Hey man, God bless you, church.
It's an honor and a privilege to be with you today.
Normally, this is the time where I get right into the message, I tell a quirky story, and uh and we get going.
However, uh that worship time was something else, wasn't it?
Can we just uh show appreciation to our our our band?
They're off stage right now, but can I can I just invite you uh just to stand to your feet for a second with me?
The Bible says in the book of Revelation that the angels sing holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
And there is a cry in heaven that said, Who is worthy to open the scrolls?
Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scrolls?
And there was one found, the Lamb of God, who was slain before the beginning of time, and the angels bowed down and sang, Holy Holy, worthy is the Lamb, worthy is the Lamb, you are holy.
Come on, church, sing it together.
Yes, an anthem to God with all your strength and all your might.
This is what we're gonna be singing to Him.
Worthy is the Lamb.
You are holy, are you Lord God Almighty?
Worthy is a lamb, worthy is a lamb.
You are holy.
Are you Lord God?
Oh my worthy is the lamb, worthy is the Lamb, Amen.
You are worthy, God, worthy are you.
You may be seated.
It is beautiful to hear your voice.
It is beautiful to hear the worship of God in your lips.
And I imagine that in this moment God shut the angels down.
He said, Just give me a second, angels.
I know that you can sing, and I know that you've been worshiping for all eternity, but just give me a second.
Just I'm gonna turn you down for a second because my people are praising me.
My people are worshiping me.
My people are singing, worthy is my name.
And that is the song of heaven.
And this moment that we just lived right now was a heavenly, divinely appointed moment for your life.
And and and this message today has nothing to do with this, but I feel that God is calling us to a deep worship.
A worship that that is born out of out of a desire.
Um, can I even say it this way, out of a despair, to need to be with him, to worship him.
That is why we live.
That is the reason for our existence, that is the purpose of our being, that is the sole reason that that we that we breathe is to worship him, and he is worthy, and we're gonna spend all eternity with him, and it's gonna be awesome, and we're gonna be there, and you're gonna be there, and it's gonna be great.
God bless you.
We are in this series called My Family and Me.
And we've we've we've learned last week about the the gift of grace and multiplying grace and generosity over generosity and what God has for our lives as we learn, as we give uh to his work, as we give to our family.
This is the reason why we're here.
And my question, I think, today is what runs in your family?
Today's title is It Runs in the Family.
It runs in the family.
And and for those of you that have children, you know that there are things that just run in the family.
And if you have friends uh that that that have children and you start seeing their children, you start to say, Well, I can identify it runs in the family.
And oftentimes that could be um eyes, height, uh a laughter, a way somebody laughs, a personality.
Uh in my case, my my children, my my boys, are actually taller than I am.
So that part didn't run in the family.
So I don't know where they got that from, but but they're taller than I am.
And I believe Grace, my daughter, she's gonna end up being about as tall as me.
Uh so I don't know where that's coming from, but that didn't run in the family because there are some things that run deeper than than DNA.
There are some things that run deeper in our family than than our looks, than our personalities, and and those things, um, those things are the stories that are built around our families.
And I was I was blessed a couple of years ago.
I think I I mentioned this at one point, but um I used to play football, and I was I was that was my that was my thing.
I was I was pretty good at football, and I thought that was gonna be what God had for my life.
I was like, God, amen.
I will be a football player for the rest of my life if that's what you want for me.
Uh and and there's this one particular game, this one particular game that uh I remember vividly, and I've had dreams of playing football and going back to the gridiron and and doing my thing, and it's this one game against a high school called AN Meyer, and in that game, I scored four touchdowns, and it was the greatest game of my life, and I thought, God, wouldn't it be awesome if I could just relive that moment?
And I've been reliving that moment in my child, my children's lives since they were little.
I've been telling them about A and Meyer, I've been telling them about the four touchdowns, and then one Christmas day, I turn on YouTube and just out of luck, I don't, I just typed in Westlane Secondary versus A and Meyer 1998.
And there was the video.
It wasn't me, it was somebody uploaded the video of my four touchdowns, and I woke up my family, and I was like, kids, I told you so.
I told I wasn't making it up.
I told you this happened, and I've got it on repeat on my YouTube playlist.
Um, but but but there are stories that get passed on, and there are great stories that get passed on to our children, but there are also those those heavy stories, those stories that that we don't necessarily talk about.
But in the province of Quebec, one in four children have lived separation.
And that's not a DNA thing, that's a family story thing, and nobody plans for division.
And this is the part that got to me.
Nobody plans for division, yet division multiplies across generations.
Nobody plans for division, yet division multiplies.
Do you do you hear how how absurd that sounds?
Like, like, even mathematically, logically, how how fallacious that statement is.
Division multiplies in families.
That makes absolutely no sense.
And that is a distortion of the principles of mathematics.
Division multiplies, and yet that is exactly what the enemy wants.
He distorts what God has called pure, he distorts what God has created, and it becomes a distortion, a fallacious account of your family's life, and that's what he wants.
He wants you to know that that he that division is now somehow related to your DNA.
And why?
Because when we see the first family in the Gospels, in the Gospels, in the Bible, when we see the first family, it's Adam and Eve, and after they sin, we get two very clear symptoms of sin.
Two very clear symptoms of what happens when sin enters the family.
The very first thing that happens when sin enters a family is hiding.
Hiding.
They sinned, and the first thing that they did was they went and they hid from the presence of God.
Sin creates hiding.
The second thing that happens is division.
You see, after after they hid, God went and he found them.
A picture of the gospel.
He went and he finds them and he says, He says, Where are you, Adam?
And and Adam says, We were, I was naked and I was afraid, so I hid.
God says, What have you done?
And here is the division.
The woman you gave me.
He's trying to alienate himself from the responsibility of what just happened, and he separates the division now happens.
He went into hiding and now he's dividing.
Sin hides, and sin divides.
And that is not a DNA thing.
That then happens in their two sons, Cain and Abel.
And in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel and then goes into hiding, and God says, What have you done?
And Cain says, Am I my brother's keeper?
Should I know where he is?
Division.
Hiding, dividing.
If we fast forward from Cain and Abel, we go into Abraham.
Going through the Bible here, guys.
Abraham.
Abraham has two sons.
And those two sons, Ishmael and Isaac.
And Ishmael is the first son born out of wedlock, born from from anxiety, born from from wanting to uh to to make God's will my will, to force God's hand into the purpose for their lives.
And so Abraham has a son named Ishmael with a with a woman named Hagar.
And as Ishmael is growing up, then the promised son comes in, and that is Isaac.
And Isaac's mom is Sarah.
And Ishmael sees his brother, his half-brother, and he wants to kill him.
And he's jealous of him.
And so now they go into hiding.
They have to be, they have to be expelled from the home.
They go into hiding.
And then there's division now between brothers.
And then we've got Abraham.
We've got Isaac.
And then we come to Jacob.
And Jacob himself has a couple of sons.
And those sons are many.
In fact, where we pick up the story, he's got eleven children.
And of the eleven children, there's one that's that's loved.
The youngest one, his name is Joseph.
And and his his love for his father is so great that his father sees it, gives him a multicolored uh uh uh jacket.
So he's wearing this this beautiful robe that he has to wear.
And his ten brothers have to go out to the fields and work.
And Joseph's job was to stay seated beside his dad.
Joseph was the one that was beside his father the whole time.
The Bible says that that his father Jacob loved him so much, he wouldn't let him go and and and work in the fields.
He had him right next to him.
And the Bible says that Joseph had dreams, and in those dreams, he he would see his brothers would bow down before him.
He's the youngest one.
He already doesn't work, he doesn't have a job, he's living off of his brother's work, and now he's got to tell his brothers, hey, guess what?
At one point, you guys are gonna bow down to me.
And they're thinking, bow down to you?
Are you crazy?
Already we are the ones supporting you.
Why don't you carry your own weight?
And he says, No, I saw it in a dream, and in that dream, he says, You will bow down.
And and and and not only you guys, you know what else I saw in my dream?
Mom and dad are also going to bow down to me, and they're thinking, this kid is gone crazy.
Like, what is going on in his in his mind?
And in that place, we see that that the brothers now start to divide.
And now they start to feel uh jealousy, they start to feel anger towards their brother.
So they sell their brother.
And and and you know the story if you've been around church.
They sell the brother, the brother gets sold, Joseph gets sold, uh, and then he goes into Egypt.
And in Egypt, he goes into Potiphar's house, and Potiphar is a a wealthy man.
And in that story, uh, Joseph is a great worker.
He makes the whole house of Potiphar uh uh flourish and blessing upon blessing.
And Potiphar says, You can you can you you can have anything you want in my in my household, and Joseph is faithful to the house of Potiphar.
And Potiphar's wife sees this young man, and she's just like a little bit thirsty, and uh and she's looking at him and says, Hey, whoa, uh that's a good-looking young boy.
And so she wants to get with him, he wants to honor God, he runs away from her, and she then accuses him of something horrible.
And then he gets taken into prison, goes to prison, goes to jail, and then gets forgotten in jail.
And that's where we're gonna pick up the story: the story of Joseph being forgotten, the seasons of Joseph's life.
So before there was a pit, before the prison, and then and then from the prison, he gets elevated to the palace.
Uh, before all of that, there's a family, and that's where Joseph inherited something that all of us can relate to, something that all of us can understand.
And what he inherited is real.
He inherited something that goes beyond DNA, it goes into the story of his life.
And now we find Joseph in the palace, and he has another dream.
Uh he interprets, I'm sorry, he interprets the dream of the Pharaoh.
And during the interpretation of that dream, he tells Pharaoh, there's going to be seven years of prosperity and seven years of famine.
And during the seven years of prosperity, Joseph has two children.
And those two children, the Bible says in Genesis 41, 51, Joseph named his firstborn Manasseh.
Everyone say with me, Manasseh.
Manasseh, one more time.
Manasseh.
Joseph named his firstborn Manasseh and said this, it is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father's household.
Do you notice that he didn't say God made me forget the pit where he was thrown into by his brothers?
He didn't say God made me forget the prison where he was thrown into by the wife of Potiphar.
He didn't say God made me forget all of the years of suffering in the jail.
He said, God made me forget all my trouble and all my father's household.
He mentions his father's household on purpose because that is where the wound started.
The wound started at home.
The problem in Joseph's life started at home.
Favoritism, jealousy, division, hiding.
That is what Joseph inherited.
Yet he refused to let the world define who he is.
He refused to let the wound defy who he is.
And he decided that every season in his life tried to give him a name.
Every season of his life was either slave, prisoner, forgotten, or victim.
And Joseph stops and he says, Never again.
I'm going to believe God's purpose for my life.
And he names his firstborn Manasseh.
The Lord has made me forget the pain and the hurt and the suffering of my past, of my family.
What I inherited from them will no longer be reproduced in my children.
And many of us inherit those things, those things that that we never chose.
We didn't choose the pain that we received from our families.
We didn't choose that.
But we get it.
And the danger is not necessarily in the wound.
It's in allowing the wound to define who I am today.
And so God is showing us.
This story, not because Joseph had a memory loss, but because Joseph now became free.
And I think that the word manase is a symbol of the freedom that God wants to give us.
He wants to give us, he wants us to be free from that hurt, free from that pain, free from that past.
Freedom in his name.
Freedom in the name that is above all names.
It's not about what happened to me, it's about what I allow to define my life today.
And if you would, if you would just allow God to let you see that moment, let you go back to that moment and not ask why it happened, but what do you want me to learn from that moment?
What do you want me to learn from that moment?
And and I have learned that that one of the greatest releases that I've had over my own life is this one phrase that my parents did the best they could with the information they had.
My parents brought us up and did the best they could with the information that they had.
And that has helped me release so much of my past, so much of the pain and the hurt.
I was I was a football player, I was a basketball player, I was a soccer player, I did as many sports as I could.
And in all those sports, I would always look up and I would I would try to find my my own dad in the stands, and I could never find him.
He was busy working.
We are an immigrant family.
So as an immigrant family, he was he was hard at work every single day, on the weekends, at night, evenings, day, all the time he was working.
And while he was working, I was playing and I was doing sports, and I would look up into the stands looking for him, and I couldn't find him.
And growing up, that was that was a pain in my heart.
And now I've got to relate to my heavenly father, and I've got to call him dad, and I've got to call him father.
And the question that I had in my early 20s was, God, where were you?
And I can relate to you as God, and I can relate to you as Jesus, and I can relate to you as King and mighty God, creator of the heavens and earth, but Dad, Father.
And in that moment, the the pain, all those memories came back.
And that's when I remembered.
And I think that's when that's when this story started started growing in me.
Because Joseph names his son Manasseh.
God made me forget, God made me forget the pain of my household.
And I started to look back and I said, God, where were you?
Where were you in those moments of victory?
Where were you in that four touchdown game?
Where were you?
And he said, I was there.
You didn't see me, but I was there.
And there was a gentleman, and I've talked about him before, but if you remember, there was a gentleman by the name of Mr.
Williams, six feet four inches tall, close to 300 pounds, the largest human being I have ever seen in my life.
He's African American.
And he had a son in the junior division.
And he would come watch my games in the senior division before watching his son in the junior division.
And he would shout out at the top of his lungs, number 24, that's my boy.
I'm like, Mr.
Williams, tone it down.
People actually believe that you're my dad.
And nobody messed with me in high school because they actually thought this was my dad.
And the whole time I thought I was this big tough guy in high school playing football, I wasn't.
It was Mr.
Williams behind me.
This whole time I've been wanting to release all of that past.
And it wasn't me, it was God.
And he was saying, I was there, I was Mr.
Williams, I was Dante Perillo, I was, I was Dougie Maddox, I was Johnny Pavone, I was these men in your life.
That was me.
And where your dad was not present, I was present through them.
And as I got older, I got married, and I'm looking for, I'm looking for a father figure.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
I worked at a church that we were that we were helping out, and and I was earning, I think, less than minimum wage.
And I was thinking, what's going to happen?
God, is this is this what you want for my we we got a young family coming up, and I have no idea what to do next.
And God put another man in my life.
Anthony Tioli came into my life, and and he's not even a believer, but he said, Sullivan, I'm gonna show you everything that I know, and and I'm gonna I'm gonna step up to the plate for you and watch what I'm gonna do.
And and this has never been done before, but we're gonna try it out.
I want you to teach at the university.
And I will I will go to the administrators and I will tell them that you are a good public speaker.
Who would have thought?
I was 26 years old, and he said, You're gonna teach here with me.
And he took me under his wing and he opened the doors, and the university opened the doors, and now I'm teaching at the university, and I'm thinking, God, wow! And every time, every time that that feeling goes back, God shows me that he's been there.
And so if you are a single mom here today, I want you to know that God is with you, and he is the father of your children, and he is a husband to you, and he will move.
And that's the beauty of being part of a church community.
The beauty of being a part of a church community is that your children have have many fathers.
And one of the things that I absolutely love to do, and and our are our children's pastors here with us, and and one of the things that I love to do is I love to go before the service, before you see me up here in the front, I'll go up to the children's service upstairs, and I'll thank every single volunteer that is up there because I know the the impact that they're going to have in our children's lives.
It's not taking care of kids, it's impacting the next generation, it's impacting our young children, it's impacting their futures.
God is using them.
If God could use Anthony Tioli, who is not a Christian, who was not a believer at that time, to lead me and guide me into a purpose, into a time, into a training, because I didn't know that this was gonna be the ultimate destiny.
I didn't know that, but God was training me and He used somebody to open up those doors, and that is what's happening right now with our kids.
And I want to invite you to be a part of that movement.
I want to invite you that if you see a child running around, they're not bothering anybody, they're discovering.
And in their discovery, they will find your love and your hug, and that is going to impact the next generation.
That is going to impact them.
And so I want to invite you to get a hold of this moment and and and volunteer with our kids.
I I can tell you, if if I wasn't up here on this stage, I would be in there in that room with them because of the importance that a father figure, a mother figure has over our children.
Would you agree to that?
Amen.
So now you gave me an applause and an amen.
You heard it.
We're gonna have volunteers for our children's ministry.
Now, watch this healing.
Joseph has two children.
And and healing is not the finish line.
Healing is not the finish line.
He has two children.
One is Manasseh, the second son is Ephraim, and in Genesis 41, 52, it says, Genesis 41, 52, I've got it here.
The second son he named Ephraim and said, It is because God had made me, has made me fruitful.
Where?
Can you read it together?
In the land of my suffering.
So Manasseh means that God, God has made me forget.
God has healed my past wounds, God has healed my family inheritance.
And then Ephraim comes on the stage and God and and Joseph calls him Ephraim.
God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.
What a vision that Joseph had.
If there is somebody in the Bible that can complain about life, it's Joseph.
He can complain.
It's not fair.
Why me?
What did I do to deserve this?
And yet he says, God made me forget my past, and now he has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.
Can I say this?
There is fruit that is going to come out of the moments of the suffering that you've lived.
There is great fruit.
A great seed was sown, even if you don't see it right now, but there is fruit that is coming from that moment.
And Romans chapter 5, verse 3 and 4 says, we also glory in our suffering, because we know that suffering produces perseverance.
And perseverance produces character.
And character produces hope.
And that is why suffering is so vital that we see that it is not it's not something that's happening to me, it's something that God wants to use for me and produce a fruit in our lives.
See, the goal of grace is not just merely survival, it's transformation.
It's to be fruitful, it's to give back.
There are so many testimonies in this place of difficult seasons that somebody else is living right now that needs you, that needs your advice, that needs your heart, that needs your wisdom, that needs your experience.
Somebody is going through what you already went through.
And when we sing that song, we we're calling on the God of Moses, the God of Mary, the God of David.
There's a song that we sing together that we're calling on the God of Israel.
And when we say that, you notice that in the Bible, in the Old Testament, it always refers to a family, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
It's always referring to a family.
And I want to say, the God of Fred.
That's who I'm calling.
I'm calling on the God that you call in those difficult moments.
In the moments where your business, you had no idea what the next step was, but you were faithful to God and you were saying, God, I'm here.
That's the God that I need for my business.
That's the God that you need in your business.
Calling on the God of Jonathan.
In a difficult moment, even through ministry, Jonathan was faithful to God.
And he said, I'm here, God, use me.
And in those difficult moments of my experience in ministry, I'm calling on the God of Jonathan, who delivered him and freed him and opened up a new path.
The God of MJ.
Through suffering and through loss.
That's the God I'm calling on.
The God that redefines our present, a new life God.
And I want to invite the musicians to come forward with us.
As we start to wrap this up, I want you to know that grace, grace is the unmerited, unearned, undeserved favor of God over your life.
And if you've been through a difficult season, that moment, God is delivering grace over your life.
The unearned, unmerited favor of God over your life, so that you can extend it out to other people.
So that you can reunite.
And so we saw how sin divides.
Sin hides, grace reunites.
And grace abides.
Grace reunites.
And so Joseph is now in the face, he's got his children, and he's called them Manasseh, and he's called him Ephraim.
And now he's in a position of power.
He is the prime minister of Egypt.
The only other person more powerful than Joseph is Pharaoh himself.
And Joseph now has to take care of his brothers.
And his brothers are presented to him because there is a great famine in the land, and they have come to Egypt to get grain from Egypt, and they have no idea that they're asking grain from the prime minister of the land.
And in that moment, Joseph has a choice to make.
And Joseph decides he has he has the ability and the power to get vengeance.
He has the ability and the power to get payback.
And it's in that moment that we see the maturity of Joseph.
Because maturity is not how we speak about our past, it's how we speak about those who hurt us in a past.
And in that moment, Joseph takes his brothers, and instead of paying them back, he declares these words over them.
He says, he says, what you meant for evil, what God meant for good.
Genesis 50, verse 20, you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.
And that's the same thing that Paul says to us.
In Second Corinthians chapter 5, verse 18, God says this that God reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.
And that's what happens when you allow God to help you get over the past.
When you allow God to heal your heart from the past wounds.
When you allow God to prosper you and to make you fruitful through the pain and through the hurt and through the suffering, something beautiful then happens.
Reunion.
Reunion happens.
Blessing happens.
Restoring happens.
Lives are transformed.
You weren't you the one that was hurt or violated?
How can you be so happy now?
And those are the things that God does in our lives.
He transforms and heals, renews and restores, and he gives you a new life.
So that you can now decide today.
It ends with me.
Today it stops with me.
Division ends here today.
Hiding from God ends here today.
I will not inherit that to my children.
I will not inherit that to my family.
It stops with me.
Joseph could have continued on.
Joseph could have had uh hurt and pain and just gone after his brothers and really paid back all those years of suffering, but he didn't.
And that is the proof of a restored life.
A life to whom God has made prosperous.
The Bible says, to whom much is forgiven loves much.
And I know that I've been forgiven of much.
And that's why I love much.
And so Manasseh and Ephraim.
Manasseh's the older son.
Ephraim is a younger son.
And there is a law of the blessing of the older brother.
And Jacob, Joseph's dad, is now old.
And he's about to die.
And Joseph brings him his two sons.
And he puts the older son Manasseh to Joseph's right hand.
And he puts the younger son Ephraim on Jacob's left hand.
And the idea here is that the older son is blessed.
A double portion of the blessing.
A double portion of the blessing over Manasseh.
And then a regular portion of blessing over Ephraim.
And so Joseph knows that his dad is getting old and it's getting harder for him to see.
So he places them in the correct order according to the blessing.
The law, the law of the first blessing, the double portion blessing of the older son.
And in that moment, Jacob sees the two boys.
And watch what he says.
He says, Joseph, these two boys are no longer yours.
They are mine.
And they're going to inherit everything that I give to them.
He adopts his grandchildren and calls him, calls them his own.
He takes the fathership of Joseph away from Manasseh and Ephraim.
And he says, These are my boys now.
And in that moment, he goes to bless him.
And he extends his right hand.
And instead of going over to Manasseh's head, he goes over to Ephraim's head.
And he blesses Ephraim.
The younger son, the one that wasn't expected to receive, now gets a double portion.
What you weren't expecting to receive.
Now God is calling you his son, his daughter, and he's extending his hand over to your head.
And you weren't expecting this blessing, but now the blessing is upon your life, and he extends his hand over Manasseh and He blesses him, and he takes his left hand and he blesses Ephraim.
He blesses Ephraim first with his right and left Manasseh.
And he crosses his arms for the blessing to be passed down.
He crosses his arms.
You messed up.
That's not how it's supposed to go.
And often that's what I say to God, God, I think you messed up on this one.
God, where's the answer to this prayer request?
Where's the answer that I'm looking for?
God, you know the prayers that I have, the needs that I have, the hurt that I'm carrying.
You know.
And Joseph runs to his dad and says, Dad, Dad, you you got it all wrong.
Switch your hands.
You're blessing the wrong kid.
And this sentence jumped out at me, and I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't continue.
I know, son.
I know.
That's what Jacob said to Joseph.
I know.
I know what I'm doing.
I know you don't understand.
But I do.
I know what I'm doing.
And in that moment, as I was reading this, and I've read this a hundred times in the scripture, it finally made sense.
I don't have the answer to tomorrow's future.
But I know who does.
And he's not giving me all the answers, but he's saying this.
I know.
I know, son.
I know, daughter.
I know that you think I should do it this way.
I know that you think that it should be this way.
I know that you would have wished for a better life.
I know that you would have wished that you were born into a different family.
I know the problems and the struggles that you've had with your siblings, with your family members, with an aunt, with an uncle.
I know.
But I need you to know that I know.
And I know what I'm going to do with your life.
And he takes our past and he takes our mistakes and he takes our wounds and he takes our sin and he takes all of it, all of the hurt, and all of the pain, and he takes his goodness, and he takes his peace and his grace, and he crosses his arms together and blesses your life and your family's life and your children's life.
And I almost feel like God, God takes all of this stuff and weaves it together and calls it good.
He looks back at the tapestry of your life and he calls it good.
For I know, declares the Lord, the plans that I have for you.
Plans to prosper you and not to hurt you.
Plans to enlarge you and give you a future that you had no idea was coming.
Plans that eyes have not seen, nor ears have heard, are the plans that I have for your life.
I can tell you, in my wildest dreams, would I have thought to teach one day at a university?
In my wildest dreams would I think that a camera could take me to Europe.
In my wildest dreams, did I think that those two things, teaching and connecting through an apparatus, would lead me here today.
In my wildest dreams.
But in God's plans, he knew it.
And he knew what he was doing.
And the blessing that comes over your life comes at the price of a cross.
In that Jacob crosses his arms and blesses.
Yet there is a cross that stands tall, that looms over my past and over my present and over my future.
And through the cross, I have access to God who blesses me and who is with us.
Church, would you stand?
The first symptom of sin is hiding.
The second is division.
At the cross.
We see that being reversed.
The Bible says that grace and truth came through the person of Jesus.
Grace is on the side of truth.
The law was given by Moses.
Grace and truth has come through the person of Jesus.
And at the cross, that is reversed.
What sin did to make us hide from God, the cross brings us close to God, draws us into a family of God.
The family of God.
So instead of hiding away from Him, we can run towards Him.
Instead of being ashamed and embarrassed, we can let all of that go and let the cross be the blessing over our lives.
So I just want to pray for you right now.
God, I thank you for our church.
I thank you for everyone that is in this place right now.
God, you know.
You know the hurt and the pain and the past.
And I would ask that right now, God, that you would give us this blessing of Manasseh.
The blessing that says that you help us forget that past.
The past of our household, the past of the wounds that were created from our families, God, we will no longer live in that.
We will live in the new life that you have produced for us, that you have purchased for us on the cross.
And God, as we do that and we are healed by the power of your word, that the blessing that came over Ephraim has well come over us, a double portion of your blessing to be fruitful and to multiply the experiences that we've lived in our past into other people.
That our testimony would be a testimony of your faithfulness.
That our testimony would be a testimony of your greatness over our lives, how you brought us out from the Myri clay, and you have restored our lives so that we may be reunited with our loved ones, so that we may be reunited with those that never thought it would be possible, so that we would show your grace and your mercy in all things.
Thank you, Lord, for what you're doing.
Thank you, God, for what you're doing.
Thank you that you are restoring and you're healing and you're raising up a new generation.
You're raising up a family in Christ.
You are leading us through the pain, through the hurt, through the past.
You are leading us and you are guiding us.
You are, you are the one that we are we are leading our lives with.
We are standing on you, Jesus.
You are our foundation, you are our firm foundation.
Everything can fall around us, but in you we are safe, in you we are secure.
Church, let's sing this song together as we praise his name.