Shadows – Shadow Mission

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason and Liz Burns in Access Church in Lakeland and Bartow, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Well, I love you so much.

Today, as we were worshiping, I just got emotional, and I'm not like normally an emotional guy, but I just had this overwhelming sense of gratitude.

I love you.

I love our church.

I love the season that we are in.

And today, I want to wrap up this series that we've been in.

That's been a really strong series.

The series is called Shadows.

And this is going to be a strong message.

In fact, every one of the messages in this series has stepped all up on your toes and people keep showing up, which is crazy to me.

Let me tell you where we've been in this series.

We've said that shadows are the dark parts of our lives that follow us around.

So we've dealt with issues like pride.

We've dealt with issues like our past.

We've dealt with issues like doubt.

We've wrestled with these.

And by the way, if you ever miss a message, you can always go online to www.access.tv slash messages, and you can find all of the messages archived there.

Please catch up.

If you ever have to miss a Sunday, please stay in touch with what God's doing through our church, and we believe it's going to change your life.

To get us started today, I want to get up all up in your business.

Have you ever had a moment that the best way to describe it is this?

It was close, but not quite.

You ever had a moment like this?

Like you made a recipe and you accidentally substituted baking soda for baking powder, and it was like close, but not quite.

Let me give you a couple examples.

I'm a big fan of AI, like this technology.

I think it's cool, I think it's smart, but every once in a while, AI can be a little dumb.

Anybody experienced this?

I got a voicemail from a guy in our church recently.

I won't tell you who it is.

But the voicemail, the AI transcribed, and let me read you what it said, and then we'll try to figure out what it meant.

Okay, here's the voicemail.

Hey Jason, this is so-and-so.

Just want to neck with you.

For people younger than like 40, neck was the way that people a long time ago used to say make out.

Okay, are you with me?

And I was like, no, not about that.

I think he meant I wanted to connect with you, but whatever, AI let us down is what it is.

Close, but not quite, okay?

Um, here's something about me that you may not know.

This is probably my superhero power if I had one.

Uh, your boy is really good at Wheel of Fortune.

Anyone else good at this?

And I love it.

It's like some super talent.

I get it before anybody else gets it.

I love the game show.

And a few weeks ago, I was watching an episode, and this moment came on, and it was kind of one of those close but not quite.

Check this out.

Well, you're gonna get three U's.

I like to solve the puzzle.

Okay, well, let's hear it.

Treat yourself a round of sausage.

I'm sorry, that's not it.

I think the answer was have yourself a round of applause.

And somehow he got treat yourself a round of sausage.

All right, all right.

Close, but not quite, okay?

You ever have a close but not quite kind of moment?

One of my fears for you as your pastor is that you will have a close but not quite relationship with God.

Close to fulfilling the plan, the purpose, the calling of God on your life, but not quite.

You see, here's something I believe about all of us.

All of us were created on purpose for a purpose.

The book of Ephesians says before God laid the foundations of the earth, he had you in mind, which means whatever you're facing, whatever challenges you're walking through, God knew the world was gonna need you.

And here's what it means.

All of us were born with a mission.

A mission is the purpose and the direction of our lives.

God has a mission for all of us.

The problem is many of us settle for something that uh I would I would call not quite the mission.

It's close, but not quite.

It's what I would call a shadow mission.

A shadow mission is allowing our lives to center around something unworthy, dark, or selfish.

The shadow mission often feels like the mission of your life, but often it's just like five degrees off.

It's close, but it's not quite the mission of your life.

This is when your wounds and your egos get all mixed up in the mission of your life.

And what can happen is you can get just slightly off of the course or the mission for your life and end up in an entirely different life than you were created for.

And as your pastor, I want to be as clear as I possibly can.

I never want you to settle for the shadows.

Never want you to settle for the shadow mission.

I want you to live your life on mission.

Today, I want to spend all of our time talking through one of my favorite stories in the Bible.

It's found in the book of Esther.

If you have your Bible, go ahead and pull it out.

Turn with me to the book of Esther.

And the story is important because it centers around four main people.

Notice I said people and not characters.

Sometimes when we think of characters, we relegate the Bible to like a Disney story.

It's not that these were real people, here were their names.

There was King Xerxes, he was the king of the major empire of the world, a little orphan girl named Esther, her cousin Mordecai, and a man named Haman, who was second in command to the king.

Now, all of these people were real people, they all had a mission for their life.

The problem is, if they're not careful, many of them would settle for the shadow mission.

They'd miss it.

Now, to show you how real the story is, I love one of the details in the Bible.

It's that it often gives us placemarkers to know what was actually happening in history.

The book of Esther starts by telling us where this is happening.

It happens in Susa, which was the capital of the Persian Empire.

This was about 470 years BC.

And what's happening in this moment is the nation of Israel is in exile.

It means they're living like in their land, but they have no sovereignty.

They're living scattered all across the world.

They're literally just kind of on the run for their life and for their freedom.

Now, when you understand that, that's the setup for the story.

Esther chapter 1, verse 1 starts with this.

Esther 1:1

So these events happened in the days of King Xerxes, who reigned over 120 provinces, stretching from India to Ethiopia.

Now leave this up for just a moment for me because I want you to see this.

We start by meeting a king, and this king has this massive land to rule.

Try to open your mind for a moment and think about the map, like the global map.

Imagine Ethiopia, Africa, all the way to India.

And in a world where there's no telecommunications, no Twitter, there's no social media, there's no cell phones, there's no text messaging, there's no DMs, there's no iMessage.

In that kind of world, the king rules over a massive piece of land.

And so the only way to reign over it is to divide it up.

So he divides it into 127 little provinces.

Now I want you to think about this, and I want you to kind of tuck that number 127 provinces away.

Here's why.

The king leads this massive amount of land, and if there was anyone who should have clarity on what the mission of their life is, shouldn't it be the king?

Like, shouldn't the king's mission be to help people flourish, to help them thrive for the economy to thrive, for the economy to grow, for people to live in prosperity?

That should be the mission of the king.

The problem is King Xerxes lives with his shadow mission on his sleeve.

What was his shadow mission?

He loved to flaunt how powerful, how wealthy, and how strong that he was.

Now, a lot of people say that you can take the book of Esther and you can divide it into ten separate banquets, because from Esther one all the way through the end, there's ten massive banquets.

In chapter one of Esther, there's three banquets alone, and the first two happen back to back.

The first banquet is a hundred and eighty days of partying.

The king invites everybody of influence and affluence to his place.

He pulls out his best china, his best mugs, and he throws a party that was lavish.

In fact, the king said, for 180 days, may there be no restraint.

Eat whatever you want, drink as much as you can possibly tolerate.

It's like on behalf of the king, for 180 days, it's Miller time, baby.

Like have yourself a good time.

Aspen, Colorado, where the beer flows like wine.

Like that, like have fun, drink, get yourself blitzed, do whatever you want for 180 days.

And at the end of the first banquet, he got this idea.

He said, I've shown off all of my material wealth, but he says, Let me show off my most prized possession.

And he calls for his wife.

Now we meet his wife, his wife's name is Vashti.

And the king calls for Vashti to come and she stands before him and some of his attendants, and he says, I want you to dance for the people.

And Vashti says exactly what you and I would say.

After 180 days of you getting sloshed, you expect me to dance for all these people?

No chance at all.

And when she says no, she unintentionally steps on her husband's shadow mission.

Now, all of the sudden word spreads throughout the country that the most powerful man in the world isn't even the most powerful man in his own home because his wife said no to him.

And this infuriates the king.

He doesn't know what to do, and so instead of going and having a conversation with her like a sane person, he does something ridiculous.

He goes to the Supreme Court of his country and asks them to vote on what has happened.

And in the vote, here is what happened.

He said that the Supreme Court said we should send a letter out to the world, and it said this, Esther 1 verse 22.

Esther 1:22

He sent letters out to all parts of the empire, all 127 provinces, to each province in its own script and language, proclaiming that every man should be the ruler of his own home and should do whatever he pleases.

All right, men, if you were looking for a life verse, this is not a good one, okay?

Um ladies, okay.

Imagine that tomorrow night you turn on NBC News and Lester Holt comes on and he's the breaking news, the Supreme Court in America has voted that men should be able to do whatever they want and say whatever they want, no matter how the ladies feel.

How do you think that would go?

It went exactly the same way for King Xerxes, okay?

This is how it goes.

And he's infuriated by this and he's so mad, but then a few days pass and he kind of calms down.

And the story goes on, chapter two.

It says after Xerxes' anger had subsided, he began thinking about Vashti and what she had done and the decree that he had made.

So his personal attendance suggested, let's just time out for a second.

I want you to notice who he goes to for advice.

Not the wise sages.

He doesn't go to someone older and wiser than him.

He goes to like his bodyguards, his testosterone-driven girl-chasing bodyguards.

He goes to them and he says, Let's search the empire.

And they they they suggested to him, let's search the empire to find a beautiful young virgin for the king.

They says, Let the king appoint agents in each province to bring these beautiful women into the royal harem at the fortress of Susa.

Hegiai, the king's eunuch in charge of the harem, will see that they are all given beauty treatment.

After that, the young woman who most pleases the king will be made queen instead of Vashti.

Now pause here for just a moment, okay?

His bodyguards, his attendants, say, here's what we should do.

Your girl, she was wrong.

She shouldn't have done that to you.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna excommunicate her, and we're gonna have a beauty pageant where we get the most beautiful girls from the whole Persian Empire.

We're gonna bring them here and we're gonna let you choose the one you want.

How do you think King Xerxes felt about this?

Next verse says, This advice was very appealing to the king, so he put the plan into effect.

Now, I want you to try to just take a moment with me for a moment.

I want you to try to imagine a world in which it would be celebrated and okay to have some sort of a contest where someone, a king, a bachelor, has all these people come and he has to pick the one that he wants.

Who would do that?

Who would watch that, right?

Like maybe give him a rose or something, like who would be a part of this?

No one would do that, right?

No, we we do this.

Turn this off.

Get this off of the screen.

Stop it, get that off.

All right, like we do this.

And here's the funny thing.

I think we take the story of Esther and we tend to like romanticize it.

We tend to glamorize it, we turn it in to like a Miss America or an ancient Miss Persia contest to see who's the most beautiful one.

If you could really kind of strip away some of the romanticized language we've heard, this is actually really one of the first pictures of sex trafficking in the Bible.

They went to every single province.

Remember how many provinces there were?

127.

And they pulled young girls out of their houses and forced them to come and present themselves to the king.

And plucked out of obscurity is this little Jewish orphan girl named Esther.

We don't know what happened to her parents, but she doesn't have her parents anymore.

She's basically raised by a cousin named Mordecai, and she's plucked out of obscurity and she's thrown into this contest with 126 other beautiful girls from all over the kingdom.

She kind of had to be scared.

I can't imagine how she felt.

And then to make it worse, the the palace turned up the pressure on the event.

Here's what it says that they did.

Esther chapter 2, verse 12.

Esther 2:12

Before a young woman's turn came to go into the king, Xerxes, she had to complete 12 months of beauty treatments prescribed for the women, six months of oil of myrrh, and six months with perfume and cosmetics.

Okay, I need you to think with me for just a moment.

Can you think back to a point in your life when you went on a first date and you were nervous?

Can you think about this?

Imagine how nervous you would be if you were stripped away from your home, thrown into a beauty pageant, and you were given 12 months of beauty treatment before you even saw your blind date for the first time.

Imagine this, okay?

Let's take a moment together and play a game.

Um you ever uh you ever gone on a date and you spent more than 15 minutes getting ready for the date?

Anybody just raise your hand if you've ever done this, okay?

You ever you ever gone on a date and you spent more than an hour primping and prepping, getting yourself ready?

Anybody ever spend more than an hour getting ready for a date?

Okay.

Uh here's another one.

Have you ever spent more time getting ready for a date than you stayed on the date?

Anyone want to admit that?

All right, bonus question.

You ever had more fun getting ready than you had on the date?

Anybody have this?

Okay.

Think of the pressure young Esther.

This young teenage girl was under in this moment, and she gets herself ready, a year of treatment by the king's attendants, and then comes her moment.

She has an evening with the king, and then the story goes on and says this.

Next verse for me.

And the king loved Esther more than any of the other young women.

He was so delighted with her that he set the royal crown on her head and declared her queen instead of Vashti.

Now the story goes on.

It says, to celebrate the occasion, he gave a great banquet, another of the ten banquets in Esther's honor for all of his nobles and officials, declaring a public holiday for the provinces and giving generous gifts to everyone.

He picks this girl, she is his queen, he's in love with her.

And if you're reading the story for the first time, Esther chapter one and two is all about this story of him picking her, but then we get to Esther chapter three, and there's this really awkward moment.

All of a sudden, it's like there's all gas, no breaks, the story takes this hard turn to the right, and we meet Mordecai.

Now, Mordecai is her cousin, he's the one that kind of raised her in the absence of her parents.

And we meet him, but he's sitting on the outskirts of the city and he's protesting in sackcloth and ashes.

Now, I want you to think about protest in your mind, okay?

When we think of protest, we often think of people picketing with signs and holding signs.

This would have been something different.

This would have been seen as the highest form of political defiance, and we don't know exactly what he's protesting, but he's sitting out protesting, and one day this man named Haman comes up to him and tries to flex on him.

Now, Haman was the second in command to King Xerxes, the second most powerful man in the whole world.

But I want you to remember this.

Everybody has a mission, and everybody has a shadow mission.

Haman's shadow mission was power.

He was one of the most powerful men in the known world, but it wasn't ever quite enough.

And there's this day when Haman sees Mordecai sitting on the outskirts of the city, protesting whatever he's protesting, and he says to Mordecai, You must bow to me.

Mordecai refuses to bow in open defiance, and it wasn't enough for Haman to just have Mordecai put to death.

He said, Something has to be done.

Well, he finds out that Mordecai was actually a Jewish man.

So he says, What I'm gonna do is something so much worse than this.

And he goes to the king, King Xerxes, and he says, King, look, this is crazy.

There is this group of people out there that want nothing to do with you.

They want you to be put to death.

They don't want you to be king anymore.

They are the Jews.

We need to do something about them.

We need to eradicate them, we need to wipe them off the face of the earth.

And because of the king's shadow mission, he says, Well, fine, whatever you want.

And he puts his royal stamp on it, issuing the royal decree.

And all of a sudden, word goes out that there's going to be a genocide of all of the Jews.

Try to put yourself in the story.

Again, pretend it's tomorrow night.

And you turn on NBC News or whatever news channel you watch, and the host comes on and he says, breaking news, there's been an issue, there's been a decree issued, and everybody in your circle of life is going to be put to death.

Whether that's based on your religious beliefs, your social status, who you voted for, the color of your skin, your education status.

Like you pick whatever layer you want, and imagine that the government comes out and says, We're going to put to death every single one of those people.

Well, word goes out to the whole nation that all Jews are to be put to death.

And then here's where the story picks up, Esther chapter 3, verse 15.

Esther 3:15

It says the couriers went out spurred on by the king's command, and the edict was issued in the citadel of Susa.

The king and Haman sat down to drink.

So, like they're just having a drink after this word goes out.

It says, But the city of Susa was.

Bewildered.

You ever had a moment in your life when something so traumatic happened that you hear that high-pitched ringing sound in your ears?

Now imagine every Jewish person.

Every mom pulling her little girl in, every dad looking in the eyes of his boys, and realizing that they were all going to be.

This is the story of Esther.

Well, Mordecai hears this and he says, something has to be done about it, and it dawns upon him that his cousin Esther is now the queen of the nation, and she too is Jewish.

And so he has this idea.

He says, I gotta get the word to her so she can put a stop to this.

Maybe the king doesn't even know that his own very wife is one of the Jews who would be put to death.

So he sends a letter to Esther and he says, You gotta do something about it, you gotta do something about it.

And here's her response.

Esther chapter 4, verse 11.

Esther 4:11

She said, All the king's officials and all the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned, the king has but one law.

If you go in without permission, here's the law, that they be put to death, unless the king extends the golden scepter to them and spares their lives.

And then she drops this bombshell.

She says, But thirty days have passed since I was called to go to the king.

Pause here for just a moment.

She writes him back and she's like, Look, I know why I'm here.

I have no power, I have no authority, I'm nothing but a trophy wife.

And in this moment, she reveals her shadow mission.

Does she think she's nothing more than a beauty queen?

She thinks she's just one that was picked because of her looks or whatever her charm is.

And she reveals her shadow mission.

She says, If I go, even though I'm the queen, if I go in and the king doesn't extend his golden scepter, they will cut my head off.

It goes on and says, When Esther's words were reported to Mordecai, he sent back this answer, and this answer confronts her shadow mission head on.

He says, Do not think that because you were in the king's house, you alone of all the Jews will escape.

He says, For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father's family will perish.

And then he says this, and this is one of the most powerful statements in the Bible.

He says, and who knows?

You have no idea.

Who knows, but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?

Like you may not understand why you're here.

You may not understand why you got snatched from your home.

You may not understand why God put you in this position, but he had a purpose the whole time.

Who knows why God called you to this, but he did.

Now, for Esther, she's confronted with the reality that a lot of us are gonna have to deal with today.

It's will I settle for my career?

And your career is all about advancing yourself, or will I step into my calling?

A career is about you, but a calling is about serving God.

Will I step into the moments when it feels unsure, when I don't know what to do?

Will I step into the moments of divine destiny for me?

If you have your message notes, pulled them out because I want you to wrestle with four questions.

In fact, let me get really real with you.

If you rode to church with somebody today, I want you to wrestle with this in the car on the way home.

If you're in an access group, I want you to wrestle with these four questions this week.

Here's the four questions.

Question number one Who plays the role of Mordecai in your life?

Who has permission to tell you the truth?

Who has permission to call out the blind spots, the things you can't see?

You see, we become like the five most influential voices in our Life.

And if people in your life are leading you away from the things of God, or if they're just allowing you to settle for your shadow mission, they're not your actual friends.

Who has permission to call you, to love you, to realign you back on mission?

Second question for you to wrestle with is what is the position God has called you to?

Let me say this as directly as I can to somebody today.

You are not who you are and where you are on accident.

It's not an accident that you live where you live, that you work where you work, that you do what you do.

You are uniquely intertwined with humanity all around you.

And it needs you to understand God has called you to do something with your life that matters.

And as your pastor, it would break my heart if you would settle for anything less than the calling, the mission that God has for you.

May you never settle for the shadows.

God placed you where he did on purpose.

For Esther, this was a moment of realization.

Wait a minute.

I'm queen and there's a reason that I'm the queen.

Let me say this to you: your kid's soccer coach is not your kid's soccer coach on accident.

You were called to be a witness and a light in his life.

That job you have, it's not an accident and it's not just a job.

It's an opportunity for you to show and share the love of God to the people around you.

You are where you are and you are who you are on purpose.

Number three, the question you should ask is what resources do you have?

For Esther, it's the realization wait, if I was back home, I would not have anything to do to fix this, but God's placed me in this position.

This is my resource.

Can I tell you one of the greatest indicators that you are living and settling for the shadow mission?

It's what you do with your commodities.

It's what you do with your time.

It's what you do with your money.

It's what you do with your energy.

And if all of these things in your mind exist to serve you and make your life better, if you think all of your money is to make your life more comfortable, if you think all of your time is about getting through work so you can get to the weekend or so you can relax, you've missed the mission of your life.

Everything you have is a tool entrusted to you by God to use to make a difference on mission with God.

One of the greatest indicators you're struggling with the shadow mission is if you spend every dollar you have on you.

One of the greatest indicators that you are settling for the shadow mission of your life is every extra minute that you have is all about your relaxation.

If you're here and you're not serving, if you're not serving someone else with your life, what are you doing?

Like we have needs in our church.

People look around our church now, they see this big church.

In fact, someone told me this week that they believe our church has become the largest church in this area.

And you can come to our church, you can come to one of our locations and look around and be like, oh, everything must be good.

It's not good without you.

Like we need you, we need your giftings and your talents serving other people.

Some of you see things like we did today, where we're gonna give away tens of thousands of dollars of gift cards, and you think, wow, this church must have it.

We don't have it, we're giving out of a place of need.

And my wife and I just made this decision.

If the church runs out of money, we'll fund the rest of it because people matter to God.

Like, like it takes all of us, don't settle for your shadow.

Question number four, ready?

What is the spiritual need you see?

I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but God wired you different.

And you see things that other people around you don't see.

You see homelessness and it breaks your heart, but other people don't seem to care about it.

You see sexual harassment in the workplace and it devastates you, and it doesn't seem to matter to anybody else, but it breaks your heart.

You see needs of inequality, you see needs of injustice, you see racism, and these things break your heart.

And there's a reason you see them.

It was always God's intention that if you see it, you would do something about it.

Let me brag on my wife for 30 seconds.

This week the news broke that there was this need because of the government shutdown that the people who received the snap benefits wouldn't receive the money that they need.

And it wasn't even on my radar yet.

And my wife came in and she goes, We've got to do something about it.

We've got to do something about it.

My prayer is that when we give away tens of thousands of dollars of gift cards to meet physical needs, someone gets a hold of it and sees that a church actually cares about them, and as a result, they give their life to God.

That's worth more than gift cards or money every day of the week.

Look at me.

Maybe you're like Esther and you see needs around you, you see spiritual needs and physical needs, you see them all around you.

And I want to say this clearly to somebody today.

It's not your fault, but look at me, it is your time.

It's your time to do something, it's your time to respond.

Step into the moment of divine calling that God has for you.

Esther is confronted with this reality, and she's got to do something about it.

Verse goes on.

It says, Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai.

Go gather together all the Jews who are in Susa, fast for me.

Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day.

I and my attendants will fast as you do.

And when this is done, I will go to the king.

Parenthetically, I will risk my whole life, even though it is against the law.

And listen to this.

And if I perish, I perish.

In 1993 or so, Mattel, the toy company, there was some sort of issue, and there was a mix-up at one of the big factories.

And somehow they switched the voice boxes from some Barbie dolls to some G.I.

Joe's.

And I don't know how that happened, but imagine how confused a boy would be on Christmas morning to open a G.I.

Joe and he pushes the little button and he goes, let's go shopping, or something like that, right?

And imagine getting a Barbie doll and you push the button, and instead of getting the cute little let's go shopping, you get a hit the ground soldier.

Now, now the king he thought he was marrying a Barbie.

But what he got was the Barbie with the heart of a G.I.

Joe.

Let me take a moment and go off course for just a second.

If you are here and you are a woman, and you have allowed the pressure of society, if you have allowed the voice of others to silence your voice because you're a woman, cut it out.

The world needs you.

God needs you.

One moment of sacrificial courage can change the whole world.

Let me prove it to you.

Because of Esther, she has this moment.

She goes before the king and she says, King, look, someone passed the law that all the Jewish people should be put to death.

You may not know this, but I'm Jewish and I'm gonna have to die.

The king says, Who would do that?

And Haman is sitting at the table, she's like, That guy.

The king goes, This is unacceptable.

And he has Haman put to death on the very gallows he had constructed to kill all the Jews.

I want you to think about this.

Remember, the story happens in 470 BC, 470 years before Jesus.

Well, Esther was Jewish, the people that she saved were Jewish.

470 years later, in a little manger in a little stable somewhere in the back streets of Bethlehem, there was a little Jewish boy born who would save the world.

Here's the question: What happens if all the Jews are eradicated from the story in 470 BC?

What happens to Jesus?

One act of courage, one act of someone saying, I have the moxie to say this.

If God's called me to it, if I perish, then I perish.

What would it look like?

If you and I just made this decision to say, God, whatever you ask of me, I'll do it.

Let me end with this question.

What is your shadow mission?

The thing is, all of us have one of these.

We do.

Every organization, every business, every church has a shadow mission.

A couple years ago, I had the privilege of preaching or speaking at the mayor's prayer breakfast to all the leaders in our city, and I asked this question, I said, every city has a shadow mission.

What is your shadow mission?

I think our church has a shadow mission.

For 13 years, this church existed and we didn't even have a building, and now we have three of them, and our church is awesome and it's growing and it's reaching tons of people.

And it'd be really easy for us to say, Oh, we made it.

Let's just take care of us.

Let's just fill our calendars with lots of cute, fun events for Christians to do that pull them out of the world.

I got emails from people this week that were like, Why don't we have a Halloween alternative?

I'm like, because Halloween's when you actually get to meet your neighbors.

Like, you do.

We're on mission.

We care about the world around us.

It's we're never gonna settle for the shadows as a church.

I have a shadow mission.

I can be incredibly materialistic.

I love to shop for me.

I love to take care of me.

I love to buy nice things for me.

And if I'm not careful, my shadow mission will allow me to drift towards a form of self-idolatry when my whole world revolves around me.

It's the reason I give.

It's the reason I prioritize giving way above myself.

Because giving breaks that hold of materialism and selfishness and greed off of me.

What is your shadow mission?

What would it look like?

We just made this decision today to say to God, whatever your mission for me is, I'm all in.

If it's finally having the courage to walk across the street and share my faith with the neighbor, if I perish, I perish.

If it's leaving this place of safety and security to step out and trust God, if I perish, I perish.

If it means speaking out against an injustice that I see, if I perish, I perish.

If it costs me everything through an act of audacious generosity, if I perish, I perish.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes with me at all of our church locations today?

Let me pray for you.

And I'm gonna pray that God will give you a supernatural dose of courage.

God, in a world that just exists to make us happy and to take care of number one, may we never settle for the shadows.

God, for some of us, if we could just be honest, we we act like we're living for you, but the truth is we've settled for a shadow mission.

Our wounds and our egos get in the story, and we think that life becomes all about us.

God, forgive us.

May we have the courage to approach the mission you have for us with everything we have.

And God, I pray for a church that lives so focused and so on mission that nothing can stop us.

God, may we have the courage to look ourselves in the mirror and tell ourselves the truth.

Am I loving you and serving you with every part of my life?

God, do you have my heart?

Do you have my time?

Do you have my resources?

Do you have my energy?

Do you have my money?

Do you have all of it?

Because all of it belongs to you.

May I live on mission with you and for you, and may I never saddle for a shadow mission.

In Jesus' name.

With your head still bowed and eyes still closed at all of our church locations today.

If you came today and you hear me talk about a shadow mission and getting off track with what God has for you, but you don't know if you're even right with God, this moment's for you.

If you came today and you would say, Jason, look, I need to start or restart following Jesus.

If this is you and you need to start or restart following him, would you raise your hand right now?

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

I see you in the back.

Thanks.

Yeah, thank you.

If this is you, I'm gonna invite you to pray this with me.

Praying this will change everything when you mean it with your heart.

Church fam, nobody prays alone.

No one stands alone here at Access.

If this is you, I want you to pray this and we're all gonna pray it out loud with you.

Come on, church fam, repeat after me.

Would you say, Jesus, I give you my life?

Would you save me?

Change me, make my life new.

From this day forward, I give you my life, and I choose to follow you.

Thank you for loving me.

Thank you for giving your life in my place.

Because of your love and because of your sacrifice, my life is made new.

So, Jesus, I give you my life for the rest of my life.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Church fam, everywhere, let's celebrate those who just made that decision.