Get What You Need with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaChurch 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.

All right, MetaCurch, how's everybody doing this morning?

Awesome, man.

We are so glad that you guys could join us for today's service.

I hope that if you were able to take last week off for spring break, that you had a really restful week, maybe you got away for a little bit, spent some time with your family.

And uh, you know, if you weren't able to take off, I hope yesterday was really restful for you and you're ready for a new week.

I really do think it's important that we all get together and we meet together in these gatherings because it kind of helps us just set our perspective, set our focus on the week in front of us.

And so we really are glad that you could carve out some time from Sunday to come and meet with us here today.

My name is Noel, I'm one of the pastors here at MetaCurch.

Specifically, I'm your worship pastor, which just means I usually uh lead the worship section of the service with Celeste and the band.

But from time to time, as Clayton mentioned, I get the opportunity to come and bring the message to you guys.

And I do believe like God has given me something to share with you today that if we can all apply it to our lives, will really help our lives go more in the direction that we actually want them to go.

And so before we get started, why don't we go to the Lord in prayer?

Heavenly Father, I am so grateful that you give me this opportunity.

God, I'm certainly not worthy of being on the stage telling anybody anything, but your power, Holy Spirit, is the thing that really speaks to people.

And so I ask for that today.

I ask, Holy Spirit, that you would move among everyone in this room, that we would hear from you, that we would learn from you, and that we would apply it to our lives as we leave today.

Jesus, we love you and we pray all these things and you're precious and in your holy name, and everybody said together, Amen.

All right, well, I'm gonna start today's message by letting you all in on something that you actually already know.

This is something that we all have in common with one another, regardless of the home you're raised in, the family you were raised in, regardless of the demographic that you come from.

It's something that we all have in common.

Are you all ready to hear what it is?

Matatra, you gotta do better than that because I'm gonna ask a lot of questions today.

Are y'all ready to hear what it is?

Okay, here's the amazing insight that I have for you today.

Try not to be too impressed, I'm just a mere man.

Here's the insight.

Everybody in this room, every single person to a person has something that they want.

That's it.

That's my great insight for you today.

Everybody in here wants something in their life, and there's nothing wrong with wanting something.

To want is a part of being human.

Maybe you think you need some more money, so you really want a raise, right?

Or maybe you've been single for quite some time now and you really want to find someone.

You really want to be in a relationship, or possibly you've been in that relationship for a while, maybe even married for a number of years, and it's just not quite going the way that you hoped it would.

You're afraid that it's gonna end, in fact.

And you really want it to work out.

The list of things that we could possibly want in this life are almost limitless.

There's so many things.

You want more purpose, you want more time, you want more friends, more rest, more hobbies.

To want is to be human.

I'm no exception.

Actually, I have many things that I want.

I don't have just like one thing that I want, I have lots of things that I want.

And some of these things are for me, like they're things that I think will make my life go better in some way, or things that I think will make me a better person somehow.

And then I have other things that I want.

And these other things that I want are usually for the people that I'm close to in my life, but regardless of the nature of the want, they're all wants all the same.

Now, when I was a preteen, I'm talking like eighth grade, I had something that I wanted desperately.

We're gonna go all the way back to the year 1996.

I'm sure most of y'all remember the mid to late 90s.

This is where this story takes place, and I had something that I needed desperately.

Now, when I was uh working on the sermon, I realized something.

I've been a musician for 26 years.

Like, how did that even happen?

Thank you.

Yes, I've just admitted that I'm old and I've been doing this for a while.

I feel like maybe I should be a little better than I am, but that's not the point of the story.

I've been doing it for almost three decades, but it started in eighth grade.

And it started with my best friend, Ricky Stevens.

Ricky Stevens was the cool kid in school.

At least I thought he was really cool.

He had like the really cool hair, or it was cool for the 90s, where it's like long and parted down the middle and went on like either side of your face, right?

He had cool clothes, or at least cooler than mine.

He was really good at art.

He could draw and he could paint.

But the thing that stood out most about Ricky to me was that he could play the guitar.

And I don't mean like he could kind of play a few chords or like sloppily pick out the lead line to Sweet Home, Alabama.

This kid could actually play whole songs, and he was my best, my best friend, which meant one thing.

We had to start a band, like we had to, it was imperative.

I knew what the mission was, I knew my assignment, and luckily for me, Christmas was on the way, and so I began asking for a bass guitar.

Ricky played guitar, so I needed to play bass guitar, and I'm talking like I was asking daily with the fervency of Ralphie asking for a Red Rider BB gun, right?

Like this was coming up all the time in conversation.

Unfortunately, I wasn't near as clever or subtle about it.

I'd be walking through the store with like my mom, and I'd say, Hey uh mom, you know what I hear really good bass guitar is?

A fender bass guitar.

I had no clue what a fender bass guitar was, but I knew Ricky had a fender guitar, so I figured that's probably what I wanted to get.

And I'd be working in the garage with my dad, and I'd say, hey dad, you know what color combination goes great on a fender bass guitar?

Black and white.

I didn't really care about the color combination, but guess whose guitar was black and white?

Ricky's.

It was the color of his guitar.

And I didn't know much about being in a band except for one thing.

If you're gonna be in a band, you have to have matching instruments, right?

That's about all I knew about being.

And it turns out that wasn't true.

You don't have to have matching instruments to be in a band at all.

I started daydreaming almost constantly about the popularity I would have as I walked through the hallways of my junior high school, me in eighth grader with a band.

And if I was gonna be popular in school, it was probably pretty likely that I was gonna become famous at some point, right?

That's a next natural step in my progression as a musician.

And if I was gonna be famous, probably pretty likely that I'd be world famous.

Like I had it all figured out.

Something really strange happened.

These daydreams, these fantasies that I had in my brain somehow just started like spilling out of my mouth while you talk to people.

I just started saying like crazy things.

I remember being at a birthday party at Pizza Hut.

Who remembers having actual birthday parties at actual Pizza Huts?

Like, this is how old I am.

We would have these Pizza Hut birthday parties, and a song came on the jukebox.

This Hotel California by the Eagles.

And if you've ever heard the song, and I'm betting you have, it had a very distinctive bass line.

I leaned over to the girl next to me.

I said, Yeah, I can play that bass line.

Which, you know, was completely false.

I hadn't even really picked up a bass guitar at all, let alone played one long enough to know how to play this song.

But whether or not I was going to be good was just a formality.

All I needed was a bass guitar, and then I would be good.

Well, Christmas Day came along.

I walked out of my room, and there in front of the Christmas tree was a fender, black and white pea bass.

It was the exact thing that I had been asking for.

I couldn't believe my parents had actually got this guitar for me.

I went up to it, I sat down on the floor, I picked it up very carefully, I held it in my lap, and then my mom came up to me like parents used to do remember camcorders instead of iPhones.

Like she came up with the camcorder.

No, what do you have?

And I said, I have a bass guitar.

And she said, Oh, well, play us something.

I just kind of looked up at her with like a deer caught in the headlights kind of look, and I said, I don't know how.

It was so weird.

Like, here was a scene that I wanted.

I wanted it so desperately, and yet, with it in my hands, I realized that I had none of the skills that I actually needed to play it.

We've seen this a lot of times in the world, haven't we?

Like, we've all heard the story of someone who didn't come from money and suddenly found themselves in the position of being a multi-millionaire because they won the lottery.

And what happens just a few years later?

They go broke, all the money's gone.

It's like, where did all this money go?

It's like they had what they wanted, and let's be honest, what all of us would like to have this huge sum of money, but they had none of the wisdom that they needed to be able to manage that wealth well.

Do you remember that first job you had that you could really see being your career?

Maybe you're still in that job, and maybe you didn't make the amount of money that you wanted to make, but you were doing something that you loved to do, and so you figured the money would work itself out eventually.

Sure, you were living paycheck to paycheck, but you're happy for a time.

How long did it take before you started telling yourself, if I could just make this much more money, if I could just make this amount of money, then I would be financially secure.

Then I could uh get off living paycheck to paycheck, and I could actually save money, I could actually pay off debt.

And then time goes by and you get these incremental raises, and before you know it, you look down at your W-2 one day and you think, I'm making the amount of money that I always thought I wanted to make, and yet with each raise, you found more ways to spend that money.

You got what you wanted, but you didn't have the discipline that you needed in order to make sure that that money works for you, and instead you're finding yourself working for your money.

It's like you get the promotion that you wanted so desperately, but you don't have the skills that you need in order to manage difficult people.

You get the relationship that you wanted, but you have none of the maturity to make sure that this relationship will last long term.

You want something in this life.

So do I.

But let me ask you something, and I'm hoping by now you've thought of something that you that you actually want, because everybody in this room wants something.

If you had that thing that you want, if it just appeared right in front of you suddenly, would you know what to do with it?

You know what you want, but do you have what you need?

There's a story in the Old Testament book of 2 Kings, and it centers itself around the life of a man named Naaman.

And Naaman had a significant want in his life.

Here's what 2 Kings chapter 5 says about Naaman.

2 Kings 5 · chapter mention

Verse 1 says, Naaman, commander of the army for the king of Aram, was a man important to his master and highly regarded because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram.

The man was a valiant warrior.

So who was Naaman?

Naaman was a soldier, actually, he's more than a soldier, he was a commander, and he is really good at commanding the army of Aram.

It says that he brought home multiple victories to his homeland.

And because of this, he was highly regarded.

He was an important man to the king.

He was a precious commodity, not just to the king, but to all the people that lived around Naaman.

He represented safety and he represented security.

Naaman was a valiant warrior.

And it would be natural to give Naaman the credit for all the victories.

I mean, after all, he was the commander that was in charge when they won.

But the Bible actually says that it was the Lord who gave victory to Aram, and it was through Naaman that he did this.

Naaman was a tool that God blessed Aram through.

And this is kind of strange because when we say the Lord, we mean God, as in the one true God, the God of the Jews, the Israelites, the Israelites who were enemies of Aram.

Like, why would God do this?

Aram didn't, the people of Aram didn't even believe in God.

They believed in multiple false gods.

Naaman, being a part of this culture, also believed in these false gods, and yet God has granted them victories, sometimes even over Israel itself.

Seems from the opening lines of these verses that Naaman had it made in the shade.

Naaman had a lot of the things that we all want at some level.

He's rich, he's popular, he's well liked, and not just by the people that are around him, he's actually well liked and favored by the one true God.

Naaman is an important man.

You may have noticed that I ended verse one with the ellipses.

This is the dreaded dot dot dot.

You know what this is because when you get a text message from someone and they end it with a dot, dot, dot, you immediately know that there's something they're not saying.

And this is true about this verse.

Like they're not saying something, or I didn't finish it.

There's more to be said about Neaman.

This is how verse one actually ends.

It says he was a valiant warrior, Naaman.

Naaman was a valiant warrior.

But he had a skin disease.

It's like all these things that we've said about Naaman, how good of a commander in the army it was, how important and highly regarded he was.

None of this actually matters because there's a but in this sentence.

But he had a skin disease.

This skin disease almost nullifies everything that we've read about Naaman so far.

I have an observation to make about this point in the verse, and I'm gonna need y'all to help me be as mature as possible as I get through this.

Can y'all do that for me?

Okay, like three of y'all can.

Alright, I'm sorry, Clayton.

It says he was a valiant warrior, but he had a skin disease.

Here's the observation I want to make to y'all today.

Everybody in this room has a butt.

It's something else we have in common.

In fact, there's never been a person in the world that's existed that didn't have a butt of some kind.

Some butts are big and some butts are small.

Butts come in all shapes and sizes.

Okay, seriously, that's one of those words that you can't make a joke about because you say the word butt far too often when we talk.

But it's a real thing.

We all have butts in our life.

They're the things that drive us towards our wants and our desires.

For Naaman, it was a skin disease.

And even though he had fame and power and wealth, all Naaman actually wanted was a cure for the skin disease.

We do this all the time.

It's like, I've got a great job, I've got a great home, but my comparison to the people around me has me leaving, uh has me feeling like completely discontent, feeling like I always need to get the next thing.

I gotta keep up with everybody else.

It's a husband that says, I have a great marriage.

We love each other, but his unhealed sexual history has him looking at pornography every single day.

It's a person who loves their friend and all of their friends, but because of their poor self-image, they find themselves gossiping about those very same friends constantly.

The butts in our life will cause us to pursue what we want.

Sometimes that cost comes at the cost of everything else.

This was actually true for Naaman.

He had a skin disease, and some translations of the Bible actually will say that it was leprosy.

But the fact of the matter is that Naaman didn't know if it was leprosy or not.

If it was leprosy already, Naaman would have been cast out from his society immediately.

Because leprosy started off like many skin conditions.

It came as a red mark on your skin.

And once that mark turned white, then you knew that you had leprosy.

But Naaman wasn't at that point yet.

He knew he had something going on.

He knew he was on an expedited timeline to try and figure it out because he didn't want to lose everything he had gained if it was leprosy.

Unfortunately for Naaman, there is no cure for leprosy.

He was kind of out of luck if it turned out to be leprosy.

I can imagine him just pacing the halls of his home, sleepless nights, his wife trying to console him.

Y'all know what this feels like.

This feels like anxiety.

Anxiety is just the fear of an unknown future, the fear of something that you don't understand yet, an answer that you haven't gotten.

This was what Naaman was dealing with.

And it must have been really obvious in his own household because there was a servant girl that lived in the house with him.

This girl was from Israel, which meant she was a spoiler of war.

Naaman had fought a battle in Israel, won, and taken this girl back to serve him and his wife.

And she speaks up, seeing the distress that Naaman is in.

She tells Naaman's wife, If only my master were with the prophet who is in Samaria, he would cure him of his skin disease.

I can almost see Naaman perking up.

Here's some kind of solution.

Here's some kind of answer.

Sure, Naaman doesn't know if this will actually work, but it's better than what he's received so far.

And so Naaman, with some amount of hope, goes to the king, this king that considers Naaman to be very important, and he tells him that there might be a solution.

And the king says, Don't wait.

Go now.

I'm gonna send you to the king of Israel himself, and I'm gonna send you with a handwritten letter from me.

Pack up and get out of here.

And so Naaman does, but it's really interesting because the girl didn't tell Naaman to go to the king of Israel, did he?

She it wasn't a he, it was a she.

She tells him to go to the prophet in Samaria.

But Naaman, ever the good soldier, listens to his king and he goes to the king of Israel.

Here's what he took with him.

It's pretty impressive, actually.

It says in verse uh five, it says, So he went and took with him 750 pounds of silver, 150 pounds of gold, and 10 sets of clothing.

Now, when I was preparing this message a couple weeks ago, I really wanted to know what that was actually worth because I think sometimes we can read these kinds of things in the Bible and we just kind of like read over them quickly, like, okay, that's what he brought with him.

But this is like 150 pounds of gold?

That's a lot of gold.

750 pounds of silver.

I don't know what that looks like, but here's what it would be worth in today's market.

The silver would have been worth 263,000.

And that's nothing compared to the gold.

The gold was worth 4.15 million dollars.

Are you starting to get a picture of how desperate Naaman is to get rid of this skin disease that he has?

He's willing to do whatever he personally can.

He'll uh talk to friends of influence like kings, he'll bring his fortune with him, whatever he can do to get rid of it, that's what he'll do.

And so Naaman brings this fortune to the king of Israel, implying that he'll pay him, like heal me, and I'll I'll give you all of this money.

The king of Israel sees what's in front of him and he's handed a letter.

This is the letter that came from the king of Aram, and it said this it said, When this letter comes to you, note that I have sent my servant Naaman for you to cure him of his skin disease.

The king of Israel knows who Naaman is.

He must have known who he was.

This is a great commander, one that had defeated Israel in battle some number of times, at least once, that we know about.

The king of Israel does something very interesting.

It's something kind of unique to the Jewish society.

He took his clothes and he tore them.

This was an act of despair.

This was an act of mourning.

And he says out loud, Who do they think I am?

God?

I can't cure this man's skin disease, I can't save his life.

It was clear to the king of Israel what was really going on.

Naaman was gonna die.

He couldn't save his life.

So this wasn't really about him being healed.

This was a way for the nation of Aram to start a fight with Israel.

He was in despair.

He tears his clothes.

Luckily for him, Elisha, the prophet that he was supposed to, Naaman was supposed to go to in the first place, he hears about this and he uh sends a message to the king of Israel and says, Send Naaman to me.

So far, Naaman's done everything he can that was within his uh capabilities, right?

He sent money, he's talked to his friends of high influence and nothing's working.

But Elisha knows something that Naaman doesn't.

He knows that he needs help from God himself.

And so Naaman goes on yet another journey, yet another trip to see if he can get the thing that he desperately wants.

He arrives at Elisha's house, he's met at the gate, not by Elisha.

He's met by a servant, and the servant has a message from Elisha to Naaman.

Verse 10 that says, Go and wash seven times in the Jordan, and your skin will be restored, and you will be clean.

I mean, this is great news, right?

Here's the actual process to get the thing that he wants.

If you'll just do this, you'll be clean.

Sure, Naaman doesn't know if it's gonna work or not, still, but it's an answer, and that's what he's been looking for.

But Naaman's frustrated.

Naaman's kind of at his wits' end.

You can see it in verse 11.

He says in response, I was telling myself, he will surely come out, stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the skin disease.

He's frustrated, and I gotta say, I can't really blame him.

He's at his wits' end, he doesn't know what else to do.

And here was this important man who was expecting to meet with a prophet instead, he's meeting with a servant.

Like he dined with kings and now he's meeting with servants, not just servants, servants of a prophet of a God that he didn't even believe in.

What Naaman actually had was an expectation issue.

I have a close friend that told me one time that.

Expectations are just resentment in disguise.

And while I don't think it's a one-for-one scenario, I have found that to be true in most scenarios in my life.

That usually when I feel resentful towards something, it's because I had an inaccurate or unfair expectation on something or someone.

This was true for Naaman.

He had an unfair expectation in someone and something.

He assumed the expectation was because he was a great man that he would be met by a great man, but instead he was met by a servant.

And he was resentful for it.

He had an expectation of how he would be healed.

He thought that this prophet would come out and call down the thunder from heaven and wave his hands around and do this big act, and then he would be healed of the skin disease.

And instead, he's told to go bathe in the Jordan River seven times.

And he has an opinion about that too.

In verse 12, he says, Aren't Abana and Farpar the rivers of Damascus than all the waters of Israel?

Couldn't I wash in them and be clean?

So he turned and he left in a rage.

He's angry.

He doesn't want to use the dirty waters of the Jordan.

He wants to go home and wash in his own rivers.

He's not going to have this anymore.

He's done everything he can except for let go of his pride.

And that's just something he wasn't willing to do at this point.

Luckily for Naaman, as he's walking away, some of the men, friends that he had brought with him on this trip spoke up.

And this is true for our own lives.

This is why it's important to have a tight circle of like-minded people around you.

And hopefully the like-minded means you're all pursuing a life that reflects the love of Jesus.

Because sometimes when we pursue what we want, when we don't get it right away, we start pursuing it in ways that we should never pursue it in.

And it's important to have these friends that can kind of redirect and guide us back onto the path that we actually need to be on.

This is what happened for Naaman.

He was done, he was gonna leave.

But these men spoke up and they said, If the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it?

How much more should you do it when he only tells you, wash and be clean?

In other words, Naaman, we know that you have a lot of pride and a lot of it is merited.

You're a great commander, you bring home the victory.

If he had told the great Naaman to do a great thing, then you would have done it because that fits your perspective of who you are.

But how much easier is it just to do this simple thing?

Just go and wash and be clean.

And so Naaman listens to his friends.

He allowed them to redirect him.

Naaman goes down to the Jordan River and he steps in and he washes and he steps out and he looks at his skin and he still has a skin disease.

He steps in again, he washes, he steps out, looks at his skin, he still has a skin disease.

He does this six times.

Every time he steps out, he still has all the markings of the skin disease that he had.

The seventh time he steps in, he washes, and when he comes out, he's healed.

His skin is completely clean.

By the way, we hear about this later on in the New Testament.

Naaman actually did have leprosy.

Jesus says it himself that he was the only man in all of the Old Testament that was healed of leprosy.

He stepped out and he was clean, and all the anxiety that he had was washed away with the waters of the Jordan.

All the fears that he had had disappeared.

And so he goes back to Elisha's house.

He beats with Elisha.

This time he actually gets to talk to him.

And here's what he says: He says, I know there's no God in the whole world except the God of Israel.

This is a huge statement because he came from a land that worshipped many false gods, and he didn't say, Out of all the gods that I know, your God is the best.

He completely threw out every other God that he had known previously, and he says, Your God is the best God in the whole world.

And so it started as a pursuit rooted in Naaman's desperate want to be healed, turned into a process that gave Naaman what he actually needed.

Even though he got what he wanted, his life still ended the same way everybody's life ends.

He died.

He got what he wanted, but more importantly, Naaman got what he needed.

He came into an acknowledgement.

He had an encounter with the one true God.

Have you ever had everything going your way?

Like it feels like all the things that you want in your life are happening.

You just are living in the blessing.

By the way, if you don't feel that way, I would challenge you to live a life of gratitude because this happens way more than you're probably giving your life credit for.

We tend to focus on the negative things in life, but I promise you, when you change that perspective, you'll see how many things are going right in your life, even in the midst of the things that are going wrong.

I had a time like this five years ago.

This was the time when Pastor Clayton had actually received the job as lead pastor at Meta Church or City Church West.

He asked me if I would come with him and be his worship pastor, and I, of course, accepted.

I was very grateful for the opportunity.

I was very excited.

I had so many things going for me that I wanted.

I had the family I wanted, the wife and the son that I wanted.

I lived where I wanted.

I lived out in the country.

I was working for the church and the location that I wanted to work within that church, and I was working for the pastor that I wanted to work for.

Everything, everything was great for like two months.

It was two months.

And I found out probably the worst thing a married person can ever find out.

And I'm not gonna go into what I found out because it doesn't really matter, but suffice it to say, it left me completely broken.

I was like a shattered pane of glass, I couldn't believe what had happened.

In fact, when I heard the news of what had happened, I couldn't move for 10 minutes.

In fact, the only thing I could think was this is very strange.

I'm literally not moving.

I was shocked.

It was the middle of the night.

I didn't know who to call.

I knew I needed to talk to somebody.

I actually called Pastor Clayton.

He didn't answer the phone, but to his credit, he did call me like 15 minutes later.

And he spoke to me for some amount of time, trying to uh pastor me and counsel me through this news that I had gotten.

What he gave me that evening was something that uh I really value.

And it was time.

He told me, take all the time that you need to figure this out.

Anybody who's close to me, and especially the people who work with me, will tell you that I am a very slow processor.

Like, you may think that I'm against whatever you're saying.

It's not that.

I just need time to process.

I just need time to think about it.

And so Clayton gave me that.

Clayton gave me the time I needed to really work through everything that was going on.

And there's so many things I don't get right in life.

Uh, I will never try and, you know, present myself as someone who has everything figured out, because I am definitely not that person.

But one of the spiritual disciplines that I feel like I have uh more right than any of the other ones is my prayer life.

I truly believe in the process of prayer and I truly believe in the power of prayer.

And so I took that time.

And most of that time I remember I was on my knees.

Not figuratively, I mean I was like literally on my knees praying to God, begging him, God, please, please don't let me lose my marriage.

I don't want to lose my wife of 10 years.

I don't want to lose time with my son, because as many of us know, unfortunately in this room, with divorce comes custody, and I just didn't want it.

I didn't want any of that to be true.

How could this be happening?

It made no sense to me.

I was very fortunate to have several mentors in my life, way, way wiser than I will probably ever be.

And through meeting with them and through praying, I discovered that I had so many shortcomings in my life, so many.

I'll tell you about a few of them.

I have one of the sharpest tongues I've ever heard of.

I can be very mean, and I oftentimes was mean, and sometimes I didn't even mean to be.

It truly wasn't something I was intending to do.

I hurt people.

I was angry.

I don't even know why I was angry.

I was just angry all the time.

Sometimes it came out as anger, sometimes I had reactions that didn't seem angry, but they came from a place of anger, which is basically the same thing.

It's still not a good place to come from.

Those are just two of them.

I promise you, I had many more than that.

They were shortcomings in my life that I knew needed to change.

Now, they weren't the sole reason why my marriage was in the state that it was, but they were definitely contributing factors.

And I knew early on that I could not control anything that my wife was gonna do in this process.

I could only control the things that I was gonna do.

And so I knew I wanted to be a better person for me, and I wanted to be a better person because that was the only way this marriage was gonna have any hope, at least from my side of it.

And so I started going through a process with a very trusted friend, a very Christ-centered process.

It was very difficult.

I wanted to get to the heart of the issues in my life that I realized I had.

And I did get to them.

I did start to change.

Over seven months, I had multiple people come up to me and say they could see a difference in me.

To this day, people I haven't seen in a number of years are surprised at my attitude and just how I speak to them.

The most telling one was my wife.

We got an argument, and I responded, I guess, differently than I ever had.

She didn't even know how to take it.

She literally said, You're acting differently than I've ever seen you act, and I don't know what to do with that.

And she walked away.

I was changing, and I was changing for the better, but my marriage was still very much up in the air.

Spoiler alert.

I didn't get what I wanted.

I lost my marriage.

All the things that I was afraid of came true.

All of them.

And there was nothing that I could do about it.

It was the hardest thing that I've ever been through.

I still feel the effects to this day, five years, four years later.

But I can tell you for sure that while I didn't get what I wanted, I definitely got what I needed.

I am a different person today than what I was.

And what I had, though it was good and though it was meant to last for a lifetime, was temporary.

There is no marriage in heaven.

I hate to break it to you.

I know you love your spouse, but it's a different reality.

And at best, this was till death to his part.

It just came a little sooner and it was sad, but it was temporary.

And what I gained was eternal.

It's something that I will take into eternity with me.

It's something that has taught me how to love people better and to treat people better and to forgive people more easily.

As one of your pastors, I want that for you.

I want what you want for your life.

If it's good for you, I want you to have it.

I want to help you with it.

I don't know how I can do that for everybody in the room, but I can start by answering a question.

And the question is, how do you get what you want?

The answer I have for you is that the way you get what you want is by pursuing what you need.

In the Gospel of Matthew, there's a section of scripture where Jesus is talking to some people that have gathered around him, and he's telling them some kind of bizarre things, especially for that time, even for this time.

He's saying things like, Hey, y'all, don't worry about what you're gonna wear, don't worry about what you're gonna eat, don't even worry about what you're gonna drink.

Like this seems pretty crazy, right?

These are the necessities of life.

We kind of need these things.

These aren't the ones we're talking about.

It's not more money, it's not a bass guitar.

These are like real things that they need to live.

He says, Don't worry about those things.

Instead, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then, and then all of these things will be added to you.

God knows that you have something that you want in your life.

There's nothing wrong with wanting things for your life.

But Jesus says that there's a heavenly process that you can actually go through that may not give you what you want right now, but it will absolutely give you the things that you need long term.

Naaman tried to do it his way.

He pursued what he wanted hard, he wanted to be cured.

But when that Israelite girl told him to go to a prophet, he went to a king.

When the king sent him back to the prophet, he met a servant.

He wasn't happy with that, he was angered by that.

He wanted to meet with the prophet.

When he was told to bathe in the Jordan, he said he wanted to bathe in the rivers of his own homeland.

It wasn't that Naaman wasn't trying, he was working hard to get the thing that he wanted.

But I want you to notice that it wasn't until Naaman submitted to what God wanted that he was healed.

And the same's true for you.

If you seek what God wants for your life, the rest of the things in life, the rest of the things you want, they're gonna take care of themselves.

If you seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

By the way, the righteousness of God, the righteousness of God is the person of Jesus.

It is Jesus, he is a representation of God's righteousness.

So when it says seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, it's saying, seek after Jesus.

Live the way he lived, love the way he loved, forgive the way he forgave.

It's really easy to say.

It's a simple concept, but it's very hard to do.

But if you can do that, if you can seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, you may not get that thing that you want, but I promise you you will find the thing that you actually need.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for your word.

We're grateful for your revelation, we're grateful for the truths that we find inside of your word, God.

And so, Holy Spirit, I pray that you would um help these words set into our hearts, God, that we could leave this place and seek after the things that we want, but seek after them with a different perspective.

Seek after them with an acknowledgement of we need to find your kingdom and your righteousness first.

We believe, God, that you care for us and that you love us and that you are very aware of our situation and that you want what's best for us.

And so we trust you.

We trust you to give us those things that we need.

We love you, Jesus.

It's your name that we worship and it's your name that we pray in.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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