or actions are not in line.
Speaker 1: We've missed the mark.
Speaker 1: It's called sin.
Speaker 1: Jesus said anything not of faith is flat out sin.
Speaker 1: So there's plenty to repent of, sometimes, just in a general nature.
Speaker 1: When we do that, that means in our mind we decide to turn in another direction.
Speaker 1: We're not going to say I'm sorry, please forgive me today and keep repeating the same thing.
Speaker 1: That's not repentance.
Speaker 1: Repentance means it grieves my heart, it busts me open, so bad that that's detestable to me.
Speaker 1: What once was so attractive now makes me want to throw up and I'm not repeating that pattern and I, with God's help, am going in the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: That's the prodigal, that's the purpose of the prodigal son story that Jesus told, and we all are prodigals in some way, shape or fashion.
Speaker 1: That's repentance Sometimes, certainly not every time.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the conflict we have with God, where we're not on the page with Him or not on the path with Him, is because we have conflict with other people and we allow that to come into our life with Jesus.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we have a conflict with Jesus, but we don't want to or we're subconscious in it, don't realize we are, we're mad at Jesus, but we will take it out on people and we will create this unity or harm or broken relationships with people, and really who we're aiming at is God Himself.
Speaker 1: So time out Y'all.
Speaker 1: It's okay to have doubts, it's okay to see things that happen, or to experience things, or things that happen to loved ones, let's say, and to not be able to reconcile that with a loving, holy, righteous God, and to take that to God and say I know that you're not obligated to explain anything to me, but I got a problem here.
Speaker 1: I have a problem in my faith, lord, and this is a reason, or this is stimulating it, or, lord, I'm going to be flat out honest with you.
Speaker 1: I'm mad.
Speaker 1: I'm just mad.
Speaker 1: I'm disappointed, I'm hurt, I feel let down.
Speaker 1: That's okay if we do it in the right way, because he understands that he sees everything anyway.
Speaker 1: He already knows what's going on y'all.
Speaker 1: We might as well just be honest and confess it right?
Speaker 1: Have you ever gotten up the courage to confess something to some family or loved ones or inner circle, at work or something?
Speaker 1: And you say you know, I finally realized I had this problem with this or that, and everybody's just kind of sitting back looking at you like well, we've known that for a long time.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you finally got on track with it.
Speaker 1: What was your big revelation?
Speaker 1: We could have told you that that's God, I think he's like well, yeah, glad you're on board, we need to do that, we need to do that.
Speaker 1: Satan, y'all listen.
Speaker 1: Satan is powerful, he's dangerous, but he is limited.
Speaker 1: He only has a few signature moves and he's been using them ever since the fall.
Speaker 1: That's all he's got, but he is really good at using them.
Speaker 1: He is deceitful.
Speaker 1: He is a liar.
Speaker 1: Jesus called him out on those things.
Speaker 1: He's the master of confusion.
Speaker 1: He is the great slanderer.
Speaker 1: He's the great accuser.
Speaker 1: How many of you have heard that little voice at two o'clock in the morning when you didn't mean to wake up?
Speaker 1: But you wake up and it's like, oh no, here he comes and that's when he decides to tell you what a rotten individual you are.
Speaker 1: We all hear that at times.
Speaker 1: That's the accuser at work.
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 1: Because he's wanting to condemn you.
Speaker 1: He's wanting to eliminate any hope in you and hope in your future.
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 1: Because he wants to destroy you.
Speaker 1: His ultimate aim for you and me and your family and everybody dear to you is to kill you.
Speaker 1: He is the reason there is such a thing as death.
Speaker 1: So once we become aware of his moves, we can be a little bit more wise.
Speaker 1: Tojohn 844, man.
Speaker 1: I love John 844.
Speaker 1: This one of those conversations, john 8, is a good read for this week too.
Speaker 1: He's in Snot Too Long Before the Crucifixion and he's like everywhere he goes, people are jumping him, trying to set him up.
Speaker 1: These are the Pharisees.
Speaker 1: They won't know part of him, they think he's a fraud and they're trying to lure him into a trap again.
Speaker 1: And how knuckleheaded can you be, how unaware can you be to not know that you are matching wits with the Creator of the universe here.
Speaker 1: And so Jesus in 844 says you belong to your father or the devil.
Speaker 1: They said, hey, don't get after us.
Speaker 1: We're descendants of Abraham, we're special people here.
Speaker 1: Let me remind you of that.
Speaker 1: And he says well, you belong to your father or the devil.
Speaker 1: You want to carry out your father's desire, who is a murderer from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Not having the truth, for there is no truth in him.
Speaker 1: When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and he's the father of all lies.
Speaker 1: Pretty much sums it up.
Speaker 1: He says he's very fluent in lying.
Speaker 1: That's the one language he has down pat.
Speaker 1: So just be aware of that when we struggle with these moral dilemmas of life.
Speaker 1: There's an honest reason behind it.
Speaker 1: There is a being behind it sometimes, who's trying to rob us of the truth and replace it with a lie, which is a thinly veiled truth, mostly wrapped in lies.
Speaker 1: That's what he falls for, that's what Adam fell for, that's what Judas fell for, and isn't he doing a great job today in our society, doing that?
Speaker 1: This used to be what everybody thought was true.
Speaker 1: Weren't we naive to believe that?
Speaker 1: Weren't we unsophisticated to believe that?
Speaker 1: Let me re-fashion that for you, because this really is the way it is now, and this ought to be celebrated.
Speaker 1: It's the same trick, it's the same old move, but it's working very well.
Speaker 1: Robert Oppenheimer was one of the chief scientists in the Manhattan Project, which we know today is the invention of the atom bomb that ended World War II, and he, we know now, struggled mightily with the moral aspect of being a brilliant scientist, a quantum mechanics expert, probably the smartest one in that field in the whole country, one of the three smartest in the world.
Speaker 1: And as they got closer to, I think we actually can make a bomb that onedrop one of them that will literally wipe out tens of thousands of people.
Speaker 1: The moral dilemma the just and the unjust will die under this thing, and is this even something we humans ought to beare we going into an area here that we shouldn't do?
Speaker 1: And at one point he's trying to recruit one of the other really good scientists to get on board and help them with the project.
Speaker 1: And the other scientist says I'm not in, I'm not going to do it, why not?
Speaker 1: He said same thing.
Speaker 1: He said basically, too many innocent people will die.
Speaker 1: And what's bigger he said is and this is an ideology discussion.
Speaker 1: He says can we trust our government with a weapon this powerful?
Speaker 1: And Oppenheimer says I don't know, but I am certain of this we cannot trust the Germans with one, and that's why I'm working on it.
Speaker 1: And with that, the ideology shift of an idea.
Speaker 1: His friend joins him and was a chief reason that we did develop the bomb.
Speaker 1: I'm not here to debate the moral dilemma of that.
Speaker 1: I appreciate the honest struggle with people like Oppenheimer because we need to be doing that on a smaller scale today with who we are.
Speaker 1: So the challenge for knowing our enemy by ourselves is too powerful.
Speaker 1: You're going to lose that fight every single time.
Speaker 1: What do we do Y'all?
Speaker 1: We've got to become more thoughtful in our following Christ.
Speaker 1: We need to learn how to think.
Speaker 1: We need to be people who are independent thinkers, well enough to take the standard which is this and to be able to digest it, to struggle with it, to ask questions of it, to pray through it, to absorb it, to the fact that then, when we make decisions, when we have ideologies because, let's face it, wars start for one reason and that is ideas.
Speaker 1: Churchill said that All future wars now will be started by ideas, idealists, and that's exactly true.
Speaker 1: Our thinking ability under Christ will be an incredibly important thing.
Speaker 1: John 6 is a great example.
Speaker 1: John 6, jesus knows, in His infinite wisdom and timing, it's time to challenge, and he challenges all the people following Him and listening to Him and flocking Him like a rock star, and at that point a large portion of them walk out.
Speaker 1: They had to be hurtful and at this point I think I'd have hurt.
Speaker 1: Jesus turns to us 12 and he says what about you?
Speaker 1: Are you going to leave too?
Speaker 1: Now, peter, we like towe like to talk about Peter, because you know at Peter, what's he going to say next?
Speaker 1: He's the loose cannon of the group.
Speaker 1: Well, of course he speaks up in this occasion also, but this time he gives evidence of he had actually been thinking and what he said where are we going to go?
Speaker 1: You have the words of life and Jesus says you're exactly right.
Speaker 1: And Jesusand Peter decides to stay in it because he has been convinced he's now a man of conviction that I don't know where we're going, but I do know this.
Speaker 1: I'm going to follow this man because he has what I have been looking for all my life and I happen to believe he may have what everybody else needs for the rest of their life too.
Speaker 1: And is that not a cause worth following Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Is that not a cause worth us following here?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it is.
Speaker 1: Let's move on real quick.
Speaker 1: That's the first thing.
Speaker 1: The second reason we don't do what we're supposed to do a lot of times is our corruption is too deep.
Speaker 1: Verse 8,.
Speaker 1: Come near to God and he will come near to you.
Speaker 1: Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts.
Speaker 1: You double-minded.
Speaker 1: Double-minded.
Speaker 1: He mentions in chapter 1 verse 8 also, and it literally meant two minds your split.
Speaker 1: Your brain has been split, and you thinkremember the old cartoons where you'd have a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel or a person on the other, and you're hearing both of them.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I mean.
Speaker 1: He could have been an artist for Warner Brothers, the cartoons, because that's exactly what we used to see on the cartoons and everything.
Speaker 1: But he's saying the way out of that is admit who you are and purify and wash, which were ceremonial terms back then, and theyeverybody knew that.
Speaker 1: So let's pretend something, because I know a lotpretty good segment of this country don't believe there's even a literal devil.
Speaker 1: So hey, if there were not, let's play that R.
Speaker 1: Let's say, oh yeah, there's a devil, but let's pretend somehow.
Speaker 1: This afternoon we get word he just died.
Speaker 1: Don't you wish the devil died?
Speaker 1: So what's that got to do with us now?
Speaker 1: Does that mean that we have the capacity to keep getting better and better, to where we're perfect one day and we're able to maintain perfection as human beings?
Speaker 1: There have been theologians in past days that thought you actually could.
Speaker 1: You press into what's good and noble enough.
Speaker 1: Christ's hard enough, good enough and diligently enough, you will get there.
Speaker 1: So now let's just go.
Speaker 1: We talked about scientists.
Speaker 1: Let's go to something more scientific.
Speaker 1: Let's study the data.
Speaker 1: How many people out of billions and billions of people in the history of the world have ever gotten there?
Speaker 1: Like zero?
Speaker 1: I don't think our odds are very good, do you?
Speaker 1: I don't think with or without.
Speaker 1: So what's going on?
Speaker 1: It's inside of us.
Speaker 1: That's back to the Bible, back to Genesis, chapter 3, they sin.
Speaker 1: They now inherit, as Paul says later, a sin we, each generation after that, a sin nature.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, chapter 4 of Genesis.
Speaker 1: They have a couple of boys.
Speaker 1: There's always sibling rivalry, but this one overboard, one of them kills his brother.
Speaker 1: And every generation since we have seen the reproduction of the first sin, that means we inherit the propensity and the draw and the magnetic ability to do our own sinning.
Speaker 1: Let me put it in the mental thing, because it always has to formulate as lack of thinking or actually consciously deciding to do a sin.
Speaker 1: One writer of a book I think it's called the Principle of the Path, said let me just remind you every bad decision that you've ever made, you were there for it and I was too.
Speaker 1: I was in the room for every bad decision that I made.
Speaker 1: So who's to blame here?
Speaker 1: Me, and it's the same with you too.
Speaker 1: Who is the worst person to lead?
Speaker 1: Some of you are responsible for hundreds of people at work.
Speaker 1: Some of you got large families, some of you now the patriarch of your families or your head of these civic groups and everything.
Speaker 1: I'm reallyevery day I'm more and more impressed with the quality of the leaders in this room.
Speaker 1: So who is the worst person to lead in all of your organization?
Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you right now who it is.
Speaker 1: At Somerville Baptist Church, the worst person I have to lead here is Randy Harling.
Speaker 1: It's me and my guess is it's the same with you.
Speaker 1: This is the person you know the best but have, some days, the least control over my goodness.
Speaker 1: My goodness All the more important to come near to God every single day.
Speaker 1: I'm only as good as my surrender to Him, my prayer, my time with Him, my meditation, which is just extended thinking with Him during the day when the Bowses pray without ceasing.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean we go around with our eyes closed to head down all the time mumbling a prayer.
Speaker 1: That means we have Him in us through the Spirit.
Speaker 1: Why don't we just commune with Him all during the day?
Speaker 1: It should always be from an attitude, from a position of surrender.
Speaker 1: What you want is what I need to do.
Speaker 1: What you want from this is what needs to happen.
Speaker 1: It's not what I want.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of wants and I'm terrible at second guessing the Lord and giving counsel to the Lord.
Speaker 1: But what I should be is a simple, loving Son who is also a slave, who got bought his freedom and now I have the ability to just stay in this family and all will be well in the end.
Speaker 1: We said it last week two or three times it can't be about me.
Speaker 1: It has to be what's best in this context for the body of Christ and it can't be about you.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: It's got to be about the body of Christ, because he showed us clearly how to do that for 33 years and we're still enjoying the fruit and the benefits of that Third thing real quickly.
Speaker 1: You know we're too corrupt, the enemy is too powerful, but our self-confidence is too high.
Speaker 1: We have much more faith in us than we should have, don't you think so?
Speaker 1: Sometimes Some of the worst jams I have ever gotten in I put myself there thinking oh hey, I can figure that out.
Speaker 1: Have you ever said how hard could that be?
Speaker 1: I've said that many times before.
Speaker 1: Losing probably 10 years of my lifespan are a tremendous setback.
Speaker 1: Let's read 9 and 10.
Speaker 1: Grieve, mourn and wail change your laughter in the morning and your joy to gloom.
Speaker 1: This is not one of thoseyou don't typically text this verse to your friends at 5 am to encourage them for their day, do you?
Speaker 1: But we've got to read further Grieve.
Speaker 1: I just read that humble yourselves before the Lord and he he, not us, he will lift you up.
Speaker 1: Humble yourself before the Lord and he will lift you up.
Speaker 1: Jesus in Luke 1, 52 says humble yourself.
Speaker 1: Says this basically, he has brought down rulers from their thrones but he has lifted up the humble and he is speaking to a lot of humble people of His day who he knew the future for them.
Speaker 1: They're going to be lifted up and people in 2024 will be reading about them.
Speaker 1: James is one of them and Luke is one of them who captured that quote of Jesus.
Speaker 1: What causes grief?
Speaker 1: Well, of course, the loss of a loved one, the loss of health, the loss of a job, career significant loss always causes grief.
Speaker 1: But you know what?
Speaker 1: There's two other things that cause grief.
Speaker 1: The Word of God should cause grief on some days in my heart, because there's times I read this and I don't see myself in it.
Speaker 1: I am saved, but my point is, I read the Christ-like characteristics and I've got to say that's not me.
Speaker 1: That wasn't me yesterday, at least that should bethat should grieve my heart.
Speaker 1: The other is sometimes when we intercede on our knees for other people that are close to us and they are far, far, far away from that ideal that Jesus brought them into this world for, and that should grieve us too, shouldn't it?
Speaker 1: We should be grieved over the plight and the direction of our nation right now.
Speaker 1: That should bring some days action.
Speaker 1: Tears to our eyes, daniel, and Daniel 9 is weeping over a nation and he starts off the prayer by saying judge me first.
Speaker 1: He was not who his nation was.
Speaker 1: He was in captivity and exile because of the sins of people in his country.
Speaker 1: But he is saying I share some of this burden and some of this guilt just because I am a Jew and I am from that nation.
Speaker 1: That's what humility is.
Speaker 1: So our attitudes got to come before our actions, and the result is we become more humble.
Speaker 1: But check this out In among our humility, we become bolder and stronger and braver and more convicted.
Speaker 1: Well, how do you know that?
Speaker 1: Read the Gospels.
Speaker 1: There's a man named Jesus who was all of those things, and nobody was more humble than Jesus.
Speaker 1: Can I tell you another quick illustration story?
Speaker 1: There was a man in the Old Testament that is in print called the most humble man who lived to that point.
Speaker 1: Know who he was.
Speaker 1: Tribute it's Moses.
Speaker 1: Now, moses supposedly wrote the book that said that, so I don't know if that means he was like.
Speaker 1: If Moses was the most humble man, let's watch what he's doing in the book of Exodus, though.
Speaker 1: He goes into town and takes on the most powerful autocrat in the whole world at that time, demands that he basically bankrupt his economy and let a bunch of free workers go free and leave them and leave all these building projects stranded and decimate their economy.
Speaker 1: How's that for a bold ask.
Speaker 1: So what happened to Moses?
Speaker 1: Moses had a sense of justice.
Speaker 1: The humble Moses in the beginning identified with the slaves more than he identified with his royal family.
Speaker 1: He realizes he's a Hebrew and he's got a high sense of moral justice.
Speaker 1: He sees a slave owner beating down a slave and he takes the law into his own hands, kills the Egyptian and realizes, uh-oh, I've just lost everything.
Speaker 1: He flees.
Speaker 1: He goes to the backside of the desert a long way away, refashioned, refigures out a life as a humble shepherd, scratching out a living with a family that he's starting and all like that, and he goes to the burning bush.
Speaker 1: God appears to him and he says I have a mission for you.
Speaker 1: And he says what's that he said?
Speaker 1: I'm sending you back to the scene of the crime that you committed 40 years earlier and we're going to get it right this time.
Speaker 1: And there is nothing in Moses that wants to participate in that.
Speaker 1: And Moses finally says well, who am I supposed to say sent me?
Speaker 1: When they start questioning me on what right do I have to march in here and do that?
Speaker 1: He just says, as you know, the famous, I am who I am.
Speaker 1: He goes in, he does exactly as he's asked to do.
Speaker 1: He's humble.
Speaker 1: He's brought to his knees repeatedly, but he is also now a bold, on fire servant prophet of the Lord Almighty.
Speaker 1: He goes into the Egyptian throne room, makes his demands a pharaoh and you know the story.
Speaker 1: Probably Did it work?
Speaker 1: It worked, it worked.
Speaker 1: Now Egypt is upset with him again and his own people are upset with him.
Speaker 1: Their life just got incrementally more miserable.
Speaker 1: This is a key defining moment for Moses, because this is the same pattern that happened 40 years earlier.
Speaker 1: He failed 40 years earlier.
Speaker 1: He's on the road to failure.
Speaker 1: That appears the second time, only in a much more public way this time.
Speaker 1: What's the difference?
Speaker 1: If you read I think it's Exodus 3, 4, 5.
Speaker 1: Along in there he keeps calling on the name of God.
Speaker 1: Only this time it's Jehovah.
Speaker 1: Jehovah will deliver.
Speaker 1: I don't know how we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: Bricks now to Jehovah will show us how.
Speaker 1: I don't know when the powers come.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I do, it's Jehovah.
Speaker 1: You know what Jehovah meant deliverer.
Speaker 1: Here's the difference.
Speaker 1: He acted alone 40 years earlier.
Speaker 1: Now he walks back into town with the great deliverer Walking with him, who has made a promise, and he's never backed up on a promise.
Speaker 1: Moses chooses to believe him.
Speaker 1: So, as the most humble man in the world, he's now also the boldest and probably the purest Walking with God of anybody up to that point.
Speaker 1: And the two of them change a nation's destiny and future and Set the course for the whole world to be changed when Christ comes.
Speaker 1: That's how Humble boldness works.
Speaker 1: So, as a close out here, can I give you an application?
Speaker 1: I think we all need some go-to verses.
Speaker 1: My definition of a go-to verse it may include your omission verse.
Speaker 1: Why are you on this earth If there's a verse you can Grab and memorize and try your best to monitor your life and live by?
Speaker 1: There's so many great ones.
Speaker 1: That's one of them.
Speaker 1: But what I'm really talking about today, how do we do the daily discipline of prayer With the Lord, if we're gonna start and end our prayers with surrender to him?
Speaker 1: Well, let me give you three or four.
Speaker 1: Romans 721.
Speaker 1: Paul says when I seek to do right, evil is right there beside me.
Speaker 1: Y'all know how that works, don't you?
Speaker 1: Every time I try to do something good, evil is right there with me.
Speaker 1: How about all of chapter Of Psalm 51?
Speaker 1: Basically, that's David's repentance after he's found to be an adulterer.
Speaker 1: And he says a lot of things.
Speaker 1: So many of them are good, especially verse 5 and verse 10.
Speaker 1: How about Psalm 139, 23 and 24?
Speaker 1: These last two or two of my favorite go-to verses?
Speaker 1: Psalm 139, 23 and 24 search me, know me and try me, oh Lord, and See if there's anything unholy in me.
Speaker 1: And what he doesn't have to finish the sentence of is to say and please get rid of it, please wash me up that Search me, try me and know me.
Speaker 1: And then I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Genesis 6, verse 6.
Speaker 1: I Don't know why this still has such an impact on me.
Speaker 1: Genesis 6 6 is where God evaluates the earth and it says he was grieved that he created man I have to put myself in that verse and God was grieved that he made Randy.
Speaker 1: Now, that's not a hopeless despair.
Speaker 1: That's the beginning of Walking with Jesus, I do believe when we die to ourselves and he lives, is there for leading us y'all.
Speaker 1: We will be okay as long as we do what's best for the body.
Speaker 1: If we are willing to be humbly bold and To simply do the next thing he has revealed to us to do individually and Corporately, we will not only be okay, we will do what Richard Foster wrote years ago in a classic book celebration of discipline.
Speaker 1: He said we are invited to partner with God in changing the future of the world.
Speaker 1: How's that for a mission statement?
Speaker 1: What do you do for a living?
Speaker 1: Well, I try to partner with God to change the world.
Speaker 1: But that's the reality of the church of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: If you want to be a part of this one, and God's led, you would love to celebrate that in a minute.
Speaker 1: If you need to come and find out more about this wonderful Jesus that gives us a new life, we can help you with that.
Speaker 1: If you want to come and pray, that'd be a great idea right today, since we're talking about it, let's stand.
Speaker 1: Eddie's gonna come and lead us.
Speaker 1: So let me pray for you, lord.
Speaker 1: I would ask that you take away any desires in me, any desires in us that just don't look like you, that are not conformed to the image of Christ.
Speaker 1: That is impossible Apart from you, but submitted to you, drawing near to you.
Speaker 1: We will be successful with it and we will be partnering with you to change the future of summer bill and Dorchester County and eventually the world, until your kingdom in heaven comes to earth.
Speaker 1: We ask in Christ's name amen.