Embracing Joy in the Spirit: Finding Strength and Happiness in Christian Fellowship and Surrender

Alright.

Thank you to all who were a part of that Appreciate you very much.

Obviously, the advent of joy and we're going to learn today some of you already know this joy is not an emotion, it's not a feeling.

We are a very feeling-based society right now and there's a lot of people making a lot of money, putting out resources or doing counseling on great coping skills to somehow get to the place where you have more joy in your life, and those are good, not knocking them.

The only problem with that is when adversity really strikes, that all melts away and then it's like you've got to have something deeper to go to.

There needs to be more substance down here in the well of your spirit than just the.

I'm affected to that degree about what happens around me.

There's a presence of being, not an emotion, and we're going to see what the Scripture says about that today.

So, speaking of that, if you'll grab your Bibles thank you for bringing your Bibles, thank you for being the brave souls Get in here today too.

Thank you all for watching out there.

We're always glad to have you.

We want to give a special shout out to the Langstans.

The Langstans, remember, are here actually.

They live now, as of recently in Germany, new assignment.

I feel like God's will was in that.

So we hate to lose the Langstans, but we're so glad that you're watching right now.

Every single Sunday all the way over in Germany, and many of you also, if you're outside the area and you're watching here.

This is one of those days here.

We've had about two inches of rain in just a few hours.

We'll probably have two more in the coming hours.

Wendy, cold rain coming down sideways, soaking wet.

But take heart, this would be a good day in Nebraska if you live there Now.

I said that at the first hour and wouldn't you know it?

Wouldn't you know it?

There were two guests halfway back just moved here from Omaha, nebraska.

So I spent about 10 minutes apologizing and they said you know well, no, why do you think we moved here?

Because you're right, that is a good day there, I think.

So it's one of those rare days here.

Luke, chapter 1, we're going to see a snapshot, if you will, of two ladies that are going to be prime examples of a life of joy, regardless of circumstances.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

And let's just read it.

I'm in Luke 1, verses 39 through 45.

Luke 1:39–45

This is a prelude to the birth narrative of Jesus At that time what time that's after?

Gabriel appears to Mary, a teenage girl.

Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth, who was a relative.

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greetings, the baby leaped in her womb.

She's pregnant.

Mary has just gotten pregnant by the Holy Spirit, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

In a loud voice she exclaimed blessed are you among women and blessed is the child that you will bear.

But why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.

Blessed is she who has believed what the Lord has said to her and will be accomplished.

We'll break that down in just a minute, because the reminder today is through the power of the Holy Spirit that greatly influenced these two ladies, and even babies yet to be born in the womb, is available to you and I today as the author of joy, regardless of what's going on.

So it is possible that in your life recently or in the days to come, he will turn tragedy into a triumph.

Only the Holy Spirit can do that, and our job is to meet both tragedy and triumph with the humble joy that he has given us in the power of the Spirit.

So, now that you're all comfortable and you're dry and everything, would you stand with me?

I'd love to pray.

Have you pray, actually?

And some days we just need to stand, I think, before the Lord reverently.

So let, mecan, I focus you on a couple of things as we get ready to do that.

One is we need to pray, as the Bible says, for the peace of Jerusalem, don't we?

For the war that's raging over there, for justice.

We also, I would love for you, to pray for your walk with the Lord today, no matter how great, how struggling it is, and be very honest just between you and the Spirit.

This morning, we all got stuff we need to confess very quickly and try to get rid of, so we're not dragging an anchor around.

We also need to see Him today in light of who he really is and who we really are, and that always opens our life and our heart up to joy.

So you do that, I'll be doing it also.

Let's pray.

She lives His one second life.

Lord, thank you for hearing prayer, thank you for being a God who speaks through your Spirit.

Thank you for what you did in the last hour and what you will be doing throughout this.

We are only as good as our dependence is on you, on the good days as well as the bad.

Lord we want to walk out of here changed from the way we came in, so now please come.

Holy Spirit, amen.

Thank you, have a seat so you might want to keep your Bible open.

If this Holy Spirit power is good enough to turn tragedy into triumph, then we're going to walk through these verses just for a few minutes and pull out two or three truths that we can apply to make it more real to all of us.

And while we're doing it, today is I looked it up it's our sixth annual Stabs of Joy Day, as we call it.

We've done it different ways, different formats Love, audience participation.

Last two couple of years we've done that.

Y'all have done such an extremely good job of actually coming to a mic somewhere and say must have a joy is for a few seconds.

We're going to do it a little bit differently this year.

We're going to challenge you to have time to think about it.

Make your own list.

I got my list and I'll be pulling it out in a minute and I'll be sharing a few of mine with you.

But if you have time to think about it too and make your list, many of you are in a life group somewhere, either at the previous hour or during the week, in a home group or something.

My challenge is leaders permitting the next two, let's finish out the year.

We're spending time in our groups just sharing our Stabs of Joy with each other.

The good thing about that is it builds our soul up.

It reminds us of how magnificent God is, but also the hero of every story is Jesus and not us.

That's a good practice.

That's a good practice, and so that will be my challenge for you to do that.

Got it?

You going to be able to do that.

Just do this, okay, all right, thank you very much.

So let's read first about the Spiritexcuse me.

The first thing about the Spirit is he surprisingly works in the youngest to the oldest, and we see that.

Look at verse 41 that we have.

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greetings, the baby leaped into her room and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

So let me give you a little back story here.

Elizabeth is a cousin by marriage of Mary's family.

Mary is by now pregnant herself.

She travels to the village Elizabeth.

Where was that?

She was in Nazareth.

Where was Elizabeth?

We're not really sure, but we know pretty close to where that was and most theologians believe she traveled, probably by herself, 65 miles pregnant to go see Elizabeth.

We also think she stayed through the birth.

Elizabeth was about six months along by now.

What's the unusual thing about Elizabeth?

Well, elizabeth was in her 70s and she's pregnant, never been able to bear children.

Suddenly, god decides I'm going to do a miracle in her life, like I'm doing a miracle in a virgin pregnancy and birth over with her family.

So when they meet up, you get this the baby who was six months along, who we know later to be named John, who would be called John the Baptist, the greatest New Testament prophet, who was the forerunner to the Messiah to announce the way of the Lord, was coming.

They're actually cousins.

And so these two ladies, when they get together, the 70-something-year-old Elizabeth somehow knows oh my goodness, mary just walked in.

There's something about that child that is supernatural, and the baby in her womb leaps for joy.

The Holy Spirit revealed to both of them what they could not have known on their own.

It is the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit moves today y'all, in every generation, from the youngest to the oldest, and we see that around here.

I'm grateful, because I get to be in a church every week, that every time we get together there's four generations under one roof.

That's an amazing thing, and we all are learning from each other and seeing experiences of the Holy Spirit in each other.

The Holy Spirit always is going to come loaded up, fortified with joy, and that's why many of you have these stories that are better than the ones I'm going to tell, probably that are like yeah, this is where I was.

It wasn't the best of situations.

It might not have been a big deal, might have been a major thing, but on the backside of it, I look back and God not only sustained and won a victory or kept me in the power of His control, but I have a sense of peace.

That is joy.

It's an amazing thing.

Well, how do you know that joy always comes through the Holy Spirit?

If it's the real stuff, it does.

A lot of places in about one is Galatians 522, the fruit of the Spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, self-control.

It just always is the way it works.

So let me crank out a couple of my first stabs of joy here.

I mentioned the youngest to the oldest.

This year and most years.

One of my stabs joy is Vacation Bible School Week, where this place is packed out with kids About 600 kids this year.

A lot of you were there because you were helpers and that's a stab at joy because 200 adults helped with the 600 children.

Again, different generations across the board, from the youngest to the oldest.

The Holy Spirit moved every single day and on response day 60-something kids came forward to receive Christ.

That's awesome.

Only the Holy Spirit could do that.

Let's shift to the oldest.

There's a couple of assisted living places in our community that some of you I know.

One of our life groups in particular sponsors.

Every Sunday afternoon Mr Perkins goes down there out of our church family and he goes down and he shows this when it's posted at two o'clock to the residents who want to come into the big room there every single Sunday.

It's a great gift to them and it's not only reaching them.

The staff comes and goes as they can.

The staff and I was able to go down there the other day and witness it.

Here's two connected stabs One in his private home but one at an assisted living place in our community.

This past year I was able to go to someone's residence and to that place and baptize two elderly people who physically were not going to be able to get here as believers in Christ, and that happened through ministry of you guys going to them where they are.

That's the power of the Holy Spirit to change lives and that's just an awesome stab of joy for me.

What's this stab of joy all about?

Cs Lewis wrote a book and one of his books years ago he mentioned the phrase stabs joy and it was like a tragic, hard time coming through it.

He looked back and he realized God walked it out with me the whole way and the end result of that experience actually was strange to me because it was joy, it elicited joy, an unexpected, quick release of God's favor which results in the word we call joy, which is attached to a lot of other things too Youngest to the oldest.

One of the things that's a little bit hard is when you're in a church this size with four generations.

We have to say goodbye to some saints who have left legacies here, and I don't want to bring the temperature of the room down to zero, so forgive me for that, but I want to be faithful and remember some people who went to be with Jesus this year and show a little quick memorial to them.

Some of them impacted me and you in very significant ways, but it's another way of being joyful for their lives.

So can we roll number two?

Say a word Thank you.

Oh.

Will my heart feel?

Will I dance for you, jesus?

Will all of you be still?

Will I stand in your presence, but to my knees will I fall?

Will I sing hallelujah?

Will I be able to speak it all?

I can only imagine, yeah, I can only imagine.

Oh, surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel?

Will I dance for you, jesus?

Will all of you be still?

Will I stand in your presence, but to my knees will I fall?

Will I sing hallelujah?

Will I be able to speak it all?

I can only imagine, yeah, I can only imagine, when that day comes and I find myself standing in the sun.

I can only imagine.

Thank you, Pastor Bert, would you come up and share yours?

Thank you and Zach.

I got to feel we might hear from Zach at the end.

right, I'm going to cut tag.

I'm going to cut tag.

Our groups meet so faithfully every week and our leaders are dedicated to teach the Bible, but also to minister and share, and so that's what our group do.

They do life together, and so that's my encouragement to you to plug into a group and to see what joy comes from journeying together, studying God's word, applying it in our lives, but being able to pray for each other and care for each other during the good time and the hard times as well.

So those are my stabs of joy and I love it.

I love it, so I encourage you to be a part of those.

Thank you.

Yeah, ministry and fellowship and discipleship happens best in those groups, so also the Holy Spirit is going to work in the lives of the unworthy and the unsuspecting.

So let's look back at what we just read verse 42 and 43.

And a loud voice, she being Elizabeth, exclaimed blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child that you will bear.

Loud voice, this is like an aesthetic.

Oh, my God, this is beyond, beyond excited that she just yells out there and she says blessed, which, as you know, sometimes the literal translation is happy, but it's more than happy, as we term it today.

It is contentment in your present situation, because you know Jesus is leading, god's leading and he's in control of this.

So why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

One translation says the mother of God.

Why do I get to be in this picture?

I'm in the room with the mother of God.

Somehow she already believed the Messiah, the Christ, was in her cousin and that her son was going to have a key role in that.

Only through the power of the Holy Spirit you ever had one of those.

Who am I to be in this picture?

Moments, what am I doing here?

What did I do to deserve this in a good way?

That's really the sense of all we ought to have just about every single day.

That's the humility that the Holy Spirit speaks to and reacts to, and welcomes and prizes, because the other part of that y'all is.

You just did some of that in your prayer time, confession.

We need to admit at times before God who we are and maybe what we're a part of and some of you you know like well, I thought God already knew.

Well, yeah, he does already know.

The advantage is ours.

This is for our benefit, because then we own it.

And if we own it we don't want to keep it.

And if we don't want to keep it, we ask Him to take it, and that's called repentance turning from it and moving away from it.

And that is the open door to know Christ for the very first time, and it's also the key to growing in our walk with the Lord.

God's not going to hear me or spend time with me if I have iniquity in my heart.

The Bible says that.

But if I'm the confessional sort and I'm going to own it and I'm going to be honest about my shortcomings and my unworthiness and all my stuff that's going on, he can do great things.

This week for devotion, I always give you a couple other passages.

John 3 would be a good one.

John chapter 3 is one of the longest narratives of a discussion between an unbeliever and Jesus Himself.

John 3 · chapter mention

It's Nicodemus and Jesus, who's an honest seeker, he's an expert in the law, he's top notch Pharisee officer, yet he's on His ear because he can't figure out Jesus.

And he says there's something about you supernatural, you're not like any other men, something's going on with you.

I need to know what it is, because you got something I don't have.

And Jesus goes straight to the bone and he says you got to be born again and that flips Him out.

And then he comes out of that and he goes.

Jesus goes right into a description of the Holy Spirit and he compares the Holy Spirit to the wind.

He says you know, the wind blows.

We can't see the wind, but we can see its effects in the leaves.

But can you control the direction of the wind?

Of course not.

The stopping and starting we can't control.

That is the Holy Spirit, that is the power of the Holy Spirit.

So let me address something real quick before I give you another couple of my stabs of joy.

We all in this room and everybody watching out there we can go here, and some of you just have recently and that is because of who you are.

You go to shame.

God didn't create you to be a part of shame-based life.

Now the world loves to pour shame on us and condemnation and tell us how bad and wicked and you know just sinful we are.

We don't have to be reminded that we're sinful people, but the reminder, that's good news.

Jesus didn't come to condemn us.

He came to save us, and when he spilled his blood out for us and then made the way for the Holy Spirit to come after him, every time we confess our faith in Jesus and we give our life to Jesus, we have not only joy, but we have the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, and so our job is to not let ourselves fall into a sense of shame, even if we did something that is a shameful thing.

That's not to condone it, but it's to acknowledge that we now have a greater one as a part of us, who has already paid the price for that.

We live in grace and will be complete and perfect one day when we go to heaven, but until now, our job is to own it, but not let the shame defeat us, because it's hard to be a courageous person when you're full of shame.

The real Christ following life, I'll level with you.

You're going to have to have some courage.

Nowadays, it's not going to be easy.

Every day you will be hard pressed and hard tempted by human beings and spiritual forces.

You're not going to win every battle.

You're going to take some licks, you're going to spend some time limping around, and when, then, you allow shame to tell you you somehow deserve it, you're worthy of that, and nothing else, guess what?

You'll go sit down on the sidelines and you'll watch everybody else play the game.

God didn't create you for that.

God created you to overcome it, and your joy is one of His greatest gifts.

To overcome that shame, we confess and repent of shame, just like we do if we did a heinous crime somewhere, because it has no place in the life of a Christ follower.

So a couple more stabs of joy.

Can you put number three up there?

That's a picture.

This is my one kind of I'll call it just more of a selfish thing here.

I am grateful.

One of my stabs of joy, though, is I work in a place that gives us vacation days.

That's a good thing, because I was able to take a few days end of the summer and go all the way out to almost West Coast.

That is, in the state of Washington.

Some of you know it.

That is Mount Rainier, 14,500 feet in elevation, and I got to tell you the way I'm wired.

Some of you would agree nothing cleanses my spirit like getting out in nature not just nature, but getting as far out in the wilderness as I possibly can.

And that's about where I was when I took this picture.

And let me tell you this, nothing fed me that trip Like the sun going down.

It's getting dark up there in the mountains across the way from where I was and it's almost pitch dark everywhere where I'm standing and there's still a shaft of light hitting that highest peak on Rainier and it lit up that snow and the light reflected off of that snow and lit up that sky all around it.

I got to tell you I had a moment with God there and I felt like it's just me and my two friends.

We're seeing this and nobody else is watching it from this angle right here.

That is spooky, but it was also a great moment in my life and some of you can relate to that.

We just need to get out in the wilderness sometimes, I think, because He'll turn the greatest tragedies into triumph.

There's another stab at joy that happens every week here and it's just what we're doing now worship.

You know, one definition of worship is you celebrate the goodness of God and the greatness of God.

If we come in here and we don't have anything to celebrate.

There's notGod has not failed, we have we're the problem.

If we're going to come in here and focus on our problems for 60 minutes, that's one thing and that's okay.

You can do that.

But the reason for worship is to focus on who he is and how great he is, and that will elicit joy.

Y'all do a good job of that and you know it's easy for me to come in here every single Sunday.

I start looking forward to it.

I don't sleep good on Saturday nights and it's not out of dread, it's out of oh wow, you know there's an anticipation coming.

Praise the Lord for that.

So the third thing youngest at oldest is one unworthy and unsuspecting is one.

The third one is he comes.

Holy Spirit works in those who are willing to believe.

The question is are you one of those willing to believe?

Look at verse 45.

Blessed is the one who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished.

Blessed is the one who has believed there is a linkage between faith and joy.

Now listen to me.

Faith drives the joy, not vice versa.

Joy is a result of believing.

What's faith?

What's belief?

It's believing in someone that you cannot see, and his promises to me and you, whether it's a private to you or whether it's a general, that's in the Scripture.

That applies to everybody.

That's what faith is, and when we're willing to believe that, no matter whether we're going through the best or the hardest, he'll do it.

Jesus, our God in the Old Testament, rewarded faith every single time.

You can just scan through it, starting with people like Abraham and Noah.

He rewarded their faith that they had heard and they believed.

His promise Goes into the New Testament.

One of the most dramatic rewards of faith that I can think of in the New Testament is Luke 7.

That's another one you might want to write down and read later.

Luke 7 is where Jesus is going through Capernaum.

These elders of the town, jews, come up to him and they say we're coming on behalf of a Gentile.

He's a Roman Centurion.

He's not here.

He sent us.

He has a servant that is sick unto death.

Nothing can heal him.

He believes that if you will come and address it, that you can heal his servant.

Now, jesus has never met this man.

This man is not there at the moment, but yet he has some kind of belief that says there's something different with you that you will do.

They start that way.

Another group of messengers come up and they say tell Jesus to not bother, it's too late, he's not going to make it too far to go, don't waste your time With that.

Jesus turns to all the people following him and he says I've never seen such faith in all of Israel.

In other words, translation the Jews who know about the Messiah don't have this much faith.

This guy, who is not a Jew, does not even know our ways, has more faith than all of you do.

So he mails in, if you will, a healing and the servant that hour is healed of whatever was wrong with him.

Reminder they never met personally.

Here's the real world too.

We're all human, are we not?

On my good days, oh, we're going to conquer the world.

God can do anything, and you have those too.

But I'm like you also, when you can get smacked around a couple of times and you're not looking, it's a little bit harder to believe, isn't it?

Let's be honest, that's our humanity.

We got a good example of that, too, in John chapter 9.

John 9 · chapter mention

John chapter 9, jesus again talking to a guy with severe need.

John 9 · chapter mention

His daughter is sick and his daughter is dying and you know, as a parent, we'll do anything, we'll grab any straw to bring relief to a suffering child.

And he's just grabbing at Jesus and saying, man, you know you might be by only hope.

And Jesus turns on him and he says do you believe that I can heal your dog?

And the guy says I believe.

Help me in my unbelief.

You've been there and I have too right.

Oh yeah, of course I believe.

Well, I'm not so sure.

Love to have a sign right now, love to have a little, something more that I could see.

But Jesus heals his daughter.

He acknowledges the honest struggle of humanity that we all have.

So let's go back to the tragedy part.

We all have adversity in our lives.

We all have hard times.

That's when joy is tested, that's when a lot of other things are tested also.

Let me read Romans 15, 13.

May the God of hope fill you with joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope.

By what power to Holy Spirit.

Holy Spirit's still around.

Holy Spirit still works on the worst days just like the best days.

Can we run number four Please?

Sabah?

So I will praise you on the mountain and I will praise you in the mountains in my way.

You're the sun at where my feet are.

I will praise you in the viales.

All the same, no less God within the shadows, no less faithful when the night leads me astray, because you're the heaven where my heart is, in the highlands and the high call the same.

Baptism always makes my list, because nothing beats changed life.

That's one of our core values around here.

It's emotional for me almost every time, because sometimes I do a flashback to my own salvation, and sometimes I know some backstories, and in my friend's case there, she should not have ever been able to be in that pool because a couple, three years ago maybe, she was in an automobile crash that was so bad it would be fatal in about 80% of all cases, and she's fully restored physically, and she is restored where it counts too now in her spirit, and God's got great things in store for her.

It gets deeper, though, because salvation is not a surface level thing.

It goes straight to the bone and the marrow of conviction and acceptance and surrender.

So can we run the next one?

That's number five.

So, zach, we got interrupted the other day.

Tell me a little bit more about what you had mentioned.

Okay, we have been in acts with youth the past couple weeks before that.

One of the things that just I think the Lord had been laying on my heart recently, and then especially just being in acts two, the end of acts two there, 42 through 47, is Luke says in that passage that the believers there were devoted to prayer.

Amongst other things, they were devoted to prayer and I started to think about in my own life, could I really say I'm devoted to prayer?

Do I treat prayer like an arm of ministry, like something we're doing alongside a bunch of other things, or am I treating, you know, speaking with God, asking God to step in, to lead, to guide us?

Is that shouldn't that be like the fuel, the steering wheel almost, for what we're doing?

So that's kind of a little bit kind of weird.

You see it as foundational, not just a part of a loose part of.

So how would that look in the youth ministry?

I had gone to an FCA at Clemson when I was in high school and something that they did with their leaders actually is they had leaders that were there and their whole goal for when they had an FCA meeting group but kind of a campus huddle is that they were just going to pray for whatever the Lord was doing during that time amongst them during their ministry, and so started to think about is that something that we could possibly do here with youth, where we are ministering to youth?

But there are people specifically that is their task during that time is to pray for our families, pray for the youth, pray for what's going on ministry-wise during that time, pray for kids and kids ministry.

Yeah, the content of our prayers tells a lot about our spiritual development, our lack of.

So what I hear you saying is, pretty much, as you have the gathering with the youth on Wednesday nights, there might be a smaller gathering of adults who are praying for those families represented of stairs.

I think that's excellent.

You know what You're about.

The sixth person recently who has come to me with this burden for prayer and that tells me and I've shared that, I've shared that since three weeks ago myself.

I think that that's always evidence of the pulling, the calling of the Holy Spirit for something special.

And so that's exciting to hear that.

This church has been known for the last several years for having an exceptional children's ministry and an exceptional youth ministry.

But now someone who walks in here is like, okay, I've heard that the youth minister is now not doing that anymore.

He's leading a site across town here, our other site there.

So I wonder what's going on in the youth ministry if it's going to be still an exceptional youth ministry.

If I saw that and I had teenagers, that would end my question right there.

We have another exceptional youth minister who is not of shallow entertainment value.

He is substance in the Spirit.

It's the Word and the truth, and I'm excited about that.

The reason we showed the video, though, is he really is one of several of you who have let it be known what's going on in my heart, too.

God's up to something.

I don't know what, but I do know this.

He's pulling us to a greater depth of time with Him through prayer and silence and solitude.

It's called spiritual formations, and I think that needs to be expressed here in some more intentional ways.

So I can tell you this Come 2024, we are going to be a praying church, not just a church that prays, because there's a big difference.

A praying church comes out of a whole different place than one who, oh, while we're together, we need to heist the prayer.

Here, the content, the delivery, the spontaneity of our prayers are about to change.

Well, how do you know that?

I'm not really sure how that's going to happen, but I know the Holy Spirit's behind it, and that's why I'm more excited about 2024 than I was about 2023, and I was really fired up about 2023.

Can you put number six up there, please?

God tests churches to see how those churches will handle special friends.

We have a lot of special friends here in our church of all generations.

We have some that I admire and are our heroes because of physical limitations.

We have five-year-old beautiful little girls like Hazel.

We have guys like 27-year-old Craig, who is now wheelchair bound.

We have Bradley, who's about the same age, who's here on a very regular basis, and we have others who, emotionally, mentally, they enhance our lives because they're just special friends and they trust God at a level man, I almost made it through.

They trust God just because he's God, and they don't know how to quit and they don't know how to bethey, don't know how to not have joy, and this photo is one of our special friends who's here at the earlier hour with some of our others.

This is Ryan.

Ryan's about 34.

And that picture is taken at a big occasion, because last fall Ryan was inducted into the Fort Dorchester High School Athletic Hall of Fame.

How about that?

He has served their athletic department since he was 15 and he's now 34 and he's still at it and he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

And we have others, so many like him Tommy, his buddy, and all of them about I don't know.

Late in the summer I ran into a friend of mine who is now a brother of ours out front and one thing led to another and I ended up leading him down to our prayer room here and we're like 10 minutes before the service started and we're like talking about whether or not he should give his life to the Lord for the very first time.

War was just cracked open and three times, while we're having this like really, really important, intense conversation, one of my special friends, tommy.

Tommy, came in three different times just to say hey, hey, tommy, but again, that's just that reminder that they're here to make sure our heart is right, not their heart, their heart's right with the Lord.

They're here to test us and I hope and pray and I believe we are past that test.

My last shout out to a special friend of mine, and many of yours also, is one that also needs prayer.

Her name's Beth and Beth has a.

We don't know how long she has, but she has cancer and Beth's not going to be around all that much longer.

She happens to be the daughter of Dr Joe Wren, who pastored this church excellently for 26 years.

That's a special family all of itself, and we need to remember and we need to honor those among us.

You can't work up joy.

You can't force it, you can only receive it.

It is a gift of God through the Holy Spirit.

If you do not have the Holy Spirit, you do not have salvation.

If you do not have salvation, that's your beginning point.

This morning, I would ask you to open your heart and your mind and just surrender your life to this great God.

That proved how much he's in the game.

He sent His only Son to be tortured and to die for me and you so that by His blood we are eligible not worthy to come to Him.

But that's a permanent thing, and once you make that decision, you are flooded with the Holy Spirit and you can see things that you shouldn't see, and you can know things that you have no business knowing, and you can have this joy that worships the greatness of God on the worst of days, because he's here to turn tragedy into triumph.

Not every story has ended well this year, but there is a story to be completed in the end, when it will all be turned around, and that is really where our joy lies.

So, as we get ready for our last time, we have the extreme privilege of worshiping this mighty God for just three or four more minutes and I'm going to challenge you In that time just thanking the Lord, sharing your staff's joy with Him privately, or to make a next step decision down here, there's something you need to confess you need a church family and you need to join here.

You need to ask Christ to come into your life.

We certainly will be here to celebrate.

Whatever you have going on.

Why don't?

you stand and let me pray for you.

Lord, we're here at your will and for your pleasure.

We really have nothing of substance to give you except some brokenness.

But, lord, we do want to be faithful as a church.

We want to be a body of Christ that celebrates you and has the courage to live in a countercultural way, just against the grain enough to where Jesus is spotlighted to the rest of this community and the world.

And, lord, that begins with me and it begins with each person in this room.

Would you inspect my heart and our hearts, help us correct what doesn't need to be there right now.

Amen.