The Art Of Being Unordinary | Part Two

Amen.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

Father, we thank you for these lives, these little lives, these little ones.

Congregation, will you just stretch your hand forward and just engage with us together and just begin to identify with the children that are on the stage here today and the families together and support.

Father, we thank you for the lives that we're dedicating today.

And we dedicate them to your love first, to your love, your care first.

We pray that your mercy would follow these children all the days of their life, that they would know that you are for them and not against them, that they would know the plans that you have in your heart for them.

Lord, would you bless their parents, blessed mom, blessed dad, blessed grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles?

Would you help them to remain faithful to their commitment and their promise today, to make this that they made today on behalf of their children, to raise them, to raise them in the ways that are right, to raise them in ways that would be a blessing.

Father, that we pray today, Father, that you would help each one of us, even in the congregation, to fulfill our responsibility to pray for these children and partner with the parents in providing the kind of environment that will help them grow and lead them to a relationship with Jesus.

We pray this in the name of our Father.

We pray this in the one who gives us every good and perfect gift, who has given us every spiritual gift.

And today, Father, we recognize each one in this place, each one dedicated today as called and chosen by you to live an unordinary, extraordinary life in Christ.

We thank you, Lord, for your covering over their lives and for your angels that will guard and protect them every day.

Support them.

Be wisdom to them.

Be counsel to them.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Right on.

Let's give them one more hand.

Amen.

Awesome.

Something about babies crying in church.

It's a beautiful sound.

Wow.

That's great.

Well, we have the honor this morning to uh hear from Pastor David Cowellman.

And before he comes up today, I just want to honor him in this place.

Thirty-seven years ago, uh, this church was established by uh a vision that was in his heart to uh reach a community and to reach a nation.

And today we stand here because of the work and the effort and the vision that he has carried and continues to carry and the support he has and continues to have for us today.

Uh I'm a second generational minister in this church, but uh I feel like I have the support of the pastoral team.

I feel like I have the support of those who went before me, and uh I believe that without their investment into our life and to our team's life, we wouldn't be where we're at today.

And so would you just welcome with me and just give a round of applause and just celebrate with me, Pastor David Caluman.

Well, praise the Lord.

Special speaker.

Thinking back 37 years ago, and with the heart of the congregation that met together, no, we started in a uh nightclub because there was no room in the inn.

There was no place to meet.

And God gave us a place, and we would go in and we'd sweep the butts out and get rid of the smell of the alcohol from the night before, and uh then we'd have church, and God filled that place with his presence.

It was a powerful time together.

And I think of that going back that far, and I see how the Lord has done so many different things in our lives in the last 37 years.

I'm very, very grateful.

Um, we've got a just a few pictures I wanted to show you here.

The first picture is our grade 10 class.

We have um we have a school on on site here, and we certainly have a strong commitment to Christian education and pouring our lives into the next generation leaders, and we believe that the school is called into discipleship.

And we see uh with the uh HCS class, they went down and they served uh in the in the uh the stellas, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this stylus, band in hope.

And uh we really believe that our kids should understand how to integrate with culture, be able to share their faith and uh have uh an impact.

And I love it when young people get together and do something for good for God and for people.

And the second one had to do with uh a trip that just happened uh uh, I think it was last week, spent a couple nights in Victoria, and then they were taken three nights into the WandaFuca hiking trail, 25 kilometers.

How many of you they had to bring everything with them?

I don't know if any of them are here this morning, but we're we're grateful you came back alive.

I think uh uh principal uh Paul Kelly was with you and uh or with them, and I think maybe the hardest thing that they had was that there was no data, no opportunity to get on their social network.

So sometimes it's just you and the and the uh the nature around you, and that those those are very healthy times.

The third picture I want to show you is a class that went down uh with our global uh citizenship program into uh into Mexico, and there they served in building a soccer field for the young people.

We've got about nine churches that we've planted in uh the Puerto Escondido area and up on the uh the southern side of the Mexican uh state of Oaxaca, and uh they served our churches down there.

They also were able to continue with their studies and learn the language, and some of them are well, they're all coming home to graduate or they're they're home now, and we're grateful again for the time that they they went out and were able to come back.

It's always a good thing to go, it's always a good thing to come back healthy.

Praise the Lord, amen.

So wonderful.

Um, wanted to say that the reason why we're doing what we're doing, some of you in the next few weeks will see a little bit of a change here on campus.

Um, the building uh project that we have scheduled for the front of the property.

Uh, you'll see the two homes on the right hand side will be coming down shortly.

We're going into fourth reading, and in fourth reading, at that point in time, we'll be amalgamating the land under that uh property.

There's a$70 million project going on out front, and that that is intended to be able to help us in producing and building a school that we're hoping that we'll be able to attach to the back wall of this ascent this church so that there'll be shared space available for the growth of the church, the growth of the school, and the growth of the online.

So you just uh pray with us about that.

We just really uh appreciate uh your prayers into all of that.

There's been a wonderful team of people working together on the project out front and now on the school, and uh we're we're believing God for some really good things flowing from this.

So praise the Lord.

Um, I want to uh have you stand one more time, if you would, please, because I always believe when we we hear the word of God and read it that you know, people don't read their Bibles enough.

Come on, not not to say anything and bring conviction to you, but I said people don't read their Bibles enough.

And uh used to be it used to be in paper form, and you were there and you'd mark it, and you look at all of my older Bibles, they're all marked up of things that God would speak to me about, and I put a date on it and a time God spoke to me.

Um but with in our electronic or digital age, we tend to just not do that anymore.

And uh I think that there's power in reading the word of God and then hearing you speak the word of God, there's things that resonate in your heart and in your soul.

So I would like you to read with me from Ephesians chapter 4.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

We're on a series talking about living an unordinary life, an extraordinary life.

How many of you would like that?

I would.

Okay, let's read it together.

This is Paul, and he's pre he's read writing this from prison.

So his desk his destination was not prison intentionally, but he got there because of his uh commitment to the faith.

And he didn't uh, no grass grew under him in prison either.

He he took up the the the quill and began to write the New Testament for us.

What a blessing! So let's listen to what he has to say.

He said, in light of all this, would you read it with me?

Here's what I want you to do.

While I'm locked up here, a prisoner for the master, I want you to get out there and walk, better yet, run on the road that God called you to travel.

I don't want any of you sitting around on your hands.

I don't want anyone strolling off down some path that goes nowhere.

And mark that you do this with humility and discipline, not in fits and starts, but steadily pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences, and quick at mending fences.

You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly.

He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor teacher to train Christ's followers.

Let me hear you, in skilled servant work, working within Christ's body, the church, until we're all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God's Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive with Christ.

No prolonged infancies among us, please.

We'll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors.

God wants us to grow up to know the whole truth and tell it in love, like Christ in everything.

We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do.

He keeps us in step with each other.

His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.

So take on an entirely new way of life, a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.

Is that what you want?

Hello?

Ask the question, is that what you want?

Because if you don't want it, probably I should stop preaching right now.

Because I want you to have it.

I want the life of Christ fully formed in you, and you becoming all that God has called you to be and do, and live an extraordinary life in this world.

That's what I want.

So, Father, help us as we read your word, let the word of God take its effect upon our personal lives and start changing us into your uh and conforming us to your will.

We ask that, Father, in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

All right, God bless you, you may be seated.

How many of you like to play the game of golf?

I like the game of golf.

And I have a favorite player.

I don't know whose yours is, but I'm gonna tell you whose mine is.

For years and years and years, I loved to watch Phil Mickelson.

And I didn't know it, but Phil was brought up right-handed, but he learned to play the game of golf left-handed by watching his dad in a mirror.

And he mirrored his dad's swing, but on the opposite side, and so wound up playing left-handed, and he's one of the best left-handed golfers that has ever lived.

Now, he's won all kinds of uh tributes.

He's in the uh PGA Hall of Fame.

But uh he's won master's titles and PGA championships and open, and it's been it's been really difficult at times to watch him play at the U.S.

Open over the years.

I've watched him play a number of times.

He's had six runner-ups.

Uh, that would have completed the four major uh major uh uh majors that the golf world uh looks at, and he would have been in a select few.

Uh he's in the uh World Golf Hall of Fame.

But in 2010, some of you may have recalled the interview that they had with him, he was diagnosed with a very severe form of arthritis, where his hands and his feet and toes would all swell up, and they were in incredible pain and agony.

And he thought basically that his uh his his world was over.

Uh, his ability to make an income or a living through playing golf was gone.

Uh he tried his very best, changing diets, etc., etc.

But in the interview, a very interesting statement was made.

He said, This is a new normal for my life.

He says, I've come into a new normal.

And when when people use that phrase, the new normal, it gave the impression that this normal was going to be worse than anything he'd had before.

But with a lot of diligence and a lot of work and a lot of effort, um, he pressed past the arthritic addition uh that he has in his body.

And actually, he's won a number of majors since.

Uh, he's actually been one of the most productive 49-year-olds in the world in terms of golf.

And so everybody sort of sits back and goes, Wow, look at this guy, he's still continuing to go.

But he had he had encountered a new normal.

Pastor Brody uh last weekend uh challenged us to live unordinary lives, not common lives.

He shared that living an ordinary life is not a really safe life.

It actually aiming at ordinary leads to a person actually entering into a trap and they get ensnared in a way of life and a lifestyle that actually draws them back from what God's intentions are, causes them to drift with the masses.

The ordinary lures us into following the crowd who yield to cultural norms, but the Christian is called to live above the cultural norm and to enter into the kingdom norm, to live extraordinary lives with extraordinary perspectives and priorities and patterns for life.

And in Ephesians, Paul is addressing that.

He's asking the church to start thinking beyond and above the normal and the natural and the ordinary, the common.

Here he is sitting in prison, and by the way, you know, I've talked about this before, but the prison that he was in, you know, didn't have hot chocolate and donuts on Saturday night.

Uh, there was a hole in the ground, it was damp, it was dark, he lost a lot of his sight trying to write, according to the uh the scriptures in terms of the oil lamps that they had, but he continued to persist to write the epistles to the church today in a place of great sacrifice.

But he writes from prison and he is encouraging the church.

He says, you've got to get up and you've got to grow up, and you've gonna have to start moving yourself into being fully mature adults.

Don't just be happy that you were born again.

Um be happy that uh that you you made it into heaven, sort of sort of to speak.

You we want to see you fully mature, fully developed within and without, fully alive in Christ.

You've got to press beyond where you are, where you got in.

It's like the little kid that kept on falling out of bed, and they said, you know, was asked the question, why are you falling out of bed?

He said, I went to sleep too close to where I got in.

And I think regarding the Christian faith, there are people that get, they they they go to sleep too close to where they actually became a Christian.

And they don't activate their faith and move themselves forward into what God's intentions are.

I was uh asked a number of years ago to speak to students at Buckingham University and on the on the campus in the UK.

And uh after I shared with the students, and these students were global, they they came for training in law and economics and and uh psychology and business, and uh many of them were were coming with uh um with opportunities to have financing and and monies from their government supporting them.

Uh many of them were from Muslim countries, and when they got uh to Buckingham University, they met a counselor there who was the counselor of the university who introduced them to Jesus, and many of them got saved and were at risk to losing all of their scholarships, at risk of being thrown out of their families because they'd come to know Jesus.

Well, I had the opportunity after I shared it at the university to go and meet with a lot of these young people.

So there were like 30 or 40 in the counselor's home, and I shared my faith and talked about the things I thought felt mattered.

And as I was leaving to head upstairs to go to bed, it was in their home, they were graciously hospitable to me.

I I turned to them and I said, Don't you ever forget, you're normal.

And then I went into my room.

And when I closed the door, I realized, what on earth did I say?

Have you ever done that?

You said something out of your mouth, and then you sat back and went, Why on earth did I say that?

So all night, of course, I'm pondering why I would say that.

Well, we were talking as uh to the young people about how that this was actually this transition to becoming a Christian is a new normal for them.

And the world considers it abnormal and and treated them so differently.

And so when I said that to them, I went to bed, I got up in the morning and I said, first thing out of my mouth was, listen, I just want to talk to you.

I said something to you before I went to bed last night, I don't know if you even know where it came from, but here here's what I think the Lord was wanting to say is that before you give your life to Christ, life seems normal.

You're a normal, average, ordinary person.

But when you give your life to Jesus Christ and you come to what is called a new norm, you come to the measure of the fullness of the stature of Christ.

You talk about the man or woman being fully alive, it's because Christ is the center, Christ is the is the plumb line.

And when when we give our life to Christ, old things pass away and all things become new.

We enter into a new norm, and our life is now having to be adjusted to Jesus.

That's what it means to be a Christian.

We we're no longer doing our own thing, we're now yielding our lives to the plumb line of who Jesus is.

We don't compare ourselves with one another, we compare ourselves to what Christ would have us to be.

Agreed?

Hello?

Are you up there?

That's the plumb line.

And I said, remember that the closer you come to Jesus, the more normal you become.

But God intended you to be.

And the farther you remain from Him, the more abnormal.

Out of sync with what God created you to be.

And so in my walk with Jesus, and we talk about moving from ordinary life to extraordinary living, we've got to do it by coming into this new norm and identifying ourselves with Jesus Christ as our Savior and our Lord, and say, from this point on, I don't want to be who I want to be.

I want to be who Jesus called me to be and created me to be and align myself to that.

So Ephesians, Paul writes some things about how to move from ordinary to extraordinary living.

And the first thing I want to say to you is what he shares in Ephesians 4.

He says, I want you to realize that God hasn't called you to walk but to run on this road that you travel.

Run.

Would you say the word run?

Because I see a lot of people on the way of life just lollying.

They're walking through life with a very uh, what should I say, unproductive, uh, apathetic, indifferent way.

If you just lolly through your Christian life, you will become indifferent.

And it will lead to distraction and a loss of focus in your spiritual walk.

And eventually you'll walk off the path.

What Paul was saying is in your old worldly norm, it was I can go wherever I want to go and do whatever I want to do.

But that's not the new norm that you've been born of Christ into.

The new norm is uh God has places that He wants to bring us, He has things He wants to do in and through us.

And Paul asks us to drop our own personal agendas and adopt the agenda of God for our life.

Not to walk this walk in fits and starts where you're hot and cold, but to steadily move forward on a run into the very uh purposes and the will of God.

When you stop and you lolly, I'm using that word lolly, when you just pander around and you get distracted on the walk that God's called you to.

Oftentimes, and I've been around long enough as a pastor to see some of my friends who have walked off the path, and the things that were important are no longer important.

And you start living going back to the old rather than moving into the new.

This is what puts the extra in extraordinary is when you have that passion to run the race fast to the goal of what pleases God.

Maybe there was a time in your life that you were really strong in that way, but you've lost that passion.

Paul says, you want to be live an extraordinary life, you want to see God do miracles in your life, then you're gonna have to start running the race again and stop walking around and meandering.

Hello?

Some people wind up drifting, and their drifting actually leads them into a place where they don't want to go.

Have you ever seen Niagara Falls?

How many of you have ever seen the Niagara Falls?

You sat there and you watch it where where the falls all uh enter down below, and it's just an amazing, powerful, thunderous roar.

But if you go up the river about, you know, a kilometer or two, it's a nice, gentle, flowing river.

And you would never have thought that the end result of it is by drifting, is gonna wind up in at the bottom of the Niagara Falls.

Our Christian life, Paul is making this statement, is not an easy life.

It's not, you know, it's it's not something simple.

It's it takes a passion, it takes an incredible desire in your heart to keep moving forward and pressing through.

That's why we sing the songs we do, that the power of God will come and greatness is not based upon who you are.

It's based upon the kind of enemies you have to fight and overcome to get where God has put you.

And and God's not going to remove those enemies from your life because those enemies actually make you strong.

He's not gonna remove the obstacles in your path because the the getting around those obstacles and through them is the thing that creates the strength and character uh that makes you more and more like Jesus, who, when he looked at the cross for the joy that was before him, he endured it.

So the first thing that God says, if you want to move from ordinary to extraordinary, you're gonna have to learn how to run and not just walk and lolly through life from Sunday to Sunday.

You're gonna have to be more purposeful in your heart.

Secondly, you're gonna have to realize that you are not traveling alone, but you're but you're traveling together.

You're not alone on this path.

Your old norm and what it seems to be the cultural norm today is it's me first.

It's selfie based, it's narcissistic.

Have you ever heard the word narcissism before?

Where you're preoccupied only with yourself and no one else.

Doesn't matter what anybody else thinks.

I'm gonna live my own life, my own way.

That that is not going to lead you to extraordinary living.

There's a new norm in town that rises above self-centeredness.

What you say and do has an effect on somebody.

It's quiet in here, but it's true.

Your life is not lived in isolation.

When you gave your life to Jesus, he put you into a family.

He put you into a body.

You are a member of the body of Christ.

And Paul was basically saying, listen, we have one father, we're one family, we're all on the same path, going in the same direction, we're all of the same blood.

Come on, realize that if we're going to do anything, we're going to have to do it together and not alone.

And as Christ's followers, our life affects others, either for good or for bad, and we have a responsibility, as he says, to be alert to the differences and mend the fences and stay together and help each other get to the common destination.

We don't live for ourselves alone.

We're to live for one another.

And when one hurts, we all hurt.

When one is honored, everyone is honored.

No one runs the race alone.

We're in this race together, and we're going to have to help each other to reach the finish line.

When I was a young man a few years ago, 29 years of age, when we planted KCC, I was in transition between a church we had planted that had grown substantially, and God said moved me into another direction and made me know that his will for my life was in a different direction.

And I was sort of caught in that limbo, that point of saying, Oh God, what next?

Where do you want me to go?

What do you want me to do?

And I remember growing a beard, had a big bushy beard, you know, hard to even recognize myself when I saw some of the photos.

I wore a cowboy hat.

I would wind up doing little tasks and everything for people around us, and we watched the food in our in our freezer wasting away.

And I said, Lord, when that's gone, I mean that's it, because as a pastor, I was uh self-employed.

There's no unemployment, there was no help.

You were just on your own, right?

God, you need to come up with a plan here.

And I remember a family from Calgary invited us to go to a conference in Banks, and the man who was speaking was his name was uh Dick Mills, and he was a man who was gifted by God to give direct words of the Lord to people.

And I thought, well, I certainly need a word from God.

My wife and I were there together.

I was walking in, and there was a man at the door, I knew it.

He said, What are you doing here?

And I said, Well, I need a word from God.

That's all I said to him.

Walked in, sat down like you're sitting down.

I was behind some people in this uh Benf uh conference room, and I slouched down in my chair to such a degree that when Dick Mills was speaking, I could not see him, I could hear him, but I could not see him, and he could not see me.

He began giving words to all kinds of people, and then he pointed to the guy that I spoke to when I was walking in the room, and he said, You know somebody here that needs a word from God?

He said, Yeah, David Kalman.

He said, Well, would David Kalman please stand up?

Well, I had to move from a slouch position to standing up.

Now God shot God found me.

Hello?

How many of you know we need the word of the Lord?

Sometimes in the race that God has for us to move from ordinary to extraordinary, we need that boost of hearing the word of the Lord.

That's why I believe in being in services like this.

Because one word from the Lord can can propel you into your future.

So he got up, I got up, and he said, I've got four words for you.

He gave me four of the words, and the last word had to do with, he said, you're gonna have to go.

We were thinking about moving to Kelowna and starting a church, which you'd never done before.

He said, You're to go, stand your ground, defend it, and the Lord will give you the victory.

And he says, and God is going to bring mighty men.

This is the chapter of mighty men.

He's gonna bring mighty men, and they're gonna stand together to accomplish something together.

I'll never forget that because I felt very, very alone.

I was a 29-year-old with a wife and three small children under five.

And I was making a decision that would have profound effect upon my life and upon their life if it went wrong, it went sideways.

But it wasn't within one month of that word from the Lord that God began to draw men together and they called upon me, and I called upon them, and we started something.

Now many of them have passed away.

That's the joy of uh you know growing old together with people as you uh you watch your friends die, right?

But but they've passed many of them have passed away.

Uh, but I'll never forget the strength that occurred in being able to run the race together.

We were like a band of brothers, band of sisters that caught the vision for what God wanted to do, and uh we never gave up on each other.

We worked together, and so today what you're experiencing here on this site is the result of standing on the shoulders of those who went before you, who paid the price, of believing in a better future for the next generation, and that's what we're doing.

We're pouring our life into the next generation.

I'll never forget the feeling of strength that came.

But I want to say this to you, because I've seen a lot of that broken apart today.

I want to say this to you heart to heart.

If you're here under 40 years of age, 45 years of age, you need to find your band of brothers.

You need to find your band of sisters, and you need to find out, you know, who's gonna walk with you and build with you because the future belongs to you as a generation.

If you can't get it together to build together, then uh a lot is gonna be wasted.

You've got to grab a hold of something in God and not let go of it because you're building for your generation and the next that are coming behind you.

And if if if your faith is waning and your children's faiths are waning, what about the life of their children?

And if your your habit is not to be in the house of God and your children's are now not in the house of God, what about your grandchildren?

Will they even know God?

The passion has got to be re redefined in your life.

And secondly, like he's saying here, if you want to move from ordinary to extraordinary, you're gonna have to know how to travel together.

You're gonna have to have a band of people that will walk with you through uh your your walk and and and and uh build with you.

The third thing he says is this he says, God has given you leaders to help you get where you're supposed to go.

The old norm of the world says you're the captain of your own destiny, listen to your own heart, make your own way, choose your own life.

You don't need anyone telling you what to think or to feel or what to do.

The new norm in God gives you spiritual fathers, gives you spiritual mothers, gives anointings in your life, people that will watch over your spiritual progress and bring the encouragement and the correction that you need to become who God called you to be.

And I don't want you to ever dismiss the power and the and the anointing that can flow from divinely assigned leaders in your life into your life through a transference of spirit.

And if you if you opt out of that, and this generation is opting out of that, you talk to a lot of them about who's your pastor, and they'll talk about you know, internet evangelists and internet teachers, and my heart to them is listen, I I get it, I listen to some of them as well, and I glean and learn and grow.

There's some tremendous speakers that are out there in the world today.

But I want to say this heart to heart with you.

When you're sick, who do they call?

Who are you gonna call on?

And when you need prayer, are they gonna come visit you?

Come on.

Do you know their family, how they treat one another?

But in the body of Christ today, this way of moving from one to the next level is the Bible says you should be known.

And those who are leaders in your life should be aware uh should be known by you.

You should watch their family, watch their marriages, watch how they talk, watch how they treat people, watch their character, watch their integrity, watch what they do with their financial.

Hello?

It would have been easier for me to have had five-year honeymoons in churches.

I've built churches before.

You go and I talked to a pastor a number of months back, and I he said, I've only got one more church to pastor, and then I'm resigning.

And I went, Whoa, that's that's not my future, that's not my heart.

I could have done that.

Planted a church, had a honeymoon with them, and then went, okay, I'm resigning and moving on to something else, and had honeymoons everywhere I went.

Hello?

But I chose to stick around and grow old with some people, and you get to know the good, bad, and ugly.

You watch the the flows of the tide of seasons in a person's life and how they handle it.

And some things I've handled well, some I haven't.

But I haven't run.

I haven't checked out.

And as a leader, you are still in my heart and in prayer.

Early in the morning, I'm praying for you.

Because I'm not going to let you go and to see you meander off the path and lose your passion for God and stop walking together.

I want a holy family hug when we enter into heaven together.

I want us to walk over Jordan together.

I don't want some left in Egypt.

Hello?

Are you hearing my heart?

This generation has lost fathers and mothers, and it looks to a multiplicity of leaders.

This lost touch with Christ's norm.

Do you know that there's something that is powerfully transferred by a leader into the hearts of those who are being led?

You can't be touched by an internet pastor, but you can when I lay hands on you.

And I impart the blessing of the Lord on you.

And I start speaking into your soul, Brian, about all of the potential that is brewing inside of you for God.

And the things your children are going to do because we're watching your kids grow up.

Seeing their passion and love for Jesus.

We see the word of the Lord being formed in your life and in your heart.

See the praise that flows out of you.

We see the man of God you're becoming.

See, there's something that is transferred by the Spirit, flesh to flesh, by touch, that you will never receive on the internet.

You're hearing my heart.

What did Jesus say?

He said, These are those you gave me, Father, and I'm responsible for them.

I prayed for them.

I can't pray for the whole world, but I can pray for those you've given me.

I can pray for those who are in my heart.

I can pray for those you keep on bringing into my spiritual attention on a day-to-day basis.

I can lift them up to God.

I can do that.

And Jesus said, I've been faithful to do that, Lord.

Father, I've been faithful to do that.

I've done what you gave them to me, and I've been faithful.

The scripture says, appreciate your leaders who give you the word of God.

Take a good look at the way they live and let their faithfulness instruct you as well as their truthfulness.

Be responsive to your leaders, listen to their counsel.

They are alert to the condition of your lives and work under the strict supervision of God.

Contribute to the joy of their leadership, not to its drudgery.

Why would you want to make things harder for them?

You want to move from ordinary to extraordinary?

Don't cut yourself off from leaders who God has placed in your life to help lead you along the path that God has called you to.

Fourth thing, and I I won't camp long on this, but I want to say you've got to realize that you've been called to change.

Nobody likes change.

To services is a change.

Next generation leadership is a change.

We're all going through changes.

We all have seasons in our life where things don't, you know, I don't have the same energy I had before.

Hello?

Anyone identify?

Witness?

Witness anyone?

Hello, are you out there?

Are you alive?

Okay.

There's change that God's called us to.

And that change is in conformity to Christ.

He's constantly requiring of my life to move from where I am to where he is.

And we talked about that new norm.

The old norm basically says, I like myself, I'm living free.

Let me be me.

I'm not going to change for anyone.

No one's going to tell me who I'm going to be and what I'm going to do.

Well, when you come to Christ, there's a new norm.

And Christ gets a chance by his Holy Spirit to speak to you about your life every day and to change you little by little, by little by little, into conformity to Christ.

That's what you bought into when you gave your life to Jesus.

You said, Jesus, I haven't been doing a great job of running my own life.

I welcome your salvation and your lordship.

You come into my life and shift and change things from the inside out.

Let me see what your agenda for my life looks like.

That's when you, that's what puts the extra in extraordinary.

It's what moves you from a common life into a supernatural life, is when you allow God to shift you and to change you who you are from the inside out.

Not one of us has been called to live an ordinary life.

Not one of us.

You're so quiet this morning.

Am I upsetting you, offending you?

Are you hearing this?

I said.

Aiming at an ordinary life is a cop-out.

And you will be going contrary to the working of the Holy Spirit, who will be constantly moving you forward into the best.

And he'll be pushing and prodding and convincing and moving you forward because that's his heart for you.

He doesn't want you to stay the way you are.

He wants to see you become all that he's intended you to become.

That's what his heart is.

And so in this in this series of moving from ordinary to extraordinary to living an unordinary life, we've got to realize we're in a race and we're going to have to run.

We have to realize that we're with other people.

We're going to have to realize that God gives us leaders and we're going to have to be willing to change and shift from one thing to the other so that God can get us to where we're supposed to go.

I don't find it easy.

The older I get, the easier, the harder it is to change and shift.

But I have to.

If I want all that God has for me.

Amen?

How about you?

Anyone here?

Let's bow our heads for a moment.

Father, we're we're coming before you as your kids, and sometimes as kids, we get our backs up and we get a little bit rebellious and disobedient to your prodding.

And we want to stay where we are when you want to move us forward.

Sometimes we're afraid of what the future looks like.

But you know the future.

You're the same yesterday, today, and forever.

You're the God who was and is and is to come.

You're the Lord of our past, our present, and our future all at the same time.

So there's no fear with you.

And if we're walking with you, we're walking into good things.

And so, Lord, I pray for this congregation this morning.

I pray for everyone that's assembled here today that if there's been a drawing back and a lock of passion, that they would quicken their pace.

They would start to run, not just run, but run with others, run with leaders.

And Lord, be welcome to the changes that you're going to bring about in their life to get them to where you want them to be.

I ask for that, Father, for that grace to settle upon us, and that willingness to settle upon us so that we can we can expand who we are, become all that you intended us to be.

In Jesus' name I pray this.

Amen.

That great message this morning.

Uh hope something that resonated with you today.

Um, having a tricky time grabbing all my stuff here.

If you're wondering what happened to me, I broke my hand last week and uh it wasn't a very cool story.

I was playing Ultimate Frisbee, so I wish I had a cooler story for you, but it's okay.

I fought a bear.

No, it's okay.

That would be a terrible idea.

Uh, we're just gonna get ready for our our givings and our offering just in a moment here.

And um, if you're if you're new or newer to our church, just give me a patience here while I grab this.

Uh, these are kind of our uh,