Strange Things Jesus Said - Hate Your Parents

Thanks for listening to the His Hands Church podcast.

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And thank you for being part of what God is doing at His Hands.

And there is nothing in this world that uh that can come close to your love, to your presence.

So, Lord, we uh we thank you for the opportunity to be together in your presence this morning, to be together as a family of people who love you and who are loved by you.

And that second part is the most important.

We are loved by you.

You are everything, you are the king of this universe, and we are your children, and we love that.

Lord, I pray that you would just speak through your word this morning and bring us together as your body of believers into a unified group of people that just love you and are serving you and serving one another.

We pray this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

All right.

Well, hey, we survived another snow apocalypse.

We're doing we are Georgians.

Isn't this exciting?

We had, I don't know, the last one I think we called Snow Apocalypse.

This one was Snow Megeddon.

We we're gonna, if it happens again, we're gonna run out of names.

So I'm hoping we're done.

But uh I just have to say I'm so proud of I grew up in the north, and uh it's funny because uh there was a skit on Saturday Night Live when the first snow thing happened, and it was kind of making fun of us as southerners, and and that we just have to laugh at ourselves sometime.

And the guy in the skit was saying, you know, when it started to snow, I went to the one place I knew was safe, the interstate.

And you could tell that the second time around we learned, we learned because we all stayed home, and it was hopefully good for you.

Hopefully, none of us lost power for long.

But we're here this morning, and we are loved by God.

We are loved.

God uh Ben Sykes is gonna be sharing with us this morning.

He's got a very, very interesting message.

I'm really excited to for all of us to hear it.

I've got a few quick announcements.

Uh, I know that for a lot of us, this will be the first week our small groups will be getting together because of the weather last week, and that's really exciting.

That's very exciting.

Um it's a it's a really important thing that we're starting together, coming closer together as a family.

And I know that a lot of us uh have signed up or or or have gotten information about that.

Just stick with that because it's gonna be a fun chapter for us as a church, getting all this going.

Uh, if your group didn't meet last week, they'll probably get together this week, so don't worry about that.

At the Connect Desk, as soon as we're we're done this morning, uh, there's gonna be some people there to to help you sign up for any of our teams here at the church, to being a part of a team.

And every month or so we want to highlight one team.

And this morning I I really want to highlight, and for the next several weeks, our kids and nursery teams here at his hands.

And uh, I'm a parent, I have a four-year-old boy, well, he's about to be four, and he's in the nursery, he's been a part of the nursery for the last several years, and it it blows me away the conversations that we have every single week that come from what he's experiencing here on Sunday mornings.

And what happens over in the kids area, and just so you know, if if you are a parent or even if you're not, every Sunday we average about 250 plus kids.

So right now, while we're all sitting in here, just imagine.

Just take us, add 255 kids, fifth grade and under to this mix, and just imagine what that would be.

It's it's a little crazy, but it's so worth it because these kids have the rest of their lives to know Jesus.

And we need great people to be willing to pour into their lives.

So just to talk about this for a few seconds, because I think it's important.

Uh a couple weeks ago, my son was learning that Jesus can do anything.

That was their theme in the nursery last month.

Jesus can do anything.

So I come home and we're talking one day, and he goes, Dad, did you know that Jesus fed 5,000 people?

And I was like, Whoa, how did he do that?

He's like, I don't know.

I think he went to public.

And he says, but but he fed 5,000 people.

He went, Jesus can do anything.

And then he went, God can do anything.

And then he asked me, Who's God?

Okay.

Last week they're they're learning right now that Jesus loves everyone.

So last week he told me this story.

He said, Dad, there is this guy named Icaeus.

Okay, we go to IKEA a lot, so I don't know if that's where it's coming from.

He's like, his name is Icaeus, and he's a little guy, and he's just all this money, but Jesus loved him anyway, and he gave the money back.

Jesus loves everyone.

And this is just coming from my four-year-old son.

So to know that and to see what he's experiencing, this is his first chance to know Jesus, and he's blown away.

And yesterday in the car, just impromptu, he starts asking us questions about heaven and about what that's going to be like.

And I know that that's the result of these seeds that are being planted in his life here on Sunday mornings.

And it and I'm blessed by that.

All of us should be, because we have amazing young children in this church and they need to know Jesus.

If you're willing, and you see the value in that to help out 12 times a year, one Sunday a month, and just give those kids your time and attention.

I can promise you one thing.

You might feel like you're giving up something in here, you're not.

I spent three years never being able to come into this room, not one time.

Because every Sunday I was with our first through fifth graders.

Three years.

And it was one of the best three years of my entire life.

And those kids taught me so much about God and got me so excited about God.

And so I know I've talked about this for forever, but I just believe that children are really important.

I know all of us do as well.

And so if you're interested and willing, I would just encourage you to head over to the Connect Desk afterwards and sign up for our kids or our nursery team.

Um, I know the people that help out will be blessed, but more than anything, there's gonna be kids that know Jesus.

And that's awesome.

That's awesome.

So that I'll I'll stop talking about that.

Thank you also for those of you that help us financially.

There's four columns in the back of the room if you want to do that this morning.

Um let's go ahead and bring Ben out.

Ben's gonna share with us this morning.

Well, Bet, you were in were you there the whole time?

That was like you were shadowed and hidden.

Slightly creepy, but I love you, Ben.

All right, Ben's stomach's everybody.

Well, good morning.

I do like to sneak around.

My wife always says she's easy to scare, so I'll just go walk around the house and sneak in.

How you guys doing?

Well, my name is Ben.

We've got uh I love the sermon series that uh we're doing right now.

Uh I think Bill Thrasher came up with this.

He spoke last week, but the sermon or the sermon, I you get fined for a dollar for saying like churchy words around here.

The message series is uh it's strange things Jesus said, which I think is great because I I I like the conceit that's kind of built into that that title, as if Jesus is the one saying strange things and we're the reasonable people.

And we get to well, I just reasonably want to explain some of the strange things that Jesus said and kind of his loopier moments, and uh that's helpful for us to do.

And so we have a really great one that we're gonna look at this morning.

You know, Jesus is probably listening in and he's saying, Really?

You know, you're calling me strange?

Like I'd like to preach a sermon series on strange things that his hands people said.

That would be like a 72-week multi-year kind of thing that he would preach.

He would speak.

So, strange things that Jesus said, we have a great launching off kind of verse this morning.

I think maybe this takes the cake, this verse, for strange things that Jesus said.

Uh, this is actually in the Bible.

I'm not making this up.

This is uh Luke 14, and this is from the uh NIV version.

Jesus said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

So there you go.

Hate your parents, hate your kids, hate your wife, hate yourself, and by doing so, you will qualify yourself to be a disciple.

So, in unrelated news, I think my parents are actually here visiting.

Awkward.

Sorry.

I I was tempted to entitle this message, it would have been too long, but I was tempted to call it uh, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure Jesus wants me to hate you.

But so what does that mean that we should hate all these people?

Um I was kind of scared given this this message actually to pick this as a topic, because I knew maybe half of us immediately would think, well, that's scandalous, and just kind of check out mentally before we ever really got going.

But that wasn't really my primary concern.

My primary concern was with the other half of us that would hear that and say, okay, hate my parents, hate my kids, hate my spouse, check, check, check.

What's the problem, you know?

Let's go to lunch.

Finally, finally, Jesus and I are on the same page.

So if you're in this half of people, then you know the the statement is supposed to have an element of shock value for it to work.

And if there's no shock, I I don't really know, you I can't really reach you, so I'm just gonna speak to these people over here.

So okay, so so what we'll find with this, as you might guess, I mean, there's there's the easy explanation, which you probably could guess, or maybe you've heard before, and that'll be enough to kind of to get Jesus off the hook from having said this this scandalous thing.

But then there's kind of the real point, which requires us to dig a little further and look at some of the verses that follow that.

So, first let's talk about this hate verse so it's not distracting.

Uh let me read it again from the NIV version.

So Luke 14, 26.

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

But notice the the clause kind of come out of the verse really quickly if you read it in the New Living translation.

That translation says, if you want to be my disciple, you must hate everyone else by comparison.

Your father and mother, your wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even your own life.

Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple.

So this is a relative thing.

Compared to our love for Jesus, we might as well hate everything else.

Because our love for him and our dedication for him, that priority is can consume everything else in our lives.

And that makes more sense.

That's something we can wrap our heads around.

And that makes more sense too, because you could probably quote like a zillion other verses in the Gospels where Jesus is talking about how important it is for us to honor our parents, love those people that are around us, and and even there's there's salvation for all these categories of our lives personally because of Jesus and what he's saying in the Gospels.

So it's not at all obviously that Jesus forgot the fifth commandment.

You know, the fifth commandment is to honor your parents.

We have to remember Jesus is not necessarily, you know, just some guy that we hope remembers all ten, like a well-meaning Messiah, we're hoping remembers all ten commandments and never makes a mistake because the stakes are really high.

Jesus is also the guy that stood on the mountain thousands of years ago, wrote those commandments out on stone, and handed them to Moses.

That's who Jesus is.

He's he's all of that together.

So he's very much concerned with honoring our parents and loving everybody that's that's around us.

So there's at least a couple other verses uh that use the same kind of hate analogy in the Bible.

I'll mention just one as an illustration.

Uh a couple chapters later in Luke, Jesus says this.

This is in Luke 16.

He says, No one can serve two masters, for you will hate one and love the other, you'll be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and money.

So take that one kind of as a separate example.

Uh, in that, you know, if you're trying to have a proper perspective on money and on God and you're you want to be prayerful about it, then is Jesus really saying that we should hate, like in a violent sense, all of our money?

Does he want us to take out our wallet and you know, shred everything that's in there out of spite?

Or is he just saying, by comparison, money doesn't mean anything because our devotion to God consumes everything?

So it's uh it's the same kind of dynamic that's going on in Luke 14 when he says, you have to hate all these other things compared to your relationship with me.

There's a lot of a lot of influential things in this world, and a lot of influential people will be around you, but my influence in your life has to be absolutely the major thing.

It's it's a matter of priority.

Uh the priority thing reminds me of uh a small group I led in in college.

It's one of the first small groups that I was in.

And I was in it for one year, and then I led it for a couple years, and met in our apartment.

And we, after we met for a few years, somebody in the group said we needed to come up with a catchy name for the group.

Like a marketing major or something, probably thought that was really important.

And so, of course, they didn't have an idea for it, and so no one could come up with an idea for the name for the group.

And so I just said, Well, the only thing that came to my mind, we were, I think, studying this verse that we're talking about this morning.

And so I said, Why don't we call the group priority one?

Because it was about, you know, this priority of everything else in our life is down here, and then Jesus is like this.

And so no one else had a better idea, so that became the name of the group by default.

But I always regretted that because it made for these really awkward conversations.

Like uh, you'd be in the cafeteria and you'd say, Hey, are you coming to priority one on Tuesday night?

And so the guy would say, Uh no, I'm actually, I got something else, another commitment.

That an awkward pause that is apparently of a higher priority than priority one.

And then you have to backpuddle, like, no, no, no, don't worry.

You know, hey, it's it's not a guilt trip or anything.

You know, we call it that because that's a priority one's our relationship with God.

It's not it's not going to that exact study that's priority one.

You know, it's a common misconception, and you know, don't worry about that.

It's fine if you want to go to your frat party.

The rest the rest of us will just go to priority one, you know.

It's so it's it's easy to be misunderstood.

I feel for Jesus here.

Um it's a it's not a guilt trip.

This is something that uh is a very real statement about the priorities that we have in our lives.

But just because it's a relative thing, it doesn't mean it's an it's not an actual choice that Jesus is talking about.

A very real choice uh for his disciples, especially.

He had this huge group of people at this point behind him, and he turns and he's specifically talking to his disciples.

When he says all this, and because many of his disciples were going to be literally disowned from their families for following Jesus, because it wasn't always a popular thing at all to follow Jesus.

Many of those families thought that Jesus was a discredited Messiah, especially when he was crucified.

And so they had to make really difficult choices to do this.

And many of them had to even decide uh is my relationship with Jesus more important than myself?

Because they had to choose, you know, whether they were gonna allow themselves to be martyred rather than to deny Jesus.

So on the one hand, Jesus is making c a colorful statement that kind of grabs your attention, but on the other hand, when he's speaking to his disciples, it's kind of literal, you know.

This is these are the real choices that I'm gonna have to make.

Jesus knew that, and he knew his followers were gonna have to make these same kind of choices too.

And so he wants to honor them by just being being real.

And it's also amazing to think about that Jesus had his own crazy family to contend with.

You ever thought about that?

I mean, we we don't really know a lot about Jesus' immediate family in in the Bible and the gospels, but we know just a little bit and kind of enough to know that Jesus was probably speaking a bit from his own personal experience.

So in his immediate family, Jesus had you know Mary and then Joseph, who probably passed away when Jesus was a teenager or a young adult.

And Jesus had four brothers and at least two sisters, we know from little details in the gospels.

His four brothers uh were James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, or Jude.

And at least a couple of these brothers eventually became very strong believers, very strong pillars in the early church.

But apparently that was not the case early on.

Uh we know there's a a s a short story in uh Mark chapter 3.

Mark 3 · chapter mention

This is uh starting at verse 20.

It says, Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat.

And when his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, where they said, he's out of his mind.

Can you imagine?

This is the God of the universe.

And so apparently Jesus had this fairly typical family life.

I mean, a lot of you could probably relate to this.

His family, at certain points, or at least this one point, they come to him like intervention style to take charge of him.

As if you could even do that.

The God of the universe.

See, it's like he's not getting enough to eat.

It's almost like a cliche.

We're gonna come grab him by the ear, intervention style, and drag him home because we think he's out of his mind.

So Jesus loved his family, but Jesus also understands what it's like to struggle with not being distracted and getting off course.

It's even from your family.

He knew that he had to choose to follow exactly where his father wanted him to go.

And he knew his followers were gonna have to make these same kind of choices, and so he's straight with them.

But you remember in that verse, uh, it's not just hate your family, hate your spouse.

It's also, Jesus says, you have to hate yourself in order to be my disciple.

Um, your very own life is one of those things that by comparison, we have to hate to be his disciple.

I'll give you another college, college illustration that seems to be the theme this morning.

Um at that at that age in my life, I really I kind of put a lot of pressure on myself.

You know, sometimes these uh these obstacles and struggles that Jesus is talking about come from our parents or from our spouse or from our kids.

But sometimes they just come from ourselves.

You know, we assume these expectations from other people.

And it at that moment in my life in college, that's kind of where I was.

I heaped all this on myself.

And I assumed at that at that moment that I was gonna be doing some kind of music or you know, work in a church with a career.

And so I decided that I needed at that point in my life to learn how to hear from God.

Uh, I guess just for inspiration, you know, because I knew I knew I was gonna need that.

And I think that was accurate, but I didn't really know how to do that or where that was headed.

Uh, I think I just assumed, you know, that God had all these big ideas or creative things at bay in heaven, and I just needed to learn how to tap into that on occasion and download, you know, for my own use.

And uh so I planned this all out.

I went to uh Furman University in in Greenville, South Carolina for for college.

I was there four years.

And if you've ever happened to visit there, uh you'll know it's it's just a really gorgeous campus.

It's amazing.

And it's got, you know, it's a small school but Georgian-style architecture and fountains and big oak trees and a lake and rose gardens.

So I would go to the top floor of the library almost every day, every afternoon.

I was probably the least exciting college student ever.

I would go to the top floor of the library, and they had these uh big windows along the back side of the library that uh these little nooks, and each one of them had its own private window uh overlooking the lake and the swans and the rose garden and everything.

And I figured if I couldn't have a relationship with God, talk to him there, I couldn't do it anywhere.

This is my one shot, my best shot.

And so every day I would go up there.

I would journal a little bit, you know, try to clear my Mind, I'd pray for a while.

But mostly I would just listen because I wanted to hear.

You know, it's enough of this.

Uh I in-between type of relationship through somebody else or through somebody else's thoughts.

I wanted to hear this direct from God.

And this was not actually a hard process.

You know, it wasn't like God was trying to hide from me at all or anything.

Because after just a day or two of trying this, kind of clear in my mind, uh, I just got this sense.

Not in a God said to me, not in a way that you know was verbal or is easy to communicate, but he just said, he said, Ben, I love you.

It was that simple.

You know, not earth-shattering, not unique in terms of or uncommon in terms of what people experience spiritually, but it was really specific and targeted at that moment.

And it was very refreshing, like life-giving.

And so I thought, okay, well, that's great.

But immediately this thought pops up in the back of my head, like, but then again, you didn't really tell me anything I didn't know.

And so I said, but that's okay.

So I went back up the next day, same place, same nook, and I'm looking down, you know, and I go through the same process.

God, what do you have for me?

I guess yesterday you were just kind of testing the waters.

You didn't want to surprise me or anything.

And so, but what do you have for me today?

What should I do?

What is, you know?

And what I got was, Ben, I love you.

I was like, okay.

Thought we covered that yesterday, but that's fine.

It's still refreshing.

You know, it was still amazing, like nothing I could have expected.

And so I went up day three.

Same process, same place.

I'm gonna hear something fresh, you know, from God.

And what I got was, Ben, I love you.

And at this moment, it started to kind of crack open some stuff in me.

Because I was like, I know that.

I think I know that.

Are you saying I don't know that?

Now I'm scared, you know, and it's on now.

I'm paranoid.

I need to know what to do.

God, you should understand this.

You're God, I'm here because I've got a career.

I gotta get this, I gotta learn this stuff.

What am I supposed to do?

What am I supposed to be?

And all this stuff just came out, you know, all this desperation.

And I think that was the point.

He wanted all that to come out.

And it's like I didn't want to necessarily have a relationship with him.

I wanted to have a relationship with myself.

And if he wanted to pull up a chair and help me do that, then that's cool.

I'll let him do it.

But he wanted to teach me how to have a relationship.

Like he's his own person, and I gotta listen.

And he has his own pace.

And it was, and you can see where this is going.

For almost four years, I went up there every day.

And almost every time it wasn't like a mechanical thing, but that's that was it.

God was just showing me, you are so desperate, and I am so not desperate.

And you just need to rest.

And you think you need to learn all this stuff, you know.

It's like I I needed, I felt like I needed to learn all this stuff so I could, I guess, spit it out in some kind of religious context and make a name.

You know, probably a priority one the next week.

And he was not gonna encourage that.

He just wanted me to know that he was there and he was the one laying the foundation.

A really strong, wide foundation.

It was his house, he was saying.

It's not your house, it's my house, and I'm gonna do it in the way that I want to do it.

I needed to learn to hate myself, my own agenda.

By comparison, just a one little sentence from him was infinitely better than all this other stuff that I thought would be great building material.

And that was a difficult lesson to learn, but amazingly important for me.

Jesus continues in this same passage in Luke 14.

This comes right after the verse on hate.

He says, If you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.

But don't begin until you count the cost.

For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there's enough money to finish it?

Otherwise, you might complete only the foundation before running out of money.

And then everyone would laugh at you and they'd say, There's the person that started that building and couldn't afford to finish it.

So Jesus is the one laying the foundation in your life.

It's his house, and he's the one that's gonna build it.

He's not gonna make the same mistake that he's talking about us making here.

He's gonna calculate the cost, and he wants your life to be built up tall and strong, but he wants to do it to do it right.

So think of yourself, think of your life like a house.

You know, we always have this sense of there's there's our lives that we walk around in, and then there's us kind of walking around in within our lives, this whole consciousness thing.

So think of your life like a house.

And the long outside walls are like your parents.

Uh, and maybe the the smaller side walls will be like your your in-laws, if that's an appropriate category.

So these outside walls are the strongest and the oldest.

They've they've been there a long time.

They can be covered on the outside with brick, on the inside with sheetrock, but really they're always there.

And those those studs, so to speak, are always uh always providing some strength.

And then think of you of the roof like your spouse.

That's your your banner and your protection.

And you gotta you gotta work on that roof shingle by shingle, always, to make sure that it's it's weatherproof.

And then you've got little rooms inside the house, and these rooms are your like your siblings or your kids.

And so these rooms look like little houses themselves.

They have their own walls.

Sometimes one of those walls is shared with you know an outside wall, like a parent or a grandparent.

But one of these days, these walls are gonna get, these little rooms are gonna get bigger and be translated and transplanted different locations, have their own roof, you know, to extend this analogy.

And then inside each one of these rooms, you've got all these pieces of furniture.

And these are your relationships, your friendships that you have.

And some of this furniture was really expensive, and so it lasts forever.

It's an antique.

And then other furniture you got at IKEA, and it didn't cost much, and so it only lasts for a season.

So that's your life, right?

It all kind of fits together.

But Jesus, you know, your relationship with God or your relationship with Jesus, not Jesus himself, but your relationship with him is like the foundation.

He's the cornerstone, he's the concrete slab.

And so if the foundation is weak, the foundation is needs work, then everything else is at risk.

If God wisely has you working on a corner of this foundation that needs work and it has to be re poured, then all of the walls are going to just by necessity be stressed.

There's no getting around that.

It's not a fun thing, but the parental walls might nag about the whole process.

But Jesus says, I need for you to count the cost because I love this house too much to not see it built right, tall and strong.

And so some of those walls might have to be kind of torn down.

Maybe some of that decorative brick we've put around the outside to pretend there's really not that thing in the middle.

Maybe that has to be torn down for a while, fix the foundation, and then it's all rebuilt.

But that's what God's gonna do.

He's the one that loves us enough to get us down to ground floor again.

I want you to hate all this other stuff.

But our thinking is, you know, I got this whole house that I'm working on.

I've got the all these relationships, these all this furniture in the rooms, in these little rooms that are protected by the roof, and then I've got the roof that sits on these walls, and it's all like a house of cards.

And so we look at that structure and we say, so that just means I'm never gonna mess with the foundation because it's too disruptive.

But Jesus is the one that says, I'm bold enough, let's fix, let's fix the bottom floor here.

So Jesus is being straight with us.

We we've got all these things in our lives that would compete in terms of priorities, you know, time, money, friends, relatives, kids, work, play.

But only by having a proper relationship, like a ground floor priority one relationship with Jesus, only when we do that will all the things that are built on top of it actually line up and be square.

It's impossible to make the house square and the sheetrock, you have it not crack, to have your paint actually look good a couple weeks later if your foundation isn't solid.

And that's what Jesus wants to have for us.

And this advice is the same, by the way.

Uh, no matter how strong you think your walls are in your house, even if you were surrounded by absolute pillars, like pillars of the faith, Jesus would give the same advice to you.

Uh, like a best example of this.

I mean, it just think of like Hebrews 11, like Bill gave last year, last week, this hall of faith.

All these great parents that came before us.

Hebrews 11, if you want to read it this week, it just lists person after person from the Old Testament that were pillars of the faith.

Imagine if those people were your parents of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, all the prophets.

Imagine that's how your house is built.

You get to the end of that whole list in Hebrews 11, and Hebrews 12, 1, it gives this advice.

You're surrounded by all these amazing pillars, all these amazing people.

So here's what I want you to do.

Since you're surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, then let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that easily trips us up, and let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.

And here's how we do it.

We do this by keeping our eyes, not on all these impressive people around us, we do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith.

He's the initiator.

And so you will not build a particularly strong or tall house if you ignore the foundation, if you ignore the one who initiates.

You know, I hope that you have really strong parents.

I hope that you have a strong relationship with your spouse and your kids.

I hope that you've got pillars of friendships, and like we talked about the last time I was up here, that's so important.

But sometimes that's not the case.

But what is essential is that we have the courage to get down to ground floor.

You know, everybody says, I really want to change in life.

But the one thing we fear most is change.

It's like a stalemate, right?

Who's gonna love you enough to break that stalemate?

Jesus is the one that's gonna do that.

He's the one that's gonna give you the courage to break the foundation and be with you through all the disruption.

Because there's gonna be a lot of steps to rebuild all that stuff.

And he's gonna bring us bring us through that.

But ultimately, even if we have these great relationships around us, every good relationship just reminds us of our best relationship that we have in Jesus.

And the only way we can really make those relationships strong is to make sure that Jesus is our priority one.

Well, let's let's pray.

God, we thank you so much that you are the foundation for us.

You are ground floor, and your foundation is firm.

And you're doing something in us, you're building something that we don't understand.

And we can't really fully count the cost on following you until we talk to you about it, because you're the only one that really knows what this building's gonna look like.

And so, how do I estimate the cost of something that I can't see?

And so we want to have a relationship with you.

I we want to hate our own agendas and know you so that we can count the cost and go to that place where you want us to go, that leak on the bottom of our lives.

But you love us enough to stick with us through it and see it fixed.

So we thank you for that this morning in Jesus' name.

Amen.