SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well glad to be with you guys this morning. My name is Harley Rethel, and I am one of the pastors here at Point Community Church. And uh just excited to have this opportunity to get to share with you guys this morning as we continue on in this series, the Gospel DNA. I love this series because it really kind of helps us set as a church what is the foundation? What do we really believe? This word gospel is thrown around a lot, and as we've gone through this series, I feel like it's helping us define, okay, what does that actually mean? It's one of those churchy words that's that's put out there a lot, and the question is, what does it actually mean when we say gospel? And Nick's done a great job of bringing us to this point and articulating, you know, this is what the gospel means, but I kind of wanted to go over and kind of re uh reiterate what we believe the gospel is, and I want to do that through a thematical kind of way, okay? So, really quickly, before we even kind of pray and dive into today's message, I want to talk about thematically what does the gospel mean? When we say the word gospel, it simply means the good news, and it's the story that we find in the Bible. It's the story of God's saving grace, it's the story of his redemption. And there's four themes that we can find in this story. The first is creation, the second is fall, the third is redemption, and the fourth is restoration. Let me explain those really quickly. Creation. We believe that God created everything. All of us were created by God and for God. We're created for his glory. We're created to worship God, but he also gave us the ability to choose, and if we don't choose God, which humanity did, we we chose to reject God, that caused sin to enter the world. And sin simply separated us from God, okay? So we've got creation, fall, separated us from God. The redemption is the story of Christ, God giving of his own son, his only son, to come and to die for our sins, the death that we should have paid, okay? So God sends Jesus to come and to die for us. We're a unique set of beliefs in that we believed our God sent his son to die for us. We don't earn our way to God, he sent his son to rescue us, okay? That's very unique. So redemption comes through Christ, and our hope and our plan for the future is to spend eternity with Jesus. There's this idea of restoration, one day when everything is made perfect, everything is right, where everything is made the way that it was meant to be. The Bible tells us that Jesus is going to come back. And I'm excited about that. So the gospel really is good news. It's not just sort of good news. No, it is good news. And when we say the word gospel, that's what we're talking about, okay? So that's the foundation that we're going to cover and kind of base off of today. If you have questions about what the gospel means or how that impacts you personally or how Jesus saves us, I'd love for you to come and talk with me. After the service, we'll have our elders up here after the service doing some prayer and stuff. You have questions, come and ask. They're good questions, okay? So that's the foundation we're starting off today. The thing that I've learned recently, and it's kind of sad that it's only recently that I've learned this, but in the last few years, God's really been showing me that the gospel is more than just about our that saving moment where we say, God, I need you to forgive me of my sins. You know, the Bible tells us if we believe in our hearts, confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord, we will be saved. But it's more than that. The gospel's not just about that moment, it's the continued moments where he moves us to be more and more like himself, to make us more and more Christ-like, okay? So the gospel's not just for our saving, but it's also our continued process of growth. And that's why it's so important for us to know and to understand the gospel. I'm going to pray for us here for a moment. So if you guys wouldn't mind just bowing your heads, closing your eyes, and what I want you to do, where you're sitting this morning, I just want you to say a real simple prayer. And I want you to ask God to speak to you this morning and ask him to take away distractions. So would you just do that and then I'll close us here in a sec. God, thank you for this rain this morning, and that it reminds us of your faithfulness, your goodness, and your provision. And God, I just pray that you would hear the prayers this morning of all the people in this room who have said, God, would you speak to me this morning? So, Holy Spirit, we invite you to guide our hearts. God, I invite you to guide my heart and my tongue as I lead out in this time. God, would you speak through me? And God, I just pray that you would help us to understand, to know and to understand the real truth. Thank you, Jesus. Amen. God is awesome and perfect, okay? God is awesome and perfect. But I believe, if we're all honest here today, that we all struggle with believing at times lies about God. God's awesome and perfect, but we struggle to believe that that is true. And it's because of this unbelief in our lives that we have sins in our lives, we have negative emotions, we have issues and problems that continue on in our lives. And my hope is today that as we look at this, I know that that's a big, bold, sweeping statement to start this morning, but my hope is that as we journey today that you'll see, okay, yeah, that may be true. God is awesome and perfect. I struggle with lies, but God wants to deal with those things in my lives. He wants to do work in my heart and in my life today. Now we're going to use this word heart a lot today, okay? Heart is an interesting thing. When we talk about our hearts, we're not actually talking about this like muscle that pumps blood around our bodies, okay? The Bible talks about heart a lot, and when it's talking about that, it's talking about the essence of who we are. And so I gave us, in your listening guide, I gave us a little place to write down basically a working definition of what our hearts is. I'd really encourage everybody to just jot down some notes. If you write something down, you're gonna remember it a lot better, okay? So just jot down some notes. Our first spot here today is the heart is the seat of our mind, our will, and our emotions. This is a good working definition. Our heart, when we talk about our hearts today, we're talking about the seat of our mind, our will, and our emotions. Now think about this with me for a minute. Our mind, that's like where all our thoughts take place. Our will is kind of like our urges, our desires, our impulses. And then when we talk about our our emotions, that's really our feelings, our our um, I don't know how to describe that. That's our like the the I guess impulses as well would be another good way to define that. So, really, when we say our hearts, we're saying it's a combination of all of those things. So it's really the essence of who we are. Our hearts are the essence of who we are and what's going on in our lives. And one of the best illustrations that I've ever heard about the heart and how it affects our lives, the behaviors in our lives, is an illustration of an apple tree. And some of you have heard me give this before, and I apologize for that. But let me tell you this this little thought. This is how it goes. Imagine with me that my wife, Liz, and I bought a house, and in the backyard of that house is an apple tree. We're really excited about the apple tree because it, you know, we like apples. So apple season comes about, and we go out to this apple tree, and we go out to look at the apples, all excited, but when we get there, this apple tree has the most disgusting-looking apples that you've ever seen. Okay, they're like small and wrinkly and like brownish, not reddish, they're kind of gross looking. And if you were to cut into that apple, they just got like a yellow flesh inside, okay? So picture with me, just not good apples. So, in this this little hypothesis, imagine with me that Liz and myself are both very upset about this, and we're like, okay, I'm a fix-it guy, I'm gonna fix this problem. So I head off to the store, and Liz is watching from the you know, from the window of the kitchen, she looks out the window, and this is what she sees. She sees me walk up to the apple tree with a bag, and I go out and I snip off each of those apples. And as I snip those apples off, throw them away over the fence, and uh I get a nice big juicy golden red apple out of the bag, polish it up a little bit, get rid of the sticker. Don't know if you guys like me, I never know where to put those stickers. Um take off the sticker, and and then I get some brown duct tape and tape it onto the tree, okay? And I do this for several hours after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, I stand back and look at my at my creation, and it looks okay, right? The apple tree looks good, sort of. Uh did I fix that apple tree?

unknown 9:16

No.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

No. I mean, it's is it a good apple tree? No, it's not a good apple tree. It's still bad at its core, at its root, the apple tree is bad. And the illustration goes like this. Our lives, in our lives, we are constantly producing fruit. There's things that come out of our lives, and some of these things that happen in our lives are not that great. We all struggle with different things, whether that be lying, cheating, uh, lust, addiction, um, you know, issues in our lives, jealousy, you name it. We all have issues in our lives, and those are like the apples on the apple tree. And sometimes when we see those behaviors in our lives, what we want to do is we want to take that apple off and replace it with a good apple. We want to do some behavior modification, okay? Some pop psychology. We want to, you know, try harder, not do this, do do that. You know, we want to fix the problem by just dressing up the outside. But the problem is we haven't dealt with the root issue, we haven't dealt with the heart. And today, what we're gonna deal with, my hope is we're gonna have some heart surgery here today. We're gonna deal with our hearts and say, God, rather than addressing these apples, rather than addressing these outside issues, we're gonna ask the question, what is causing that apple to grow in the first place? What's going on at the root of the issue? And I think a great place for us to start this morning is looking at the first time that sin entered our worlds. Well, because this isn't a new thing that's happening. This actually happened the very first time sin entered the world in the Garden of Eden. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab our Bibles. If you don't have one, there should be one near you in a seat in front of you. Feel free to get your phone Bible app out. We're gonna go to Genesis chapter three. The Bible hasn't been going very long before sin is introduced. Genesis chapter 3. It's where we're gonna jump in today. And we're gonna read verse 1 through 7. And we're gonna talk about and see what's going on in Adam and Eve's hearts, okay? So Genesis chapter 3, verse 1, I'll read it for you. Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God really say to you, You can't eat from any tree in the garden? The woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit from the trees in the garden, but about the fruit in the m uh of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, You must not eat it or touch it, or you will d die. No, you will not die, the serpent said to the woman. In fact, God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of it and of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked. Okay, we're gonna stop there. I want to ask you a couple of really quick questions about this. What was the real temptation for Adam and Eve, and what was going on in their hearts? The real temptation wasn't to eat fruit, okay? You guys see that, right? It was more than just about fruit. The temptation for them was this idea that maybe God is holding out on us. Maybe we the created beings could be equal to the Creator. There was this temptation for a power shift. There was this temptation and a struggle going on in their hearts. Let me read this to you. This may sound harsh, but I believe this is true. Adam and Eve sinned because they believed a lie that they should be God. They thought that his rule was oppressive and that he had taken their freedom, and that living for themselves offered more than what God had provided. That's what was going on in their hearts. Now listen very closely as I read that same sentence and personalize it. We sin because we believe a lie, that we should be God. We think that his rule is oppressive and he has taken our freedom, that living for ourselves offers more than what God provides. That's pretty harsh, right? That's not the sort of thing that you just come out and say. Like, that's not something that even in a small group or in a you know a close friendship with somebody, you walk in and say, hey, this is what's going on. Like, I I feel like I should be as important as God. But this is what I'm trying to say. Below the surface, at a heart level, this unbelief is what we struggle with. Where there's a power struggle constantly going on in our hearts. And we need to let God deal with our hearts. There's a gap between what we know in our heads and what we truly believe in our hearts, and in that gap is where our unbelief lies. And my challenge for you, my my challenge for you and for me this morning is that we would let God really impact and affect our hearts with the truth. We must preach the gospel to ourselves so that we can understand and know in our hearts what truth really is. See, see, going back to that apple tree, it's not just enough, like I said, to pick these apples off the apple tree and call it done, or to replace it with new apples. What we need to do is we need to replace the root, the heart of the tree. You can't just take the root out. You can't just say, Well, um, I'm gonna, you know, stop believing that God isn't supreme. I'm gonna take that out. You've got to replace it with the truth. God is supreme. Okay, so you can't just take something out. We also need to replace the tr with the unbelief with a belief. We have to replace the lie with a truth. So that's where we're going today. Now, this talk about truth reminds me of this passage, this beautiful passage, where Jesus is talking to a big group of people. He's actually debating back and forth with a bunch of religious leaders. And they're they're actually it's quite heated in this conversation in John chapter 8. I'm not going to get you to turn there today, but in John chapter 8, there's this conversation going back and forth between Jesus and these religious leaders. But there's a group of people around them, and they're hearing what's going on. And as they hear this message, they all of a sudden, it says in the in the scriptures that they believe in Jesus. And Jesus knows what's going on, and he turns to them and addresses the people who just believed in him. And he said this very simple yet powerful statement. It simply says this John chapter 8, 32, many of you will know this. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Jesus turns and says that. And my prayer, my my hope today is that all of us, as we're open and honest before God, is that we would allow his truth to set us free. That leads us to a quote question. What is truth? What are we to believe about God? And that's really where we're gonna spend the rest of our time today. We're gonna spend the rest of our time today talking about four truths about God. We call these four truths the four Gs. They are called the four G's because they all start with G. That's really smart, isn't it? So the four G's is where we're gonna spend the rest of our times. And this isn't like some magical word formula that's going to miraculously make you a better person. This is just a perspective to help you know and identify what's going on in my heart and how does God want to deal with my heart today. So let's jump into looking at these four truths, and I really challenge you, I challenge myself to be open and honest with God as we look through these things. The first truth this morning is this God is great. So we don't have to be in control. God is great. We don't have to be in control. Is anybody here like me in that you like to be in control? I like I just tip oh, that's a good show of hands. That's good. We could have a therapy session here. Okay, let's have a little therapy session here. I tend to like to be in control. Uh I like to know what's going on, I like to have a plan, I like to know what's going on. But the truth is that control, that idea of control that I have is an illusion. The reality of the fact is that it's not my job to be in control. That's God's job. And sometimes when I try and take that from him, when we try and take that from him, that we can get angry, we can get frustrated when things don't go our way, or we can be anxious and worried that God doesn't have things the way that he's meant to. Listen to this Psalms. Psalms 145, verse 3 says this Yahweh, God, is great and highly to be praised. His greatness is unsearchable. Not his greatness is big, not his greatness is as big as the ocean or the mountains. Literally, his greatness is unsearchable. That means like you cannot get it. Like, if you tried to understand God's greatness, you literally cannot understand it. And I find rest in that today. I hope you find rest in that today. The God we serve, the God we love, is that great that we can't know his greatness. But let me help you try and get a little perspective here, okay? Imagine with me in this hand, I have a basketball, okay? Imagine there's a basketball in this hand, and that was to represent a scaled down version of our sun. In my other hand, I have, imagine with me, again, thank you for your help, a peppercorn. Okay? That is the size of the earth in comparison to the sun. Basketball, peppercorn. All that you know, all that I know is scaled down to this little peppercorn. Okay? Now, to keep things in scale, to just remind you of how small we are and how big God is, I'd need to put that basketball 85 feet away from the peppercorn. That's how far away we rotate around the sun. Now, if that's not enough, the planet they discovered in 2005 called Eris or something like that, it's rotating, if we kept the same scale, and put the basketball over there and drove a mile and a half away. That's how far it's rotating from the sun. It's it's held by the gravitational pull of the sun, a mile and a half away in scale. And that's just our solar system in our galaxy. And there's millions of those. The scriptures tell us, Isaiah 40 says, that God holds the universe in the palm of our hand uh of his hand. Okay, so God is great, he is big, he is awesome, and I think a lot of us, yeah, we get that up here, but we struggle to truly know that here. And so we we fight God for control. And when I remind you of that scale, I hope that you see that it's much like my son Trafford. I have a two and a half-year-old son, and oftentimes he'll be trying to do something that there's no way he can do it. And I'll come up to help him, and I'll try and you know, intervene to help be the good father, you know, and he looks up at me and says, No, I do it. And I think I think that's how we we interact with God sometimes. We've got life going on, and we look up at him and we're like, no, I do it. But but the reality is God is great, we are not great, and so he should have control. What we need to do today is repent of our desire to be in control, worship him as the one true God, see that he is great, and see that we don't have control. Because I believe if you know that truth, if that's the truth that you need to hear today, that that truth will set you free. The second G. God is glorious, so we don't have to fear others. Lots of us struggle. We have this common issue, especially at different times in our lives, of craving the approval of other. People. We're fearful of rejection. We're fearful of disapproval. And so the opinions of others mean more to us than the opinion of God. This idea, this thought is in the scriptures in the Bible is called the fear of man. And there's a beautiful scripture that talks about that. Let me read it for you. Proverbs 29, verse 25 says this. The fear of man is a snare, but the one who trusts the Lord is protected. What does the fear of man look like? Well, it can look like several things. Let me read a few things to you. It can look like susceptibility to peer pressure, needing something from a spouse or a partner or a significant other. Self-esteem issues. Being overcommitted because you can't say no. You want to please people. Fear of being exposed. Small lies to make yourself look good. People making you jealous, angry, depressed, or anxious. Your emotions really are controlled by others. Avoiding people, comparing yourself to others, and this one really hurts. Fear of talking about Jesus. Some of us really struggle with the fear of man. We're worried about people's glory, and we've forgotten that the only people that we need the only person's glory we need to worry about is actually God's glory. The answer to the fear of man is fear of God. And if I was to ask you today to put those people whose opinions matter most to you next to God, I think you'd see pretty quickly that their opinion really doesn't matter. Picture with me, some of you have read the Bible and you know there's parts where it talks about God in the throne room, and there's like flashes of lightning, there's angels flying around, there's jewels everywhere, there's people falling down in worship. Picture that image, and then the people whose opinion can compare like worries you. Like put those two next to each other, and pretty quickly we see we're reminded God's glory is what matters, not people's glory. We don't need to worry about that. God is glorious, and he's worthy of our fear, worship, respect, and trust. When we see him as most glorious, and we don't fear others, I believe that this truth can really set you free. Okay, third G. God is good. So we don't have to look elsewhere. God's good, you don't have to look elsewhere. The two key words you hear here are that's hard to say, isn't it? Here, here. The two key words in this one are satisfaction and fulfillment. Think about this for a moment, if you would, for me. Just think about what are you currently looking to for your satisfaction and your fulfillment? Be honest with yourself. What do you look to first for your satisfaction and fulfillment? The truth is, God creates a need, needs in our lives, and he fills those needs. You know, before the fall, Adam was walking around looking for a partner. God gave him a partner. You know that Adam and Eve had to eat. God creates needs in our lives and fulfills those needs. God also doesn't just meet our physical needs with good things, he meets our deeper needs with the ultimate good thing, which is Himself. God is our ultimate good. That's why when Jesus was walking around, sometimes he'd turn to the crowd, and this really made people feel strange, but he'd turn around and say, I am the bread of life. If anybody eats of me, you know, he'll never go hungry. And people were like, What the heck is this guy talking about? He was talking about this. He was saying, the ultimate good thing for you is me. If you look to anything else, whether it's, you know, friends, it's uh love, whether it's money, hobbies, whatever, you know, finances, security, all of that stuff falls short compared to me. They're all hollow compared to me. Yet we often look to the creator gifts for satisfaction and fulfillment instead of looking to the one who gives us those gifts. Let me give you a really big owie, as my son would say, a big owie statement. Sometimes we want God's provision, but we don't want God. We want God's provision, but we don't want God. Guilty, right? Psalms 34, verse 8 says this taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the man who takes refuge in him. Not how happy is the man who takes refuge in his relationships or his bank account or in his job or whatever else, who takes refuge in him. Remember, God doesn't exist for us, we exist for God. God is good, and so we don't have to look elsewhere. When you know that truth, I believe that truth can set you, can set me free. Fourth G, God is gracious, so we don't have to prove ourselves. The two main problem areas here that we struggle with are pride and guilt. Pride and guilt. The pride comes in the form of this. If you're somebody who would call yourself a Christian today, sometimes when you're going along in your Christian walk, you'll be uh you would very quickly say, you know, Jesus saved me, I'm saved by Jesus, I'm saved by grace. You'd say all of that, but in reality, what you're believing down here in your heart is that God saved me, but I'm trying to work for and earn his approval by the way that I'm living. I'm living morally, I'm living right, I'm spending a lot of time reading scripture or praying, I'm which aren't bad things, but if they all of a sudden become ways of earning God's approval, that's not grace. Let me give you the definition of grace. Grace is freely given unmerited favor and love from God. That's grace. And yet sometimes we we start to put all these extra things into our Christian walk and we start trying to prove ourselves to ourselves or prove ourselves to God. Say, I've done this for you, I've done that for you. If that sounds familiar, we talked about it last week with the older son in the parable of the two sons we talked about last week. He really was struggling with this. He was trying to prove himself to the Father. Now let me show you how preposterous this is. It's like we're standing, let me give you this illustration. We're standing in front of a huge mess we've created, which is our sin. And the sin's going to cost us, if we could put a money figure on it, it's going to cost us $500 million to fix, which we don't have, okay? So we come up to our sin, we've got no way of getting out of it, and Jesus comes up with a couple of suitcases full of money, dumps them down, and starts taking care of our debt. He's paying the $500 million for us. And we're looking in our pockets saying, Oh, oh, I've got an extra $2. I'll let me help you with that, Jesus. Let me let me let me help you get that fixed up. We want to put in our two cents to earn our salvation. How silly does that sound? How ridiculous is that that we would think we could earn God's favor. We don't have to prove anything to God. He loves us just as we are. The scriptures tell us that no one is righteous, not even one. Paul was struggling with this at one point in his ministry. 2 Corinthians 12, verse 9, he records what Jesus said to him as he was struggling with this. Jesus simply said this to him, My grace is sufficient for you. And some of you need to hear that today. God's grace is sufficient for you. You don't have to work to earn his approval at all. Now I said there was pride in the guilt. The guilt comes when we put up these measuring sticks and we don't measure up to our own measuring sticks. For example, you may say, okay, it's a new year, I'm gonna start, you know, doing 45 minutes of quiet time every day. And then when we start, don't, you know, when when things, the wheels fall off, we look at that and we're like, I'm not doing it, I'm a horrible Christian, and this guilt and this shame, this condemnation starts coming down on us. We're not meant to live with either of those. The reality is that we're meant to live with confidence and humility. They can replace our pride and our guilt. Confidence in Christ's finished work on our behalf, and humility in that we can know the reality of his grace, the magnitude of his grace. You don't have to prove yourself. And when you truly know that, I believe that that truth can set you free. So those are the four G's. And I hope that you see here that as we've gone through those four truths about God, that God is great, and the ultimate example of his greatness was found in Jesus. I mean, Jesus coming, living for our sins, dying, raising to life again. We also see that God is glorious. Jesus is the ultimate expression of God's glory. We also see that God is good. Jesus was the expression of God's goodness. We see that God is gracious, and obviously, Jesus was the ultimate expression of God's graciousness to us. I want to tell you how this impacted me personally. A couple of years ago, I was going through a Bible study with a group of guys, and it was the first time that I ran into these four truths about God. As we're going through this study, the study asked us to pick out one area in our lives that we wanted God to change. We called it our gospel change project. And as I was praying about what it should be, I really felt like God was convicting me that it needed to be this area where whenever something wouldn't go my way, whenever things weren't going how I wanted, especially working on projects or things around the house or things in the garage, whatever, that whenever things didn't go my way, I would go from zero to sixty in a second. Like, I mean, I would go from the nice, calm, you know, pastor guy, whatever you want to call me, to like this babbling, furious heathen in a second. Okay, so this rage would come out of me, this anger, this frustration when things wouldn't go my way. I was like, okay, I think that should be my gospel change project. You're laughing because it's obvious to you. It's never obvious when you're the person, but uh I was like, okay, I'm gonna let God, well, I'm gonna try and let God impact this area of my life. And so as we went through that process of going through this study, we finally came to this week where we did the study on the four Gs. And as we're going through these four Gs, it was like God took this big spotlight and went and shone it in on this. God is great, so you don't have to be in control. And I was like, that's the truth that I need to hear, that it's at the bottom of this lie. I think that I'm in control, and every time that things don't go my way, I blow up, I get frustrated. And so from that moment on, God's really used that truth in my life to help change that. Now I'm not saying I'm perfect at this moment. I still struggle, but I'll tell you, a lot of the times when that frustration would have come, like it would have in the past, like I literally hear the phrase drop into my head, God is great, you don't have to be in control. And in that moment, it's like this perspective. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's true. This is still annoying, but I'm gonna like it's not gonna ruin my day, it's not gonna ruin my relationship with Liz, it's not gonna ruin my life. And so that's how the gospel has really been impacting my life through these truths. My hope today is that these four things, these four truths, would just really be a grid for you to look at your life and say, what is the truth that I need to hear today? Nick told us a couple of weeks ago that we worship our way into sin and that we can only worship our way back out of sin. And that all of life we are worshiping, whether we like it or not, it's like this hose that's constantly on. You can't go over here and turn the worship off. You know, whether you're worshiping, you know, your day, your um priorities, your uh hobbies, finances, God, you know, he might occasionally get worshiped, but that hose is always on of worship. What I want to challenge you guys to do today is simply look at your lives, look at those apples in your life, and rather than dealing with the behaviors and the things that are going on in your life, I want to challenge you to look to the heart of the issue and say, which of these truths am I struggling to believe that are affecting the behaviors of my life? And that really gives us a way to say, where do I need to point, where do I need to point my hose this morning? Where does my worship need to get pointed to? If you're struggling with control issues, point that worship at the fact that God is great. Think about that, worship on that, pray about that, meditate on scriptures that tell you that God is great. If you're struggling to believe that God is glorious and you've got this fear of other people, take your worship hose and point your worship at the fact that God is alone is glorious. You don't need to fear anybody else. You don't need to be worried and anxious. If you're struggling with the idea that God is good, you're looking for satisfaction and fulfillment in relationships or in the things you own or whatever else, take that worship hose and point it directly at that. Remind yourself God is good. I am not going to be fulfilled by any of that other stuff. Or finally, maybe you need to take that worship hose and point it to the fact that God is gracious. You don't have to prove yourself. Remind yourself of God's graciousness. Meditate on that, worship him for his graciousness. Like I said, it's not some hocus pocus thing. More than anything, this is just a grid for you to look at and say, where do I need to worship in my life? So that the Lord is most glorified in my life. And my heart is in the right place with him. We never arrived. This is a continual process. And so I hope you feel you don't feel beat up by what we've talked about today. My hope more so is that you would feel hope in the fact that God is ready and able to exchange those lies for truths in our lives. Let me pray for us. God, thank you for today. Thank you for the things that you're doing in our lives. God, thank you for these truths. I just pray that we would really and truly know them at our heart level, that we wouldn't just know them in our head, but we would know them in our hearts. God, help us to know that you are great, you are glorious, you are good, and that you're gracious. Would the reality of that really impact our lives today? God, um, I just pray we'd be honest with ourselves. Holy Spirit, we invite your conviction in this time, and we invite your healing. God, we pray that you would give us joy in this process, that we'd be filled with joy as we realize the work that you're doing in our lives, that you never give up on us, and that you are continually gracious with us. Thank you for that. Thank you that we don't have to earn your approval. Just pray for freedom in this place here today. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.