Ecclesiastes 1:1-11, 3:11 | Winter Wisdom

Listen to this week’s sermon, Winter Wisdom: How We Spend Our Time preached by Pastoral Resident Kenneth Dyches from Ecclesiastes 1:1-11, 3:11.

Chapters

• 0:00 Scripture And Framing The Question Of Time
• 2:27 The Weight Of A Week And Wasted Time
• 3:55 Vanity Versus Eternity: The Thesis
• 5:28 Solomon’s Wealth And The Trap Of Money
• 10:20 Power Accumulated And Power Surrendered
• 15:40 Pleasure’s Limits And Modern Addictions
• 19:46 From Doom Scroll To Glory Scroll
• 21:20 A Ministry Misstep And Heart Posture
• 22:30 Investing In Eternity: Jesus And Money
• 26:18 Jesus And Power: Emptied To Serve
• 29:20 Jesus And Joy: The Cross And Adoption
• 31:15 It’s Not Too Late: Paradise Today
• 32:45 Letting Go And Watching God Work
• 34:11 Prayer And Call To Surrender

Transcript

Rev. Benjamin Kandt: 0:06

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Benjamin. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, Orlando. At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer. For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.

Sarah Bruner: 0:20

Good morning. Please stand as we ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate our hearts to God's Word. Eternal God, the grass withers and the flower fades, but your word will stand forever. Holy Spirit, help us to love and trust your word through Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. Today's scripture reading comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verses 1 through 11, and chapter 3, verses 11. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind. And on its circuits, the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, see, this is new? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. This is God's word. You may be seated.

Kenneth Dyches: 2:27

So have you ever got to the end of a week and somebody asks you, hey, how was your week? And you think for a second and you're like, what the heck did I do this week? And then if you allow yourself a moment of existential dread, you begin to wonder, was the how did I spend my time? Was it worth it? What did I gain from all of my work, from all of my play, from my relationships this week? Was it all vanity if I can't even remember it all? I feel like as you become a parent, actually you don't lose brain cells, but they're taken up by all of your children, and so you forget what you're doing. But you have that question: how are we spending our time? What am I doing? Will it hold weight in eternity? Or is it all vain? David Cassidy was an American actor. Uh he was lived between 1950 and 2017. Uh, American actor and singer, best known in the 1970s as the Teen Idol, uh, who was on a sitcom. But as a singer, he achieved massive international success. And, you know, during a time before TikTok or the internet, right? So this was a big deal. He sold over 30 million records and starred in sold-out concerts worldwide. And he got to the end of his life and he thought about how he got to do all that he put his heart into. He all the passions that he had, he saw fulfilled. Uh he made money, he played before millions. Uh he was on TV. He

Speaker 2: 3:55

got it all. And when he reflected on his life, his last words before dying were so much wasted time. The average human being in the US now lives to 79 years old, and we'll spend the majority of our time sleeping, working, uh, engaging in some sort of digital media or screens, followed by commuting and eating. The average estimated lifetime screen time is 6.3 hours a day or 15 to 21 years. So, if you're wondering, that's 26 years worth sleeping, 10 to 13 years varying uh working, 15 to 21 years on screens or media, and several years eating, commuting, and doing household activities. So, if you're keeping track, that's 50 years accounted for. Now, if we go through all of those activities, not mindful of the way that we are investing our time in eternity, then we are spending our time in vanity. That's 50 years that can go by in the blink of an eye. See, the difference between spending our time on vanity or investing our time in eternity is the desire of our heart. It's our heart posture. Apart from the work of Christ in our hearts, our hot postures are always towards vanity. However, today we're talking about how we can spend our time on vanity or we can invest our time in eternity. And those are my two main points today: spending our lives on vanity or investing our time in eternity. Go ahead and uh we're gonna actually unpack this in three sections uh per point. Uh it's gonna be money, uh, it's gonna be power and pleasure. And so go ahead and look with me at verse one in Ecclesiastes chapter one. It says, the words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Now, uh people differ on who they think the preacher is, who the author of Ecclesiastes is. Uh, but one can say we're definitely meant to draw to mind Solomon. When you see the son of David king in Jerusalem, uh, we think of uh David's immediate son who ruled over Israel, King Solomon. And essentially he is the paragon. He is the epitome of so much of Ecclesiastes. He had so much power, he had so much wealth, so much pleasures that he had accumulated, he would be a key person to reflect on the vanity of all of these things. And so when we look at Solomon's life, uh we see that he begins by asking the Lord for wisdom. The Lord says, Ask of me whatever you want. And he could have asked for anything, but what he asks for is wisdom. And he trusts in the steadfast love of the Lord, not seeking riches or power at first. And so the Lord is pleased with him. He's pleased with the posture of his heart, so he blesses him with wealth and honor in addition to wisdom. So we look at Solomon and we think, wow, this man was investing in eternity. He was investing in what God was doing in redemptive history through Israel. But then, several chapters later in 1 Kings 10, we see that while Solomon starts with wealth as a gift of God and begins to see financial flourishing in his kingdom, which is so good, soon he begins intentionally accumulating wealth. In 1 Kings 10, the accumulation of gold and silver is mentioned 11 times. And we see the number of the beast, 666, in the talents of gold brought in. And maybe this is a foreshadowing of the beast and revelation, uh, or perhaps this is simply the number of imperfection, the number of perfection being seven, right? And so 666 was almost like his wealth was whispering, failure, failure, failure. Regardless of what the symbolism means, we know that it is true that he was accumulating and lavishing his hell, his house and possessions in gold and silver, to the contradiction of the commands in Deuteronomy for kings. I wonder, I wonder what the wealth that you've accumulated, that we've accumulated speaks. Does it testify to a life invested in eternal things? Do the possessions we have testify to that? Or do they whisper, failure, failure, failure? What happened with Solomon? See, Paul says in 1 Timothy 6 that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evils. See, his heart went after money. His heart already tended in that direction. And as he received more, his heart went after it, and he spent his time accumulating money. So not only was his heart going after it, but the more he gained, it empowered his heart to seek after it all the more, because he was formed in spending his time in the pursuit of money. Warren Buffett is among the wealthiest men in the world. Uh yet he insists that money is not his most valuable possession. The renowned investor and philanthropist and multi-billionaire admitted, I can buy anything I want, but I can't buy time. Money has no utility to me. Time has utility to me. See, he knew that he could he could buy whatever he wanted. He can enjoy this life, and yet he understood that if he's not investing his time in things that matter, all his money is vanity. So what does this look like for us? Well, I'll give you a series of questions to help us look at that. It's we can ask, chasing, is are we chasing money as a proxy for worth? Do we look to our job for status? Do we try to get jobs of status? Do we measure our own salary by those around us? Are we optimizing endlessly to get more? Looking for that next promotion, grinding our way in work for a hypothetical future life? Are we earning money in order to just spend it on ourselves, upgrading our lifestyle faster than we're upgrading our happiness? Are we mistaking business for progress, side hustles that don't have great purpose in our lives, financial tweaking all the time, or monitoring the markets instead of living for eternal things? Are we accumulating as much income as we can, as much money as we can out of fear, hoarding money to quiet the anxiety in our hearts? See, money is not evil in and of itself, but all of these are ways we spend our time in vain ways in pursuit of what money can't buy. They're like a river running into the ocean that's never full. And it reveals a heart striving after fullness from something that can never provide it. God calls us to invest in eternity and to eternity and to trust Him to provide the rest. So we know that money can be a striving after vanity, and so can power. In verse 4, it reads, A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. David, King David, awesome King David, and all that he did came and went. Solomon, in all of that he did, all the splendor that he created, all that he did for Israel came and went. But God's purposes on earth remain. See, when Solomon got started in 1 Kings 9, we see God's promise to Solomon. He says, As for you, if you walk before me as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and of brightness, doing according to all I have commanded you, keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever. Right? There is eternity. Right? If you want to rule in a way that matters, that bears weight in light of eternity, follow me. Spend your time walking with me, praying with me, reading my scriptures, asking what I'm doing, and following me in those places, and then you will see an eternal weight of glory. So Solomon starts with that promise, but how does he end? In 1 Kings 10, we see that Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen. He expanded the military. He had 14 chariots and 1,200 horsemen stationed in chariot cities, right? So this kind of military might puts him in the same category as Egypt, Assyria, and the Hittites, right? He was making Israel a military superpower. Right? He was no small ruler. Solomon was gathering military might. And yet in Deuteronomy 17, again, we see the forbid that it's forbidden to accumulate horses, is forbidden to accumulate that military might. And so he's going against the commands of God once again. And in 1 Kings 11, we see that the Lord himself will oppose him. Not the nations, right? Not the people he was probably trying to protect against. The Lord raises up adversaries against him and promises to tear the kingdom from him and ultimately undoes all that Solomon built up. All of that amazing military might would come crumbling down. All that vanity. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. So what happened? Well, God in Deuteronomy warns that governmental leaders will constantly face the temptation to abuse their power. The more they gain, the more their hearts go after. Solomon spent his time accumulating power rather than investing his power in God.

unknown: 13:29

Right?

Speaker 2: 13:30

When we look at the Old Testament, we see that Joseph rose to power in Egypt, became numbing too in Egypt from just being a slave, right? And the youngest of his brothers before that. Moses, right, was a disgraced prince who brought a slave people out of Egypt, not by his own military might, but by the power of God. We see that Joshua walked around the jaw, the walls of Jericho and they came tumbling down, not by military power, but by the power of God. God's people again and again, they see that as they listen and obey God, he is glorified through his power for his own purposes and for their good. But Solomon trusted in worldly power. Abraham Lincoln said, Nearly all men can stand adversity. But if you want to test a man's character, give him power, because it will draw out what is actually in his heart. So you might be saying, Well, I'm I'm not King Solomon, you know, I'm I'm not a president, uh, I'm not in politics, I'm not, you know, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I'm not in the business of creating power, right? Of holding that sort of power. But let me list a few ways that we do uh hold power. We might be information hoarders. Maybe you make sure that you know things that others don't, right? You always have an answer to the question. You're able to leverage the information you have in all sorts of ways. Maybe you control narratives, subtly editing stories about yourself so that people see the image that you want them to see. I know I myself can be tempted towards that. Somebody tells a somewhat embarrassing story about me, and my temptation is to say, oh yeah, that's true. But it actually happened kind of like this, right? What am I doing in that moment? Uh I'm making a power move. I'm editing the story so that it makes me look good, right? And I'm feeding my heart, I'm empowering it, I'm empowering the sin and lies there that if I make myself look good, that people will accept me, right? I'm spending on vanity instead of investing in eternity. We can also build social capital, right? If enough people like us, then we'll be fine. We can do that on social media, we can do that in the workplace. Just make sure that everyone likes us. We can be gatekeepers. Maybe you decide who gets information, introductions, or opportunities. And we can regulate our emotions, right? Uh in certain situations, refusing emotional vulnerability rather than uh authentic emotional response. Because we want to let them be vulnerable and not ourselves. Or maybe we accumulate skills, making sure that we're irreplaceable, making sure that we always add worth and value to every situation. In all of these ways, we can spend our time accumulating power. These all take time to accumulate, and ultimately, Solomon's awesome accumulation of power, like him, will not only come to nothing, but enable the sin in our heart toward sinful patterns. And that leads me to pleasure. So we've seen this in money, in power, and in pleasure. Verse 8 says, All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Essentially, he's saying, All of our senses, right? Our sight, uh, our hearing, our seeing, uh, none of them will ever be satisfied in just worldly things. And in first King 8, we see Solomon and all Israel make great sacrifices and feasts together, and they go away in awe and enjoy in what God is doing in their midst, and offering up what they have in sacrifice to God and in worship. See, this is what we were created for uh to worship God, to do good work, to enjoy him, to enjoy all that he has given us. And yet then in 1 Kings 11, we read, He had 700 wives who were princesses, and 300 concubines, and his wives turned away his heart. I hope this is not true of anyone in here, but if you consider yourself a player, well, you got nothing on Solomon, right? Again, the iniquity in his heart sought to be filled with pleasure, and clearly it was never enough. And he must have invested time here, right? I mean, how many times do you got to get down on one knee to propose to all these wives? Like, I don't even understand. Hopefully, he shifted knees, right? So he didn't have knee damage from all that. But he must have been considerable. So the time he invested in pursuing all of these wives and women, right? It not only revealed his heart, but it also empowered his heart to continue to go after vanity. What does this look like for us? What are our crutches? Well, we know about 10% of Americans are estimated to be addicted to social media. That translates to 33 million people in the United States alone addicted. Teenagers and young adults are especially vulnerable, with some studies showing up to 40% of those aged 18 to 22 reporting addictive feelings towards social media. And we think, okay, it's kind of like coffee, you know. I have somewhere between like two and like 12 cups of coffee a day. Like it's probably, it's fine. Everyone drinks coffee, it's it's it's socially acceptable. Except we know from studies that social media leads to increased anxiety, loneliness, sleep disruption, and lower self-esteem. Even the uh statistics on depression and suicide have gone up wildly since the invention of the smartphone uh and the adoption of social media. And yet, when we get on social media, we just can't stop scrolling. I mean, I get on Facebook Marketplace just to sell a couple things, and an hour later I'm wondering, what in the world? I'm supposed to be writing a sermon, not like looking at weird videos on Facebook Marketplace, getting caught in the comment section. You know what I'm saying. So, what does this look like? Well, what can we do instead? How can we get out of anxiety and depression and the doom scrolling? Well, we can read the glory scroll rather than the doom scroll, right? Did you know that if you read your Bible a few times a week, uh, there are nominal effects in the transformation of your life. But if you read your Bible up to four times a week, which is the majority of the days of the week, right? If you spend the majority of your time in God's word, they've seen even statistics like 50% decrease in alcoholism. That's wild. That's an addictive behavior, right? God's in the scriptures, it says God's word does not come back void. If we fill our hearts with God, we fill our hearts spending time with Him, we will see His promises. He will transform our hearts and even help us to leave behind the things we pursue in vanity for the sake of being full of God. We can fill our hearts with God's word. In my first year in Orlando in 2016, I was a missionary of sorts. I was on staff with Destino at Campus Ministry at UCF. Uh, and there were only one or two students who were there when I got there, and so I said, okay, we got to build up these numbers. Uh, and so we got to beef up these stats. And so I went to campus and I was like, okay, we're gonna do a big outreach. We're gonna have free food, we're gonna have a movie, it's gonna be awesome. We we flyed, we passed out pamphlets, I got other people to help me fly. We spent in hours and hours flyering to make sure that we got the word out, right? Uh so I reserved a room, I did all the things, day came, five minutes in, nobody's there. Ten minutes in, one student shows up. That one student was the only student who came that night. And I was grateful, I'm sure God was doing a work in his life, and yet it made me wonder was all the time I spent preparing for this vanity. And indeed, a lot of it was because I didn't come and pray and ask the Lord to draw people together. I didn't go to the other believers on campus and ask, what is God doing in your life? What do you see him doing on campus? I didn't align my heart with the eternity of what God was doing. Instead, I worked out of my own power and strategies to try to accomplish God's purposes in my own way. And that leads me to point to investing our lives in eternity. Look with me at chapter three, verse 11. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. So we've looked at King Solomon and the ways that he dealt with money, with pleasure, and power. And now we're going to look at our King, King Jesus, and the way he dealt with money and pleasure and power. Jesus taught 15 to 20% of the time about money. Yet he owned little, he lived off shared resources, and he was an itinerant teacher with nowhere to lay his head. Now, of course, he was a carpenter, you know, before he started his ministry, but you know, I didn't see him opening up IKEAs everywhere. You know, he didn't have some master plan to make lots of money and fund his ministry. No, he modeled the money J curve, the dying and rising it took to obey the Father's will for God's glory and our redemption. He modeled what it meant to invest his time in the kingdom, refusing the idol of money in the heart and trusting God for provision. He said, No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. First and foremost, all of our money, all that we own, must be submitted to God who owns all things and who's given us all things. And why can we do that? Why would anybody want to say, Lord, all of this money is yours, all that we've worked for, all that we have, all of our security blanket, all that adds the comforts to our life? Well, it's because our good God, he says just a few verses later, we can seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all that we need will be added to us. We have a good Father. He sees what we need. Are we willing to invest all that we have in him that we might reap eternal rewards and know that our good father will give us what we need when we need it? So there is a rich young man who came up to Jesus one day and he said, What do I need to inherit the kingdom of God? And Jesus said, Well, follow all the commands. And he listed them all out. And the rich young man said, Great, I've done all of those things. Jesus probably smiled, right, and said, I'm so glad. Now I need one more thing of you. Sell all that you have and give it to the poor and come and follow me. The young man went away discouraged. And I wonder for myself, for all of us, if we were to have a conviction, if friends came around us, uh, if we were reading the scriptures and praying, and we had this conviction that I need to sell all that I have and become a missionary and raise support. Would we walk away discouraged? See, we have practical in our ways that we can invest in eternity with our finances for eternal things. What does that look like? We can budget generosity first, not last in our financial plans. It's good to have a financial plan. It's good to be a good steward of what you have. Money and possessions are not evil, but are we budgeting first to be generous? Or do we budget everything else first, right? Our savings, uh, what we're putting into the stock market, what we're putting away for retirement, what we need for our home and for everything else. And then at the end, with what we have left, giving generously. We can also resist lifestyle inflation, right? The more that you make, the more that I need to buy. And we can choose when enough is enough. We can spend less uh so that we can work less. We can use financial margin to instead of tackling all those projects and things that we want to do in our lives, to say yes instead to God and to others. In other words, we can be intentional about how we work towards and spend our money. We can financially plan by submitting all of it to God and trusting Him to provide. And then how we use our time will flow from that. We'll follow Jesus and it will be shaped, and therefore we will shape our hearts in the way that we use our time to pursue Christ. And that leads me to the question: do we believe God will make all things beautiful in their time? If we do, then we can submit our finances to God. And then in power, right? We see that Jesus emptied himself. He was in the form of God, but did not count a quality with God, a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself. Right? Jesus had all things. He had eternity in heaven with the Father, he had a beautiful community in the Trinity, and yet he became one such as he created, right? He emptied himself and took the form of a servant of those who had sinned against him, right? Knowing that he would have to go to the cross and die. Jesus repeatedly left the scene when they tried to make him king. When his powers were called upon for good, like healing the sick, he was often unaccounted for. Where was he? Praying to the Father. Before he chose his own disciples, where did he go? He prayed to the Father. When faced with the cross in the garden, he submitted his will to the Father and was silent even before Pilate, who claimed false authority to crucify him. See, Jesus repeatedly modeled what it looked like to submit his life to the Father, to spend his time submitting to the Father rather than accumulating power. He said, You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them, not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant. So what does this look like for us? We can choose to let go of power or influence when it would benefit us. Think of controlling the narrative. Instead of controlling the narrative, we could just humble our own hearts. Let God exalt us in his own time. We could do unseen work without reminding people who's in charge. Have you ever done something really great? I did this all the time in my marriage. I like do all the dishes and clean, and then my wife doesn't say anything. I'm like, when she's gonna say something. And then uh eventually she doesn't say it. I'm like, hey, did you see all the stuff I did? Isn't that amazing? She's like, oh yeah, good job, babe. Um right, but that's that's me looking for, like, hey, look what all the things that I have done. Um we can also mentor others instead of merely managing, right? Do we seek to replace ourselves? Do we seek to empower others to the flourishing of the work that God has given them to do who are under us, or do we just manage? We can also decline promotions if they require ethical erosion. Do we ask, hey, by taking this job, by taking this promotion, are we essentially submitting to ethical erosion, being forced into positions that would not glorify God? And we can invite accountability. We can actually take the blame when appropriate, right? This can happen in relationships, this can happen in your marriage, this can be at work. We can invite accountability. See, Jesus only did what he saw the Father doing. Right? When it comes to power, are we constantly inviting God to speak into our hearts? Are we inviting him to give us wisdom in the decisions we make? Are we inviting him day in and day out to allow us to submit our whole lives to him, give our power and our autonomy, not to ourselves, but to God. And finally, pleasure. We see Christ in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. We see that Christ's humiliation, uh his incarnation, his coming to earth consisted in his being born in a low condition. He was born in a food trough. He was made under the law, he underwent the miseries of this life. He stuffed his toe, he went and experienced the wrath of God, the cursed death of the cross, being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time. Again, we see that the God who created all things entered into his creation a finite being in order for the joy set before him.

unknown: 30:03

Right?

Speaker 2: 30:03

What did he find satisfaction in? It was in doing the Father's will and in seeing a family redeemed. That was the joy set before him. And so also we see that when the fullness of time had come, right, we want to experience the fullness of God. God in redemptive history, we see the fullness when Jesus came to die for our sins on the cross, uh, when he was raised to new life, and when he invites all of us who submit our lives to him, submit our time to him, right? We are invited to enter into the fullness of time in Jesus through the forgiveness of our sins and being redeemed in his righteousness so that we might receive adoption. God is outside of time, right? And yet he entered time for our sakes to invite us into the family of God and into all eternity. This is what he is inviting his children into. Some of you here today might have heard all of this and think, man, I have wasted a lot of time. Some of you here today might be experiencing some of that existential dread. Maybe you're not a believer yet. Maybe you're thinking, It's too late for me. I've spent my life on the wrong things. Well, there's another man who experienced that same thing. He was crucified on the cross next to Jesus. And he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into eternity. And Jesus said to him, Today, today, you will be with me in paradise. Jesus invites us the same way. Today we can submit our lives to him. Today we can submit our time to him, our wealth, our power, our pleasures. And we know that he will bring redemption to all things. We know that in the new heavens and new earth we will see the fullness of all that we have done in Christ in eternity. And hear, well done, my good and faithful servant. You know, going back to my ministry at UCF, uh, we eventually saw God do incredible things there. Uh we saw a staff team become uh 10 people. Uh, we saw God raise up more and more students, more and more laborers on the college campus. We went to students like campuses like Valencia and other UCF campuses, pioneered a new funding model. Uh, we even saw the community in Orlando uh start to come and do ministry with us on campus. It was incredible. Uh but then uh just um within a couple years, God dispersed our staff team. Uh, and then the student movement on campus dwindled to just a couple students who were occasionally at a table at one campus. And it left me thinking, what is God doing? Uh was all of that for vanity. Of course, the students who came when I was there, uh, they received from the Lord, but what is he doing now? Um, but I continued to pray and just trust that he was going to do a work there, just releasing that to the Lord and following him in what he'd called me to do. Lo and behold, uh just this past year, a student uh came up to me after church one day and he said, Hey, you're Kenny, right? And I was like, Yes. Uh and he said, Well, I really want to relaunch Destino on campus. And I was like, Great. Who are you? Uh he's one of like three Colombians here in our congregation. Uh, and he just also so happens to be going to UCF, and uh he just opens happens to be going to the same church where I am a pastor. Uh and I happened to be one of the best people to empower him to do ministry on campus. I still had my connections on campus. I knew the campus directors there. I had access to the funds in Destino and the national leadership team. I had years of experience that I could pour into him. And so I did. I gave up my power and I just thought to disciple and to coach him and to pray that God would do an incredible work through him on campus. And in just one semester, they raised up 50 students whose heart language is Spanish, who heard the gospel in their own language and are coming to receive from Jesus. That was amazing. I got to see God fulfill his beautiful purposes in their time. God is likewise inviting us this morning to align ourselves with his beautiful purposes for our lives. He has that for you today. He's inviting you into that today to spend your time, spend all of your life on him because it's worth it. Go ahead and pray with me. Lord, we know that you have brought us here this morning, and we spent our time here this morning worshiping you, hearing of your word. We pray that your spirit would bring to light in our hearts those things that we need to hear. What are the ways that we need to submit our lives to you? The idols in our hearts seeking after vain things that we can invite you through the Spirit to renew, to bring us into true fullness and true joy and true life in our Savior Jesus Christ. You have enabled this, O Lord. You are bringing to redemption all things. We are so grateful for that. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.