Overflow: Seeds of Sacrifice with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time to get alive that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

All right, MetaCurch, how you guys doing?

Yeah.

Well, I want to welcome you in if you're new with us.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

I'm so glad that you guys joined us today.

Whether you're here at our Holotus venue, our Petrenko venue, or streaming with us online, I'm so glad that you are here.

You've joined at a really unique time in MetaCurch's annual rhythm.

At the beginning of the year, we come together and we make commitments for how we are going to be generous for that year.

It's a way to really put our foot down and decide how we believe in the mission and the vision that God has given us.

Last Sunday across two locations, five services, there were hundreds of you who came forward to make a commitment, either to start on your journey of generosity, which is so exciting, like I'm gonna start giving for the first time, or I'm gonna start giving consistently for the first time, or many others who are have been seeking God for how we can expand our generosity in our current giving.

We're gonna continue on this topic.

We're gonna really get to the ground level, get super practical today.

I'm excited about the message.

It's called Seeds of Sacrifice.

Seeds of Sacrifice.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you.

We thank you for your great love for us.

I thank you for MetaCurch.

Um, God, just a movement of people who always respond to whatever you are calling us towards.

And that is why you've allowed us to have so much impact in our city.

We pray that you would just continue to move in us, Holy Spirit, that we would be humble enough to open our hearts and minds to you today.

And we trust uh that you will speak to us.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, and everyone who's ready to get going say amen.

Amen.

Now, I I told you this last week.

I'm gonna tell you again if you missed week one of this series, uh, I am like begging you to make sure you go back and watch it.

We make it super easy.

You go to youtube.com slash metachurch.

All of our old sermons are on there.

Specifically, week one of this series matters because it gives context for how we think about generosity and how the Bible speaks to us about our money.

It's no surprise to you that people have a very difficult time when the church brings up finances.

There's so much hurt and there's so much pain.

And that's because for hundreds of years there have been preachers who take God's word and twist it and use it in very harmful ways.

And so in week one, we talked about that very clearly and very specifically, so that we could kind of clear the path and see what scripture actually talks to us about.

Now, I'll give you a little snippet from week one.

We rooted that week and we've rooted this series in the words of Jesus in Luke 6.

Jesus said, Give, and it will be given to you.

A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be poured out in your lap.

For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.

Now, we were very careful to say this could sound like the prosperity gospel, but that completely ignores the context that Jesus was speaking in.

Jesus lived his life and always preached through the lens of how to be a part of God's eternal kingdom.

This is not simple reciprocity.

You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

This is what we're calling spiritual reciprocity.

That's the idea that we offer what we have to God, trusting that his blessings will overflow some of it in this life.

We do believe that God wants to bless his children, but the majority of that blessing is stored up for us in eternity.

This isn't just, you know, give some money to God and you're gonna have all the houses and drive all the cars and wear all the watches and have all the brands.

This is give to God and you will live a quality of life and have an impact during this life that will speak to the innermost part of you that cries out for a life that really matters.

A life we always say lived on purpose and with purpose.

Now, what this teaches us about generosity is that generosity literally expands your capacity to receive God's blessing in your life.

Some of that will be experienced right here and right now, and the superabundance, the overflow that God offers you will be experienced in eternity.

Now, last week we talked about the powerful pull towards riches that get in the way of our generosity.

We are marketed to 24-7, 365 days a year, and many people live with the desire to be rich.

Scripture says those whose main desire is to be rich, they fall into a trap, and the lifestyle over time plunges them into ruin and destruction.

There is a better way, and the actual cry of our heart is not to be rich, it is to be enriched, to have a better quality of life, to experience God more fully, to live a life that enriches those around us.

And so many of us decided we were gonna shift our perspective last Sunday.

We're not gonna live to be rich, we're going to live an enriched life.

And so that's high-level perspective shift.

This week we're going to the ground level.

And here's the issue: there are so many followers of Jesus who desire to be generous, they just don't quite know how to do it.

And it's because of the problem of priorities.

Most of us were not taught proper financial stewardship.

You learn all kinds of things in school.

You can find, you know, all the different angles in a triangle.

Like, how many times have you used that in your real life?

Like, I wonder what the angle is on the bottom left of that triangle.

If you're an architect, sure.

If you're a pastor, I'm just letting you know, I don't use that, right?

What I was not taught in school was how to balance a budget, was how to invest well in my future, these basic life skills, and generationally, not only were we not taught that, but the majority of people did not have that modeled to them by their parents.

This is why about 60% of Americans say that their finances are an incredible source of stress in their life.

This is why 83% of Americans admit that occasionally in a given month they will spend more money than they make, and why almost 30% of Americans say that they virtually always spend more money than they make.

They live above their means.

And of course, you do this by putting purchases on credit, which piles up debt, and so you take care of that debt with another line of credit, which adds even more to your debt.

And by the time you extinguish a little bit of debt, you see something else you want to buy, and so you put a little more debt.

So let's connect this to the series.

In this series, we have learned scripture is very, very clear, God wants to bless you, and your generosity increases your ability to receive God's blessings in your life, in your family, in your movement.

If we're spending more money than we are making, we have no room for generosity.

Another way to say this is followers of Jesus don't have a motivation problem when it comes to generosity.

We have a margin problem.

We have the motivation to be generous, we do not have the margin in our finances to be generous.

I want to show you how this works.

This is an illustration, many of you have probably seen before.

We're just gonna give it a little more of a specific context.

Um, in everyone's life, uh you have a financial capacity.

Now, for some of you, right now, you make$30,000 a year.

That is your capacity.

For some of you, you make$130,000 a year.

That is your capacity.

This scales because you can always fill up your capacity, and the majority of people are living actually beyond their capacity, spending more money than they make.

We have a few different things here.

We have sand, and then we have some gravel, and we have our big rocks, and crucially, the the smaller substances are lower priority.

And so when you get down to the sand, this is not what you need, this is just what you want.

These are your desires, these are the things that grab your attention, that are marketed towards you all of the time.

And then with our gravel here, we have things that should be somewhere in the priority.

You know, food and shelter and water and clothing and kids and education, like things that matter and that you need to live.

And then we have our big rocks.

And your big rocks are your highest priority.

Now, if you are a skeptic, you're not convinced of the claims of Christianity.

Number one, I'm so glad that you're here at Medichurce, and I hope you'll keep coming and wrestling with this, and I think God is gonna find you at some point.

But you're gonna have to decide what your big rocks are, and hopefully they are something meaningful and that add value to your life and the life of others.

If you've put your faith in Jesus, this isn't up to you.

This has been prescribed for us.

Scripture is clear that we, this limited time on earth, maybe 80 or so years, that we might get, women, you get a few more years than we do, because men make really dumb decisions and you're a little more careful, right?

Men get like 78 right now, women get like 83.

That's expected like life expectancy in the West.

That is like the blinking of an eye in the scope of the eternal life that we have been given.

And so the highest priority, our greatest investment, our best impact is investing in the kingdom of God.

And the vehicle that God has chosen to build his kingdom on the earth is the local church.

That is priority.

However, most people don't know proper financial stewardship.

I lived much of my life this way.

And so as soon as money comes in, we skip past our highest investment.

We even often skip past our needs, and we go straight to our wants.

And our wants start taking up significant portions of our capacity.

And we saw that they released some new Jordans.

I'm not calling anybody, I'm not calling myself out right now for sure.

They just released some new Jordans and you just got paid.

So you need groceries, but you're gonna hit stock X real quick, you know?

And it's like, TJ Maxx is having a sale.

And I hear that all the time.

Can I tell you something?

TJ Maxx is always having a sale, right?

It's just one big sale.

And so you hit it up, and about halfway through the month, you're like, oh snap, I haven't paid my rent.

I better come over here and at least make sure that I have somewhere to live.

And it starts taking more capacity, and we take care of the basics, and we buy some ramen noodles, and then we get right back into what we want, you know?

And Instagram ads now, we don't have to go looking for what we want.

What we want comes looking for us.

And then it's like, yeah, you know, the kids do need some clothes right there in that gross further, and I gotta keep the lights on, and I gotta make sure there's AC in the house, and I gotta take care of all of my responsibilities, and we get to the end of the month, and then we get to see what we have left over for God.

And for a lot of us, this isn't even the real picture.

The real picture is just with our wants and needs, we're already overflowing.

We're living beyond our needs.

Even if we leave a little bit of margin, it's like the big rocks, the things that matter the most, the eternal things, they just don't fit.

And so it's like, look, God, I made my commitment, and next month, like I got you next month.

But next month, the new trucks go on sale.

Next month, that Instagram ad shows up for that thing that you didn't know, you didn't know that you needed a sauna in your house, but for$4.99, I'm sorry, four payments of$4.99.

We don't have a motivation problem.

I don't believe that, especially not at MetaCurch.

I do think we often have a margin problem.

We don't have room to see through the desires and the commitments that we have made towards what is most important.

This is the problem of priorities.

We're gonna be looking in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, he was overseeing this large network of churches.

They were kind of all over the known world where he was living.

And you could say, kind of like we say about Metachurch here with our Petrenko venue and our Holodus venue, that they were one movement with one mission, but they were meeting in multiple locations.

And one of the things Paul was trying to teach was a lifestyle of generosity.

And and you see this interesting tension in Paul, and and it's something I resonate with because I feel it every time I do a series like this.

On one hand, Paul is convinced that when you become generous towards God, it increases your capacity to receive blessing into your life.

And so he desperately wants his people to experience that.

He's also overseeing this movement that God has entrusted him with, and he knows if if his people will just give what they can, that there is like no end to what the church can accomplish.

On the other side of the tension, Paul goes out of his way to not strong arm, to not coerce, to not manipulate, to not lead through fear.

He's so careful about it.

And so in the church in Corinth, when he was there, people were so excited.

They were like, we're gonna start giving when money comes in, we're gonna set money aside, we're gonna give it to this movement.

But Paul was on a journey, he was away from Corinth.

And it seems like he caught wind that other priorities started creeping in the way.

They got distracted by the sands of life, and they were no longer being generous towards God.

And so in 2 Corinthians, Paul is writing to them.

I want us to look at what he says.

In 2 Corinthians 9, 6, he says, the point is this the person who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the person who sows generously will also reap generously.

Now, this is undeniable.

This metaphor is used all throughout scripture in the Old and New Testament.

It is an immutable law.

It's like the law of gravity.

You don't have to like the law of gravity, you can disagree with the law of gravity, but if you jump out of a window, gravity will prove itself to you, right?

It's just, it's an unchangeable law, the law of sowing and reaping.

I want to kind of, for just a second, step outside of the spiritual conversation we're having and just have like a very secular worldly conversation because the other thing Paul's doing here in this immutable law is he's demonstrating the difference between a wealth mindset and a poverty mindset.

And having a poverty mindset doesn't mean you're actively living in poverty.

In fact, there's people who on paper are very rich, but their mindset is poor.

And there are people who don't have much to their name, but they're living with a wealthy mindset.

See, he's talking about seed.

You'll never find a farmer who is jealous for their seed.

You see, when you invest your seed into the soil, this is one kernel of corn.

One kernel of corn results in one stalk of corn, but one stalk of corn typically has two ears of corn, and each ear of corn can have anywhere from 500 to 1,000 kernels of corn.

So investing one seed, planting one seed, sowing one seed can result to up to a 2,000-fold return.

He's using this as a metaphor for our finances.

A poverty mindset sees money as the end.

Money is the goal.

I grew up listening to uh a lot of rap music.

Now, of course, I don't listen to rap music anymore.

Alright.

Like 40% of the message of rap music is stack that paper.

Get as much money as you can, and then take it out your pockets and throw it and throw it.

Some of y'all know rap songs.

That is a poverty mindset.

The end goal is as much money as I can put in a bank account.

And if I just have a lot of money, or if I look like I have a lot of money, or I have the status symbols of money, then I made it.

I'm rich.

A wealth-based mindset sees money not as the end, but as a means to a greater end.

They see money as a means of investing for a greater return.

Money as a way to secure the future.

Money as a way to create impact.

Money as a way to build capital.

Money as a way to invest in business.

It goes beyond itself.

And so think about a farmer who refuses to plant their seed.

Who mistakes the seed as the end instead of the means to an end.

It's a poverty mindset.

Can you imagine a farmer whose neighbor comes over and is like, bro, are you going to sow your field?

And they're like, I can't sow the field, I won't have any more seeds.

I can't get rid of my seeds.

If I don't have any seeds, what do I have?

It's like, if you don't sow your seeds, you'll never see the return.

And so let's step back into a spiritual conversation because God does not see money as an end.

God's view of money is it is a blessing, that is a means, to a greater end.

And the problem is our minds have been so warped by the world that we live in that we get money and we keep investing it in sand.

Not our highest priorities, not our needs, but our wants.

And you know the truth about our wants is almost all of them are depreciating assets, which means the second you take the seed that God has given you and invest it into that sand, it loses its value and continues to lose its value until it's worth nothing.

People who selfishly hoard their seed or invest it in the sand, they just get poorer and poorer and poorer, even if they look on the outside like they're rich.

A wealthy mindset and a godly mindset is God has put this in my hand for me to find ways to give it back to God.

And there is nothing that you can invest into that can bring a return like the eternal, everlasting, righteous kingdom of God.

It is coming.

It's why we must live with the pilgrim's perspective, it's why we must keep eternity in view.

And this is the crazy part.

God has chosen his church, he has made us the hope of the world.

We are the vehicle for God's kingdom to be built.

It's why it's the big rocks in our life.

The most important are the things that come first, the things that have a return, not just by blessings in this life, but blessings upon blessings in the life to come.

This is the idea of spiritual reciprocity.

We prove our faithfulness to Jesus by giving back what he puts in our hand, using what he puts in our hand to enrich the lives of others.

And scripture is very clear.

When we prove that God can trust us with what he put in our hands, he will put more.

And if we are living with the kingdom of God in mind, then when he gives more, it increases our capacity to bless even more people.

He goes on in the next verse.

This is our key verse for today.

He says, Each person should do as he has decided in his heart.

Not reluctantly, not out of compulsion, because God loves a cheerful giver, Metachurch.

This is the heart of why we come together at the beginning of the year and make commitments to the Lord for our generosity in his movement.

In week one, we said clearly we don't teach the prosperity gospel, we do not preach the poverty gospel.

Those are both distortions on biblical teaching.

And a lot of times these are taught by people who really believe it and they have a good heart behind it.

And then there are some people who I think are teaching this maliciously, and I believe they're heretics.

Regardless, it's really obvious.

The prosperity gospel, it's obvious.

There is another incorrect biblical teaching that is all throughout our churches.

And it is taught by great men and women of God who love the Lord and are leading really good churches, but I believe they are wrong on their interpretation and that it is hurting the church, and it's hurting how we talk about generosity.

Probably even in the church you grew up in.

If you grew up in church, they taught the tithe.

This is the teaching that God commands 10% of your income to go to God through the local church.

Now, there is a more insidious version of teaching on the tithe, which has become really mainstream in evangelical churches today.

And it goes like this if you give 9% of your money to the church, your other 91% in your bank account is cursed.

If you give 9.9% of your income to the church, the 90.1% of your money in the bank is cursed.

But if you give 10%, your other 90 will receive blessings on blessings on blessings.

The reason the tithe is taught so broadly is because the tithe was taught in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament law was written to the nation of Israel, and much of the law organized the theocratic kingdom of Israel.

You might find it interesting that the Old Testament law does not prescribe one tithe, it prescribes three.

You gave two tithes, two tenths, every year, and you gave a third tithe every three years, that equals to roughly 23 and one-third of your income going to the government of Israel every year.

The tithe in the Old Testament was the tax system for the nation of Israel.

We now live under a new covenant, and as believers in the church, we are not held to the Old Testament law.

We're held in many ways to the higher standard of the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the apostle.

And so what did Paul say?

This is his teaching to the church on giving.

Paul did not say, each person better give their 10%, because if you don't give your full 10%, you are accursed to no end.

Paul said, each person should do as he has decided in his heart.

I'm not mad at the idea of 10%.

As a matter of fact, it might be a really good goal for you to aspire to as you're trying to increase your generosity.

Here's the problem.

The problem is when you teach someone who can only give 6%, that's all they can give right now.

And you say if you only give 6%, your money's cursed, and if you give 0%, your money's cursed, guess what they're gonna give?

0%.

It's cursed either way, and I can have more money every month.

The problem, too, is on the flip side.

There are some people who God has just blessed abundantly, and they're at a place in their financial life where 10% would just not be a sacrifice.

They could lose 10% of their money every month and not know it.

But they give 10 because that's what's commanded, and it's actually holding them back from giving sacrificially.

The problem with the tithe is that on both ends of the spectrum, it ends up limiting God's people.

I love what Paul says.

He says, each person should do as he's decided in his heart, not reluctantly, not out of compulsion, because God loves a cheerful giver.

It's not just what we give, it also speaks to how we give.

When we are living with this pilgrim's perspective, keeping our eyes on Jesus and eternity, we will be joyous to give back to God.

If you were giving in 2024, you probably just received your end-of-the-year giving statement.

And you know, MetaCurch is a nonprofit according to the IRS, and so you get some tax incentives for giving here, and it's not why we do it, but it is it is nice.

And you know, it's like if you gave reluctantly all year long, then you're gonna see that number of what you gave in 2024, and your first thought's gonna be like, I could have done so many things with this money, you know, so many things I could have fixed, upgraded.

There's so many things I could have bought.

If you are giving cheerfully with a pilgrim's perspective, not out of compulsion, not out of reluctance, you're gonna see that number.

And maybe last year you expanded your giving.

You know, my family, we looked and expanded this year.

We're gonna expand again.

You see that number, and you go, 2024, 139 baptisms.

2024, we open a second location.

Marriages healed, kids finding their confidence in the Lord, addictions overcome, graduates in the academy, like God is moving and you're overjoyed, and it's like, how do I invest more into this?

How do I give more of what God has given me?

How do we see more blessing in our world?

Here's the other problem, very pragmatically.

If you give because you feel compelled, someone's twisting your arm, if you give but you're really not happy about it, the sands of life eventually are gonna get too heavy.

And you'll quit giving.

Because you didn't want to do it in the first place.

You know, when we talk about giving, I always feel compelled to say, it's like if having to give is gonna keep you from coming and wrestling with God and asking the big questions, don't give.

Like if that's gonna keep you from really like integrating and joining a live team and believing in what's going on, then don't give.

And if you're gonna give, but it's reluctantly, pick a number you can give cheerfully.

Like, God blesses cheerful givers.

You'll experience the joy of generosity when you approach it through the correct perspective.

Paul has a real tension, and and transparently I feel it as well.

It's like, I want you to be generous.

It is good for our church, it is good for your community, it is good for your family, it will be good for your life.

But I also understand people get uncomfortable talking about money.

And so if you're going to give out of compulsion or you're giving, but you're giving reluctantly, don't give.

Give a number that you can do it cheerfully, and God will bless, and God will take care of our movement.

If we do what God asks us to do, we believe He will do the rest.

I love that this verse is attached to a promise.

In verse 8, it says, And God is able to make every grace overflow to you, so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work.

Now it doesn't say that God will make every monetary blessing overflow to you.

Every new car overflow to you.

It says every grace.

What is the promise that you always have what you need, and God will place in your hands what you need to make sure that you continue in the good work that God has given you.

To make sure that you can live a life on purpose and with purpose that blesses God and blesses those around you.

This is, once again, spiritual reciprocity.

We offer cheerfully what we have to God.

We decide and commit, and we trust his eternal blessing will overflow to us in this life, and most importantly, in eternity.

So you may be asking, we don't teach the tithe, and so how do we ask you to give as the people of God?

We say in scripture there are three characteristics of a cheerful giver: they give first, they give sacrificially, and they give automatically.

These are our parameters.

We give first, we give sacrificially, and we give automatically.

I want to show you what this is supposed to look like.

Everyone has a financial capacity in their life, and typically we do this in the exact wrong prioritization.

But we are called to put God first.

And so the first thing that we do, before we have paid any bills, before we have bought any depreciating assets, before we have hit TJ Maxx, before we have bought some sneakers, preaching to myself, before we've done anything else, we first give to God.

It says, give what you have decided in your heart to give.

You know, this really matters.

I'm always gonna lead with a high level of transparency.

I told you uh towards the end of 2024 that last January we made our commitments, our giving really went up.

And it was it was just enough for us to open Metachurch Holodus.

It was a huge blessing.

Now, as you can imagine, when we started operating two venues instead of one, our expenses increased pretty significantly.

And at the exact same time, our giving went down about 25%.

All through the fourth quarter, we were not bringing in enough to function.

We have been in a spending freeze, we're barely out of it right now.

We made commitments last January, and everyone has their theories.

A lot of churches saw this, to be honest with you.

Um, and it's like, oh, it was the election, maybe, I don't know.

It was the you know, holiday season, maybe, I don't know.

This is why God has to come first.

It's like I am going to give to God what I decided to give to God, no matter what else happens.

And my commitment to God doesn't get organized around my other priorities.

My other priorities get organized around my giving to God.

And you know what's really incredible is if you start prioritizing things in the right way, these are the same rocks and the same size containers, but things start to be able to fit.

And so we we take care of our needs, and you know, things have to be adjusted, and there's kind of some gaps, and you have to shake it all down, and and there's still like plenty of room for our desires.

God wants you to have a good life, God wants you to experience blessing.

God is not a miser, he doesn't want you miserable.

This isn't the poverty gospel, it's just about proper prioritization.

And even the things that you want, you often have significant, significant room for.

And at the end, when you reach capacity, you will have to sacrifice.

We give first and we give sacrificially.

We give in a way that costs us.

But meta church, if we want to be generous towards God, we have to be willing to sacrifice sand.

Not our needs, not our highest priority, our wants, desires, depreciating assets.

We give first and we give sacrificially.

We give in a way that costs us, and we give automatically.

And we really encourage you guys at the beginning of the year, the best way to do this is to set up a recurring gift.

You can do that very easily on our online platform.

Setting it up recurring guarantees you're giving first, that you're giving your sacrifice, and it is automatically coming out.

We can do this, we can live generous lives towards God, and only you know what that means because sacrifice is scalable.

And so we're coming to the point where we're gonna make our commitments.

And for some of you, you haven't been giving.

And it's beautiful that you're here and you're integrating and you're becoming a part of this movement.

And this is the year that God's calling you to start your journey of generosity.

And you may be at a place where you're like, I don't have much to give.

God will bless your sacrifice.

Your sacrifice might be$50 a month, and that is what you can commit to.

I I said last week some pretty like basic math.

Uh, we have a lot of people who go to Medichurch across our two locations.

If if 500 people either started giving$50 or expanded their giving by$50,$500 people giving$50 a month, that's$300,000 a year.

Like if everyone will be faithful with what they can give, God will do the rest.

For some of you, God's really blessed you.

Maybe over the last year, He's really shown up in your finances, and you can do more.

You can start giving$200 or expand your giving by$300.

Only you know, here's the call, it's out of scripture.

Give what you've decided in your heart.

Please do not give reluctantly.

Please don't give under compulsion.

Give freely, cheerfully, and joyously.

And so I'm gonna pray, and uh, in a little bit the band is gonna come up, they're gonna sing a song over us.

And when the band starts singing, that is your time to come forward and to take one of these bags.

And this is symbolic.

What you're saying uh across our venues as you fill your bag is I trust God for the overflow.

I trust that my heavenly father will give me everything that I need to excel in every good work.

And I encourage you to take this home and put it somewhere where you can see it and remember your commitment and remember that your generosity expands God's ability to bless your life.

So before we get to our commitment, let's pray together.

Right where you're at, you can bow your head and close your eyes.

There's nothing magic about that.

Just create some space for you and for the people around you.

As some of you are preparing to make this commitment, I want to take a moment and I want to talk to anyone who has not taken their first step of faith.

You see, Jesus was the ultimate act of generosity.

He demonstrated that when he came from perfect heaven down to our broken world.

He demonstrated that in the ultimate act of generosity when he went to the cross and died the death that we deserve.

The wages of our sin is death, and yet God demonstrated his love for us, and that while we are still sinners, Christ died for us.

He took our place.

He demonstrated this by raising from the dead, proving that he is ready and willing to give us life after death.

All Jesus asks is that you trust him, that you believe he is who he says he is, and he's done what he says he's done, and scripture promises that when you do that, all of your sins will be forgiven.

That you'll be given eternal life with your Heavenly Father, and that you will be adopted as a child of God.

If you're here at one of our venues and you've never had a moment in time where you've put your faith in Jesus and you're ready to make that decision today, I want to ask you, with everyone's eyes closed, to just simply raise your hand up in the air.

And by raising your hand, you're saying, Today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

For those who raised a hand, I want you to know that God sees and accepts your faith, that your sins are forgiven and you have been given eternal life, a gift that no one and nothing can ever take away from you.

So, what I want to do is very simply help you acknowledge this moment through a prayer.

If you raised a hand, I want you to repeat this prayer with me.

And so you don't feel singled out, I'm gonna ask all the believers across our venues to pray this as well.

Let's pray like this.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God, that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.