When Things Happen!

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

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

Such an honor to be with you today and thank God for such a great, wonderful leader that you have here, Pastor Robert.

Thank you for having me here.

You and your lovely wife.

It's great to be with you guys.

What a blessing with your team and everyone and everyone that's here tonight and all that you guys do here and what your ministry is all about is winning souls, you know, more than anything at the end of the day.

And we thank God for that because really that's the number one thing that we're called for, you know, when God calls us.

You know, it's not about us when God calls us.

Oh, yes, some of y'all missed that.

You're still thinking it's about you, but okay.

God's got a word for you tonight.

Let us pray.

Father, we love you, honor you, praise you.

Father, we give you glory.

Do what only you can do.

You are everything that we need in this time, this season.

No matter what the season may be, Father, you have all the answers.

We thank you for the answers that you have for us.

We thank you for the body of Christ.

We thank you for the movement.

We thank you that you have called in this time, this urgency, that the word of God be speak, we will speak it boldly today for the kingdom.

That lives may be changed, people may come back, people may repent and ask God to forgive them.

May we turn from our wicked ways, Father, may you use us to glorify your kingdom and represent your son Jesus for all that he has done for us.

He has already paid the price for us.

Father, we thank you.

We give you honor, glory.

We send this petition up to you, and we ask that you seal it today.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen and amen.

Well, glory to God.

See, I always think about it, I wasn't always like this, you know.

You can laugh, it's all right.

You know, you're not gonna hurt my feelings.

You know, God has changed me, but I wasn't always like this.

See, I was a liar, cheater, womanizer, I was an alcoholic, I was a drug addict, I was a sinner, I was privileged, rich, lived behind community gates, had it all, but I was saved by grace.

See, I need to share a little bit of my story because it is the grace of God that can only save a man.

A man can't save himself.

It doesn't matter how much you have and what you achieve and what you look like, you cannot save yourself.

Jesus is the only one that can save you.

You can keep trying and keep trying to accumulate more.

And if I had a little bit more of this, I had a little bit more of this, my life would be better.

No, baby, if you had a little bit more of Jesus, your life would be better.

That's the understanding that we need to come to.

And that was the understanding for me.

I had to come to that revelation.

You don't get the revelation until you pick up the book.

You know, the Bible talks that my people perished because of lack of knowledge.

The reason I was perishing is because I had every earthly thing, but I had no kingdom things.

I had everything that a man can want to achieve from an earthly standpoint, but I was broken on the inside.

You know, what I look like on the outside doesn't make me well, it just makes me what I look like on the inside.

You know, outside.

But what I look like on the inside is totally different, totally separate from who I am on the outside.

And I think the broken pieces started in my life early when, you know, my father was a raging alcoholic, and he came home for the last time, pulled out a shotgun when I was 14 years old, said he was gonna kill the whole family.

Me and my brothers went into action.

Had it not been for my mother getting us out of that house, we would have killed him that night.

See, and I always say, my pain led me to my greatness, but my greatness would eventually lead me to my destructive behavior.

See, because pain is real, brokenness is real.

See, we living in a time where lawlessness brings about a broken generation of people.

And it just continued to go on until one comes to the place of receiving Christ for his life and getting well.

See, this was an overnight miracle that happened in my life, the man I am today.

It was a process.

See, everybody believes it's an overnight miracle.

Jesus just comes, poof, and everything changes.

Well, that's not the way it happens.

It's a process.

It's a process before I ever got to this place where I'm at today.

And it had nothing to do with Major League Baseball.

Of course, I played Major League Baseball for 17 years and achieved all these great things.

Of course, uh beat up on the Astros and the Texas Rangers, you know.

What can I say?

You know, the greatest pitcher I ever had to face, my greatest challenge was facing Nolan Ryan.

So, so I got a chance to hit a home run off of him in the playoffs.

I carry that around forever.

I don't know how many times he struck me out, but I sure got a chance to hit one off of it.

But baseball was very good to me from a standpoint of putting on a uniform on and just being a baseball player.

The uniform doesn't make you a man.

Somebody needs to know that today.

That does not make you a man.

It made me a baseball player.

I didn't become a man until I met Jesus.

That's when I became a man when I met Jesus.

And it wasn't overnight, like I said before.

You know, my mother was praying for me when I was a heathen, rich, famous.

She was dying at the age of 55 from terminal breast cancer.

And after she passed away, my sister finds a journal under her bed, and there she is praying to God, save him, knock him off his throne.

Her prayers came to pass after she passed away.

She didn't get to see it in the natural, but she's watching in the supernatural.

So for some of you mothers out there that's praying, keep praying.

It's not up to you to see it in the natural.

God's got it.

God heard my mother's prayers.

The prayers that my mother was praying, she wasn't concerned about me being famous, rich, and achieving all these baseball things.

She was like, God, save him.

And she told me one night I prayed for her, and she said, You could pray.

She said, God just spoke to me.

She said, God said, You're gonna go through it, but he's gonna get it out of you.

I said, Mom, don't tell me that.

I need another drink, you know.

But that's just where I was at at the time.

But she was praying, and the reality is her prayers have come to pass.

What she was praying about has come to pass in my life, and I would come go on to be an evangelist.

God will save me, and I would come on to be an evangelist and travel the nation 250 times preaching the gospel.

And I'm not even qualified.

What's a good thing about that?

All of you need to understand that none of us is qualified.

See, because when God called me a little over 14, 15 years ago to preach the gospel, I said, You got the wrong guy.

He said, No, I got the right guy.

I said, I'm not qualified.

He says, No one is qualified, I qualify the call.

So eventually God will qualify the call that's in you that He's created in you.

But we must pay attention to the details of who God is.

We sing about Him.

What a wonderful name it is.

The name of Jesus.

Well, who is Jesus?

Who is Jesus to you?

Jesus is a man that hung on the cross at Calvary.

And when he hung on that cross, he said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Then he says, Father, why have you forsaken me?

But his last words on that cross was, It is finished.

He went to the tomb early Sunday morning.

He got up from the tomb.

When he got up, he was resurrected.

See, when you die from the flesh of you, you get to be resurrected just like Christ.

Galatians 2 20 talks about it.

I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, it is Christ who lives in me.

It is Christ who rules and reigns over your life.

That's when you start to understand who you are in Christ, not you in the natural, but who are you in Christ?

My message tonight was pretty clear when I was thinking about it, but I needed to share the first part of who I was because I wasn't always this person.

You know, I was rich, famous, and lived behind community gates, and you know, the devil had deceived me, made me believe I had it going on.

Just like he does to most people.

See, Jesus said it in John 10, 10.

Jesus said the thief does not come except to steal, kill, and destroy.

He says, I have come that they may have life and may have it more abundantly.

Abundant life is not stuff, abundant life is not success.

It's peace, joy, wisdom, knowledge, power.

It's far greater than you can ever imagine.

That has nothing to do with stuff.

See, but he was telling us about the enemy, how he deceives us and he makes us believe that we have it all together.

He tells us in that text, he comes to steal, kill, and destroy.

So just understand this about the devil.

While you're sleeping, he's doing push-ups.

Seeing who he will deceive and make believe that they got it going on.

Because we look at celebrities and we think, well, they have it all together.

Yeah, then why can't they stay married?

Why why why most of them are end up on drugs and OD and dying because they don't like themselves.

You know, they have everything from an earthly standpoint, but they have nothing from a kingdom standpoint.

And I was that same person.

I had everything from an earthly standpoint, but I had nothing from a kingdom standpoint.

See, the kingdom is far greater than this earth we live here because this is not home, this is just a pass-through.

See, Matthew 6 33 says, but seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, then all these things will be added into you.

It says, seek after the kingdom.

Then all these things will be added into you.

All these things that are lacking inside of us come strictly out of this book here.

I don't know what took me so long to pick it up, Pastor.

Like most people, we're so foolish.

We're believing in our own self, we won't believe in the word of God.

We'll believe in what the news is telling us, somebody else is telling us, but we will not believe in the word of God.

It's when when do we come to that place of believing in the word of God?

My title today was like when things happen.

When things happen, things will happen.

A pandemic, marital problems, sickness, kids problems, job loss, when things happen.

Who are you trusting?

Who are you trusting when things happen?

Like I said, I didn't get like this overnight.

You gotta remember, God sat me for seven years to be disciple.

Some of you need to be disciple.

Some of you need to understand the discipleship of what you get from the church, then you can step into the purpose why God created you and the plan that He has for you.

But if you never get disciple, you can never step in to where God wants to use you.

When things happen, when facing storms, when the storms of life and things happen, who are you trusting?

Proverbs 3, 5 and 6 says, Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

It says, lean not on your own understanding.

It says, in all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He shall direct you.

What?

He's got it already planned out.

He's already got it mapped out for you.

All you got to do is be persistent and surrender yourself to God.

If you're persistent to go after God and surrender yourself to God, God's got something that He wants to give you that you cannot even imagine.

See, one thing I do know the Holy Spirit dwells in me because I don't preach, the Holy Spirit preach.

So I just allow him to preach the word of God because he is the one that taught me the Bible.

When God called me 15 years ago to preach, he says the Holy Spirit is going to ascend upon you, saturate yourself with him, and he's gonna teach you the Bible supernaturally.

See, so many of us won't listen to the Holy Spirit, we'll listen to our own thoughts.

You better listen.

The Holy Spirit is God Himself, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the Trinity, the three and one.

The Holy Spirit is a bad dude.

He will teach you some things that you could never imagine because he's God, he's supernatural.

He will teach you scriptures, he will teach you to understand the Bible.

All you gotta do is turn off the cell phone and turn off the television, turn off the social media and dive into the word of God.

The Holy Spirit is gonna teach you, even when things happen, even when things happen, financial problems, sickness, marital problem, kids, boy.

If you have some kids now, I understand what my mother was praying for.

Job loss, whatever it may be.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

It means you gotta trust in the Lord with all your heart.

And then you have to lean not on your own understanding.

The reason I was falling short because I kept leaning on my understanding.

I had enough money, I had enough stuff.

I went to every doctor, went to every lawyer, went to every situation.

It still didn't make me well, Pastor.

Wasn't until I surrendered myself to Jesus when I came to the cross and finally surrendered myself to Jesus.

Who is Jesus?

He's the Alpha, the Mega, the beginning, the end.

He's the King of Kings, He's the Lord of Lords.

He was wounded for your transgression.

He was bruised for your iniquity.

By his stripes, by his stripes, you get to be healed.

Don't you understand that?

You cannot heal yourself.

You get to be healed because of his strife, because of everything that he has already done for us.

Jesus has already paid the price for us at the cross of Calvary.

Everything that could everything that kills us, Jesus already killed it.

He's already killed it.

Jesus should be your hero.

Not a man.

Jesus got up.

He conquered death.

There's no other man that will ever conquer death.

He is the only one.

So that's who we should be worshiping.

That's who we should be thanking.

Not all this other stuff.

We get consumed with all this stuff, other stuff, and worried about this other stuff.

And the doctors and the television and the news, they're trying to tell us how to live and they don't even know how to live.

Better pick up this book.

It's been here forever.

If you really want to learn how to live as a Christian and have the victory, see, I'm not a victim of what happened to me.

See, most people sit around and say they're victims.

I'm not a victim.

I'm an overcomer because of the blood of the Lamb.

I'm not a victim.

You understand?

You get to be an overcomer.

Don't let a society put you in fear and cramp or you know, make you cramp up and like you can't move.

You know, Christians, we're not supposed to be in fear.

We're supposed to learn to walk in faith.

What is faith?

Faith is the substance of things, hold for the evidence of things not seen.

See, God is working out things behind the scene.

Because what is God?

He doesn't have to work it out in front of you, he works it out behind the scenes because he is the miracle maker.

We sing about him, but do we know he's the miracle maker?

Hallelujah.

See, I like I said before, God's got a great sense of humor.

God used two women in my life to straighten me out.

My mama and my wife.

He knew I was a big womanizer, so I see, I guess he said, I'm gonna use these women to straighten you out.

So he would eventually use my wife, who's my wife today for 15 years, Tracy.

She's got 21 years in recovery.

21 years ago, she was pulling me out of dope houses.

I was shooting dope, smoking crack.

I was$3 million in debt.

And she's banging on doors, pulling me out, and saying, God's got a plan for you.

Do it again.

God's got a plan for you.

I says, Why don't you and that God just leave me here and let me die?

She said, You're just not that lucky.

And today we've been blessed and married, and God gave us a ministry, not because anything great about me.

It's because he used that woman to straighten me out to find the cross.

She led me back to church.

And I was wondering why she's always so happy and so free, because she loved Jesus.

She was getting up every morning, she's still to this day, she gets up every morning at 5:30 to study to be with God.

I was like, God, I ain't getting up at 5:30.

But I was like, we go to church and she'd be so happy.

I come downstairs, she'd be like, Hi hon.

I was like, well, who she been down here with?

Little did I know, she was down there with Jesus.

She had been down there studying the word of God, and the joy of the Lord was her strength, and she was always joyful because she was in the word of God.

And I was like, God, why are you always talking to her?

He was like, Well, because she spends time with me, she's in the word, she's studying.

He says, When are you gonna spend time?

And that's when I turned off the television and cell phone and I saturated myself in the word, and I got a relationship with God myself.

So so many of us want this relationship with God, but we won't do the work that we need to do to get to where we need to get.

Well, I'm here to help you today and tell you and encourage you.

God's not mad at you, and God does not need you, but he will use you.

If you allow yourself to be available for him, if you can surrender yourself daily to him.

See, my daily worship to God is getting up, even when things are happening.

I get up anyway, I spring out of that bed, and the first thing I do is I put on worship music.

It's because I love Jesus.

Nothing comes before my worship with Jesus.

There was a time it was always about me and me and poor me, poor me, poor, poor, poor me.

You know, we're living in a society that's trying to make us, you know, be consumed with everything else somebody else is saying instead of this.

Heaven and earth are gonna pass away, but not my word.

I'm gonna pass away, you're gonna pass away, but this word is not going anywhere.

And it's here for us to pick it up and read it, and it's free.

Everything else is gonna cost you, but this is free here.

And now, if we can dial ourselves into it and eat the word of God, then we'll know who we are in Christ because the Bible is the blueprint of who you are.

It's been waiting for you.

It was waiting for me.

All I had to do is pick it up and figure out who I was in Christ, not what I did from an earthly standpoint.

All that is meaningless.

It doesn't matter.

You go to the book of Ecclesiastes, you go to King Solomon.

He was the richest, wisest man in the land of Jerusalem.

He writes the books of Proverbs of Wisdom and Knowledge, and then he goes back and writes the book of Ecclesiastes, and you can imagine he says, it is meaningless under the sun without God.

He's telling you he had all this stuff, but it is meaningless under the sun without God.

He's telling you that he's gonna pass away, you're gonna you're gonna pass away, and then guess what?

Another man is gonna come along and take what you have built.

So you might as well enjoy yourself with God while you got a chance.

Make it fun, because God is fun.

You know, when you get to know him, get close to him, you even when things do happen, even when you're facing the storms of life, the storms of life are real.

Either you're in a storm or storm's coming on coming coming at you, or you're coming out of a storm.

You still gotta go and pass the test through the storm.

Because Jesus is the deliverer of all things.

Your sickness, your anxiety, your frustration, whatever it may be, your fears, your doubts, everything that has bothered us, Jesus has already done it at the cross on Calvary for you.

You must trust and know God did not create the storms of life.

He allows them to happen, but he didn't create them.

People were like, Well, God is always why did God do this?

See, if God really wanted to stop all of us, all he had to do is put a famine on the land.

None of us could do nothing.

Maybe the pandemic was a wake-up call for everybody to realize who am I following?

Who am I trusting?

Who am I believing?

What am I believing?

You know, we gotta you gotta ask yourself, you gotta ask yourself what are you believing in the most difficult times that we are living in now?

If you're a Christian and you love Jesus, This is the greatest time.

You should be winning.

Because you know what?

Folks are hurting.

And we need to be directing them to the cross.

We need to show them where the cross is.

We need to show them where the victory is at.

The victory doesn't lie in us, the victory lies in the cross.

And if we can understand that and become everything that God has created us to be, we get to fulfill the promises and become the descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Now you get to eat from a land that you don't even know about because you walk with God.

If we sit here and say, well, I coulda, shoulda, that's what they want me to say about my baseball career, Pastor.

I coulda, shoulda.

No, I don't want to say that.

That's over, dead and gone.

That guy no longer lives.

2 Corinthians 5, 17.

Therefore, if anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation.

Old things have passed away.

Behold, all things have become new.

See, I can't get to the new if I'm still holding on to the old.

See, God got something new for me every day.

If you spring up, God's got something new for you every day.

If you're here tonight, God's got something new for you every day.

But you have to challenge yourself to believe that God has something new.

You got to operate in a different capacity.

You can't operate in your own village.

You have to operate in the supernatural spirit of God.

When you operate in the supernatural spirit of God, you will be able to handle anything that comes your way.

See, anything that comes my way, I can handle.

See, getting in the pulpit was one thing I didn't want to do, Pastor Robert.

Trust me, that's the last thing I wanted to do because you know when God called me, He said, make sure you don't play when you get in this pulpit.

Because you're talking to people, and if you're playing, not living according to my biblical principles, you're gonna hurt a lot of people.

And I had already hurt a lot of people.

You know, my father was this raging alcoholic, and he rejected me and beat me, and just he was a crazy man on top of it.

And he would come home crazy.

And I said I wouldn't grow up to be like him, and guess what?

I grew up being just like him because of what I saw.

And it wasn't until I met Jesus that my life would change forever.

And I kept him out of my life and my career because I hated him.

And I remember one day I was going to preach at a man's conference, and God says, How dare you not forgive him and I forgave you.

He said, Who are you to not forgive him?

He said, Go down to the hospital and ask him for forgiving that you will forgive him for keeping him you forgive.

Will he forgive you for keeping him out of your life and your career?

I said, really?

I said, Yes.

This is when things happen in our lives.

And I go down there and I do exactly what God tells him to do, tells me to do.

And I asked him to forgive me.

I said, Will you forgive me for keeping me out of my life, my career, not knowing your grandkids?

And he said, Yes, shook his head, said yes, and a tear came out of his eye, and I lost it.

I laid in his lap and I lost it.

And God says, Raise up.

He says, Now lead him in the center prayer.

I said, You know the Lord's changed me.

Would you like to accept him as Lord over your life?

He said, Yes.

Let him in the center prayer.

He goes on and gets saved and he passes away five months later.

But what God had to remind me in that, that the forgiveness was not for my father, the forgiveness was for me.

No wonder I say broken all those years because I wouldn't forgive.

So many of us never get to the place of freedom when things happen in our life because we don't trust in the Lord with all our heart.

We think we're holding somebody else hostage in our life, but you know what happens?

We're really holding ourselves from being free.

See, there's a freedom on the other side that God wants you to experience.

John 3 30 says, He must increase, but I must decrease.

He must increase.

See, he can't increase if you don't decrease.

The decrease of us is dying every day to our flesh.

Well, people say, Well, how do you die to your flesh every day?

I tell my flesh, shut up, you stupid.

Because the flesh is gonna always tell you to do something stupid.

It's gonna always lead you in the wrong way.

But it's not until you take authority over your flesh and tell your flesh to shut up.

He must increase, but I must decrease.

I must die daily.

Not sometimes, but daily I have to die.

So he can increase.

If I die daily, he's gonna increase and he's gonna give me his goods.

It's not us, it's the Holy Spirit that comes up on us and ascends upon us, and he shows us the way of living.

1 John 4.4 talks about it.

1 John 4.4 talks about it.

The Holy Spirit ascends upon us.

Greater than he that's in me than he that's in the world.

It's a great one that rule and reign.

He rules and reigns.

He's the Holy Spirit is the bad dude.

When you and when you saw understanding, the Holy Spirit started understanding, you're working for Jesus, you're not working for man, you're not working for yourself, you're working for the king.

You know, when you work for the king, you worship the king, you submit yourself to the king, you love the king, you thank the king, you thank him for the grace.

Thank you for the grace.

He didn't have to give me the grace, he don't have to give you the grace.

What is grace?

He gives it to you anyway.

That grace is something that you don't deserve, and he gives it to you anyway.

Second Corinthians 12, 9.

Grace.

How do you know scriptures?

Holy Spirit, he taught me scriptures.

They're not in my head, they're down in my belly.

When I need them, I pull them out.

Because he's supernatural.

If you spend time with him, he will teach you the word of God.

It's the people that are willing to walk God's ways in God's ways and understand who God is and understand the way.

Jesus said in John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes through the Father except through me.

I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes through the Father except through me.

Jesus is the way to everything that you're looking for.

Whatever it is, whatever it is, Jesus is the way.

Jesus is the man.

Jesus wants to give you something that you can't even imagine that he will do in your life if you can just trust him.

If you can trust him.

See, I was once about a time trusting in all the home runs I was hitting and the trophies I was carrying around.

Man, that does not even compare to the relationship and having the privilege to be used by God.

Because what we teach out of this book will save us forever.

What we achieve from an earthly standpoint won't mean anything.

Because you will come and go, and after you die, they'll talk about you for about a week and then they'll stop talking about you.

See, the book of John is about believing, which I love the book of John.

The book of John is about miracles.

Jesus turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000, raising Lazarus from the dead, pulling Daryl strawberry out of a pit, putting him in a pulpit.

Jesus is something else.

He's the miracle maker.

He's still doing miracles today.

Don't you want to be a miracle?

When you start understanding the book of John and realizing the book of John is about believing.

John 3.

Jesus told Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee teacher, leader, unless one is born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Nicodemus was confused.

Well, how can one go back and be born again?

He wasn't talking about the natural birth, he was talking about the second birth, which is greater, the spiritual birth, born of the spirit.

Say, the one you're living with now is not your husband.

But he was telling that woman a very profound thing.

If you only knew the gift who you were talking to, and you drank this living water, if you drink this living water, you'll never thirst again from drinking that water out of the well.

You're gonna always thirst from drinking that water out of the well.

But he said, This living water that I give to you, if you drink it, you'll never thirst again.

Ever since I've been drinking the living water of God, I have never ever ever been thirsty again.

Ever.

It's something about living water.

This book is living water.

If you drink it, you'll never be thirsty again.

Have never been thirsty since I've been drinking out of this.

John 8.

Don't point at somebody else's sin.

Scribes and Pharisees wanted to stone the woman because of the law of Moses.

Jesus didn't come here to destroy the law, he came here to fulfill the law.

Jesus was hanging out, stooping down in the sand.

They wanted to stone her.

Jesus raised himself up and he says, He who without sin cast the first stone.

From the oldest to the youngest dropped the stones, guess what?

Because they all had fallen short.

And they walked away.

Then he said to the woman, Where are your accusers?

Have anyone accused you?

She said, No.

He said, Neither do I.

Go and sin no more.

See, we live in a society that keeps us and makes us want us to believe that we can do and say and be whatever we want.

Well, you can, but you'll never have the victory.

See, there's the victory that comes with paying the price of giving your life up to Christ and submitting yourself to God's will.

There's a great victory that comes.

See, God crowns you from the top of the head to the bottom of your feet when you're sold out for him.

See, I didn't want to be a hypocrite anymore.

I don't want to be a Dow, strawberry rich, famous, stroud on the fence, and not knowing Jesus, just knowing his name, but denying his power.

See, there's something great about knowing his power because when you know his power, he gives you all his goods.

See, he doesn't give you a halfway of him.

We give him a halfway of us.

John 5, the pool of Bethesda.

A man sat there with a condition.

He sat there for 38 years, paralyzed.

What I love about Jesus, Jesus never asked that man about his condition because he didn't have to.

The angel striped the pool, the first one would get in and get well.

He sat there for 38 years in a condition.

How long have you been sitting in the condition unit?

Jesus never asked that man about his condition because he didn't have to.

Jesus asked the man one thing: Do you want to be well?

The man says, Sir, every time I try to get in the pool, he's not talking about the excuses.

He says, Do you want to be well?

The man said, Yes.

He said, Pick up your bed and walk, made him well, just like that.

Some of you today need to know that God wants you well.

Free.

It's the blood.

It's not anything else.

That great blood that he shed it on the cross.

That blood is holy.

And that blood comes into you and it purifies you, it liberates you, it redeems you, it brings you in whole wholeness and right standards with God Himself.

Don't keep coming to church and just putting a check in the box that I come to church and do a church thing.

Then the Bible sits up on the top of the shelf and you go the next Sunday and just check it.

I went to church.

Come to the place of having a personal relationship with Christ.

Because when you have a personal relationship with Christ, now you have entered into the purpose of why you're here.

God does not make mistakes.

We as people make mistakes.

God does not make mistakes.

God does not lie.

We lie to each other.

God sees everything, God knows everything.

No one gets away.

I thought I was getting away with the lifestyle.

The reason I was falling short, because I was a sinner.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6 23.

God sees everything, knows everything.

He wants you, he loves you.

He's crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy about you.

So for any of you that need to make a decision, you make that decision.

Today.

Don't wait till tomorrow.

Today is your day.

This is the day that the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Tomorrow's not promised to us.

Jesus will never leave you nor forsake you.

Everybody else will be gone, but guess what?

Jesus will be right there while everybody else is gone.

I remember 15 years ago, 19 years ago, whatever it was, when all my teammates saw me and said I was gonna follow Jesus, they said, Well, let's see how long this is gonna last.

Well, it's been 19 years, and I've been preaching 15 years.

It's still lasting, so he's pretty good.

Okay, so the evidence of God is good and the goodness of God.

I gotta go here.

I love you, Gateway.

Thank you, Pastor Robert, you and your lovely wife and your staff and everyone.

God loves you.

Let us pray.

Father, we thank you, we glorify you, magnify you.

Father, we give you glory for your goodness.

We thank you for your word.

We thank you for the hearts that have been touched.

There's some new believers, there's some coming back home.

Whatever it may be, may they come back home and surrender themselves to you.

We give you honor, we give you praise, we give you glory.

In Jesus' name, amen.

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.