The Cost of Staying // David Swart

So good to be here.

I just spent a couple weeks uh traveling with Sean Grainy in uh Germany and in Armenia.

Got back about ten days ago and we were there for about ten days.

So it was amazing.

I want to call up Sean, just give a little testimony of what God did while we were in Armenia.

Can uh everybody say Sean?

Let's go.

Sean, you ready?

Let's go.

Um me and David were in Armenia, like he said, and um visiting a local church there.

And one of the things that stuck out to me the most was um how different it was to everything that I was used to.

Um the language was different, um, the people were different.

Uh we were walking around, nobody looked like me, nobody talked like me.

And it just gave me a different perspective of what God is doing outside of you know my own bubble and what God is doing around people around me.

And it led me to get to this place where I was opening up my hands and asking the Lord, you know, Lord, what what do you want to do with my life?

Because what he's doing is so much more than what he's doing in Columbus, Ohio.

Yeah.

And I really enjoy Columbus, you know, I'm from Ohio.

I'm a regular guy, I'm a routine guy.

I don't like to travel the globe and be in uncomfortable situations.

But I'm realizing that I'm just a drop in the bucket in the global gospel plan and mission that God has, and it led me again to this place of whether it's Columbus for the rest of my life, Lord, or Armenia, wherever it is, um live your life through me.

So I'd encourage you to see what God is doing around the world outside of Ohio or wherever you find yourself in.

Sean and I shared a bedroom for 10 days.

You you learned a lot about a guy in ten days, let me tell you.

Uh it was amazing.

Um I still like him.

He's awesome.

He's a um man, I I'm gonna make no secret of this, but I wish that all of us over the next two years, I'm gonna put a goal out there, we'll put our feet outside of this country and just see what the Lord is doing around the world.

And so we're gonna show you all the different opportunities over the next 18 months, especially, where you can get involved in going to South Africa or Guatemala or to Haiti or to these equips in France or or um Holland and just all around the world.

There's so many open doors for us.

This year, almost 50 people from our country, from our church will be in different countries of the world, including the international internship, Guatemala coming up, and the few trips that we've already done.

So I'd love to see all of us go and get your passport ready.

Can I hear a amen?

Good.

So I read this study from uh Gallup from 2024 that says that something like 70% of workers globally describe themselves as essentially trapped, powerless in a system they didn't design, that they're just stuck in.

Uh, sociologists call this an existential alienation.

And many people feel trapped because of high debts, uh loads, others trapped because of economic situation or whatever situation we find ourselves in.

I think it is a growing issue and a very real issue.

I spent 25 years in um outside of church work in in finance and banking, and the amount of people that I would work with and do life with who explay describe themselves, maybe not in those exact words, but definitely in the idea of just being trapped.

The debt load, the the the put, the time they've put into it, the the size of house, the size of living that we have signed ourselves up for, and people are finding themselves unable to go and do the thing that God has called them to do because we're trapped in a system of our own making.

And I think that's really important.

Our country is built on this idea of freedom, but for most of us, it's just past another milestone, then we'll be free.

Just past that debt, past this relationship that we're that I'm in, past this job, and we keep moving the line.

And I'm here to say that if we look at scripture, what God has for his people isn't that kind of slavery, it is freedom.

It is freedom.

And if you're uh I can open your Bibles, uh, Exodus chapter 12 through 14 is what I'm gonna be reviewing today.

Exodus 12 · chapter mention

We've been slowly going through the Old Testament this year, and we'll be committed to doing a review of the whole Old Testament story.

The first three months of this year we looked at creation and leading up to Abraham, and that was the first three months.

Now we're in an era of what we're calling the kings, the era of, I'm sorry, the era of the patriarchs, where we went from Abraham uh all the way through to Joseph.

Uh Joshua, we're gonna get to Joshua, and then we're gonna enter in from July, we're gonna look at the era of the kings.

We look at David and all the kings of Israel and Judah.

And I want us to get an idea of the arc of the biblical story that so many of us, myself included, spend most of my time in the New Testament.

But there's a whole history of story from Genesis through Malachi that tells us how did we get to the desperate need of Jesus?

And we see how Jesus is painted through all of the scriptures of the Old Testament.

So that's where we are.

Are you with us?

Are you ready?

I told people in Germany that we are a holler back church.

Is that true?

Okay, good, thank you.

And in Germany, I say, Will you holler back?

They said, Ja vol.

Yeah, we will.

Uh not exactly like that, but uh, Exodus 12 through 14.

Let me just tell you where we are today.

I'm gonna talk about this idea of freedom.

Exodus 12 through 14, we enter into the tenth plague as God is trying to deliver the people of Israel who had been enslaved in Egypt for 430 years.

He sends Moses, he hears the cries of his people, he sends Moses and he starts a series of 10 uh plagues that we understand them as today, to try and get Pharaoh to loosen his grip on the people of Israel so that God's people could go and worship him and serve him.

So we are now in chapter 12, the 10th one, and we're gonna walk through the story of them getting to the Red Sea, crossing the Red Sea, and into the freedom that God has called for them.

So we've got to understand the context.

They've been slaves for 430 years, real, brutal, multi-generational, forced labor.

Moses is sent.

Now, there's something we've got to understand about Pharaoh to even understand why this was so difficult for him to let go.

Pharaoh was not just a political leader, like a this elected political leader, like the system that you and I grew up in.

He was, in a sense, the best way to describe this, like the cosmic axis or the living embodiment of what the Egyptians would call Mars.

This idea that order of the cosmos was held together by a system, and at the center of that was the Pharaoh who held this all together.

So Pharaoh had a very important part in the history and the psyche, the understanding of the Egyptians.

So, therefore, to resist Pharaoh himself felt like a threat that could unravel their whole universe if you understand their worldview at the time.

And that's really important.

The Bible project has an image for this, they call it uh creation as a beautiful knitted garment.

And if Pharaoh's systematic evil is a loose thread, that when God dismantles Egypt through the plagues, he isn't just flexing his power, but he's exposing the fact that Egypt's stability was an illusion based on human suffering.

You have to really think through this.

The Bible tells us about 600 men left Israel.

If you consider women and children, that wasn't in that initial number.

You're you're looking at roughly two million people were exiting Egypt at this time.

I asked my good friend Chat how many Egyptians were there at the time, and they he is he it estimates between two and a half and four and a half million Egyptians.

If you think of that kind of a number, if two and a half to four and a half million Egyptians and their whole system, their whole economy is upheld by two million slaves, them letting go of that would unravel reality as they know it.

Everything, their workforce, the the things that they they had built on the back of these slaves, them all leaving, everything changes for the Egyptians.

This was a significant deal that God was wanting to bring his people in, but it had real consequence for the Egyptians as well.

So, as your Bibles are open at chapter 12, we come into the tenth plague, the death of every firstborn child in Egypt.

Basically, what it says is every household with the blood of a lamb on its doorpost without the blood of the lamb on its doorpost will be struck.

And God tells his people put the blood on the doorframe.

When I see the blood, I will pass over.

Hence the term the Passover, as we have come to know it today.

Look at verse 12 in chapter 12.

He says, Therefore, I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments.

I am the Lord.

The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

What happens after this is it happens.

All these firstborn children, beasts, die all across Egypt, in all the houses where the blood of the lamb was not posted over the door post.

Pharaoh then says, Okay, fine, you win, let them go.

And he finally actually lets them go.

They're going, chapter 12, chapter 13, we get to chapter 14.

Once again, he changes his mind and he sends the entire chariot army after them.

Now, picture this Israel, two million people.

Picture this.

How many people are in Columbus, Greater Columbus area?

Just over two million.

Imagine all of us going on a little expedition, plundering the Egyptians first, and here we go, we're in the desert.

They're making it down, they get to the Red Sea, on the left is a mountain range, on the right is a mountain range, and now they're looking back, and here comes a whole Egyptian army behind them.

They are petrified, and that's where we find ourselves now in chapter 14 and verse 13.

They are afraid.

And Moses said to the people, verse 13, fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today.

For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again.

The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.

Maybe the hardest part in all of this verse.

Verse 21.

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right and unto the left.

What happens after this?

They make it through, and now the Egyptian army, they're like, we gotta do this too.

So they start following them into the dried up Red Sea.

Pick up at verse 26 again.

Then the Lord said to Moses, Now stretch out your hand over the sea, that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen.

So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared.

And as the Egyptians fled into it, the Lord threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea.

The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea, not one of them remained.

Let's look at some of these movements.

And what I want to look at today as a big picture here is the cost of freedom.

The cost that it cost God, the cost that it would cost you to go, and the cost that it would cost you to stay.

There is a cost to everything that we're talking about here.

Let's start with the cost that God was willing to pay.

Now, if you've been following the story of the plagues for a while, if you've been reading scripture for a while, or if you're new to this, you may have a question on your mind.

What kind of a God would send all these children, these firstborn animals and people to die?

And I want to answer the question or begin to try and answer it, because often we have these questions and we think we're not allowed to ask them.

And I think the Lord encourages us, come to Scripture, come to Him, ask your questions.

Don't just sit in doubt and just wondering what you know what the Google is telling you about the answer.

Come to the Lord, ask him what is going on here.

How can a loving God kill children?

How can we read this and call the Lord good?

And I don't believe it's a cynical question, I think it's an honest one.

If God is love and God is power, and he could have freed Israel another way, then maybe the death of these children feels arbitrary.

But what does the text tell us?

We gotta go back a little bit, work a little bit harder in this text to understand the context of this random, seemingly random tenth plague.

Here's the story Egypt had spent 80 years executing a state-sponsored program of infanticide against Israel's sons.

How do I come up with that?

If you were with us on Mother's Day and I went over the story of Moses' mother, Jochebed, and in that time we were in chapter 2 and 3 of Exodus.

If you remember chapter 1, Pharaoh issued an edict, all the male children of the Israelites should be killed.

Throw them into the Nile.

They should be taken care of.

And there's no record in Scripture that tells us that edict ever stopped.

Now, perhaps it wasn't very successful because the Israelites multiplied and more and more of them came.

But in some way, this edict was still happening, and our Israelite brothers and sisters in those days were used to burying their children.

They were used to going for it.

For 80 years, because this is this was the age of Moses when he stood before Pharaoh and these ten plagues started.

Eighty years long, they were putting their children into graves.

That is really important for us to understand.

You see, the death of Egypt's firstborn children was not arbitrary, it's in a sense the precise return of God of Egypt's own violence upon itself.

This was the path that they had chosen.

See, God does not forget what was done to the weak.

In a sense, he keeps a ledger and eventually the cries of the oppressed always comes back around.

But what makes this story different from any other ancient story of retribution, God doesn't execute judgment from a distance and walk away.

In a sense, he stations himself at the door.

The story of the Passover is important to look at the details.

The Jewish word for Passover is pesach, uh P-E-S-A-C-H, Pesach.

And we've always translated as just kind of like passing over the house, but more accurately, it's in the sense of hovering over or spreading wings over the house.

He's not absent from the house, he is shielding those inside the house from the thing that is coming.

God isn't just randomly executing judgment, he's placing himself in the situation and covering his people, covering them with his very presence between the destroyer and the door.

Tim Keller maybe puts it this like this.

He says, God doesn't tear up the bill of their sins and our sins, he puts it on a cosmic credit card.

The debt is real, every human house deserves what the destroyer brings, but God puts it all on accounts, and the account comes due at the cross.

A lamb whose bones were not broken absorbed the full force of everything the destroyer was owed.

So now when we read Exodus chapter 12, you're not reading about an angry God who kills people.

Exodus 12 · chapter mention

You're reading about a God who stations himself at your door and takes the hit himself.

The cost of your freedom, friends, started long before you and I even knew we needed it.

And the price was paid.

So what stands behind the door is not a transaction that we get to negotiate, it's a reality that you and I need to receive.

The fact that he has paid the price for your sin.

He put it on himself.

And so now every time you're reminded of the cross, we need to stop.

Look at the door.

Something died there so that we didn't have to.

Something died there that we didn't have to.

Armenia has this practice.

Uh Armenia is officially the first Christian nation in the world.

Uh the king of Armenia in the year 301.

I'd love to tell you this story one day, but in the year 301 declared it a Christian nation.

And from then they started um carving stones and putting a cross on these stones, um, most beautiful crosses.

I've got probably 15 different pictures of different crosses that were decorated all the way back from like the year 800.

And every time you see a cross in Armenia, Jesus is not on it, but every cross is decorated at the edge of the cross, at the edges with flowers or with birds, or with some sign of life, and for them just signifying the life of the cross, the life of what that purchased for you and I.

I think we need to put a few more crosses up in here so that you and I can be reminded over and over that your price was paid for, it was taken, it was finished.

He had accomplished it all, and he did it willingly.

Amen.

Let's talk secondly about the cost of refusing freedom.

And I want to talk about Pharaoh again because perhaps we get him a little wrong and we read the plagues and we think that he was just being stubborn or irrational or doubling down on a losing hand, but it's not quite what the text is showing us.

If you look at chapter 14, verse 4, God says, I will harden Pharaoh's heart.

I used to stumble over this a lot because I'm like, what chance did this guy have if God was the ones hardening his heart in the first place?

I mean, it's game over, right?

Like it's gonna happen.

But we have to, again, look a little deeper at the words.

The Hebrew word there is called chazak, chazak, and I had to look this up for any of the literary nerds amongst us.

It's called a hip-hill causative verb.

In a sense, God is not injecting something new into Pharaoh.

What it text is showing us is that he's reinforcing what was already there.

If you read earlier on in the ten plagues, it started with Pharaoh hardened his hearts, and then it changes to and God hardened his heart.

In a sense, God wasn't creating a new thing there, he was reinforcing what Pharaoh had started with and was doubling down on, and he is, in a sense, building a fortress around what Pharaoh already built.

And he makes him stand under the weight of his own decision.

Now there's a cost to staying in your slavery.

What was happening here with them is they came up to the Red Sea, they had the mountains on the sides of them, and suddenly the people of Israel started complaining to Moses.

In fact, they said, Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die?

In a sense, take us back.

Why did you bring us out of this only to kill us over here?

There was this reflex in them that says, What the heck?

Now, I read this.

There's this researcher named Rachel Yehuda.

She published a study in 2016 called Biological Psychiatry.

And what she was doing was examining the Holocaust survivors and their adult children.

She found that the trauma of the survivors that they experienced had changed the biology of their children who hadn't experienced the trauma.

And it was done at a genetic level.

So the children of these of the Holocaust survivors were wired differently for a type of hypervigilance, for a threat response, or a particular kind of fear that showed up in their genetics, even though they themselves didn't experience the Holocaust.

It's like their bodies carried something that their minds never subconsciously experienced.

I bring that up because you're standing as a two million people about to experience and taste freedom, and your gut response is, why did you bring us here?

At the first obstacle that they're facing.

These Israelites had experienced ten plagues.

They had gone through this.

This wasn't just, we can read this in like a few minutes, all ten plagues, and think, oh wait, what a story.

This happened over a number of months.

This had to happen.

They'd experienced it.

They saw the miracles of God in all ten of them.

They saw the water turning.

They saw the locusts.

They saw all that the hail.

They saw everything that was going on.

And they knew the miracle hand, the powerful hand of God.

Yet when they faced the Red River, this reaction just reactivated in them.

They had been genetically modified in 400 years of slavery to that kind of response.

Maybe going back is better than stepping into the unknown.

Maybe going back into the familiar slavery I understand is better than stepping into the thing I don't quite understand.

It's a very interesting thought for us to ponder.

I wonder if the most dangerous prison is the one that we've just learned to call home.

We've come to think that that kind of life I'm living is freedom.

I'm going to ask you a question.

Maybe the text is asking you, what have you built your life around that you cannot afford to have God touch?

If He has to challenge you onto some things, maybe it's your career.

Maybe you've built a career of working 10, 15 years, and a salary finally feels like proof that you've made it.

And there's this quiet terror underneath that if it gets disruptive, you don't know who you are without it.

Our identity is formed by our career these days.

Is it the image?

The finely curated image that you have and put out to the world.

And you wonder if people actually know you or love you for who you are.

But you've worked so hard on this image to show people who they want who you want them to think you are, and you're trapped in trying to keep up that facade all along.

That's not the kind of freedom that God wants for us.

Is it a number, a portfolio, a pension?

I know a lot of you are too young for to think about pensions, but a financial threshold that keeps just moving and supposed to make you feel secure, but you never quite get to that number because the number itself keeps changing.

Friends, the the cost of staying in Egypt is real.

The cost of staying in Egypt is real.

And the question isn't whether God can free you.

The question is whether you're willing to let go of what you've been holding.

Because here's what's on the other side of that decision.

God has life for you on the other side of the freedom, the slavery that we're living in.

Now I'm particularly burdened by this idea today that I think so many of us, whether it's professionally or in the decisions we've made are caught up in a trap of slavery, which the Bible says the debtor is slave to the lender.

And we have made decisions, some of it not your own, some of it is just the way life has been structured.

And we have car debt and student debt and home loan home debt, or you're you don't have a house, you think I could never do that, and you're just like, I am stuck.

I'm stuck in what I'm living in.

And I'm here to tell you that is not what the Lord wants for you.

It is so easy for us here in America.

The minute you earn a certain amount, you start living up to that amount.

Then you earn, get the raise, and you're like, good, I deserve the bigger car.

I deserve the bigger house.

So we get up to that level of standard, but we never get to a place of actual freedom, of living with less than we earn, so that we could be the most generous people that God has called us to be.

I don't want you to feel condemned, but I want you to get a vision of this is not what God has for you.

This is not what God has for you.

Other days someone said to me, Well, you know, the cost of a starter home today is X percent higher than it was, you know, 50 years ago.

And that number was what, I don't know, 50%, let's say something like that.

I just want to remind you, the size of the starter home that you're looking for is also 50 to 100% bigger than the starter home 50 years ago.

And so we're making these comparisons, like I could just never get ahead.

When way maybe God wants us to live on a little bit less so that we can live as free people into what he has for us.

Is this okay?

I'm speaking as one who at age 35 was sitting onto a negative net worth because I kept earning, I kept buying up to my earning.

And then the markets crashed in 2008, and I was stuck.

I was stuck.

And I'm telling you this as a story, not of condemnation, but one of as if we decide to make some big decisions, God can walk you out into freedom.

There's a cost to staying in slavery, and there's a cost to walking in freedom.

Which one do you want to pay?

Is this okay?

You okay?

I know this is heavy, and maybe many of you are sitting here thinking, I could never get out of that.

Please come and talk to me.

Please come and talk to me.

There is a way to freedom, but it'll cost you something.

Amen?

I'm smiling.

You happy?

This is what the Lord has for us.

He doesn't want his people stuck in Egypt.

He doesn't.

I say it with all confidence in my heart.

Let's just look at this last cost for a second.

The cost of walking out.

Israel stands at the edge of the sea, Pharaoh's army behind them, they're terrified, they're complaining, and Moses says, Hold up, just be quiet for a minute.

The Lord will deliver you.

The water parts, the dry ground, and they they walk into this new freedom.

Here's the crazy thing about walking into freedom it's gonna feel so uncomfortable at first.

Because your familiar, we like familiar, don't we?

I wake up the same time every day, go straight for my coffee, sit down in the same chair, and I go through my routine.

I like familiar.

Anyone with me?

What these guys had to learn is their familiar was 430 years as slaves.

The freedom God walked them into at first looked like this.

A cloud's gonna lead you by the day.

And a fire is gonna lead you by night.

Once they got through the Red Sea, what happened?

They were fed in the morning with manna, every mut every day, new manna, just for that one day.

Their sense of control, this is me getting anxious right now, even just telling you the story.

Are there any control freaks here with me?

Just say loud and proud.

Come on.

My sense of control, I don't like that.

I don't like that.

If I should drive to California right now, it's like a four-day journey, right?

Don't just tell me trust the cloud or follow the sun.

You know, forget about it.

Like I want the Google map, I want to see which hotel, which nuts, which one is a nice breakfast, and I curate the whole thing.

I like control.

These guys were saying, you've had 400 years of being told what to do every morning, noon, and night.

I'm about to sit you into freedom.

Trust me.

Trust me, follow the fire, follow the cloud.

Day by day you will learn I am your provider.

I will walk you into freedom.

That is uncomfortable.

Unless some of you have no control issues and you're like that, sounds amazing.

Uh, if that's you, wave your hand as well.

That sounds amazing.

But to not know that to walk into that, where am I gonna stay?

What am I gonna eat?

What career am I gonna have?

What is the Lord leading into me?

What we're doing is we're learning to put our future and the things we hold so dear into the arms of the one who loves us so dearly.

We're learning to surrender.

We're learning to and now we begin to understand true freedom.

Now, when your house isn't locking you up and the Lord says, Let's go to Armenia for a year.

Go and support what the Lord's doing there.

You aren't got a bunch of balls and chains behind you, called debts and responsibility and everything else that's holding you back from following the Lord and saying, Yes, yes, Lord, I will do what you call me to do.

Amen.

I remember a couple times the Lord had called us to change careers, and it didn't make any sense.

The first time, actually, my daughter right here, Abigail, Kathy was pregnant with her.

And I was like, What kind of a man am I that is gonna take, you know, I have a wife or one child and one on the way, and we let go of a job that said, No, no, we'll keep paying you.

You could keep doing it until you find another one.

And the Lord said to me, You're not trusting me, you're trusting them.

To say, okay, I don't know.

So a few months not having work, not knowing where this money would come from, not having savings either.

Finding envelopes with cash on our door, finding bags with of groceries, finding people who just randomly paid our rent that month.

Like, I don't know, but that's trusting in the Lord when He tells you to go.

Are we willing to be that open with the Lord, with the sovereign Lord, creator of heaven and earth, who loves you, knows the beginning from the end, who is the beginning and the end?

Are we willing to trust that God?

Is that the one that we serve?

Amen.

This is going a little bit long.

We're about to wrap up.

Are you with me?

Matthew 2, verse 15.

Matthew 2:15

When they see Jesus, they quote this.

Matthew quotes this verse from Hosea, out of Egypt I called my son.

That's not a coincidence, friends.

Matthew is telling us something.

He's telling us that Jesus is the true Israel.

And he retraces his entire path.

Jesus went, his father, trying to flee, goes into Egypt, and out of Egypt, the actual Jesus is called, retracing the steps of the Israelites who were in captivity.

He comes out of the water, baptized in the Jordan, the new Red Sea.

He spends 40 days in the wilderness, Jesus does, signifying the 40 years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness.

And he is the firstborn who died and came to life again.

He is the one that now paid the price that each one of us, our homes, would be safe should we put our faith in him.

John 1.29 says, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Friends, not just Israel, not just this nation, not just that nation.

All who call upon the name of the Lord, all of them will be saved.

John 19, verse 36, when the Roman soldiers came to break the leg of the crucified, they broke the thieves' legs, but they didn't break Jesus' dead legs.

John 19:36

This is the same as the rule for the Passover lamb.

The Passover lamb, the bones were not allowed to be broken.

And in that again, Jesus fulfills the sacrifice of the Passover.

Friends, the Passover was never just about Egypt.

It was always pointing there to the lamb, to the door, to the blood that guards you and I now.

I want to ask you to do one thing as we finish.

Name your Egypt.

Name your Egypt.

Name the thing that's holding you back.

The thing that's holding you in slavery.

Name it.

The system, the relationship, the fear that you've built your stability around, the image that you have curated, name it.

What is keeping you bound to something that is not the freedom that the Lord has for you?

And then ask yourself, what does it cost me to stay?

And what would it cost me to walk out and obey?

The worship team join, please.

I want us to finish in a moment of just surrender to the Lord one more time.

And friends, I've given a lot of examples here, but you know what you're walking through.

You know what's in your life, and I want to encourage you, will you do some work with the Lord just in this last song?

And as I get ready, if you don't know Jesus, if you haven't surrendered your life to Jesus in the first place, this is just gonna feel like a lot of work to do as well.

The door into this kind of freedom is receiving Jesus.

The door.

The only reason you can be free is by accepting what Jesus had done for your life, asking him to forgive you of your sins and applying the blood of the Lamb to your life.

And the Bible says, He believes and confesses will be saved.

Would you close your eyes for a second?

If you're sitting in this room and you have not surrendered your life to Jesus, I want to pray with you right now.

And again, I'm not asking you, do you know Jesus?

Uh do you know Jesus or do you have you heard about him?

Let me tell you, Satan knows him.

But he hasn't surrendered to him.

Have you surrendered to Jesus?

And what I want to do is just pray a quick prayer.

Begin it, in a sense, a conversation between you and the Father, of you accepting and receiving the person of Jesus in your life.

And I'd like to know who I'm praying for.

This, you, if you want to give your life to Jesus, would you put up your hand so I know who I'm praying for?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyone else here?

Thank you, ma'am.

This is the single most important decision you'll ever make in your life.

And I'll just get one more minute.

Is there anybody else I can pray for?

Thank you, sir.

Jesus loves you.

Jesus died for you.

Jesus gave his all for you.

Thank you, ma'am.

And he's inviting you into relationship with him that you can begin to have a chance to taste the freedom and the adventure that he has for each one of us.

There's a number of people who raise their hands, but I'm gonna invite you.

If you want to pray this with me, just pray this out loud.

Say, dear Jesus, I believe you are the Son of God.

I believe you paid for my sin.

And I want to ask you to forgive me of all my sins.

I receive you right now.

I receive you in my heart.

I want to follow you, Jesus.

Right now, I don't understand this all.

But I see you and I want to follow you.

Will you help me?

Thank you, Jesus, for this life.

Amen.

Amen.

Friends, if you prayed that the first time, we'd love to stand with you.

We're gonna have a prayer ministry team that's gonna come up.

Can we all stand together, please?

I think there's some response for us.

I know we've gone a couple minutes late today, but but just be with us.

Just a few more minutes.

The Lord is knocking on your heart.

He wants you free.

Please believe me, He wants you free.

He wants you to know and experience the freedom of the Lord.

If you gave your life to Jesus, come and talk to one of us, one of the leaders up front.

We'd have to give you a Bible and just the next steps.

If you need prayer, come forward and pray.

Let's just take one more song and worship the Lord this morning.