What Do I Need To Let Go Of? | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Uh if you have your Bibles, go to Isaiah, the book of Isaiah, Old Testament book.

Chapter 43 is where we're gonna be reading today.

Want to say we're starting kind of what we call a mini-series.

It's gonna do two weeks.

And uh the title is Forget Not, but ironically, this first week I'm gonna look at a passage that tells us to forget, and then tomorrow or next week we're gonna look at forget not.

And uh there's some things that we're instructed here to uh to forget and some to forget not.

Let's make sure we're focused on the things we're supposed to focus on and moving beyond the things that we need to move beyond.

And so I'm looking forward to these conversations.

Isaiah 43, starting in verse 18, it says, forget the former things, do not dwell on the past.

See, I'm doing a new thing.

Now it springs up.

Do you not perceive it?

I'm making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

Um, okay, we're in Isaiah 43, and we recognize that we are jumping into a book in its 43rd chapter.

If you imagine watching a movie and jumping in at the 43rd minute, you would know there'd probably need to be some explaining to understand the dialogue that you're hearing.

And so, what I want to do is two things, and hopefully this will help you anytime you're reading the Bible, to introduce uh this technique in terms of making sure that we're picking up what the scripture is putting down and uh understanding it.

You're gonna want to uh look at not only the preceding chapters from a big picture perspective, but then the few verses that you read before.

So when you read something like forget the former things, you're like, well, what does that mean?

And what former things are you talking about?

So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look briefly at a summary of the first 43 chapters of Isaiah, and then we're gonna look at the few verses before so we really understand what's what's being given to us here.

So, if you look at the book of Isaiah, it's it's really uh divided kind of into three different sections.

Um, the first section of the book is 39 chapters, and the theme of those 39 chapters is warnings and judgment.

If you were here at Christmas, you'll remember we talked about kind of a summary of the Old Testament.

God gave the nation of Israel a covenant and he called them to be obedient to that covenant, and he gave them a promise, and he said, Listen, if you do it my way, I'll bless those who bless you and I'll curse those who curse you.

In other words, even though there are bigger nations than you and they have more money and more firepower, you don't need to be intimidated because your provision and your protection is going to come from me.

And if they come against you, they're coming against me.

So I'm asking you to stay faithful to what I've given you.

And of course, over the course of the Old Testament, the nation strays, and God would send prophets, priests, and kings to give important messages.

Often what we see here in 39 chapters of Isaiah, a warning.

He's warning them.

Guys, what are we doing?

We have our eyes on these other nations.

In this particular case, it's the Assyrian Empire that's they're steamrolling towards the uh towards the southern kingdom, and they they they're threatening them, and so they're starting to succumb to that fear, and and he and so they're straying and they're turning to idols.

And so you have 39 chapters of warnings.

Don't do this, turn, repent, change.

Look what it says here in Isaiah 1, 2 and 3.

Uh listen, O heavens, pay attention, earth.

This is what the Lord says.

The children I raised and cared for have rebelled against me.

Even an ox knows its owner, and a donkey recognizes its master's care, but Israel doesn't know its master.

My people don't recognize my care for them.

He's essentially saying, My own children don't even know me.

He says in verse 15, When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you.

Even when you offer many prayers, I'm not listening.

Your hands are full of blood.

You remember we talked it during uh Christmas about the law of God, and that the law was given not to try to catch people in a mistake so that they could punish them, but that God was putting his character not only on display in front of people, but injecting his character into their community.

So the judicial law was designed to show God's justice, what we might call righteousness, doing right by people, treating them the right way.

And then the ceremonial law was designed to connect people to God, the proper sacrifices of gratitude, and even to receive forgiveness and to connect with God and put his holiness on display and in the hearts of the people.

So what you see here in verse 15 is he says, you're doing the ceremonial law in terms of the letter of the law.

You're showing up and you're praying the prayers and you're opening up your hands and you're singing the songs and you're you're making the sacrifices, you're doing everything according to the letter of the law.

He said, The problem is you're following the ceremonial law to the letter, but the heart of God has not entered you, so that you're actually giving the judicial law with justice.

So you do the ceremonial law, you get a false positive that you think that you're all good with God, and yet when it shows up in the day-to-day, in the world around you, in the community around you, your hands are full of blood.

And the contradiction is not lost on God.

When God sees that happen and that discrepancy, he goes, You think that you can sing in a way that pleases me, but I see the blood on your hands, and so I cover up my ears.

So for 39 chapters, man, you get these types of warnings.

By the way, there are some today who are in a season where you are being warned.

There are red flags that are in front of you.

In fact, you may have had people sit you down and start to talk to you.

Listen, let me tell you where you're headed.

One of the hard realities of life is red flags and warnings are always easier to see in hindsight.

When you get into exile and you start looking back and you're like, How stupid am I?

They told me.

They told they warned me, they talked to me about this.

You look back and the red flags that you were looking right over, the warning signals that were right there.

You're like, how could I have missed it?

But sometimes when you're in that 39 chapters, even as crystal clear as Isaiah is being with the people, they just continue to ignore the warnings, and so after 39 chapters, they end up in judgment.

What's wild is this shift in tone.

Is uh you go from chapter 39, which is just full of strong language, and then when you get to chapter 40, verse 1, the tone shifts drastically from judgment and warning to comfort and redemption and reset.

So look at chapter 40, verse 1.

It says, Comfort, comfort my people, says God.

Well, we talked about this before, but it's good to have top of mind.

When you think about the judgment of God, you know, when we think about judgment in terms of the judicial system or the world that we live in, sometimes even the way we might think about God, we tend to think of judgments as final.

We we you think of a case closed, okay?

Here's my verdict, and it's over.

And when it comes to the judgment of God, God's judgment is not about God quitting on you or being done with you.

It's about God clearing the soil for something new He's about to do.

It's the meta-narrative of the Bible that even from the beginning of the garden, when they lost the garden from judgment, it was the beginning of something fresh and new that God was doing in their life.

And so what you have in chapter 40 now is a nation, a group of people that did not listen to the warning.

They did not make the change, they did not repent, they they were dealing with what Isaiah calls over and over again spiritual blindness.

They over, they they looked over the red flags, they they tuned out the warnings, and because of that, now they're in exile.

And when they're in exile, they've lost their temple, they've lost uh their culture in many ways, they they have lost the things, their land, the things that are precious to them.

Their failures are fresh.

They can taste them.

And now they're starting to deal with regret.

But the big issue they have is has God quit on us?

Have we disappointed him so much because we disobeyed the covenant and we tuned out his prophets that now we failed so miserably that this is the end for us?

So this is where you now see the the shift now, where in Isaiah um the call is is not to take and rub their nose in their mistake further and to demoralize them, but to to comfort them and to now give them hope of restoration and reset.

Okay, so now we have an idea of the first 40 chapters leading up to what we uh just read a second ago about forgetting the former things.

But we need to look now and do our second part of our techniques.

We looked at the big picture.

Now let's go a few verses before uh verse 18.

In fact, let's go let's backtrack to verse 14 to look at the preceding verses right before the forget the former things, so we know what the former things are that we're supposed to be forgetting.

Okay, here we go.

Verse 14.

This is what the Lord says your redeemer.

Don't miss that, by the way.

He announces himself as redeemer, he declares himself redeemer, he labels himself, I am your redeemer, the holy one of Israel.

For your sake, I will send to Babylon and bring down as fugitives all the Babylonians in the ships in which they took pride.

I am the Lord, the Lord, your holy one, Israel's creator, your king.

This is what the Lord says.

He who made a way through the sea and a path through the mighty waters.

And he's going to go on to talk about the one who drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea, all right?

The one who made dry land through water.

He's like, That's who I am.

I'm your redeemer.

So this is getting starting to get interesting because after what does he do?

He says, Look, just like in your history, Egypt was your oppressor and Egypt fell, and I redeemed you.

Babylon is your new Egypt.

And he says, Babylon will fall too.

Those ships they're so proud of, don't be intimidated by them, because I'm going to send them running in their ships.

And then he recreates and summarizes the how of how he delivered them from Egypt.

And he says, What did I do?

I made a dry land through water, and I drowned their armies.

And then he says, now the verse we started with, forget the former things, do not dwell on the past.

See, I'm doing a new thing, now it springs up.

Do you not perceive it?

I'm making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

So ironically, when when God says to them, forget the former things, do not dwell on the past, he's not just talking about the failures of their first 39 chapters.

He's adding more dimension to it.

He's saying, forget the former things, like he's actually attaching what they need to not focus on to one of the greatest moments in their nation's history, which was their deliverance from Egypt.

This is really interesting.

Because most of the time we say, hey, you know what, forget the past.

We're talking about, hey, don't get stuck in shame and you know, forget about your failures and move on.

And we we only think about how our mistakes from our past could show up into our future.

But he does something deep here.

He actually takes them to a moment of triumph.

And he says, Babylon will fall like Egypt fell.

But then he says, but don't get so focused on how I brought you out of Egypt, how I brought your ancestors out of Egypt.

Because if you get focused on the fact of how I redeemed them, instead of just the fact that I'm a redeemer, you might miss what I'm up to.

So notice what he does.

He inverts uh the the deliverance.

So he says, the first time I made dry land through water.

This time I'm gonna bring water into the dry land.

I'm gonna do something, and he flips it into complete opposite.

When he says forget the former thing, he's not saying wipe your memory and don't ever remember it.

He's saying don't focus on it.

Because as good as the Exodus was, it was simply a way, not the way, not the only way, it was a way that God redeemed them from bondage.

And he says, if you only think about it, he goes, You're you're gonna have to like move on from that.

You're gonna have to let go of that because even though it was really good, you now are are trying to limit me to that.

And now if I want to do this, it doesn't look like that, and so you keep rejecting the new thing I'm trying to do because it doesn't look like the old thing.

You know, it's interesting because I I turned 45 this year, I turned 45 and I start getting these birthday messages from people saying, Happy birthday unk.

Happy birthday unk.

I'm like, what are you talking about, right?

And these people call me unk now, okay?

And I'm like, what are you talking about?

This is people younger than me, you know, and they're just happy birthday, unk.

And I'm like, what's what are you talking about?

Why am I unk?

And then they send me charts that say, based on how old you are, what your title is, right?

And so apparently, technically, I fall in the unk category now.

Uh, and just for fun, I peek down, and apparently next stage is old head.

Okay.

Unk doesn't sound as bad when old head's what's coming down the pike.

So I said, okay, you know, I started to think about, I guess I'm an unk now, you know, headed towards old head.

And as I started to think about that, you know, I thought, you know, the reality is the older I get, I do notice an appreciation for nostalgia.

Especially as it relates to faith and religion.

And there's something in our mind, and I'm not here to dog on nostalgia.

In fact, I'm a fan at this point.

I'm an unk now.

Um, but but the the idea of nostalgia, it does something to us and it makes things feel right and pure.

Uh, there's something about an organ, there's something about a pipe organ that just feels a little holier than a synthesizer.

Uh, there's something about a harp that just feels holier than an electric guitar.

They all both have strings, but there's just something about it.

I remember I did a wedding one time at this beautiful, absolutely beautiful cathedral.

And I walk in, it's stained glass everywhere, and and uh I walk in and I meet with the pastor who who pastored this beautiful place, and he starts explaining to me the theory, the artistic theory behind um gothic architecture.

And he's like, This gothic architecture, it's these high arches, and they're designed to take your eye up to heaven.

And I kid you not, well, he's telling me this, I'm standing there like I just keep walking around this thing, like, oh, and I mean there's art on the ceiling, okay, it's ornate, it's beautiful, but the whole thing is literally designed to make your eye go up.

And I'm just standing there and I'm like, you know, we need some gothic architecture at one church, you know, it's just it it was working, you know.

I'm looking up to heaven.

There's something about old and nostalgia, you know.

I love the organ, but you know what?

My mom played the organ.

I grew up in church, my mom played the organ when I was a little kid in church.

I was sitting at my mom's feet while she was working the pedals, playing the organ.

And and and so to me, when I hear an organ, uh it it grounds me to something that was safe in my childhood.

Okay, and and there's nothing wrong with that.

These these these are uh there's important uh things and good things.

Uh, it's funny, when we were doing the pre-record for New Year's, the one we played last week, um, I didn't know what songs they were gonna sing.

And so I'm in there, you know, just worshiping and and they go back to this song.

It was when I think about the Lord, how he saved me, how he raised me, how he filled me with the Holy Ghost, how he healed me to the uttermost.

When I think about the Lord, how he picked me up and turned me around and placed my feet on solid ground.

It makes me want to shout.

If I could sing, I would I'd be ripped, I'd be ripping it right now.

Makes me want to shout, hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus.

Lord, you're worthy of all the glory.

Okay, we're sitting there now.

I gotta tell you, that song hit big time when I was in college.

When I was in college, I had made this big change in my life.

Lord, I'm gonna follow you.

I had no resume, I didn't really know much about the Bible yet.

All I had was commitment and a pure heart.

I was like, Lord, I'll do whatever you want me to do, I'll go where you want me to go, I'll say what you want me to say.

I was fully, totally committed, and I was willing.

And so I remember moments when they would sing that song in our chapel services, and I would go down to the front, man.

I'm in the altar, I'm crying on the carpet, I could show you some tear stains that are mine, right, in those spots.

I it took me back.

So when they started singing that, something just felt right to me, something was pure, and you know, and I just felt a need to throw a chair or something.

I had like a spirit of vandalism, you know, that came over me.

I was like, you know, just remembering, okay?

And so so here, this is what I want to say because I have a tremendous value for nostalgia, not just in church, but in many areas of my life.

But if you're not careful, what you'll do is take the nostalgia and the feeling that it gives you of something being right and righteous will play tricks on you.

And what you'll start to do is put God in a category that he can only redeem like he did in Exodus, instead of missing that God can redeem in any way he wants to.

When he's bringing you out of Babylon, it may look completely different than when he brought you out of Egypt.

Understand this.

When it comes to God's character, he's unchanging.

He's the same yesterday, today, and forever.

He's always been a redeemer since the garden.

He's still a redeemer and he will always be a redeemer.

He's a God of patience, he's a God of grace, he's a God of truth, he's a God of love, always has been and always will be.

But at the same time that you hold God's character as unchanging, you need to know that his methods are always shifting and he's doing a new thing.

In fact, one of the themes of the Bible from beginning to end are people that miss the flow of what God was doing because it didn't look familiar to them.

All the way to the time that Jesus shows up and people looked right over the head of the Messiah.

Right over the head of the Messiah to miss God's chosen one who was sent to them because he did not look like what they expected.

So, friend, you've got to hold two hands.

On one hand, you have to hold God's unchanging, same yesterday, today, and forever character.

That's why he announced himself as redeemer.

At the same time, you have to be ready for God to change and to do things.

One time he makes dry land through the water, other times he brings water to the dry land.

This is why it says in the text, do you not perceive it?

The question is not, is God not working?

God is working.

The question is, he says, Do you perceive it?

Are you missing it?

I I saw a video that was going around a little while ago, and it was these two guys, and the one guy says, the other guy, he says, Hey, let's do this real quick.

He said, I'm gonna give you five seconds.

You're gonna have to go fast, five seconds.

But I want you to, as quickly as you can, look around this room and identify everything that's blue.

Count it and flag it, and I want you to find every blue thing in this room.

And Marcus said, Go.

Time's up.

Okay, he gives him five seconds.

How you doing?

And the guy's like, Okay, I got it.

And he's I saw this many things, and this is what I saw, and he saw things all over the room with accuracy, and he was able to get it done.

And he goes, Cool, cool, okay, close your eyes.

He said, Tell me one thing in the room that's red.

The guy couldn't name one thing.

He said, Open your eyes.

And there's a red thing right in front of him.

He saw the blue thing back on the back corner and saw it with tremendous accuracy, and yet there was a red thing right in front of him that he didn't see because he wasn't looking for it.

In Isaiah, when he says, Do you perceive the work that God is doing?

It could be that I don't see what God is doing because I'm looking for God to do a blue thing.

When this season God may be working in red.

And I only think he can do blue.

So I just keep looking for blue and I keep missing the red thing that God's doing right in front of me.

He said, Do you perceive it?

Or are you just looking for me to make a dry land through water?

Yeah, the interesting thing historically is when you look at the Exodus, okay, we we know the Exodus story.

How does God deliver them?

He crushes Pharaoh, he sends plagues, one plague after another.

It's real dramatic.

He parts the Red Sea, they drown the oppressor in the water, and then they come out of the other side on dry land.

What's interesting is the Babylonian exile was not big and dramatic.

It wasn't that Cyrus the Great was crushed.

It wasn't that the army drowned.

It was actually a diplomatic move where Cyrus ultimately was trying to gain compliance with not just the children of Israel, but all the people that they had captured, to say, instead of us trying to get compliance by forcing you to be like us, we're actually gonna say, go ahead and restore your own culture.

Back to your own countries, go back to your cities, and when you do, go ahead and restore, but be a part of our uh of our nation.

So when they did, again, the the idea was it looked totally different.

They got to go back to their land.

They left exile.

You're coming back in freedom.

You're gonna restore the law, you're gonna restore God's word, you're gonna be able to do um the worship practices and all of this.

But it's not going to be God smoking uh Pharaoh on the way out.

He was doing something different.

So the idea is, again, they had in their minds a way God would deliver, and God is giving them now a word through Isaiah, and he's saying, God is a redeemer, and he's going to bring you home.

He's going to bring you out.

Do you perceive it?

Or are you simply looking for something that God used to do or did in the past?

So, friends, we have to be able to do this, and one hand, to remember and to look back on the things that God has done and to be inspired by his faithfulness and his consistency and redemption.

And at the same time, not being so, not latching onto it so hard that we put God in a box that he does not belong in to go, Lord, what's the new thing that you're gonna do that will make me uncomfortable?

It might feel like the opposite of what you did before, and yet, Lord, if that's what you're doing, that's what I'm into.

That that's the flow that I want to be in.

I want to walk in that.

So I want you to think about this.

I want you to think about this.

What is maybe the move of God or the working of God in your life that's hiding in plain sight that you're unfamiliar with and frankly uncomfortable with?

It could look like something like this.

Maybe your desire is to be in a romantic relationship.

Maybe your desire, maybe you lost a romantic relationship, you had a breakup or a divorce or something, and so now you're going, God, I want you to move in my life, and so I want you to bring me the person of my dreams.

I want you to bring me a better match.

And so now your whole obsession is I gotta find this.

And in your mind, you think the way God would bless you would be to bring somebody in so I'm not alone, and yet there may be a redemption work that God wants to do in your life that would be done best in a season of singleness.

It might happen in some times of solitude, it might happen in some times of frustration, it might be that the thing that you want you don't have, and then and you're looking right over it, going, God, would you bless me with somebody?

And God says, Actually, I want to bless you with nobody.

That's a prophetic warning for somebody right there.

That is a prophetic warning.

Listen, sometimes God wants to bless you with slowing you down.

I was telling a friend we were processing this sermon together.

My nature is I'm a go, go, go, go.

I have visions, ideas, I want to make it happen, I do whatever.

And God has worked so deeply and unexpectedly in my mind, often through things that forced me to a standstill.

Things like physical injuries, things like actually the the the condition of my son's special needs, that if the conditions were different and I could just harvest, harvest, harvest, harvest, harvest, harvest all the time, the harvest might distract me from sitting down and doing the work that I had to do when I was at a standstill, when I had to stop.

So often, God will do a redemptive work in your life when you are forced into a pace that you don't want to be in.

Some of you are wired for, and you have almost maybe even a craving for it, a obsessive, compulsive drive to make things happen.

And so when things are a little chaotic, it actually feels right to you.

Okay?

And so when you are in a place where you're slowing down, you call it stuck.

Why am I stuck?

And instead of stopping and going, Lord, why do you have me at a stop right now?

Because God may have something He wants to do in the stop, but you keep thinking it's stuck, but God's got you stopped.

So if you'll stop and go, Lord, what do you want to do in the stop?

There may be a work that God does in the stop that you can't do at 55 miles an hour at 75 miles an hour at a breakneck pace.

Things are going too fast.

So you may be feeling stuck, but God may be having you stopped.

And the redemptive work may cause that pace.

The inverse is true as well.

Some of you go, man, I like to have my ducks in a row.

I like to have things in order.

I like to have it organized.

I like it to be predictable.

I don't want to go too fast.

I'm not trying to break the world record.

I like to just have it all within my control.

And all of a sudden you find yourself at a chaotic pace.

And in the chaotic pace, you don't see it as God's will.

But maybe God wants to teach you how to have peace in the chaos.

Maybe there's a redemptive work that He wants to do when you're out of that comfort zone.

So what we have in Isaiah 43 is a beautiful, beautiful picture of forget the former things.

The forget the former things is everything from the first 39 chapters of not paying attention to the warnings.

It's not forget that, it's grow wise from that, but move on from that.

And it's also good things, not just the bad things of the first 39 chapters, the good things of the few verses before, of the work that God has done that we're thankful for, we're grateful for, but if we're not careful, the nostalgia of those things will play tricks on our mind to keep us stuck in what God was doing in Exodus and miss what God's doing in Isaiah.

Alright?

So do you perceive it?

Are you seeing it?

Are you in lockstep with it?

Are you sensing what God is up to?

And so he says, God's moving and God's going to make a way through the wilderness.

Do you perceive it and will you walk by faith?

Here's how I want to take a moment here to end.

I want to put up three questions, and I just want to give us some space to breathe and to pray and allow the Lord to speak to us.

Here's the three questions.

And you all three may be for you, or there may be one that you latch on to that is for you today.

The first is where do I need to let go from the past?

And for you, it may be that first 39 chapters where instead of just going back and going, I wish I would have, and woulda, coulda, shoulda, and man, I can't believe I did, and how dumb was I, and wish I could just go back.

Well, you can't go back, so it's time to let go.

Learn everything you can learn from it, become a better, wiser person than you were before.

Learn to not ignore red flags when they come up because the red flags in the first 39 chapters, those aren't the last red flags you're gonna see in your life.

So learn from that, but then you got to let go of it.

And for some of you, it might be actually letting go of some good things in your life.

It may be you've been praying for God to bring back something that He's been calling you to move on from.

So, what do I need to let go of from the past?

The second is what is God doing now that I've been overlooking.

For some of you, when I talked about the blue-red analogy, so you look for blue and you missed the red.

Maybe God's doing something red and you keep looking for blue.

For some of you, that might have illuminated something in your heart that you go, okay, this is it.

I see it.

Aha, I see what I've been looking over.

And yet for some of you, maybe there's still a big question mark there.

And you're going, man, I'm open to the fact that maybe I've been limiting what God does in the future to how I've experienced him in the past, but maybe that's still a question for you.

And I don't necessarily have the answer.

I don't know what that means for you, but that's a wonderful thing to bring to God in the next few moments and in the next season, as you ask God to help you do what the verse said, which is perceive.

Do you not perceive?

I want to perceive, Lord, what you're doing, and I'm on board.

And then the third is what does it mean for me to walk by faith right now?

And my hunch is that there are probably some in the room today that when you look at your path forward, it feels like you're going through the wasteland in the wilderness.

And you might almost feel like you you can't see a way out, or you question if you're up for that long walk through the wilderness.

And today I want to encourage you to commit yourself to take one step of faith at a time.

God said, I'll do my part, which is I'll bring water into the wasteland.

I'll bring water into the dry place.

And some of you you go, my life is a dry place.

You need to walk by faith and trust God to bring the provision when you need it.

God will bring sustenance into the wilderness.

God will bring water into the wilderness, but you have to admit do your part to say, I'm going to walk by faith, even though I have questioned whether I can make it or not.

So let's take a moment.

Let's take a moment and ask these questions to God and pray these prayers.

God, I release the former things.

God, open my eyes to perceive what you're doing.

God, help me see the way that you're making before me.

Let's take a moment.

Lord, I do so with a heart full of gratitude.

I thank you for how you save me and how you raise me.

And it makes me want to shout.

And yet, Lord, help me to not let the nostalgia of the way you delivered me in the past cause me to limit what you want to do now.

Help me to perceive what you're up to now, even if it looks like the opposite of how I've seen you move in the past.

Lord, if you want to make water in the dry land, I'm not gonna try to make you make dry land in the water.

If you want to flip it, flip it.

Count me in.

I'm in for whatever you want to do.

Help me to see my part.

Now, Lord, I ask you to make a way.

Make a way through the wilderness.

Provide.

Lord, you do the directing.

We do the moving.

You do the making.

We thank you, God.

Lord, I pray for my brothers and sisters, Lord.

Lord, I thank you for the ones today who have a clear answer to their questions.

Lord, you have a way of speaking, often putting a spotlight on something that we need to think to align and calibrate our thoughts to you.

So I pray for those ones who are going to leave today clear.

I pray you give them a sense that you're with them and that you're walking with them and that they're not alone, even though it may feel like a lonely season, that you're with them.

And Lord, I pray for those ones today who have just begun to ask the question that still feel like the answers are elusive.

The ones who would say, No, I don't really perceive what God is doing, but I'm open to it.

Lord, I pray that that process of discovery, Lord, would be rich in their lives, and that as they continue to pray that prayer and ask and seek and knock, that you would open those doors and that you would bring answers to those questions, and that you would do a formative work in their lives.

We thank you, we praise you, Lord.

We give 2026 to you.

Lord, we cast all of our cares upon you.

We don't know what January, February, what each month will hold, but we know that you're there, that you'll be with us along the way.

So, Lord, we don't walk in fear, we walk in confidence, we walk by faith.

And Lord, we release the things we're supposed to release so we can lay hold of what you're trying to give to us.

In Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.

Amen.