What Is God Doing Right Now? (Guest: Nick Mayo) | 4/12/2026

Well, good morning, good morning.

This on there we go. Blessings, honey guys this

morning, excited to, to be here. What a joy to, to worship in

this house this morning. Being at both services and just

seeing the, the strength of the team here in the warmth of the

body is just pretty remarkable. So thank you guys for having me.

A special thanks to Pastor Kurt and Jace for, for allowing me to

come and share with you guys today.

I was thinking during, during worship, Psalm 133 says, oh, how

pleasing and beautiful it is when God's people dwell together

in unity. And then it goes through and

starts talking about the, the dew.

It's like blessing from above, the dew from Mount Hermon on to

Mount Zion. Then it starts going through the

oil that's poured out on the, the crown and down the the robe

and garments of Erin. And it's this blessing from

above, down below. And I was just thinking about

all the snow that you guys have gotten.

You guys have blessed us down in lower Michigan with the

abundance of rivers and, and water.

So I feel like even as you guys have been worshiping up here,

we've been communing together through weather down South and

yeah, we're, we're happy to be here.

I came today with a, a pastoral word and kind of a theological

lens to hand over to you guys. As I was listening and praying

with the Lord, I just, I really felt like primarily I want to

come and just shepherd hearts, offer a, a pastoral

encouragement. But then secondarily, I'm, I'm

both a pastor and theologian. So I also want to give you a

theological lens in which will help to shepherd your heart

moving forward. Sometimes we could think of

theology as the the dead and dusty books, but the way that I

see theology is actually it's listening to the God who speaks

to us. Our God is a self revealing God.

And sometimes getting a, a theological word gives us lenses

in which we can understand the common threads that go through

scripture. And I want to give you a common

thread. In fact, I hope that both the,

the question I give to you today and then the theological lens

that I give to today would haunt you as you go forward in, in all

the best ways, in the right ways of haunting, in the way that

Christ kind of haunts our consciousness when we hear his,

his parables and we go, what is that?

What does that mean? That's a good question that that

we can't get away from. And I, I kind of want these

things to just linger with you today.

So if you would join me in prayer, stand with me.

We're going to pray as we go through.

If you can. If you can't, it's all right.

And I like to to kind of embody our movements of prayer.

So if you could put your hand over your heart, Lord Jesus,

Father, Son, Holy Spirit, we recognize your presence here

today. We welcome your presence here

today. We long for your presence here

today. Would you help us to have eyes

to see what it is that you were doing in our midst?

Would you help us have eyes to see what you're doing in our

life? And by your Spirit, would you

equip us to be able to walk this out with you to participate in

what you're doing. I love putting my, my hand over

my heart when I pray and stay in this posture of prayer because

hopefully you, you can feel your heart beating inside of your

chest. And I, I just want to give you

an encouragement that, that Christ, especially in, in that

great outpouring of his Holy Spirit has put his life within

us. And now as you feel your heart

beating, you can realize that Christ is as intimately present

as your beating heart. You don't have to do anything to

muster up His presence. We simply turn in a tune and set

our awareness on where He is with us, what He is doing, a

myriad of things, and then we get to participate with that.

And that's today's message. So Lord, we thank you for it.

When you say Jesus thank you in Jesus mighty name, Amen.

You can take a seat. Sorry.

Give me one second. If I don't have my coffee, I'm

going to start losing my voice. This is my wife by the way, my

sleeping son Isaac. It actually worked out better.

Second service, first service. He was like running circles

around and up and down the aisle and which is also beautiful, but

sleeping child is peaceful. If you didn't get a handout in

the way and I encourage you to to grab one in the back.

They're made available. There's going to be hopefully

we'll get to a a larger portion of Romans that we're going to

read and to have it in front of you will help you to to stay

pressed in and alert. So the the pastoral word that I

I want to offer over to you. What I couldn't get away from is

this question, what if the very circumstances that you find

yourself in right here and now in your life, both highs and

lows, the pain points of your week, that maybe you've been

crying out to the Lord, you've been asking for Him to do

something in the circumstances. What if those circumstances are

the very place that God wants to actively form Christ into our

life, to actively massage the very life of Christ into our our

being, the fabric of our being, which hopefully by the end of

the service is that if that's foreign language to you, by the

end of the service, it's going to be very, very comfortable

language 'cause we're going to see it in the the writings of

Paul. It's in the Scriptures all over

the place. As I do my studies over the last

eight years, I've been digging in deep to the early church, the

ancient church, the 1st 500 years of the church.

Guys like funny names, Irenaeus and Athanasius and Maximus the

Confessor, awesome names. I wish we would bring some of

those back today. In fact, I tried naming my first

son after Athanasius and Maximus the Confessor, but my wife

wasn't having it. So he ended up being Samuel.

But as I go into the early church and as I think through

the, the lens in which I, I kind of was raised in, in a

evangelical context, I often thought of what happened last

week, the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I thought of it as you know, Christ is the, it's the great

exchange. He takes our sin, He offers us

forgiveness and sets us up in a beautiful way to receive

resurrection life to come. And the early church would say,

yes, all of that is is a part of it.

But the early church pressed it even deeper.

The early church moved it from a center in ourselves to a center

in Christ. And then everything was Christ

working it out from the inside out.

Christ didn't just take our sin, He took our very life.

He doesn't just give us forgiveness, He gives us his

very life. It's beautiful in Christ.

We've been. We've been united to God in his

person, and now he offers us up his very life.

This is how the church was talking for ages and ages and

ages. But as we get to our kind of

modern postmodern, individualized context, we

sometimes miss some of this language.

We don't know what to do with it.

It feels really odd to us. What does it mean that we are

united to Christ? What does it mean that he gives

us his own life when all of the world right now is telling us

you get to define you. So just go and exhort yourself

to work that out. And sometimes we can hear the

Christian message through the the individualized message.

And we, well, I've even heard preachers preach this.

This is what Jesus done, now what are you going to do for

him? This is what Christ has done on

your behalf. Now what are you going to do on

his behalf? In the early church that was

absolutely foreign. The early church didn't go what

are you going to do with Jesus? Because they didn't have a

picture of an absent Christ. When Christ ascends to the right

hand of the Father, it's not his escape from this world I love.

The Easter tide is not just a single day of Easter.

It's actually 50 days Easter going all the way up to

Pentecost with the ascension 40 days in.

So you have Easter, 40 days ascension, 10 more days

Pentecost, 3 distinct moments, one unified movement of God in

the resurrection. Christ is bodily raised,

defeating sin and death, putting it to the side and bringing

forth victorious newness of life.

But he's not done yet. He does 40 days of exhorting his

people on the Kingdom of God, and then he ascends.

And again, this is not his great escape.

He's not jet packing out of all the turmoil saying hey, hold on

tight, I'll be back. The ascension language is from

the Old Testament. Kings would ascend to their

throne, the high priest would ascend into the Holy of Holies.

That's what Christ is doing. He's not inactive.

In fact he is at rest, extremely active.

Just like when God creates all of creation and it says He rests

on the 7th day, you realize that even in His rest He was still

holding all things together by the power of His Word.

So as Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, He's

not on vacation, He's not in retirement, He is active and

present, says He ever lives to make intercession on our behalf.

He so desperately desires to put His life into us that 10 days

after the Ascension, He pours out His very spirit, His life to

go to the depths of our being and to work all of what He's

accomplished for us and secured for us from the inside out.

So what if the very circumstances that you find

yourself in is a very place that God by his Spirit is working the

life of Christ into your life. I'm in pastoral care and do

spiritual direction and I sit down with people on a a frequent

basis. And as I'm as I'm sitting and as

people are opening up and talking about the deep

wrestlings and desires and questions of their heart, more

often than not, it sounds like God's will is somewhere outside

those doors. But I'm not experiencing it

right here now. A lot of young adults go, I, I

know I have a calling on my life.

God has called me to do this thing, but I'm not in it right

now. So I can't be in God's will

until I'm in it out there somewhere when I get that job,

when I get that spouse, when I get fill in the blank or the

other side of it is I just don't understand where God is in this

because it's just pain and it feels like hell and turmoil.

That's the great benefit of of what Christ going to the cross.

So many things that Christ going to the cross did on our behalf.

One of them is Christ took up our entire life, the entire

human condition and plumbed the depths on the cross of human

despair, abandonment, brokenness, fear, turmoil,

experienced it all and then fills it with the life of God

that there's there's no further place we can fall that Christ

has not already gone to meet us there and to draw us up into

himself to put his very life within us.

That's good news on the cross amongst all the other things

that the cross is a picture of the cross is meeting us in the

pits of our despair and calling out, I'm still active to make

you more like me. I went there to meet you there

to give you my life and remove you from there.

Does that make sense? As I as I popped up from early

church studies and I go where is this in the scriptures, I

started reading again through this lens and started seeing

Paul been talking about this the whole time.

I just didn't know how to see it.

Listen with me Colossians, Colossians one since they're

sorry, Colossians 3, one and three.

Since then you have been raised with Christ.

Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the

right hand of the Father. Set your minds on things above,

not on things of this earth, for you have died, and your life is

now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life

returns, you also shall return with Him in glory.

Have you ever contemplated on this?

Have you ever meditated on this? This is really strange to our

individualistic culture, that I'm no longer trying to make

myself, that Christ has given me his own life, that it's no

longer, as Paul says in Galatians 220, I that live, but

Christ that live in me. Can we say with Paul that I have

been crucified with Christ Jesus, that my old man has been

put to death? So now the life I live, well,

it's actually Christ who's living in me in the life I live

in this flesh. I now live by the faith of the

Son of God who gave himself for me.

Realize this is a big shift. This isn't Christ did this for

you. So now what are you going to do

on your on his behalf? This is Christ did this for you

and it is now doing it in you and will never leave you or

forsake you. He's going to see what He has

started to its completion. He is the author and perfector

of our faith. Hebrews tells us so on your

sheets. What Christ did in His life and

ministry not only dealt with our sin, it reached to the very core

of what it means to be human. Christ took up our lives so He

could give us His very life. Our life has been united to

Christ's life. What has happened to Him has

happened to us and is being worked out in us by His Spirit.

That's important by His Spirit. Philippians 2 Paul says, Work

out your salvation with fear and trembling continues on, for it

is God who is at work in you. We're not left to our own

devices. This isn't just, hey, go on and

try and muster this up. This is, hey, Christ has done

everything on your behalf. Will you recognize what He's

doing right now and cooperate and participate with it?

Can we have eyes to see what He's doing in our midst here and

now in the pain points of life? Sometimes we desire that the

circumstances are going to change.

Sometimes they will, sometimes they won't for some time.

What the Lord desires is that we would change in the midst of

them, that He would form to the depths of our being the very

image and likeness of His Son. You see this God's supreme will

and calling for your life is that you would receive and be

conformed to the very life and likeness of His Son by the Holy

Spirit. Romans 829.

We love when we have trials to, to quote Romans 828, and it's a

beautiful, beautiful passage that God is working all things

together for those who love him, right?

And we we grab hold of that, but sometimes we fail to read on to

see what the good God is working out for those who love him.

He continues on and Paul says for those whom he foreknew and

also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son in order

that Christ might be the first born among many brethren.

Galatians 419. Paul's talking to Glacia and and

he's, he's bursting at the seams.

He says, my children, for whom I am again in the anguish of

childbirth, until Christ be formed in you.

We tend to picture the will of God as the things we do and the

places we go. But if we're not able to do the

things or go the places again, then the will of God is separate

in somewhere outside the doors. We got to go hunting it down.

Maybe we need another worship service.

Maybe we need another prayer time.

Maybe we need a. But the brilliant thing is, and

what Christ has done for us and what He has secured for us and

what He has placed in us by His living spirit means there is no

circumstance I could be in that I'm not touching the will of

God. If I would have eyes to see what

Christ is actively doing, if I would submit my life over for

Him to form His life on the inside of me, and then guess

what? Situations start changing

because I'm walking in newness of life.

In fact, if you've anything like me, there's many times where it

took the awakening of, Oh yeah, this is what Christ is doing.

Wait, I was misreading my circumstances because I'm pretty

large, knucklehead. And I start to experience

humility. I start to realize, man, the

argument that I might have been having with my wife, I was the

one who is wrong. I wanted God to change her.

And he's going, Nick, Nick, Nick, open up your eyes.

Will you see what I'm doing with you?

Can I transform you into my image and likeness?

And will you trust that I'm doing the same thing with your

wife? Right.

The Co worker at work, the boss at work, the sibling, the

parent, all of these different movements.

Will you? Will you cooperate with me?

Will you have eyes to see what it is that I'm doing in your

midst so that you can carry forth my life into the midst of

what you're experiencing? There's not a single movement in

our life that is not touching the will of God if we would just

be active and present to what He's doing.

We so want God to move and the things around us, and He will.

He cares about those things. He is a good Father.

He takes our needs and our desires to heart.

But man, He wants to translate our heart into the heart of

Christ. He wants to put His love into

the depths of our being. So that way, even if the

circumstances don't change, we do and we walk in a new way.

There's not a single moment within your life that God isn't

intimately present in actively working out the very life of

Christ offered over to you by His Spirit.

OK, one moment I need to remember when I need to be done

by. Awesome, good, I'm a talker.

I can just keep going. We could be here all day, but I

won't. I'll be mindful of the the

timeline. Hopefully this is, this is good

news for you. Hopefully you're, you're feeling

the, the weight being brushed off of your shoulders.

Because if it's about me seeing what Jesus has done and me going

out and trying to muster it up and doing it on my own cord, I'm

going to walk in turmoil. I'm going to have a lot of

anxiety coming in. I found last year at a a thrift

store a little Pennant cross that on one side I had a

beautiful cross and then on the backside it said Christ is

counting on me. Realize the weight that that

thing would have hanging on your your neck.

That is not the gospel. The gospel is not Christ is

counting on you. The gospel is.

We can count and rely on Christ who is actively at work in our

life even today. That as I go out into the world,

He's there with me and I get to learn how to walk in step with

his Spirit. Paul's two favorite phrases #1

in all of Paul's literature is in Christos, in the the Greek,

in Christ, that we are united to Christ, that our life is now in

Christ. You will see it all throughout.

That's why I'm saying I want this to haunt you.

That as you go into his prison letters, you go there it is.

I have eyes to see because it's all over.

The other one is walking by the Spirit in step of the Spirit,

the life in the Spirit, the the gifts of the Spirit.

Like Paul is talking about this life that Christ has secured for

us that we are in and then the life that Christ has deposited

us into us in the Holy Spirit. It's all throughout and he's

inviting us into this journey of going.

Would you have eyes to see what the Lord is working in your

life? One of my favorite stories from

the Old Testament is Elijah and his his servant.

Elijah, his Elijah's servant are being surrounded in encampment

by all these these armies of the nations around them.

And Elijah's servant is outside and he's looking around and his

knees are shaking because they're being surrounded by some

pretty aggressive armies. And Elijah says to him, hey, you

have no need to worry. Those who are with us are

greater than those who are against us.

Elisha's servants looking at him going, those who are with us, do

you have a mouse in your pocket? Like what's going on here?

So Elisha prays a simple prayer. Lord, would you give him eyes to

see? Would you open up his eyes to be

able to see your hand at work? And the scriptures say that his

eyes are enlightened, scales fall off, he looks around, and

whereas before he just saw the armies of the earth on the

mountaintops, he saw the Angel armies that were in camping

around, that those who were with him were greater than those who

were against him. And all of a sudden, shaking

knees became steady. This is what the Spirit is

inviting us into. Would you have eyes to see on

your sheet I give you just a couple questions that we could

bring into our our daily prayers versus you know, it's good to

pray that situations change the prayers of righteous people

avail much and we have a crowd of righteous people in here.

You should be praying over these things.

Absolutely. We pray over the city.

We pray over circumstances, but I invite you to invite some

prayers of Lord. What are you doing down at the

the bottom. It's in bold on the first page.

Lord, what are you doing here? A really good prayer.

When I get home from work and I'm I'm stressed out from just

an exhausting day of work. You guys have been there and my

2 toddlers want to jump on me and it's like over stimulating

and all of a sudden I'm about to break.

As a a father, I could pause and go, oh Lord, what are you doing

here? Where are you in this midst?

Would you give me eyes to see? One of the beautiful things that

the Lord constantly tells me about my boys is I just hear the

Lord's invitation. Let the children come to me.

He had this, this grace to allow the children to be children to

to sleep and snore over on the side.

It's a beautiful thing. I love it, the sweet little Coos

and snores of a A2 year old. Let the children come to me.

I can cooperate with that. That gives me peace.

I can now I could participate with the the Lord allowing my

children to be children and I can receive them as they are.

Lord, what are you doing in me? Well, most of the time it's

crucifying my need for tidiness. I could tidy things up after

they go down to bed, but He starts to do this in me and I

can receive His movements. I could learn to participate

with them. I don't always do it well.

I don't always pause and ask and sometimes I break.

I love you, buddy. Those movements when I I feel

misunderstood and I want to justify myself.

I want to prove myself. I'm about to step back into my

old way and doing it on my own accord.

I could pause and say, Lord, what are you doing?

Speaking life into you? I'm encouraging you on who you

are, that the world might misrepresent you, but you have

been perfectly represented in Christ before the Father.

Would you receive that here and now?

Somebody cuts you off on the highway, right?

You want to bless them with a specific finger?

You pause, Lord, what are you doing right now?

These are things, these are ways that that all of a sudden now

I'm participating and cooperating with the will of

God. And now every moment becomes

opportunity to pray and receive from God above, from Christ who

is seated at the right hand of the Father as am I.

Ephesians 2 says You also are seated in heavenly places with

Christ Jesus. So my life is rooted there.

So then he could put his life into me here and now instead of,

you know, saluting the the guy who just cut me off.

I bless him, give him the right away and maybe I move over to

the slow lane and I no longer have to be the fast one.

Anyway, he starts to work Christ into me at a young guy, I'll

just call him Adam for the sake of the the story who would come

in and I was on office duty for the day and I sit down with him

and his world was just it felt like it was in shambles.

He had just wrecked his car the week before his his relationship

was up in in turmoil. His he was living back home with

his parents that was in turmoil. And after, after sitting and

hearing his story for a bit, I just asked him the question,

where do you think God might be in the midst of all this?

And at first he didn't have an answer.

And, and he had talked about a story how three years prior he

had actually died of a pretty serious drug overdose.

And he said in the story, he said, Siri saved my life.

I had to call out to Siri to get the, the ambulance there.

And then when they got there, I was dead on the spot and they

had to resuscitate me and bring me back.

And I, I brought the story back up and I so it, the thing that

we could rest assured on is that Christ is active in every moment

of our life. There's not a single moment of

our life that has not been touched by the life of Christ.

So why don't we just ask the Lord, Lord, where were you in

that situation? Because his great praise was

that Siri saved him. And all of a sudden he gets into

this prayer and he gets a revelation of it wasn't Siri

that saved me. This is the hand of the Lord

intervening on my behalf, leading me and guiding me.

He said it was actually after that that I had the wake up call

and realized that I needed to return to the faith that I left

when I was a child. The Lord is all over it, drawing

him in. Now the Lord didn't cause the

the incident, but man did He use the incident to bring him to the

place that he was. And once he saw Christ's

activity and presence there, as we went back into prayer for the

situations that he was in, he started to see the hand of God

already at work. And that was no longer him

trying to hold his life together.

It was actually Christ who was upholding in him.

We live and move and have our being.

And now he got to see the hand of God and just walk in step

with it. Again, the weight off the

shoulders. He left my office an hour and a

half after coming in with severe anxiety, talking 1,000,000 miles

a second. He left with peace, Shalom.

And we continued to walk over the next six months and see as

the Lord was just showing up for him and showing him, here's my

hand in your life. Will you bless my hand?

Will you learn to cooperate with the Spirit, to walk in step with

the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the

flesh. Paul says in Galatians 5.

But you will bear forth good fruit, Lovejoy, peace, patience,

kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.

Lord, what are you doing here? Lord, what are you doing in me

and how might I receive and participate in your presence and

activity? Originally, when I was sitting

down, I was I was building out. I want to do this movement with

you guys. I, I'd heard from the Lord what,

what I should deliver and I was going to do a Romans 8 study and

as a theologian, you sit down, you start writing and after one

evening I, I wake up the next morning, I open it up and

realize it was 13 pages long. I cannot do that to you guys.

But sometimes the, the beautiful thing.

Some people like to critique the message and I I I give you the

the movement that it is a paraphrase, but Eugene Peterson

was a pastor and a theologian, also a a language scholar.

And I think one moment while I readjust there we go.

Sometimes I open up the message and the way that Eugene has

unpacked the original language for us to put it in such

theological movements, but such relational and easily acceptable

terms is just brilliant. And the other night I opened up

to Romans 8 and I wrote it out of the message and just realized

I just want to close our service out and read this over you

realizing that this is this is Paul's language for us today.

And with all that we just talked about in mind, I hope you'll

start to see where some of these movements are really starting to

come out. And then as you go through

Paul's letters again, I pray this haunts you.

I pray you can't help but to see that Christ is giving us his

life through and through and through, and it's piercing us to

our core. Something grand and mysterious

is happening, if we would have eyes to see.

So if you have your sheets, this is on your sheet.

They will put it up on the screen.

It is a lot of reading, but if you would bear with me.

Romans 8 with the arrival of Jesus the Messiah, that fateful

dilemma is resolved, The dilemma of wrestling with ourselves,

trying to do it on their own accord.

Romans 6-7 number and eight, those who have entered into

Christ's being here for us no longer have to live under a

continuous low lying black cloud getting here.

See what Eugene is doing amazing movements crisis.

Emmanuel, God with us in his ascent to the right hand of the

Father. He is not now God not with us.

He is still God here with us now, the spirit of life or

sorry, we don't have to live under a continuous low lying

black cloud. A new power is in operation.

The spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has

magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a faded

lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when He sent His own Son.

He didn't deal with the problem as something remote or

unimportant in His son Jesus. He personally took on the human

condition. Enter the disordered mass of

struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all.

The law code re weakened as it always was by fractured human

nature could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin

instead of a deep healing of it. And now with the log code asked

for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of

redoubling down on our own efforts, simply embrace what the

Spirit is doing in US. Those who think they could do it

on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral

muscles, but never get around to exercising it in real life.

Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is

in them, living and breathing God.

Obsession with self in these matters as a dead end.

Attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious,

free life. Focusing on the self is the

opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in

self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than

God. That person ignores who God is

and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being

ignored. But if God himself has taken up

residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of

yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not

welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit

of Christ won't know what we're talking about.

But you who welcome him, in whom he dwells, even though you still

experience all the limitations of sin, even though you yourself

experience life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it,

that if the alive and present God who raised Jesus from the

dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he

did in Christ, bringing you alive to himself.

When God lives and breathes in you, and he does as surely as he

did in Jesus, you are delivered from that dead life with his

Spirit living in you. Your body will be as alive as

Christ. He's talking about the alive and

reigning Christ today, this resurrection or so.

Don't you see that you don't owe this old do it yourself life 1

Red sent. There's nothing in it for us,

nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it

a decent burial and get on with your new life.

God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and

places to go. He will lead you.

This resurrection life you received from God is not timid,

not a grave tending life. It is adventurously expectant,

greeting God with childlike. What's next, Papa?

God's Spirit touches our spirit, confirms who we really are.

We know who He is, we know who we are, Father and children, and

we know we are going to get what is coming to us.

An unbelievable inheritance, Christ himself.

We go through exactly what Christ goes through.

If we go through hard times with them, then we're certainly going

to go through the good times with them.

How magnificent, How magnificent.

God doesn't leave us to our own devices.

He places his very life to the depths of our being.

And now we get to learn what it looks like to walk in step with

that. And part of that looks like just

the awareness of going God, what are you doing today?

How might I participate with it? I'm going to continue on.

We're going to skip a portion. Romans 8 is just beautiful.

Started to talk about the Spirit and what the Spirit's doing in

you and groans of of prayer that when we don't know what to pray,

the Spirit prays on our behalf. Like it's there through and

through. But he closes out, at least in

this portion. He decided from the outset to

shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as

the life of His Son. The sun stands first in the line

of humanity He restored. We see the original intended

shape of our lives there in Him. After God made that decision of

what His children should be like, He followed it up by

calling people by name. After He called them by name, He

set them on a solid basis with Him.

And then after getting them established, He stayed with them

to the end, gloriously completing what He had begun.

This is gloriously good news, friends, and I'm here to tell

you from the Lord today that it's true.

It's available and present. So I have a quick invitation to

give to you is if you would close your eyes and just turn

your awareness to the Lord, you might say, Lord, you are here,

what are you doing right now? Gone

and you listen and you wait. Jesus says, my sheep hear my

voice, the voice of another. They will not follow.

Hearing God is the most natural thing for the human condition in

Christ. Lord, what are you doing?

You might take that circumstance that you found as a pain point

this week and you might hold it up before the Lord, and you just

say, Lord, what are you doing there?

What are you doing in this circumstance?

And Lord, what are you doing in me?

What are you working out in me? She helped me to see.

And how might I participate in what it is that you are at work

doing? I trust the Lord is making His

activity and presence known to many in here and I I trust that

He's going to continue to do so. As you go out into the world

from here, if you have not received Christ Jesus as your

Lord and Savior, then I could tell you confidently that I know

what he is doing in this moment. He is working to soften your

heart for reception of his life in your life.

And it's simple. Ask the the entire church

family, would you would you pray with us, with anybody who who is

not also taking this step and put your faith in Christ.

Join in with us today. This is a marking moment in your

life as you're learning what it looks like to participate in

Christ's movement on your behalf.

And would you guys out loud say, Lord Jesus, I receive you, You

are God, you are Lord, and I am not.

That's good news. I receive it.

Ioffer you my old life, my old ways, my old rhythms, habits.

Would you help me to put them to death and would you help me to

receive your new life that you're placing in me?

Well, Father, I thank you. I thank you for each and every

person in here today. God, I know that you are

intimately present and at work in their lives.

And Father, I pray that as they go forward, You would give them

eyes to see, ears to hear, a spirit of wisdom and revelation

to be able to pick up on what You are actively doing on the

landscape of their circumstances, their life

circumstances, in their relational capacities, God.

And they would be able to see and bless your hand at work and

participate in what it is that You are doing.

I bless them. If you would stand, I have a

benediction to speak over you. I'll start this way and then

we'll go into the the standard blessing.

But you are one in whom Christ dwells and delights.

You are living in the all powerful, unshakable Kingdom of

the triune God of grace. His Kingdom is not in need.

It's not in lack, and it's not in turmoil, and neither are you.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

May He make His face to shine upon you and He surprised you

with His grace, favour and mercies.

As you go into your week and walk this message out, Go and be

the church. God bless you guys.

Thank you.