Freedumb with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

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

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Awesome, man.

It's so good to see everybody.

Glad you can make it to service.

If you're new to MetaCurch, my name is Noel, I'm the worship pastor.

And as always, I am so excited to be bringing a word to all of you.

Listen, whether this is your first time or your hundredth time at MetaCurch, we believe it is no accident that you're at service today.

We actually believe that your best bet in this life is coming to church every single Sunday because it's here where you learn where your story and God's story intersect, and it's at that intersection that you will find the purpose that God has created you with and has created you for.

So again, we are so glad that you're here today.

Now, I gotta say, and I feel like I say this every single summer summer is going by way too fast.

I can't believe that we are already in July.

We have so many things going on here at MetaCurch.

Our youth just got back from camp.

I heard they had a wonderful time.

Our meta kids are going to camp at the end of the month.

Today, as in this very day, is my one-year anniversary to my wife, Elizabeth.

It's been an incredible year.

It's gone by so quickly.

We just celebrated the 4th of July, by the way.

Did everybody have a good 4th of July?

Yeah.

Man, I had a great one.

Thank you all for asking.

It was a great 4th of July.

I love popping fireworks.

I gotta admit, I never really grew out of my love for fireworks.

I love hanging out with my family and making new memories, but if I'm being honest with you guys, I'm not ever really thinking about the meaning of Fourth of July.

I mean, I know why we celebrate it.

Of course, we all know why we celebrate the Fourth of July.

We find it right at the end of our national anthem.

We sing, O say, does that star spangle banner yet way?

Y'all help me finish this over the land of the who?

The land of the free and the home of the brave.

And we sing that line, the land of the free.

We're talking about you and me.

We are the land of the free.

But have you ever asked yourself, what exactly are you free to do?

For the American revolutionaries, the ones that fought for our freedom, there's many things that they wanted freedom from.

One of the most pressing issues that they wanted freedom from was a lack of representation in England as England was imposing new laws and new taxes on them from across the ocean.

And so they fought for their freedom and eventually they got it.

But they didn't use this freedom to do whatever they wanted.

In fact, they instituted a government pretty much immediately.

And this was a unique type of a government.

It was a democracy.

And democracies exist to represent the will of the people at large that find themselves under that form of government.

The desire for freedom has never really gone away.

As people, and especially as Americans, we do not like to be told what to do, and we especially don't like to be told how to do it.

I think in most people's minds, the best life is a life of absolute freedom.

But today I'm going to suggest that there's no such thing.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, I am so grateful for the opportunity to speak to my brothers and sisters, people who consider themselves to be a part of this movement, even the people who are visiting, asking the important questions about what your role in their life is, God.

I pray, Holy Spirit, by your power we would be able to understand something new about our lives and how we should live and behave.

But we need your help with that, Holy Spirit.

So guide us, counsel us, and teach us today.

Jesus, we love you.

We pray all things in your precious and in your holy name, and everyone said together.

Amen.

Now, I'll admit, it's a bit odd that on a week where we've celebrated our nation's freedom, our independence, that I'm here to convince you that you can't really be free.

But hopefully by the end of the message, you'll understand better what I mean by this.

Generally speaking, I think our constant push for more and more freedom ends up enslaving us.

Let me give you a quick example.

I was born in the early 80s, I was raised throughout the 90s, and I've reached that age that everybody inevitably reaches where I look back at my life and I say, man, things sure were more simple when I was a kid.

How many people think that about their lives, right?

Most of us think it was way more simple.

This became very clear to me just a couple of years ago.

I was looking for something to watch on TV, and I came across a show I remembered from my childhood.

It was called Highway to Heaven.

Who's brave enough to admit that they watch Highway to Heaven in here?

It was a great show, man.

It had a great message.

But after one or two episodes, I found myself getting a little sad, almost like a little depressed.

This show seemed so old.

Like, how could it be that old?

It was on when I was a kid.

And so I started investigating.

I was watching everything.

Was it the haircuts?

Did that make it seem old?

No, that wasn't too weird.

Was it the clothes they wore or the cars they drove?

It was none of those things.

You know what made it seem so ancient to me?

It was the technology that they used or the lack of technology that we have today that they didn't have all the way back then.

They had no internet, they had no cell phones, they certainly didn't have any smartphones, they had no public Wi-Fi.

It reminded me of how different the world was when I was a kid.

Now, there's no doubt that these technical technological advancements have made the world better in many ways.

They're incredible tools for our growth as a culture, but have these technologies given us more freedom?

Because every time a new technology is introduced into our world, it promises us more freedom to live life the way we actually want to live life.

And so I thought it would be kind of fun to look at some of the technology that existed when I was a kid.

Are y'all game to do this?

Okay, good.

It doesn't really matter because I have the microphone.

You can't stop me.

This is happening either way.

Okay, the first thing we're gonna look at existed in everybody's home.

You would see it on a wall somewhere.

It wasn't a technology that was new to my time, it had been around for a century or so, but it was a technology that made us more free.

Anyone want to take a stab at what this technology was?

Yeah, you got it.

Not just a phone, a telephone.

That's what you gotta call these things.

That's how old they are.

A telephone.

You would walk into somebody's house, this would be hanging on a wall, it had this cord here and a handset, and you would punch in a bunch of numbers, and you could talk to somebody if you were able to get a hold of them.

They didn't even have to be around you.

This was a new type of freedom when it came out.

Before phones existed, you had to be in the same place as anyone you actually wanted to talk to.

This gave you some freedom.

It was limited, however.

I mean, you had to be wherever this was located in the home.

You had like five feet of cord, unless you're a teenage girl, and then you had like 25 feet of cord that always got tangled up, right?

You had to know the phone number of whoever you were calling, and they had to be near their phone so they could actually answer the phone when you called.

It was freedom, but it was limited.

Here's a piece of technology that was new for when I was a kid the home computer.

Man, it was the early 90s when we brought home our first home computer.

Nowadays, everybody has computers, if not multiple computers in their home, but this was unique.

This was brand new.

And the computers back then were extremely limited compared to what we have today.

But still, it was a thrilling experience to have my own computer, well, my family's own computer in our house.

This technology advanced really quickly.

I mean, they just got better and better every single year.

Finally, in the late 90s, we got the world wide web, or what we call the internet.

Now we could be connected to the entire world.

It was incredible.

The only thing I used my computer for before the internet was playing Solitaire and Minesweeper.

Now I could connect to the internet and look up how to play Minesweeper, because nobody really knows how to play Minesweeper, do they?

It's just like this game where you click things.

It was incredible.

All you had to do was unplug that ancient telephone, plug in the cable to the back of your computer, hit connect, go through this painful sound.

Yeah, I know what it is.

Oh yeah, that's dial-up.

That's the modem.

Some of you are traumatized by this sound, and I get that.

Everybody knows where they were when they first heard this.

But it was a necessary evil.

We could be connected to the entire world because of that sound.

Sure, that telephone that you had in your house was useless at that point.

Nobody could call you anymore as long as you were connected to the internet.

The internet was also really, really slow.

I mean, how fast can you download a song in today's age?

Like in five seconds?

It would take us an entire day to download one song back in the late 90s.

It was insane.

We were more free than ever, but we were still limited.

With each improvement of technology, there is a promise of a higher quality of living, better relationships, increased productivity, the eradication of social and even health problems.

In other words, your best life was ahead of you, and because of technology, it would be a life of absolute freedom.

You'd be free from the home phone, free from dial-up internet, free from the lack of information.

You'd be free to connect with any person, anywhere, at any time.

And now we have these little guys, right?

Smartphone.

Just about everyone in this room has a smartphone.

It has more capability in this little package than all other technology in history combined.

With this one device, you can text, call, watch movies, set calendar to dates, calendar dates, uh, search for anything that you want to.

Basically, anything is an option.

It's the ultimate freedom.

And yet, everywhere you go, you'll see people glued to this device.

Go out and eat dinner sometime.

You will see people looking at their phone, taking pictures of their food.

You'll see entire families with iPads and iPhones not connecting with each other instead, just connecting with their device.

We all have the coworker that has her phone out every single meeting, and you're like, are you doing business-related things or are you like shopping for a new swimsuit?

We just don't know, do we?

Every free second we get, we have the phones up and in our face.

We've unlocked a new level of freedom, but we're more enslaved and disconnected than we've ever been.

In fact, psychologists are now pinpointing the window between 2007 and 2011 as a watershed moment that began our country's mental health collapse.

This is, of course, the period of time when smartphones were introduced and gained in popularity in our country.

So let me say it again.

The more free our technology has made us, the more enslaved we've become by that same technology.

So maybe the best life possible isn't a life of complete unimpeded freedom.

Maybe even freedom itself comes at a cost.

You know, it's not just technology that does this to us, there's other areas of our life that can enslave us.

Most of us believe in the American dream.

We were taught that if you grow up and you get a job and work hard, you can have all the things that our great country has to offer.

You can have the home and the family and the vacations.

And so we followed it through.

We got the job, we worked our nine to five, but it didn't take long, did it, before work started following you home?

Before it started taking you away from your family.

It didn't take long for you to open your email when you're sitting on a beach on vacation just to make sure you didn't have too much work waiting for you when you got off vacation.

You were free to live the American dream dream, and yet you've let it enslave you.

Even good things in our life can begin to enslave us.

Have you ever met someone on a health journey that develops a bad relationship with food?

What started as a way to drop a few pounds has now turned into an obsession of counting calories, even to the point of them declining invitations to go hang out with friends and family for fear of giving in to the temptation of eating something they don't want to eat or drinking something they don't want to drink.

They got free in one area and they became enslaved by another.

We think more money will bring us freedom, but the pursuit of that money and the eventual problems that it creates, it's its own special kind of trap.

Our culture pushes ultimate sexual freedom, and yet, the more sexually free we become, the more sad, the more lonely, and the more unfulfilled we report to be.

The list could go on and on.

But the point is simple.

The more freedom we obtain, the more enslaved we become by that very same freedom.

And when you become enslaved to something, it's easy to feel like you're stuck, and that's a problem.

Because when you feel like you're stuck, it's hard to live out your God-given purpose.

I think it's safe to say that the apostles in the New Testament, the ones that were starting the first church, the ones that were going out and spreading the good news of Christ, were living out their unique purpose at the highest level.

In fact, as you read their letters in the New Testament, you'll see something really interesting in many of the greetings.

I'm going to read just a couple of these for you.

In Romans 1.1, it says this Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, Philippians 1-1, Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus.

Titus 1-1, Paul a slave of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ.

James 1-1, James a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Peter 1-1, y'all can fill in the blank.

Simon Peter, a slave and an apostle of Jesus Christ.

One more, Jude 1-1, Jude a of Jesus Christ and a brother of James.

The trend is pretty clear, isn't it?

In many of these letters, the very first thing that these apostles say that they write down is that they are slaves of Christ.

I think it's really easy to just read right over these verses because as Americans, I do believe we're really uncomfortable with the idea of not having freedom.

We're uncomfortable with the idea of being slaves to anything.

And here, the leaders of the early church and apostles sent by Jesus keep calling themselves slaves of Christ.

And on one hand, I really do get it.

I've believed in Jesus for most of my life.

I do really understand what he's done for me.

And so it makes sense that I would live for him, that I would submit to everything he tells me to do, but I also know that God gives us free will.

And just like many Greek words that are translated into English, the meaning of the word can vary depending on the context of Scripture.

Here's some of the meanings of this word and scripture.

The first meaning is exactly what you would expect.

It means that you are enslaved to something or someone.

You don't really have a choice for it.

You didn't get to decide, you're kind of hopeless in it, you're just enslaved.

The second meaning is to be devoted to another, to the disregard of one's own interests.

And the third meaning is where I think we find what the apostles actually meant.

The third way it's used is as a metaphor.

And this metaphor brings forward the idea of a person that would give themselves up to another's will.

And in the apostles' case, this specifically means a total commitment to be used by Christ in the extending and advancing of his cause among men.

Well, that kind of sounds like exactly what these apostles were doing.

I'm a part of the Holotus launch team and we're reading through the book of Acts.

By the way, do I have any Holotus witnesses in here?

Yeah, see?

These are the people that are starting the Holotus team.

As we're reading through Acts, we are reading over and over how these apostles gave up everything to bring the good news of Christ to everyone that they possibly could.

Two out of three of the uses of the word doulos implies that the choice is held by the person.

That would be free will.

And so these apostles consider themselves slaves to Jesus, not because Jesus demanded them to be his slaves, but because they chose to consider themselves to be his slaves.

Slavery and indentured servitude were a part of every society at the time.

The Israelites themselves have been slaves multiple times throughout their history.

Not only that, but within the Jewish law, they had a carve out for this type of free will decision to serve another person.

We read about it in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, chapter 15, verse 12.

Deuteronomy 15:12

It says, if any of your people, Hebrew men or women, sell themselves to you and serve you six years, you must set him free in the seventh year.

So let me tell you what this is actually talking about.

If you, as a Hebrew man or woman, owed me a Hebrew man money, but could not repay that debt, you could make the free will choice to serve me in order to get rid of your debt.

You had to serve me for six years, but once those six years were over, you were free and clear.

Now, God was very clear about this law, about this carve out that He made for the people.

I could not sell you into slavery.

That wasn't an option.

I couldn't sell you into slavery so that I could get my money back.

It had to be your choice to serve me.

You would serve me for six years.

That's quite a long time.

But at the end of it, you would have redemption.

You'd be debt-free, and you wouldn't leave empty-handed.

In fact, God commanded the person that you had been serving to send you off with a minimum of 40 pieces of silver and then to also bless them with whatever God had blessed you with.

So if somebody had a lot of fine linens, they would give you some of the fine linens to leave with.

If they have a had a lot of livestock, they would leave you with some livestock so that you wouldn't be empty-handed.

The indebted person will be free of their debt and filled with blessing.

It's a fresh start.

And so that's a context that the apostles who wrote the New Testament understood.

That when there is a debt that you cannot pay, you have to make the free will choice to serve someone, to become a doulos, a servant to that person.

When you read the rest of what these men wrote in the New Testament, it becomes obvious why they would see themselves as servants to Jesus.

They were well aware that they had a debt that they could never, ever repay.

Here's what Paul wrote in Romans 3.23 for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

You and I and everyone throughout the history of the world has a sin debt that we cannot pay.

We don't even have the currency it takes to pay off our sin debt.

And it's this sin that separates us from God.

And if we continually look within ourselves in order to cancel this debt out, we will live lives that are not filled with hope.

But there is, in fact, hope.

Jesus walked onto the pages of history and he offered something brand new, something that had never been seen or heard before.

He realized that the more humans pursued worldly freedom apart from God, the more and more enslaved they would become.

He understood this because he knew the history of the Israelites, God's chosen people.

He knew the vicious cycle of them being free and going into slavery.

You see, as long as God's people submitted themselves to serving Him, living as a do loss to God, they experienced freedom and prosperity.

But so often they would become tempted by the things of the world around them, the sexual freedom of all the pagan nations around them.

They'd be tempted by the wealth of the empires that they encountered, and eventually they would succumb to the temptation.

They would engage in what these other nations were engaging with only to end up enslaved, sometimes literally.

Jesus came and spoke directly to this in John 8, 34.

He says, Truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.

You know, money is not a bad thing, but allowing money to master you, that's a sin.

Sex is not a bad thing, and the fact that sex is a very good thing, but pursuing sex outside of obedience to God, well, that's a sin.

Technology isn't a bad thing, but using it for pride, sloth, or envy, that's a sin.

And everyone who pursues sin is a slave to sin.

Jesus knew this.

He also knew how living as a slave to sin would ultimately leave you.

He knew it would leave you feeling weary, that you would feel burning.

Out in your life, hopeless, wondering if your life even matters.

You knew it would make you feel burdened.

You'd be overwhelmed, you'd be under pressure, you'd be failing, you'd feel stuck in your life.

So Jesus makes an offer in Matthew 11, 29, he says, Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

It's a pretty incredible offer.

The people that Jesus was speaking to, the Jewish people were literally held captive by the Roman Empire at that time.

And spiritually, they were longing for the kind of freedom that's only found in Jesus.

You see, the Jewish people have been following the Old Testament law.

They've been working and working and working to pay off the sin debt that they have.

But remember, as humans, we don't have the right currency.

We cannot pay off our own sin debt.

And the way of this life and living this way was exhausting, leaving them feeling weary and burdened.

And so Jesus says, Come to me, and I will give you rest.

But how?

He continues on in verse 29.

He says, Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Jesus is using an agrarian metaphor that most of us don't naturally understand in this day and age, but make no mistake, Jesus is saying that the rest that your soul is desperately longing for comes from making a free will decision to attach yourself to him.

Now, when a farmer had some heavy work to do, if he needed to plow the fields or carry a cart, he would take two of his livestock, say ox, and he would put a wooden yoke across both of their necks.

And what this would do would tie is tie the two animals together so that they had to walk the exact same direction.

Once they were yoked up, there was nothing they could do about it.

That's how they had to live while the yoke was on them.

It was a common metaphor in Jesus' day.

Everyone was yoked to something, and that something was usually whatever they thought would bring them the most freedom.

For some, they were yoked to the Roman Empire.

For some, they were yoked to their wealth.

For some, they were yoked to the religious law.

But Jesus is telling people that if they want the freedom and rest that their soul actually needs, they need to be yoked to him.

Jesus knew that all of the things of this world would leave you weary and burdened.

Because pursuing freedom apart from Christ will only leave you more and more enslaved.

What if true freedom comes from choosing to be a servant of Jesus?

That's actually our main idea today.

It's not actually a question.

Really, we should say true freedom comes from choosing to be a servant of Jesus.

For those living outside of relationship with Jesus, you do have a sin that separates you from God.

Because you're separated from God, you're also separated from real hope.

Jesus came and paid the price for your sin, but that doesn't get enacted into your life until you place your faith in Jesus.

And until then, you will remain a slave to sin.

And for those of us in the room who are believers in Jesus, if you do not submit to his yoke, if you don't choose to serve Jesus with your life, then while your eternal life may be secure, your earthly life will be defined by being a slave to sin.

True freedom comes from believing in and following Jesus as his doulos, his server.

So I think we have to ask ourselves some simple questions today.

I think the first one is are you weary and are you burdened?

Do you feel like you're stuck in your own life?

Because I can't tell you how many times I meet with people and they say, no, I just feel stuck in this situation, or I just feel stuck in my life.

In full transparency, I can't tell you how many times I've said that about my own life.

Sometimes you just feel stuck.

But what if being stuck isn't the actual problem?

What if the actual problem is that for all the freedom you've been given in your life, you've allowed yourself to be enslaved by things that at best are indifferent to you and at worst don't care about you at all?

Your bank account doesn't love you.

Your physical health, it matters, and it's a type of care for you, but your physical health does not care about you.

Your work funds your life, but work in and of itself does not hold your future in its hands.

Politics will work really hard to convince you that they care about your interests, but we all know that that's not exactly the case all the time.

How much work are you putting in, exercising your freedom only to be enslaved by things that aren't working for you?

What do we do when our freedom enslaves us to things that are keeping us stuck in life?

I think we see it over and over throughout all of the New Testament, and we see it in the example of the apostle's life.

We have to make the free will choice to enslave ourselves to someone who actually does care about you, to enslave yourself to someone who actually does love you, who's known you before you were born, who knows the number of hairs on your head, someone who has your best interests in mind, someone that knows the best path for your life, and not only knows the best path, but will actually help you find it.

We have to be willing to submit to God.

We have to be willing to be servants to Jesus.

To the believers in the room, we have a question that we need to wrestle with, and I really want you to think about this as we close out today's service.

Think about your life.

What are some things that you feel like you're stuck in within your life?

What are the things that are enslaving you in your world?

I have a good friend who works with a lot of AA programs, and I asked him one time, I said, Hey, how do you know the difference between someone who has an unhealthy relationship with drinking and is a full-blown alcoholic?

There's got to be some kind of difference there.

And he said, Of course, there's not one answer, but generally speaking, what he's found is that when somebody is actually an alcoholic, if he asks them, hey, can you picture your life in five, 10, 15 years without alcohol?

If he asks them that question, they start getting panicky and anxious and they start making deals, like, yeah, I could probably do that if I could drink one more time or I could drink for one more day.

Those people are generally speaking probably gonna be your alcoholics.

Do you have anything like that in your life?

I mean, it could be alcohol literally, like you may need to reassess your relationship with alcohol today.

It may be food.

You may need to reassess that relationship.

It could be just the relationships in your life.

Maybe you're looking for affirmation from relationships all around you and not from God.

Maybe it's even something as silly as social media that is controlling our lives.

Because the things that we don't give God control of are the things that we get stuck in.

They are the things that end up enslaving us.

And Paul reminds the early church over and over that they've been freed from sin because of their faith in Jesus, and to not let themselves be enslaved by anything or anyone other than Jesus.

If you're in this room today and you have put your faith in Jesus, then I want to remind you of the same thing.

And it's very much like what Pastor Tony talked to us about last week.

If life gets tense, when the tension of life gets too much, what do you turn to?

Because what you turn to is what you worship.

It's the thing that you believe will make your life better.

I think it's time as believers that we stop serving the temporary things of this world, the things that offer temporary freedom and start serving an eternal God.

At MetaCurch, we tell you every single week that you are created on purpose and with purpose.

It's not just a good thing.

It is a good saying, but we actually do believe this to our core.

We have intentionally made programs and given you opportunities so that you can find that very purpose and we'll walk right alongside with you.

We have serving opportunities where you can volunteer on Sunday to bring this very service to the community around you.

We have life teams that you can join where you can find a community that will help you with the application of everything we're learning in the service.

We have the MetaMovement Academy where we can help you get healthy emotionally, relationally, financially, and spiritually.

But the truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter how many good programs we create at MetaCurch.

You have to make the choice to live as a dulos, as a servant to Christ, in order for any of the stuff to actually work in your life.

For the non-believers in this room, almost feel silly saying it.

I think every single church would say this, but I am so glad that you're here.

I am so glad that you're willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation where you can ask some real questions.

You are maybe the minority in this room.

I'm sure there's all sorts of thoughts that are going through your head.

Maybe you're sitting there thinking, all of this sounds great, but man, I've just sinned too much.

If they knew what I did last week, if they knew what I did last night, surely they would kick me out.

This is good for everyone else, but it's not for me.

I'm just too far gone.

I'm gonna ask everybody to do something, and I do uh really ask that you do this.

It'll just take a second.

I want everybody to look at the person to your left.

Now, everybody look to the person to your right.

If there's not someone to your right, look behind you.

We'll see someone.

Now, everybody look straight at me, eyes up here.

Everyone you just looked at, and everyone around you that you didn't see, every single person is a sinner.

And I don't mean that past tense, I don't mean like we were once sinners.

I mean I am still a sinner, I still sin.

I haven't figured it all out, and I never will until I'm with my Lord Jesus one day.

Then, then we will be complete.

But until then, we're all sinners.

It's a level playing field because of what Jesus has done.

And so if you feel like you're too much of a sinner, you're in good company, all of us are.

It doesn't change the fact that while you are still a sinner, Christ Jesus came and died for you.

All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

That's what Paul tells us in Romans.

He also wrote this in Colossians.

He says, And when you were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive with him and forgave us all our trespasses.

That's your sins.

He erased the certificate of debt.

That thing you couldn't pay, he erased it with its obligations that was against us and opposed to us and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross.

You do have a sin debt, that's true.

It does separate you from God, that's true, but you don't have to stay there, you don't have to be a slave to sin, you don't have to be stuck in life, you can move forward.

If you're a believer, the same is true.

You can still sin, you can still get yourself stuck, but you have to make the decision to put your faith in something greater than what this world has to offer.

You have to believe and serve Jesus.

When you can do that, you will be freed from the chains of sin and death.

You're gonna ask everybody to go ahead and bow their heads, close your eyes.

As Pastor Clayton always tells us, this is not some magical thing that we do, it just gives the people around you some space as we deal with matters of the heart and of God.

If you've never had a moment in time where you've made the decision to trust that Jesus is God and that he paid the price for your sins, those things that keep you separated from him, the things that are keeping you stuck in life.

If you're ready to make a decision to put your faith in him, I'm gonna ask you with everybody's eyes closed to raise your hand up.

Raise it up high so I can see it.

Leave it up.

I'm gonna scan the room.

I just want to make sure I see everybody who's lifting a hand.

Yep.

I see those hands.

By raising hand, you're saying, I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

For those of you who are raising your hands, I want you to know that Jesus sees and accepts your faith.

That means you've been given eternal life.

So I want to simply help you acknowledge the decision that you've made today.

For those who raised a hand, I want you to pray this prayer out loud with me.

And for those of you who have been believers your whole life or for however long you've been a believer, I want you to pray this as well.

And let me just tell you personally, when Pastor Clayton first asked us to do this, I thought, I've prayed this prayer.

And then I prayed it out loud with everybody, and it reminded me of the beauty of salvation, the great gift that we've received.

And so, everyone, pray this out loud.

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

I believe you are God that you came to earth, that you died for my sins, and I believe you rose again.

Thank you for loving me, and thank you for a new eternal life.

Now let me pray over you.

Heavenly Father, I am so grateful for every person in this room.

God, you know all of our hearts, you know all of our intentions.

Sometimes, God, our actions don't actually line up with our heart's desire.

And I pray that's why we've come here to learn how to reconcile that, to learn how to live and behave in a fashion that reflects our heart for you, God.

And I do believe that in this world we will be slaves to something.

The choice isn't to be a slave or to not be a slave, it the choice is to what we will be a slave for.

So, God, I pray for everyone in this room that they would see that your burden is easy, that the workload, everything you have is like God, that you're gonna walk right alongside of us and choose to yoke themselves to you, Father, to live a life that's pleasing in your sight to the best of their ability for as long as we're on earth.

Jesus, I thank you for the truth of salvation, that when we put our faith in you, that moment of faith in the person and work that's found in you, that we can have eternal life, that it will never go away, that our sins, past, present, and future, are forgiven.

We love you, Jesus.

And we pray all things in your precious and in your holy name.

Everyone sit together.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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