Move

Man, there's a lot of energy here today.

This is good.

I like that.

I like that.

I like that because today we're starting a brand new series called Move, and so your energy is very, very appropriate.

I'm really excited about this series, and if you've been coming here for a while, you know that every time we start a new series, I tell you that I'm really excited.

And it's not because I'm faking it, it's because I am really excited.

In fact, I have a rule that I made up for myself, which by the way, those are like the best rules, right?

The rules you make for yourself, because you can break those rules if you have to.

Uh but this is one I am I am intent on keeping, and that is this I don't ever want to talk about something up here that I'm not excited about.

Unless God tells me to.

If He tells me to talk about something I'm really, you know, I don't know, bored of, uh, maybe I will.

I mean, I'll do it if God says.

But I just have this personal conviction that if I'm bored talking about it, you're probably gonna be bored listening.

And for years, churches had this reputation of being boring, and I don't know why, because I haven't been part of it for, you know, all that long.

Um, maybe it's because the people leading it were bored, I don't know.

But I just have this feeling that if if we're excited about what's actually happening, if we really believe that a life with God, a life connected to God the Father, a life with Jesus, a relationship with him, and a life empowered by the Holy Spirit, if we really believe that that life is the most exciting life you can live, then we shouldn't be bored here.

This should be a place where we're less bored than at any other time in our lives.

And that's just what we believe.

So we don't believe in boring.

Passion is kind of a must at his hands.

It's interesting.

If you think about the things that hold you back in life, the things that we would put into the category of those struggles we have that keep us from the life we could live, there are a lot of usual suspects that make the list, right?

There's anxiety and fear and worry and stress, and maybe it's a sin issue, it's a lack of self-control, it's an addiction, maybe, maybe it's financial stress or relationship tension or career frustrations.

There's a list of things that we would say, yes, these things belong in the category of what holds us back, but rarely do we talk about boredom.

When we're children, we're very aware of boredom, right?

Kids have this built-in radar for all things boring.

And they live passionate about avoiding whatever is boring at all costs.

I have a son that's about to turn six, and if I look at Liam and say, hey son, hop in the car, because we're about to go to Toys R Us.

I get to say that like Oprah, right?

Like we're going to Toys R Us, like here we go, we're doing this.

And he's like, Woo! But if I say hop in the car because we're gonna go to the grocery store, the look on his face, it's like I've delivered tragic news.

Right?

Like I've said, hey, uh, they've canceled Ninja Turtles forever.

They're gone.

I mean, he's he's like, he's he's mortified.

And if it's something even more boring than a grocery store, then he has to hold back tears.

He does.

And so it's not uncommon for us as a family to be all out and about, and Megan to want to go by her favorite store, which is Joann's.

You're familiar with Joann's?

It's a fabric store.

My wife is, I say a lot, my wife's crafty.

I don't mean that she's like sneaky and scheming.

She likes crafts, she likes making things.

And so Joann's is is like her toys are us.

But to a six-year-old, you literally cannot think of a place that is more boring than Joann's.

And so, in the grand scheme of excitement of places you can go to be excited for Liam, there's like Disney World.

Way down here would be maybe school, because at least school has recess.

The grocery store is below school, Bed Bath and Beyond is like right here, and then Joann's is laying on the floor.

I mean, it's all the way down.

When Megan says we're going to Joanne's, I want to cry a little bit, right?

But we go.

We go.

See, children live life to avoid what is boring at all costs.

But somewhere along the way, as we get older, that that boring radar, it kind of fades.

And I think we just sort of accept the fact that maybe life is supposed to be boring.

But as someone who has kids and who's actually spent a lot of time with children, I used to work with kids constantly, and I I've learned that they have so much to teach us.

Sometimes life is not about what we need to learn, it's about what we need to unlearn.

And and I wonder sometimes if maybe that that natural aversion to boring things, I wonder if that maybe isn't there on purpose.

Like maybe God built us and designed us to begin life with this hatred for boredom on purpose.

Like, what if life is actually supposed to be exciting?

What if you're supposed to love your life?

What if you're supposed to enjoy living it?

Like her.

What if you're supposed to wake up in the morning excited about what you have to do?

See, I believe God did make us that way, and I believe that boredom belongs on that list of things that holds us back.

You were not created to be bored.

But see, boredom is so ubiquitous, it's so common in our world that we don't even recognize how bored we are as people.

The average American watches more than five hours of television a day.

And some of us just say, hey, I'm watching Fox News or CNN, I'm just well informed.

Maybe we're bored.

Right?

Maybe we're bored.

See, if I were to ask us, all of us, how many of you are bored, and I'm not talking about right now in church, please don't raise your hand.

But if I were to say, like, how many of you are bored in general, you're bored in life, I don't think that many of us would raise our hands.

Because we might say this, I'm not bored, I'm busy.

And we think busy is the opposite of bored, but it's not.

It's not.

See, you can be really busy and still really bored.

I'll give you an example.

Let's say you have a day that's full and you run a lot of errands and you go here and you do this.

We pack more into a day than people used to pack into whole weeks.

And at the end of the day, at the end of your average, busy, busy day, right?

You're running around like crazy.

At the end of that day, if someone asks you the very common question, hey, what'd you do today?

What is the most common answer?

Nothing.

That's weird, right?

I mean, we're we're always freaking out because we're so busy, like, I gotta do this and I gotta do this, and I don't know how I'm gonna have all the time to get it done.

And then at the end of the day, when someone says, Hey, what'd you do?

We're like, nothing.

I didn't do anything.

And we don't mean nothing when we say that.

Sure, we did things.

We mean nothing I'm excited about.

Nothing of consequence, nothing that stirs me, nothing that moves me.

Maybe we're bored.

See, busy and bored are not opposites.

Fulfilled and bored, those are opposites.

Those are opposites.

Being bored, it's not about a lack of things to do, it's about a lack of things worth doing.

It's not about not having enough balls to juggle in the air.

It's about not having passion and purpose and meaning behind all the activity.

See, I believe we're meant to live an adventure.

That you were created by God to have an adventure of a life so that at the end of your life, whenever someone says, hey, what'd you do?

Your answer is not nothing.

And at some point in time, maybe we've we've settled for less than we can have.

And for the next few weeks, for the next month, I want to offer us the opportunity to live an adventure with God.

To be free of boredom forever.

And I think that happens when we do one thing.

One thing, and it's this one word that we're gonna focus on a lot in the next month, month and a half, it's the word move.

Now I want to stop here for a second, which I know sounds strange since we just said move, right?

Like let's move, so let's stop.

But I want to make sure we have clarity here.

Because I think one of the things that throws us off in life, I think it's how we start to confuse busy is being the opposite of board, is that we often confuse motion and movement.

They're not the same thing.

Motion, that's busyness.

We have a lot of motion in our lives.

You don't need more motion.

Life is gonna give you plenty of motion.

You don't need more of it.

Motion is getting it all done.

Motion is getting all the boxes checked at the end of the day.

Okay, I did this, I paid this bill, I got groceries done, I got this done, I got the kids to school, I, you know, all that.

That's busyness.

That's motion.

We have a lot of motion.

Movement is different.

Movement means you actually go somewhere.

Movement is about progress.

Movement is about going to places you've never been before.

We don't need more motion, but we do need to move.

In fact, I believe we're built by God to move.

And I know that because God is always moving.

God is always moving, and you were made to be like him.

You really were.

Genesis chapter 1, verse 24.

Genesis 1:24

Then God said, Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.

I love that he says us and our because you got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even in the very first chapter of the Bible.

Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.

So you were created by God in his image to be like him, and he is always moving.

In fact, you can you can look at the whole story of the Bible.

And if you looked at it through the lens of God moving and people moving with him, it would not be in an accurate way to sort of categorize the story of the Bible.

It's the story of a God who moves and people who are willing to move along.

Along with God.

For example, Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

This is when God calls the first person that's really called to be a God follower, Abraham.

He's the one that is going to start this whole nation of people that God is gonna use to show the world what he's really like.

And the very first thing God asks Abraham to do is move.

Genesis 12, 1.

The Lord said to Abram, he hadn't changed his name to Abraham yet, leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family, and go to a land that I will show you.

God says, Hey, move.

And it's interesting because the way of life that God chooses for his first followers is a nomadic way of life.

He calls them to be nomads, to be constantly moving.

And so they do.

They move, they never settle, they're always moving.

His grandsons, their grandsons, eventually they settle in Egypt, and that's when things kind of go sideways.

And they become slaves in Egypt for over 400 years.

And so God sends a prophet, a man named Moses, and he frees them, and again they're on the move, and they spend the next 40 years living as nomads in the desert.

And that's a phase of their history that usually is looked upon in a negative light.

It's categorized by a lot of failure and frustration, but even though they did some things wrong, they were still in this really amazing place with God, learning how to move as God moved.

In fact, Numbers chapter 9 tells this story of how they would go about moving around in the desert.

Numbers 9 · chapter mention

It's amazing.

Verse 15 says, On the day the tabernacle was set up, that was the place that they worshiped.

The cloud covered it.

Now, when it says the cloud, it means the presence of God.

God did this miraculous thing, this kind of unbelievable thing.

He manifested his presence as a cloud in the daytime so they could see it.

And at night it was fire.

It says, But from evening until morning, the cloud over the tabernacle looked like a pillar of fire.

It must have been so beautiful.

This was the regular pattern.

At night, the cloud that covered the tabernacle had the appearance of fire.

So whenever the cloud lifted over the sacred tent, the tabernacle, the people of Israel would break camp and follow it.

And wherever the cloud settled, the people of Israel would set up camp.

In this way they traveled and they camped at the Lord's command whenever he told them to go, wherever he told them to go.

Then they remained in their camp as long as the cloud stayed over the tabernacle.

If the cloud remained over the tabernacle for a long time, the Israelites stayed and performed their duty to the Lord.

Sometimes the cloud would stay over the tabernacle for only a few days, so the people would stay for only a few days, as the Lord commanded.

Then at the Lord's command they would break camp and move on.

Sometimes the cloud stayed only overnight and lifted the next morning.

But day or night, when the cloud lifted, the people broke camp and moved on.

So here we have the people of Israel.

And what are they doing?

They're moving.

But God is moving first.

They're just responding to his movement.

Years later, King David, this great king, he's in the promised land.

The people of Israel have settled there.

They've conquered it.

They're living in Jerusalem.

And he's kind of upset about the fact that God lives in a tent.

Makes sense.

There's all these fake gods, these made-up gods, and they live in these grand cathedrals and these beautiful, beautiful pieces of architecture, these temples that are gilded and amazing.

And God, the real God, the only God, lives in a tent.

That's got to change, right?

And so he has this idea: I'm going to build a temple.

And God's going to love this, God's going to be so excited about this, but God isn't really thrilled with the idea.

And so God speaks to this prophet named Nathan in 2 Samuel 7.

But that same night the Lord said to Nathan, Go and tell my servant David, this is what the Lord has declared.

Are you the one to build a house for me to live in?

I've never lived in a house.

I've never lived, I love that.

I've never lived in a house.

From the day I brought the Israelites out of Egypt until this very day, I have always moved from one place to another with a tent and a tabernacle as my dwelling.

Yet no matter where I have gone with the Israelites, I've never once complained to Israel's tribal leaders, the shepherds of my people.

I've never asked them, why haven't you built me a beautiful cedar house?

In other words, God is saying, I like to move.

I like my tent.

If he were a person today, he'd be one of those people that has campers, right?

Like some of you do.

Parked in front of his house.

He likes to move.

He doesn't want to stay still.

That's not his nature.

See, God's always moving.

And we look at that in those stories, and we see him moving in a physical sense, that he's moving from place to place, but he's always moving in the sense as well that he's always doing something new.

He's always taking us, taking people into uncharted territory.

He's always moving us out of something and into something better.

He's always been like that.

Jeremiah was a prophet that lived prior to the years of Jesus.

And God spoke to Jeremiah, spoke through Jeremiah, and he wrote, This The day is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah.

This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and I brought them out of the land of Egypt.

They broke that covenant, though I love them as a husband loves his wife, says the Lord.

But this is the new covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after those days.

I will put my instructions deep within them and I will write them on their hearts.

I will be their God, and they will be my people.

God is saying, Hey, I want to move.

I want to do something new.

I'm not satisfied with the way things are.

And my focus is not to preserve those things.

I want to do something new.

I want to move into a new place.

When Jesus came, he continued that movement.

And people had a hard time with it because Jesus was doing new things.

Jesus was doing things no one had ever done before.

And he was ignoring some of the ways things had been done.

That did not sit well with a lot of people.

And so we see an interaction take place in Mark chapter 2 that highlights this.

Mark 2 · chapter mention

Once, when John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, some people came to Jesus and asked, Why don't your disciples fast like John's disciples and the Pharisees do?

Jesus replied, Do wedding guests fast while celebrating with the groom?

Of course not.

They can't fast while the groom is with them, but someday the groom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast.

Besides, who would patch old clothing with new cloth?

For the new patch would shrink and rip away from the old cloth, leaving an even bigger tear than before.

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins.

For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost.

No new wine calls for new wineskins.

They would store wine in these animal skins, and new wine, it moves, it ferments, it expands, but the old wineskins were rigid and hard.

They didn't have the ability to expand anymore.

So if you put new wine in those wineskins, the wine had nowhere to move and expand, and it would break the wineskins.

Everything would be lost.

Jesus is saying, hey, I am moving into a new place.

I'm doing something that's never been done before.

I need people who are following me that can move with me.

So you Pharisees, you people who are so fixated on religion that you're rigid.

You can't move, you just can't be part of what I'm doing.

Because I'm doing something new.

From the beginning to the end of scripture, it's a story of a God who is on the move.

And it's the people who are who are willing to take the adventure of moving with him.

We are made to move.

We are made for more than busyness.

We are made for more than motion.

We're made to go places.

You can go through the motions and not actually go anywhere, right?

Have you ever experienced that in life?

I experience that all the time.

In the last year, I've put on 20 pounds of what is most definitely not muscle.

And uh, you know, sometimes Megan will be like, no, you're kind of big bone.

I'm like, there's not a bone here.

There's what bone is large?

I mean, I have a spine, but I don't think that's pushing this forward, you know, have other problems if that was the case.

And it's not abnormal for a man to gain weight when his wife is pregnant, right?

My wife's been pregnant for the last nine, ten months, gestation period of a human being.

And um, they call that sympathy weight.

So I'm so sympathetic and just loving.

20 pounds with I should get a medal, really.

And what's really frustrating, but kind of funny, is that the whole time I've been putting on this weight in the last year, I've been going to the gym.

Like I've been there and I thought I was moving.

I thought I was doing things, I thought I was making progress, I thought I was working, but it turns out I was actually just going through the motions.

And I know this not just because I put on the weight, but because this year, and I mentioned this a few weeks ago, it's a big deal for my life.

I decided to hire a personal trainer, and that is not something that I wanted to do.

Because it costs money, and I don't want to spend that money on that.

It's a sacrifice, we have to move some things around financially.

I don't want to do that.

There's other things I'd rather spend the money on, but I had this epiphany one day of like, hey, six months of a personal trainer will probably cost me less than the medical bills 20 years from now.

So I should probably just bite the bullet and do this.

And so I did.

And it became apparent to me during my first session that what I have been calling working out is not actually working out.

It's not the same thing.

It's like what I've been calling working out is motion, and now my trainer has me moving, and I'm I'm blown away by the pain that I feel in the places that I feel the pain, it doesn't make any sense to me.

Just this last week, actually, I go in and the trainer asked me what I ate that day because there's accountability.

And I said, Well, I had oatmeal for breakfast and you know, for lunch, I had this really healthy lunch.

I left out the fact that I stopped by a raised donuts on Canton Road and got a maple bacon donut made with real bacon.

Have you had those, by the way?

You should have those.

And here's how I kind of because I can convince myself of anything.

You know, you got protein shakes, okay?

There's a lot of protein and bacon, or there should be, I think, because it's meat.

And so it's kind of like a protein donut.

That's how I think about that.

Right?

Which somehow is healthier than a regular donut.

I don't know.

But I just left that one off.

And I said, hey, here's what I've eaten.

I had lunch.

This was 12:30, right afternoon.

And the trainer looks at me and says, Well, um, how long ago did you eat lunch?

I was like, I don't know, 30, 35 minutes ago.

And the trainer goes, Oh, oh, okay.

And then they look at me and they ask a question that no one wants to hear their trainer ask them before they work out.

Trainer says, Do you throw up easily?

And I'm I'm like thinking, I'm like, I've been in this situation before.

I remember one time years ago I was getting my hair cut.

This is a true story.

And the person cutting my hair had the clippers on the back of my head and they stopped, and this happened.

This really happened.

They asked me, Do you wear hats?

And I didn't know what to say, and so I just responded with the question.

I just said, Well, am I gonna need to?

Right?

That's all I want to know.

And when my trainer says, Do you throw up easily?

I just said, Am I gonna need to?

in the next 30 minutes.

I really hope not.

And all I'm gonna say is that from now on, I will not eat lunch 30 minutes before I go.

It's never gonna happen again after that experience.

It won't happen.

See, I thought I thought I had movement in my life.

I thought I was doing things, but in reality, it's just motion.

The story of Scripture is not the story of busy people occupied and overwhelmed by all the motion in their lives.

It's the story of a God who moves and the people who move with him.

The people who live the best adventures in life are those easily moved by God.

And if you want life to be an adventure, if you want more than motion without meaning, boredom, and busyness, then you need to learn to move.

And to move like God moves.

Because that's how that's how life becomes fulfilling.

That's how life becomes something that excites you.

You're not you're not made to wish you had someone else's life.

You're made to love the life you have, to actually enjoy living it.

That happens when we move.

Like we're meant to move.

Over the course of the next several weeks, we're gonna study and look at how God moves, how he likes to move, how he calls us to move specifically, so that we can learn to be people who recognize when God is moving.

We can learn how to move in kind.

But today, today's kind of an introduction to this concept.

Today's like the appetizer.

The point of the appetizer is not to fill you up, it's to make you hungry.

Because I want us to leave today hungry for real movement in our lives.

You were made to move.

And today I want to challenge you and ask you, myself included, because this is hard, to pray a very, very dangerous prayer.

We're going to pray some dangerous prayers this month.

Those are the best kind.

We love danger, don't we?

We love danger.

We just tend to outsource danger to Netflix.

You're like, ooh, what's going to happen?

I wonder if they win.

They always win, good guys.

Well, unless they don't.

But you weren't made to outsource adventure to TV.

You're made to live adventure.

Your life is meant to be a story worth telling.

So danger's a good thing.

We're going to pray some dangerous prayers.

The dangerous prayer I want to ask you to pray today is simply this God, move me.

I will be movable by you.

If that is your prayer, if that's your prayer, be ready for an adventure.

God, move me.

I will move with you.

Make me movable.

The people that live the best adventures are the ones most easily moved by God.

That is what makes us effective at life.

That is what makes us effective as a church, by the way.

This is important because as a church, as a family, as a group of people, it's not our size that makes us effective in this community.

We've grown a lot in the last few years, and that's great.

But it's not the number of people that call his hands their home.

It's the number of people here who are easily moved by God.

What will make us really effective in God's kingdom is the fact that we're going to be a church that says, hey God, when you move, we'll move with you.

When you tell us to go here, we'll go there.

When you tell us to do this, we'll do it with passion.

Because we want to be movable.

You know why?

Because we want to be part of a movement.

Don't you want to be part of a movement?

Something bigger than yourself, something that outlives you.

That's what I want for my life.

Yeah, delayed clapping.

Let's do this.

I mean, seriously.

There have been so many movements in history, great movements, important movements.

Some come and go.

You've got the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and Tybo and all these movements that happened and they came and they went.

You know?

Being a vegan, it's a movement.

It needs to stop, but you know.

I mean, how many maple bacon donuts do I need to eat?

If the vegans would eat them too, it wouldn't be so many for me to eat.

That's what I think.

Joking, sort of.

So, all joking aside, 2,000 years ago, the greatest movement in history began.

And it's this movement of Jesus, breaking people free of everything, everything that robs them of life.

And Jesus having the power to do it all himself, but actually out of love for us and out of a recognition that we were made to move, we were made to be like God, we were made to live an adventure, Jesus calling us out of the monotony of life to move with him and to be part of his movement.

If you want to be part of his movement, you gotta move because you can't have an adventure standing still.

So pray that this week.

Pray, God, move me.

I will be, I will be movable.

And then be ready for resistance.

Because there is so much in life that will fight against you actually moving forward.

And there's a lot.

There's a lot that will fight against us personally.

There's a lot that'll fight against us as a church.

Like religion, for example.

We talk about religion a lot, and if you're new, understand that when we say religion, we're not talking about the good things people do in honor of God.

We're talking about the rules and the regulations that people replace God with.

See, religion is something you should never follow.

You want to know why?

Religion doesn't go anywhere.

What's the point of following something that doesn't move?

Religion by nature is rigid, it drops anchor.

And it believes that preservation is way more important than progress.

But God is always moving.

He's always moving forward, he's always doing something new.

Jesus fought harder against religion than anything else.

Than anything else.

I love this quote.

It's one of my favorite quotes ever by a man named William Barclay.

He says, the church always runs the danger of condemning a new way just because it's new.

In one sense, there is hardly any institution in the world which resents change so much as the church does.

It has often rejected a great teacher and often refused some great adventure simply because it suspected all things new.

As a family, his hands, we want to live a great adventure.

And to do that, we're going to have to be willing to move with God.

Religion says, stay here.

And it's funny, we actually live in this time when there's a lot of churches doing things in a lot of new ways, and it's really exciting, and you know, things are more modern and more relevant to culture, and that's all good, but religion, it's still there.

And so the second that we have this attitude of, hey, we do it the right way, this is the only way.

And if you don't do it this way, you're doing it wrong.

That's religion.

We can't have that.

We have to fight that.

Because it will work its way in.

I know that.

We used to do Lord's Supper every Sunday.

Sorry, I guess I'm on my throat.

Now we do Lord's Supper almost every Sunday.

But when we do baptisms during the service, some of you who are new don't know we made this change.

That Sunday we do baptisms instead of Lord's Supper.

We used to do baptisms after church, but we wanted everyone to be able to experience those stories of the people going all in with Jesus.

That's exciting.

And so we've been doing Lord's Supper every single Sunday for like seven years.

And then we switched from every Sunday four times a month to three times a month.

And I got some emails.

Right?

I got some people like, hey, change.

Change is bad, says religion.

But we're gonna move.

And we're gonna be movable.

Fear, fear in our lives will fight against movement.

We live in a world that values personal safety and security above all things.

In your five plus hours of television viewing today, pay attention to all the commercials that are selling you safety and security and an idea of safety and security.

Hey, buy this, have this, and everything's gonna go smoother, everything is gonna work out.

And here's the thing God wants you to be safe and secure, sure.

It's just that he's your security.

And if we just let him be our security and let the rest work itself out, we'd be a lot better off.

But what if what if God's primary purpose for your life is not that you're safe, but that you're fulfilled?

What if God's primary desire for you is not that everything is always safe and secure and good and smooth, but that you're actually doing something in life?

See, sometimes in our desire for safety and security, in our desire for nothing bad to happen, we live a life where nothing happens.

And God wants something to happen in your life.

He wants you to be the something that happens in someone else's life that changes them.

But that fear of anything that involves risks, see, we're gonna have to fight that if we're gonna be people who move.

We're gonna have to fight complacency.

This is the big one.

It's the temptation to settle.

To say, hey, I've gotten to this level, I'm here, I can check the box off and say, hey, we've done it, we've made it, we're good.

And then to stop just short of what we could really have.

And there's actually nothing personally that breaks my heart more than to see people settle for just less than they could really have with God.

And I see it happen all the time.

I see it happen in my own life all the time.

Sometimes we settle for church.

And you need to understand this.

Our hope for you is not that you like church, it's that you love Jesus.

Because you can like church and not love Jesus, and it doesn't really matter for you.

It's that you love Jesus, you love him, you know him.

It's that you actually have the Holy Spirit in your life.

And hearing that freaked me out seven years ago.

Anytime someone will be talking about the Holy Spirit, I'd be like, weirdo, and I would sort of like move away.

Because there are a lot of weird people that talk about the Holy Spirit a lot and use the Holy Spirit as an excuse for their weirdness, and they just need to quit it, right?

That that's true.

But see, deep down inside, I I don't know.

I wouldn't be wouldn't be upset if some some kind of weird but cool things happened in my life.

You know?

I want to see some things happen.

I don't want to settle for normal.

I don't want mundane.

And you know what?

If the Holy Spirit's real, I sure as heck want real in my life.

So let's not settle for for less.

Let's not settle for for church.

Let's not settle for success.

Let's not settle for for even Christian.

Let's be people who are very rare, even even Jesus followers who are very rare that say, I want it all.

And I want it all so I can give it all away.

Let's be those people.

Let's move.

Let's see what God does when we say as a church, move us.

Move us, take us to places we've never been, do things we've never imagined, bring us out of our comfort zone, move us, push us forward, but just be gentle.

We can pray that.

And he is gentle.

He is, he's so good.

None of that matters if we don't decide in our hearts right now to be movable people.

Isaiah says it this way in chapter 64, verse 8.

And yet, O Lord, you are our father.

We are the clay, and you are the potter.

We are all formed by your hand.

This is Isaiah saying, hey, shape us, move us, stir us.

I want to be part of a movement.

And I would love for all of you to be part of it with me.

And I think this world, this community maybe, I can't even imagine what would happen.

If the people who say they're Jesus followers would live life constantly praying, move me, constantly sensitive to how God is moving.

And constantly responding when he does.

The people that live the greatest adventures are those most easily moved by God.

So be movable.

Pray for that.

Seek that.

And let's see what happens.

Let's live an adventure.

Pray with me.

Jesus, thank you so much for this church.

God, we want to be movable.

And you know, for some of us, that's really inconvenient because we're gonna have to change some things.

For some of us, this prayer of being movable might mean for the very first time us moving out of the life we're living and into a relationship with you for the very first time.

And Lord, if there is one person in the room that doesn't know you, that hasn't made that move in their life, I pray that right now that happens.

That they just pray in their hearts right now to you that they're yours, that they believe in you, and that they want to live their whole life walking with you.

And God, as a church, as a group of people, we are we're gonna pray this together.

And it is dangerous, and who knows what's gonna happen.

But move us.

Make us movable.

Give us soft hearts.

Give us responsive spirits.

God make us those those new wineskins that you can pour your spirit into so that we can go to new places that we've never been before.

We don't want motion.

We're tired of boredom.

We want to move and we want to move with you.

And we pray all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.