Ephesians Part 7 - Behavior and Belief

Mark: Well, welcome to Hope Church. What book are we where where are you turning in your Bibles? You should all know by now. The book of Ephesians. Go ahead and go there, chapter four. While you're doing that, look at your neighbor and just tell him, man, you make Sundays look so good. Come on, encourage somebody. Close to you. Hallelujah. Ephesians chapter four. We're about at the halfway mark, the book of Ephesians. How many's enjoyed this series? Yeah, this is good, right? That we would walk through an entire book from front to back, chapter to chapter, we get a full picture, right? And so it's good. And also there's another layer when you also get different voices speaking in. So last week Pastor Aaron did an incredible job. Pastor Josh has done a great job teeing this thing up, but it's good to also get different perspectives, different voices, right? We all see in part. And so when one person brings their part and another person brings their part, we start to build a fuller picture. And so this is good. Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17. We're gonna start kind of halfway through the book, ⁓ through the chapter. ⁓ if you weren't here last week. ⁓ we'll catch you up a little bit, but I would encourage you to go back in the ⁓ in the on the website and and review ⁓ the first part of chapter four. That'll help you kind of ⁓ continue with where we're at. All right, here we go. Are you ready? Come on, I love it, I love it. Ephesians chapter four, verse seventeen. Now this I say, who's writing the book of Ephesians? Paul and who's he writing to? Ephesians. The church in Ephesus. Now this I say to say and testify in the Lord. That you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them due to the hardness of heart. They have become calloused and have given themselves up to sensuality, greed, to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ. Come on. Assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus. How many knows the truth is in Jesus? To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through the deceitful desires, and to be renewed. Everybody see renewed in the spirit of your minds. So Paul opens up and says, Don't walk like the Gentiles. Their minds are clouded. They walk with futility of mind. And then Paul goes on to say, You need to be. Renewed in the spirit of your mind. ⁓ cre ⁓ and put on the new self, created in the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, everybody say, Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor. For we are all members one of another. Be angry and don't sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger, give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal. But rather let him labor doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anybody in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths. This one hits home for me, man. Let no corrupting talk, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger clamor Slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. Sheesh, that's a lot. Let's pray, and then we're gonna sort of break this down a little bit. Sound good? Holy Spirit, we we're so thankful for these words of life. I pray today that you would help us step into the not by might or power, but by your spirit reality. Let these words make entrance into our hearts in a deep, profound way. Let it impact us, let it shape us, and let it change us in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Quick question for you this morning. I'm just curious if anybody in here is like me and you got a complicated relationship with the mirror. Anybody? The mirror? Sort of got this love hate thing going on. Some days you walk by one. You catch your reflection and you go, man, not bad. We may be turning a corner here. Anybody? Yeah? And then there's other times. You walk by that thing and you're like, woo-hoo, man, I might need a juice cleanse or something. A planet fitness membership. Anybody? What about this one? And you accidentally open that front-facing camera on your iPhone. Anybody? Dude. Nobody has ever been encouraged by looking at themselves in that front facing camera. Ever. Ever. You accidentally open it and it's looking up at you from underneath your chins. Bad. Nobody opens that and goes, That's it, that's exactly how I imagined I look like. Nobody. All right, now go with me. Let's say somebody loses their memory and they wake up, they have no idea who they are. And somebody hands them a mirror. They can see their face in the mirror, but they have no idea what they're looking at. And then people start to speak into their life. Someone says, Hey, you're a doctor. And then somebody else comes along and says, No, man, you're a musician. And then somebody else comes along and says, No, actually, you're a criminal. And then somebody says, No, dude, you're actually a millionaire. And then somebody says, Actually, no, you're not any of those things, you're a failure. How would they know what to believe? Without knowing who they really are, they every decision would start to become confusing. Every voice would have the potential to become influential, everybody, every opinion would seem possible. Because when you don't know your identity, you're forced to borrow one from somebody else. Now play this out with me. Okay, now imagine the door opens and a family member walks in. And this is not somebody who has another opinion, but somebody who actually knows who the person is. And they look at them in the eyes and they say, This is your name. And this is your family, and this is where you belong, and this is your story, and this is who you've always been. Suddenly, everything would start to make more sense, right? The confusion would start to fade, and ⁓ competing voices would start to lose their influence, their power, the questions that were spinning in their mind would start to settle because identity answers the question that. All the other decisions depend on. Like, who do who do I belong to? Where do I fit? What's my purpose? And which voice should I listen to? And how should I live? Once you know who you are, church, a thousand other decisions become easier. Not because life gets simpler, but because you finally have a reference point. We almost always live out of the story we've accepted about who we are. Think about that in your life. This is exactly what Paul is doing in the book of Ephesians. Okay? Now, if you haven't been with us for the last few weeks, we've been walking through chapter by chapter, book of Ephesians. One guy called the book of Ephesians the distilled essence of the Christian faith. That's pretty good. It's a remarkable letter. Catch you up to speed, okay? If you don't, if you're not sure where we're at. For the first three chapters of this book, Ephesians 1, 2, and 3. It's almost surprising how little Paul asks us to do. Okay? For three whole chapters, Paul seems determined to simply do one thing, and that's overwhelm us with everything that God has already done. Ephesians moves in this intentional progression. Before Paul tells the church how to live, he reminds them who they are. Right? So he doesn't begin with, hey guys, try harder. Be better. And here's 12 steps to becoming a card-carrying member of the Jesus Club. He begins with identity. Yeah? And he goes, You're blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. You're chosen before the foundation of the world. You've been accepted by God into his family through Christ. You are accepted in the beloved. You've been redeemed through his blood. You've been included in God's eternal plan. You have obtained an inheritance in Christ. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. For three chapters. In essence, Paul spends three entire chapters looking at believers in the eyes and saying, This is your name. This is your family. This is where you belong. This is your story. Because Paul understands something deeply significant that I think we need to understand. That it's hard to consistently live beyond the identity that we believe about ourselves. Most of us don't struggle because we don't know what God wants us to do. We struggle because we forget who God says that we are. Keller says it like this Christian ethics always begin with Christian identity. Can't get it backwards. There's something deeper than what God wants us to do. And it that can almost sound wrong, right? Because it's easy to quietly settle into thinking that the Christian life is mostly about assignment. Yeah? Yeah. Like what I'm called to do, and what's my purpose, and what's my ministry? And somebody give me a prophetic word. I need to know what to do, and how should I grow? And all those questions matter, but none of those are first. Before God ever sends you to do something for him, he invites you to simply just be overwhelmed by his love. The first thing God wants from you is not your activity, friends. The first thing he wants is your heart. That is the wisdom of God. God knows that what captures our attention shapes our life. So if the first thing we hear is do better, if that's the first thing you hear when you go to God, you might not be hearing from God. If that's the first thing we hear, what happens is we end up spending our Christian lives looking at ourselves primarily. How am I doing? Am I doing enough? Am I praying enough? Am I holy enough? Am I failing? Am I succeeding? But Paul wants our eyes on something else. For three chapters, he keeps saying, just look at him. Just get your eyes off of you and get your eyes on him. He's beautiful. His grace is amazing. Look at his love. Look at his mercy. Take it and look at his power. Look at what he's already accomplished. Because transformation doesn't happen through endless self-examination. It happens through beholding Christ. We become different by beholding him, not by obsessing over ourselves. This might be the reason why some of us are exhausted in our attempt to change. Maybe we spent years staring at the wrong thing. Paul is calling us out of the mirror and into the face of Jesus. You have permission, friend, to stop making yourself the center of your transformation. Let Jesus be the center. This is important, man. Because usually we're ⁓ way more comfortable doing something for God. We're way more comfortable doing something than simply being loved by Him. Serving feels productive, and leading feels measurable, and working feels useful, but sitting at the feet of Jesus and just receiving his delight, just believing that he enjoys us apart from our productivity, that could feel uncomfortable. Because it requires you and me to stop proving ourselves. Got a YWAM friend named Dan Bauman. It's a missionary giant. He's done so many incredible things for God. And he he puts this whole thing in this in this way. He plays it out like this. He wakes up in the morning, he's like, Hey God, what do you want me to do today? And Dan goes, I hear God go, hey Dan. Good morning. It's so good to see you today. Yeah, good to see you too, God, but but what do you want me to do? Dan! So so good to see you today. It's so good to see you. Yeah, it's really good to see you too, God. But what do you want me to do today? Dan! Man, it's so so so good to see you today. We can talk about that later, but first, here's more of my love. So Paul closes out Ephesians 3 with this foundational apostolic prayer. And he doesn't pray that we would preach better sermons. He doesn't pray that we would plant more churches or that we would work harder. He prays that we would have the strength to comprehend. What is the length and the width and the height and the depth of the love of God, to know the love of God that surpasses understanding and to be filled with the fullness of God? Paul's great prayer is not give them a bigger assignment, God. It's God, let them experience the fullness of His, of, of their, of your love. Here's more of my love. Because He knows. Paul knows the person deeply rooted in God's love will naturally start to live differently. So close chapter three, and then we open chapter four with one simple word. Anyone pick up on what that word is? Therefore, I therefore, a prisoner of Christ, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called. Pastor Aaron did an incredible job on this yesterday. I mean last week. What day is it? But that one word, right? It carries the weight of everything that Paul just said for three chapters. It's the bridge. Okay, this is Paul saying, in essence, in light of everything that you just heard for three chapters, now live differently. Everything I told you about who God is, everything I told you about what Christ has done, everything I told you about who you are now, through the body and the blood of Jesus should begin to work its way and show up in how you live everyday life. A healthy Christian is not somebody who no has more Bible knowledge than they used to have. A healthy Christian is somebody who increasingly looks more like Christ. Chapter 4. It's a transition chapter in the whole letter. Okay? And what we're gonna see for the rest of Ephesians is Paul showing us what it looks like when a people who have been so overwhelmed by the grace of God begin to actually walk in the reality of that grace. Not just attend church service. Which is the whole point of grace, right? Grace is God's power to become Who he's already decl declared you to be. So Paul writes chapters one through three, not so that we can go, that's awesome, and admire from a distance. He writes chapters one through three, so they'll produce chapters four through six. If chapters one through three have truly gotten into you, chapters four through six is what will start to come out. Grace was never meant to stop at your heart. It was always meant to change your walk. The point is not merely that we get to heaven, the point is for the point of grace is to make us like Him. To restore the image that sin destroyed, to form Christ within you, to create a people that actually reflect the character of the one who saved them. Grace doesn't just change your destination, friends, it sh it should change your nature and your desires and your instincts and change how you walk through the world tomorrow. Okay, Ephesians one four seventeen. This I say, testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. Now, Paul, ⁓ he's not writing to Christians who grew up in church. Okay? ⁓ Most of the Ephesian believers were former pagans. Ephesus is one of the largest, wealthiest, most influential cities in the Roman Empire. Temple of Artemis is in our is in Ephesians, right? One of the seven wonders of the ancient world. So you're talking about a city that has. Government sanctioned citywide idol worship with sexual immorality attached to that government-sanctioned citywide idol worship. Okay? Magic and occult practices are everywhere. It's Acts 19, if you want to look at that a little more. This, this, in other words, this wasn't just a city that had some different beliefs. This this city had an entire different, an entirely different way of seeing reality. Every temple, every marketplace, every celebration, every cultural value, every spiritual practice was discipling people into a very specific worldview. Are you guys following me still? Then revival hits Ephesus. Jesus turns the whole thing upside down. That's Acts 19. People start burning their magic scrolls and their books. Now think about that. Think about it in the context of what we're talking about. The church in Ephesus didn't just adopt a new belief system, they abandoned an entire way of interpreting the world. Okay. And then Paul shows up and goes, Now you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of your minds. And then he goes on and he says, But be renewed in the spirit of your mind and put on the new self created after Christ. You guys following? Paul is going after something way deeper than behavior modification. He's talking about the lens through which we see everything. Because people don't ultimately live according to what they say they believe. They live according to what they have come to believe is true about reality. Those are two different things. Now think about that. If I were walk around this room, ask people, do you believe that God is in control? Most of us would say yes. It's the good Christian answer. Good job. You get an A. But what happens when life suddenly falls apart? What happens when the doctor report comes back, or you lose your job, or your child starts making destructive decisions? What happens then? If anxiety immediately takes over, what does that reveal? Not that you're a bad Christian, but it does reveal that somewhere beneath what you profess, there's another story competing for your trust. Yeah. And what Paul is emphasizing is that the Christian life is not simply just believing in God. But it's learning to interpret all of reality with God at the center. Everything. Everything. Your success and your suffering. Your relationships and your future, your disappointments, your victories. The gospel doesn't just give us a different destination after we die, it gives us a completely new way of seeing while we live here. The feudal mind, Paul calls it. It's it's it doesn't always just flat out it deny that God exists. It's it can be way more subtle. And we sort of just manage life as though God is mostly unnecessary. Feud a feudal mind, it's not just atheism, okay? It's it's thinking, it's thinking that's disconnected from God. It's interpreting life as if God were functionally absent. Okay? Think about Monday morning, right? Tomorrow. What are you gonna do? You're gonna wake up, you know, you're gonna grab a a cup of coffee, you're gonna check your phone, you're gonna read the news, you're gonna look at your calendar, you're gonna start feeling overwhelmed, some of us are gonna. Where stress is gonna start building. We got this pile of lists, to dos to do, and and then without really realizing it. We all know that scenario, right? You're looking at me like I'm the only one. Without realizing it, we spent the first couple hours of our day carrying the weight of our lives as though it depends on us. You believe in God, we do, but in the moment, you're thinking as though he's not involved. Yeah? Paul isn't really necessarily describing people who deny God exists. He's describing people who live as though God isn't relevant to the moment that they're in. You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of your minds, but you must be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Here's the tension. Our spirit was made new the moment of faith in Christ through his death and resurrection. Brand new, new creation. But our minds are renewed over a lifetime. That's why Paul can write to Christians, people who've already been born again, and still tell them, don't walk like the Gentiles anymore. They've received a new nature. Now they have to learn a new way of thinking. Just because your spirit's been made alive doesn't necessarily mean that every pattern of thinking immediately changes. Christians can still default to patterns of thinking that function as though God is not present. You can belong to Christ and still instinctively process life the way you did before Christ. You guys following? We're tracking here? That's why Paul starts right here. Because behavior is never the deepest issue. The mind is. If you only address behavior, you may change somebody's actions for a minute, but if you renew the way they see reality, their entire life will begin to change. It's Romans 12, 1 and 2. Don't be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be Transform by the renewing of your mind. I preach this verse so many times to our kids in the youth program that they're like, please don't teach that verse anymore. Then I show up on Wednesday, I'm like, open to Romans twelve. So important. Because this isn't about tweaking a few bad habits here and there. What Paul is inviting you and me into is a total overhaul in how we think and perceive reality. Paul knows that the church doesn't need better rule keeping, the church needs a renewed imagination. People whose minds have become so saturated with the reality of Christ. That they begin to instinctively see life the way that he sees life. And maybe that's where some of you guys are today. Now think about this. And you've spent years trying to change your behavior, trying to modify behavior. Fill in the blank. Whether you're the dad that has the little the sleeve of you know shots in the freezer, and you slip out there every now and then and take a couple. And you you know what you're doing and you just you try to grit your teeth and and change for years. Maybe you're the person who slips out in the middle of the night and gets on your browser history and you know where you're going there. And for years you've been trying to change. Grit your teeth, try harder, make promises, start over. This time I'll get it together. I this time I got this. Only to fall back into the same patterns. Fill in the blank. Maybe the issue is not that you're not trying hard enough. Maybe it's that you've been fighting the wrong battle. Cause every pattern, think about those destructive patterns in your life. Every one of those patterns has a thought beneath it. Every habit has a belief system feeding it under under the surface. The battle isn't only over what you do. The battle is over what you believe is true. Whatever occupies your imagination will eventually shape your life. But here's the good news. The Holy Spirit is jealous to renew our minds. He delights in exposing lies with truth. He's not tired of correcting our distorted perspective. He is relentlessly committed to teaching us to see reality through the eyes of Jesus. He's not frustrated. He's not frustrated when your old thought pattern resurfaces. He's patiently and faithfully, he will faithfully and patiently keep bringing the truth of Christ back to your mind. Much of the Christian life isn't God giving you brand new information. It's God faithfully bringing us back to eternal truth until it becomes the way that we naturally see life. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind and put on the new self created in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, verse twenty five, there's another transition. Having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor. For we are members one of another. Be angry, don't sin, don't let the sun go down on your anger. Give no opportunity to the devil. Verse twenty eight Let the thief steal no more, but let him work honestly with his hands, so that he may have something to share with everybody in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for the building up, as it as it fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you. Along with all malice, be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. In other words, the renewed mind isn't just some mystical Sunday morning experience. It's as much for Monday morning everyday life. Paul doesn't leave the renewal of the mind in some weird abstract theology space. He brings it into kitchens and workplaces and friendships and conversations and conflict. These are the places outside of this building, those are the places where the gospel either becomes flesh or it remains a good idea. Our everyday life outside of here. Our everyday life is where our deepest beliefs are revealed. It's those thousand little decisions we make every day, right? The words we choose. And the assumptions we make about people. The story we tell ourselves when somebody hurts us, when the boss is being an absolute jerk again. The way we spend our money. The thoughts we entertain when we're not alone. When we are alone. The life we live in those moments outside of here is simply. The visible expression of the reality that we have come to believe. So Paul isn't giving us a laundry list here. He doesn't close out chapter four with a laundry list of like it feels like disconnected moral rules to add to some good Christian checklist. That's not what he's doing. This is deeper than that. What Paul is saying is let me show you, church, what a renewed mind actually looks like in ordinary life. Because the question becomes like, how do we know if our mind is actually being renewed? How do we actually know? Because that's easy to make theoretical. Yeah, of course my mind's being renewed. Okay, but what does that actually look like? What does that actually look like? Paul is describing what life starts to look like when Jesus becomes more than the center of our Sunday and he becomes the center of our thinking. This is brilliant, man. This is brilliant. Because we all have a definition, right, of what spiritual maturity looks like in our minds. The question is: is our definition God's definition or ours? Yeah. Right? For some of us, it might be the person who highlights their Bible in 20 different colors. Right? For some of us, it might be the person that knows all the Christian vocabulary. Bro, I'm just walking through the wilderness, right? Know what I'm saying? I've just been pressing in. Yeah, I'm contending. But Paul says, let me show you what maturity actually looks like. This is a reliable definition, friends. Let me paint a picture, Paul says, of what the renewed mind looks like in everyday life. This these verses aren't primarily what God expects from us, as much as they are about what God intends to produce in us as we continually surrender to Him and let the Holy Spirit renew our minds. And then so we go speak the truth instead of falsehood. In the little things and in the big things. Speak the truth. Contend for the truth. Champion the truth. Deal with your anger without sinning. Might be some dads that need that one. Work honestly, be generous. Use words that build up instead of tear down. Put away bitterness. Some of you have been carrying that thing around for too long. It's time to put it away. Put away anger. Put away quarreling and hostility. Be kind to one another. Be tenderhearted. Forgive one another. It's reliable definition of what maturity looks like. These ending verses in chapter four and I'm done they rescue us from two dangerous illusions. The first is the illusion that we're doing better than we actually are. And the second is the illusion that God isn't changing us as much as He really is. For some of us, these verses guilty can be wonderfully humbling. Because maybe we've measured our maturity by how much we know, how many times we go to church a week, how long we've been a Christian, how many Bible studies we attended, how many sermons we listened to. Bro, your cue on your podcast is stacked. How involved we are in the church, but Paul would gently say those things matter, but it's time to look a little deeper. How do you respond when somebody hurts you? How do you use your words? Can people trust what comes out of your mouth? How do you handle your anger? Are you becoming more forgiving? Are you becoming more generous than you were five years ago when you said yes to Jesus? Are you becoming more truthful? Suddenly the measuring stick changes, right? And maybe we're not quite as mature as we assumed we were. Yeah? But on the other side of the coin, this picture can be just as encouraging. Because maybe you're sitting here thinking, Man, I'm not very spiritually impressive. I don't know all the Christian language, I don't know much theology. I couldn't teach a Bible study if my life depended on it. But there's more kindness in you than there was last year. And you apologize quicker than you used to, and you speak more gently, and you forgive faster and you love people more sincerely. And if that's true. Then don't overlook and undervalue that because you don't know all these songs up here, right? The Holy Spirit is doing exactly what he said he would do in you, and he's forming Christ in you. Hallelujah Some the best advice I ever got was from my old pastor friend. He said, son, sit down. Looked at me and he goes, You're never as bad as you think and you're never as good either. So here's the challenge for this week. Let's not walk away from Ephesians 4 going, what rules do I need to keep now? Let's walk walk away asking, Holy Spirit, what part of my mind are you trying to renew? Where in this whole thing am I believing in old story? Where am I still pr pretending and interpreting where am I still interpreting life as though you aren't present? Where am I still thinking like the old man instead of the new one? That's Ephesians four. Because somewhere this week, somewhere this week, friends, unless you're retired and you're gonna be on the golf course all week. But you might find it there too. Somewhere this week, something is not going to go according to plan. And in that moment, the question won't simply be what should I do? Holy Spirit, help us to ask a deeper question. And that's this what is true in this moment because you are on the throne? What is true because Jesus is Lord? That's the renewed mind. And that right there, friends, that's where discipleship happens. That's where transformation happens. Amen. Stand with me. Felt a real burden today for people's minds. People that are stuck. First John 3. The purpose that Jesus came was to destroy the works of the devil. That word actually, if you look at the picture, it's actually Jesus came to tear down the architecture, the structure. Right, and those patterns of thinking, those that old way of thinking, it actually becomes a structure, a stronghold in our minds, and Jesus is jealous to tear down that structure. And some of you us in this room, you know, you know, you need renovation, breakthrough in your mind. Hallelujah, Jesus comes to kick out all the cats. So I'd just like to open open invitation, and we got four minutes left. God wants to do something significant today. The Holy Spirit is jealous to renew our minds. He will give us breakthrough, catalytic moments up here that He wants us to go from here with and walk out in lifetime. Yeah. So if that's you, and you're just like, God, I I I need this. I need this breakthrough. that this preacher's talking about, I need this today. Would you just lift up your hands? Yeah, this is a real thing in the earth today. Yeah. Come on, lift your hands. Holy Spirit, the jealous one. Jealous. Jealous, you see the person that is deeply hurting mentally, that can't get over that mountain. You see them, God. I pray right now. Touch their minds. Sound mind. A sound mind. It's the gift of God for you today, a sound mind. Receive, receive the wind of the spirit, the mind of Christ. Be renewed now in the spirit of your mind. Yeah, receive, receive. Come on, let him touch you. Some of you feel heat right now on your head. Let the Spirit of God breathe. Touch your mind. Receive, receive, receive. Receive. You're off the hook. You're not at the center of your transformation. He is. You're off the hook. Receive. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Receive that like oil running down your head. He anoints my head with oil. Receive. Receive. Jesus' name. Jesus. Will you just sing that you are? ⁓ Yeah Anxiety has to flee. It has to go. Say Be coming, be my sister. In you are In you I live, in you I have all my being in you I lit it be in you I live in you I have all my ⁓ In you I in you in you I live in you I have all my every voice you are in you I know in you in you I In you I have all my because you are. Santa The sand Okay. Thank you, God. Ever the same. Just gonna ask maybe one or two ministry team people to slip up here and we'll just close like this. Just want to encourage you. Lord's doing things on different layers here, but if you want more prayer, just like I just need more prayer in this, come find one of us. But also, if you felt something, the Holy Spirit often will manifest in tangible ways. It's just an indicator to help build your faith that he's like doing something. So I would just say if you felt like warmth come over your head, your face, your ears, anything like that, I would just encourage you to come and just receive a little more prayer. And and if we'll wait, oftentimes he'll do more. And so. That's you, and you've felt any of those things. I would just encourage you to come and just receive a little more prayer. Amen. God bless our family today, this morning. Your beloved bride, these friends, peers, brothers and sisters in Christ. I pray the blessing, the wonder, the beauty of Jesus flood every family, every life, God, to overflowing. Let the tangible sense of your presence, that manifest glory go with us like a cloud as we leave this place and go with us into restaurants and grocery stores and family gatherings, God, I pray. Blessing and favor of God go with you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Ephesians 4:17