Rescue: 99 Problems with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's 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.

Well, I want to welcome you in.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And we are in week three of our rescue series, where we are going piece by piece through the story of Jonah back in the Jewish scriptures and the Old Testament of our Bibles.

A little bit of review in week one, we saw Jonah running from God.

Last week we saw him right in the middle of self-made storms.

And today we're moving on to chapter two.

Chapter two of Jonah is like a microcosm of how life actually works.

And not only that, it's one of the greatest examples of just how great God's love is for each and every one of us.

A little bit of review on the story of Jonah, if you're unfamiliar, God called Jonah to go and prophesy to the evil people of Nineveh, and Jonah refused.

He disobeyed God and ran as far and as fast as he could.

After getting on a ship to sail to like the end of the world, God sent a storm, which resulted in Jonah having to sacrifice himself in order to save the innocent sailors on board.

Jonah, as we will see today, was sinking to the bottom of the sea when something incredibly happened.

In Jonah 1:17, the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah.

Jonah 1:17

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

Now, today, for the first time ever, uh I actually have two titles.

It's like a choose your own adventurer.

You can pick which title is your favorite.

Would you like to hear both of them?

Yeah, okay.

The first one is kind of just mundane.

There's nothing too fancy about it.

The first title we came up with was Big Fish, Bigger Problems.

Okay, so that's that's fine.

But then last week I was inspired by the philosopher T.

Swift for my sermon title.

And uh I, you know, I love music.

And don't worry, we're not going there again, but I have another message title for you to try on if you like this one better.

Um, my message today is 99 problems, but a fish ain't one.

So that's the second title that you'd go with for today.

Um the second chapter of Jonah really is significant for a couple of reasons.

Number one is it's a prayer, like the almost the entire chapter, verses two through nine, are a prayer that's recorded from Jonah when he was actually in the belly of the fish, like at the bottom of the ocean.

And so we really get to see Jonah's heart.

The other thing that's very cool about it is in chapter one, we got to see the story of Jonah being thrown into the raging sea from the perspective of the author, the narrator of the story.

In his prayer in chapter two, we get to hear about Jonah being thrown into the sea, actually from Jonah's perspective, and it really helps us feel and understand the magnitude of this massive, massive storm.

In Jonah chapter two, it says, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish.

I called to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me.

I cried out for help from deep inside Sheol, and you heard my voice.

And when you, God, threw me into the depths, into the heart of the seas, the current overcame me.

All your breakers and your billows swept over me, and I said, I've been banished from your sight, and yet I will look once more towards your holy temple.

And the water engulfed me up to my neck.

And the watery depths overcame me, and seaweed was wrapped around my head, and I sank to the foundations of the mountain, the earth's gates shut behind me forever.

And then you raised my life from the pit, Lord my God.

As my life was fading away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, to your holy temple.

Those who cherish worship worthless idols abandon their faithful love.

But as for me, I will sacrifice to you with a voice of thanksgiving.

I will fulfill what I have vowed, because salvation belongs to the Lord.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you, and we're here today to see what you have for us.

And I thank you for a place like Meta, where all people can come, all different parts of their faith journey, all realizing that we are broken, flawed people, and yet you created us on purpose, and you instilled a purpose inside of us that if we were to unlock it, we would find out what it truly means to live an impactful and fulfilling life.

So, Holy Spirit, we trust that you're here, that your deepest desire is to speak to us, and I pray that we would be humble enough to listen.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, and if you're ready to really get going, say, Amen.

Amen.

There's this common trope in like the last 10 years of movies, and you've you've seen this if you really think about it.

It's when the movie opens and the main character is in like a terrible position, and then all of a sudden the movie will go to a freeze frame, and the main character will start narrating, and they'll say, Yup, that's me.

You're probably wondering how I ended up here, you know?

It's even become kind of a meme, like I'm in this terrible spot, and now I'm gonna backtrack and tell you how I got to this position.

This is like chapter two of Jonah.

Jonah's like, Yep, that's me in the belly of a fish at the bottom of the ocean.

You're probably wondering how I got here.

And if you've been in the series or you know the story, you know how this happened.

You know how we got to this point.

God tells Jonah to go to a very specific place and to say a very specific thing.

And Jonah goes the complete opposite direction, specifically because he does not want to do what God has commanded him to do.

And from that moment on, his life has just gone down and down and down.

And interestingly, this really blew my mind.

When I was studying for this series, studying the book of Jonah, I found that the author did this very intentional thing in the text, actually showing the descent of Jonah from a prophet of God to the very depths of chaos.

Very intentional.

I want to show it to you.

Back in chapter one in verse three, it says, Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord's presence.

He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish.

He paid the fare and he went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord's presence.

In verse 5, the sailors were afraid, and they each cried out to their own gods, and they threw the ship's cargo into the sea to lighten the load.

And meanwhile, help me out, Jonah had gone where?

Down to the lowest part of the vessel in verse 15.

Then they picked Jonah up and they threw him where?

Down into the sea.

And we just read in chapter 2, Jonah describes where he's at as Sheol, which in the ancient mind is like the underworld or even hell itself.

It's literally as far down as you can go in verse 2.

He said, I called to you and you answered me.

I cried out for help from deep inside Sheol.

Literally down as far as I can go.

All he's doing, since he turned his back on God and pursued his own way of life, is go down and down, and he's like in a Johnny Cash song.

I went down, down, down.

Like this is his life now, and he's now gone as far down as you can possibly, possibly go.

And this is not just the story of Jonah.

This is how life works.

When we choose to head down a path apart from God, then we suffer the mostly natural and sometimes supernatural consequence of stepping onto a very slippery slope that will go down and down and down.

We talked a lot about consequence last week.

One thing that we didn't quite cover is that typically when you go apart from God, turn your own way, the severity of your consequence grows over time.

And over and over again, scripture says that God is patient.

He's our good, heavenly, loving Father.

And so if he can get your attention and have you stop and change your mind and turn back to him with a light consequence, then he will.

But if you do not heed his warnings, the consequences will grow more severe.

And that's just how life works.

You know, when you have a little kid who doesn't know how to respect the people around them, it means they're not gonna be able to share, they're not gonna listen to other people, they're not gonna be aware of other people's feelings, and that's gonna have consequence.

When they're little kids, it means that they will struggle to keep friendships.

Their friendships will be inconsistent.

Now, little kids are very, very forgiving.

So they'll have friends, they will just struggle to be consistent in their friendships.

And if they don't know how to respect people, there will be tension between them and their teachers, and tension between them and other authority figures.

And those are consequences, but they're not very severe consequences.

However, if nothing intervenes in that child's life and they never learn that lesson, they never change their mind, as teenagers, if they still don't know how to respect the people around them, the consequences will grow more severe.

The older kids get, the less forgiving kids become.

And so now you won't have inconsistent friendships, you'll have no friendships.

You'll become very socially isolated from the people around you.

You won't know how to function on a team, which removes all kinds of opportunities from young people.

Not only in the sports realm, but with social clubs and anything that requires interacting with other people, the consequences grow.

If you become a young adult and you still are headed down the same path and don't know how to respect those around you and don't know how to function, now you're gonna struggle to come into a romantic relationship with role further isolate you from the social world around you.

And you will struggle to gain employment, which means you will struggle to bring in income, which means you will struggle to live, and all of a sudden the coping mechanisms that you turn to as an angsty teenager become addictions and habits and patterns that take over your life, and you just see your life going down and down and down.

If you have relational struggles, it starts with inconsistency in relationships, and then you struggle to have relationships at all, and then even the people closest to you begin to distance themselves from you.

If you have career habits that you're unwilling to change, you go from job to job to job, and you think everyone else is the problem, but you're the common factor among all of those things, and your life goes down and down and down.

This is the way that life works.

Here's how the Apostle Paul describes it in Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

In Romans chapter 1, basically the whole chapter is describing this downward descent when you live life apart from God.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Let's look at two of the verses.

In verse 21, it says, For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude.

Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened, and claiming to be wise, they actually became fools.

This is the progression that we go down when we part ways with God.

Our minds are overtaken by the things of this world, and eventually that makes its way to our hearts, and our hearts grow calloused to the things of God.

We become arrogant, thinking that our own path is better than the path laid out by God.

We live in a culture that convinces us we can be our own gods, we can make our own truth, we can have our own success, we can develop our own purpose.

And in reality, the more we become apart from God, the more foolish we become, and you know this: the more foolish someone is, the more convinced they are that they are actually geniuses in their own imaginary world that they have created for themselves.

Jonah went down and down and down.

He was asked to speak the truth and to obey God.

And Jonah is a microcosm of how life works.

We are asked to stand on the truth and to obey God.

And Jonah had all kinds of opportunities to stop, change his mind, and turn around.

The first thing he did in the text is he goes to Joppa, that's the port city, and it is in the complete opposite direction of Nineveh where he was asked to go.

And as soon as he walked into town in Joppa, he could have stopped and said, What am I doing?

I'm a prophet of the Lord.

I'm running from him right now.

This isn't how I'm supposed to behave.

He could have stopped, but he kept going down.

He went down into the ship.

Now we know historically that the Israelites were land-dwelling people.

They did not traverse the seas.

He got on a boat, and as a Hebrew, he's like, I'm not supposed to be here, you know.

I don't know anything about sailing.

This is the wrong spot for me.

Another opportunity to stop and turn around and change his mind.

But he didn't.

He kept going.

He looked around the ship, it was full of pagan sailors, people who worshipped idols.

He looked around and knew I don't belong in this crew.

These aren't my people.

And he could have stopped and changed his mind and turned around.

And then they asked him to pay his fare an extraordinary amount of money.

Most Jewish scholars think it would have been his life savings.

And as he laid out his fare to cross the seas and run from God, every bill he put down, an opportunity to stop and change his mind and turn around.

But he kept going.

He went down into the lowest part of the vessel.

It says he stretched out and fell asleep.

And I'll be honest, I don't exactly know what's going on there.

Because even the storm doesn't wake him up.

And there's some psychologists who have like a lot more degrees than I do.

And they say that when you are living so much in the wrong, it can create a depression where you basically block out the world.

I don't know what's going on, but he sleeps through the storm.

And finally, when it can't get any worse, everyone realizes he's the reason they're about to die.

And now he has to be thrown down into the sea.

And we read about this, we just saw it in his prayer in dramatic fashion.

In Jonah 2, starting in verse 3, he says, When you threw me into the depths, into the heart of the seas, the current overcame me, and the breakers and billows swept over me.

And I said, I've been banished from your sight.

Yet I will look again towards the holy temper temple, and the water engulfed me up to the neck.

Is anybody in here like uncomfortable in water?

Uh just something about me.

I don't swim, okay?

I sink really well.

Okay, I'm like a professional sinker.

I've done it all.

I've been pulled off the bottom of swimming pools so many times, like that embarrassing whole thing, you know, that I just, you know, I don't really go in the deep end much.

Um I don't like just reading these verses is so much anxiety.

The water engulfed me to my net, and then the watery depths overcame me.

And if that's not bad enough, seaweed is wrapped around my head, and I sink to the foundations of the mountains, the earth's gates shut behind me forever.

These are ancient people, these are non-scientific people.

Um this is what they believe about what's under the ocean because they have no means to explore it.

Like that's where you know how trees have roots, and they can see the tree and they see the roots.

So they think the mountains have roots and that the roots of the mountains are all the way down in the depths of the ocean.

He's saying, like, I'm going down all the way to the bottom.

Chaos.

Distress.

And Jonah knows he had every opportunity to stop and change his mind.

Turn around.

He did.

He kept running from God.

And now he's landed at a place that in our culture we call rock.

The end of the line.

Where just misery and depression gives way to complete hopelessness in despair.

Rock bottom is where you have nowhere else to go.

The lowest.

Quite a statement.

When you get to the place in your life where you're willing to say, I hit rock bottom.

And the scariest part is it's hard to know you're there until you actually get there.

I mean, one of the scariest things you can say is how can it get any worse than this?

Like, what else could happen?

And the answer in Jonah's story seems to be keep running from God and find out.

Maybe you've been there.

If you've lived long enough, most people have.

Maybe if you're willing to get really brutally honest, which is part of what we do here at Metaturch, you're there now.

Hopeless.

The lowest of the low.

Maybe you're on your way and you're very aware of it.

You know how God has laid out his designs and desires for our life, and you know that you're living in opposition to it, and you've already started feeling the consequence, but the bottom hasn't completely fallen out.

Maybe you're on your way to rock bottom and you have no idea.

Jonah ended up in the very depths of chaos, lower than low, a hell of his own making.

And part of the question that Jonah's story answers is something like how far is too far for God to quit pursuing you?

How far is too far for God to finally throw up his hands and give up?

How many times can you go down and down and down before God finally gives up on you?

Maybe you're close to rock bottom.

Emotionally, relationally.

Maybe your addictions are starting to run and even ruin your life.

If you're really honest, you've been headed away from God for quite some time.

So what I want us to look at is the very last line of Jonah's prayer.

Because what I think we need in the church today, and what we need in our lives, is a new perspective on rock bottom.

And I think the story of Jonah offers that to us.

And it's a perspective that if you realize it and you actually accept it in your life, it could very well change your life forever.

Jonah's prayer ends with a line that has been called the central truth of all the scripture.

More than that, it might be the greatest summation of the most important truth in all of human history.

In Jonah chapter 2, verse 9, this is the end of his prayer.

Jonah 2:9

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

Jonah is the 32nd book of the Bible.

So there's 31 other books before him in the Old Testament.

And there's a lot of prophets who have come before him.

And a lot of these prophets are way less screwed up than Jonah is.

Jonah has imploded his entire life and his entire ministry.

He is jacked up wayward.

He's in the midst of running from God.

He had to be thrown out of the ship just so a bunch of innocent people didn't die.

And it's here, all the way at rock bottom, that he concludes his thoughts with salvation belongs to the Lord.

And here's why that matters.

It matters because Jonah didn't learn that truth in the halls of academia.

Jonah didn't learn that truth sitting under the teaching of the priests in the temple.

Jonah didn't learn that truth at the height of his popularity as one of God's prophets in Israel.

That was not revealed to Jonah on the mountaintop of life.

Jonah learned this truth all the way down at rock bottom.

I don't think God sees rock bottom the same way that we often do.

And so often we have this misguided view of our Heavenly Father, and we think that the closer we get to rock bottom, the more anxious God is, just itching to finally get to punish us and smite us and strike us down and give us what we deserve.

That's our view of it, which is why so many people hit rock bottom and never look back to see if God might be pursuing them there.

God uses all things for his redemptive purposes.

And God is more than willing to use your rock bottom to bring you back to himself.

And honestly, in our culture today of so much affluence and so much convenience and so many promises from the culture around us that we really can be our own gods.

So many promises that if you'll just follow this path and make enough money and have sex with enough people and be popular enough on social media, if you just do these things prescripted out by the world around you, that you will be fulfilled and impactful, and you'll live a life of promise and you'll have everything that you need.

And maybe you still buy some of those lies at this point.

But I promise you, any direction you go apart from God, you live long enough and you will find out that at the end of that journey, you are more empty, more shallow, less fulfilled than you were when you started on it.

It is only in relationship with your Heavenly Father that you find your true purpose and your true impact and the true fulfilling, incredible adventure of a lifetime opportunity that God offered you when He created you.

We go through all of these things, and in our culture, for many people, it requires some sort of rock bottom.

Coming to the end of themselves, realizing.

That all of the things they've put their hope in cannot actually hold the weight of their hope or their future or their life or their eternity or their purpose.

And when they've come to the end of themselves at rock bottom, then they are finally willing to look to God.

And I'm here to tell you that if it takes rock bottom for you to finally consider your heavenly father, then we'll just say, thank God for rock bottom.

That God is willing to use anything and everything, including you coming all the way to the end of yourself, just to display his great love for you in your life.

Maybe you're at rock bottom right now, and you're just still hiding away.

Because you've bought the lie that all God wants to do is punish you.

Here's what Peter, who is one of Jesus' disciples, and not just any disciple, he's a disciple who just screwed up all the time over and over and over again.

Here's what he says the Lord does not delay in his promise, as some understand delay.

But the Lord is patient with you.

Nobody knows that more than Peter.

The Lord is patient with you.

Why?

Because he doesn't want anyone to perish or desires at all to come to repentance.

And repentance means to change your mind.

You have decided your plan is better than God's plan.

Change your mind.

You've decided to pursue your desires over God's design.

Change your mind.

Stop, change your mind, and turn back to your heavenly father who is waiting for you with open arms.

You know, when you're raising toddlers, they're mobile, they're dangerous because they can like walk around and stuff, you know.

And you give them a lot of rules.

And a lot of times we give toddlers way too many rules.

Here's kind of a rule of thumb for young parents.

Um, you should give your toddlers the minimum number of rules necessary to keep them alive.

Okay, that's like a good rule.

And then you observe them.

Not over the top of them, because that's gonna be what you want to do because you love them so much, and you don't want them to bonk their head, and you don't want them to touch that or eat that, and so you cover around them, you know.

That's don't do that.

Just observe them close enough to keep them safe, but enough space to let them make mistakes.

And what they learn is the rules you've given them are good because they break them and they experience the natural consequence of that.

And they go, oh, that's that's why dad said that.

And when they learn that your rules are good, they learn that you are good, and that the rules you've laid out for them are part of how you pursue the best life possible for them.

And you let them grow.

And God is our good heavenly father, and he's revealed his design and his desire for our life, and he's watching.

And he's given us freedom, you know.

And so if you want to go down to Joppa, you're welcome to.

God's gonna be trying to get your attention through revelation and consequence.

And if he doesn't get your attention, you can go down onto the ship and you can leverage all your assets and you can pay the fare and you can head off to a far land.

And God will be trying to get your attention, and God will watch you in your relationships as your behaviors that are contrary to how God has asked us to live, or creating distance between the people who love you the most.

And he'll watch you as instead of leaning on God, you lean more and more on numbing the pain of this life through your addictions, and they begin to take over more and more of your life.

And God knows that if you don't turn around, rock bottom is coming, and he's just patiently waiting, not wanting anyone to perish, wanting all people to stop and change their mind and turn around.

The psalmist says this so beautifully in Psalm 40.

He says, I waited patiently for the Lord, and he turned to me and he heard my cry for help.

And he brought me up from a desolate pitting, brought me out of the muddy claiming, set my feet on a rock, and made my step secure.

That's God's desire for your life.

And this isn't religion.

Religion waits for you to hit rock bottom and then just kind of throws a never-ending ladder your way.

Like, good luck, man.

Now that your legs are broken, you're confused, and in the dark, try to climb your way out.

God steps right down into the pit with us.

He meets you at rock bottom.

He doesn't ask for you to clean yourself up or memorize all of the scriptures or go to church ten times in a row.

He meets you exactly where you are at the lowest point of your life.

We never have to question how God feels about us at rock bottom.

Because we can look at the moment where Jesus, God in human flesh, stepped out of perfection, what we call heaven, and stepped down into our brokenness, into our pain.

Scripture says that Jesus, who is in his very nature God, did not consider being equal with God as something to be leveraged against us instead.

He humbled himself.

He stripped himself of his divine attributes.

He became as a man.

He humbled himself and was obedient to death, even to death on a cross.

Jesus came to rock bottom to meet us there.

We asked a question earlier how far is too far for God to quit pursuing you?

How far is too far for God to give up?

Last Saturday I saw one of the greatest examples of the gospel I've ever seen.

Like I experienced it in real life.

And it was such a beautiful picture of what God did in my life and what I know He desires to do in yours.

Um, my oldest son, Lane, he just started at Texas AM, and so we took the family and we went up last Saturday to watch the Texas Aggies blow some random team out of Louisiana out of the water, you know, and and we're there.

If you've never been to an Aggie game, there's like a hundred thousand people there.

It's quite overwhelming.

And and we left, you know, at the end of the third quarter because it was a blowout.

Most people left at the same time.

Tens of thousands of people all exiting the stadium all at the same time.

Now, Katie, my wife, is the most observant person I've ever known.

And as we were walking and wading through the sea of people, she saw a little girl who is on a grassy hill up above us.

I didn't see her, but Katie saw her and she said, I think that girl's lost.

And it got my attention, so I looked, and and this girl was sprinting and just tears flowing from her eyes.

And so we stopped her and just asked her what's going on, and she said, I can't find my family.

Tens of thousands of people, by the way, at an AM game who are all dressed exactly the same, you know.

And she was panicked, and so she was gonna run to find them, which is not what you do.

You know, you need to go back to the last place you saw each other and just stand there and let the parents find them, right?

That that's what you're supposed to do.

And so Katie and I kind of wrangled this little six or seven-year-old girl, and we got her back to the big statues.

It was the last place that she saw her family.

And this was more than likely this little girl's first rock bottom.

She was beyond hopeless.

And we went through this interesting pattern for about 10 minutes, which was 30 seconds of her being just completely hopeless, bawling, just saying over and over, they're not gonna find me.

They don't know I'm gone.

I don't know where they are, I don't know if they're looking.

And Katie and I being the encouragers, your parents are gonna find you.

They're gonna come look for you.

And then she would kind of raise her spirits for about five seconds, and then right back into 30 seconds of just inconsolable, I don't know where they are, and they can't find me, and they don't know that I'm gone, and they're not looking for me.

And I mean, we you know, we just got more verbose.

Like, listen, I have a daughter, you know, and if I found out she's gone, I would do anything to find her.

Your parents are gonna come looking for you, and then 30 more seconds of just bawling and just inconsolable, I'm never gonna see my family again, and they're not looking for me, I don't know where they are.

And we're we're watching her, you know, just concerned about her and keeping our eyes on her.

And all of a sudden, everything changes.

Her face shifted so dramatically, it was like I was looking at a different kid.

And she just said a few words.

My dad's running.

We said, What?

She said, My dad's running.

And we looked up and across this sea of people, there's one man sprinting back towards the last place that he saw his daughter.

He's coming.

My dad's running.

I spent years running from God.

And this was an accident.

I found out they have six kids, they had friends with a bunch of kids, you know.

Mine wasn't an accident.

I I knew who my heavenly father was, and I knew what he required of me and what he wanted for my life.

And I saw kind of the glitch and glamour of the temptation of the world trying to be somebody, trying to prove something.

And I ran from God for years, and I hit rock bottom.

I wanted to give up on everything, things I had worked a decade on.

I just wanted to walk away.

I was depressed.

I didn't want to do anything.

I felt like my life was purposeless, hopeless.

And I didn't believe in a patient God, I believed in an angry God.

And what changed my life and why I'm here doing this, and why I'll give the rest of my life to telling people the good news of who Jesus is and what he offers us is because when I came to the end of myself and there was nowhere else to look, I looked back towards God, and he was running.

After me.

And that picture, my dad's running.

He's for me, he's after me, and he'll never, ever stop.

And I really believe with all of my heart if it takes rock bottom for you to see your father running after you, that we can just say, thank God for rock bottom.

Thank God for anything that will bring you back into relationship with your heavenly father.

You have freedom.

You can run from God until your dying breath.

But you need to know until that last breath, your father is running.

He's after you, and he will do anything he can to bring you back into the family.

Would you guys pray with me?

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

There's nothing magic about that.

Just create some space to reflect on what God might be saying to you in this moment.

And I don't want to beat around the bush today.

I just want to get directly to it because I believe there are probably some people in a room this size, some people who might be streaming with us online, who've never had a moment in their life where they put their faith in Jesus.

Jesus proved that he will meet us at rock bottom when he stepped into our world and gave his life for us.

And what Jesus did on the cross was pay the price for all of the sin that separates us from God.

And all that he asks of us is that we would believe.

Believe that he's God, believe that he really died for our sins, he really rose again, and he's coming back for us someday.

That's it.

Jesus did all of the heavy lifting, all he asks is for our faith.

And if you're here and you've never had that moment in your life where you've put your faith in Jesus, I want to ask you, you know, with every head bowed and eyes close, I want to ask you to do something courageous.

Right where you're sitting, right now, I'm gonna ask you to just slip your hand up in the air.

I've never believed in Jesus, and today is my day.

I'm ready.

I'm ready to be back in relationship with my Heavenly Father.

Amen.

Amen.

For those of you with your hands raised, what I'm gonna lead you through is a very simple prayer to just affirm your belief.

And I'm gonna ask all of the believers in the room to say this prayer with them so no one feels singled out.

All of us affirming our faith in Jesus.

You can repeat this prayer after me.

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

I believe you are God.

I believe you died for my sins.

I believe you rose again and that you're coming back someday.

And today I thank you for a new eternal life.

Amen.

Let me pray over you guys.

Heavenly Father, you have heard confessions of faith, people who are moving from spiritual death now into spiritual life, people who are distanced from you, their Heavenly Father, who are now back in relationship.

This is not the end of something, this is the beginning of the life that you actually offer us.

And I pray we would take hold of that.

We pray it in your name, Jesus.

Now, for everyone in the room, Celeste and Noel are gonna sing a song over you.

And I want you to consider what rock bottom might look like.

Maybe you're there.

Maybe you've been there recently, maybe you're on your way.

We can follow Jonah's example.

Jonah said, I look to your holy temple.

He said it twice in his prayer.

The temple in the Old Testament is where God lived.

He's just saying, I'm gonna stop and change my mind.

Turn around and look back towards God.

And I want to encourage you to do that same thing during this song.

To reflect on the areas where you have gone astray from God's desires for your life.

To make the conscious decision to stop running.

To change your mind.

To ask forgiveness, and he is faithful and just to forgive our sins.

And to commit to come back to him.

Take this time.

We give it to you, Jesus, in your name.

Amen.

God, don't give upon me yet.

But I'm trying.

Don't give up on me yet.

And God's leave me here alone.

Don't leave me here.

I know I'm not the same.

But you know that I would change, and I feel like you're trying to tell me it's okay.

And I know I've come so far, but got so far to go.

And with these broken scars and this broken heart, it's hard to really know if there's a reason and if I'll ever see it.

But I wanna believe.

So don't give up on me yet.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, I thank you that you don't give up.

We run, we repel, and you pursue, and you're patient.

And your desire is for all of us to come back.

Your desire is that no one would perish.

And you've promised us that you loved us so much, you gave us Jesus his life on the cross so that everyone who simply believes would not perish but would have eternal life with you.

And we thank you that once again you have brought salvation to this place.

Thank you that you use our rock bottom to teach us, reveal things to us, bring us back to yourself.

We love you.

We thank you for your great love for us.

We pray all of this in the powerful name of Jesus.

Amen.

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.

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