Check Yourself | Part Two

Thank you for listening to the Colonel Critics and our podcast.

Our desire is that today's credit and criticism.

This is the second week of our check yourself series.

Pastor Brody last week spoke on uh the attitude of gratitude, so that's the best attitude to have.

Um right now he's actually up in Grand Forks hunting at a campground that may have Wi-Fi.

So I'm not really sure what kind of campground that is, if he's in an RV or he's actually camping.

Um but hi, Pastor Brody, if you happen to be watching.

Um the last couple weeks we had uh a sermon or a series in September called Level Up.

And I feel like Level Up isn't something that just starts and stops because we did a series on in all of September.

But last week when he was talking about gratitude, that was actually a really good extension of the series that we're going into for this check yourself.

And check yourself is a really, it can become a very it is, it should be a very intimate moment that you're gonna have with God.

Because if we think we were talking about walls this morning, and it's really interesting how it all ties together.

I love how the Holy Spirit works out like that, um, just with the songs and the words that come forward.

But um, we're gonna be talking about our filters and then the the filters that do need to come away.

So I just want to start with uh just warning you I get a little excitable.

Why not who said that?

Someone said, who no way.

I get excitable when I preach about when I get when I get to talk about Jesus, I get kind of wound up.

So Pastor Brody's uh advice to me was like, don't yell.

So I'm not gonna try and yell too much.

Um how many of you remember me from years ago?

I'm sorry.

I was just an unpleasant Julie's laughing at me.

I was young and immature, and I looked back and I'm like, man, I was unpleasant.

Just wasn't a uh I'm sorry.

Because I like who I am now.

God has really done a lot of work in my life to create the guy that I am now, but man, Pastor Ed, if he was here, he would tell you, or he wouldn't because he's Pastor Ed.

He's like, no, he was fine.

I asked Pastor Brody one time, he said, What do you remember?

He's like, Brian, you were intense.

I don't actually think that's changed very much, but my intensity has kind of been redirected into what God's called me to do.

The difference, and this is what I want to guess.

Thanks for the clapping.

But the the thing that God's done from when I was a snot-nosed, 20-year-old, overly opinionated, unpleasant, grouchy, I had so much hurt and so much anger to where he's brought me today is a testament of how my filters have broken.

And the authority that God has in your life can make such a difference to how you're gonna live your life.

So I want to start with that.

Uh how many of you, obviously, how many of you are on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat's a thing, I think.

I I downloaded Snapchat a couple days ago because I wanted the filters, but we're gonna talk about filters this morning.

The if you look at all of the pictures that you get on Instagram or Facebook, so many of them are just not raw pictures.

What you're getting is just a filter and then someone showing themselves the very best.

And even the ones that are like before and after, this is what I look like before, uh, or without the filter and with the filter, it's more about likes and things like that.

How many times can you get clicked and you can get a little shot of energy when someone says, ooh, they like my picture?

I don't have the patience to constantly go on to Instagram, or honestly, it's just the creativity level runs out in about an hour, and I just don't really know what to do next with the the filters.

But we all have those filters.

Filters are used in so many different things.

You got filters in cars, filters in cooking.

What happens if you don't change the filter in your car?

Really bad things will happen.

It actually, the filter will get so gummed up in your the performance will die.

You can actually warp parts inside of your your car because of the filter and how bad the filter is.

Because you didn't change the filter.

The same thing with cooking.

You have one of those little filters, you strain food through, and what it does is it takes away all the impurities and all the bad things that are going on.

Now, I have some pictures of filters that I made today.

Um I just want to show off my kids.

Well, two of them anyway.

Uh, and I have another one of these are all filters just from uh Snapchat, I think.

And the next one that's me and my daughter, and we look like we're aliens.

And this last one, just different filters on there create a different emotion, different feeling, different looks.

Sometimes you can look at something like that, the the one on the far right or one in the middle there that's dark.

That was kind of depressing, even though dragonfly, the picture itself wasn't depressing.

Picture itself was a bright picture with lots of colors and had life teaming out of it, but you put a filter on it, and instantly you're seeing the darkness.

You're not seeing the light.

And that that's that's not what we want.

We want to see the light.

Amen.

So, this last one that I'm gonna show you, this is my proudest moment.

Because I was super creative with the filter.

Can you put that up, Steve?

What are you all laughing for?

That's gonna happen.

Legitimately, guys, I can't actually grow a beard.

It's actually impossible for me to grow a beard.

I want to be able to grow one so I can shave it off and say that I don't need to.

So you manly guys with your beards, I feel left out.

So I do, I'm just gonna move on from that.

Um thanks, Steve.

But I want to talk a little bit about the filter.

I was talking earlier about how I've changed a lot since when I was here before.

And I say this, it's a real honor to be able to come back to the church that actually trained you, that actually invested in you, that actually poured its leaders, its life to come back to that same church and be able to be a pastor at that church.

There's there's no there's no way that at 20 years old that I think I would be standing here working with Pastor Brody and Pastor Dave and Pastor Malachi and Pastor Ed and all of these guys that can invest into my life.

There's no way I would have thought that 20 years ago.

Because the person I was was very jaded, was very angry, was very bitter, was very sad, was very abandoned, was very hurt.

And everything in that 20-year span from the time that I left this place, I got married at I think 23.

Yep.

See, she said yes, we're good.

But I got married, and then what happened was because I never dealt with those filters that were on my heart, that were in my life, that would actually stop me from actually having a successful marriage.

Now I can tell you, I mean, we've talked about this a lot.

This is how we teach this all the time, or we say this all the time is that I barely survived the first two years of marriage.

And I'm not kidding, we talked about divorce in the first two years of marriage.

Going into it saying, hey, we're never gonna be divorced.

But eventually talking about it so badly, and I will tell you this straight up the majority of the issues were not her, they were me.

And I and people always laugh at that, just like Mikiko did.

People laugh at that, but I'm not kidding.

The the issues that were in the marriage were not because of anything she was doing, it's because of where my heart was.

I got married, I stopped communicating, I stopped opening up to her, I stopped dating her, I stopped being uh gentle, I stopped being tender.

There was intimacy was a problem.

All of these things happened because I had unresolved filters that were in my life that were not being dealt with.

And in all of that, it carried from we had the we always I actually don't even count the first two years of marriage, she does, but I don't count the first two years of marriage because they were so bad.

Like on the surface, the filter was clean.

Everyone's like, oh, you guys have a great successful marriage and everything's going well.

It was hogwash.

It was absolute hogwash.

Behind closed doors, all we did was fight, all we did was argue about everything.

We said things, we did things, we were angry, but my filter was so broken.

My filter was so broken.

There was a wall around my heart that was so intense, that was so large, that was so um thick that it was it was almost impossible for anything to get through.

And I was willing to live like that because of the sometimes in the filter you don't know how dirty it is until someone points it out to you.

A mental filter is a faulty thought pattern that can often lead to higher levels of anxiety and depression.

When thinking through a mental filter, a person is focused on only the negative aspects of a situation and filtering out filtering out all the positive ones.

There's a reason that we have filters, which comes to my first illustration.

This is an air filter from your house.

Not yours.

I didn't sneak into your house and get your air filter while you're asleep.

Anyway, this is a dirty ale filter.

What happens when you're when your air filter in your house gets dirty?

All the impurities that are supposed to be coming through that are are clean and truthful and right, because you know that what God's word says, like I'm I'm a believer, guys.

I struggled with this filter because it was so dirty.

There was nothing that was getting through this.

And every time a little bit of truth would come up against my filter, only fragments of it would get through, and it was unacceptable.

They didn't, it didn't actually attach to me.

It would come in just like a um light hits a prism.

When a light hits a prism, it gets shot all over all over the darkness.

It's not getting to what you have.

My filter was messed up.

And so when the air, like we have one of these filters, when the air is gonna go through, you need it to go through.

What happens when you don't clean out one of these filters?

Your furnace stops working.

Performance.

I looked up how what happens when you stop changing.

Your performance in your life, that means the relationships that you have, the friendships that you have, the things that are going on in your life, when these air filters are not clean and not taken.

When that filter in your life isn't clean, because you're allowing this the certain things, I want to get to that when when you allow nothing to get through this because it's so dirty, because you've not replaced your filter.

And as a believer, my filter is filtered through the word of God and the truth that he says about me, not the lies that the devil tells me.

Amen?

These filters get absolutely filthy.

My grandma told me a couple days ago that she hasn't changed her filter in three years in her house.

You're all like, she what she does is she takes it outside and she washes it off.

I don't know if that's okay, Johnny.

He's an air conditioning specialist and he's just laughing.

And I do want to direct us to actually Pastor Brody stole it from me last week.

I'm pretty sure I'm stealing it from him now.

I'm gonna be honest.

Is that Judges chapter 6, verses 12 and 13?

Judges 6:12

We talked about Gideon last week, and I'm actually gonna read it.

The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak of Ophrah, not Oprah, that belonged to Joash the Abyssarite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites.

And I've said this before, and I'm gonna say it again.

If you're threshing wheat, you need to be in the open where there's a wind, so the stuff separates and something goes in a different difference.

He was afraid of the enemy, the Midianites that were there.

He was afraid of the Midianites, so he's doing it at night in a wine press with no wind.

Because he was afraid.

When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.

And I love this.

Pardon me, my Lord.

Gideon replied, But the Lord is with us.

Why has this happened to us?

Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us when they said, Did not the Lord bring us out of Egypt?

But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us the hand of to the hand of Midian.

The Lord said to him, Go and the strength that you have, and save Israel out of Midian's hand.

Am I not sending you?

Again, he says, Pardon me, my Lord, but how can I save Israel when my clan is the weakest in Manasseh and I am the least of my family?

His filter was of one that he wasn't enough, that he was the weakest, that he was not the strongest, that his clan wasn't, he was his filter was of being afraid.

His filter, Gideon's filter, the one that took 32,000 soldiers, whittled them down to 300, the original 300, or the Bible 300, the Bible 300, and whittled them down to 300 and took on thousands upon thousands upon thousands of enemy, only with a lantern and a jar of oil.

And the Lord says to him, Go in the strength I have given you.

His filter needed to be replaced.

His filter was one of fear.

His filter was one of I can't do this because I am the least of.

How many of don't put your hands up, how many of us suffer with the I am not enough?

As a husband, as a wife, as a brother, sister, as a father.

How many of you suffer with I am not enough?

It's a place that can eat us alive and degrade us to a place that we can't make decisions.

Because as soon as you think that there might be success in this, you'll just stop.

Because I like I'm not enough, I can't do that.

If I would have looked at myself 20 years ago and said, hey, you're gonna be preaching at KCC and you're gonna be working with your youth pastor, I would have been like, I'm not enough.

There's no way.

How do we know what filters are keeping from us from moving forward?

See, any filter that causes us to settle when the Lord has more for us is a faulty filter.

Any filter that keeps us thinking small when God has more for us, larger for us, is a faulty filter.

Any filter that causes you to hold others responsible for your situation is a faulty filter.

We can't hold others responsible for the decisions that we make, but yet we do.

That person did this to me, and this is how I responded.

We'll get to that.

When your filter gets changed, your life will change.

When your filter gets changed, your life will change.

How many of you know Craig Chase on?

I keep dropping names just because I'm I want to see hands up.

But Craig Chase on is uh one of my oldest friends, he's about 6'6, and his dad uh had two motorcycles.

We had a he had a Kawasaki 200 Green Demon, is what I I used to ride, and we had this uh Yamaha 250.

And we used to go up to Gallagher's Canyon or to where the trestles were all the time, uh, and his dad's old brown beat up dodge, and we would take the bikes, wrap them up in his many ropes, because you know who needs any kind of ratchet strap or anything like that.

We used all the worst ropes, and it was like a mixed mess of spider webs just to get the bikes to hold still.

But we would take him up into the bush and we would just get off and we would ride.

Now, the thing is, is my little green demon was like a race bike.

It had like disc brakes and had all it was like wound up and a big old muffler and it made lots and lots of noise really, really fast.

It was still technically smaller than his 250, but my Kawasaki always, always outperformed his bike.

Always, no matter what.

He used to get so mad because we'd be in the trails and I'd just be zipping through and flying around and doing all this stuff, and he's like and he couldn't get it to go up the hills, stick it in first, and it would bog out, and it just like it just didn't have it was not it was not doing exactly what it needed to do.

For the longest time, he we we we did everything.

He changed the oil, he changed the the oil filters, he changed the anything that needed to be changed on there, he didn't.

So one day, after him being really angry at this for a long period of time, he actually went down to the Yamaha dealership that used to be somewhere on the highway.

We used to we went down there and he was talking to a professional.

The professional, after hearing what Craig and me had to say about the bike, instantly said, Hey, did you change the air filter?

Air filter?

Because we're 17 and we didn't have Google.

Yeah, you young kids that are here in your Google, we had to go and look at encyclopedias or find a manual at the library or actually go and physically hold something and read the information.

It's called a book, uh, and we still have them, I think.

But we we had to, so the guy told us and he gave us a piece of paper, and he said, go take it to the parts counter and buy this air filter.

So we're like, oh, that's good.

Now we had we didn't know where the air filter was, he still didn't tell us where it was.

So we had to go back and we asked him the air filters in this particular model.

He had to pull up the back seat, and it was right in behind there and a little plastic thing.

We replaced the bike.

I replaced the filter.

Well, as soon as we fired the bike up, it actually instantly sounded better, didn't sound like it was sucking dirt through the system, and so we we weren't allowed to his dad was home, so we couldn't take it onto the street over just over here on Homer Road.

We had to load it up onto the truck and we had to take it up to the bush.

The moment that we get out there, he starts that bike up and he's gone.

And it's actually now to the point that I'm mad because I can't keep up with him anymore.

But what did he do?

We tried everything else in our own strength and our own knowledge to do something that we weren't meant to do.

We were trying to do things that we had no knowledge of.

We were trying to take things into our own hands.

And the moment that we went and talked to a professional, that's this the professional being Jesus in this matter, is he replaced the filter.

And instantly power came to that bike.

The impurities that were being sucked through the system were no longer.

They were pulled out.

Anything that was going through was not getting into the engine to cause it to not run forward.

What do our own filters do?

They stop us from seeing the next step that God has for us.

And we are we are more than willing just to hang out with them.

We're more than willing just to have the filter on our life and not make any changes.

We're more than willing.

Even when that filter that you have, you know for a fact is actually causing you pain.

It's causing you damage.

You know that you can't move forward in this.

And this is what I learned.

You can have progress or you can have excuses, but you can't have both.

You can have progress or you can have excuses, but you can't have both.

I lived in the world of excuses.

Every time something would go wrong, oh, my dad didn't teach me how to do that, or this guy didn't do that for me.

I lived in the realm of excuses.

The one day I had a friend tell me, Brian, shut your mouth.

Like, thanks, bud.

Like, and he said it like firmly and angrily.

He's like, Brian, shut your mouth.

Said every time something goes on in your life, you make an excuse.

I'm like, kind of, it hit me hard, but I'm like, no.

It's just like we ought to, no, I didn't.

No, I don't.

I'm my own man.

You can't tell me what to do.

But the truth is, it bothered me so much because I knew he was right.

I made an excuse every single time something didn't go my way.

An excuse that it's it's hard for me now even to even think of what they were because I had to get over the filter.

I had to take that filter of excuses and blaming everyone else for my own issues, pull it out, replace it with the Word of God.

And the thoughts that He thinks about me, not the lies that the devil told me.

The lies that the devil told me was that I wasn't enough, that I didn't have the upbringing to be able to do the things that I was doing, that I was gonna fail at every everything that I tried.

That was my that was my default filter, was an excuse.

Every time someone said anything to me, that remark remotely corrective, I had an excuse for it.

And it's not to say that now when Pastor Brody comes to me and he's like, okay.

We gotta talk.

That honestly, my first response isn't always, hey, I love feedback.

Like I really do.

I love feedback.

That's how I get better at everything that I do.

I can't be a better leader if you're not gonna tell me how bad I am at it.

And I say it like a joke, but what people are oftentimes afraid to tell you what you need to hear in that moment because they're worried about hurting your feelings.

It's more of an issue for me now that if you don't tell me, you're gonna hurt my feelings more by not telling me what's wrong with me and how I can repair it.

Because correction and feedback from the ones that you love will make such a difference in your life, like you you don't understand.

If you don't have a father or you don't have a mother, I understand that's where I came from.

I don't have a father, I have a loving mother, I don't have a father to teach me all those things, so that was my excuse.

Oh, he didn't teach me how to do that.

I'm a horrible mechanic.

But I will try anything until I break it so badly I have to call in a professional.

But I'm what what I wasn't willing to do was to even make an effort to try it because I was afraid I couldn't do it.

And I have fixed more things now and more vehicles now, just be willing to try it because I don't I wasn't making excuses anymore.

What's what's the excuse?

You might break it?

Well, it's already broken.

Can't break it anymore.

Well, you can have progress or excuses, but you can't have both.

John chapter 5, verses 5 to 8.

John 5:5–8

One of the men lying there had been sick for 38 years.

When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, Would you like to get well?

How many of you want to get well?

I want to get well.

I know that I'm imperfect and I have issues, but I want to get well.

Said, I can't, sir, said the sick man, for I have no one to put me into the pool when the when the water bubbles up.

Someone else always gets there ahead of me.

A little bit of context on this pool.

Once a year, the they thought that an angel came along and stirred up the water, and that was the as soon as that happened, that was the moment of healing properties.

Thirty-eight years this guy sat there making an excuse that he couldn't get into the water, that no one else helped him do it, that people got ahead of him.

Two or three points.

He blamed others for the circumstances that he was in.

And here's the real truth: you can't control your circumstances, but you can control your response to it.

My response on every given situation was to make an excuse.

My response on every situation was to pull away, believe that I was right, even when I wasn't, and make an excuse.

And I'm not kidding, guys, for 15 years I feel like my spiritual life stopped, my personal growth stopped.

Now it didn't.

There's things that I grew in and the things that happened and all of those things, but if I look back to it, I can say with certainty that I would have, and I'm gonna say this as a man, if I would have manned up and stepped forward into what God called me into, instead of running away and replacing my filter, if I would have replaced my filter when I was 25, I'm not talking this, what I'm talking about today has so little to do with career, has little to do with work, has little to do with anything physical.

I'm talking about what God's doing in you is more important than the job that you do.

Your relationship with God will come first, and then the other things will follow.

Faithfulness in the small things means faithfulness in the large things.

But because I was so stunted in what I was doing, I couldn't move forward.

I couldn't move forward.

Let's look at this a different way.

God doesn't need you at your best, he needs you at your yes.

God doesn't need you at your best, he needs you at your yes.

If we live in a place where you have to be the best of everything before you make any attempt, you're never gonna do anything.

Or you'll be doing one thing.

The idea that if you have to be the best at everything, what you've done is exactly what Pastor Malachi was talking today about this morning when he was giving the exhortation.

He was talking about the law.

We're doing things for the law if you're trying to be the best in order to get the favor that you think that you need.

Now let me tell you for certainty that your behavior and your the things that you do have nothing to do with the grace that God's offered you.

That's free.

God doesn't need you at your best, he needs you at your yes.

So what I've done is I made just a few of these, just filters, these are coffee filters, but I've written things on them.

Things that I was I was thinking about and I was praying about as we were going through this, one of the biggest ones that I suffered with was fear of failure.

I feared failure so much that I was unwilling to take a risk at anything.

Comparison.

This one's a killer.

Ryan, can you come here?

I warned him beforehand.

Give Ryan a hand.

So you might notice two things.

Why do you guys always laugh when I see like come on?

Two things.

One, he's quite a bit taller than I am, and two, he has a glorious beard that I cannot grow, I cannot grow.

The thing is, is that if I compare myself to him on two counts, this is physical, I'm not talking about spiritual gifts or anything else.

I'm talking on two things.

The fact that he can grow a beard and I can't, in the fact that he's six six four, and I'm not gonna tell you my height, but if I was to five four, but if I was to say I'm gonna compare myself to him, knowing that physically I can't grow a beard, but physically I can't actually get any taller.

I've stopped what God has for me, and I'm comparing to something that wasn't even designed for me.

His height and his beard, but his height is meant for him, not for me.

So what I've done effectively is stop any kind of growth moving forward because I'm comparing what God built in me and designed in me, and intrinsically said, This is yours, Brian, and I just stopped it from moving because I'm comparing it to someone else.

Amen?

Thanks, Ryan.

We've talked about this one.

I'm not good enough.

How many of you don't put your hands up?

I do this a lot.

I'm not good enough.

Lies.

Lies.

Anything the time you hear this, that's a lie right from the devil.

God is not for me.

This is a lie that Christians believe and just accept without fail.

God is not for you.

The Bible says he will never leave you nor forsake you.

You got you didn't get your prayer answered.

Okay.

I haven't either.

My hope is in who Jesus is, not what he gives me.

My hope is in who Jesus is, not who he gives me.

God is not for me, he sent his son.

I don't know what kind of response we need to have to that, other than holy man, thank you for what you did, and dying on the cross for me and willing to do that.

And send and being that we have grace.

Offense.

I can hear a pin drop on that one.

Offense.

I think we spelled it right.

You know what the Bible says?

The Bible says in Luke, there is no, it's in it, it is impossible for offenses not to come.

You're gonna be offended.

You're gonna be offended.

What you do with the offense is up to you.

You want it uh Kevin Gerald says this from Champions Center.

He says, being offended is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

There's two stages of offense.

You're gonna get offended, you're gonna get offended.

The second stage is do you choose to be offended and live with that offense or not?

Because I can tell you for a fact, I've been in that place where I've been offended at so many different things and it eats you alive.

If you've been offended any time in your life, you know for a fact that it eats you alive, and there's no way out of it, unless you replace your filter.

Negativity.

Negativity feeds on other negativity.

And all that ends up happening is you end up having more negative people around you because the positive ones want nothing to do with you.

Unmet expectations.

This is a killer in marriage.

Unmet expectations.

Do you know why?

Me and my wife have been working with couples for a long time.

Do you know what the thing about unmet expectations is?

Is the reason that they're not met is one, your expectations may be way so high, and the person you're with is never gonna be able to meet them anyway.

Or two, you never told your spouse what they were.

And they got unmet, and then what happens is you harbor bitterness and anger and resentment now, even though they have no idea what expectation it was.

So you've effectively just put something on your relationship that's gonna be crushing.

Unforgiveness.

I only have a few left, guys.

Unforgiveness.

I lived in the world of unforgiveness.

The Lord healed me of unforgiveness.

You know why?

Because he forgave me first.

If you're unwilling to accept the forgiveness that God has for you, then you're not gonna be able to forgive others.

Pride.

This is a gooder.

Pride.

The Bible says God oppresses the proud but gives grace to the humble.

I feel like I don't want to be oppressed by the Lord.

It took you guys a second there.

Like selfishness.

It's all about you.

There's two times in your life you didn't get realize how selfish you really are.

One when you get married, and two when you have kids.

Blaming.

Blaming.

Other people are the cause of your problems.

You took$500 out of your bank account, went down to the gambling or the casino, blew$500.

Whose fault is that?

You stepped out on your wife.

You got drunk and ran into a post.

Whose fault is that?

It's the post's fault.

When our minds are out of alignment with God's thoughts, we accumulate limiting, sometimes toxic, unhealthy distortions in our outlook in life.

God doesn't need us at our best, he needs us at our yes.

Said your value and your worth have nothing to do with how well your performance review was last week, how well you treated your wife.

If you had an argument with your family on the way to church this morning, if you yelled at the barista at your coffee spot, your value and your worth is everything to do with how God views you, not how the devil views you.

And what we've allowed the enemy to do, and we've accepted these things, is that negative thoughts outweigh positive ones, even though positive could be something that's just consistent in your life.

But you will hear the negative and never the positive.

Why is that?

So here's what I want to do.

There's how do we how do you move forward from that?

How do you take your filter that you currently have?

There's been times in my life where I've felt so distant from God.

And I was unwilling to pray, I was unwilling to worship, I was unwilling to talk to people.

The first thing you need to do is you need to recognize the faulty filter that's in your life.

And it may not even be in this pile of things that I talked about.

There's thousands of other things that God could be saying to you right now this morning.

We need to recognize the faulty filters.

The next step is you gotta reject the lies that it tells you.

And how do you reject the lies that it tells you?

Is you replace the lies that are in there with what the word of God says about you.

Because the word of God is the difference between life and death.

Number three, you have to replace that filter.

You reject the lies.

You hear what it is, you replace it with what God's called you and what God says about you.

But you know, the the difference between you moving forward right now in your life and you being stuck and staying right where you are is your yes.

It's your yes.

If I would have decided that in my life I want to be the grouchy, angry, bitter, resentful, hurtful, terrible husband that I was, if I wanted to stay like that and choose that over life, this I wouldn't be where I am now.

I wouldn't have three children, I wouldn't have a family that loves me, I wouldn't even have a relationship with my dad again.

Why?

Because I said yes.

This isn't like this message in general, but coming to church on a Sunday morning, I said it already.

If you're coming just because you want to fill a seat, all the power to you.

But if you want to come here because you feel like God's got something for you and it's gonna change your life, then you tell all of your friends that God wants to meet them.

That God wants to meet you, that you're not serving a God that's just a statue, you're not serving a God that just has no life in it.

That what we see is that we see a God who sent his son to die for me so I can have grace and mercy.

I get excitable.

And you know what?

This is one thing I always used to always say.

Oh, you don't know anything about me.

You don't know what I've been through, you don't know my past.

It doesn't matter.

I know what God did for me.

I know the countless uh testimonies and relationships I've seen God change.

I've seen God take relationships that had nothing left in a marriage that had nothing left and no will and no hope and no direction and no purpose, and change it for good.

Because the God that I know and the God that I serve takes all of the sin that I have and it's already been dealt with.

I have nothing but grace in my heart and grace in my life.

I'm gonna read a whole bunch of scripture because this is what God thinks about us.

This isn't what I think, this isn't what the next person thinks.

So I want you to just close your eyes and listen to what I'm saying.

Every word that I'm gonna speak is gonna be scripture, right from how we're a Bible-believing church.

Believe this.

Believe that the Holy Spirit wants to change your filter.

He wants to replace it for something good, he wants to move you into a place you never previously thought you could be.

Now, that doesn't mean a physical place necessarily.

What that means is that your relationship with Him is more full, more complete, more filled with God's grace and forgiveness than ever before.

I breathed into your nostrils the breath of life.

I created you in my image.

My eyes saw your unformed substance, I knit you together in my mother's room.

I know the number of hairs on your head, and before a word is on your tongue, I know it.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

You are more valuable than sparrows.

I have given you dominion over sheep and oxen and all beasts and field and birds of the heavens and fish of the sea.

I have crowned you with glory and honor as the pinnacle and final act of the six days of creation.

However, from the beginning you changed the truth about me for a lie.

You gotta stop believing the lie.

You worship and serve created things rather than me, the creator.

You have sinned and fallen short of my glory.

And yet in my great love I gave my unique Son, that all those who believe in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.

While you were still sinners, Christ died for you.

While you were still hostile towards me, you were reconciled to me by my death of my son.

Sin does not have the last word.

Grace does.

Sin does not have the last word, grace does.

Now everyone who calls on the name of Jesus will be saved.

You who have believed are born again.

I have adopted you.

You are children of God, heirs of God.

You're no longer orphans, you belong to me, and I love you as the perfect father.

That's God's thoughts towards you.

That's God's thoughts towards the situation that you're in.

That's God's thoughts towards the filter he's asking you to replace.

Because if we don't gut that filter and move it out of the way, anything that he says to us gets skewed and turned aside into something that was not what he intended for you.

He intended life and life more abundantly.

The Bible says he will never leave you nor forsake you.

That's a promise.

That's a promise.

I will never leave you nor forsake you.

Even though you may not have had your prayers answered or moving in that direction, or you don't think that God is for you, know this, He is for you, regardless of what you think, He's still for you.

But what will happen is you will push aside the blessings that He has for you by just ignoring what He has for you.

Let's bow our heads and pray.

The question is, what's your filter?

What are you gonna do with your filter?

I felt like we needed to pray for two groups this morning.

One's that we've been believers for a long time.

We need to take a look at our own filters.

What's preventing me from knowing God more?

What's preventing me from the from healing in my heart?

What's preventing from a fresh outlook of who Christ is?

Positivity, negative, like what is the filter that's stopping you from moving your life forward this morning?

I just want to pray for those people, Lord, that this morning, even through the worship and everything that's been said and the intentionality of your presence this morning, Lord, that those who have been believers for a long time would take a look and listen to what your Holy Spirit is saying this morning.

That by your authority and the fact that your son died on the cross for us, our sins are forgiven.

Past, present, and future.

Once we recognize it, once we reject the lies about it, we replace the filter with something better, which is you.

You don't know what's happening, but you're like, I want that.

Lord, I want the the church to repeat after me when we say this, the repeat after me.

Said, Lord Jesus, I am a sinner.

I have done many things that don't please you.

I've lived with my filter.

Lord, I am sorry.

I ask you to forgive me.

I do believe that you died on the cross for me to save me.

You did not, you did what I could not do.

I give my life to you.

From this day forward, help me live for you in a way that pleases you.

Jesus' name.

Amen.

What a great message from Pastor Brian.