Hey, this is Pastor John Ryan Cantu from PNEUMA Church in Houston, Texas.
Thank you for listening to the message today.
I hope that it blesses you and all those that you share it with.
God bless you.
I love you, and you are at a really, really good spot.
Amen.
I know we have some people that are out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday.
We're going to be praying for them.
Amen.
But let's go to the Word.
If you have your Bibles, go with me to Luke, chapter 18.
Luke, chapter 18.
Amen.
Anybody blessed to be in the house of God this morning?
Amen.
Praise the Lord.
Luke 18, chapter verse 10 through 14, if you have it, give me a amen.
Amen.
And I have it for you on the screen if you don't have it.
But it says this.
It says, two men went up into the temple to pray.
One was a Pharisee, and the other was a tax collector.
The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed, God, I thank you that I am not like the other men,
extortioners, unjust adulterers, or even this tax collector.
I fast twice a week.
I give tides of all that I get.
But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven,
but beat his breath, saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.
I tell you that this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
Amen.
Let's pray, Heavenly Father, I thank you for this word that you have given your servant this morning, Lord.
I pray, Father God, that as I have received it from you, my God, that your people would receive it from you, Lord.
Holy Spirit, I pray that you would be on my lips this morning, and that you open up our hearts to receive everything that you want to say,
not just the parts that we like in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Go ahead and be seated.
Amen.
This week will be, you know, November hits, mid-November hits, and this is what happens.
People kind of fall off church, right?
They'll say, I'll see you in January, right?
But, you know, this week we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving.
I believe that some families, they're already out, they're already celebrating Thanksgiving.
Amen.
And so we'll be joining our time with our family and probably gaining five to ten pounds.
Amen.
But I don't, you know, I don't really, I don't give Thanksgiving sermons.
I used to, but after eight years of preaching every Sunday, it just, it felt a little forced, you know?
And so I wasn't going to give like a Thanksgiving sermon, but the Holy Spirit was really ministering to me earlier this week,
and I just, I had this sense of gratitude, and so I was like, okay, we're going to call this our Thanksgiving sermon.
Because I'm just, I'm grateful.
I'm grateful for what God has done in my life.
Anybody grateful?
Just, just grateful.
Just grateful to be here.
Amen.
If we don't learn how to be grateful, we'll learn how to be bitter.
So we have to wake up in the, in the mercies that are made new for us every single day, thinking God.
Back in the day, we used to have Sunday night services long, long time ago.
And in the Sunday night services, we would, we would designate time for testimonials, testimonies.
And, you know, those were always interesting.
You never knew what you were going to get and who, who was going to stand up and talk for 20, 30 minutes, you know, about who knows what.
But for the most part, they were, they were encouraging, right?
And I remember these two sisters who they still attend our church.
They've been faithful members probably for longer than I've been alive.
Ermana Ortiz and the Ermana Carranza.
And every single Sunday night, every time there were testimonies, you could count on them.
They were going to stand up and they were going to, they were going to give their testimonies.
I mean, it just never failed.
And I don't remember for as many as I've heard from them, I don't remember a single testimony they gave.
But there was one phrase that they would always say, like it was almost as if they were reading from a script.
They would stand up and they would say, primeramente quiero da gracias a Dios por mi salvación.
First of all, I want to give God thanks for my salvation.
And that was their constant testimony of gratitude.
And I will admit when I was younger, I thought it was just something to say.
I thought it was just a way that they introduced what they really wanted to say.
But as I got older and as I got wiser and as I've seen what sin can do,
and as I have experienced the luring power of temptation to make us weak and fall short of the glory of God,
as I have seen people die in their sin when they didn't have to die in their sin,
I understand why they were so thankful.
I'm grateful for my family. Got a beautiful family.
I'm grateful for my church. I'm grateful for my ministry.
I'm grateful for many things. I'm grateful to have a roof over my head, but more than anything,
I am grateful for the grace that God has given me in my life.
Because you know what? When I didn't deserve it, he gave it to me anyway.
And his mercies are made new every single day.
I don't know if you can tell, but I'm not operating on yesterday's grace,
because yesterday's grace was for yesterday's mistakes.
I woke up with new shortcomings. I woke up with new mistakes.
And so today God has given me new mercies to sustain me.
That's the title of my sermon this morning.
Grateful for grace. Grateful for grace.
How many of us can really say, man, I am grateful for the grace of God this morning?
Some of you shouldn't even be here. Some of you shouldn't even be alive.
But because God had mercy on your soul, you are standing here, sitting here today,
listening to the power of God.
Man, I wish more people were here today, because I'm going to preach the word today, man.
You know, people ask me a lot of times, because we get a lot of requests to present babies.
And sometimes they ask, do you baptize babies?
And we don't. Catholics do, and maybe some other Christian traditions do,
but Protestant Christians like us, we don't practice water baptism, or infant baptism.
And the reason for that is because we believe that water baptism is a conscious decision.
Just like repentance is a conscious decision.
When you receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior, that is a personal decision, right?
And the next step is to be baptized in water, because that is your public profession of your conversion, right?
That you made to follow Jesus. So if you've been saved already, but you haven't been baptized, let's get you baptized.
You can see Sister Heather over here, she'll get you on the schedule.
But that's why we don't baptize babies, because we believe that that is a conscious decision that babies aren't able to make.
We'll still dedicate and present the babies to the Lord, but repentance and baptism, nobody can do that for you.
In order to repent, I want you to hear me, in order to repent, you have to know what you're walking away from, right?
You have to know what you're walking away from.
So you have to know the effects of what sin did to you and how it made you feel and how it crippled your soul.
You have to know what it felt like to be in those chains, and you have to know what it felt like to be consumed with things that you just wish that would get out of your life.
And then you have to come to the realization that sin doesn't want to leave, it wants to stay.
So if you're going to get it out of your life, you have to be the one to walk away from it.
That's what repentance is. You have to know what you're walking away from, and so you can't really know what grace is until you have met sin.
This is the argument that Paul makes in Romans. He says, through the law comes knowledge of sin, because the law of God is perfect and it reveals our imperfections.
That's what the Old Testament law did. It exposed how sinful we were, and then sin exposed how much we were in need of saving.
Babies don't know what sin is, and because they don't know what sin is, they don't know what grace is.
Even older kids, man, I don't know how to minister to kids. I don't.
I think I spoke once to kids, like they invited me years ago to speak to PNEUMA kids, and I don't think anybody received anything.
I would make a terrible children's pastor. Terrible. Because I'm a gospel preacher.
I want to preach the gospel. When you're preaching the gospel, you've got to let the gospel do the gospel work.
And the gospel wants to offend us by convicting us, right?
And that conviction leads us to grief, but Paul calls it good grief because it's grief that leads us to repentance.
I don't know how to communicate all that to kids. I don't know how. I don't know how to make them feel convicted when their biggest sin was lying about how many cookies they ate.
I'm sure there's a way to do it. I just don't know how to do it because to me, the greater the sin, the more you appreciate grace.
Now, I'm not telling anybody to go out and sin greatly. I'm just saying that when you come from a crippling life of sin,
and you've been beaten down and almost taken out by the enemy, and the enemy was laughing at you because he thought he had you,
you become so grateful when the grace of God saves you.
People ask me, so when's it good age to baptize your kids? And I don't really have an answer for that.
I think, you know, if they are conscious about what sin is and they know what grace is and they've accepted Jesus,
and they want to be baptized and baptize them. I think that's what Scripture teaches, repent and be baptized.
But I'll say this, and this is personal. When I was 10 years old, I was baptized. I was 10 years old.
When I was in Colorado, I was baptized, which was funny because when we went to Colorado, we actually left the Lord, but that's when I got baptized.
But I got baptized at 10 years old, and I understood the concept of what I was doing. I knew what I was doing,
but I didn't have the gratitude for the grace that was being given to me at 10 years old like I do today.
My biggest sin at 10 years old was lying about silly things.
But when you go through life and you mess up and you mess up and you mess up and you mess up,
and you realize that the grace of God is still there for you because the love of God is so powerful, that makes you so grateful.
I have this dream to one day have the privilege of baptizing somebody on death row.
And this is only for selfish reasons, right? Because I want to be a front row witness of what all that grace can do to all that past sin.
I want to see somebody who is almost taken out by their sin, come up from the waters, completely renewed and transformed by the glory of God.
Because if there is anyone grateful for the grace, it is someone who has experienced total darkness from God.
It is someone who didn't think that anybody could save them, who thought that no one would love them.
But here comes Jesus, right? With all the weight of sin on his shoulders.
And he says, I've got some love for you and some hope for you and some grace for you.
That is the grace that makes me so grateful.
We should never become immune to the goodness of God, church.
Because I think it is so easy to become so routine by church and by Christian culture that we forget our roots.
We forget where we came from.
And as Christians, I think many times we forget how lost we were, that we stop looking at the world with compassion and we look at them with judgment.
I hate to say it, but I think Christians more often than not, we mock people's sin more than we show compassion to the sinner.
And I just imagine Jesus up there in heaven shaking his head, seeing guys grow up.
Grow up. Like, I know how mad you are about the world, being the world.
I see it all over your Facebook posts. I know how disgusted you are. I know how angry you are.
But where is the compassion that I once showed you?
And so it's in this way that I believe that we become like the Pharisees.
The text talks about, you're still with me, right?
Alright, I gotta do my check-in.
The text talks about two people. One of them is a Pharisee.
And you know, we talk very critically about the Pharisees because we think to ourselves, well, I'm nothing like the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were super judgmental. They were self-righteous. I would never be like a Pharisee, right?
We don't realize that when we talk like that. We're actually doing the same thing the Pharisees did.
We're just doing it towards the Pharisees.
And the biblical authors, they depicted the Pharisees in a certain light for a reason, right?
Because the Pharisees were never meant to be modeled.
We should never, you know, they were the antagonists of every exchange in the Gospels, nearly every exchange.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they want to make clear to their audience that we cannot and should not be like the Pharisees.
Now, with that said, I don't think that every single Pharisee was just the worst human being.
I think there were some Pharisees who were good fathers and good husbands.
I think there were some Pharisees who maybe even made decent role models.
The Bible talks about Nicodemus. It kind of talks about him highly and how he was viewed highly by society.
I think there were some decent human beings who happened to be Pharisees.
The problem with the Pharisees, this is the problem.
The problem was that they were bound to their idea of God's religion.
It was a false religion. There was some elements of truth to it, but they were bound to it.
And so in this false religion that the Pharisees were slaves to, there was no room for compassion.
That's the issue with the Pharisees.
If you're a Pharisee, there is no room for compassion.
So if you're a leper, hold on, what are you doing here?
The law says you're unclean. There's no room for compassion. Get out of my sight.
If it's a Sabbath, well, hold on. I know you're sick, but it's the Sabbath.
We can't heal on the Sabbath because that's against the law.
There's no room for compassion on the Sabbath.
So in the Pharisees' mind, if you're not righteous, you don't belong here.
I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. That's just the way it is.
And so when Jesus steps on the scene, he disrupts this whole religion of the Pharisees with one four-letter word that embodies the whole character of God, love.
And love makes all the room for compassion.
And so Jesus says, yeah, I know you're a sinner, but there's room here at my table for you. Come and have a seat, right?
He says, yeah, I know it's a Sabbath, but do you want to be made well? Go ahead and get up and walk.
He says, I know that you're a Samaritan woman and Jews don't talk to Samaritans,
and you're a woman who's been married like five or six times, and you probably had daddy issues and baby daddy problems, right?
But I can give you this water that will never run dry.
He tells a woman of the blood issue, sorry, for 12 years, you're an outcast to society.
Nobody wants you around, but I am here to make you well.
That's what love does. It makes room for compassion.
It makes room for compassion.
And there are Christians who are more like the Pharisees than they think.
They consider the addicts and the drunks and the homeless and the transgenders unclean, and don't get me wrong, their sin makes them so.
But if Jesus made room for them, if Jesus made room for you, we should make room for compassion, right?
And listen, not to affirm their lifestyle.
There's got to be a line drawn.
Not to say, hey, it's okay to remain a slave to your sin. That's not love.
But to introduce them to the same grace that God once showed you.
The Pharisee prayed, God, I thank you that I'm not like the other men.
I thank you that I'm not like the extortioners.
I thank you that I'm not like the adulterers.
I thank you that I'm not like this homeboy right here, the tax collector.
I fast twice a week. I give my tides of all that I get.
See, the Pharisee was essentially praying, Lord, thank you for who I am instead of thank you for who you are.
Thank you for all that you've given me.
Thank you for the righteous person that I am.
Thank you.
I started thinking like, what is the modern day equivalent to this prayer?
What is it that we sometimes pray that kind of relates to this Pharisee's prayer?
Maybe, Lord, thank you that I'm called.
Because it's better to be called than not to be called.
Lord, thank you for anointing me to preach the word because I would hate to just be a member at church Hill.
Thank you for making me a singer.
Thank you for giving me a position.
Thank you, Lord, for making me, for not making me like the other men who struggle with sexual sin and they cheat on their wives.
And like, how could they, how could they're so nasty?
Like, thank you for not making me struggle with depression and anxiety.
And Lord, I thank you that I don't gossip like everybody else in the church.
Lord, thank you, thank you, thank you for making me attracted to the opposite sex.
Self-righteous people will thank God for everything they have, but they will never say, Lord, thank you for your grace.
Because saying thank you for your grace admits that you are in need of his grace.
It admits that you are not perfect.
It admits that you are unworthy to even stand in the presence of God.
I don't know about you, but I am unworthy to stand in the presence of God.
I want you to think about this for a moment.
You know, in the Old Testament, they were, they were required to bring the best, the best sacrifice, best animals, fattest bulls, the unblemished, most unblemished animals, right?
And present them to the Lord. That's, that's how it was supposed to be.
Can we honestly say that every time we come up to the altar, we're giving God something unblemished?
That's a stupid question.
Even after a 21-day fast, even after a night of worship, even after seeking God fervently in prayer and through His Word, I never come close to God's holiness.
The other man in the story is the tax collector.
And tax collectors were the worst, man.
You know, like they, you know, you know the people that call you to scam you?
That's the tax collector.
Nobody likes those people.
They're like, they were considered the scum of the earth.
They would, they would, they would lie to people, they would lie about their tax bills and they, they forced people to pay them or, or, or otherwise they'd be thrown into jail.
And so the Pharisee says, Lord, thank you that I'm not this tax collector.
And the tax collector is, he's in the temple.
He's at the altar and he can't even look up.
He can't even bring himself to, to point his eyes towards the heavens because he's that ashamed because he's presenting this damaged spirit to the perfect God.
He's not, he's not sure of God.
Oh, listen, he might be too far gone.
He's not sure that he could be forgiven for the grievances that he's caused people and God and he beats his chest.
And he says, Lord, have mercy on me.
A sinner.
I'm a sinner.
I know that I have infested like the other people.
I know that I don't pray like the other people.
I know that I don't come to church.
I haven't been to church in a long time.
I know that just last night I was staring down a bottle of alcohol trying to relieve the stress and the anxiety and the depression that I'm feeling.
I know that I don't belong in your presence, but have mercy on me, Father, because I am in need of your grace.
That's who Jesus came to save was the sick, not the healthy.
And I, I fear that Christians, we have come to a point where we think that we don't need the grace of God anymore.
And I fear for that person because the moment, the moment you begin to have, begin to have a prideful heart, the moment you think that you are holier than everybody else.
Is the moment that God will reject you.
When you walk into these doors, it's a privilege.
When I walk, when I'm Mondays, when I come into the church Tuesdays, sometimes I come in here and I just, I pray and it's, it's, I come in with fear.
I think we have lost the fear of the Lord.
I preached this recently that, that you can love God and not fear God.
And we have a lot of Christians who love God with all their heart, but God wants to know, do you fear me?
I am fearful of the holy God because I know how unholy I am.
And when I think about, man, when I think about Jesus and I think about, you know, his love, I think about his, his grace, not many things make me cry, but this does.
When I see a sinner redeemed, and that makes me choke up.
When I see a family member give their life to Jesus, and that takes me out.
I know that's right, brother Mikey.
That's why you wear your shades.
I, man, I see somebody, I see a prodigal.
When I see a prodigal, I notice, I see them.
They sit all the way in the back because they don't want anybody else to see them.
They want to be the first ones to leave once we dismiss, but I see you.
And I'm up here rejoicing, Lord. Thank you.
I'm up here saying, Lord, I need you to speak because I want them to stay this time.
That makes me the grace of God.
It just, it just does something to me.
God has made me a softy when it comes to sinners being made well.
And I personally believe that the grace of God, you're still with me?
Okay.
The grace of God, when you experience the grace of God, you will love him more than any other side of God that you can experience.
God, God is an infinite God. He has infinite manifestations.
He manifests himself in so many different ways.
And so you can know Jehovah, Rafa, Nisi, and Elohim, and you can, you can know, you can know all the, all the manifestations of our Holy God.
But I think that when you understand who Jesus is, Jesus, Yeshua, God saves, that is what is going to draw you in more than anything else.
Because listen, God, God can heal you from your cancer.
And I know that he has many of you.
God, God can deliver you from, from your pain and your afflictions and your suffering.
He can provide for you when, when you are at the brink of losing your house and God just steps in the nick of time.
And, and provides for you. All that is wonderful, but none of those things hold the same value as grace.
And so I, I understand the testimonies of my sisters.
Primarily, I want to thank God for His grace, for my salvation.
Because if I lose my house, I'll probably find another place to stay.
If I lose my job and some of you are praying, Lord, I need some money, Lord, I need provision.
If you lose your job, God will probably take care of you anyways.
You'll still be able to feed your family.
If I lose my health, shoot, if I lose my life, I have the assurance of heaven.
But if I lose His grace, I have nothing.
With His grace, I have everything and without it, I have nothing.
That's why grace is more valuable than any, anything else that God can give us.
I thank you for your provision. I thank you, Lord. I thank you for your healing, but your grace.
Grace, if I don't have that, I have nothing.
And there's grace in this room.
Jesus made room for you. We're just saying that song, I will make room for you.
We can only do that because He made room for us. We only love Him because He loved us first.
And so if Jesus made room for you, we should make room for Him.
And I think that somebody needs to hear that this morning, that He has made room for you because sometimes you doubt it.
This is why sometimes you just choose not to come to church.
This is why you choose to separate yourself from the things of God because you're like, I can never even come close.
So you give up. But I want you to hear me this morning that God has made room for you.
That's something I have to remind myself of daily, man, because I've got my struggles. I've got my weaknesses and my moments.
But Jesus made room for me and He made room for you.
See, when you come to Jesus, I'm going to have the band come up.
Brelleri, can I get you to come up real quick?
When you come to Jesus, Brother Larry is going to be a sinner today.
When you come to Jesus, you come with baggage, right?
Come with your past. Come with all kinds of stuff.
This is your lifestyle of sin that you've carried for such a long time.
And there's all kinds of stuff in it. We're going to find out what Brother Larry struggles with today.
Let's see what we got here.
I see.
All right. What does that say? Bitterness.
Okay.
What does that say? Jealousy.
Don't be judging. I have an iron in my shirts.
What does it say? Pride.
Anger.
Some of y'all got angry.
Phrenography.
Got all kinds of stuff in here.
Drug addiction. Drug addiction.
This one is alcoholism.
I know people are struggling with alcoholism.
What is this? Oh snap.
Believe it or not, I know that there have been people who have convicted murderers
who have stepped foot into these doors.
Don't look around. I don't think they're here today.
But we come with all these things, all this sin, and when you come to Jesus,
you come with all these things, and Jesus says, I want you. I don't want this.
Are you hearing me today? I want you. I don't need this.
I need you to drop that. I need you.
Now look, this is the point where, stay there for a second.
This is the place where many of us say, you know what?
I don't know that I can commit to never doing this again.
I don't know that I will never struggle with my anger problem.
I don't know that I could totally promise that I will never have lustful eyes again.
I don't know if I can do it. And so so many people get to this point where Jesus is saying,
I want you, I don't want that, and they're like, well, I don't know if I could commit to all of that.
And many times, I want you to hear this.
Some people don't understand the power of grace and the power of love,
because many times as we have left these things behind, some of us still struggle.
Raise your hand if you struggle. Don't. You still struggle.
You still struggle with the things that you repented from.
You were knowledgeable of it. You knew what you were doing.
You said, I don't want this anymore. And so you walked away from it.
But every now and then, you struggle. You struggle.
And I want you to know this morning that Jesus never said, I want you to stop struggling.
He said, I want you to drop that bag and follow me.
And I will help you through the struggle.
The Bible talks about Paul's weakness.
Paul's weakness, his thorn in the flesh.
Nobody knows what his thorn in the flesh was.
All we know is that the Bible says that a messenger of Satan was sent to Paul to harass him.
And Paul prayed, Lord, take it away. I don't want to deal with this.
It's causing friction. I'm trying to advance the gospel.
I'm trying to progress. I'm trying to move forward quickly, more efficiently.
Take it away. This is weighing me down.
And God said, my grace is sufficient.
My grace is sufficient.
Now, everybody and their momma for the past 2,000 years has been concerned with the question of what Paul's thorn in the flesh was.
Some people say maybe it was a physical illness.
Maybe it was a temptation issue. Maybe it was something spiritual.
I don't think it matters so much what it was.
I'm more concerned of what it caused Paul to feel.
What did it do to his spirit?
The stuff that he had to wake up with every single day, being harassed by the enemy.
Did it affect his spiritual life? It had to.
When Satan is sent to harass you, it leaves after effects, church.
We talked about this last week, the unfair favor of Job.
Satan attacked him in so many ways and it left scars.
When Satan is attacking you or tempting you or even annoying you, it will cause all of these things.
And I've known people and I talk to them regularly who have said yes to Jesus.
And they call me in a moment of weakness and they say, Pastor, I went back.
I had a drink.
Sometimes they call me and they say, Pastor, I thought I was healed, but I still got some bitterness in me.
They call me and they say, Pastor, I don't know why.
I'm so angry because I have the joy of the Lord, but I'm so angry.
That's what sin does. It leaves scars.
And sometimes in those moments of temptation where the enemy is harassing you,
it will lead you back to some of the things that you left in the enemy.
I mean, no disrespect, brother Larry.
But the enemy says, look what you did.
Look what you did.
You still got this anger. Look at that. Look at that.
You said you were going to give that up.
You said you were going to give up alcoholism. You can't even do that.
You're not good enough. Jesus said, Jesus said to walk away from all of this. Look at it.
You keep falling. That's what the enemy does.
And this is where so many Christians throw in the towel and they gather their things.
They say, you know what?
I can't do it. They take their bag and walk away from Jesus.
Thank you, bro.
And this is what I want you to understand today.
That you, you comes with imperfection.
You leave the baggage.
You leave the contents of the things that you were carrying for so many years.
But Jesus knows that you are not perfect.
You have some scars.
Because everything that you left at the feet of Jesus, it did do some damage to you.
It left you with some scars.
Even Jesus had to walk away with some scars in his hand to remind us of what sin did,
but it no longer has power.
And that's what I want you to know today.
That you might have scars, but it has no power.
Has no power.
Jesus knows that an alcoholic may face fierce temptation with alcohol even after he left the behind.
Jesus knows that even though you forgave people from hurting you, you might still have a hard time trusting people even after giving your life to Jesus.
He knows that you might, you might still deal with depression at times.
And it's not because you don't have the joy of God.
It's not because you don't love the Lord.
It's because he knows that you might still feel the after effects of those scars.
And I'm sorry, church, but the enemy is not going to stop tempting you.
He's not going to stop accusing you.
He's not going to stop lying to you.
He's going to work extra hard because he wants you.
And there it's going to be days where you say, Lord, I'm tired of struggling.
I'm tired of being tempted.
I'm tired of failing.
I fail every single day.
Sometimes it feels like with the same thing.
I'm tired. Take it away.
But Jesus is saying, my grace, my grace is sufficient.
My grace will sustain you yesterday.
You needed it and it was there today.
You need it and it's here tomorrow.
You're going to need it again, but I promise you it will be there because my mercies are made new daily.
As long as you remain faithful, as long as you remain humble,
you, you, I coach you, I coach you, you will be justified.
Because at the end of the day, it's not about what you did.
It's about what I did.
It's about the free gift of grace.
That's what grace means in the Greek.
It's a gift.
It's something that we cannot earn.
I give it to you.
My grace justifies you.
All you have to do is take it.
Jesus says, I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.
But the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
My Lord paid a debt that I will never be able to repay.
You know, he doesn't expect this to.
Jesus doesn't charge you for his grace.
But he just expects us to walk with him daily, abide in him.
Bala this morning, she spoke on abiding, abiding, being connected to the vine.
You know, sometimes even though we're connected to the vine, sometimes it sometimes we struggle to bear the right fruit.
I don't know anything about plants like a lot of Bastaulahs do here.
But even if you're connected to the vine, it doesn't always guarantee perfect fruit.
But as long as you remain in him, he will remain in you.
I hope that you know how much you're loved.
I hope that you know how much, how much grace there is for you.
I want you to stand with me this morning.
I want you to stand with me this morning.
I want you to stand with me this morning.
There's some people who have struggled.
They have struggled to the point where they almost gave up.
But God is saying this morning, look, my grace will sustain you.
My grace will make you stronger.
And I promise you church, that the longer you remain connected to the vine, you will get stronger.
You will get stronger.
You might not bear fruit the very next day.
But God is doing something in you.
As long as you remain in me, says the Lord, you will begin to see a work that you never thought that I would do in you.
You will begin to see fruit that you never thought you could produce.
You will begin to see anger as a thing of the past.
When you thought that it would never leave you as long as you remain in me.
As long as you remain in me, says God.
There is grace for you church.
And if that's you this morning, if you say, I am in need of the grace of God.
I am in need of strength.
I am in need of you Jesus.
I want you to come forward this morning.
As we can pray, as we pray with you, if you don't want to be prayed for, you just want to have a moment with God.
I want you to step forward as the worship team sings this song.
We are reminded that we no longer walk in the trespasses of our sin.
But we have been changed by grace, renewed by your love Jesus.
Thanks for listening. If you'd like some more information on PNEUMA Church, visit us on our website at mynumachurch.org.
If you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe or share it with your friends on social media and tag us at mynumachurch.
Thanks again and God bless.
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