When Your Way Isn’t Working – An Unhurried Life

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.

Today, we are in part two of a four-part series called When Your Way Isn't Working.

When Your Way Isn't Working.

If you missed last week, my wife brought a beautiful message on a topic that is so hard for so many of us.

It's the topic of control and surrender.

And we don't think of ourselves as controlling people, but the truth is no one likes to live a life out of control.

So she gave us some framework and some handles on what we do with the controlling nature we have.

Today, I want to preach a message to you that is on a topic that if I could just be honest with you, probably more than anyone in our church, I struggle with it.

Probably more than any topic I could preach, it is a problem in my life.

And I'm gonna open the Bible and I want to give you God's word on a practical topic that has the potential to really change our lives.

Let's do this, let's pray, and then let's get after it together.

So, God, in these next few minutes, would you do what you do best?

And would you speak to us?

God, you know that I've practiced and prepared some words, but none of these words matter unless your voice cuts through the noise and the chaos in our lives and speaks to our hearts.

So, God, would you do that?

Would you speak to us, challenge us, change us?

And God, may we all leave our churches today and say to each other, Man, God was there.

We thank you for it in advance, God, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

I think when it comes to TV, I'm kind of an old soul.

I don't know if anybody's like this.

But when it comes to game shows, I'm an old man.

And I love two game shows more than any.

I love Wheel of Fortune and the Price is Right.

Anybody else want to admit to that with me?

Nobody.

Okay, cool.

Like, I love those shows.

And I'll be honest, I'm not good at a lot of stuff.

Like, I can talk in front of people, and I am good at Wheel of Fortune.

I am like really good at that show.

And so some nights, if I'm home, I like to turn it on.

And then another show that I love is I Love the Prices Right.

Now, unfortunately, that comes on during the workday, but if I'm ever off for a day, I make sure to catch it and I love that show.

Now I love the games, I always wanted to be in the audience, I wanted to get called up.

But can I tell you my like secret other reason I love the prices right so much?

It's not the show, it's the commercials.

You ever watch The Prices Right and pay attention?

The commercials are obviously not intended for me.

I am not their audience, you know.

A lot of the commercials are for medicine.

And I don't know, this isn't trying to be political.

I don't think they should be able to make commercials for medicine.

I think you should get medicine if you need it, not because you saw it on TV.

That's a separate conversation.

But if you ever pay attention to the medicine commercials, it's really interesting because often what will happen is they'll start with the problem that people have, and then they'll introduce their medicine and how their medicine can help change their lives.

But here's what's funny to me.

If you really listen closely, or if you read the fine print at the bottom of the commercial, very often the side effects are worse than the problem you had to begin with.

Have you ever noticed this before?

So it's like you've got an upset stomach, you know, it's like it's like the medicine commercial comes on.

If you struggle with an upset stomach, if you feel like you always have to be within 30 seconds of a restroom to enjoy your life, take this medicine.

And it's always these really happy people that are going about their day, walking through a meadow or sitting in a bathtub for some reason, and then and this happens, and then at the end, you'll hear this voice.

Uncommon side effects include, and the uncommon side effects are often so bad.

It'll be things like dementia, loss of limb, or in some rare cases, death.

And I'm like, I'd rather have bubble guts, you know what I'm saying?

Like the side effects are worse than the thing in the first place.

Okay, if you can understand that, maybe that'll help you to frame what we're talking about today, because I think for many of us, we bought into what I call the American dream.

And what we do is we chase something that we think will make our lives better.

Unfortunately, the side effect of what we chase has the potential of being so much worse than the original issue.

Here's the thing I think many of us struggle with, and we we wouldn't say it like this, but I'm gonna help you to see it.

We struggle with hurry and worry.

Hurry and worry.

I love that they rhyme, hurry and worry.

And these two words don't seem like they're that connected to each other, but I'm gonna show you in scripture that these words are inextricably tied to each other.

Let's start with worry.

Jesus one time was preaching Matthew 5, 6, and 7, and what is arguably the most famous sermon ever preached.

It's a sermon called the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus preaches these chapters and it's all over the place.

He preaches on things like money and marriage and divorce and fear and worry.

In the middle of all of this, he says this to these people.

He's like, Listen, you don't need to live a life consumed by worry.

He says, Look at the birds of the air.

They're not worried about where their next meal will come from.

Look at the lilies of the field, do they worry?

No, because their father in heaven takes care of them.

And then in Matthew 6, verse 34, Jesus says, Therefore, so because he takes care of the birds and because he takes care of the flowers, therefore, do not worry.

Matthew 6:34

Now, sometimes, if I could just be real, I wish we had a YouTube video of Jesus saying this.

Because I wish we could hear his tone, I wish we could hear what he was saying.

And for the longest, I read this verse as Jesus saying, Hey, don't worry, man.

Like it's not that big of a deal.

Kick your feet up, get you a drink with the coconut, with the uh umbrella in it, lay back in your beach chair and just let your troubles melt away.

But it wasn't a suggestion.

Jesus said, therefore, okay, everybody look at me, do not worry.

Yeah, but what about that health scare?

Do not worry.

What about my finances that feel like they run out before the month runs out?

Do not worry.

What about my job that's hanging on by a thread or that my wife that's threatening to leave?

Do not worry about tomorrow.

For tomorrow will worry about itself.

Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Another translation of the same verse that the translator Jesus translator translated Jesus as saying, Let each day's troubles be enough for that day.

Jesus says, Do not worry, and this is all written in Greek.

The Greek word for the word worry is a fun word.

It's the word maris, which means a part or a division.

Now that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Jesus says, therefore do not allow your life to become a part or a division.

I think here's what Jesus is saying.

Jesus is saying, do not let your life become so preoccupied by everything else that you're physically one place, but the rest of you, your emotions, your heart, your energy, your focus is somewhere else.

It's like you become this fractured, splintered, broken kind of life.

I know this is true for me because there's been so many times in my life where I've been somewhere, come on, but I haven't been there.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Some years ago I went on our first mission trip we ever had as a church.

We went to this place in really the furthest part south in Mexico.

And because I had to preach on Sunday, our team went ahead and I preached Sunday, then I caught a flight Sunday afternoon and I flew down.

And the team had already been there for a couple days.

They had acclimated to the place and they had acclimated to the culture and the food, and they had acclimated to the fact that where we were, nobody's phones worked.

And so I fly down, the driver picks me up, and I get to this restaurant where I meet the team, and everybody's there and they're so happy.

And we ate at this restaurant that was so good.

The weirdest part was they served grilled cactus with the meal.

Never had that, never will again, but we had it that day.

And then we get there, and I'm gonna be honest with you, I sometimes struggle to be where I am because I'm busy and people depend on me, and I've got a family and I've got a lot of employees, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I get there and I get seated at the restaurant across from some grilled cactus and this man who has this, he has this social disconnect.

Anybody know someone like this?

Like he's the person who calls you on stuff.

He's the person who's like, hey, where are you?

Hey, focus, focus.

He's that guy.

And I'm sitting there and I keep doing this thing where I keep like pulling my phone out.

I I keep doing this thing where I like I keep pulling my phone out and I keep checking on everything, and my phone had no signal.

And he says to me, he goes, Hey, um, what are you doing?

It doesn't matter how many times you check it, your phone's not gonna magically work.

I was there, but not there.

Are you with me ever have this happen?

According to Jesus, worry is the failure to be here in this moment.

James, the half brother of Jesus, said it like this one time.

James said, Now listen, you who say today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.

Those of you who are really busy, here's what I want you to know.

He says, Why?

You you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.

Then he asks this question What is your life?

Four profound words.

He says, You are a what?

You are a mist.

A mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Jesus said, he goes on to say this.

He says, Instead, you ought to say, if it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.

James compares our lives to a mist.

It's here and then it's gone.

Here for a moment and then it vanishes.

It's funny to me, I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you sat at the funeral of someone you loved.

Have you had this happen?

And it's like you're sitting there and you just face the reality that this life is never promised.

Like tomorrow is never guaranteed for us.

I'll never forget, I was about 18 years old.

And I sat in a funeral back at my home church for the younger brother of the kid who was like my best friend in elementary and middle school.

Uh it was funny.

This this boy was the guy that I'd go to his house, he lived one street over, we'd play Super Nintendo and we'd play basketball together.

And I remember as a kid we were so close to each other, and he had a brother who was two years younger.

Well, I got a little older, went off to college at 18, and I get a phone call, a sad phone call, that his younger brother at 16 years old had gotten one of those little speed bike motorcycles, and he was driving early one morning, he hit a hill pretty fast, and when he came over the hill, he couldn't see ahead of him, and there was a semi that was stopped with its hazard lights on, and my friend's younger brother slammed into the back of it and died on impact.

And I remember sitting at this funeral thinking, like, I'm 18.

Like I thought I had forever and ever and ever to live, but we don't.

We're not guaranteed tomorrow.

Why do we live that way?

So, according to Jesus and according to James, I think our goal should to learn to be fully present, here, now, wherever we are to be here.

This brilliant Canadian author, Anne Voskamp, said this.

She said, being in a hurry and getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me, I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry.

She said, but a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands lie in the wake of all the rushing.

She said, Through all that haste, I thought I was making up time.

It turns out I was throwing it away.

Yesterday, my son Joey, who's 17, he called me.

And he's in Honduras on a mission trip for his spring break with this school, and they're going to the place that our church goes to every year.

I've been there many times.

I love this place.

And Joey, he calls me, and I know that the first day he was there, he had the opportunity to share a devotional for his whole class of 40 or 50 students who were there with him, and it went really good, but it went too good.

And so the missionary pulled him aside a day ago, and he goes, Hey, Joe, listen, that was great.

We're gonna have you tonight preach to all the adults at this church.

It's a 35-minute sermon.

And Joey had a little bit of a panic attack, to be honest.

He was a little nervous about this, and and he goes, Okay, hold on, hold on, wait, wait, wait.

I did a five-minute devotional.

You want me to do 35 minutes through a translator?

And so he calls me and I was like, Joey, God prepared you for this moment.

This is actually cool to me.

I posted about it on my Instagram earlier this morning because late last night the missionary there sent me pictures of Joey, my son, preaching to a translator to a whole church full of adults.

This is something that most people would have a full-blown, full-scale panic attack over.

And at 17 years old, he stepped into that moment and confidently preached.

But what's beautiful to me is this that was a full circle kind of moment for me as his dad because seven or eight years ago, October of 2017, we were at that same campground and Joey preached for the first time.

And I say preached like this because Joey was maybe nine years old.

And I posted a picture at the in that series of pictures of Joey, and last night I found the video of him preaching, and he preached to this group of like five or six Honduran kids through a translator, and he was so nervous that he did this like the whole time as he spoke.

It looked like he was doing a dance routine, and he just moved and danced, and he was so nervous.

And I was so proud of him.

He's been the best kid ever.

When he was a baby, he was like the best baby in the history of babies.

He was so good.

He slept through the night by two and a half months.

I normally don't tell people that because some people, their kids don't ever sleep through the night, but you know what?

In your face, Joey's the best kid ever.

He was so good.

And when Joey got to be a little older and he started talking, one of my favorite moments ever with him was he went through the mama and the dada, and then he learned cookie.

He knew his first three major words.

And then I'll never forget this moment.

Um, there was a day when Joey started saying, I love you.

But he didn't say, I love you.

He said, Alaya.

Just like this.

And I would beg him to say it, and he was so smart, he wouldn't do it.

He was like the dog who goes outside and won't come in unless you say treat.

I'd be like, I'll give you a cookie.

Alaya.

He would just say it like that.

And there was this day when I was busy working, sitting on my couch, laptop in my lap, going through work, serving God, honoring people, whatever, whatever, whatever.

And I knew Joey was around, but all of a sudden, as I'm working, I feel this stabbing pain in my leg.

My feet were sitting up on the coffee table, and I feel the stabbing pain, like someone shoved a knife in my leg.

I looked down and it wasn't a knife, it was my wife who was kicking me with her sharp toenails, and I said, What are you doing?

And as I did this and came out of this moment, I looked, and right beside me was little Joey on the couch on his hands and knees, over and over and over again, saying, Alaya, a laya.

And I was there, but missing at the moment.

What's so funny to me is of all the different things that we can get wrong in our life, this one has the tendency of being celebrated.

Like I thought about it like this this week, okay?

Here's a list of what I would call holics, alkaholic, shopaholic, golfa holic, chockaholic, come on, workaholic.

And some of these things are like not great.

Like, golfaholic could be expensive, chhokaholic could be expensive to your waistline, shopaholic could be expensive.

No one celebrates being an alcoholic, no one does this.

But but this one, workaholic, is the one that if you do it, if you kill yourself for your company, if you work 120-hour work weeks, they they don't discipline you for it.

You don't have to go through some sort of 12-step program.

They celebrate you, they promote you, they give you a raise, they give you the corporate office, the corner office.

This is what happens to us.

We live in a culture that celebrates the wrong stuff.

Corey Tin Boone, this amazing person who survived the Holocaust, said it like this.

She said, if the devil can't make you sin, he'll make you busy.

Somewhere along the line, we've bought into the American dream.

The American life that says, if I'm busy, I'm productive.

If I'm productive, I'm valuable.

If anyone in the Bible should get this right, it's our boy Moses, right?

Moses is so funny.

Moses has this moment where God gives him the Ten Commandments, and in Exodus chapter 24, four chapters after the Ten Commandments, there's this verse that scholars have this weird kind of take on.

Exodus 24 · chapter mention

It says, Then the Lord said to Moses, Come up to me on the mountain and be there.

And I will give you the tablets of stone and the law and the commandments which I have written that you may teach them.

Okay, pause here.

God says to Moses, Come up to me on the mountain, and then be there.

Doesn't that feel silly?

Doesn't it feel redundant?

Like some scholars think that God stuttered in this moment, but I don't think he did.

He says to Moses, I want you to come up on the mountain.

Ready?

Why would he say, and be there?

Because if he came up, he would be there.

Why would God say to Moses, be there?

I think it's because Moses had the same tendencies and proclivities that we do, which is that if he finally made his way to the top, where does his mind immediately shift to?

Coming back down.

God says to Moses, I want you to come.

And when you get here, I want you to be here.

The Hebrew word for this phrase, to be here, is the word wayah, which literally means to be or to exist.

And I love this about God because God created humanity to be human beings, not human doings.

And the funny thing is, many of us we find our identity, we find our worth, we find our value in what we do and what we accomplish.

And I just want to say to you, it's possible that you can give out your life to doing all kinds of good stuff at the expense of missing the beauty of your life.

That there's a term that some psychologists coined several years ago.

It's called hurry sickness.

And I think I suffer with this.

And the truth is, I think all of us do.

Let me give you a quick litmus test, okay, just for fun.

Hurry sickness.

Um, this is gonna be a question.

I want you to raise your hand if this feels like you.

Do you ever go to the grocery store or Walmart or Target and you get a buggy full of stuff, food and groceries or whatever?

And when you get to the checkout line, all the checkout lines are full.

And so before picking one, you glance at all of them and you find which one you think is going to go the fastest, and you go there.

Now don't raise your hand yet because it gets worse.

And then if you're a real psycho, you do what I do, and you mark every other person who is in line, the place you would be behind them, to see if you get through faster than them.

Anyone else want to admit to having hurry sickness?

Yep, me too.

Here's another one.

Uh, you come up to a stoplight, and there's two lanes on your side of the road, and there are two cars, and there's no one behind you.

So you pick which car you're going to get behind based on how fast you think the car's going to go.

Come on, anybody else do this?

If it's like a Corvette and a Buick, you're like, oh, Corvette all day.

Come on.

You know this?

Okay.

We're sick.

The funny thing is, this is bled into every part of our life.

Just walk through your grocery store, and I want you to notice how many words for food are connected to not food or taste, but to speed.

Look at this.

We've got fast food, we've got express lunch, we got minute rice, and if you don't have time for minute rice, we got 59-second rice.

We got go-gurt, it's yogurt, but it's on the go.

We got drive-thru, we got food that's ready in minutes, and all of these are about speed, not about joy and pleasure.

You ever um you ever had a meal with friends?

Where you dinner served at six o'clock and you sit around the table and you eat your food and you're laughing so hard that your face hurts, and then you wake up at one point and you're like, oh my God, it's nine.

How do we spend three and a half hours here?

It's because meals, even in the Bible, are beautiful and even sacred kinds of places, and we hurry through them and we rush through them, and I think we miss it.

Why does this matter?

Let me show it to you.

Because hurry and love are incompatible.

Okay.

Let me show it to you like this.

You can't do anything that matters in a hurry.

You can't.

You can't listen to a friend who's going through a difficult time in a hurry.

You can't play with your kids on the floor in a hurry.

You can't laugh with people you love in a hurry.

You can't offer a hug in a hurry.

You can't be a shoulder to cry on or a voice of celebration when you're like when one of your friends has their best moment.

You can't do any of those things in a hurry.

But we try.

Now, if you're starting to get it, that we live the American dream, and the American dream might be causing us to miss our life.

We're gonna have to change something.

And here's what it is I want you to see this.

If we want the life of Jesus, we have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.

Let me show you what this looks like because this is a hard change for us as a Americans.

Jesus said this about himself in John chapter 10.

John 10 · chapter mention

He said, The thief, Satan, comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

What does he want to do?

He wants to steal your hope and kill your dreams and destroy your destiny.

But then Jesus says, But I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.

But can't tell you what we often hear, we hear that a full, busy life, that's not what Jesus is saying.

He's saying, I've come that you might have life and have it to the full list.

That might you might experience the fullness of life.

How did Jesus live?

Let me show it to you like this in the book of Luke.

It says, but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

The person who in that time probably had more demand on his life than anyone else in the world.

He would often withdraw and pray.

I read a Japanese scholar who I don't want to risk saying their name wrong, called Jesus the three mile per hour God.

Never rushed, never hurried.

As far as we can tell, there's maybe two times in Jesus' life where it kind of implies that he just said, Let's do this now.

But he was never hurried.

Let me show you some examples of this.

In the book of Mark, Mark chapter, next line for me, please.

Mark chapter six, it says the apostles, those close to Jesus, gathered around Jesus and reported to him all that they had done and taught.

Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he, Jesus, said to them, Okay, listen, all these people want their attention.

And so Jesus pulls them in and says, Come with me by yourself to a quiet place and get some rest.

Is this not the opposite of the American dream?

The American dream is step on the gas, strike while the iron's hot.

Like all these people want your attention.

Of course, you should do that.

And Jesus said, no, no.

In that moment, why don't you just get some rest?

Several verses later, Jesus does this amazing thing, this amazing teaching, and all these people want to be with him.

And it says immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Beth Seda while he dismissed the crowd.

And look what Jesus does after this big moment.

After leaving them, he went up on the mountainside to pray.

That Jesus learned to live with this different kind of pace, this three miles per hour kind of God kind of pace.

Even in what would be arguably the moment that would make the most sense for Jesus to hurry.

In John chapter 11, Jesus gets word that his best friend was sick.

John 11 · chapter mention

He says, now a man named Lazarus was sick.

He was from Bethany, the village of Mary, and her sister Martha, this Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.

So here's what happens.

He gets word that his buddy's sick.

So the sister sent this word to Jesus, Lord, the one you love, your boy Lazarus is sick.

And when he heard this, Jesus said this.

I want you to see this.

He said, This sickness will not end in death.

No, it is for God's glory that God's Son may be glorified through it.

Now Jesus loved Mary, I loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.

So what do you think Jesus would do?

Rush over, pray for him, heal him.

No, no.

So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he what he stayed where he was two more days.

Jesus ultimately goes on to bring Lazarus back from the dead, and it's this beautiful miracle story, but you've got to see this because this is so important.

He never rushed towards anything.

If Jesus is the master of living and we are to follow his example, we're gonna have to change what we do.

Some years ago, I read something that forever changed my life.

There's the pastor that I admire so much named John Orberg, and he was interviewing a man named Dallas Willard, who was one of the great theological thinkers from our most recent generation.

And he he sat down with Dallas Willard one day and he said, Dallas, listen, help me.

I want to help people grow closer to Jesus.

What do I need to teach them?

Like, what is the way to get people closer to Jesus?

And he said, Dallas, thought for a second.

Didn't say anything.

They sat in silence.

And then Willard said this.

He said, You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

And then John Orberg said, Cool, what else?

Willard said, you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life.

And it doesn't seem that important.

It's not something you hear lots of sermons on.

But if you miss your life, you miss your life.

So thinking about this is like, how do I how do I help us do that?

How can I give us some handles on this?

How do we ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our life?

And I came up with two things that I think we should consider.

They are technology and the pace at which we live.

Technology is the first one, and I'll be honest with you, I feel bad for our generation of people.

Because up until a few years ago, nobody had phones.

Nobody had the constant sense of connection.

I heard someone one time say that phones have actually given us this inflated sense of self-confidence because 20 years ago, if we didn't know something, we didn't know it.

Now if we don't know it, we talk to our phones, and our phone tells us the answers that we didn't know.

These are with us everywhere.

And what is the promise of technology?

Faster, more convenient, more connection.

But what does it do?

It actually causes distance between us.

Let me give you an example.

Started noticing for a long time that I would go to lunch with people and I would sit down, hey, how are you?

How's life?

And I would put my phone face up on the table.

What was I unintentionally saying?

You're important to me, but there could be someone more important that needs me.

Didn't mean it, but I did it.

For a while, I bought an Apple Watch and I loved it.

It was so cool, so connected.

It was good to know my heart rate and how many calories I had burned or whatever.

But I started getting annoyed because I would be sitting with people in a meeting or someone going through a difficult time, and I would feel my watch buzz, and I would just, as I'm talking to someone, I would just go.

And I would look at it and I was just seeing what it was.

Like I wasn't trying to ignore the person in front of me, and over and over and over again I heard this common refrain.

Oh, I'm sorry, do you need to go?

No, I don't need to go.

The thing that I thought was bringing me closer was actually distancing me.

I wonder how much of our lives we waste on our phones.

Another one is the pace at which we live.

We live these frenetic, busy, crazy packed schedules.

If you have kids, it just gets busy, and I get it, I'm the chief among sinners on this.

So I think something you should do is practice the art of intentionally flowing.

What does that mean?

Okay.

You're not gonna like this, ready?

I challenge you sometime soon when you're on I4.

Told you.

Get in the slow lane.

Just stay in the slow lane.

Why?

Like how much time are you actually saving?

Get in the slow lane just to practice being slow.

Here's a weird one.

Today, when you go to lunch, count how many times you chew your food before you swallow it.

Super weird, I know.

But what I read is you should probably chew your food north of 20 times before swallowing it.

But the average American chews each bite roughly five to six times.

We're forcing it down quickly in order to move on to the next thing.

I could come up with a dozen examples for you, but I want you to intentionally slow yourself.

I challenge you to slow yourself in the area of your rest.

A study was done in 1914 that said the average American slept 10 hours per night.

Now, according to the most recent stat, I could find 35.3% of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep a night, and one in every three Americans feels chronically tired and fatigued.

What if we just took the pace of Jesus?

What if instead of allowing life and busyness and culture to set our pace?

What if we lived at the speed of Jesus?

And what if we took his words to heart?

I've come that you might have life and life to the full.

That doesn't mean full and busy, it means the fullness of life.

We don't miss the beauty, we don't miss the sunsets, we don't miss the Ius, we don't miss the moments.

What will happen?

Because I think we'll get to experience the joy Jesus promised.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes with me?

It's one of those messages that's way easier to talk about than it is to live out.

Let's just talk about it to God and let's give him, let's ask him to give us the courage to live it out.

So, God, in this place, we want to just invite you to give us courage because it's gonna be hard to swim upstream against a culture that's so busy, so consumed, so frenetic all the time about everything going on.

God, here's my prayer.

My prayer is that we will have the courage to live at the speed of Jesus, a different kind of speed.

God, for those of us like myself who've messed this up, we just ask you to forgive us.

And God, may we understand the beauty of not missing this life.

We love you and we thank you in advance for this, God.

God, may we experience a different level of joy, a new kind of peace, a sense of not living with a consistent fear or worry because we've learned to live in step with Jesus.

We thank you for that, God.

With your head still bowed and eyes still closed.

If you're here and you would say, Jason, I don't even know if I'm right with God.

Maybe this means you've never started a relationship with God, or maybe you just feel like you've walked so far away.

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

I want to pray with you.

No matter where you're joining us, if this moment's for you, would you raise your hand?

Thank you, thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm gonna invite you just to pray this prayer with me now.

If this is you, say, Jesus, today I give you my life.

Would you be my Lord and Savior?

Jesus, I believe that you are the Son of God.

I believe you came into this world to pay the price for my sins.

And because of your great sacrifice, I believe my life can be made new.

So, Jesus, would you take my life and forgive my sins?

And from this day forward I'll live for you.

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

And it's in your name I pray, Jesus.

Amen.

Church fam, we just had people pray to make the decision to follow Jesus.

Come on, let's celebrate it, everybody.