Four Cups – How Did My Heart Get Here?

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

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Let's get to work today.

We are in part four of a five-part series called Four Cups.

To get us going today, I gotta I have to ask you for a moment of confession.

If you ever had a moment when you slip sleepwalks, anybody had this happen to you?

A few of you are brave enough.

Um, it's happened to me twice in my life that I know about, maybe more, but twice in my life that I know about.

Uh, one of the times that was the most embarrassing, one of the most embarrassing moments of my life is when I was about 15 or 16 years old, I took my first major international trip.

And that meant I flew with my family to Australia.

And it was an awesome trip, but to get there, it's a hard trip.

So you start by uh leaving Florida and you fly to Los Angeles, and then it's like a 16-hour flight from LA to Sydney, Australia.

Now, I don't know how you roll, but I do not sleep on planes.

Like my dad drives me crazy because he falls asleep before the plane takes off, and when the plane lands, it scares him and he wakes up.

Okay, like I hate that.

I can't sleep at all on a flight.

So it's a long flight, and then you get to Australia, and the time difference is 14 or 15 hours.

So you want to talk about jet lag?

You feel like you got hit by a truck and then rolled back over and hit one more time.

I mean, you're out of it altogether.

So we land in Australia, we go to the hotel room, and we said, let's just get a quick nap.

Now, I am jet lagged, I am exhausted, I am at the end of my rope, and I go to take a nap.

Now, I need to tell you a detail about me that you didn't come to church expecting to learn, but we're family, everybody.

I don't believe in pajamas, I'm asleep in my drawers kind of guy.

Now, why do you need to know that?

I'll tell you in a moment, but I want you to not think about it.

Okay, can you do that for me?

Like, don't think about it.

But it's important to the story.

So I'm jet lagged, haven't slept for probably 30 to 40 hours, get to the hotel, strip down to my drawers, get in bed, fall asleep hard.

One of those ugly sleeps where you wake up and your your mouth's all wet, pillows all wet, I'm just asleep.

And I don't know what happened, but sometime after falling asleep, the tiredness must have gotten to me because I woke up to one of the most dreadful sounds in my life.

It was the sound of the hotel door slamming shut behind me.

I'm on another continent, in another country, in a hotel, locked out of my room, standing in my drawers, and I woke up and I had slept walks.

I don't remember how I got out of bed.

I don't remember anything except for the sound of that door clicking behind me and realizing I didn't have the key to get back into my room.

I'm standing there in my drawers, one last time, in my drawers, just couldn't believe it.

And I asked this question how did I get here?

Come on.

Anybody ever have a moment like this where you woke up and you're like, How did I get here?

Like, in my life, how did I get to this position?

How did I get here?

All of us have had a silly moment like that, but have you ever had a harder moment like this?

You ever had a moment when you asked the question, how did my heart get here?

You ever had a moment when you didn't realize that like all the pain had accumulated so much and your heart was just so bitter?

You ever had a moment when it felt like all the things that have happened to you, they've caused your heart to become hardened.

You used to be so kind, so gracious, so loving, and now you don't want anything to do with people.

Your heart is hard.

You've been betrayed, and so it feels like you'll never be able to love again.

And you you wake up one day and you think about it and you're like, I wasn't always like this.

My heart wasn't always this hard, my heart wasn't always this cold, my heart wasn't always this distant and disconnected.

How did my heart get here?

If this resonates with you in any way, shape, or form, you are a candidate to drink from the third cup that we're gonna talk about today.

But to get us started in this, I need to recap where we've been in the series.

We're in a series called Four Cups.

And four cups is really this ancient practice that the ancient Jews had, where they would get together at the Passover meal and they would take what we would call communion together.

But instead of taking one cup and one piece of bread, they would drink from four.

The four cups that they drank from were a reminder of four of God's promises to the people of Israel.

Now you need to know this.

The Bible is full of God's promises to people.

There's over 7,000 promises of God to humanity, but there are four that scholars call perpetual promises.

They're promises that God made in Exodus chapter six that keep on keeping on.

In fact, if you read your Bible cover to cover, you'll find them over and over and over again.

These four promises of God are the spiritual journey that God wants to take his followers on.

Now, we believe in this so much as a church that we've literally built our whole church around these four promises of God.

I want to read the promises of God.

I'll explain them to you as I go, and then I'm gonna challenge you today to take a step towards fulfilling what God has for you as you take another step in your spiritual journey.

These four promises of God are found in Exodus chapter six.

Jewish people might call them the four I Wills.

Here they are.

God said to Moses, Therefore say to the Israelites, I am the Lord.

This word Lord is kind of a, it's God's covenant name to the people of Israel.

And here's the first one.

He says, And I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.

So God's talking to Moses and He says, Tell the people of Israel who have been in slavery for hundreds of years, I'm gonna get them out of slavery.

And then the second promise is, I will free you from being slaves to them.

Now that's weird because God's like, I'm gonna free you, then I'm gonna get you free.

It feels redundant, but we talked about this last Sunday.

What we said is step one is God's like, I'm gonna save you.

But once I save you, then I'm gonna help you to work out the issues that are plaguing your heart.

Salvation and the process of becoming more like Jesus are separate.

They're separate issues, and a lot of people think about it backwards.

A lot of people think that I've got to get my life right, I've got to stop my sin, I've got to polish out all the rough edges of my life, and then I can come to God.

And God's like, no, no, no, no.

Salvation, the first step, is easy.

Just let me save you, and then when I save you, I'm gonna work out those issues that plague your heart to the people of Israel.

He was like, You're in captivity in Egypt, let me free you from being slaves in Egypt, but then I want to work on your heart that even though you're out of Egypt, your heart still might be enslaved in Egypt.

Talks about that last week.

He says, I will free you from being slaves to them, and then here's the third I will.

I will redeem you.

And this is the only one where God says, How?

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

We'll come back to this in a moment because this is what we're talking about today.

Then he goes to the fourth promise, and this is interesting.

The first three are all about you as individuals.

Promise four is about us collectively.

It's about the family of believers.

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

God's like, here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna get you out of slavery, then I'm gonna help to get the slavery out of your heart, then I'm gonna redeem you, which means I want to restore your heart to its original intent.

And then the fourth promise is I'm gonna put you in a family of believers, so that together you can do more than you could ever do on your own.

He says, Then I will be your God.

Then, and I would say only then, will you know that I am the Lord your God who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians?

Now, these four I will promises are something that Jews to this day will gather together for a Passover Seder meal.

They'll open their Bibles to Exodus 6 and read these verses, and as they read them, they will drink from four cups.

Each one of the cups has a name, and I believe each name has a promise for you and for me.

The first cup is called the cup of sanctification.

And the promise of God is salvation.

God's like, I'm gonna save you from the sin in your life that's plaguing you, it's enslaving you.

The second cup is the cup of deliverance, and God's promise is freedom.

I'm gonna free you from those sin issues that keep assaulting your heart.

The third cup is called the cup of redemption, and God's like, I want to restore your heart to what it was intended to always be, so that number four, you can drink from the fourth cup, which is the cup of praise, and God's promise is fulfillment.

Let me pause here for a moment.

Next Sunday, we're gonna talk about this, and I challenge you to be here because we're gonna we're gonna tie all of this together, and we're gonna end with what I believe is an interesting surprise from scripture, and we're gonna end by taking communion together as a church.

Now, if you've been to our church, we give out little individual cups like personal cups.

I had a dude ask me, he goes, Am I gonna have to get four of those things open?

They're not easy to open.

We're just gonna do one, everybody, okay?

We're gonna celebrate the cup of praise, and here's God's promise to you.

You ready?

Fulfillment.

Like God doesn't just want you to be happy.

That's what Americans chase.

We chase, we chase like a quick high, some sort of temporary happiness.

God's like, I want something that will once and for all fully satisfy your heart.

I'll give you a spoiler alert.

You'll never experience this until you get connected into a church family and you're doing something together that literally changes the world.

That's what God wants for you.

Today I want to talk about this third cup, the cup of redemption.

And it's important for me to help you understand that every word that we say, it has meanings, and if we don't understand the meaning, we might have a wrong assumption about the cups.

This third cup, the word he uses is God says, I want to redeem.

Now, here's the funny thing.

I don't use the word redeem very much.

I use this word maybe if I'm talking about a coupon or a coupon, depending on how you say it.

But redeem has an interesting definition.

In fact, here's three right from the dictionary.

The first one is redeem means to buy back or to repurchase.

Let me give you an example.

Um, imagine that you had a family heirloom.

For generation after generation, it was a diamond ring that your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother had, and for generation after generation after generation, it was handed down to you.

But one night, someone broke in and stole the ring, and you were so devastated.

It was yours, it was a family heirloom, and years pass by, and one day you went to a pawn shop and you're amazed to find the ring that you are 1,000% sure was your great-great-grandmother's ring, and you see it in the store, and because it means so much to you, you decide to buy it back.

This is what the picture of redemption means.

That God saw us in all of our sin.

We he we he made us for him.

We turned and ran from him, and God's like, I love you so much that I'll do whatever it takes.

I'll repurchase you, I will buy you back.

That the second picture of this word redeem is to change for the better or to reform.

God's like, I see more in you than you see in yourself, so I want to make you better than you ever were.

The third definition means to repair or to restore.

I love this definition, and to kind of help explain it a few years ago, I got addicted to a TV show that I just loved.

Anybody seen this show before?

Anybody seen Pawn Stars?

Anybody see this one?

And I loved it so much because people would bring in the weirdest stuff and they would have it appraised.

Someone would say how much it was worth, and then it was this guy Rick's job to negotiate for it, right?

Someone come in with something, it's valued at$10,000.

Rick's like, best I can do,$1,000.

And he would negotiate with them.

Well, I loved the show because I loved all the random stuff that would come in.

And over the years, people would try to sell him old used vintage cars, antique cars.

And very often the cars were in disrepair.

They needed a lot of work, but if they had work done, they would have a great value to them.

And he took them to a guy that got so popular from Pond Stars that the History Channel literally made a whole show for the car guy.

The show was called American Restoration.

Did you see this one?

And I love this show because people would bring in old, beat-up antique cars.

Often they had been sitting out in the sun or sitting in a garage and they were dirty, the upholstery was all ripped up, the hood was rusted, the paint was chipping.

It was at one point a beautiful car, but now because time and the weather had really torn it down, something had to be done.

What this man would do is he would go to work and he would find the original leather and he'd fix the upholstery.

He would clean it, he would paint it, he would fix the engine and fine-tune it.

And he was restoring that car to what it was always intended to be.

Can I say this to you?

This is what God wants to do for you and for me.

That if sin has destroyed your heart, if you feel unlovable, if you feel unworthy of even receiving God's love, if you feel like you've done too much for God to ever use you for his glory, God is in the business of redeeming and restoring our lives.

Now, here's the crazy thing.

Statistically, over 80% of Christians never get this.

They get so stuck in their sin, so trapped in their ways, that they never get it.

And I want to ask the question, why do so few drink from this cup?

Like, why is it that so few get it?

And so here's what I want to do.

I want to show you the promise again, and then we'll talk about why so few actually drink from it.

Here's the promise.

Exodus 6, verse 6 and 7.

Exodus 6:6

God says, I will redeem you, I'm gonna fix you up, I'm gonna restore you with and he gives two things, an outstretched arm and mighty acts of judgment.

What does this mean?

An outstretched arm means God sees us in our low point and he says, No, no, no, no.

And he pulls us up.

The psalmist David in the book of Psalms says things like, You rescue me, you pull me out of the miry clay, and you set my feet upon a rock.

And the second thing is with mighty acts of judgment.

But this isn't towards you, this is towards Satan, the enemy of your soul.

He's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna save you, and then once I've saved you, and once I've set you up, and once I've restored your heart, I'm gonna destroy the works of the enemy in your life.

So why don't Christians uh entertain this and enjoy drinking from this cup?

I'll give you two quick reasons.

Number one, I think, is inferiority.

We believe this lie that we'll never be able to get past our past, that will never be good enough, that will never be fully forgiven.

And so we buy into the lie.

And every time we step out in faith to try to do something, we hear the voice of the enemy in our soul saying, Yeah, but you remember what you did.

Yeah, you remember who you were.

How could God possibly ever love you?

How could God possibly use you?

And so we make ourselves very, very low.

I said it earlier.

David says it like this in the book of Psalms.

He says, You stoop down to make me great.

You reach down with an outstretched arm and you make me great.

You see me differently than I see me.

And I think for a lot of us, we just don't see ourselves the way God sees us.

We see ourselves as busted, broken, unfixable, unlovable.

We think about our past and we think there's no way that God could possibly love me.

And I just want to submit to you, if you think about yourself that way, you're thinking the wrong way because God doesn't see you that way.

In the book of Ephesians, Paul says it like this: Ephesians chapter 2, he says, For we are God's masterpiece.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

I'm gonna come back to this word.

We're God's masterpiece.

He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.

This word masterpiece in Greek is an interesting word.

It's the word poema.

It literally means the highest form of divine poetry.

Essentially, what Paul is saying in this verse is that when God made you, he didn't make a mistake, and that he hardwired into you giftings and talents and abilities to be used to make a difference.

And he uses this language that says you are his masterpiece, you are the pinnacle of his creation.

God, the master author, is penning a story through your life that is so beautiful.

And if you see all of your mistakes and all of your failures and all of your shortcomings as reasons God can't use you, you're not fully seeing it.

You don't understand that God is really in the business of using everything for his glory.

Let me show it to you.

I think the first thing that causes us to trip up is this inferiority complex that we carry.

But the second thing that trips us up is what I would call diversions.

Diversions in our life are those things that we think God can't use.

They're those parts of our story that we feel like God can't redeem.

They're those parts of our story that we think, how could I possibly be a masterpiece when every part of my life feels like a master failure?

If you feel like that, this verse is for you.

Romans 8.28.

It says, for and we know.

We have confidence in the fact that God uses, everybody say this word, God uses everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.

I want to pay attention to one word.

Ready?

It's this word, everything.

And can I tell you what everything means in the original language of Greek?

You ready for this?

It means everything.

Like God uses all the good stuff in your life for his glory.

And I got news for you.

You ready?

And he uses all of the junk, all the bad stuff in your life for his glory.

Part of what makes our church special, in my humble opinion, is that God used one of the darkest moments of my life and my wife's life for his glory.

Six months into marriage, my wife was diagnosed with cancer.

Six months into marriage, I flew home and I sat down with her the night before she started chemo, and we prayed a prayer.

Oh, God, never let us forget how we feel right now.

And for 17 years, people have hopefully walked in these doors and felt loved and cherished and that they matter, that their story matters.

You could never tell me that God wanted to use cancer in our lives, but God has used that difficult, dark season of our life over and over and over again for his glory and for his renown.

Can I say this to you?

You are a masterpiece, and God wants to leverage your story for his good.

God uses everything, and everything means everything.

Let me show it to you like this.

In the book of Romans, Paul again says, God's gifts and God's call are under full warranty, never canceled, never rescinded.

If you feel like God can't use you, but at one point maybe he could have, God, you need to understand, he's still in the business of using you.

In fact, I'll say it like this: God never changes his mind about you.

Ever.

Like that should be good news to somebody because God can't and he won't change his mind about you.

He's crazy about you, he loves you.

If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it.

He loves you.

So how do we do this?

Like, how do we drink from this third cup?

Well, this is an area that some people just don't get their heads their heads and hearts around.

This is an area that some churches just refuse to talk about, but it's in the Bible, so you know, let's talk about it.

I believe that God has given every believer spiritual gifts.

What are spiritual gifts?

Well, let me show it to you.

The book of Romans, chapter 12, Paul says we have different gifts according to the grace given us.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

Now, if you grew up in church, the word grace often means God's unmerited favor.

That's a good definition.

But in this verse, the word grace is the Greek word charis.

Caris is what I would call a divine enablement from God to do something that you couldn't do in your own strength.

I bet you if you were to think about your life, there are some things in your life that you just do so naturally that other people struggle to do.

Have you noticed this?

There's some people that struggle in conversation, but for you it flows naturally.

There's some people that struggle to be a leader, but for you, you just feel like you're a natural born leader.

I think about my life, and uh, it's funny because most Americans would say that their number one fear is to stand in front of people and talk to people.

Can I be honest with you?

I feel better standing in front of a room full of people than I do sitting across the table one-on-one talking to somebody.

And that's not something special about me.

That's a gift that God gave me.

Now, can I be honest with you?

You have gifts that I don't have.

You have abilities that I don't have.

God has hardwired into us caris, gifts.

And these gifts are given by God to be used to literally make a difference in the world.

So, what do we do?

Well, 1 Corinthians Paul says it like this: he says, follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts.

You've got to want what God has for you.

Well, how do you do this?

Well, let me give you three thoughts and then we're done for today.

Pull your notes out.

Number one is this you've got to discover your gift.

God has given you special giftings.

And most believers walk through this life never knowing the gifts that God has given them.

In the book of Psalm 139, David beautifully says, You made all the delicate inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb.

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex.

Let me pause here for just a moment.

If these words feel like you, wonderfully complex, if you've always felt like an outsider because you're unique or you're different or you're quirky, God wants to use that.

He wired you that way.

He says, Your workmanship is marvelous.

How well I know it.

One of the things that I so believe about every believer is that God gave us spiritual gifts.

All the quirkiness, all the weirdness that makes you you is God's design.

And here's what I want you to get today.

You ready?

Your design reveals your destiny.

Your design, the way God made you, it'll show you what you're to do with your life.

And here's what's funny: a lot of believers never discover their design.

Now, earlier I said this, our whole church believes this so much that we literally built our church around the four cups, the four promises of God.

And the third promise of God is that I'm gonna return your heart to the way it was before.

How do you get there?

By discovering the giftings and talents that God has placed inside of you.

Once God saves you, once God begins to work on your heart, then He wants you to discover your purpose so you can actually live them out.

So in our church, here's what this looks like.

As a church, we do every single month on the first and second Sunday of the month something that we call our next steps class.

It's two steps.

Step one is discover the heart, vision, and values of our church because you need to be in a local church.

This is so important.

You need a family of believers to belong to.

Now, I hope it's access.

It may not be access, and that's okay, but I challenge you to find a church and just go all in.

Like whatever they ask, just do it.

Like go push the chips to the center of the table, give and serve and be involved.

I challenge you to do it.

Now, this class for us happens every month, not so that we can have more stuff for you to do.

You're busy.

We're busy.

It's not about having more, it's about helping people on their spiritual journey take the third step or to drink from the third cup.

Step one's about our church, but step two is all about.

You.

We want to help you to discover your design so you can know the destiny God has for you.

So here's what step two is it's about you.

We have you take personality test, spiritual gifts test, leadership assessments, and we have you study all of these things and put them together.

And can I tell you what happens every single month at our church?

People take it and go, Oh, I never knew this.

I never knew this about me.

And once we help people to discover it, once they discover their giftings, then we plug them into a place where they can use those gifts to serve God and to serve other people.

So here's what I want to challenge you to do.

If you've never gone through our next steps class, it's literally on the first and second Sunday of every month.

If you've never done it, pull your phone out.

Go to access.tv slash info.

The next one in North Lakeland and South Lakeland is coming up on October 6th and 13th.

Go to access.tv slash info and register.

Why?

It's not so we can get something from you, it's so we can unleash something in you.

Book of Ephesians, Paul says it like this.

He says, it's in Christ that we find out who we are and what we're living for.

Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes of, he had his eyes on us.

He had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and in every one.

It's in Christ that you discover why you were created.

It's in Christ that you discover what those purposes are for your life.

And our whole church exists to help you with that step.

We want to help you discover why God made you so you can use your giftings and talents in a way that honor Him and make a difference in the world.

First thing you gotta do is you gotta discover your gifts, and we'd love to help you with that.

The second step is you've got to develop your gift.

And you understand this in every part of your life, right?

Like your body's never gonna get stronger unless you exercise, unless you work it out.

The same is true in the areas of your giftings.

They'll only be good and really useful if you develop them.

So part of our job as your church is to help you develop them.

The book of Ephesians, Paul says this, Ephesians 4, 7.

But to each one of us, grace, charis, has been given as Christ apportioned it.

So, like we've all got gifts that Jesus handed out to everybody.

So Christ himself gave, and then he gives the fivefold offices of ministry: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers.

So God gave the church all of these different types of leaders in the church to do what?

To equip God's people for the works of service.

Okay, I want you to see this.

This is my role.

This is the role of our church staff.

It's not to do the work of ministry, it's to help you discover them and then to equip you so that you can be the kind of person who does them.

It's not our job to do it, it's to equip you for it.

So when it comes to your gifts, you've got to discover them.

You need to develop them, and then here's the final point, and this is so important.

It's no good to know them unless you use them.

And one of the things that breaks my heart is how many Christians sit on the sideline of their purpose, never using their gifting, never using their talent to serve God and serve others.

And what happens is we get selfish and self-centered.

The book of 1 Peter, Peter, who is one of Jesus' disciples, said God has given gifts to each of you from his great variety of spiritual gifts.

God's like handed out all different types of spiritual gifts.

Manage them well so that God's generosity can flow through you.

God wants to flow through you.

In the book of Hebrews, the author of Hebrews said, God is not unjust.

He will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.

This is something that I believe is so important.

God takes it personally.

It blesses him when you use the giftings he's given you to serve someone else.

Like it blesses God when you're not selfish and make everything about you, but it blesses God when you use what he's given you to bless others.

I could summarize everything with this simple thought.

Ready?

My purpose is to serve God by serving others.

I said this to you earlier.

Your faith will come alive.

Your relationship with God will reach new heights when you understand that it's not just about you.

So many Christians, if I could just be honest, are what I would call spiritual consumers.

We come to church and we ask, what's in it for me?

We come to church and we worship and we sing the songs, and we get in the car and we're like, ah.

I didn't like that second song.

Hey, spoiler alert, we weren't worshiping you.

We get in the car and we're like, that message today, I mean, I was blinded by how handsome that preacher was, but I didn't get it.

Wasn't for me.

It happens.

Here's the thing.

If you think church is all about you and serving you, you've missed it.

Church isn't about what I get, it's about what I bring.

So one of my great challenges to you as your pastor is get out of the cheap seats.

Stop being a critic from a distance and get in the game and use your gifts to serve God.

So here's my challenge.

You ready?

Here's how we're gonna end today.

I challenge everyone to give God one year.

All in one year.

Same principle works at a gym.

If you go to a gym one time, you will see no results at all.

You go consistently for a year, you'll tell.

Other people will be able to tell.

Same thing's true with God in church.

Give God one year all in.

Literally schedule your life about being in God's presence with God's people in church.

I challenge you to give God one year of giving.

Saying, God, I trust you.

Your ways are better than my ways.

I don't have to trust me.

Here you go.

I want to challenge you though, in this series to trust God on this third step.

That if you want to reach the fourth cup, the cup of fulfillment, the cup of praise, you're gonna have to take the focus off of you and you're gonna have to serve other people.

As our church has gotten bigger, this is crazy to me.

We have six or seven hundred people who are on a team that we call Team Access who serve together.

That's a lot of people.

Can I tell you what's even crazier?

Our church is now probably between four and five thousand people who come over the course of a month.

Six or seven hundred out of four to five thousand means there's a lot of people sitting on the sidelines, consuming, but not contributing.

So I want to challenge you to take a step and contribute.

Something crazy is as our church has grown, now we've launched North Lakeland.

We sent hundreds of people to North Lakeland and it's awesome.

It's created major opportunities to serve.

Uh early next year, we're gonna launch in Bartow.

We're gonna send hundreds of people and create even more opportunities to serve.

North Lakeland, South Lakeland, Bartow.

It's gonna take all of us to accomplish all that God has for us.

So I want to challenge you to get out of the cheap seats, stop being a consumer and serve.

Inside your worship guide today, you should have gotten a blue card that looks like this.

It says here to serve.

If you're joining us at church online, you can go to access.tv slash serve and you can do this now.

I want to challenge every person in the room.

If you're not serving, it's time to get out of the cheap seats, and it's time to take the focus off of you, and it's time to serve somebody.

Why?

Everything, all of our needs are covered.

You're around the most generous people.

This isn't about getting our church more help.

This is about you fulfilling your God-given design and your God-given purpose.

So let me show it to you.

There's like five or six categories of places that we want you to serve.

The first one is Access Kids.

If you love kids and you want to help kids take the next step in their relationship with Jesus, Access Kids is the best within a thousand miles of here.

Access Youth and Young Adults, man, we have an awesome service every Wednesday here in South Lakeland for Access Youth, and we're coming for you, North Lakeland, in just a few weeks.

We'll have a plan together.

Access Young Adults is all about reaching the college and next gen for Jesus.

Maybe host team and hospitality team is a team that would be fit for you.

Those are the people who create the environments for people to come and feel loved and welcome when they get to church.

Maybe for you, you want to join the Next Steps team.

This is about helping people grow in their faith by joining our church.

This could be the baptism team, our next steps class team.

The next one is our setup and teardown team.

I don't know if you've noticed, but when you show up at church, there's tents set up, there's flags set up, there's people who are greeting you.

These are the people who make that happen.

And then the final one is our worship and production team.

If you really have a gifting and a heart for worship, we we have room for so many musicians, so many singers.

If you want to be a part of that, we'll literally just check this box.

We'll call you this week and we'll set up a time for you to come and try out with the team and see if it's a fit for you.

I want to challenge everybody to use your gifts and to stop playing games with God.

At the bottom is your name and contact info.

And the last question is have you completed next steps?

The reason I'm asking you to do this is I don't want you to just jump in and serve with our church without knowing what our church is all about.

I want you to know what our church is about, and I want you to pair your gifts, your spiritual gifts, your leadership gifts, along with the things of God so that you can use them to change the world.

Let me say it to you like this.

Your faith will come alive for you when you take the focus off of you and you put it back on God and serving his people.

I challenge you to give God one year.

Here's what I'm gonna ask you to do.

I'm gonna ask you to fill the card out.

And I'm gonna ask you, if you're not currently serving, to take a year and give God one year.

If you'll fill it out on your way out, there will be people with baskets on your way out that would love to grab those cards from you.

Let's do it.

Here's why.

It's not about me, it's not about our church, it's about your spiritual journey.

Next week, we're gonna talk about fulfillment.

Living a life that at the end of your life you will say, My life mattered and made a difference.

That in a world where so many people exist just for themselves, how incredible would it be that if your life was a life that was fulfilled because your life was lived on purpose?

Would you bow your head and close your eyes with me all across this place?

As we pray in a moment, I'm gonna ask you to ask God to give you the courage to take a step closer to Him on this.

So, God, that's what we pray.

Give us courage.

Courage to push back against the consumer mindset.

Courage to say, God, I'm not in this just for me, but I'm in this for you and what you're about.

And God, what it seems like you're all about.

You're about people and you're about eternity.

So, God, give us the courage to use our time, our talent, our giftings to serve you.

God, I pray for us to have the courage to just give you one year.

I'm saying, God, for one whole year, I'm just all in.

I'm in and giving, I'm in and serving, I'm in with whatever you have for me.

My answer is always yes.

God, I thank you that as we do and as we honor you, you use us.

God, that's what it's all about.

It's not about checking more boxes or filling different spots to serve, but it really what it's about is about serving you and serving others.

That's where true fulfillment comes from.

So, God, I pray that we'll have the courage to trust you, the courage to take a step closer to you in this way.

In Jesus' name.

Before we go today, with your head still bowed and eyes so close, here, North Lakeland, Church Online, wherever you're joining us, if you would say, Jason, I don't know if I'm right with God.

But today I want to make my relationship right with God.

I want to start or restart a relationship with God today.

If this is you, would you raise your hand right now?

I want to pray with you.

Thanks.

Yep, thanks, thanks, thanks.

Wow.

If this is you, I'm gonna ask you to pray this prayer with me and hear me on this.

Praying a prayer changes everything when you mean it with your heart.

Would you pray this today?

Say, Jesus, today I give you my life.

I invite you to be my Lord and to be my savior.

Jesus, I believe that you're the Son of God and you came into this world to die on the cross for me.

Jesus, it's because of your sacrifice that my sins can be forgiven.

So today, Jesus, I give you my life.

I invite you to be my Lord and my savior, and from this day on, I'll live for you.

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

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

Amen.

Church fam, look up, man.

We just had people all over pray to make that decision.

Let's celebrate like it matters.