The Walking Dead

Transcript

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

I want you to take a second and I want you to get a sheet of paper, either the worship guide that you have whenever you came in or another sheet of paper or your hand or however you wanna do this and I want you to write something down. Want you to write something down? I'm gonna put it up on the screen. I want you to write down two or three actions past or present that indicate that you are avoiding God.

Write down two or three actions past or present that indicate to you that you are avoiding God. In other words, when I avoid God, I do these things. I try to drown out God's voice by doing these things. Or when I'm doing these things, I'm like, oh, I'm trying to not listen to God right now. I'm being like Jonah, right, I'm running. Might take you a second. Two or three actions past or present indicate that you are avoiding God. So I want you to just kinda hang onto that. We're gonna look at that a little bit later. I want you to begin kind of thinking about that because this is where our sermon series begins. We're starting a new sermon series today in Ephesians, we're covering Ephesians two and three. And the sermon series is called Alive.

And I'm very excited about it, but as we'll see in verses one and two, if we're gonna begin with Alive, we need to start somewhere a little bit darker, right? So look at Ephesians chapter two, verses one and two. These verses that we're gonna be going through, we're only hitting three or four verses today. They're gonna be up here. And there's a Bible that's located near you. We're gonna be in Ephesians chapter two, okay? Ephesians two, one and two says, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Okay, so we're talking about alive. We gotta start talking about dead first. At least that's how Ephesians sees it, right? At least that's how scripture kind of comes to us. We've just spent the whole first chapter of Ephesians

talking about our identity in Christ and all that Jesus has done for us and all the inheritance that we have, like everything, and we've had kind of this cosmic view and we talked about how the church is integral in that whole thing, and here we are and we're just like, man, isn't this so great? And we're just finishing up that prayer that ends in verse 23 of chapter one and the next verse, chapter two, verse one. And you were dead. It's kind of a jarring thing.

And what it's saying is like, it's just remember it, but it doesn't just say remember, it kind of paints the picture for us, right? Remember how you were kind of stuck in the ruts of this old world. Remember, it was like a merry-go-round that didn't stop. Now, I know merry-go-rounds are some like happy childhood memory for some of you, but I hated merry-go-rounds. I'd be, amen, yes, sir, right there, another traumatized child. I'd be on that merry-go-round and my older brother would just be like, and I was just, just so scared that I was gonna go flying off, the G-forces were crazy. I'm like hanging on like I'm in the movie Twister. And so I'm just trying not to die on the merry-go-round. That following the course of this world is like this merry-go-round that just doesn't stop. It actually gets faster, you get sicker and sicker, right? You get dizzier and nobody else,

like it's talking about here in Ephesians two, one and two, nobody else seems to notice what's happening, right? Everybody else is just kind of going along with it. Everybody else just seems like this is okay, right? We're following the course of this world kind of like everybody else is doing. It's like being on the shore, playing on the beach, and then you see this huge tsunami that you definitely can't outrun. And it's just barreling toward you. And everybody else is just playing on the beach. And you're like, you guys not see this imminent death that awaits us? No, okay, we're gonna keep playing on the beach, cool. Remember how that felt. Remember how that felt, it felt like a puppet. Felt like you were controlled by your appetite. It says following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience,

and it keeps going, verse three. It says among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and we're by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. You were just kind of going along, controlled by whatever was happening, whatever desire kind of came up. That was what you did next, okay? That kind of built your agenda. It's whatever you felt like doing. And so it's kind of building on that. Remember how you were in debt to God with no way out, right? Remember all of this. And the most poignant example, I think, in today's culture would be the walking dead. It would be a zombie, right? This is kind of a great picture of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. And in our culture's zombie lore, okay, the story of the zombie in American culture, they are terrifying, not just because they are monsters

and they look ghastly and they're either slow or fast, depending on what movie you're watching, right? And it's not just that. It's not just that they're terrifying because of all those things. There's something deeper. There's this horror of being a slave forever that not even death rescues you from, right? That you're driven along by the appetite of whatever. For zombie, it's brains. It's gross, I know, but that's just this, you're just driven along by this desire

to fill your belly and that's really it. And you can't die. What a horrible existence that is. And don't get me started with like, you actually can kill a zombie. We don't need to have that discussion today. The picture that Ephesians two, one through three is painting is that even in death, even when you're definitely going down and you know you're going down, you're still just driven along by your appetite alone. Chuck Klosterman, who is not a Christian, but is an author and writes social commentary a lot, actually, a very interesting writer. He and others have written about how our day-to-day existence can feel zombie-like. He acted this whole piece in the New York Times about it. And he writes about how the grind of just powering through 400 work emails in a day, and only the next day to get 400 more work emails that you need to power through, amen? Amen, okay, yeah.

Or to jump into paperwork that you know actually creates twice as much paperwork, okay? You know you've been there, okay? That is the laughter of pain right there. You've been in this existence that it just doesn't get any better. And that social commentary is like Chuck Klosterman and several others liken this to a zombie existence where you just literally get up, go to work, go home, watch TV, go to sleep, next day, same thing over and over and over and over. And you were just driven along by that. And so then when we look at verses one through three, it can seem a bit strange, right? If we're gonna sum up verses one through three, it's remember the pain of the walking dead. Remember when you were walking dead. And it doesn't honestly feel like much of an encouragement, truly. When you read those first three verses, even when you read four and five, it does it, at first glance, it can feel harmful

to talk that way to somebody. It can feel manipulative. Like why think back to before you knew Christ? Why think that? Why remember that you were like a zombie? Why remember the hopelessness? Why remember that pain? And if somebody actually said this to you in conversation, it would probably, initially, maybe at first glance, it's gonna come off like, hey, don't forget where you came from. And if somebody would tell me that, it'd be like, are you trying to bring me down? Am I in the movie Rocky right now? Why are you telling me, don't forget where I came from? Okay, why are you saying this to me? Are you trying to trap me into something? And quickly, no, that's not what these verses are trying to do, but there is more, kind of more meaning to it. And when we look at the wording, we can actually see in the beginning of verse two and the beginning of verse three,

it talks about in which you once lived. So remember all this pain, remember the file, you found the course of the world, in the things in which you once lived. And the beginning of verse three, it says we all once lived that way. The word once there is carrying a lot of weight. In other words, at the same time that verses one through three are describing our old life, it's also emphasizing that it's old, that it's gone,

that it was once there and is now not there. And here's kind of what I wanna take away from this kind of initially is that verses one through three are helping us understand that this is not your identity anymore. And it's saying more than that, but that's kind of the first thing that you should see. It's not your identity anymore. Your old life was literally death warmed over. That was your old life. You were doing the same things over and over, just like everybody else. There was no end in sight. You knew vaguely, mysteriously, that you had some debt toward God, and you tried to pay that off and be nice or go to church or read the Bible every once in a while or pray whenever something really horrible happened to you. But you didn't really understand that there was this relationship waiting for you. You didn't really understand that there was joy and hope and actually life, vibrancy to be found

in this relationship with the Lord. You were just like, I owe him, sort of. He's like the big man upstairs. I don't really go upstairs. I don't really know that guy, but he just is up there and I kind of know him. So a while back, we've talked about this, we've talked about how in the South culturally, that we are haunted by Jesus, right? That people grow up in the South and they've got this vague sense of, I think I'm supposed to go to church and be nice, but I really don't know the particulars of that, so I'm just gonna go to church and be nice and kind of like, oh, I'm hoping. What is this gonna do?

But it's not because, it's not because, it's because it's written in your heart, right? That everybody's born, everybody's born into this life with this knowledge that we are children of wrath, like it says in verse three, right? That we owe God something, some way, somehow, and if we don't really know what we owe or how to pay it back, God seems pretty mean, right?

And it says, it says remember that, remember that feeling. Remember that life. That is not your identity anymore. And if it is not your identity anymore, then you can remember it without reliving it. Let me say it again. If this is not your identity anymore, then you can read verses one through three and you can remember it without reliving it, without suffering the trauma again, right? You can remember it without reliving it. And we do this all the time in our culture. We wear a hospital band of that time that we had that surgery to remember that we were in the hospital, right? We don't cut it off immediately like, wait, I'm gonna leave that on because I wanna remember what I just survived. I wanna remember the pain I just went through. I wanna remember what I was delivered from. I wanna remember that sickness. We have scars that we pass our fingers over to remember,

right? We don't cover them up. We have some scars that we cover up, okay? So that is true. But we have other scars that even when we cover them up, we kinda run our fingers over it because we want to remember the scar. You can't say anymore. It's been too long, too many years. My sophomore year of high school, a buddy of mine pulled up behind me and hits Volkswagen Bug and this is like the old Volkswagen Bugs. This is not the new kind, although I don't know if it would've changed the story much. He pulls up behind me and he kinda revs his engine, Brad Olivier, he revs his engine and he had this dream sickle orange Volkswagen Bug and he's behind me and I'm like, okay, I hear you. And so I run backward real fast and jump on his hood and right when he did it, because we're all sophomores, so we're crazy. Sorry sophomores. And as soon as I get on his hood, he guns it.

And this is like on my street, right? So he guns it as much as you can gun a Volkswagen Bug, but he's gunning it. So I mean, we get all the way up to 35, I think, which is still pretty fast. And so we're just like zooming down my street. This is right after I get off the bus. So I'm zooming down the street and I'm trying to pick myself up further on there because I'm kind of slipping forward because the hood is like that, it's like nothing. So I'm slipping, trying to get up and I put my foot on the bumper to try to get up and my foot slips and the road catches it. And then I just fall, I get sucked underneath the car and I'm holding on to the bumper and I've got one leg kind of trapped under a tire. Right when I started falling, he put on the brakes, bless him, I mean, his response time was great. So sophomore in high school, I had great response time, mom. And so I've got several places.

I've got like two places on the top of my wrist, the top of my ankles, actually, a place in my hip and a big place in my arm where it's just, it was hamburger. I mean, it was terrible and so it was gross. And so I go to school the next day and it's short sleeves, it's South Louisiana, nobody's wearing long sleeves. And so I had this, I mean, massive road rash here and it was great. I was really, I got kind of famous for that my sophomore year, so that was kind of fun for me. But for years after that, I have one big one on my knee and years after that, I would still kind of like pass my fingers on that and, mom, don't listen. But I, you know, that you were, I smile when I think about that. Like that was a really terrible thing to do, I know. Maybe I should say, moms don't listen.

It was, man, it was a dumb move, I was a sophomore, but it was kind of just indicative of my sophomore year. I remember it kind of fondly. I don't tell that as a warning story. I do a little, anyway. We do these things all the time, right? We have some scars that don't have happy memories to them, right, we have some scars that are just mistakes that we made or worse, you know, scars of self-harm. And we run our fingers over that and we remember. We might keep a picture of our childhood of abuse. We might remember that. We might actually post the rejection letter that we get from college. We might actually post that in our locker to remember, right, this is my motivation. This is something I don't want to receive again. And we don't do those things. We don't wear the hospital band to remember how bad we are, to consider how bad we are. We don't do that for that.

We actually do it to remember how much our identity costs. Let me say it again. We don't read verses one through three. We don't put the hospital band on to remember how bad we are, but to remember how much that identity cost. Because we were not in a position where we were like the number one draft pick and God was like, oh good, I get the pick first, you. That's not how it went. That we were not in a place of deserving that we received this when we didn't earn it.

And we remember how much that identity costs. Look, we take good things in our life for granted all the time. We have some people that really want a child, really to have a child. Then we have some people that have so many children and the family concerns kind of become white noise after a while, right? Work. Some people we have looking for a job, but other people you have a job and it's just background noise for you. You can only see how much you're not getting paid or how much you're not appreciated. It's the only thing you can see. You're taking a good paying job for granted. You're taking a family for granted. And when you do that, really everything else just gets a little paler and you get a little nummer and it's a little harder to be excited about really anything. And if you follow Jesus, man, your prayer life takes a hit. It's just there, right? You don't have this big concern for people

that are exploring the faith. You don't really care about what's happening around you. You wanna just binge Netflix and go to sleep. But I want you to take a minute right now and I want you to remember life outside of Jesus. I want you to take a second and I want you to remember what your life was like before Jesus, outside of Jesus. And for some of you, you're like, I can't remember because I was saved when I was like six or something and I don't remember. If you don't have that much life to remember, that's fine. Consider the times that you really messed up but did not suffer the consequences.

Okay, remember that. Remember that thing that you did that if anybody knew, you'd be in big trouble but nobody knows. Mm, bless you. Yeah, somebody does. Remember that. Think about that. Remember the pain of confessing that if you did. How painful that was. Remember the frustration of doing that thing that you didn't wanna do again and again and again. Remember that.

Remember that pain. And as you're doing that, man, just remember, open up your paper, open up the thing that you wrote, right? Look at what you wrote down. And if you're doing that, if that's a present thing for you, even if it was in the past, remember it, confess it. Until you become grateful. Remember it, confess it, repent of it. Until you become grateful. Because there is a way that you can take the ultimate sacrifice of humanity, the son of God dying on a cross and it just can become white noise. It just becomes, yeah, yeah, Jesus died. Right? It can't, it's easy, actually. It's easy to do.

And verses one through three help us remember that. And this is actually how we actively put sin to death. I don't know if you know that you're supposed to do that. Romans 8, 13 tells us it says, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. How do we put to death the deeds of the body?

We repent. Repentance turns to gratitude. This is how we fight sin. This is how we actively put sin to death in our life. We remember what's true beyond how we've acted. If you need to remember, if you are dealing with kind of a besetting sin, or something that you're just doing over and over and over again, my encouragement, read Ephesians one. As you read through that, there is a truth there that does not depend on what you just did. The truth there doesn't depend on you at all. It's what the Lord God has done for you. If you come to Jesus and you say, Jesus, I love you, I'm following you, but I keep doing this thing over and over again, man, read Ephesians one, because those things are true of you. And if you don't know the Lord, right, like if you're just kind of being driven along by your appetite right now, like if you read Ephesians one through three and you're like, that's me,

then the encouragement isn't that you like hurry up and get your life right, or that you hurry up and like take a shower so that you can get clean. It's not, that's not the encouragement. The encouragement here is in the next couple of verses. Look at Ephesians two, four through five. But God, can we just stop there for a minute? What a great two word combo at the beginning of that verse. But God, right, but God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses made us alive together with Christ by grace you've been saved, hallelujah. That's right.

But God, man, what a U-turn. I mean, you're reading one through three and you're like, yeah, I'm in it. I remember that. I remember the despondency. I remember the vague notion that I needed to pay God back for something and didn't have a way to do it and didn't really understand. And then I, man, but God, if you are in a position where you don't know what to do next, if you're like, I feel like I have done something against God and have no way to kind of make that right. Well, first of all, you're correct in that assessment. You have done something against God, you cannot make it right on your own. The truth of the gospel is not that you do something right to fix your life. The truth of the gospel is that God himself, being motivated and rich in mercy and in love toward you,

reached out and made you alive, offers you that life for free, even while you sit dead. The encouragement is to pray, to receive that life, to begin that journey with him. It doesn't depend on what you do, it depends on what God already did. And when you believe that, you can walk in freedom, you can follow Jesus. This is the reason why we call it good news, because verses one through three is very bad news. It's kind of the worst news. And without verses four and five, we are left in a zombie state. We are left following the prince of the power of the air, we are left following our appetites, right into the tsunami, right into death.

And we're gonna discuss this more next week, but I wanna bring out another reason for verses one through three, because I think this is extremely helpful. Verses one through three become instrumental. Look at verse three again, Ephesians two three. It says, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Just let that sink in for just a second. Among whom we all once lived, right? The current state of the people around you, the people that you work with, the people that you go to school with, the parents of the children that your kids go to school with, the other families on the baseball team, right? The current state of those people outside of Jesus Christ, right, if they are not following Christ, if they're not made alive in Christ,

the current state of the people that are around you is spiritual death. It's not that they're going to hell when they die, that's true also, but right now, they are living in spiritual death. And sometimes they get some highlights out of that, right? Like sometimes they watch a Hallmark movie and it makes them smile and cry, or sometimes they read a card from a note and they're like, oh yeah, that's great. Sometimes they have a family reunion and it feels good, but what's the baseline? The baseline is they're staring at the tsunami and there's no way out. The baseline is there's a vague haunting of Jesus and religion and spirituality and they either run from that, curse at it, or try to ignore it. That's the current state of people outside of Jesus Christ. Unless you think I'm getting self-righteous on that, man, that situation should not make you feel better.

That situation should make you feel worse if you are following Christ. Like, man, if anybody, if anybody begins to follow Christ and they're like, man, look at all those other people not following Jesus, absolute heathens, suckers. I'm in, they're out. Boy, howdy. You know, I hit the lottery and then you just go home on the couch. I'm gonna say like maybe you missed the gospel. Somewhere in there, right? Maybe you didn't quite understand, oh no, you were dead and didn't deserve this. All these other people are dead and also don't deserve this. What's your part in that?

What's your part in that? And here's the best way to illustrate it because I think I could say a lot, but I'm just sorry. This is gonna be a bit visceral, a bit turned up. So just stay seated, it's fine. I want you to consider the threat of being attacked and killed, okay? I know, Sunday morning, you're welcome. It's 1119, where were you whenever Drew said that? I want you to consider the threat of being attacked and killed.

Okay, now, it's not one that we're hoping for, okay? In fact, all of us in here are actively avoiding that scenario, actively. Some more actively than others, okay? Men probably less actively than women, okay? But this fear, right, this threat of being attacked and killed, okay? All of us are actively avoiding that scenario, but here, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know the Lord, somebody who does not have a relationship with Jesus, right, they have no hope beyond being attacked and killed.

That's it, that's it. No, look, I'm not saying like it's just some great thing, but like they don't have a hope beyond that. Being attacked and killed will actually ruin their existence. It will actually destroy everything that they're trying to live for. The fear of death in that situation is absolutely suffocating, and their only hope in the midst of that is to not think about it too much. In Christ, your hope goes beyond being attacked and killed,

and I know that sounds very strange to say, but consider it just for a minute. When your hope goes past being attacked and killed, like again, no one's actively chasing this scenario. It's not what we want, we're avoiding it, but when your hope goes past that, that fact alone, like when you can actually understand that life goes past that, I'm living for something beyond that, that's not the end of my actual existence, right? It has a profound impact on how you live your life and how you plan for the future. And it doesn't mean like I'm in Christ, I'm gonna go skydiving tomorrow. That's not what I mean, I just mean on a simple level, like on an everyday kind of level, on a how you raise your children kind of level, that when you are not afraid of those things, it changes how you talk to people. It changes how you interact, it changes how you raise your children.

It changes what you choose to do on a given day, right? You can face the prospect of dying with dignity and grace squarely because your hope goes beyond it. Only because your hope goes beyond it. If your hope doesn't go beyond being attacked and killed, that is the worst thing that could happen to you or anybody else. And everybody else is crazy for not being extreme, like hyper-vigilant and checking every corner and being as careful as possible. Everybody else is crazy. If your every move is not trying to prolong your life, existence on earth right here, if your every move is not trying to prolong that life, then you're clinically insane. If you don't have a hope beyond that, man, you gotta squeeze all the juice out of this life.

You do, in fact, only live once. And this is what you are not. You are not subject to the enemy schemes. You are not on a slow path to destruction and torment because hell is real. You're not, drug along by the passions of your flesh, you're not afraid of any threat that you can't account for. And you might like, you might plan to avoid a bad scenario. And that's fine, and that's Christian, okay? It's fine, okay, yeah, have an IRA, fine. That's not what I mean. What I'm saying is that your hope goes beyond your IRA. Your hope goes beyond having a good career. Your hope goes beyond raising your children right. Your hope goes beyond all those things. You want those things, obviously they're good, right? It's okay to chase those things. It's okay to enjoy our lives. That's good to do, right, to enjoy life before God. That's awesome. But man, our hope as Christians goes beyond this life.

In fact, the way Jesus teaches us, we're supposed to put more stock in what's coming than what's now. We're supposed to lay treasure up in heaven where thieves cannot steal, where moth and rust cannot destroy, right, eternal. This is what Jesus talks about. At best, people without Jesus can forget about what's coming. They can get sentimental about the past. They can get lost in a book or a movie, but they will not know, outside of Jesus Christ, they will not know true hope outside of that. When you see another person, and maybe that person, you can tell that they don't have hope in Jesus. Maybe they've told you, I've had people tell me before, like, hey, I kind of grew up in church and I don't really care about that anymore. And so they know I'm a pastor, right? And so they're just like, hey, just don't waste your breath. Okay, I even talked about that last week a little bit.

There are people like that. Here's what I would tell you. Let your old life read Ephesians two, one through three. Let your old life be an ever-present reminder that people need compassion. My wife, whenever we're driving somewhere, I am less patient than she is on the road. I know that's difficult to imagine, but it's true. And I want people to go quicker, because I like going quick. And my wife has a wedding cake theory, okay? And it's pretty amazing, really. She says that when people are going slow, we're making a slow turn, which is one of my top 10. That's my favorite. And somebody's making a slow turn right, okay? No obstruction in front of them, just pulling into a parking lot, going zero miles an hour on a 40 mile an hour street. When they're doing that, my wife's wedding cake theory is maybe they have a wedding cake in the trunk, and they're trying to not tip it over.

I know, it's very sweet. It's very, very, very sweet. But what it allows her to do, and it's actually brilliant. I mean, I'm not even making fun. It's actually brilliant, and it's helped me even. It helps me have compassion for the person in front of me, because maybe they don't have a wedding cake, but maybe they have somebody old in the back. Maybe they have a kid in the back who is being too rambunctious, and maybe undid their seatbelt, and they have to be really slow with how they turn. I mean, there's a thousand scenarios, right, of people that don't, they don't need me to honk at them. They don't need me to honk at them. They don't need me to honk at them. They don't need me to honk at them. They need me to remember that they're a person, right? They need me to remember that they're trying to just live their life like I am, that they're doing the best they can with what they got.

And man, that is the people around you. I know that people can seem like villains, right? I know that people can seem horrible when you kind of isolate some of their acts and you write the story about how they've got it in for you and all of this, right? But what I have found is that most people are doing just what makes sense to them in the moment, right? It might not be the best decision in the world, but it's the best decision they think they can make. When people don't have Jesus, those decisions get pretty limited and pretty selfish, by default, by default, because whatever they give to you, they don't have for themselves. Whatever life they give away, they don't get for themselves. And there's all these little like platitudes and quotes and kindness matters and like things, bumper stickers that people put, all that's great, but it's just platitudes, it's just sentimentality.

It actually doesn't hold water, it doesn't mean anything. Because if you have to be, if you only are kind because somebody told you to be kind, you're gonna quit being kind eventually. But if you're kind because someone, some point in time, was extremely overly, wildly, radically kind to you, that is motivation to be kind to somebody else. We love because he first loved us, right? We are kind because we have been shown ultimate kindness. We don't kind, we're not kind because somebody like quoted Einstein to us. That might help us like on a day, but what's a lifetime that's being shown that kindness? Jesus is our hope. In Philippians 1, 20 and 21, it's this really kind of grim, good thing. It says this, it says this, it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always, Christ will be honored in my body,

whether by life or by death. And then 21, for to me to live as Christ and to die as gain. That's not just a platitude. That didn't just belong in a bumper sticker. That's actually what we see, what we perceive as believers. That we are living for something beyond our kids. We're living for something beyond our legacy, something beyond our career, something beyond our own integrity even, that we're living for a kingdom to which we pledge allegiance when we follow Jesus and we find true life there. There is an expression called memento mori. It's a Latin phrase, memento mori.

And it means a couple of things depending on how you translate it, but remember to die, remember to die, which is a funny thing to say. But what it means is, just remember that we all die. Keep your mortality close to you. Remember that you are living for something beyond this physical life, memento mori. These three things that you've written down, your past and present things that maybe that indicate that you are avoiding God, and maybe you only got one out, that's fine. Like it's not, you're not turning it in for points, I promise. But these acts that are written, right, that you have, I don't want you to throw them away, right? We're not gonna, you know, we're not gonna nail them up somewhere. We're not gonna do anything like that. I want you to keep it. I don't want you to throw it away. I want you to keep it, put it in the fold of a Bible, put it somewhere, put it in a journal,

hang it on your mirror, whatever. And when you see that, let it burn gratitude in your heart, that that's not all you're living for, that you're more than what you think about yourself, that your identity goes beyond that. And let it burn compassion and grace for other people into your heart. They've all got a wedding cake. Let's pray. Jesus, we know that you look upon us with great compassion, care, that beyond all of our excuses, you know our heart, you know what we're really trying to do, you know when we're being selfish and we're kind of covering it with religiosity or looking good or saving face or whatever, you know the true us. You see the true us. You offer us real life, real life beyond, anything that we can manufacture, you offer us real life. I pray that you would help us to listen to you. I pray that you would burn gratitude in our hearts

and that that would in turn help us to be gracious with people, the way that you're gracious with us. Even if we were a fraction as gracious with other people as you are with us, Lord, change our lives, help us to live for you, help us to begin that relationship with you and pray that we pray. Would you please stand as we stand.