The Chair You Didn't Choose | Pastor Chris Kouba

Alright, you guys got me all fired up.

You're worshiping the Lord in a good way.

Good to see you finally awake, back.

School started, so you're in and being able to be focused.

Let me read you a verse.

You know this verse, you've heard it a thousand times.

Jeremiah 29, 11.

It says this, for I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord.

Plans for wholeness and not for evil to give you a future and a hope.

We love that verse.

Think about what we just sang, though.

Look at what verse 12 and 13 says.

He says, Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.

I sought the Lord and he heard and he answered.

Verse 13, you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.

Father, we come into your presence today, and we are so thankful that we're not just lifting up praise to you with some hope that somehow we could make you happy enough to be able to give us a little blessing.

But you invite us into your presence.

You invite us to walk with you as with a friend.

And so, Father, today as we open up your word and as we hear from you, I pray this would not be another part of the service that we go to every week, but God, you would meet us in this moment.

That God, your presence would be here.

That Father, whether we were expecting it or anticipating it or even wanting it, God, I pray you'd show up in our hearts.

Lord, may you bring conviction, may you bring comfort, may you bring peace.

Thank you for the privilege of knowing that when we seek you, we will find you.

When we seek you with all of our hearts.

It's in the name of Jesus that I pray.

Amen.

Hey, grab your Bibles, open them up with me to 1 Samuel chapter 24.

1 Samuel 24 · chapter mention

1 Samuel chapter 24.

1 Samuel 24 · chapter mention

And go ahead and grab your journals, if you would.

Hopefully you've been coming and you've been a part of our series the last couple of weeks and have been following along in your journals and taking notes.

If you do not have a journal, we do want to put one of these in your hands.

Just raise your hands and we will get these to you.

Keep those hands up and we will make sure to get a copy of a journal in your hands.

I've got some up there up top.

Uh, we want to make sure to open them up to page 10, is where we're gonna be today as we begin to take notes, walking through this passage in 1 Samuel chapter 24.

1 Samuel 24 · chapter mention

We are a couple of weeks into a sermon series that we've just been entitling The King's Table.

And the the whole series is kind of built on these two big premises, okay?

One of them is the fact, I've got some over here, guys, as well, up there in the section for me.

They're getting them to you, no problem.

Uh, first premise is this: all of you are leaders.

Everybody that's hearing my voice is a leader.

You're either a leader in your company, you're a leader at your school, you're a leader on your team, you're a leader on your block, in your neighborhood, you're a leader in your group, maybe you're a leader at church, maybe you're a leader in your house.

No matter what, all of you are at least leaders of yourselves.

And what I want to argue, the image we're trying to use is that King David, as we look at the relational life of King David, King David has a table.

And at that table, he has chosen people to be at that table who give him influence, who speak into his life, who have the ability to shape what he does and how he thinks.

And I'm gonna argue that all of you, as leaders, have a table.

And you have a choice as to who gets to sit at your table.

Talk so far about two different people that you can put at your table.

One is Samuel.

Samuel is somebody who sees what God sees in you.

We love having Samuels at our table.

I mean, Samuels are the ones who we want to be able to speak what God sees that we may not even be seeing or be able to call out what we felt like God is saying, but maybe didn't have the courage.

The Samuels in our lives begin to say, go for it.

Last week we looked at Jonathan.

Jonathan is the one who fights for us.

Man, we want to just fill our table with Jonathan's, right?

Like that is a great thing to have Jonathan's in your life.

Today, though, what I want to talk about is another seat at the table, but this is not a seat that you get to choose.

It's actually somebody that's sitting at the table and you don't want them to be there.

And in fact, you not only want them to be there, you would love to remove them and put somebody else at the table.

The problem is you're stuck with this person.

Maybe this is the family member who just doesn't go well.

You got a couple times a year, you know you're gonna have an event, you're gonna have a holiday, that you're gonna be near them.

And as much as you've thought about it, you're stuck with them at the table.

There's really nothing you can do.

Maybe this is your ex, kids are involved, and you're literally attached forever.

And as much as you would love to just remove that person out of your life altogether, it's not realistic.

They're always gonna be at your table.

Maybe for you it's a work colleague, maybe it's the person that's gonna do your year in review, maybe it's the person that got added to your team.

And if you were honest in a moment of vulnerability, you would say you don't even like them.

Yet you're stuck with them.

You've done the analysis, lay to bed at night, and thought, what would it cost me to get rid of this person from my table?

You've run the numbers and it doesn't add up.

To walk away from this particular situation means you're gonna walk away from other relationships that you do want at your table.

Maybe you really need the job, so it's not worth it.

So you just deal with it.

Maybe the kid dynamic is such that you know, you just you gotta figure out how to make it work.

And so instead of you be removing this person from your table instead, what you've had to do is figure out how to manage the person at your table.

You show up 15 minutes late, anytime you know that you're gonna be together at the same place, that way you can just have a little less time of interaction.

You got your two basic topics that you go to that you talk about, which are super surface-y, and you just stick with those two topics, and you make sure you never talk about anything else.

Maybe you're just gotten worn down with age, and so therefore you're just like, Look, I don't even care anymore.

But you honestly are saying, I'm not gonna engage and respond to you, I'm just gonna tolerate you.

But all along, they're at the table and they have influence over you.

They can speak into your life by what they do or what they don't do.

And you've run the you've you it's like keeping score.

The problem is the score never gets settled, they're just always there.

What I want us to consider and think through is what do we do with those people who are sitting at our table that we don't want to be there, but we can't do anything about.

We're gonna look at a passage of scripture where David had somebody just like that at his table.

But David's situation wasn't like a minor annoyance or just an inconvenience.

This was a guy who was actively seeking to kill him.

Like he was running for his life, but he's got this guy named Saul always sitting at the table and he can't get rid of him.

Let me give you a little bit of a context, okay?

Saul was somebody who was the current king.

And we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

David had been anointed as going to be the future king.

The problem is Saul's not dead.

And so, in light of that, what you see is that Saul becomes very jealous of David's popularity and the fact that David has this great future, and so therefore, he mandates he needs to be killed, he needs to be eliminated.

What you see in chapters 21, 22, and 23, you see David on the run.

And multiple times you see Saul bringing a massive army going after David, trying to catch him, trying to ultimately kill him.

But what we see is over and over again, God begins to intervene and he gives David a heads up, and David is allowed to escape, and Saul is not able to carry out his vindictive plans.

We get to chapter 24, and it's the same thing we expect is going to be taking place.

Rinse and repeat.

David runs, he gets a word from God, and he leaves and escapes the situation.

Saul comes after David, but that's not at all what takes place.

Would you stand as we read God's word together?

1 Samuel chapter 24.

1 Samuel 24 · chapter mention

We're going to be reading all throughout the chapter, but I just want to start by reading these first three verses as we stand in honor of God's word.

When Saul returned from following the Philistines, he was told, Behold, David is in the wilderness of Engedi.

Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel and went to seek David and his men in front of the wild goats' rocks.

And he came to the sheepfolds by the way where there was a cave.

And Saul went in to relieve himself.

Now David and his men were sitting in the innermost parts of the cave.

You guys can take a seat.

Let me set the scene up for you.

Lot of descriptions here in the Bible.

Love it.

Three thousand men coming up against David and his men.

We learned from 1 Samuel chapter 23 that that's about 600.

1 Samuel 23 · chapter mention

3,000 against 600.

And then Saul walks into the cave by himself.

It just happened to be the same cave that David and his men were in.

And he walks in.

He is not armed, and he's going to the bathroom.

I don't care how strong you are.

Nobody's that strong when they're going to the bathroom.

Alright?

He's in a vulnerable position.

And what you see in this moment is that God is not giving David yet another way to escape from Saul.

God instead is there to test Saul.

Or excuse me, God is there to test David.

The man who had spent three chapters trying to kill him is standing right there with his back turned, and the way out of this situation isn't the door.

The way out of this situation is taking out the threat that's in front of him.

And the question in that cave is not whether David can survive Saul.

He has proven that over and over again.

The question is: can David be trusted with Saul?

Take your journals out on page 10.

I want you to write down the main bottom line of the message today, which is this leaders honor God even when relationships become difficult.

Leaders honor God even when relationships become difficult.

I didn't say leaders honor God whenever it gets easier.

I didn't say leaders honor God when the person finally admits what they did.

But when it's still hard, they're still doing it, and nothing has changed.

The question is, how?

How do you do this?

How do you honor God?

And how do you especially honor God in this situation here with David when it literally looks like you've been handed over a way to deal with your problem?

I want to show you four things from this chapter.

The first one is found in verse four.

Look at what it says.

And the men of David said to him, Here is the day of which the Lord said to you, Behold, I will give your enemy into your hand, and you shall do to him as it shall seem good to you.

Then David arose and stealthily cut off a corner of Saul's robe.

Write this down.

How do you honor God when relationships become difficult?

Number one, follow your conviction, not the crowd.

Follow your conviction, not the crowd.

It says there that these men of David come to him and say, quote a Bible verse.

Here's the day of which the Lord said to you, Behold, I will give your enemy into your hand, and you shall do to him as you shall seem good to you.

That is an awesomely quoted Bible verse that doesn't exist.

God never said that.

And they've been running for years from King Saul.

And now you see Saul right there.

He is going to the bathroom.

He is vulnerable in every way.

And they're thinking, well, surely the Lord must want this.

This must be his way of delivering.

You can imagine how often they have been praying, God, would you deliver us from our enemies?

And now we see the situation.

And the assumption is surely.

So they quoted something that they wanted to be true, and they just put God's name on it.

You ever done that before?

You ever found yourself in a situation to where what you want to happen lines up with what appears to be possible in front of you, and it doesn't seem like it's a temptation.

It actually seems like it's a confirmation.

But an open door is not the same thing as the voice of God.

One of the things the Lord's working with me on a lot right now is timing.

In my mind, I always want to be urgent.

I always want to go.

I always want to move forward.

And the invitation that the Lord is giving to me is to wait.

And in my mind, I'm thinking, well, we're going to lose all of our momentum.

We're going to lose all of the urgency.

We're going to lose all of the ground that we could take.

And the Lord has been responding to me and say, Do you honestly think I'm worried about your urgency?

Don't you think with my timing is greater than your urgency?

Folks, the crowd is going to tell you, go.

But the spirit may be saying something very different.

And what we see here is that David gets told by all of these guys, quoting a Bible verse, maybe go take him out.

And it says that he goes up to Saul and he takes out a sword and he stealthily cuts off a corner of his robe.

Doesn't seem that bad compared to what he could have done, which is killed him.

Look at verse 5.

And afterward David's heart struck him, because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe.

The phrase struck there in the Hebrew is actually way more vivid than it is here in the English.

It's actually the same word that is used for cutting a man down in battle.

It's the blow that ends someone.

But in this context here, the only one who got struck in that cave wasn't Saul.

The only one that got struck was David.

And he did it to himself.

Every one of you knows the chirp.

The chirp never happens at two in the afternoon.

The chirp only happens at two in the morning.

You hear it, you think clearly I was dreaming.

There's no way that that's real.

30 seconds or so later, you hear the chirp again.

And you realize your smoke detector is letting you know that the battery is dying.

And I don't care how many batteries that you have in your house, how many 9-volt batteries you bought previously, at 2 a.m.

you can never find a 9-volt battery anywhere in the house.

Ever.

And so because you keep hearing it and trying to ignore it and it's not going to go away, what do you do?

You grab a chair, you grab a ladder, and you just rip the stupid thing off the ceiling.

And you put it down there on the counter and you go back to bed and you sleep.

Amazing.

Wake up the next day and you see it on the counter, and you just realize how annoyed that you were that that took place.

But you don't do anything about it.

Couple days later, you look and you're trying to tidy up the house a little bit and you notice that the smoke detector hasn't moved from the counter that you place it on at 2 a.m.

whenever the situation happened in the first place.

And so, therefore, in order to tidy things up, you grab it and you stick it into a cabinet drawer and you just leave it there.

Only to look up a couple of weeks later, and now you have a spot missing in your ceiling where a smoke detector used to be, and you don't even think about it anymore.

Was the smoke detector broken?

No, the smoke detector was actually working.

The chirp was your indication that you need to deal with this.

But because we got rid of the chirp, we now assume that a quiet house is the same thing as a safe house.

And it's not.

David is in the cave and he hears a chirp.

And the crowd, the men around him, are quoting Bible verses to him to say, hey, just ignore the chirp.

You don't need to worry about that.

This is God, this is him giving us what we've always wanted.

Do not listen to that chirp.

But David could have taken it.

Nobody in the cave would have argued with him if he would have gone and taken Saul out in that moment.

But he instead allowed the conviction of the Lord to not only come upon him, but to cause him to be struck in his heart.

Folks, conviction is that thing that keeps going off after everybody around you has agreed that it doesn't need to.

Conviction is the thing that lets you follow God's voice instead of allowing the crowd to quiet your conscience.

Think about it.

If he'd have followed the crowd and done what they wanted him to do, he would have become the very person that was trying to kill him.

Follow your conviction, not the crowd.

He said to his men, The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my Lord, the Lord's anointed, to put out my hand against him, seeing that he is the Lord's anointed.

How do you honor God when relationships are difficult?

Number two, honor God, not the person.

Honor God, not the person.

Here's what I want you to see.

David didn't say one word in verse six there about Saul's character.

He didn't argue that Saul deserves better.

He does not claim that Saul is a good man who's having a rough decade.

The reason he stops is one phrase said twice in verse six.

The Lord's anointed.

David spared Saul because of who God is, not because of who Saul was.

You might wonder, like, why is cutting off the robe that big of a deal?

It represented a lot.

Back in 1 Samuel 15, we actually see that Saul tore the robe of Samuel, and Samuel said to Saul, Saul, I want you to know because you have done this grievous thing, it's going to indicate that the kingdom of God is, or the kingdom that you have is going to be taken from you.

So David knew that to cut off the robe was like an act of war.

So he goes in there and he cuts off the robe, essentially saying, I'm going to go and take this kingdom over.

I'm going to take upon your throne.

We know that God had already promised that, but the reason that he felt guilty was not because of what he had done, but because of the timing of what he had done.

He was trying to take the kingdom on his terms instead of trying to take the kingdom the way that God was going to do it on his timetable.

Church family, hear this.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Some of you may be in a situation right now and you have the opportunity to do what it is that you want to do.

Maybe what you feel like is even justified to you, that doesn't mean you should do it.

You instead need to be so led by the Spirit of God that his timing trumps your results.

Because ultimately that's what the problem was.

Please hear me though.

I get it, man.

It is hard.

We want revenge.

We want justice.

We want that person to finally get what is coming to them.

You read the Psalms and you see this is a very natural thought.

David, many times the precatory psalms this praying, God, bring down wrath on my enemies.

And you read it and you're like, okay, I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

But what I want you to see though is just because it's a normal feeling doesn't make it your job to achieve.

Honor God, not the person.

You are not being asked to call somebody safe who is not safe.

You're not being asked to call somebody good who is not good.

You're not being asked to say somebody is right who is not right.

But you are being asked to answer to somebody higher than they are.

David honored the office that God put Saul in.

He never once honored the man that Saul had become.

That's not what happens.

Look at what continues in verse 8.

It says, after where David also arose and went out of the cave and called after Saul, my Lord the King.

And when Saul looked behind him, David bowed with his face to the earth and paid homage.

Let's just stop right there.

Can you imagine how hard that would be?

This guy's been seeking you in your life.

Yet he shows him the honor that he is due by bowing down to him and calling him my Lord the King.

Verse 9, and David said to Saul, Why do you listen to the words of men who say, Behold, David seeks your harm.

Behold, this day your eyes have seen how the Lord gave you today into my hand in the cave.

And some told me to kill you, but I spared you.

I said, I will not put out my hand against my Lord, for he is the Lord's anointed.

Same thing we've seen before.

Verse 6.

See my father, see the corn see my father, the see the corner of your robe in my hand.

For by the fact that I cut off the corner of your robe and did not kill you, you may know and see that there is no wrong or treason in my hands.

I have not sinned against you, though you hunt my life to take it.

Third thing, the way you honor God when relationships are difficult.

Number three, speak it, don't spread it.

Speak it, don't spread it.

When we are heard, it's very easy to tell everybody else and start trying to collect people to get on our team.

But the right move, we see it over and over again.

Proverbs over and over again, Ephesians, James, so many of these passages about our speech say the thing that you're supposed to do.

Matthew 18, go to the person.

Don't talk around it, go to them.

Look at verse 12.

May the Lord judge between me and you.

May the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you.

Look at verse 15.

May the Lord therefore be judge and give sentence between me and you and see to it and plead my cause and deliver me from your hand.

Twice.

David hands the verdict to God and he tells it straight to Saul instead of telling everybody else about Saul.

Folks, I'm guilty on this.

In my flesh, I've done this before in the past.

Where somebody's got something against me, somebody's got a problem with me, somebody's got a they they disagree with me on something.

And instead of going to them and talking to them, what I'll do is I'll maybe go and find Jason, staff member, and I'll go executive pastor.

And man, let me let me just process this with you and I'll kind of tell them the story.

Essentially getting him on my team.

And then I'll go home and I'll talk to Hillary and man, you're gonna believe this, and this is what happened, and this is kind of this person thinks this way and feels this way, and get her on my team.

And then maybe I see somebody else out and I talk to them, like, man, you know so-and-so, right?

Can you believe?

I think they think this, and then I'm kind of I just don't understand why they would feel that way, and I get them on the team.

And then what happens?

Essentially, I've got all these people on my team.

I go and then I see them out in public, and what do I do?

I see them there and I begin to rehearse in my mind.

Okay, what am I gonna say if they walk up to me?

What am I gonna say if there's a confrontation and I've going through all of these scenarios, and it's certainly affecting not only my mood in that moment, but it's affecting the rest of my day as I begin to process and think through that.

And all along, if I'd have just had a conversation with that person, I could have either dealt with it if it was a real situation, or I could have realized it wasn't a real situation to begin with.

It was just all in my head.

Folks, we do this all the time.

We we spread it instead of speak it to the person.

Then we come up with different ways of doing it.

You know, some of you are like, Well, I'm just I'm just gonna avoid them.

I'm not gonna say anything.

I'm just gonna be gracious, I'm not gonna really make a thing of it, I'm just gonna kind of drop it.

But the reality is you're just filing it away, keeping a big, large file that's gonna come out somehow, sometime.

Or maybe you are like I tend to be, and maybe you're kind of like, well, I'm just gonna go tell somebody, I'm gonna tell the group chat.

I'm gonna call my sister on the way home and fill her in.

Okay.

I'm gonna I'm gonna share it as a prayer request, put a Bible verse on it, and then basically get everybody on my team.

If your best friend knows all the details about the situation, but the person that you're in the situation with doesn't, that's a problem.

What I want you to see is the way you honor God is not by getting more people on your side.

The way you honor God is by speaking directly to them.

David had 600 men that he would have gladly been able to tell all kinds of things about Saul, and they'd have easily piled on.

Instead, he walks out, he bows down before Saul himself, and he speaks it right to Saul's face.

Look, the verdict's gonna be the Lord's.

This is where I'm at.

Whenever you speak it instead of spread it, it's a freeing thing.

Because you quit writing a story in your head that nobody else gets to answer.

David has said his peace and he stops talking, is the first time that we see Saul start to engage.

It's kind of his move now.

And look at what happens in verse 16.

As soon as David had finished speaking these words to Saul, Saul said, Is this your voice, my son David?

And Saul lifted up his voice and wept.

He said to David, You are more righteous than I, for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil.

Skip down to verse 20.

And now, behold, I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand.

Final way I want you to see to honor God when relationships are difficult.

Number four.

Let God have the last word, not you.

Let God have the last word, not you.

And 24, the end of it especially, it kind of reads like a pretty good ending.

Like it kind of maybe what you would want.

David speaks up.

Saul feels remorse.

He breaks down and cries.

And then watch how the chapter closes.

Verse 22.

David swore this to Saul.

Saul went home.

David and his men went up to the stronghold.

Saul went home.

David went to the stronghold.

They walked off in opposite directions.

Saul cries in the cave.

He tells David that he's sorry.

You were right.

I was wrong.

Everything's good, right?

Nope.

He ends up going back home.

Starts thinking about it a little bit more.

Gets mad all over again and goes right back after David.

David, on the other hand, because of his experience in that cave, he actually did leave with a clean conscience and a God who's keeping his promises, which he's gonna need because he's gonna go back on the run.

Here's what I want you to hear.

Some of you have been waiting on a verdict.

You've been wanting someone to say out loud that you were right and that they were wrong.

You want the apology, you want that one person to say, yes, that happened and it was not okay, and you might get it.

And the situation doesn't change.

But it could change dramatically for you because God is not promising you a clean ending.

God is promising you the last word.

He's just promising that he gets to be the one that gets it.

So what does this mean?

All of you would love for you to be able to quietly, peacefully eliminate that person from your table and replace it with somebody else.

The reality is this rarely happens.

The chair ends up staying, but you get to quit keeping score because somebody higher than you already is.

Let me ask you have you let God have the last word in your life?

Are you willing to hand your situation over to him?

Romans chapter 12, verse 19 says this, beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.

Romans 12:19

For it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

And the verse right before it, verse 18, says this if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

The word if is an important word.

It doesn't mean that it's always gonna happen, but it means you always have to try.

It means that I've got to do everything in my power, not to try to get rid of them from the table, but to live peaceably.

And if it doesn't work out, if they still come after me, I'm gonna trust the Lord.

I'm gonna honor him.

I'm not gonna go back to all the things that I want to do to discredit him, to get people on my side.

Instead, I'm just gonna follow after God.

And I'm gonna trust with the results.

Some of you are sitting here and you're thinking, How does anybody do this?

Like, how could anybody actually live this way?

Here's the answer: it's people who got mercy when they knew they had justice coming.

Romans 3 23 says this for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Most of us like to grade our sin life on a curve.

We try to find somebody else who's who's worse than us, and we think, well, at least we're not them.

But God's standard is perfection, holiness, and righteousness, and none of us add up.

And because of that, all of us have a debt that we had to pay.

But God sent his one and only Son, Jesus, to onto this earth, live a perfect, sinless, obedient life.

He died a sacrificial death on a cross.

He paid for all of our sins, yours and mine.

He rose from the dead three days later, defeating the power of sin and the power of death, and then he offers you who deserve nothing the opportunity to have all of your sins forgiven.

And if that wasn't enough, he offers the one who is an enemy of God to become his friend.

And it allows Jesus, the scriptures say, to be the just and justifier of our sins.

He paid the penalty and he gives us his righteousness.

And so the reason why you're able to sit with somebody at your table that you don't want to be there is because you know that you're sitting at a table that you don't deserve to be at either.

Let me ask you this: have you ever received Jesus as your Lord and as your Savior?

Would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me all across this room?

Have you received Jesus?

Have you given your life to him?

Have you allowed his forgiveness and his mercy to cover your sins?

I want to invite you to do that today.

In just a moment, our team is gonna be up front.

What I want to ask you to do, they're gonna be at the bottom of the steps in the front of the church.

Would you just come forward?

If you've never received Jesus, you've never given your life to him, you've never allowed his forgiveness to be on your account.

I'm gonna ask you to come forward.

We want to pray with you.

We want to answer questions that you have.

We want to walk with you in this decision so that you can leave here today, knowing with certainty that you know Jesus.

Others of you need to come and join United City Church.

God is leading you to make this your church home.

Your coming is going to encourage others.

Others of you need to come and be baptized.

This is your next step of public obedience to be baptized.

Maybe some of you need prayer today.

Maybe you need prayer because, man, you're in the throes of it.

You're about to be sitting at the table with that person.

And you need help.

You need someone to come alongside of you.

Maybe you're know that maybe today you felt even the prompting of the Holy Spirit, the conviction of God to maybe to move forward on some things or maybe to wait on some things.

You don't want to walk that alone.

Would you come and let us pray with you?

Want everybody just in a moment of prayer.

Just with your heads bowed and your eyes closed, would you just put your hands out just right in front of you with your palms up?

I want you to visualize this.

I want you to experience.

Now I want you to think about that person who's at your table that you don't want to be there.

And I want you to clench your fists as tight as you can.

Do you feel the tension in your arms?

You feel that tension in your entire body?

This is you trying to control the situation, trying to control that other person, trying to control their reaction, trying to control their response.

Would you just release it and feel the freedom that comes?

Father, we give these people to you.

God, we recognize that they're a child of God.

They may be an annoyance to us, but they are a beauty to you.

Father, would you keep us from buying the lie that we can control everything?

Father, we seek you with this relationship, we seek you with this problem, we seek you with this challenge.

And Father, we want to honor you in every way, believing God that you've got a purpose and you've got a plan for our lives, for this relationship, for our future.

Man, what an amazing time that we had today.

Hey, if you know of someone that needs to hear this message, we'd love for you to share that on socials.

We'd love for you to actually go and check out our socials so you can stay up to date on everything happening in the life of United City.

And if you need to take the next step, we'd love to help you do that as well.

Love you guys so much, and we'll see you next week.