(This transcript was generated by AI. Apologies for any inacuracies)

So we've been in this series called Valorous Matters and why it matters.

And I love dedication Sundays.

It's so awesome to see families dedicating their children to God, dedicating them to the church.

But what's also awesome is that it's not just that, it's the church dedicating ourselves to their families.

Because I don't know if all of y'all know, but raising kids is hard.

I don't care if your baby is five minutes old or 85 years old, raising kids is hard.

And you can't do it alone.

And you shouldn't have to do it alone.

You should have a church body, a family that rallies alongside you for the good times, for the hard times and celebrates you and lifts you up.

And that's exactly what we look to do here in Valorous Family Ministries.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Jared Walls.

I have the privilege and the honor of being your student's pastor.

So I teach you.

Thank God.

And I preach to your sixth grade through 12th grade, and we try to teach them how to shine.

And y'all see a lot of kids wearing these shirts that slap.

Wait, hold on, I'm sorry, I'm a student's pastor.

These shirts that are really cool.

And on the back of them, it says shine.

Just so y'all know, when your kids say something slaps, that means it's good.

Everybody say that slaps.

But y'all see these shirts, and I wanna kinda take a second and explain to you what this shine means and what we try to come alongside this next generation to show it's not just about being a light of Christ.

Now, you know that we're a city on a hill, we're a lamp on a lamp stand, and that's exactly what I want our kids to be into the community.

But I want them to shine in such a way that's not afraid to go into dark places, that's not afraid to come up against darkness and shine a light into places that don't normally see light.

I want them to be a danger to the enemy's camp day in and day out and shine the light of Jesus Christ.

I just got back from Atlanta the other day.

It used to be called Hotlanta, but they shut down Gladys Knight Chicken and Waffles, now it's just Atlanta.

That's it.

Anybody here from the A?

Nobody, that's it.

They're all still there.

But Chicken and Waffles, man.

I tell you, has anybody ever had Chicken and Waffles?

It's delicious.

You can pray over that all you want, it will not nourish your body.

It will not get you some table muscle.

But we went down for this conference, it's called the Orange Conference, and it's so awesome, man.

I mean, it's thousands and thousands of students ministry, children's leaders and children ministry leaders all gathered together because they're all so passionate about this next generation and raising them up in the way that they should go.

And it's so awesome because sometimes when you're in kids ministry or youth ministry, it feels kind of lonely because, you know, when it's nine o'clock at night, because y'all didn't pick your kid up until 830, and you're putting away basketball goals and all of this stuff, it gets hard and you feel alone.

And it's so awesome.

I remember this one point we're worshiping and it is powerful worship.

We're in this huge arena and I hear all these voices around me and it made me think of when Elijah ran.

Anybody know that story?

When Elijah ran from God and he was in the cave and he came out and he said, I'm the only one left, God, I'm the only one.

And God said, I have 7,000 in Israel that have not yet been able to bail.

You ain't never been alone.

And I'm not alone today.

I got some friends here to come help me preach this message today.

Can I get Kellen?

Matthew 19, 14.

Jesus said, let the little children come to me and do not hinder them for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

Jesus had a lot to say about kids.

He said, let them come to me, don't hinder them.

He also talked to leaders of children and talked about don't mess up because y'all tie a millstone around your neck and something about an ocean and stuff that's really spooky for everybody that's in students.

What I want you to understand is it takes all of us in here for these families.

And it's not just for kids and families with kids.

It's for families who maybe don't have kids and wish that they could have kids.

We'll come alongside you too, because you're part of a bigger family.

You've never been alone and we don't intend for you to be alone.

That's what valorous looks like.

And when you drop your kids off at Valorous Kids, this is not a child watch program.

We're not just watching your kids.

Our goal is not to just make sure they don't die.

That is part of the goal.

Y'all's kids are crazy.

Okay.

But, and it's not just to teach them some Bible stories.

It's about connecting them to the author of those stories.

It's about showing them who he is and through that they can find out who they are.

Because if we don't tell them how amazing they are and all the gifts that God has placed in them and all the incredible things that he has planned for their life, who will?

Who will?

Power.

The power that's available to them.

What was also encouraging while I was down there is just seeing how committed Kim and Clay and Ann and Ainsley and everybody that works as volunteers with us, all of our teammates are to this ministry called Valorous Families.

They spend so much money, so much time and so much energy to make sure that we do this the right way.

But electricity, and actually I learned this, got the idea for this message from some of our unsung heroes, Doug Osmond and Michael Allen.

Can we get a round of applause real quick?

If they didn't show up on Sunday, none of the rest of us would either.

Doug Osmond, I really believe he could fix anything except for American politics.

Michael Allen, if it's computerized and he can't fix it, it's because it's from the devil.

That's it, that's it.

But they're amazing.

But it was back when we were at the tent.

Y'all remember that?

Y'all remember when we were in a little tent out in the parking lot and it was raining and the water coming like a river?

Well, we came a long way, didn't we?

Look what God did.

But it was in this time when I had jacked something up, because I do it a lot.

And we had this generator, so on Wednesdays I had to turn the generator on.

After about two weeks of that, Doug was like, buddy, you ain't turning it off right.

We're getting dirty power.

Now, I'm not an electrician, I didn't even know what that meant.

Some of y'all are thinking weird things right now.

I didn't know what it meant.

You got to shut this and this and this, and it's got to be all in order, otherwise you start to get dirty power.

Can I get that picture?

This is what clean power looks like, a simple wave.

Now I want to kind of pair that with our faith, because sometimes our faith is way up here, and sometimes our faith is way down here.

But it doesn't make it less powerful, it just means that it's a flow.

But then there's dirty power.

And dirty power starts to fizzle out our circuit boards, starts to change us from being what we should be, and as powerful as we should be, to being a little off course.

Does that make sense?

Anybody ever been off course before?

Oh yeah, me too.

We ain't going to talk about that though.

But what we're about here is connection.

Giving you a live wire connection to the source.

Can I get Xavier?

John 15-5, I am the vine and you are the branch.

If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

I am the vine.

And if you remain in me, you will bear much fruit.

Now you might bear some fruit, you could bear some fruit, some good things may or may not happen.

You will bear much fruit if you stay connected with me.

Not with an idea of me, not with a thought process of me, not with a cartoon version of me, but if you connect directly with me.

And I want to ask you today, can I preach to you like I preach to your kids?

Because I don't pull any punches, we don't use any pillow, anything.

We tell them the truth.

And every year we do this rising sixth graders thing where parents can come, they can ask questions.

A lot of them have a lot of questions about what do you talk about with gender and stuff like that?

What about these things that our kids are up against?

And I always answer the same way, the truth.

The truth.

If it's not in here, in the Bible, it ain't true.

If it goes against what anything in this says, it ain't true.

It's as simple as that and as flat as that.

But man, this next generation matters.

And it's up to us to model it for them, to model what it looks like, because we can tell them all day long and we can tell them all kinds of things, but until we show them how, touch your neighbor and say, show them how.

Show them how to live it.

They won't really see it.

I got saved at 12 years old and I meant what I said on the front porch of the Brandywine Baptist Church in little old Brandywine, West Virginia, right across from the trailer park over there with Hoy.

But I didn't really have a model for it until a little bit later.

And I had a praying mama.

I had a mama who prayed circles around my life and showed me what it meant like to chase after God, to wander after God.

And then I messed up.

I went my own way again, all the way completely jacked up my life.

Can I tell you, you can jack up your life a couple of times in life and God will still show up.

And then I learned something even more, the power of a praying wife.

Yeah, I was all the way down a praying wife and she throws bricks for the enemy.

When she gets in the zone and she talks to the living God, things start to happen.

As we model this thing, I wanted to tell you and encourage you, even if you don't have kids or you're not modeling for kids, any of these things, I want to encourage you today on the how to, because I try to tell your children things, but also try to show them real life application, how to do it today.

How can this benefit me right now?

How can I take what I've heard Sunday morning and still apply that come Monday morning and not just forget about it with your kids?

How can I, how can they take what we've talked about on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, put it into action?

Because I believe in sweat equity.

I believe that worship of God is best done in work boots with dirty callous hands.

So I take your kids on mission trips, not the kind of mission trips that you've heard about.

I'm going to steal a joke here, but, uh, you know, a lot of churches and I'm not putting anybody down.

They take kids on mission trips that are about seven to 10 days.

They're always to some tropical Island.

It's beautiful, has a great beach there for eight days.

And they take about 15, 20 kids down there to put on a doorknob.

It's a big doorknob though.

It's important.

I'm playing.

I'm playing.

I take them up to North Carolina once a quarter and they package boxes.

We do whatever they ask us to do.

When we get there, a place called charity mission and they package boxes and they send it out to the elderly in the community.

They don't have enough food to get through a month.

And I'm not saying this to make it to look, Oh man, look how great this is.

I'm doing it because they sweat for it.

They work for it.

And when they're done, it's great because the first night we're there, I have to ride in a van full of them and they are not tired at all.

And I wish they were tired.

You know, like when they're three and they fall asleep in the car every time.

It's so wonderful.

They don't, but the next night, well, you gotta, you gotta kick them out of bed.

They're ready to go.

But we also started a thing called Saturday serve where they put it into action right here in North Myrtle beach, where one Saturday a month we go out and have somebody in the community right here that needs a little help.

They can't mow their grass or can't do this or can't do that because showing up for children matters, showing up for students matters.

And then showing up for your community is what valorous is.

But you got to have a good connection.

Otherwise it becomes impossible to show up.

And so many times we look at the devil kind of in the wrong way.

We look at him as this big, mean, scary guy, and he's going to show up and scare us and turn everything against us and all that stuff.

And sometimes he does, but oftentimes it's just that little fuzz in the power line.

That slight distraction, that little twist from here to there that gets you just off track or distracted.

One of his favorite ways to do it is this.

Yeah.

It's hard for kids now.

It's harder for kids now than it was for a lot of us.

A lot of y'all should be really grateful that people couldn't video and record and put online everything you did when you were a kid.

I'm so glad.

It's tough.

And kids right now are more anxious than they've ever been.

They're more depressed now than they've ever been.

And I'll give you a couple sad statistics.

Forty-three percent of kids between the ages of 10 and 14, 10 and 14, have self-harm issues.

They hurt themselves.

Suicide rates are higher than they've ever been.

So when we talk about this showing up and being a danger to the enemy's camp, I want you to know how much is riding on you showing up for them.

They need you.

And what they need is for us to model because we're so quick to criticize this generation sometimes.

Am I wrong?

Because what they do all the time is just this.

You know what the most of them see all the time?

Just this.

Yeah.

We don't have time to read our Bible, but we got time to play Candy Crush.

We ain't missed an Instagram story in six months.

I'm not calling anybody out, but if I was, it would sound like that.

How do we model it?

First, we have to know what we're up against.

Can I get Damien?

Y'all met him a little earlier.

Damien.

John 1010.

Thieves come only to steal, kill, and destroy.

I have come that they may have lived and have it to the full.

That's what we want.

The thief comes to steal.

Most of the time he steals our attention just enough to get us off the track of God, destroy our peace and confidence in our God, and to kill our potential because he knows that he cannot stand against a child of God that is fully connected.

He knows he can't stand against us.

So often we give the devil way too much credit.

We talk about how scary he is and all of these things.

We blame everything on him.

Not all that's wrong, but sometimes we need to realize that when we're standing in the shadow of Goliath, we need to stop trying so hard and just look a little higher and see that he's standing in the shadow of my God.

To see that every mountain that I'm standing in front of is still in the shadow of my God.

And if he is with me, who could be against me?

So I came up with some simple things.

Now I didn't come up with them, but I just wrote them down.

A couple of things, a couple of ways for you to connect with God.

And the first one I want to be really, really, really intentional about as I'm going to be with all of them.

One, read the Word.

I mean, read the Word.

Read it every day of your life.

Read it as often and as consistently as you eat.

The Bible says that man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.

Read the whole thing.

The whole Bible.

I got any readers in the house?

Anybody read a lot?

Man, look at them.

Give them some claps.

Reading's hard.

I got the attention span of a goldfish.

I just fall asleep.

But it's funny because I don't with this book.

You guys got a sense of humor.

I never liked school because I can read.

I just don't really like to do it so much.

But God said, yeah, you're going to go back to school and go to seminary.

And I'm like, cool.

I mean, like associate's degree, right?

He's like, no, you're going for the PhD.

And I'm like, not me.

Not me.

Read the whole thing.

How many of y'all that read regularly, buy a brand new book, read two or three chapters of it, and put it on the shelf?

She does.

And he does.

They're the only ones.

Don't talk to them about this.

I'm just kidding.

Read two or three chapters of it and put on the shelf.

And my wife constantly buys books.

We have a ton of books and she's going to get to all of them eventually at some point.

But read the whole thing.

And I want you to know why.

Because you will never be able to properly worship a God that you don't know.

And you won't know him until you've read every one of those 66 love letters that he left for you.

Every single one of them, the whole of it.

Because what will happen as you read the whole of it and you see his character and you see who he is and you see how much he loves you in every single sentence of this book is you will start to see the world through the lens of Jesus instead of seeing Jesus through the lens of the world.

It's tough.

Sometimes the verbage that we use in church makes it hard for folks because we call him our heavenly father.

Some of us don't know how to respond to that because we didn't have one.

Or if we did have one, maybe he wasn't so great.

Or maybe you had a fantastic one and that makes it so comforting for you and I'm so happy for you.

But if I really get to know my father, if I really get to know my father, then some things are going to happen.

The next thing that's going to happen is I'm going to get a lot better at worship and I'm going to know what worship looks like.

What it looks like.

When we think of the, when we say the word worship, typically what we think of is come in here and we sing some songs, we raise our hands.

That's good.

That's good worship.

What Paul says your good and proper worship is, is to offer your life as a living sacrifice.

So let me tell you about a couple other things that worship is.

Worship is a lot more than singing songs.

God loves it when we sing, even if we sing badly.

The Bible says make a joyous sound.

It doesn't have to be a good one.

It's not just telling him how good he is.

It's living like we know how good he is.

It's living like we remember where he took us from.

It's living like we know the grace that we needed in that cross.

And so we show it to other people on a daily basis.

When I wake up in the morning and I read when I don't want to, that's worship.

When I'm kind to the people who are unkind to me, that's worship.

When nobody can tell me and confuse me with facts because I know what my God told me, that's worship.

When I am obedient to my God, because I know that if he told me to do it, it's going to end up good and he might not have shown up yet, but when he does, things are going to happen.

Things are going to change.

And I worship him with everything.

I put him right in the middle of my marriage.

Yeah.

Connecting with God is a lot like connecting with your wife.

The Bible says that we are the bride of Christ connecting with your husband.

I worship him when I'm good to her and she is good to me.

I worship when I edify her and she edifies me.

But more importantly, my God shows me the benefit of that worship when he shows it to my children.

And my daughter knows what a praying wife looks like.

And my son knows what a man of God looks like.

And this is the kind of worship that changes the world.

This is the kind of worship that impacts generations.

Worship him.

I want you all to clap for that.

When you are tempted to do and say things you know you ain't got no business doing and you say, not today, Satan.

Not today.

Slappy neighbors say, not today.

That's worship.

That's what it looks like.

And when you put on some work boots and take all that faith and everything you've learned about God and put it to work, that's worship.

Because this ain't no cruise ship.

This doesn't happen on accident.

I'm not even sure how it all happens.

It just does.

It's amazing.

Like at my house, we have a magic sink.

I put dishes in there and the next morning they're clean.

It's crazy.

I have this laundry basket in the room.

Just put the clothes in there and they're clean.

I'm playing.

Ladies, I want to tell you.

Men, I want to tell you, that's worship.

Washing your kids' clothes, that's worship.

Washing dishes, cooking dinner, that's worship.

All of those things, all of those things that come alongside your kid, every kind word.

When you know that they've had a hard day and you set this down and say, baby, what's going on?

That's worship.

When you show up for their ball games, that's worship.

When you say, I know some other things are going on in my life, but that's not as important as the time that I have with you right now, that's worship.

Wouldn't you worship a good God?

And to reveal to the world that I know what He did for me.

And maybe this is your first time hearing about Jesus.

Maybe somebody drug you here today.

You should thank them.

This is a good place.

Every church is a good place.

I remember when I showed up here, I was fresh out of hell, smelled like smoke.

The truth, I'm honest.

But they treated me like I was somebody.

They treated me like I was family.

And in here, we're real.

Staff, it's real.

And we're dysfunctional sometimes.

We get mad at each other sometimes.

Then we say, I'm sorry.

And we get on with our lives because Sunday is still coming.

I ain't got no time to stay mad at you because there's a whole lot of people that are counting on it.

And remember in the grace that was offered to me so that I can show it to you.

And I think that's so important that we remember that on a daily basis.

Remember our Savior who stepped down off of a throne of glory and put on flesh and went through all the pain and the suffering that I go through, all the heartbreak, all the betrayal, all the temptation that I have suffered.

He did for me and He hung on a cross for me so that I didn't have to.

And this is something that I teach your students.

It's called substitution.

And we know it, but sometimes we don't look at it quite that way, that substitution that happened, because we see this picture on Good Friday of Jesus on the cross, bloodied, battered, unrecognizable.

And God had to treat Him like He had lived my life.

Like He had done all the things that I've done so that, everybody say so that, He could treat me like I'd lived Jesus's life.

Like I'd only come to heal and to make the blind see in the lame walk.

I will worship Him with all of my life for the rest of my life.

And if God gives me five more minutes, I'll talk about Him for another five minutes.

I can go till four o'clock.

Y'all in?

I like that one guy that said, yeah.

And then pray.

How's your prayer life?

Not for real though.

How's your prayer life?

Now this isn't to call you out, it's so that we can get a couple of things, keep the main thing, the main thing, prayer, prayer.

I know the power of prayer because I've seen it.

And a lot of times y'all don't know, when y'all write these prayer requests down here, we have a team of people and your staff is included, that pray over every single one of them, because you matter.

We don't put this stuff up and just say Valorous Matters because it's a cool quippy thing to say for a series that'll encourage you to get involved and roll up your sleeves and sign up for some kind of ministry.

Students, we meet on Wednesdays from six to eight o'clock and we would love to have you, but you got to sign up because I get you a background check to make sure you're not weird.

Valorous Matters, prayer matters.

But sometimes we kind of go through the motions of prayer.

Am I the only one?

Sometimes they're just like this set of memorized things that we say before each meal.

Sometimes a set of memorized things that we say before we go to bed and we make sure we thank Him for all the things and all of that stuff.

And I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but I wish you would put a little stank on it.

I wish you'd put a little faith behind your prayer, because I'm going to tell you something, because a lot of us are hurting and a lot of us have a hard time focusing in on our prayer because we've been hurt before.

We prayed for somebody for a really long time and the tide didn't change.

We prayed over a relationship for a really long time, but that relationship still fell apart because what I tell your students is God won't overstep somebody's free will.

And I make it very clear to them that if you won't choose God while you're here, He won't force you to spend eternity with Him.

If you won't choose to spend time with Him now, a lot of people hurt because they've prayed on things that the other person wouldn't choose.

But I want to tell you something.

I want to declare something to you today.

God answers every single one of your prayers.

Every single one of them.

He either says yes, no, or not yet.

And you better be thankful the times He says no, because that no is a good no.

And it means you didn't need it.

It wasn't as good as you thought it was.

Anybody ever thought something was really good, but they found out later, no, it wasn't.

Benjamin has.

And then sometimes when He says yes, it doesn't show up the way we thought it would.

Sometimes we get this narrow minded version, so narrow minded we can look through a keyhole with both eyes on the way things are going to show up, the way the blessings will show up.

And I am not about being a prosperity gospel in any way.

We all want those blessings really to show up in our bank accounts.

Sometimes, sometimes it don't.

God may bless you with an abundance of wealth.

But one thing that I do believe is that if you are a true believer, how much is coming to your bank account should be reflected in how much goes out of it, because generosity is what our God shows us.

But sometimes the answer to your prayer shows up in a way you didn't expect.

And my wife prayed for me for a lot of years to choose some things that weren't what I was choosing.

And sometimes that looks like God throwing you down a flight of stairs to wake you up, because I'm hardheaded.

My grandma used to say a hardheaded always got to feel it to believe it.

And I am living proof of that.

Pray, pray, pray.

And remember who you're talking to when you do it.

My mom used to say that.

I know y'all probably couldn't believe this, but I was a smart aleck little boy.

My mom used a different word that you can't say on Sundays.

But so she would say, I don't know who you think you're talking to.

I know she's watching online right now.

Or she would say, you better remember who you're talking to.

And that's what I want to tell you and declare to you today.

When you pray to the living God, I want you to remember who you're talking to, because the same God that you're praying for the deliverance from that addiction for your family, for the deliverance from that bad relationship, is the same God that parted an ocean to send the Israelites through on dry ground.

The same God that you're praying over that late power bill and that late mortgage payment is the same God that provided manna and water from a rock.

He ain't changed.

Nothing's changed.

He's the same God today and tomorrow.

The same God that you're praying for your wayward child over, that they would get off the drugs, they would get connected, they would come back, is the same God who reached down and snatched his baby out of a borrowed grave.

I wish you'd pray to him like you knew who you were talking to.

And Jesus said that if you pray and you believe it, now I'm not saying that it's just going to show up the way you want to because you believed it, but if you believe that whatever he says is good, I don't know what it'll look like, but whatever he says I'll do because I know what happens when Jared drives this thing and it ain't real great.

And I also know what happens when he does and things look rough for a little bit and they're tough for a little bit and it's a little bit harder, but every time that it's tough and it's hard, I get a little bit stronger.

I'm so glad that we have a God that will bring hardship to you so that you won't be weak as water because faith is a muscle.

You know when muscles grow?

When they hurt.

It's through pain the character is built.

It's through struggle that muscle is built the same way.

And if you would pray like you knew who you were talking to.

Can I get Shalen to read this next part?

Because if you do this, you have a little confidence like they talked about in Hebrews.

Hebrews 4.16, let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

That means that when I pray, I leave it.

I'm done worrying about it.

I'm done fussing about it.

I'm done struggling about it because I know whose hands it's in.

And it's amazing because a lot of us, we don't get involved because we feel like we really don't have a lot to offer, right?

Like, man, what am I going to be doing in students?

I can't come to children's ministry.

I don't even know what I'm doing.

That's okay.

I remember a time back in the Bible when all they had was what we call a Jewish Lunchable.

It's just a couple of fish and a couple of loaves.

And it wasn't about how much they had.

It's about whose hands they put it in.

Because when they put it in his hands, suddenly it was enough to feed, how many?

5,000.

But wait, it was just 5,000 men.

We remember their wives and their children, their children's children and all that.

Now, I'm not a math magician, but I think that equates to a lot more than 5,000, 10,000.

And if he can do that with a Jewish Lunchable, let me show you what he can do with you.

Because if he can do some stuff with my story behind, I'll bet he can use you better.

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

If God ever runs out of grace, it's my fault.

I took it.

I needed it at all.

I struggle.

Like you struggle.

I'm just okay with telling you about it because I know that you feel it too.

Sometimes it's hard and it's going to continue to be hard, but I promise you it's worth it.

And when I get there, I want to show up with holes in the soles of my shoes, nothing left in these two hands, but calluses, cuts, and hope.

Just hope.

I want our kids to shine.

And I mean really shine.

I want us to see how much they matter.

If I could just get all the students, everybody from 12th grade down, just stand up.

I promise I'm not going to embarrass you or anything.

Y'all please just stand up for me.

Come on.

I'm not going to make it weird.

Just stand up.

Now just stay standing for a second.

Here's something that really tickles me.

How many of them you don't see because what we raised them to do, that's what they're doing right now.

So many of them are over in Valorous kids living on mission.

They're telling the littles about him.

They're raising them up.

These girls sing songs to them.

Everybody's got a different gift, but they show up down here.

But this guys, y'all can sit down now.

Y'all can sit down.

This is the next generation.

If we don't model it for them and we don't show them and we don't come alongside them, the kingdom doesn't keep expanding.

If we don't show up, this whole thing that we've called valorous, this impacting community that is faith being tested, which is authentic and unstoppable faith that is built like a muscle and then sent out into the world to make a difference and put dents in the enemy's camp, it doesn't keep going.

So I'm going to ask you today, if you're not involved, if you're not connected, there's tons of ways that you can.

And I don't know what your gift set is.

I don't know if you're feeling that nudge in your heart right now.

If God's telling you to get your hands dirty, or maybe God's telling you just to be more generous.

I'm not sure what it is, but I'm telling you that if you were to listen to him, if you do what he asks, you see mountains move.

You see your life change.

You'll see him take you from one place to another place.

And it's funny because we can only ever really see the path in reverse.

I don't even make plans anymore.

I don't know what God's going to do on Tuesday.

Y'all are laughing, but I am so serious right now.

They asked me to like get my message plans like a month in advance.

Yeah, that doesn't happen because I don't know what he's going to do.

And I also suffer from a debilitating disease called procrastination.

But if you show up and you show out and we show them how to shine, how to shine the light of Jesus into a world that so desperately needs it, Jesus will do some things with it.

Show up consistently.

So much of this ministry is a presence based ministry.

It's just about being there and being consistent and showing that you care.

You ain't got to have some fancy words and know how to put them at all.

I mean, they only hear like 10% of what I say on Wednesday.

They're checked out.

A lot of y'all have been checked out for the last 20 minutes.

You're already thinking about lunch.

Like, well, we're going to Dory's opens in an hour.

That sounds good.

I could do a budgie, but here's what will happen.

They'll show life where there was no life and life abundantly.

It's a life lived to serve and to connect every man, woman, and child to a living God.

They'll bring hope to the hopeless.

They'll shine a light into dark places.

They'll bring peace where there was only conflict before.

They'll bring love where only hatred existed before that.

They'll bring joy where only anguish existed before.

Hope, light, peace, joy, and love.

It has a name and his name is the name that is above all names.

The one that every knee will bow to and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And they'll find a purpose for their life they never knew existed before.

See, he came the first time as a lamb, but the next time that he comes, he's coming as a lion.

I know whose team I want to be on.

I know whose side I want to be on when he shows up.

Me and my wife on the way back from Atlanta, we're talking about this because we oftentimes, you know, we don't really think about it, you know, but we don't really think about it, think about it, because it's beyond what we can comprehend what it's going to look like when Jesus comes back, when he shows up.

And we know there'll be no more tears.

There'll be no more sorrow.

There'll be no more pain.

There won't be any more of those things.

I have this vision, man, where I sit down with him and we look out at all the people that came with me and he says, you remember it?

You remember all the hurt, all the blood, the sweat, the tears, all the times that you felt like you just didn't have any more?

The times when you had to pull with your fingernails and I carried you?

Remember the times when you couldn't go at all and I really did just carry you the whole way?

Was it worth it?

I say, yeah, yeah, it was worth it.

Would you do it again for me?

Anytime you ask.

Jump in, get involved, make a difference.

You weren't made to just hear this word and sit on it.

You were made and we are all commissioned in the same way.

Jesus said, go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

It won't always feel thankful.

It won't be glamorous, but I promise you it will be worth it.

Let me pray for you.

Father, thank you so much for today.

Thank you for the blessing and the honor it was to speak with your people.

God, I just ask that you would come alongside of all of us and help us to be everything that you've created us to be, Lord, that we might glorify your name and lift you on high everywhere that we go.

And if you're sitting here right now and you don't know Jesus and this is the time that he's nudge you and put it on your heart, just lift your hand up and say, Jesus, I'm tired of doing it my way.

I want to do it your way.

I want to come and see what you have in store for my life.

I want to meet the me that you created long before you laid the foundations of the world.

I want you to come into my heart and fill me with your Holy Spirit and guide me for the rest of my days.

We love you, God.

We praise you and we give you all the glory and honor and all God's children said, Amen.