Recaptured by the Kindness of King Jesus

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Speaking of family, I wanted to show you mine.

I've got a picture of my daughter and I.

I became a mom through the miracle of adoption the year I turned 50.

And so I was uh really scared and really foolish, thick as a brick and not in the Commodores kind of way.

I was just scared to death in my 20s and 30s of intimacy.

And so God in his kindness allowed me to become a mom late in life.

I brought Missy home the year I turned 50.

And it has been glorious.

I'm now 60, so I've had her home from Haiti for 10 years.

She is she is second to Jesus.

She is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me 10 years into motherhood, and I'm still kind of in the honeymoon season, and Missy is sweet, but she's 14.

And um, and she is not a morning person.

And so um we were we were driving to school.

This was right before Christmas.

I was driving to school, she goes to this great little Christian school in Nashville.

We're driving to school, and I am kind of slow as a parent, and so it takes me a while to figure out what I should have done.

It's usually after I do what I shouldn't have done.

Um, there's no daddy in our house.

So if you know a man between 60 and death who's loves Jesus and is employed, uh, that would be a preference.

But anyway, it's just me.

And so, you know, there's there's glory, but there's a lot of responsibility as a parents.

I'm driving her to school, and Missy just doesn't like to talk in the morning, and God has saddled her with a morning mama.

I love the morning.

I love to sing, I love to dance, I love Lauren Dagel, I love Shania.

I don't care.

I just love mornings, and I get on her last nerve in the morning on the way to school, and so I just saw you say, Amen.

That makes me so happy.

Got another perky mama.

So anyway, Missy and I are driving to a little Christian school.

And you know how you know, don't say it, don't say it again.

I'd already encouraged her to start eating her bagel because we only have 15 minutes from our house to school, and it was just crickets, and she's just sitting there.

A demon had invaded her face.

Because normally she's like perfect.

I mean, she's amazing, but just not mornings.

And so I was like, no, baby, you need to go ahead and eat your bagel.

I mean, we're just we're gonna be at at school in 12 minutes.

I'm looking at the clock, and you know how your your that little Holy Spirit in your head goes, shut up.

It's okay if she's hungry, that'll teach her the lesson, but I just I can't stop talking.

And so I was like, baby, you really, really need to eat that bagel.

Just crickets.

And so I wait, we wait one song, because I think if it's a Christian song, it'll soften her up.

Wait about five minutes, and then I look over, and this is the third time I've talked about the bagel.

I knew I shouldn't do it.

But I said, now, baby, we're almost to school.

You really need to eat some of your bagel, but now the cream cheese has gotten all gooey.

And so when you take a bite of your bagel, you know, you hate it when you can tell that's gonna come out of your mouth.

I was like, don't say it, don't say it.

I said, when you take a bite of your bagel, lean forward so the cream cheese doesn't get on your navy blue Christian shirt that I had ironed, as all good Southern mothers do.

And when I said that, I another demon entered her.

I could see by her face, she was mad.

And I thought, just let it sit, let it sit, let it sit, let it sit.

I let another half a Christian song go by.

I look over, and my precious miracle child gift from the Lord has a big wad of cream cheese on her, her, her navy blue Christian shirt, and I was like, oh, and it worried me for a second because I thought the bagel had attacked her, and then I noticed that that cream cheese was in a perfect circle.

Perfect circle.

And I'm slow on the uptake.

It took me a second to realize there's no way it could be that perfect unless she had purposefully undone the bagel and smashed it on her chest.

And when I realized that was indeed what had happened, I did what I betcha a few of y'all have done.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road, and I went, we do not do things like that.

We are harpers, that is so disrespectful.

And then I said a word that's not in the Bible.

And I was all Christian and all perky until that moment when I saw all that crites and my precious miracle and done it on purpose.

I couldn't believe it.

And that word flew out, and when it flew out, my child looked at me and with all sincerity said, Mom, Jesus doesn't like it when you say that word.

And because I'm a Christian, my response was, if Jesus was here, he'd say the word too.

So mad.

Every now and then I'm reminded, often through my daughter or through Spanks, that I need a course correction.

I need to be reminded, I need a little WWJD, I need a Christological course correction, because what would Jesus actually do?

If he had a kid who went all wild bagel rebellion, what would Jesus do?

If you brought your Bible, turn to Matthew 18.

We're gonna have uh a little Christological review here at first.

So I'm not gonna tell you anything you don't already know, but if you're like me, you need to be reminded of the character of our king so that you don't lose yours.

Matthew chapter 18, verse 15.

Matthew 18:15

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.

But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If he refuses to listen, tell it to the church.

And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector.

I came about my yelling in church, very honestly.

I grew up bapticostal.

And a lot of the youth pastors, my my mama is still alive, she's Baptist to the bone.

My daddy started as Nazarene, but he had a hard time with monogamy, and so he went Nazarene, eventually got to assembly of God because we embraced him, and so I'm much more costile now, but I've I've got kind of a lot of the denominations under me, and I went to a lot of different youth conferences, and it seemed that the really, really good communicators yelled a lot.

And so I just thought, if I ever get to talk about Jesus vocationally, I'm gonna be a yeller, and and I want to get the veins popping and everything going.

So I came by it.

This is in my spiritual DNA.

One time, Pastor Robert, I thought you had to swing your Bible too.

And I was a young Bible teacher, and I flung my Bible in a church and Genesis flew out, hit somebody in the front row.

It's a wonder I wasn't sued.

But anyway, um, this passage in Matthew 18, that's a Christological passage, it's about Jesus.

It's about what Jesus would do in the case of rebellion.

Uh, the first time, I don't know if it was the first time, but it's the most memorable time I heard this preached, heard a pastor exegete this passage.

I was at a youth conference.

I grew up in Orlando, Florida.

I live in Tennessee now, that's why I talk correctly.

But I was at a youth conference, I was 13 years old.

We were in a National Guard armory, probably about 2,000 kids.

This youth pastor gets up, he starts preaching on Matthew 18 about the character of Christ, the authority of Christ.

He's swinging his Bible around.

And he says, So if someone doesn't repent, let him be as a Gentile and a tax collector.

I remember sitting in the back of the armory thinking, I hope I'm never a Gentile and tax collector.

And then he started to detail what our sins might be.

And he didn't talk about bagels, but he talked about heavy petting.

I was 13 years old.

And he said, Any of you've been involved in heavy petting?

He said, We were gonna be treated as Gentiles and tax collectors.

And I'm sitting in the back of the armory and I thought, I'm not sure if I'm a heavy petter, but we um got this dog, sweetest dog.

Her name was Smokey.

She was half hound dog and half German Shepherd, and my mom only let us watch one television show a week.

And so I watched Ada's Enough, and sometimes I'd get so engrossed in Ada is enough, I would rub Smokey the wrong way.

I'd rub her fur back just because I wasn't paying attention.

And I thought maybe that's heavy petty.

And I thought I'm probably guilty of heavy petty.

And so when he started yelling and the veins started going, I ran to the front and I repented because I didn't want to be treated as a Gentile.

And I mean, I thought of God as this unibrowed librarian who would respond to us the way I responded to my precious daughter when I yelled at her and said words that weren't in the Bible.

That's what I used to think our God was like with rebellion.

I want to quiz y'all for just a minute.

Who wrote the gospel according to Matthew?

This is not a trick question.

Matthew, right?

Matthew wrote the gospel according to Matthew.

Do y'all remember what his vocation was before he became an evangelist?

He was a tax collector.

Jesus is speaking through Matthew.

Now I want you to think of all the encounters Jesus had with Gentiles in the Gospels.

The Gospels are those first four books at the beginning of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The word gospel comes from the Greek word ewangelian.

It means the good news.

They all are kind of a little different vantage point, but they're all telling the stories of Jesus' earthly life and ministry.

So Matthew is telling the good news about Jesus to a group of mostly Jewish people.

He was a die-hard Jewish guy.

A lot of Jewish flavor in his gospel.

It's segregated into five accounts to match up with Torah, with a Pentateuch.

So Matthew's formerly a tax collector.

You think about Jesus encounters through Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, Gentile.

Do y'all know what that means in the Greek?

Non-Jew.

All it means is somebody who's not a Jew.

How did Jesus engage with non-Jews and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

Every single time with compassion.

Every single time with compassion.

How did he engage with compassion?

You remember about a wee little man in a sycamore tree?

He invited himself to Zacchaeus.

And after having lunch together, Zacchaeus was so undone, so transformed by the encounter.

He didn't have to study systematic theology to repent.

He just said, I want to be closer to you, Jesus.

Turn my life upside down, Jesus.

It was stunning to me when I began to study this passage.

A few years ago, I went back to school.

I thought it'd be cool if I was in school when Missy was in school, so I went back to Summery for a doctorate.

And I had a professor who turned to this passage of all passages to talk about the compassion of Christ.

And I thought I always thought that passage was about church discipline.

I always thought it was about yelling and veins popping and an angry God.

Do you think possibly Jesus is saying, get your arms a little wider around people who can't repent quite and treat them like Gentiles and tax collectors?

Right after he says that, we've got the parable of the unforgiving servant.

You've got this other contrast where Jesus compares the audacious forgiveness of Father God with our tendency as image bears to be stingy with forgiveness.

We kind of treat forgiveness sometimes like carbs and we're on keto.

We're stingy.

We want to give forgiveness to those who deserve it.

And so Jesus tells a story and he says, our creator, redeemer, isn't like that, y'all.

God's love for us is forgiveness.

It's so much bigger.

And it's not just a New Testament thing.

We tend to think of Jesus as the kind facet of God, the Son of God, and God the Father as kind of a divine policeman with a unibrow who's mad.

That's not biblically defensible.

Our God has always been a good God.

He's always been for us.

We just spend so much more time on social media than we do in Scripture that a lot of times we don't get the context of Scripture.

But if you go into the Old Testament, even there you see that our Savior is compassionate, holy, perfectly holy.

But he condescends to be compassionate, not to yell at his kids.

He's not a God who whacks us over the head with a 50-pound Bible.

Turn backwards if you brought the word with you.

I know this is Gateway, so most of y'all have it memorized.

But if you don't, go to Deuteronomy chapter 22, one of my favorite passages in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 22, 28.

Deuteronomy 22 · chapter mention

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father, the young woman, fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has violated her.

I mean, doesn't that sound really Jerry Springer?

Because if you read between the lines, it's saying if a woman is abused by a man, then he puts a ring on it and she has to marry her abuser.

And you're like, ooh, gross.

That's one of those Old Testament passages needs to stay in the Old Testament.

Oh my heavens, y'all.

We miss out on the love of God because we want everything fast.

We want instacart spirituality.

If you spend time soaking in this love letter we call the Bible, you will find over and over and over and over again our God is good and He's for us.

He's a good God.

He's holy and He's kind.

Those are not opposite ends of the continuum.

He is so holy and perfectly compassionate.

Deuteronomy 22 takes place right after God's people have been rescued.

Remember who rescued them out of captivity?

Moses or Charlton Heston.

And so he brings them into the promised land, and there God says, we've got new parameters.

You've been under the first iteration of Sharia law.

When they were in Egypt, the law said that any woman, any woman over the age of 12 who's not married or engaged to be married, can be violated by any man.

And guess what the consequence was for the violator?

Nothing.

Not a traffic ticket, not a slap on the wrist.

But the woman who's been violated is considered forever damaged, dirty, and unmarryable.

So God effectively vaults over the fence of culture and says, I'm not willing for my daughters to be abused anymore.

This is 3,500 years before women march for the right to vote.

Let me tell you how kind our God is.

So it has to be in her daddy's name.

He's saying, you're going to set her up because you took everything from her.

Then you're going to give her a last name.

You're going to give her respectability.

And then, big boy, if you decide to divorce her and not provide for her and not take care of her, you get stoned by the community.

We read this at first glance and we think of God as an angry God, like I was in the car with Missy.

It's not at all that way, y'all.

He has always been a kind God.

From the very beginning, he's been for us.

We are first to him.

He loves us.

We matter to him.

He has always been redeeming and restoring our inherent dignity as his sons and daughters.

He's always been mitigating evil.

Jump to the right, one more page to Deuteronomy 25.

We don't talk about this usually in church, but man, I love this passage too.

If there is a dispute between men and they come into court, the judges decide between them, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty, that if the guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence with the number of stripes in proportion to his offense.

Are y'all encouraged yet?

Forty stripes may be given him, but no more, lest if one should go on to beat him with more stripes than these, your brother will be degraded in your sight.

You go, ooh, gross, Lisa.

That's another hard passage.

I'm not gonna Instagram that.

Y'all consider the culture.

Again, they've just been rescued from Egypt.

In Egypt, it was legal to beat someone 200 times.

You could beat them 200 times and you could cause five open wounds.

God says, no.

No, it was never my will that y'all abuse each other.

So I'm gonna begin to mitigate the evil that y'all are causing to each other because I love you.

And if you love me, I want you to love each other.

So here's the deal: you can't abuse each other anymore.

If you go back to Exodus, he's already set up an emancipation program so that slaves can be free.

He says, you can't cause death anymore by beating.

This is actually why Jesus was beaten by the Romans 39 times, because they knew this law.

And then he introduces, we skip over this, but this is extraordinary.

He says, you can't degrade your brother.

He introduces integrity.

He says, you actually all have inherent value.

We didn't have inherent value as human beings until God entered the story, until we have this love letter called the Bible.

Do you know murder was not considered a negative cultural ethic until we had to rock?

You wouldn't murder somebody in your clan, but if some guy dished your wife across the valley, you could murder him.

Didn't matter then.

God says, no, I love you, and I want you to love each other.

We don't have an angry, unibrowed God in the Old Testament and Jesus with hair extensions in the New Testament.

That's not who he is.

We have a perfect Trinitarian God who has always been for us.

What would Jesus do?

He would love us.

He would love us holy, calls us to repentance, but he is a loving God.

He doesn't want to kick us to the curb.

Some of y'all have been laboring at the beginning of the year under the idea that you have to clean yourselves up first.

You came to first because God has been wooing you.

You think I just got to get it all together.

Some of y'all still smell like smoke.

And you sprayed yourself in Febreze in the car because you think I can't be walking up in the gateway smelling like smoke.

That's not what Jesus is going to focus on.

He's not going to focus on your bagel.

Jesus is going to say, I know you're not a mourning person.

How can I love you?

How can I help you?

He's such a good God.

One of my favorite pretend theological boyfriends.

His name is Helmut Telica.

And he says this unless a theology works at the margins of life, it's not worth anything, even if it makes sense, at the easy center.

In other words, our God isn't just good when our life is good.

When there's no wars and rumors of wars, when our skin is tight and our metabolisms are high.

That's not the only time God is good.

Our God has always been good.

And he will always be working for our good.

He's a good God.

He's a holy God, perfectly holy, but He's for us.

I'm telling you, when you talk about first things first, we've got to start at theodicy.

We've got to start at we have a good God who's for us.

He sees you, he loves you, he's for you.

He is not mad at you.

Being mad at you and being holy are not the same thing.

In his holiness, he chooses to be kind.

Speaking of Of messy middles.

I came to know Jesus as my Savior when I was five years old.

My dad had left us for another family, and I was devastated.

Thought it was at least partly my fault, but if only I'd used my inside voice more, maybe dad wouldn't have left.

And uh after my dad left, some men came and went from our family, and there was a lot of sexual molestation in my story.

And so I knew I was dirty.

I didn't have to have a pastor tell me that I was dirty.

I felt dirty and damaged from my earliest memory.

So it was very, very natural for me as a kid when mom moved us to a new church after the divorce.

Very natural for me to ask God to make me clean, to beg God to make me clean.

That was natural for me.

What was not natural for me was to believe that Jesus was for me.

I knew it was God.

I didn't doubt in his divinity.

I just thought he was ashamed of me.

I didn't think he liked me very much.

I'm 60.

Which means I get discounts at fast food restaurants.

I can wear pants with zippers anytime I want to.

But I've also learned at this point of my walk with Jesus that I need course corrections often because I get crooked in my Christology really, really quickly.

I've been a believer for 55 years, spent eight years in seminary, and I still have to unlearn bad theology.

I still have to have Holy Spirit course correct my Christology.

Every year at this time of year, I'm like, Jesus, what would you do?

What would you do?

Remind me of who you are and who you've called me to be in light of that.

Last passage, Mark 15.

Took me a while to love this passage.

And it's become a passage that I would tattoo.

I've got enough skin now to tattoo.

I'm just afraid it would morph into something I didn't intend it to be.

Mark chapter 15, verse 33.

Mark 15:33

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, Lima, Sabacthanai, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And some of the bystanders hearing it said, Behold, he is calling Elijah.

And someone ran and filled the sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come down to take him.

And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, Truly, this man, this man is the son of God.

Truly, this man.

Do you know the centurion is the very first person who called Jesus the Son of God?

Do you know the disciples spent three years hanging out with Jesus, missed it, believed in him as the Christ, as the Messiah, were still really confused about his kingship.

Do you remember there just a few days before the cross?

Remember how James and John argued about who could sit at his right and who could sit at his left?

Because they still thought King Jesus would usher in some kind of hierarchical reign.

And they wanted to curry favor with King Jesus.

So they said, let us sit at your right and at your left.

You might as well ask the Messiah to use his omniscience to pick your Powerball numbers for you.

How audacious to ask Jesus.

If you could sit in his right and his left, they still didn't get it.

Then you've got a centurion.

He's Roman, he's not Jewish.

And the word centurion means he started as an enlisted man.

So he didn't go to Preston Wood High School.

He didn't go to Highland Park.

He went to a big old state school.

Didn't go to college.

Went straight into the military.

A centurion was an enlisted man who worked so hard, who had so much guts and gumption that they rose through the ranks and they eventually became a military officer.

It's a big deal.

So he's a military officer there, and all he's doing is supervising the crucifixion.

He's only there to make sure that they cross every T and dot every I.

During that period of history, Roman coinage had an imprint on the coins, and the coins said, Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus.

That means Roman citizens, even when they jingled a change in their pocket, only thought of the reigning Caesar as divine.

So the only person this Roman military officer would call divine would be Caesar himself.

And all he's doing is watching Jesus die.

He didn't see him walk on water, he didn't see him heal a leper, he didn't see him hang out with the disciples.

All he watches is Jesus hang on a cross and die.

That's all he sees is Jesus suffer.

That's all he sees.

And after he watches Jesus hang on the cross, he says, that right there is king of all kings.

That right there is a son of God.

It was heresy for him to say that as a Roman military ruler.

But he was so undone by a king who would lay down his life so that the people under his authority could have life.

His eyes were opened to the deity of Jesus.

He is perfectly kind.

And it's that perfect compassion that makes him the only true king.

The only king willing to lay down his life, to take his royal scepter and lay it down and pick up a wet towel and wash our feet, knowing that we're going to betray him.

Knowing that we're going to miss it.

Knowing that no matter how often we come to church and worship, sometimes we're going to miss who Jesus is and what he does.

When I first brought Missy home from Haiti, my friends who are in adoption circles said, Lisa, she's really going to struggle with consistency.

She's been beaten while she was in Haiti.

She didn't have a mom and a dad who loved her well.

And so you can't just tell her you love her.

You just got to be consistent.

That's what's going to be safe for her.

So they said you need to come up with some things that you just do over and over and over again so that she knows you are not going to change.

Your love for her is consistent.

So the first thing I started doing first day I had her home from Haiti, April 14th, 2014.

I started rubbing her feet with lotion because she didn't wear shoes in Haiti.

So she had just these beautiful little brown four-year-old feet, and they were just all cracked.

So I'd rub her feet with lotion and I'd say, baby, outre brav.

You're very brave.

Outre belle.

You're very beautiful.

Outre intelligent.

You're so smart.

And I'd say that over and over and over again as I rubbed her feet.

Outre brav.

Baby, you're so brave.

I can't believe what you endured in Haiti.

You're so hungry.

And you were so sick.

And a lot of people would have given up.

I'm so proud of you.

You're so gray.

Honey, you were so beautiful.

Her teeth were mostly black.

She'd been so malnourished.

Missing a lot of her hair.

She had um all kinds of medical issues when I started the adoption process.

Every time I went to Haiti, I would get scabies.

Um, that's full body lice.

The first time um I went to Haiti to be with her, I came back to the States and spoke at a conference in Oregon right after that.

And I was so preoccupied with Missy, I couldn't even think.

And at the end of this three-day conference, you know how you'll have those balloons in your head?

And I'm I'm teaching, and I thought, I wonder why all these women are itching.

It took me uh a minute to realize I'd given everybody full body lice from Haiti.

But I was like, you know, we can go to Walgreens and get cream to put on it.

It's good for us to be reminded of how some people live.

But I was like, baby, you're so beautiful.

Nobody ever told Missy, she was beautiful.

You're so intelligent.

At the orphanage, they told me she'd never read or never write.

She's in the seventh grade.

Have y'all done seventh grade math recently?

Utre brave, outre, belle, utre, intelligent.

The first week she couldn't even look at me.

Second week she'd kind of glance at me and she'd look away.

Third week she'd look for a second and still look away, couldn't quite make eye contact.

After a month of saying, outre belle.

Outre prof.

Outre intelligence.

Moi, Renman, ooh, mama loves you.

She called me Mama Blanc, white mama.

Mama loves you, and Jesse Jesus loves you more.

He loves you so much more.

After a month of saying that, I will never forget it.

Almost exactly 30 days in, Missy turned and looked at me.

We were lying parallel in her little twin bed.

And she went, Mama?

Love Missy?

It was a form of a question.

And then I said, Oh baby, I love you more than I can than I can articulate.

I I don't know how to tell you how much I love you.

And then she said it in the form of a declaration.

Mama love missy.

And then she took all ten toes.

She has the cutest toes you have ever seen in your life.

These perfect little toes.

And I grew what I call the valley of affection right here just for her.

And so I have this little fold in my belly.

I actually got it from Chick-fil-A.

I thought, since it's a Christian company, I thought it wouldn't have any calories because it was Christian, so I made all those waffle fronts, and I got this little valley right here.

And Missy just went, she just stuck all ten toes in that crease.

And then she just sighed, Mama, love Missy.

Our Jesus is kind, perfectly kind, perfectly compassionate.

You can't outrun his love.

His love for you is higher and wider and deeper than you can wrap your mind around.

He loves you, he sees you, you matter to him, you are precious to him.

He's not mad at you.

He's a kind Savior.

Perfectly kind.

And he's perfectly king.

Absolutely authoritative.

And in that perfect kingship, he set his favor on us.

My hope for all of us this year is that we wouldn't just lean into Jesus, but we would lean so fully through through coming to church, through worship, through marinating in this love letter.

It's not a rule book, y'all.

It's a love story.

That we'd marinate it, that we'd see things we haven't seen before.

And we would move so much further into his embrace that through Holy Spirit we would miraculously be able to take our proverbial human toes and stick them right into the miraculous valley of his affection and his authority.

He's not a faraway God, he's transcendent, perfectly holy, but he condescends to be close to us.

He's kind and he's king.

Do you know both of those things tonight?

Do you know his kindness?

Even when you're in rebellion, do you trust his embrace?

Do you believe that he is the only true God?

He's not a way to be reconciled with God the Father.

He's the only way.

The only king, the king of all kings.

I'm gonna ask y'all to stand up, and I know I don't have any authority in this house.

I'm so beyond honored to get to be with y'all.

Just can't quite believe it.

And so forgive me for taking a liberty that I have not earned.

But when we were praying about an hour ago, just praying that God would have his way tonight.

I know most of you know Jesus.

But I sensed in my spirit that some of y'all are laboring under that lie, labored under for so long.

And you think you've got to get yourself cleaner.

And you think that he kind of lowered the bar to let you in.

That there are other kids that he's lavishing with grace and favor because you're just such a messy one.

That's not biblically defensible, y'all.

That's not who he is.

All of us get to be lavished by that.

If you need, if you need to be held by Jesus, there's distance in your relationship with God.

Maybe because of something you did or something that was done to you.

I want to ask you to just come to the altar tonight.

Um, all the campuses, you've got your campus pastors are going to shepherd this moment, but I want to just open the altar tonight.

Some of y'all came here because you didn't know how to get out of the invitation.

It was your mother-in-law.

And you just didn't know how to get out of it.

And God's been wooing you for a while, and you were able to gut through Christmas services, but now you're face to face with a kind king who loves you.

If you want to encounter Jesus, can I ask you to just come forward?

How do you stand up?

This isn't gonna be hard if you're standing next to somebody and you know that they really need more intimacy in their relationship with Jesus, they need more forgiveness, they need more hope, they need a bigger knot at the end of their rope.

Would you just say, I'd love to come forward with you to encounter Jesus?

If you need more of his kindness, if you need more of his authority, maybe the authorities in your life have not been kind, and you've been running scared, wondering how in the world you can engage with a holy God.

Would you just come forward?

He loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he loves you.

Pastor Matthew is gonna shepherd the rest of this moment.

And so I'm gonna turn it over to Pastor Matthew.

But um, and I'm out of time, I apologize, I already confessed that I was long-winded, concise, has never been my gift.

Um, but y'all, let's not rush so fast to Uncle Julio's that we miss Jesus.

He loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he loves you.

Do not settle for religion when you can have an intimate relationship with Jesus.

Do you have the same joy you had when you were first in Christ?

Do you have the same hope you had when you were first in Christ?

Do you have a desire for God's word that you used to have after last year's conference?

If you need to encounter Jesus, will y'all come forward tonight?

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.