Encountering Jesus

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

January 1st is simultaneously the most optimistic and the most pessimistic day of the year. On one side of January 1st, you've got hope. Not just hope Harrington, although hope, we're glad you're here. You've got hope. You've got new ideas. You've got new plans. You've got, Ryan, you've got all these prospects of things that are going to be happening. But the other side, what do you have? You have past failures. You have regrets. You have New Year's resolutions that didn't make it past February. Okay? And so it's with a certain hesitancy, I think, that we approach New Year's resolutions in particular, right? When somebody starts talking about how great this year's gonna be, it's hard not to kind of pull back and go, okay, yeah. Well, we'll see. For example, this past December, mid-December, Forbes Magazine published the following articles in a matter of two days.

Article number one, five New Year's resolutions, a countdown to communication excellence. Number two, three New Year's resolutions for successful and ethical leadership. Third article, New Year's resolutions fail. Do this instead. So I get it, they're trying to get as many headlines as they can, but they were published all within two days of each other. So today, I want to sidestep some of that resolution talk. Is it me, or is there kind of an echo? Are there three of me in here? Okay, sorry, a bit of an echo situation. It's going to start calling and see if I can hear myself call back. I'm not really sure how to fix that. There it is. Okay. So what I want to do today is I want to sidestep some of that resolution talk and I want to start this year by removing clutter by clearing the table and by focusing our attention only on what is absolutely essential. I

Don't want to worry about necessarily resolutions. I'm gonna look them all for it. It's January 1st right new opportunities abound. That's great I'm I'm excited about that But I think if we start focusing on all that we could do, we might lose sight of what we absolutely need to keep hold of, what we absolutely need to have in front of us, what is absolutely essential. On the thing maybe that outranks other important things. It's something that doesn't get stripped away when you ask, is this really necessary in my life? Like it doesn't get stripped away there. I'll give you an example from parenting. In parenting, there are things that are important. If you've been a kid, you've been a parent, you understand. There's things that are important. Going on vacations, there's a really important do. Fond memories with your kids. Making sure that your kids bathe regularly.

That's important. Nobody wants stinky kids, you or anybody else. Giving them healthy eating habits. Those are important things to do for kids. They need nourishment. They need, you know, like feed the brain, feed the body, they need that. Even something like creating memorable birthdays. That's important, right? Those are important things. If I saw an article that's like how to give your, you know, how to give your teenager the best birthday they ever had, I'm clicking it, right? I'm there. Because it's important. It's really important. However, it is not absolutely essential. All those things are great. Even bathing and feeding your kids nourishing meals, those are important but they're not absolutely essential. What's absolutely essential in parenting is expressing a genuine, relational love to your child. Nothing's more important than that. Vacation, you can go on a great

vacation but if you're cold and distant, that vacation is going to be terrible. It doesn't matter how much you try to fake a great birthday, if you're closed off, right? If you do not express genuine, they don't believe you when you say, I love you. You're done. You're done. That's the foundational piece of parenting, man. You can't do it without it. And so, now that we've kind of seen it with parenting, let's consider the same question for us as a church, for us as disciples, for us as people, human beings. What is absolutely essential? There's important things. Reading your Bible is really important. Right? The Word. In fact, one of the questions that David Triple and I ask when we evaluate a service, and we evaluate every service, I know that might sound weird to you, but every Tuesday we're there picking this thing apart. Okay, what could we have done better?

Okay, blah, blah, blah. One of the questions that we ask, we ask five questions. One of those questions is, was the Word prominent? Like, was the Word of God, Did it take center stage? When we can say yes to that question, that means we've done... That's in part as one of five. That means we've done a good job. If the word's not central, like if the word isn't like there, like we're just not... We're kind of missing it. We're kind of missing it.

Reading your Bible is important. Spiritual disciplines are important. Hospitality is important. These things are very important. These things are listed for qualifications for pastors. These aren't small things that I'm talking about. But above these important things, there is one thing that is absolutely essential. In fact, yeah, I'm not going to overstate it, sorry. There's one thing that's absolutely essential, and that is a true encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ. A true encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ. Today and the next two weeks, we're gonna be remembering our mission. We're gonna be thinking through what it is to be on mission together and really to do that as a church, as disciples, as people, as families. Anytime we're gonna do that, anytime we need to remember the mission, we need to begin with what is absolutely essential. Vince Lombardi, who's a great legendary football coach.

Some of you might not know who he is, but he coached the Green Bay Packers and they won title after title, you know, back in a long, long time ago, black and white television days. Something he did at the start of every season was he'd take a football and he'd say, he would say to men that have played football their entire lives, he would take a football and he would say, gentlemen, this is a football. That's how he'd start the year every year. He would tell him what a football was. And it was a message. It was a message to say, you cannot forget what is essential. We need to remember what a football looks like, okay? And you might be thinking, I know what a football looks like. I mean, I've done this my whole life. We need to be reminded of what is absolutely essential. We need to remember that. So the way we start our mission, and we're gonna be going through our mission statement

the next, this week and the next two weeks, the way that we start it, the part I wanna focus on today is that we need, we all need a true encounter with Jesus Christ. I wanna introduce you to someone Let's see. Let's see if this is going to work. His name is Daniel Souter. And sorry, my... Let's see if he answers. Is he answering? Hello? Hang on. Sorry. Switch to a video call.

Okay. Sorry. Now we should be good? It's just me. I know. Hello. There he is. Okay. Can Okay, can you guys hear him? Talk for us, Suter. Hello, testing 123. Okay, that'll work. Okay, sorry, we've got to set this thing up here. Let's do this. Okay, all right, we got you. Thank you. All right, Suter, can you hear us, brother? Can you hear us? Can you hear you now? Okay, he can hear us now. Great, good, we're good. Okay. Okay. I wanted to introduce you guys to Daniel Sutor. You might not know Suter, but Suter is a part of our church. He just goes by his last name, Suter. He's part of our church. He came over with us way back at the beginning of 2020. And man, he was a great help to this church. He's just good, just good dude. Suter's going to be coming back. Sooner, what are you due to come back January 26th?

Sometime in March. Okay, sometime in March. Sooner's got some big plans for whenever he gets back. He's going to be a little busy. But what I wanted to do was introduce you to Sooner, because he's been in South Asia at a location I cannot disclose for two, well have been two years. He left February 2021. And so he's coming back around that same time. I just wanted Sudar to give you like two or three minutes on what on the work he's doing in South Asia So Sudar take it away brother

Yes here in South Asia. I work with Muslim people and So that entails sharing the gospel with Muslims and Training what we would call Muslim background believers and and how to share the gospel with their neighbors. And then training up leaders to multiply those teachings out to more and more believers. And in the past year, we've really focused on forming churches. We've seen that the work here in South Asia will go for a number of years and then persecution will arise and then the work will stop for a number of years for out of fear. And we've seen that this is mostly because they're not meeting together as churches and they're not strengthening one another as the body of Christ. And so for the past really year, we've focused on planting churches and teaching what it means to meet as a church. And so we've seen in the past year, roughly 30 new churches get planted and about 50 new

baptized believers. And so developing these churches into start with some skill and ability to share the good news and have them teach others to do the same and of course. Suter, we're going to just end our time right now with by praying for you. We're just going to pray over you as a church. Guys, I just want to encourage you to just pray along with me as we lift up Suter. Lord, we thank you for Suter and all of the work that you have put his hands to, all of the ways that he's seen you be faithful in all that you're doing at South Asia. I pray that as he leaves there that you would help him to leave well, that you would let him be encouraged, that you would help him to have a clear mind to be able to accomplish what he needs to, to set things up well for the many men and women who need to hear the gospel in that region. Jesus, we love you and we thank you.

It's your name that we pray. Amen. Okay, we can do it now. We can do it this way. See, yeah, sure, that's terrible. Okay, we'll do it this way. Everybody wave bye to Suter. Okay, there you go, Suter. All right, bye, buddy. The wonders of technology, man. There we go. Let's see. Perfect. Great. Guys, I could have told you everything that Suter just told you, right? It's just information. It's just information. I could have said, hey, Suter's been planting 30 churches, man. Thirty churches. Our church has a hand, a very small indirect hand in planting 30 churches in an undisclosed location in South Asia, meaning it's illegal to plant churches there. Okay, I could have told you all that information. It would not have been the same. It wouldn't have been because now you've had a true encounter with Daniel Sutor. You've seen his face. You've heard his voice. You've seen that glorious mustache he has.

You know of its legendary status now. You've beheld it. And it's just different, right? It's different if you're just hearing a story about a guy named Daniel Sutor in South Asia. He just sounds like another story, right? But this is our guy, and that's him. And you've had a face-to-face, it's not exactly face-to-face, it's about as close as we could get face-to-face.

What I wanna do is I just wanna show you the importance, the difference between having a face-to-face encounter, having a true encounter with somebody versus just kind of hearing about it. What I want to look at in Scripture is three encounters, three true encounters that people had, or actually two true encounters, one not so true, encounters with Jesus in Luke chapter 5. We're going to start in verse 3. So again, these are three people that, or three times, that people have encountered Jesus. And I want to look at that in Luke 5. We're going to start kind of at the beginning of the chapter, I'm going to skip a bunch of verses and go to the end to look at a few different ones. As you're turning there to Luke 5, I want to say, when I say true encounter with Jesus, I am differentiating it from just kind of passing Jesus by. I don't mean having a spiritual feeling.

I don't mean feeling religious guilt. I don't mean those things. I mean just being able to get face to face with Jesus. You're looking at him, he's looking at you, and there's something that's going to happen. And what I want to do is I want to look in scripture to talk about when that happened, what did happen. First encounter, this is Peter, Simon Peter, also Andrew, James, and John are in this, but we start kind of focusing on Simon Peter. And Luke 5 opens, first couple of verses opens with Jesus preaching open air, right? He's just preaching kind of just out. And he spots two unoccupied boats, okay? He just spots him, pick it up in verse 3. It says, getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, Simon Peter, he asked him to put out a little from the land, and he sat down and taught the people from the boat. Okay, this is only the setup. Jesus hasn't encountered people just yet, but you can already see an encounter coming

that Jesus is imposing politely on a random fisherman. Okay, he's like, hey, you, person, put your boat out so that I can be in it. Okay, next two verses, Luke 5, 4 and 5. And when he had finished speaking, Jesus said to Simon Peter, put out into the deep and let your nets down, let down your nets for a catch. And Simon Peter answered, Master, we toiled all night and took nothing, but at your word I will let down the nets. So just so we understand, Simon Peter is not lingering. He's not like twiddling his thumbs, like hoping Jesus is going to come talk to him. Okay? He's just doing his work. Okay? Jesus is approaching him is my point. Jesus is imposing on him. He's starting a conversation with him. Jesus is coming to him and he begins that conversation. And truly, it's less of a conversation and it's more of a challenge. He's more just challenging him because, the reason I say it's a challenge is

because he's commanding Simon Peter to do something that they both know seems futile. Right? Like I just spent, when he said toiled, I mean, he, fishermen worked at night. Okay, it's kind of a long story, but they work at night. Okay? So by the time it's the day, if you can imagine somebody who's pulled a night shift and they're kind of, you know, waltzing up, hadn't caught anything all night. Okay? So we stayed up for nothing. And Jesus says, Hey, why don't you let down your nets? It's a challenge. Saying like, let down your nets, I dare you. Peter accepts a challenge. Verses 6 and 7 says, And when they had done this, let down their nets, they enclosed a large number of fish and their nets were breaking. They signaled to their partners at the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats so that they began to sink. So when Simon Peter accepts Jesus' challenge, Simon Peter experiences in that moment way more than he expected.

Now, you could make the argument that he expected Jesus to be right, but I guarantee you he did not expect his boat to start sinking. Okay. He might have said, you know what? Yeah, maybe Jesus... Yeah, okay. I think he might do that. You know, like Peter actually is expressing faith here, really believing that what Jesus says is going to be true. But I almost, I mean, I would guarantee you, he did not expect to pull so many fish in. Because even catching one or two fish would have been pretty miraculous for Peter who had worked four hours and not caught a fish. Okay. Luke 5, 8 through the beginning of 10. So that when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus's knees, saying, depart from me for I'm a sinful man, O Lord. For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken. And so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon." Okay, so here we've got, let's stop at the

mid verse, we've got a true encounter, okay? Jesus has challenged Simon Peter out of nowhere, imposing himself upon him politely. Peter has accepted that challenge and when he does, He sees what Jesus is really about and he's blown away. Now, this is only the first part of a true encounter. If we're really gonna talk about what a true encounter is, this is the start of a true encounter because Peter accepted Jesus's challenge, but the encounter's not done. There's one more element to the encounter. Let's look at the other half of 10 into verse 11. And Jesus said to Simon Peter, don't be afraid from now on, you will be catching men. And when they had brought their boats to the land, they left everything and followed Him. Okay, the accepted challenge opens up into an invitation. In other words, it's not just Jesus daring people. You have to go and let down your nets, see what happens.

And then he just kind of like puts his glasses on and walks away. Right, that's not how it works, right? He's not trying to pull off that move. The challenge opens into an invitation. Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Drop everything and be with me. Jesus is not inviting him to kind of go home and do an online course about how to study, you know, the Bible. Or he's not inviting Jesus to go hang out with a friend of his who he's really in good contact with and then Jesus moves on and keeps challenging people. No, Jesus challenges Simon Peter and then invites him to be with him. This is personal. The challenge and the invitation work together. The challenge, Jesus' challenge is situational. It's in the moment. It comes and goes, right? In other words, you're not always being challenged by Jesus every second of every day, but that invitation is comprehensive.

It's life-altering. The challenge is mysterious and provoking. The invitation is personal and warm. Challenge and invitation. Jesus uses both in tandem. And in fact, you could say it this way, that the challenge is the doorway to the invitation. The challenge is the doorway to the invitation. Does Peter get invited if he doesn't accept the challenge? I don't know, but probably not. They work together. A true encounter with Jesus, if we're gonna think about it in terms of us, right? A true encounter with Jesus, it challenges us and invites us at the same time. A true encounter with Jesus challenges us and invites us at the exact same time. And we see more of this in the second encounter, but we find out some different things too. So go down a bunch of verses to Luke 5, 27. We're going to go all the way past a couple of miracles that Jesus is doing, which are great, and you should totally read them.

But we're going to look at the second encounter, and it's with a guy named Levi. Now Levi, in here, his actual name or his name that he goes by, that we're more familiar with is Matthew. Okay, so this is Matthew, the guy who wrote the first book of the New Testament, right, but Levi is kind of his other name. And so verse 27 and 28, after this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, follow me. And leaving everything, he rose and followed him. Okay, so here we have a much more condensed version of what's going on, okay? Much more condensed version of Peter's encounter. Clearly there's a backstory, okay? But even in the phrase, follow me, right? Even in that, there's this challenge. Leave everything, but there's this invitation. Follow me. Don't just start making things up and doing things. No, no, no, do what I do.

Be with me. But then look at what happens next. This is really interesting to me. Look at how it's next. Verse 29, Luke 5, 29. Remember, he just said, follow me. And Levi made him a great feast in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. Reclining at table just means it's kind of idiom, it means just to relax, right? So they didn't have chairs, they had kind of pillows-ish. And to recline at table is to kind of just lean, like on a, and just kind of eat grapes or whatever, you know. That's kind of how that was reclining at table. So it's a classic feast, it's just a party, right? And it's not even a party like you and I would think of as a party. It really is just you calling up 15 people and them just showing up at your house. And you got the football game on and you got food going. It's basically a Super Bowl party.

It's just everybody's laid back, okay? But I want you to understand, I want you to see this. Jesus goes up to Levi and says, follow me. Levi says, okay, where are we going? Jesus says, your house. Right? That's where we're going. We're going to your house. Now, why? Because you're having a party. Okay, I'm having a party. Who's coming? All of your friends and your fellow tax collectors. Okay. So he's following Jesus, right? And we don't really know the particulars. We don't know their conversation. I'm supplying that. That's not anywhere else in Scripture, I promise. It could be that maybe Levi was already hosting a party. I don't know. It seems unlikely. Maybe his friends just showed up. I'm not really sure. I don't know who called whom or how they called each other in the first century.

But I will just say, I'll just leave it at, it is no coincidence that this happens immediately after Levi gets up and follows him. It's no coincidence. If Levi is supposed to be at work, then why are his friends at his house? Well, something happened. Somebody had to say something like, hey, let's get your friends over. I don't know, something. What can we discern from this? What I want us to see is that when we have a true encounter with Jesus, when anybody does, when we face the challenge and we accept the challenge and we accept the invitation, our circumstances, what immediately happens around us often stay the same. In other words, Matthew didn't go to some strange house, meet all these strange people. I mean, he definitely met a strange person in Jesus, right? That was definitely different. But everything else stayed the same. All of his circumstances stayed the same is what I mean.

When you and I are approached by Jesus, and we are challenged, and we say, okay, Jesus, I'm going to do what you're asking me to do, I accept that challenge. Often, very often, you are sent back to the people that are already around you. Even Daniel Souter, who was sent to people of South Asia, where he had to learn different languages and all that, even Daniel Souter was not sent there immediately. The first place he was sent to was his family, his friends, his coworkers.

That was the first place that he was sent. Whenever we're sent, it's often to the relationships we already have, the same workplace, the same spheres of influence. We don't accept the Lord and then all of a sudden become a completely different person in a completely different scenario. No, no, that's not how that works. It's often the same workplace. Gracious. Sorry that you had to hear that over the microphone. But if you were not awake, you are now. Okay. I want to talk about that in a second, but I want to look at a third encounter. And it's in Luke 5, 30 through 32. This one does not go very well. It's the Pharisees. How could it? Okay, 38, 31, and 32 of Luke five. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples saying, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? Jesus answered them. This is a really interesting answer. You gotta pay attention.

He says, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Jesus is saying, people that are doing fine don't go see a doctor, but the sick people, they're the ones who see a doctor. 32, I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The Pharisees right here have an opportunity for a true encounter, but they blow it. They blow it. And when Jesus is talking about those who are well, we need to understand that Jesus is employing a bit of sarcasm. But you didn't know that Jesus was sarcastic every once in a while. But here he is being sarcastic, saying like, Oh, oh, Pharisees, you must be confused. I didn't come for you because you're already righteous and you're already healthy. I came for these other people. And what Jesus is saying essentially is, you Pharisees do not believe that you are sick. You do not believe that you are unrighteous.

You do not believe that you are sinners. You are convinced that you're right. You're convinced that you're okay and that you don't need a Savior. And what we need to see from this, we need to see that you can be in Jesus' presence and you can miss a true encounter. You can be in Jesus' presence and you can miss a true encounter. How does that happen? Well, for starters, if we look at the Pharisees, it's when you refuse to be vulnerable. If you're going to come to Jesus and pretend to have it all together, and not come to Him kind of as this white belt, right? As this young learner, as this, right? If you're not coming curious to what Jesus has for you, then you're gonna go away without a true encounter. Because you're not really convinced that you need Him. When you maintain a facade of righteousness, self-righteousness, right? And these true encounters that we're talking about,

they're not just one and done, right? And I kind of hope that you've kind of caught on that. This combination, maybe it's like a left-right of invitation and challenge, right, where when that happens, that is a combination that continues to happen your whole life. The way that we walk with Jesus is by sorting through these challenges and seeing the invitation on the other side. It's challenge and invitation. It's challenge and invitation. And there's times whenever we need to just be knocked down a peg and Jesus comes to us and he just knocks us down a couple of pegs and we're just going, ow. That hurt. That's not fun. But Jesus has our attention and he says, will, Jesus looks us in the eye and he says, will you, will you give that to me? Will you stop doing that? Will you give that up? Will you let me have control of this area in your life? Right? I know for me in college whenever I was dating, so this girl, in fact, a couple of different

girls I dated, man, I just wanted to make them happy. I would fall into this trap of whomever I was dating was just my world. And I just wanted them to, I just wanted to put a smile on their face. I just wanted to, people please, that person, I wanted a person please. And one of the things that really broke me in college, and I was about 20 whenever this happened was the Lord just kind of being, just kind of come to me in a very real sense and just, I could, it wasn't audible, but I heard, I just understood, hey, if you're going to follow me, you need to give up trying to please that person. You need to just please me. You let that person worry about whatever they're going to worry about, but you've got to please me. It was a challenge. I needed to quit trying to please other people, but But unless I did that, I wasn't going to go through the door. I wasn't going to go into the invitation.

I wasn't going to experience what was on the other side of accepting that challenge. In fact, I would even say this is a sign of a healthy Christian life. A sign that you are following Jesus, that you are not stuck in religion, is that you hear and you accept Jesus' challenge, and when you do the invitation, follows and you go deeper, and that this is a regular thing. I don't mean like that you're always on a mountaintop, right? I don't mean that you're always feeling good, but what I'm saying is, if it's been a while since you've accepted a challenge, and by a while, I mean a couple of years. If it's been a couple of years since you've heard the word challenge you and you've accepted that challenge, it's probably because you're not listening, but I guarantee you those challenges are going out. The continual call of Jesus on our lives is this. It says, let go of all you're holding onto and see what I can do with it.

be with me. This is the continual call of Jesus Christ. Not just the first time, not just when you're a young Christian, but now and forever. Let go of what you're holding on to and just see what I can do with it. So I want to put it to you like this. For 2023, as we continue to discern between what is important and what is absolutely essential as we wipe away kind of some of these, you know, the great, they're important, they're good, but in an attempt to focus on what is absolutely essential, we clear the table just for that. I want you to ask yourself, have you had a true encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you done it? When was the last time? A true encounter. You heard the challenge. I want to give you just some things to think about. Like, when did you make time to listen to Jesus calling you?

When was the last time? When did that happen? I hope that that's happening regularly. I'm not saying fire has to fall from heaven every morning for you when you open your Bible. What I am saying is, if you're making that time, then the Lord is gonna speak. When you make that time, the Lord will speak. Have you heard him challenge you? Have you heard him calling you to a deeper relationship? Right? is not there just to beat you down, just to make things hard for you, right? But that challenge is necessary because that invitation is coming. Make room for a true encounter. And this is really a basic necessity of following Jesus. It doesn't work secondhand, right? If I wanna have a true encounter with Jesus and I try looking for it at a church service, okay? That's okay. But if I'm just trying to vicariously live through other people's, you know, true encounters with Jesus, then I'm going to be left wanting.

I can't experience that second hand. It has to be firsthand. It has to be Jesus challenging me and me accepting that challenge and me hearing the invitation. I tell this story often. I'll say it very quickly. This time I was in England and I was talking with this gentleman. And his name was Tom. And Tom and I began to talk about spiritual things, right? We were at a pub trivia and we were just talking about it. And he relayed this story, and I'll tell you the long version later if you want, but he relayed this story where he kind of felt led to go into this graveyard, which is on his way home from work. And before he knew it, within about 10 minutes, it slowly dawned on him. But by the time he realized that he said was this really bright light. And this is a guy in his mid-60s who did not care what I thought about him. I mean, he was a Brit. He definitely didn't care what I thought about

him. But he was also 65, so he definitely didn't care what I thought about him. So he's not telling me this story. He's not making it up. He's perfectly saying, kind of, you know, toned down. He said, I'm sitting down and there was this light, this bright light that washed over me. And in that light, I heard this phrase over and over again, I love you. I love you. I love you. And he said, I was curled up in the fetal position and I'm rocking back and forth, and he said, you know, just hearing, just like love washing over him. And the most astounding part of that story to me was not that that graveyard encounter happened. It was what he answered whenever I said, well, what happened next? At first I said, how long ago was that? He said about five or six years ago. I said, well, what happened next? He said, what do you mean? So what do you do with that, right?

Is this a moment where you started talking to God? just, oh no, no, I just went home. Nothing. Look man, there are people, there are people around me that honestly believe, you know what, if God showed up to me in person, then I would believe in Him. Then I would have that true encounter. Then I would be different. Then I would live my life differently. No man, they wouldn't. Tom is just one example. But there's a way for you to have light washing over you in a graveyard and you hearing a voice saying, I love you. And you being overcome and like crying and all of this for no apparent reason, there is a way for all of that to happen. And for you to miss a true encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ, it is possible because you mistake the invitation for the relationship.

The Lord Jesus Christ was inviting Tom to something deeper. But Tom just thought it was a light show in a graveyard. And I felt bad for him. And I talked with him. I mean, I shared with the brother, right? I mean, he got the truth. My encouragement to you today is what is the Lord calling you to do? And if you need a graveyard and a bright light, okay. But most of us don't really need that. Most of us just need to do what we already know the Lord is calling us to do. There's some things that the Lord Jesus is challenging you to do right now. I mean, as I've been preaching, you've been thinking about it. It's been on your mind. What I want you to do, we're going to have a time of response. What I want you to do, I want Jesus' words to just kind of cut through the noise, right, of whatever else you got going on this morning. I know half of you stayed up past midnight last night.

I know that. I can see it in your eyes. That's okay. I did too. I went to bed at like two. Okay, we're all tired. That's good. But let's just hang on for right here, right on this moment. What is the Lord calling you to do? As we sing, as we pray, I want you to discern to discern what the Lord is asking you to do and to just pray to Him. I just say, I'll do it. Whatever you want me to do, Lord, I'll do it. Won't you pray with me right now? Jesus, thank you so much for this morning. I pray that you, I pray for an encounter with you.

Lord, without your spirit, we're sunk. Without your challenge, we're just making it up as we go along. I mean, we are lost without a fresh word from you. Lord, I pray that You would help us to answer the challenge that we already hear. And if we don't hear a challenge, I pray that You would perk our ears up, that You would give us ears to hear, and hearts to perceive, eyes to see what You are doing. And that's Your name that we pray. Would You please stand?