The idea during this series is that the Israelites of old had the promises of God and they had imagined things about the Messiah. They imagined ideas that what he might do or what he might be like. Clearly, when we see the coming of Christ, when he's in his ministry and he has his disciples and others following him, they expected certain things of him. If he was the Messiah. They expected he would do certain things and fill out a certain profile or character profile.

And yet it turns out he was different than anything they had imagined or believed or thought of. And as it were, that it was so much more than they could have imagined. One of the parting words of Jesus to his disciples was that he would, when he went away, he would be able to send the Holy Spirit. And through that, that they would do even more than what he had done. And so Jesus, his birth, his coming as the Messiah, and as we look forward to his return one day to bring the new heavens and the new earth, which is the redemption that we hope for in eternity.

When he comes to do that, it will be more than we ever could have imagined. All of our songs, all of our liturgies, all of our prayers, all of our books that we've written. Jesus can do so much more or he will do so much more in eternity than what we had imagined. He can do so much more on this earth now than what we've dreamed possible. And he will do so much more in your life than what you have thought possible.

Let's go to the Psalms. That's what we're doing over these weeks is looking in the Old Testament at some of the beliefs that people had. And the neat thing about prophecies in the Old Testament and Psalms and the writings of the people of God is that they spoke both to their life right then, but also looked forward to the future that God had intended for them. So in Psalm chapter two, the author says this, and it doesn't say here exactly who wrote it. It might have been David, it might have been someone else.

But he speaks words that made a lot of sense at that time, but also seemed to make sense in our time. In Psalm chapter two, we see this. Why do the nations rebel? Why are the countries devising plots that will fail? The kingdoms of the earth form a united front, and the rulers collaborate against the Lord and His anointed king.

They say, let's tear off the shackles they've put on us. Let's free ourselves from their ropes. The one enthroned in heaven laughs in disgust, and the Lord taunts them Then he angrily speaks to them and terrifies them in his rage, saying, I myself have installed my king on Zion, on my holy hill. The king says, I will announce the Lord's decree. He said to me, you are my son.

This very day I have become your father. Ask me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your personal property. You will break them with an iron scepter and smash them like a potter's jar. So now you kings, do what is wise. You rulers of the earth, submit to correction.

Serve the Lord in fear, repent in terror. Give sincere homage. Otherwise he will be angry and you will die because of your behavior. When his anger quickly ignites, how blessed are all those who take shelter in him. Let's pray for a moment.

God, we thank you for your word today. We pray that as we listen to this message and as I proclaim it, Lord, that it would not just be the words that come from my heart or from the studies that I've done, but Lord, that it would come from your Holy Spirit speaking through me. That it would be the message that we here in this room, or those who might follow up online later, that it might be the message that we need to hear to grow us into the people that you want us to be, to be useful in this world for the sake of right now and eternity. In Christ's name we ask. Amen.

There's this idea of something that's called the prophetic voice. Now when you think of a prophet, when you think of prophecy, a lot of times what people think of is forth telling the future, telling things that will happen in the future. And certainly there's an element of that in the sense of the prophetic voice is looking forward to the future and seeing what God has said he will do. And proclaiming that God said, for instance, to the Israelites, he put terms on them, they were under a covenant with him. We talked a little bit last week about a covenant that God had with Abraham and his descendants.

And in these covenants there was terms that they had to abide by. God had promised to do certain things and said if they transgressed certain things, that this would be the recourse or the punishment for it or the thing that would kind of kick into play. And so one of the things that a prophet would do is to speak, hey, you've been doing these things wrong. It's a no brainer. God said, this is what he'll do if you transgress this.

So for instance, we read in this psalm where he says, you know, kiss the king's son or he will be angry, you know, give him honor, or you will die because of your behavior. In other words, when you're speaking to a group that's in that covenant, you're saying, the terms of the contract are clear. If you disobey what the master of this contract or covenant has said, you will fall term or fall to the terms of that covenant. And so that's just what naturally will occur. So in a sense, a prophet is really just speaking logic.

They're looking at history, and they're looking at the future, and they're saying, I see where this is going. Sometimes it's easy for us to do that in this world. I mean, if you're a good student of history and say you went back, you know, just less than 100 years, or in the time about 100 years ago, and you look at what was going on between different nations after World War I had happened, and then you think, oh, that was the war to end all wars. Except it wasn't, because it didn't settle anything. It just put a few bullies in their corner, put a few powers kind of out back a little bit.

But they reformed and they regrouped and they came back stronger and more united and ready to fight. And without getting into everything about World War II, I'm by no means the least bit of an expert. But you look at what was going on with nations starting to kind of draw battle lines against other nations. It doesn't take very much of a genius to look at where we're at right now in the world, both this country as its place in the world and other countries, and see that there are battle lines being drawn between other nations, between nations and nations. They're drawing alliance or forming alliances, drawing lines.

And we could look at that and say, we're headed towards another conflict like that. And yet the prophets, they're doing more than just looking at the past and looking at the current day and predicting the future. What they're actually doing is they're listening to the Spirit of God to lead them into what to say to the people of God to bring them back into right relationship with God. The prophets of old, the Jewish prophets that we read in the Old Testament and the Psalms sometimes are very prophetic in that what they are doing is they're listening to God's Holy Spirit and he's telling them how the people ought to live. Many times what a prophet does is they call out a lack of justice or an injustice that the people are committing.

Now, our country talks a lot today, and I'm sure there's other Western countries that are especially good at doing this. They talk a lot about injustices that are occurring. They like to pick out what they deem a marginalized group and say, well, this group is marginalized. This group is somehow taken advantage of. And so that's been our fault.

That's our bad. We need to fix that. And we need to make sure to somehow set that right. And to be sure, there ought to be some of that reflection in our lives to say, well, where is it that, let's say the people that are kind of in power over society have taken advantage of others and actually held them down rather than lifting them up. For sure that's a good thing for us to do.

And yet that's not the concept of justice that God has in mind. In his scriptures. Over and over again, through the mouths of the prophets, God says things like, I don't care about your sacrifices and your offerings. I don't care about how many bulls you slaughter, how many lambs you bring, how many grain offerings, olive oil, wine, all these things. I don't care how much of that you do.

That's not the religion I'm after. You're just being religious at that point. You're just being check the list to make sure I do all the right things. But you're not really honoring the heart of God and the will of God. What he ends up saying to them is that I don't want your sacrifices.

What I want is your heart. What I want is for you to pay attention to three groups of people. Widows, orphans and aliens. Now, I could get into what he means by aliens. There's actually three different types of foreigners in the Old Testament scriptures.

But the ones that he has in mind is somebody that's not just coming through on a journey or somebody that's coming for a little bit of time, but a foreigner who comes and resides in your midst seeking to be one of you, to live in the land as one of you. They're willing to adopt and adapt some of your cultures and language and way of life. They're willing to do that, but you're overlooking them. You're not concerned with them. Now, for certain, God doesn't use this language to try to separate out people and say, well, these are.

These are ones you don't have to care for. And these are ones you don't have to care for. But what he's saying is the people that have the least ability to care for their own financial needs and security needs. Widows, orphans and aliens that are living among you, those are the ones that you are supposed to look out for the most in your midst. This is the type of justice that God is seeking.

Today we have things like not just widows, but we have a lot of single women, especially single mothers. For instance, some of you have been great, thank you at bringing gifts for the Solomons group. And we are going to deliver them up there. Today.

We have that need or that burden to care for these ladies who are caring for children, some of which are similar to the orphans of the day. An orphan being someone who didn't have their parents and couldn't care for themselves and required somebody else to care for them. But we have a lot of kids who their mothers have to go work. So they're kind of like, where do they go during the day? Where do they go when their moms are at work?

And so they're being cared for. And we have a responsibility to do that, to care after them. And for sure, actual orphans, actual kids in the foster care system, actual widows, for sure God's heart is with them. But anybody who has a hard time caring for their own needs because of some infirmity or situation in life, it is up to the people of God to watch out for them, to look after them. Too many times, I believe the church gets criticized for failing to do that.

I think that's actually got the cart and the horse reversed. See, what happened was the government started jumping in on our territory. They had a lot of policies, especially after World War II, where they said, hey, we need to get these social programs and put them into place. And more and more, they actually edged out what the church was doing and replaced it with what the government wanted to do. And then if there's any fault on our part, it's that we got complacent in that.

And we said, okay, that's fine. You guys have it taken care of. We'll build bigger buildings. We'll have more programs for those who are within the church. And we forgot about those that the scripture considers marginalized.

And so what the church ended up doing was we reacted poorly to what was going on in the world. And now we're looking at it and saying, well, when the government runs out of funds for that program or when the government fails, where is the church? We don't have a program for that. We don't have a fund for that. We don't have a way to help somebody when they're in that situation.

So for sure we have work to do as we're looking at the situation in the world around us. And so what the prophetic voice does is speaks into those situations in the world and says, okay, this is what God would have us to do. And so we're going to do those things. We're going to care for people. We're going to have the heart of God inside of our midst in us personally and in us, in the church, in the congregations, and we're going to have that heart of the Lord in us to see his will and his work come to play in the world.

Now, all that was an introduction for what it means. The prophetic voice. The prophetic voice is something that the psalms are employing here and saying, this is what God is doing as he looks at the world. And he's saying, there's all these nations of the world that are working against God. There's all these nations in the world that are rebelling against God.

And for sure, that was what the first sin was. That was the thing that Satan did to get himself kicked out of heaven. See, Satan was originally a beautiful angel of light, he's called. He was one that was in God's presence. But he decided that he wanted to work for himself.

He didn't want to work for God. For some reason he had a falling out and he decided to rebel against God and was kicked out of the throne room of heaven. But Satan also decided that he wanted to do the same thing to the pinnacle of God's creation. Human beings. We are created in God's image.

So if we are created in God's image, what does Satan want to do? But to the scriptures tell us, steal, kill and destroy. Satan is after you. If you've wondered if there's a battle or a war going on, there is. The scriptures also tell us that our battle isn't against people that are living in flesh and blood, but it's against the dark powers in the world, the spiritual forces as the workers of evil that are around us, but that we don't see with our natural human eyes, but that the battle is raging and that it is the battle in which we fight.

But we don't fight alone, you see, we have the Holy Spirit of God in us. God sends angels to work on our behalf. And you might never know about it, but angels are there fighting on our behalf. We see this, for instance, in the book of Daniel, where Daniel was looking for an answer and he didn't receive it for a long time. And finally, a messenger from God shows up and says, I was on my way 21 days ago, but I was detained by the prince of the kingdom of Persia.

He wasn't speaking of a physical person. He was speaking of a spiritual prince that was an overlord in the forces of evil over that kingdom, in that area. And so we see from examples like that that there is this spiritual battle that's going on. One of God's prophets, I believe this one was Elijah. He had some men that were coming against him, a whole army that was coming to attack him.

And his servant was trembling, he was shaking. He says, look, master, there's so many of them. What are we going to do? And the prophet prayed, open his eyes, Lord, that he can see what I can see. And so that servant could see that on the hill surrounding that army was an army of God's angels ready to fight and attack, that they were covered by these powers of God.

We see that there's this battle raging around us, and we understand that the nations are raging against God, that the nations are fighting against God. It might seem like it's just politics or it's just regional conflicts that are going on, but the truth of the matter is in every face of evil that we see, it is an evil that is working to overthrow God. And we live as citizens of the kingdom of God. We live in heaven. That is the kingdom of heaven that has come crashing to earth.

That's where we live. That's where we dwell as believers in Christ. And so we're part of that battle. We're part of that fight. So when we see nations or we see local people or whatever it might be working against the things of God.

The Scriptures speak prophetically about that. They speak about those situations that they had in those days then that we also see in our day. And they speak against that. And they say, why do these nations do this? Why are they devising plots that will fail?

They're trying to overthrow God, in other words. But it's never going to work. It says, they want to tear off the shackles that are put on us. Have you seen that in our nation? Many of you have lived a lot longer than me, and you've seen these things happen.

One of the biggest ones is talking about prayer in school, for instance. You know, when we say, well, they took prayer out of schools, and we could probably have debates with people where some think that's a good thing and some think that's a bad thing. But I think it's symptomatic of something larger. See, I believe that it's part of this thing that has been going on where Satan is working to overthrow what God is doing in this world. And Satan, if there's one little thing he can do, is not just taking prayer out of schools because individual kids can pray.

I prayed in school. Nobody could punish me for that. I could pray, I could pray at my meals, I could pray before a test or whatever I wanted to do. Nobody could stop me. We could bring a book to class and read it during a reading time in one year.

I brought my Bible and I read that. Nobody could stop me from that. They've certainly tried now at different places. I've heard of kids where they were told they couldn't do that and they say, well, I'm doing it anyway, try to stop me. You can't see, but they can't really stop.

When the people of God get serious about doing the things of God, they cannot stop us. The problem, I believe, is that we got complacent. We said, okay, we'll give that inch, we'll give another inch here and we'll give another inch there. And after a while we start realizing that we're the frog in the pot of water that's already started boiling and we didn't realize it. And so through all of this we find out that our nation has slowly started rejecting God.

We find today that the fastest growing segment of religious peoples is the non religious people, what we call the nones. They have no religion, not like marginally Christian or marginally Buddhist or marginally this or that. They just say none, I have no religion. That's the fastest growing population in our country as far as, like when people answer a census or something like that, or a poll. And so we see that that's going on in our world, that we're moving farther and farther from God.

And this is what Satan has in mind. Because his ultimate goal is to steal, kill and destroy. And so we look here in the scripture and we see that God addresses this, that he's speaking to them and he's saying that I've put my king in place. I've installed my king in on the throne. Now they can accept him or reject him.

They can either accept that king or reject that king. We look at what God was doing in the time of the prophet Samuel when the people wanted a king. The people of Israel had been led by leaders, by judges or by prophets. And Samuel was perhaps one of the greatest of those men. He was both a judge and a spiritual leader.

He was a priest and a judge over the people And Samuel did a great job of this. But the people said that they wanted a king. They wanted to be led by a man who would take them into battle. And Samuel said, well, he'll do that, but he'll also make your sons to be soldiers in the army. He'll take taxes from you.

And they're like, taxes? What's that? And he says, well, let me tell you, it's about the worst thing ever. They're going to take your money and do whatever they want with it. Whether you like it or not, whether you like the things they do with that money, you won't have a say so in it.

One of the things about our country today is they take our money and then they use it to fund wars around the world. They use it to fund regimes around the world that are abusing the people that live in those countries. And I have no say over that. And I might think, well, I can vote for people. I can vote for politicians that align more closely with the image in scripture that I think they should live up to.

But then when it comes down to it, they get in place, and then they have to vote with their party, they have to vote with the leadership, or they won't make any traction at their mission that they went into politics for. And so they have to start compromising, it turns out. And we find ourselves throwing our hands up in the air saying, I thought I had hope with you guys. And now we start to see it quickly vanishing away. And we realize perhaps our hope was a bit in vain towards those people, that our true hope is not in some of those politicians, but it's in the true king that God is installing.

Because what the people of Israel did when they asked for a king, and he says, I put my king on the throne on my holy hill, which is Jerusalem, they found out quickly that it wasn't everything they had hoped it would be or that it had been hyped up in their minds. And so the first king was. Was King Saul. And he was a tall guy, he was a handsome guy, and they thought, he's the guy for us. Except he was shy and timid and scared.

And then when he overcame all that, then he was a bit abusive and perhaps crazy at times and tried to kill his best guy, which was David, because it turns out David was a man after God's own heart and loved and respected God. Well, then Saul dies, David becomes king, and David, he had been known, of course, for not only killing Goliath, but just slaying tens of thousands of the Enemies of Israel. He was a victorious warrior. He was also called a man after God's own heart. I believe that that means he was a man who was seeking the heart of God.

And yet he had many sinful failures in his life. We've seen that as we read through it, the story about David, as we read that, we see that he was not a perfect man. And so even the good king wasn't a great king in the sense of how he lived for God. His son Solomon was the one that built the temple for the Israelites, that built the temple that was supposed to be the home of God. Although Solomon acknowledges that even heaven and the highest of heavens can't contain God, much less this physical structure that he had built.

But he says, lord, if you can at least be happy to put your name here, if we can come here to bring our offerings to you and our sacrifices, then we'll do that. And God did honor that. And the temple shook as he entered with his presence. And the people could worship God there at the temple. But that king, the king that Solomon was, might be what they had in mind in Psalm chapter two, when they said that the king had put his son on the throne.

Perhaps when David put Solomon on the throne, perhaps that's what they're considering, is that that David is saying, you should honor my son as I place him on the throne. And yet David had a hope for the future that was so much more than his kingdom or his son's kingdom or any descendant of David that would be on the throne. David had a hope that would be one day fulfilled by the coming of the Messiah. David understood that. He understood that as good as he might be or as good as his son might be, and he certainly gave him a charge for how to follow God and to worship God.

That despite how much David might have instilled or tried to instill a fear of God in Solomon, that Solomon still might come to failure on a religious and a political leadership front. But they still, they required an allegiance to the king. And yet I believe they're looking forward to a future king that would come from the family line of David. You see, they knew that God was one day bringing his son as the Messiah. The promise had come long ago.

I mean, not just through Abraham, but all the way back to Adam and Eve, where God had promised that salvation would come. Victory over the serpent. Victory over that evil serpent, the devil. That victory over him would come through the eventual offspring of the woman. She, of course, much like us, she put her hope in that day and on something that she could provide when she bore a son.

Well, first she bore two of them, Cain and Abel. The first one, Cain, she says, with the help of God, I've brought forth a man. She's thinking, I brought forth an offspring in accordance with what God said I would do. And he is going to overthrow that serpent that got us in this mess. It turns out Cain was not the guy.

Cain was pretty bad. I mean, like, he was not only just angry and just violent towards God even, but he killed his own brother when his brother had met with God's approval because he brought an offering that was commendable before God. So Cain killed Abel. So now they're down to this one son, and clearly he's not the one that's going to overthrow the serpent. It seems like he's actually been kind of controlled by the serpent or given into the serpents leading astray.

And so then she bears another son later, names him Seth, and says, okay, here they'll replace the son that Cain killed. But he wasn't the hope for salvation either. Eventually, though, God will come to bring his promise to fruition that one day through this young lady, young girl named Mary, that he would say, mary, you are going to be the one that brings the fulfillment of that promise. You're going to be the one through whom I bring my king, my son, into the world. That's the son that this psalm is ultimately talking about, where it says to kiss the son, to give honor to the son, to love that son, to respect him.

Because when you do that, you will be living out the hope and promise of God. See, God's had a better plan than what any of us could have imagined. God had a better plan than what any of these offspring, whether it was Eve's offspring or Adam and Sarah's, Abraham and Sarah's offspring, or whether it was David's son. Any of them that they thought the hope came through, it was so much more than they had ever imagined. See, God knew what he was doing throughout all time.

He knew that he was going to bring his own son into the world, that he would lead and teach people and set the example, but that he would also suffer and die at the hands of some of those same people. And yet he did that intentionally. He did that willingly so that he could bring about a change, not only for our here and now, but for our eternity. And he did that willingly. And his son came and Jesus came to this earth.

And he. We talk at Christmas in the Advent season about his birth, and we talk about all these things with the traveling and the crib, the manger is a crib and the setting and where he was, the angels, the shepherds, the. The wise men, all these things fleeing from Bethlehem into Egypt because there was a threat against his life as an infant, as a newborn. And we think of all those things during this time of year. But sometimes at Advent season, we miss the part about how closely it's tied to Good Friday and Easter.

You see, God knew that he was sending His Son to set something right. That had been going on for a very long time. These nations that had been raging in vain against God, he was going to not attempt to bring their destruction sooner. He was attempting to erase that. He wanted through His Son, for those nations to be saved through His Son.

He wanted those nations to come to salvation so that they would no longer be working against God, but that they would fall under his reign and rule, submitting themselves to Jesus Christ. Have you ever imagined what it might look like in our country? Try this with me if you can. This is about imagination more than we can imagine. But I want us to try just a little bit.

And I'm going to take about two minutes to walk us through a little imagination process. So if you need to close your eyes or just listen to me or look at me, whatever you want me to do, but picture with me if I don't know in what time frame. But over a few years, so many people in this nation, millions upon millions of them, became passionate followers of Jesus Christ. And in so doing, immediately their lives and their families lives are changed. The generations that come from them are changed, Their whole family tree gets changed.

But then so much of that occurs that all of the things that we fight over, all the things that we get embroiled in in this world, in this country that we see are wrong. If those things cease to matter because so many people have come to Christ, there's such a great awakening of people getting saved that all of a sudden those things don't matter. That as there are needs among us, just like the church in Acts after Pentecost, when there were needs among them, they took care of those needs. When there was problems with how somebody was being treated, they addressed that. And they worked in the justice of God to fix those issues.

And through that, people's lives are not only redeemed from sin, but they're restored into the image of God that He created them to be. Can you imagine with me how much this conversation that we might even be having in our country today about is our government Too big? Does it need to be shrank? How much it would actually become irrelevant. Elections would just kind of be like nobody would even want to run because they say it's more important that I'm serving in my community and in my church than that I'm serving in Tallahassee or Washington or wherever their capital might be that they're serving.

Can you imagine how we wouldn't want to take part in any wars because Jesus said that his children that want to see his kingdom are those who are those who seek to make peace, the peacemakers, rather than those who are war makers. Can you imagine how it would be that our jails would be emptied, Our police would just be more like what some people wish they would do now is just trying to go and serve the community, that they would actually do that, because that's all there is left to do because crime has fallen, because nobody is even willing to commit those crimes anymore. Can you imagine with me what that would be like to live that society and in that world? See, I believe that that's actually what Jesus came to do. He said he didn't come to overthrow any government, but I believe if he was speaking his words, that he spoke to his disciples.

I believe if he was speaking to us today, that one of the things he might say is, I didn't come to overthrow your government. I just came to make it unnecessary. I just came to make it where you guys don't need that anymore. There's no devisement of any political system in this world. Communism, Marxism, Nazism, any of those types of things.

Capitalism, which I know isn't government, that's financial, but there's none of those things in this world that even could imagine an outcome like that. And yet I believe that's what Jesus came to do. Oh, for sure he came that you might have salvation, that you might have life and life to the fullest. He came to bring restoration. As I mentioned a couple times in this message, you were created in the image of God.

You were created in his image. And yet. And yet that image has been so distorted and so tarnished by sin and sin's effects on you. I heard an example of that this week as I was listening to an audiobook. And the man talked about if you found a painting of, you know, just kind of a famous painter.

One of my favorites is, you know, nevermind, I forgot his name. Guy that did the starry night swirly pictures. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Thank you.

Van Gogh made a picture of the church at Auvers. Auver. However, you pronounce it, and I just love that painting. But can you imagine if you found some painting that you really enjoyed and you knew that you could tell that it was from that famous artist, but then there's mud splashed all over it, there's dirt covering it. It's still that painting underneath, but you just can't see the beauty of it.

And then if you said, well, I'll just take a garden hose to it, or I'll get Tom to get his pressure washer out, I'll clean that mud right off of it. You don't have that painting anymore, do you? It's destroyed. But if you take it to somebody that can restore that painting, you take it to somebody that understands that artwork, understands what the composition of those paints has in them, somebody that understands what the canvas or medium that it was painted upon and how to treat that, how they can restore it with precision and with professionalism to where that painting shines for what it was supposed to be. You bring that painting to that person and allow them to repair it, to restore it.

You see, you're God's masterpiece. You were created in his image and his goal has been for you to live that out. And yet, as sin entered into human, human's existence, into our lives, as sin entered humanity, and you're born into this cycle of falling prey to sin, what God has come to do is to say that sin is a mud that's coating over my masterpiece. And I can still see my image in you. But I want to clean that off, folks.

I can't do that for you. I can point you to the Scriptures. I can preach a message every week. I can teach you in Sunday school or Bible study at 11 o'clock on Thursdays as we're going through the book of Hebrews. Shameless plug, huh?

Did I say Wednesdays? I didn't say Wednesdays. I don't know why I even said that. It's definitely on Wednesdays. Thank you for that.

If you wanna come talk to me on a Thursday, give me a phone call, you know. But anyway, definitely come Wednesdays at 11. But when we, you know, when I speak to you, I'm not the one that fixes you or cleans you or cleanses you. I'm just pointing you to the One who can. But Christ is the One that has provided all that for us.

And not only to clean you up to an original kind of what you were created to be, but his goal for you. His message for you is that he has more for your life when he fills you with His Holy Spirit and commissions you to work in the manner that he has created you to fulfill. He has so much more for you than you could ever imagine, more than you could ever hope for. And so when we come into this Advent season looking at the birth of Christ, we talk about that every year. And as a pastor, sometimes that gets difficult because I have to.

It's like, how do I make this new and fresh again every year? And it's a challenge for me as a person because I need to come to the Scriptures and say, lord, how is the message of Christ fresh and new in my life? How is it that you can speak to my life in a new way this year? So my goal for you, my goal in this series as we look through it, is that you would say, I'm tired of just living life how I've been. I'm tired of saying, well, I'm saved, or, well, I've grown just a little bit, and that's good enough.

My goal for you would be that you would catch wind of what God is seeking to do in your life and that you would say, lord, what more do you want to do in me than I've ever known possible. None of us are too old for that. None of us have gotten to a point where we've said, okay, I'm done growing. I'm done learning. I'm done being anything new.

See, God is constantly working in us if we're willing. So we just recently went through a series on the fruit of the Spirit and looked at inviting the Holy Spirit into our lives. I would say one of the ways or the way you get on this more than you can imagine ride, if you haven't ever before, is to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. The next thing you need to do, though, is to dig into the Scriptures and grow in Christ through your study of the Scriptures. And then as you realize that Christ has offered us His Holy Spirit, that you say, lord, send the Spirit into my life through him, show me how I can live out more than I've ever thought possible.

Because God is never done with you. God has never taken you to a place and said, well, that's far enough. He's always willing to take you farther. He's always willing to take you deeper into your relationship with him and to do more through you. I believe that if we all get on board with that, I think that even if 10 or 15% of us did, it would start to catch fire through the rest of the place and that the community would notice that our state would notice, our nation would notice.

Jesus came to change the world so many times, we're content with him just changing me, when really what he wants to do is bring his salvation to the whole world, which is more than I've ever imagined. But God's opening my heart up to those possibilities right now, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes for him to be that more than I've ever imagined. Are you there?