Four Cups – A Fulfilled Life

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

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Today I'm excited you're with us.

We are wrapping up our series called Four Cups.

And today we're going to end it by taking communion together as one church family.

It's going to be a really special day.

Let me tell you one of the things I love about the message today.

In this series, I've been talking about God's promises to all of humanity.

And every week I've been talking about what God's promises were.

Today I want to take it one step farther.

And today I want to talk to you about how it applies to us here at Access and how we try to do everything we can to join God in his design of a spiritual journey for every believer.

It's going to be a really great day.

To get it started today, though, this week I was at the office just doing my thing.

I was working, and a man popped his head in my office and he goes, Bro, is there any chance you have like two minutes for me to talk to you?

And I was like, Come on, man, I always got two minutes for you.

So he came and sat down and he did that thing.

You know that thing where someone sits down and they want to talk to you, but words don't come out?

And then he starts crying in my office, and I'm like, bro, what's going on?

And he said, I had everything.

I had I had it all.

I had achieved the highest levels of living, the highest levels of achievement in my industry.

And I know about his industry, and it takes like the most incredible of the most incredible ever achieved the levels he's achieved, and the people he's worked with are unbelievable.

And he had everything that everyone in the world would envy that he had.

But then he said these words.

He said, I got it so wrong.

Like I had everything you could ever want, and I had it all backwards.

I chased all the things, achieved all the things, but I just got it so wrong.

And I wonder how many of us this might feel like our life.

I wonder for how many of us we feel like we've achieved some stuff and we've done some stuff that matters, but the real honest to goodness truth is we just we've gotten it wrong.

We haven't gotten it right based on God's definition of right.

I want to talk to all of us today to make sure that we are always doing that which God has called us to do so we can live the life God's called us to live.

Now, if you've missed any of the series, allow me to catch you up quickly.

In the book of Exodus, chapter six, God speaks to Moses and he says, I've got some promises for the people of Israel.

Biblical scholars say that these promises of God are perpetual promises, which mean they're literally, they were true then.

You can find these promises written in different ways all through the Bible, and the promises still apply to you and to me today.

These promises are four promises that God gives to the people of Israel, but they're really the spiritual journey God wants to take all of his people on.

And we believe this so much as a church that we've literally built a whole church around helping you take your spiritual journey through these four steps.

Now, uh, Jews would call these the four I wills of God.

Let me read them and I'll explain it as I go in case you've missed it.

Exodus chapter 6, verse 6.

Exodus 6:6

God says to Moses, therefore say to the Israelites, I am the Lord.

That all capitalization of Lord means that's God's covenant name, Yahweh, with the people of Israel.

And here's the first one, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.

Well, this was a very specific promise to them because these people of Israel had been in captivity for hundreds of years, answering to Pharaoh.

They were physically enslaved.

And God says, I'm literally gonna take you out, I'm gonna rescue you and save you from slavery.

The second promise, he says, is I will, next verse for me, please, I will free you.

And it's funny because that feels redundant.

God's like, I'm gonna free you, then I'm gonna free you again.

And these are two totally separate promises.

God says, I'm gonna get you out of that which enslaves you, and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna now work on your heart.

I'm gonna get you out, but then I'm gonna get that stuff, that sin, those addictions, those habits.

I'm gonna get those out of you.

I will free you from being slaves to them.

And then here's the third I will, and I will redeem you.

This word redeem means to restore your heart to what it was always intended to be before sin and hurt and remorse and guilt got in there and messed everything up.

And he says, Here's how I'm gonna do it.

It's the only one of the four promises where God tells us how.

He says, with an outstretched arm and mighty acts of judgment.

The outstretched arm is that God sees us differently than we see us.

We see ourselves so low sometimes, and God says, I'm gonna pull you out.

Like with an outstretched arm.

In the book of Psalms, David says, You rescue me out of the miry clay and you set my feet upon a rock.

With an outstretched arm and then with mighty acts of judgment.

Who are the acts of judgment against?

Satan, the enemy of your soul, who's trying to tell you that you'll never reach all that God has for you.

So God says, I'm gonna get you out of the thing that enslaves you, and then I'm gonna help to get that thing out of your heart.

So God's gonna save you, then he's gonna help to change you.

And then God says, I'm gonna heal your heart once and for all, so that you can do the things I have for you to do, which is the fourth cup.

And here's the fourth promise.

He says, I will take you as my own people.

Now notice this cups one through three, promise one, two, and three are all about you, the individual.

But this fourth I will promise is for you, plural, as a people.

What God is saying is, I'm gonna take you out of all those things, I'm gonna restore and redeem your heart, but then I'm gonna set you in a spiritual family.

I'm gonna put you in a church, on a team, in a group.

I'm gonna get you in community with each other as my own people, and then he says, and I will be your God.

And I love this.

He says, Then, I would add, only then, will you know that I am the Lord your God?

Pause here for just a moment.

I think the reason this matters so much to me is there's so many people that have opinions about Christianity that, in my opinion, are so different than God's opinion of what it was created to be.

Come on, don't you know somebody out there who has an opinion of all Christians are the same, and based on someone's social media account or the way they talk about politics or the way they're just so hateful and vengeful online.

Some people judge all Christians the same way.

And I want you to hear this.

God says, You're gonna understand who I am when I've saved you, when I've changed you, when I've redeemed you, and when I've set you in a spiritual family.

Like all those definitions of Christianity will never really make sense to a person until they've experienced this fourth level.

He says, then you will know that I am the Lord your God who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.

So I want you to understand this.

These four promises of God are still true, and they're still true for us.

I'm gonna ask you to pull your message notes out, and today I'm gonna do something a little different.

Every week in the series, I've told you what the four cups are, and I've told you the promise of God that is the fill-in-the-blank answer.

Today, I want to not do that.

Today I want to tell you how we try to do this as a part of your spiritual journey as a church.

The first cup is called the cup of sanctification.

And the hope of the cup of sanctification, God says, I'm gonna save you, God offers salvation, but how we do this as a church is we do weekend services.

And this is important to me that I want you to know why we do services the way we do them.

There's a reason that we have people that greet you from the parking lot all the way to your seats.

There's a reason we have coffee available in the lobby, there's a reason your kids love coming to church, is we want people to be here in our services because the goal of our services is not just to fill your hour with some fun.

The goal of the services is that every person will come to know God a little better.

The word know in Paul's writing is a really interesting word.

The word that he uses for the word no doesn't mean to intellectually know about.

It means I want you to know God on a profound, deep, intimate kind of level.

We hope to help you every week through our weekend services.

The second cup is called the cup of deliverance.

And the cup of deliverance really is all about you finding freedom from your yesterdays, freedom from your past, freedom from your shame, freedom from those hang-ups and holdups that cause you to not step into your future.

And the way we do this is you need to be in community with people.

We call that an access, access groups.

Access groups are when we get out of our rows and we sit in circles.

It's when we get together in community and we share our life.

So many of us, we hide who we really are.

That there is this fear.

If you knew me, you couldn't possibly love me.

But the way we do this is when we get honest with people, take the mask off, and be vulnerable.

Why does it matter?

Let me let me show it to you scripturally.

First John says, when we confess our sins to God, He's faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness.

It's a beautiful verse.

But the way we find freedom, according to James chapter 5, James 5 says, confess your sins to one another that you might be healed.

James 5 · chapter mention

God wants us forgiven and healed, and the way we do this is by having friends and relationships in our life that we can confess our sins to.

The third cup is called the cup of redemption.

And the promise of the cup of redemption is I'm gonna restore your heart to its original intention.

I'm gonna restore it to what it was like before sin ever got in and hurt you.

And the way we do this as a church is our third step is what we call our next steps class.

Our next steps class is a two-step class.

It happens every single month on the first and second Sunday of every month.

Class one is about our church because you need to be in a spiritual family, and we want to help you know if this church family is right for you.

The second class is all about you, it's about discovering your spiritual gifts and your talents and your personality.

And we give you a bunch of different quizzes and we put it together.

And every time we do it, people are like, whoa, I didn't know it till now, but now I know there's a reason you made me.

We wanted you to discover why you were created.

And most people go through life never knowing what this is.

And if you want to join us, there's still room for you.

Really, the first and second Sunday of October and the first and second Sunday of every month.

If you want to join this, pull your phone out and go to access.tv slash info.

You can register there.

The fourth cup is this.

It's what's called the cup of praise.

And I'm convinced the reason it's called this is if you've had four cups of wine, you were gonna praise something, everybody.

That's what that's about.

The cup of praise is this reminder of God's promise of fulfillment.

And I want you to hear this.

God wants you to be fulfilled.

And a lot of us have a wrong picture of what that means, but I want to tell you, you will never be fulfilled, chasing a job, chasing a person, chasing money.

All those things can be good, but they're fleeting.

There is only one thing that ever promises true fulfillment, and that's what we're gonna talk about today.

I want to tell you how we do this as a church.

It's we realize that last step.

Remember, it says God says, I'm gonna get you out of slavery, I'm gonna get the slavery out of your heart, I'm gonna restore your heart to what it was intended to be, and then I'm gonna put you in a family, a family or a team that's doing something together.

So we came up with a name for this for our church.

It's every person who serves other people, whose life is connected to our church and making a difference for eternity.

They're on the same team that we call team access.

And every person who serves here, you are connected every single Sunday.

When a person makes a decision to follow Jesus, if you serve them, your fingerprints are all over them.

So talked about this last week a little bit, and since not everybody shows up every Sunday, I wanted to give you one more chance.

Inside your worship guide, I'm gonna ask you to pull out this little blue card.

The blue card says, I'm here to serve.

And we want you to understand that you can serve everywhere all the time, but there is something profoundly special about serving in and through your local church that makes a difference that literally is felt for all of eternity.

This is what we want for you.

If you want to fill this out, if you haven't done it yet, if you'd like to jump in and serve and give God a year of giving him everything you've got, I challenge you to fill it out and you can drop it off on your way out today with our ushers.

We want this for you.

We'll contact you this week because we want you to do this.

And here's the point none of these steps are about us.

We don't need more people to do more things, we don't need more from you.

We want something for you.

Let me show it to you really simply this.

Our goal as your church is for you to experience four things.

Number one, we want you to know God.

We want you to really know Him.

The second thing is we want you to find freedom from your yesterdays.

The third thing is we want you to discover your purpose.

Why?

Because when you lose your why, you lose your way.

And so many people float through life not really knowing what their purpose is.

And the goal of discovering your purpose is so that you can make a difference.

Let me be really clear.

This is my goal as your pastor.

This is my goal, is that every person who's a part of our church in some way or another will be connected to God's purpose for their life and live their life in a way that makes a difference that's felt for eternity.

So I want to challenge you.

In fact, let me ask everyone, I want you to look right at me.

I'm gonna look right in the camera for a moment.

I want to challenge you when it comes to our church, but really it's not our church.

When it comes to God's plan for your spiritual journey, here's my challenge.

Give God one year.

All in.

All God, God, whatever you want from me, I'm literally all in.

If you've asked me to do something, I'll do it.

Give God one full year of saying, God, I will center my life around you.

I will be in a spiritual family church.

I'm gonna use my giftings and talents to serve somebody else.

I'm gonna discover why you made me.

I'm gonna live open-handedly and generous and see what God does in your life if you just give him one full year.

I think a lot of us make this weird mistake where we think I can do something one time and then I'm good to go.

It's like going to the gym one time and expecting to have a six-pack and biceps that are bulging.

It doesn't happen, but it's compounding.

So I challenge you.

Listen, I some of you rode to church with someone today.

Get in your car and say, what if we gave God one year?

And just go all in with God for one year.

Today, I want to talk about the fourth cup, the fourth I will promise of God.

It's called the cup of praise.

And I'm gonna start with a statement that for some of you might feel weird, but I'm gonna show it to you biblically today.

And here's the statement God always intended you to live a life of fulfillment.

Here's the funny thing.

I think for a lot of us, we think God created us to live a full life.

And there's nothing wrong with having hobbies, there's nothing wrong with keeping a lot of plates spinning in your life, but don't confuse or conflate a full life and a fulfilled life.

Fulfillment comes from doing something that matters for eternity.

And you can fill your life chasing all kinds of dreams and all kinds of bucket list items, you can travel the world, earn a billion dollars, and do all kinds of things and still feel empty on the inside, but that's never been God's purpose.

In fact, Jesus said this in John chapter 10.

John 10 · chapter mention

I want you to see this.

John 10, 10.

He said the thief, Satan, his purpose is to steal, kill, and destroy.

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

But look how Jesus contrasts himself with the enemy of your soul.

He says, My purpose is to give life in all its fullness.

Okay, what does a fullness kind of life look like?

It's a life where we take our eyes off of us and we put it onto something that matters.

Let me challenge you with a simple thought.

Living a fulfilled life doesn't mean your problems will get any less.

It doesn't mean your problems will all go away, but it does mean that you're gonna live your life in a way where your purpose far overshadows your challenges.

It's where you live a life where your purpose and everything you're doing makes everything else in comparison feel small.

So who wouldn't want that?

Who wouldn't want to live that kind of life?

So ready, ready?

So why don't we live it out?

Thank you for asking.

Number one, I think we allow our past to paralyze us.

We want to step out and do something for God.

We want to live a life on purpose that's felt for eternity.

And then the moment we're going to step out, we hear a voice in our ear.

Yeah, but you remember what you did.

Yeah, you know you're not good enough.

Yeah, you know that he left you and therefore you're unlovable.

Yeah, you know that she walked out on you, so how could anybody ever trust you again?

Yeah, yeah, you failed over and over and over.

What's going to be different this time?

And I just want you hear this.

That is the voice of the enemy trying to distract you or disarm you or to cause you to not live the purpose God has for you.

Don't you dare let your past paralyze you.

If this is you, maybe you'll relate to David, David who went on to become king.

In Psalm chapter 38, this is what David says.

Psalms 38 · chapter mention

He says, My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear.

I am bowed down and brought low.

This was never God's intention for you.

In fact, the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3.16, John 3.17, literally the next verse says, For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world.

This has always been God's intention, never to let your past define you.

The second thing, the second reason many of us don't step into our destiny is we let culture define us.

What does this mean?

It means we're running the wrong plays from the wrong playbook for our life.

We think the goal of this life is to succeed in relationships and business and financially.

We think the goal of this life is to have a six-pack and to be in good health so you can play with your grandkids when they get older.

We sometimes run the wrong play from the wrong playbook, and so we're gonna get the wrong results from it.

Now, if you know anything about me, you know that I am a lifelong, die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan.

I love the Dallas Cowboys.

I think they are God's favorite team.

And I think all of you are wrong.

And I have a problem though.

As a Cowboys fan, I got set off on the wrong foot because when I was an early teenager in the 1990s, for some of you, that's the 1900s, everybody.

When I was a teenager, the Cowboys won three Super Bowls in four years, and I thought this is how it's always going to be.

This is gonna be the greatest ride of my life.

And I believe that maybe the owner of the Dallas Cowboys sold his soul to the devil for those three Super Bowls because since then we haven't even sniffed the playoffs.

We've had three playoff wins in 27 years.

It is hurrowing, it is gutting to me.

I it is so bad that I have asked the Dallas Cowboys to be the pallbearers at my funeral someday so they can let me down one last time.

This is how bad it is for me.

If you want to know if your pastor is humble, yes, I love the Cowboys.

This is me.

Okay?

In the early 1990s, when they won their first Super Bowl, Troy Aikman, who was their quarterback, who, in my opinion, is right up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as some of the greatest Americans of all time.

After they won the Super Bowl, this is what he said the next day.

I love this.

He says, I kept thinking back to when I was a teenager.

How I thought life's problems would be solved when I turned 16 and got a car, but they weren't.

He says, now, here I am, here I was at the top of the professional football world, and I found myself thinking the same thing.

Is this all there is?

You can chase everything that this life has to offer.

You can run the plays from the wrong playbook, and you're gonna live this life of is this all that there is?

So here's Paul's words.

In the book of Galatians, Paul says Galatians 1, 10, am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God?

Hey, look, if you fell asleep and missed the whole first part of the message, you could spend a whole week chewing on that sentence.

Whose opinion are you living for?

Am I trying to win the approval of men or of God?

Or am I trying to please men?

If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.

It is possible for you to give your life, chasing the exact wrong thing, running your life off of the wrong playbook, and you're gonna get the wrong results every single time.

So we let our past paralyze us.

We we let culture define us.

And then number three, this is so important for so many of us.

Go on to point number three for me if you wouldn't.

We try to do it all alone.

We try to live our life all by ourselves, and here's the problem: you'll never accomplish all that God has for you all by yourself.

You just won't.

Like we were created for community.

And here's the thing: some people are single and they hear this and they think, well, I'm not married.

Does this exclude me?

I'm not talking about married relationships.

I'm talking about you were created to do your life together with other believers, chasing the same dream, living a life on purpose and for a purpose.

Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, at the end of his life, the everything was coming off the rails.

And he said, There was a man all alone.

He had neither son nor brother.

There was no end to his toil.

Like he worked himself into oblivion, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.

You can chase everything and get everything and still have nothing.

If any of those feel true for you, today I want to challenge you to make this decision that I'm gonna leave here drinking from the fourth cup.

We would call it in English the cup of praise, the cup of praise.

The Jews would have used a different word for this.

It's the word halel.

Now, if this looks familiar to you, it's because this is the root of the word hallelujah.

Let me try to explain it to you.

Halel means to celebrate God, okay?

It means to celebrate, and then the Yah, so Hallelujah, the Yah is God.

So it means to celebrate or to live out thanks and gratitude to God.

The Jews would have said, This is let's drink from the fourth cup the cup of halel.

And it's not just something we do, it becomes everything we are.

That my whole life is lived as a celebration of God.

It's lived on purpose, and here's the point it is lived for God's purpose.

And I want you to get this because this is important.

The Bible has been true the whole time.

And what I love is when science and psychology catch up to the things of God.

If any of you have had a psychology 101 type class, you you probably remember one of the most famous psychological concepts ever was written in the 1940s by a man named Abram Maslow.

It's called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow identified five needs that every human has.

Later, scientists added two more to it, and just recently they've added an eighth one.

So there's eight needs that all of us have, and I want to show them to you, and you're gonna see how God's word always is true.

The first set of needs are called the deficiency needs.

These are the things that if we don't have them, our lives will feel incomplete.

We need them.

The first one is physical needs.

All of us need food and water and air in order to live.

The second is called safety needs.

We need a door that we can close and lock.

We need a roof over our heads.

We need to feel safe and secure.

The third deficiency need is love needs.

All of us are created for love.

We need to receive love and we need to give love.

And the fourth need that many of us have is what's called an esteem need.

All of us need to be built up.

And in a world that tears us down, we need encouragers in our life.

And let me teach you a quick side note.

If you want encouragement in your life, be an encourager to somebody else.

Like you should be the biggest cheerleader in the lives of all of your friends, and it always comes back to you.

So the first set of needs is the deficiency needs.

The second set of needs are what we would call fulfillment needs.

These are the things that you're going to need in order to live a life that feels fulfilled.

The first is what we'd call cognitive needs.

Your mind was created for wonder and beauty and awe.

This is the reason that you love learning certain things.

This is the reason that many years ago there was a show that came on called Planet Earth, and I just loved learning about all the weird animals all over the world.

Like we love learning stuff.

The next level of needs is what's called the aesthetic needs.

Aesthetic needs is all of us have this need to see and experience beauty in our lives.

Last night I ran out and got dinner from my family.

And when I got home, there was this rainbow that was so beautiful, it was so vivid and so bright, and it was right over my neighbor's house.

And I yelled for my family to come downstairs because they had to see it.

And when they came out, my daughter goes, she had never seen anything like this.

Our souls crave beauty.

The seventh of the eight is where they used to stop, and they call it self-actualization means.

This means that all of us need to live a life where we discover our unique purpose.

Does this sound familiar?

All of us need to discover why our life exists.

For many years, this is where Maslow's hierarchy stopped, but recently they've added one more, which is called transcendence means.

Transcendence means a life beyond you.

For many of us, our whole life centers around us, but you're never really gonna feel fulfilled until you live a life that is beyond you.

And here's what I love Science is catching up to what God knew the whole time.

God knew that your life would never feel fully and completely fulfilled if it was all about you.

So he challenges us to make our lives not about us, but to take the focus off of us and to make it about others.

So let me summarize it with this statement.

Ultimate fulfillment comes when you're a part of a spiritual family and making a difference for eternity.

Once and for all fulfillment.

When you go to bed at night and you say, Oh, I did it again.

That's how you live a life on purpose comes when you're part of a spiritual family and you're making a difference for eternity.

So here's what I want to do today.

I want to give us three final thoughts as to what it looks like to live our God-given purpose.

And I want to write a sentence that we will read together at the end and it'll kind of make everything come together and make sense.

Okay?

If you're gonna live a life on purpose, if you're gonna drink from the cup of praise, you need to understand number one, it begins with a calling.

Now, here's the funny thing about callings a lot of people think the calling of God is reserved for pastors and ministers.

They think, well, you're called by God to be the pastor.

I want you to listen to me.

Every single person has a call of God on their life.

You are not where you are on accident.

You don't work where you do on accident, you don't have the friendships and the relationships you do on accident.

You are a minister of the gospel and the message of Jesus Christ to the world around you.

It is not just me who is called, and it's not revered for just pastors and preachers.

It was created.

The calling is for all of us.

In the book of 2 Timothy, Paul is writing a man who's going to become a pastor named Timothy.

And he says, God saved us and then he called us to this holy word.

We had nothing to do with it.

It was all his idea, a gift prepared for us in Jesus long before we knew anything about him.

So here's the first part of the sentence I want you to understand.

Ready?

Next slide.

I am called to make a difference.

I'm called to live a life in a way that my life makes a difference and it keeps being felt for generations to come.

The first thing you need to understand is I am called.

Okay, I want you to get this.

You are called by God to do something with your life that matters.

The second thought I need every person to understand is that calling that God gives us it stands on a cause.

And here's the funny thing: a lot of us feel like the point of our life is to check off everything on our bucket list, it's to visit all the places in the world we want to visit.

It is to swim in the most beautiful oceans and to have a bank account so full of money that we never feel stressed about money.

And you can chase lots of good things, but they're not the right thing.

They're what I call counterfeit.

What is counterfeit?

It's something that has the appearance of value, but it's worth nothing.

No different than a fake$100 bill.

It's not worth the paper it's printed on, but it looks like it has value.

I think a lot of us settle for counterfeit kind of lives and we miss all that God has for us.

In the book of Acts, I love this.

It says, My life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus.

What is that work?

The work of telling others the good news about the wonderful grace of God.

Okay.

First part of the sentence we said is I'm I'm called to make a difference.

And here's the second part.

It's doing something that makes a difference.

Well, what is the something that makes a difference?

Let me make it really easy for you.

You want to know what makes a difference?

You ready?

People and eternity.

Period.

It's not chasing money, it's not getting fame, it's not getting more followers on TikTok or Instagram or Tinder.

It's none of those things.

A real difference that actually matters is living your life where people are affected and eternity changes.

A real life that matters is when you live your life blessing and serving the people around you and realizing that heaven and hell are real and we are playing for keeps.

When you understand that you will live your life in a way that feels different and is different.

Why?

Because you're living on purpose for a purpose.

I am called by God.

My calling has a cause to it, and it's not just me and keeping me happy and keeping my bank account full or traveling the world.

The cause is people in eternity.

The last thing I want you to get is this is it spreads from me to we.

What does that mean?

It means you can't do all that God has for you all by yourself.

You can.

It's when we move to we that it matters.

The book of Ecclesiastes, here it is again, Solomon, who says, two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor.

In our minds, one plus one equals two.

The way God works and the way eternity is forever shaped is realizing that one plus one in God's economy doesn't equal two.

It might equal ten or twenty or fifty.

It's that together collectively we can do so much more.

I like to think about what happened last weekend in our legacy offering.

I'll give you more updates on that soon.

But in our legacy offering, if you gave by yourself to change the world, it might make a small impact.

It might make a little dent.

But together, collectively, when we give, we're literally changing the world together.

So I am called by God to make a difference by doing something that makes a difference.

And here's the fourth, the third point with people who want to make a difference.

What does it look like for us?

Well, here's Jesus' words in the book of John.

He says, This is to my Father's glory that you do something, that you bear much fruit, that your life makes a difference, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

Okay.

Jesus says, You'll know you're my follower.

You'll know you're a disciple when your life is bearing much fruit, or when your life is making a difference.

So here, we made a sentence.

Now we're going to read the sentence, and I'm going to read the white parts, and we're all going to read the yellow parts out loud together.

Ready?

Here it is.

I am called to make a doing something that makes a with people who want to make a.

This is God's hope and this is his intention.

You will live a life that experiences true fulfillment when you understand that you are called to make a difference by doing something that makes a difference with people who want to join you in the pursuit to make a difference together.

Here's how I want to end the series.

As your pastor, my goal is that you and I will live a life that feels, experiences true and lasting fulfillment.

I loved the series because it really showcases God's heart for humanity.

That He wants to get you out of slavery, He wants to save you.

He wants to keep your heart from being enslaved once and for all.

He wants to change and restore your heart.

That God wants to restore your heart to what it was always intended to be before sin entered the equation.

And here's the final point God wants you to live a life that's fulfilled.

If that's you and you want all those things, I want to end today by taking communion together.

But I want to show you something really cool.

I told you that the series is called Four Cups because Jews would take four glasses of wine when they would gather together for their Passover, their Seder meal.

The word Seder means order.

And if you know much about it, the Seder meal, it has 14 steps to it.

So it would start where they would read these verses and they would drink the first cup of wine.

The cup of sanctification, and they would thank God for saving them.

And they would eat bread, and then they would drink from a second cup.

The second cup is that that cup of deliverance that God wants to set their heart free.

They would drink, and then they would eat what they called supper, and then they would drink the third cup.

But there's this interesting moment where Jesus is with his disciples in Matthew 26.

Luke's gospel also records the same thing.

And there's a detail that if you don't understand the four cup principle, it won't make sense to you.

But in Matthew chapter 26, Jesus gets to the third cup, he drinks the third cup, and then he's like, Alright, boys, I'm done.

Matthew 26 · chapter mention

And they're like, hold up.

We only drank three, but there's four.

And here's what Jesus says.

I want you to see this.

Matthew 26, 29, I tell you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's kingdom.

What is Jesus saying?

He's saying that when you take communion on this side of eternity, it is a forecast, a foreshadow of what's going to happen in eternity, where Jesus says, I'll complete the communion process by drinking of the cup of praise with you in heaven for eternity.

Because everything on this side of eternity is a shadow of true ultimate fulfillment.

Like you'll never fully feel fulfilled until you stand with God in His presence for eternity in heaven.

So when we take communion together, it's a picture, it's a promise, it's a forecast, it's a foreshadowing of what is to come for us.

It's a reminder that Jesus saved us.

He changes our heart, he restores our heart to its original intent so we can live out as best we possibly can on this side of eternity a life of fulfillment.

So here's how I want to end today.

In a moment, we're gonna take communion.

In a moment, you should have gotten a cup when you came in, and in a moment, if you didn't get one, I'll ask you to raise your hand and we'll make sure everybody has one.

But in a moment, I want to take communion.

But before I do, I want to talk to you.

1 Corinthians chapter 11, Paul says there is an unworthy way in which a person can take communion, and it's really simple.

1 Corinthians 11 · chapter mention

It's to take communion, but not to be in right standing with God.

So I'm gonna ask you all across this room and in North Lakeland and wherever you're joining us at church online, would you bow your head and close your eyes for a moment?

I'm gonna ask you to examine your heart.

If you would say, Jason, I don't know if I'm in right standing with God.

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

And in either case, if you need to restart or start a relationship with Jesus, would you just raise your hand right now?

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

This is the first cup.

This is just allowing Jesus to save you.

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

I invite you to be my Lord and my Savior.

Jesus, I believe that when you came and died for me, you came to save me from my sins.

So Jesus, today I thank you and I receive your gift of salvation.

But I also want you to be my Lord.

That means you're in charge.

That means you call the shots.

That means whatever you say, I say yes, and I will follow you all the days of my life.

Jesus, you gave your life for my life, and now I give you my life in return.

Thank you for your love.

Thank you for your grace.

Thank you for saving me.

Your name I pray, Jesus.

Amen.

I'm gonna ask you to do this with me all across this room in North Lakeland and everywhere.

Would you grab your communion cup?

If you didn't get one, now's the time.

Raise your hand, our ushers will get you one.

We're gonna take communion together.

I'm gonna ask you to go ahead and open the top layer of that.

To get your little piece of bread.

When Jesus was with his disciples at what we call the Last Supper, he took the bread.

And he said, When you take this bread, break it, and remember my body that will be broken for you.

Why was Jesus' body broken for you?

Well, scripture records it's by his stripes, the stripes that he took on his body, that we are healed.

Talked to a sweet lady in our church earlier today.

I said, We're gonna take communion together.

She told me she had had some pain, some issues in our body.

I said, I believe that the healing power, the healing virtue of Jesus flows through this moment when we receive it as a gift from him.

So let's take this.

Jesus, in this moment, we say thank you for your body broken for us.

We believe by your stripes we're healed.

Jesus, I believe that when they shoved the crown of thorns over your head, it was symbolic of the fact that all sickness has to leave our body, including mental illness.

For the person who's dealing with pain or sickness in their body, thank you for healing power.

For the person who's dealing with sickness, depression, anxiety, fear, suicidal thoughts in their mind, thank you that your healing is there for them.

Jesus, we take this, we break it, and we remember your body broken for us.

Would you take it and break it and eat with Jesus?

And if you'll open your wine, Jesus said, when you drink this, remember my blood spilled for you.

I always think of the song that we sang when I was a kid.

Simply said, What can wash away my sins?

The answer is nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Jesus said, When you drink the juice or the wine, remember my blood spilled for you.

So Jesus, all across this city, and really wherever people are joining us around the world, we pause and we say thank you.

We drink, you want to remember your sins for us.

Let me pray for you, and then we're gonna celebrate what Jesus did for us.

So Lord, thank you.

Thank you feels shallow, it feels hollow, it doesn't feel like it's enough.

But we say thank you.

Thank you for your love, thank you for your grace, thank you for your blood spilled for us and your body broken for us.

Jesus, thank you that you saved us so that you could use us to change the world.

So, God, my prayer is that this won't just be a one-time thing.

My prayer is that you will use us to change the world.

We love you, we thank you for God in Jesus' name.

Come on, if you're thankful for Jesus and all he's done, can we put our hands together?

Can we celebrate him?