But we're going to jump into Nehemiah chapter 12 today, and I'm definitely not going to read the entire thing for you again. There's a lot of names and a lot of stuff going on in there that it's just like, why? And there's reasons why it's in there. There's reasons why there are all these names, there's reasons why these things exist, and yet they're not necessarily crucial for every week when we're preaching and hearing the Word, but they're. They are crucial for studying different things.

And there's some things that are within those names that I. That I have pulled out of there. And I'm not going to read through them all, but it informs part of the rest of the message. So we're going to look at verses 27 through 30, and then we're going to jump down to verses 43, 47. At the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, they sought out the Levites from all the places they lived to bring them to Jerusalem to celebrate the dedication to joyfully with songs of thanksgiving and songs accompanied by cymbals, harps and liars, which was like a stringed instrument, I believe the singer singers were also assembled from the district around Jerusalem and from the settlements of the Natophathites.

Did I do that name right? Anybody have a different way to pronounce it? No. You're not going to try it, huh? The topathites.

I think I nailed it. Nobody's ever met a natopathite, so you don't know. But they were also from Beth Gilgal, in the fields of Geba and Asmaveth. For the singers had built settlements for themselves around Jerusalem. When the priests and Levites had purified themselves, they purified the people, the gates and the wall.

Now Wanda said, she stepped out. Wanda said, I was going to ask her a question, but she's not in here now. She said, you know, talking about the place being holy. And she said, no, we don't think of like the altars and all that being holy. And I want to say, are you sure about that?

I wanted to interrupt her, but it was good. So they purified it says themselves, the people, the gates and the wall. We're going to get into that later, but for right now we're going to jump down to verses 43, 47.

On that day they offered sacrifices and rejoiced, for God had given them great joy. The women and children also rejoiced. The rejoicing in Jerusalem could be heard from far away on that day, men were appointed over the storerooms for the contributions. That's like the stock room, you know what I'm saying? Like, this sounds like a boring job, right?

Like, hey, you're in charge. Make sure the stuff that's there belongs there and that nobody steals it, you know? They were appointed over the storerooms for the contributions, for the first fruits and for the tithes to gather them in into them from the fields of the cities, the portions that were prescribed by law for the priests and Levites for the people of Judah. Listen to this. They took great delight in the priests and the Levites who were ministering, in other words, the, the.

The leaders that they had among them that were leading their worship. They said, we love these people. They're doing a great service to us, for they are leading us in worship. And so they supported them well, according to the way that God had laid it out in the law. So verse 45, these people perform the service of their God and the service of purification along with the singers and gatekeepers, according to the commandment of David and his son Solomon.

For long ago in the days of David and a guy named Asaph. Asaph was a worship leader who wrote a bunch of psalms, by the way. In those days there had been directors for the singers and for the songs of praise and thanks to God. So in the days of Zerubbabel. Remember Zerubbabel from like our first week studying this.

Zerubbabel was a guy that had come back like a hundred and some years before and started the rebuilding of the temple. And he rebuilt the temple. In fact, there's a smaller prophetic book, one of the minor prophets called Haggai, that the main thrust of his message was Zerubbabel and all of his people with him. It's time now to rebuild the temple. Like now is the time to do it.

Now's the time. Don't wait for a later day. Don't wait for things to be perfect. Now is the time. So that's who Zerubbabel was.

So in the days of Zerubbabel, and then later, verse 47, in the days of Nehemiah, all of Israel was contributing the portions for the singers and gatekeepers. According to the daily need. They also set aside the portion for the Levites, and the Levites set aside the portion for the descendants of Aaron. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for all these things that are in there and some of them that don't kind of jump right out at us at Some point as we first read it, but with a little bit of study and a little bit of work. Lord, we recognize that you've got a message for us here, that you've got something for us to see and something for us to pay attention to. So God, I pray that you would speak to us. I pray that hearts would be prepared right now to receive this word and that you would, that you would open our minds and our ears to hear what it is that we might be called to do at this point. In Christ's name, amen.

So the first thing that I think of is that I went, I went like three or four different little titles for this message and I just landed on consecrated for worship because that's mostly what's going on here. But the other thing that I recognize is there's like, I know we don't have like, well, there's not a lot of us in here today, but we don't have like a whole bunch of men. But if I had like a big, just a, like a group of 50 men, I would say men, we like a battle sometimes, don't we? I don't mean like when we're driving and we're angry at that. Like when we were coming home yesterday, there was a car going up U.

S or Florida 39, all the way up, 39, 45 to 49 miles an hour in a 60 mile an hour road and a double yellow line for like 13 miles. And I, I won't do that, especially in the church van with a bunch of church people, you know, like, I'm not going to pass on the double yellow line. And there was a whole lot of oncoming cars, so I didn't have the option anyway. But you know, like in my mind I was resolved to not pass on a double yellow line even if there was an opportunity. But seriously folks, 49 miles an hour, 50 maybe in a 60 mile an hour zone.

I'm not saying you're going to hell for that, but I am saying that if you do go to hell, like you will probably have a special place with other people that did that, you know, Like, I'm just saying there's probably a place. Never mind, I shouldn't have gone there anyway. It's like that's not the battle I'm talking about. Like, it was a battle. I'm like, come on, hurry up.

You know, the battle was really me not like showing my anger to all the people that are going to hear me preach the next morning, you know, and so it's like, okay, Come on, car. Like, let's go. And I didn't flash my lights at him. I did tailgate them. Not like, super close, but, I mean, like, they knew somebody was, like, trying to push them.

It didn't work. Like, air isn't that strong. I was trying to get, like, a push of air, you know, and it didn't work. It's like trying to push a rope. You can't do it.

So it didn't happen. But that's not the battle I'm talking about. See, there is a battle. There is a war going on around us. There is this battle going on around us, and.

And. And it's happening already. We don't have to look for it. We don't have to try to find it. What we have to be doing is deciphering what that battle is.

And I'm not just saying men are the only ones to fight it. I'm saying men are the ones that are looking for a war. Sometimes we're actually. It's, like, built within us. We're looking for a fight.

Men are, like, always that way. I. I know, ladies, sometimes you are the ones looking for a fight, like, with your spouse, probably, because you're like, I wish he would just change, and he won't. And so you're like, maybe if I argue with him about something, he'll figure it out. No, we won't.

We're that stubborn. We just won't figure it out. You got to come, like, pretty directly with this and be like, here's what's wrong. Okay? You're like, okay, yes.

There's a show on public. Like, public television, at least up north. It was a Canadian show called the Red Green Show. Has anybody actually heard of this? Like, seen it?

One, two. Like, Kendall was out there. Three, four of us. You've got to check this out. Is this Canadian redneck guy.

They had this, like, lodge, and there's all these guys there, but they would have this meeting of the men at the end of every episode, and they would say the man's Oath or motto or whatever. It's like, I. I'm a man, but I can change if I have to, I guess, you know? And so that was, like, how they would always start their meeting out anyway. He.

You know, he would do that. But it's like, we. We need it laid out for us. What's wrong with us? But we're looking for a war.

We're looking for something to fight in a noble way. I mean, like, yeah, sometimes we get, like, those emotions misplaced and we try to fight the traffic, we try to fight the family, the spouse, the neighbor, the, this, the local government overreach, whatever it is. We're looking for a battle like we're looking for something to fight, but we're looking for the wrong things. And the thing is, the battles that were fought in Nehemiah, we talked about these breaches that were in the way and all these different breaches that we have found. It wasn't just the wall, it was the systems of worship, it was the systems of oppression over the poor among them.

It was all these different things. And they fought those battles. And what, whether it was Zerubbabel or Ezra or Nehemiah or whoever it was that led those, these men fought those battles and they fought it with a godly valor that, that showed that it was a battle worth fighting. And they were, they were appropriate battles, they were worthwhile battles, they were godly battles. And so especially for men, one of the struggles is we're always looking for where is the war, where is the battle?

And many times we choose the wrong one. We choose the wrong thing. For me, one of the things that is tempting for me to get into is into politics. It's not because I believe in Republicans and Democrats and left and right. I don't think those are the answers.

I think though that unfortunately, the political leaders that sometimes are led, as we were looking at last week a lot of times by things like Hollywood and other media companies and big corporations, they tend to get swayed in the way that they lead and run their positions and run their states and their countries and, and so I, I want to see good people or people that are willing to at least listen to truth and be honest. I want to see them elected into office and I want to see them do well. But I don't really have faith in that being the answer. And so I don't tend to get wrapped up in the battle of, of, of left and right politics and things like that. And yet at the same time I, I tried to, I tend to get wrapped up in this culture war.

And I believe there's some validity to that. I believe we need to be recognizing what is the culture trying to sway the world to do that is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I want us to be gospel minded. And where the world is working against that, we don't identify those people and say, oh, well, these are the people that we hate and we have to denigrate them. Rather we say these are the people who somehow have missed out on the truth of the gospel and the love of Jesus Christ.

And those are the people that we should be reaching with the gospel and the love of Christ and trying to show them. Dan Boone, the president of TR Nazarene University, shared yesterday in a report that he gave about a time a few years ago when there was a group that came to protest the college for some things that they just assumed they would be about. It was a group that tended to be LGBTQ minded folks, and they wanted to protest this, what they considered a conservative Christian university. And so they must be mean and hateful towards people like us. And instead what he did was he found out about it and he called up their group, talked to the president or leader of their group and said, hey, we heard you're coming out to our college.

When are you coming? And they're like, why? Because he said what they wanted to do, normally what people would want to do is get like armed guards, police, bar them from entry onto their campus. And then it would be a big media thing and a big news story. Instead, what he did was he said, well, the reason I want to know is because parking can be an issue and getting a, you know, if you're coming in on a bus, I want you to know what route, because there's like this roundabout and you might not get it through there.

So I want you to. We'll have the dean of students come meet you at the gate and show you, like, where you can go and park and where you can get out. They ended up opening up the president's dining room and had a meal with them and they kind of shared. They had a bunch of their staff and students and faculty there and they divided them up and they just talked with all these folks, said, what are some of your concerns? Let's talk with you and let's tell you our heart.

So they start having this meeting with them and. And then they had like this forum where they sat up on a platform and took questions from all the students and everything and they did all this stuff. And he says at the end, the. The woman that was kind of leading this protest against the college kind of said, I wish I would have known. And I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact quote, but she said, I wish I would have met some Christians like you guys a long time ago, because I might not have had to go on this whole crusade.

That's my paraphrase. I can't remember the exact quote. But folks, what. Sometimes the battle that we find when we're Looking at the culture, and we're seeing things that don't line up, but we look at and we say, well, these are the people I need to fight. Instead of saying, lord, where is the spirit that's behind us?

What is the thing, whatever it might be, whatever area of our culture that we see going off the rails, it's like, lord, where is this coming from? What is the core thing that's wrong? What's the evil spirit that is behind this area of culture and society? And so we looked last week about these mighty men of valor that had been servants of David, soldiers for David, King David, and these mighty men of valor that had served. And then we saw that there was people that were moved.

They were selected by a lottery kind of thing. They were moved from their surrounding outside villages, the areas of Israel that were outside of Jerusalem. And one out of every ten got selected to move into Jerusalem because they needed to populate the city now that the walls and gates and everything was in place. And they needed more people to live there. And so they selected these people.

And one group of them, 128 of them, I believe it was, were descended from and were still considered mighty men of valor. Now, these are the ones. And I spent a few minutes last week talking about, like, some of the exploits of David's mighty men of valor. And I'm not getting into all today. You should go back and watch it.

It was great. But the. These mighty men of valor went to move into a city. And I talked about how much I hate cities. Like, I really do.

They're too big, and there's all this stuff. But mighty men of valor moving into a city. And why would they be even willing to do that? Because we recognize that there is a battle to be fought even within the city. And it's for the soul of the city.

It's for the heart of the city. And what we wish to see is the. Is not somebody to take down and to conquer, but we wish to see that the love of Christ would permeate through every portion of the city. And that's what we want to see in our city of Zephyr Hills that many people still call a small city. Which is laughable to me because it doesn't feel that small.

It doesn't feel like the traffic, you know, is getting any lighter, you know. But nevertheless, whatever size the city is, our heart is for the city. We love our city. Or we would. Some of you would probably move.

Jesus called me here, and I'm like, jesus, I'll be here as long as you want me here. So it doesn't matter whether I love it or not. I love things about it and there's things that I hate about it. But my heart is for the city that I live in to come to Christ and to know Christ and for a culture of the Gospel to be that which permeates our city. And so men are looking for a battle, but we don't have to look too much.

We just have to witness the spiritual battle that is already being waged all around us and say, lord, where is my part in that battle? So one of the things that the Israelites in Nehemiah's day did was they consecrated themselves and we talked about that. Consecrating is, like I said earlier, to be set apart for a purpose, a sacred purpose, and to be cleansed and purified. And don't think that you can be set apart without being first cleansed and purified. Like, that's step one.

And there's many people that have come to Christ and said, okay, my sins are washed away. We partook of communion and we say, okay, we're celebrating that Christ cleansed me, that he took my sins away, that I'm a new creation, that I've been born again. And yet at the same time, you're not willing to allow him to continue the work of cleansing you continually. Because the longer you've walked with Christ, at least if you're listening to His Holy Spirit and allowing him to. To get into your heart, you're going to find out that there's more areas in your life that he says, I love you.

You are perfect. I created you perfect. You're not living perfectly how I created you to live. You see the difference there? See, God doesn't hate you.

He doesn't look at you and say, ah, you're all messed up. God loves you. He loves you. To be like Robin Williams character on a movie called Good Will Hunting where he said, it's not your fault over and over to Matt Damon's character. He loves you.

I don't know who needs to hear that today. Just feel like I need to say it a couple more times. God loves you. God accepts you. He doesn't accept everything you're doing.

He doesn't accept every bit of your life the way you've been living it simply because you weren't created to live that way. God loves you. Don't forget that part. You need to hear that. But there are things within your life, there are things buried in your heart that maybe the person closest to you, doesn't know about.

And those things need to be wiped away because those things are poison within you. Those things need to be cleansed and purified from within you. Attitudes, thoughts, behaviors, actions, whatever it might be, they need to go. Hatred, rage, bitterness, things that have been inside of you for years, decades, they need to go because those things are dragging you down. Those things are not allow or they're disallowing you to be the person that God has created you to be.

See, none of us are quite living to the fullness of how we were created to live. And the thing that I learned, if there's, if there's one thing that I pick up in reading Nehemiah and some of the prophets, the writings of the prophets surrounding that time, is that it doesn't take long for, for from the time that we consecrate ourselves, purify ourselves, allow God to cleanse us and, and, and then it doesn't take long for us to fall away from that. We're going to see that next week. If, if we conclude it, we might do two weeks for chapter 13. I still don't know yet.

You'll have to come and find out next week. I have to move along. We're running out low on time here. I just looked at the clock and recognized that. So here's the deal.

I've only gotten like this far down this much of notes. So let's see here we talk about consecration. It involves purification. It's important for that. And so one of the things that they did though, after they consecrated themselves, they consecrated the walls and the gates.

But then I want to look at some of these groups. I talked about the Netophathites and I talked about them a couple times because I wanted you to remember that name. It's important. You probably don't need to remember it beyond today, but the Netophathites were descendants of some of David's mighty men of valor. But did you notice what it said they did?

Like, if you were paying attention in here, if you look at what the Natophathites were about, it says that they were part of this enclave of artists, singers, musicians, songwriters, mighty men of valor. You know, the guys that were always looking for the physical battle to fight, now their war, their battle, is to lead the people in worship. See, worship, like worship isn't just songs, but in many times involves that and, and worship. Worship is the things that we do that take the focus off of me and my life and focus us on God and what his spirit is calling us to do and worship leaders, people that write songs. And, and there was.

There's like. Did you know there's a hymnal in your Bible? It's called Psalms. It's. It's a hymnal.

It doesn't have the notes, but it has the words. And they knew the notes. Like they sang these things. Jesus sang psalms. He sang a psalm from the cross.

Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He sang that. They didn't read the psalms. They didn't recite the psalms.

They sang the psalms. They were meant to be sung. In fact, when you read through some of the psalms, there's this little title above some of them that it says who wrote it and it says what it was for. It says who it was written for. Like, some of them are for the, the musical instruments and the person that led those.

Some of them are for those who were. Who were singing in different parts of the worship service. And so it describes why it was written or who it was supposed to be utilized by. And some of them, it says who wrote it. Some of them says what kind of a psalm it was.

But. But there's a group of them that was written by what says the sons of Korah. Now, Korah is an interesting one. There's actually three cores mentioned in your scripture. One that we know nothing about, one that we know almost nothing about, and one that we know a lot about.

And he was a relative of Moses. So we're going way back, like, like 1400 years before this or something like that. This, this guy, this guy Korah got some dudes with him that were allied with him. And they said, hey, we're like related to Moses and Aaron. Why do you guys think that you get to be the leaders of the people?

Now here's the interesting thing. They had a job. They had been assigned some work. They were along with three groups of ministers that had work to do. But the work that they were given was like kind of the lowest menial task, the way they looked at it.

And so they said, basically, why do we get the sloppy job? Why don't we get something a little more pretty and fun like you get to do Moses? And Moses said, you know what God's going to decide about us? If you're right, then you'll live and die a normal death. If you're wrong and evil intentioned in your heart, the ground's going to open up and swallow you and everybody that's following you.

Literally, the ground opens up. This is like a Florida Sinkhole. You know, like, you've heard stories of people like their house. Like, I was in my house, and then I walked out the door, my house was gone. You know, like, it was just in the ground.

And that's what happens to them. 250 of them done. Whoa. Fear of God immediately into the people. Now it says that some of their family perished with them.

They had evil wickedness in their hearts. But we find later that there were some of the sons of Korah that were the writers of the psalms. These were obviously people who took it seriously that dad. Dad had done some bad stuff. He had some evil in his heart, and it.

He was judged for that. And so they said, you know what? From now on, our family, our name is going to be changed. I think that it's interesting that, like, our district, district advancing, that we talked about the. The motto was no matter your story or whatever your story, it's like their story goes back to a dad that got sucked up into the earth.

Like, that was not a great way to say, bye, dad. But at least, you know, the funeral and the. The internment were at the same time. Bad joke. Sorry.

Okay. You know, just knock it all into one thing. Don't have to have the procession from the funeral home to the graveside. Sorry. Okay.

That's the way my brain works on the fly. I didn't really plan on saying that, but anyway, they. So, so, so these sons of Korah wrote some psalms. One of those psalms is Psalm 84. 10.

It'll be on the screen. It says this. It says, better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked. See, that psalm, to me, is beautiful because these men recognized what was considered maybe one of the lowliest jobs, a gatekeeper.

I don't know how they dress, but picture, like, those British guys. I should have put one of these pictures up, but I just thought of it like the British guys with the big fluffy black hat and the red thing. And they just stand there with their, like, sword or gun or whatever, and everybody tries to make them flinch. And they just. Straight ahead all day, as long as there's shifts going on, you know, gatekeeper.

Literally one of the just most like, standstill and do nothing jobs. At least that's how we think of it. But I think there was two gatekeepers. I think there was the gatekeepers that opened the gates of the city. Every morning, they open them.

Every evening, they close them. Literally the first to Come. And the last to go. Right. Like that song, you know, the loadout by.

I Forgot His Name. No, you're not gonna help me, Amy. Okay. Jackson Brown. Yeah, like that Jackson Brown song.

You know, talking about the roadies that, you know, they bring his instruments out, they take, pack them up. He's like, they're the first to come and the last to go. If you don't like that song. Sorry. It's a good one.

I got the record. It's fun to listen to. So, anyway, people are talking about, like, oh, do you ever play a record? I'm like, I still play them often. I have my collection of vinyl.

It sounds fantastic. You know, I love this stuff. And so first to come and the last to go. That's how the gatekeepers were. But they weren't just the gatekeepers of the city, which was important because they had to keep evil and wicked things out.

See, part of the battle is we have to see evil that is trying to come into our midst. Not people who are practicing evil, but people who are trying to sway us to do evil. One of the things that we see in Nehemiah was they were people that were foreigners that were trying to bring in the things that they wanted to sell on the Sabbath. And they said, no, we don't buy and sell on the Sabbath. Stay out.

That's one of the jobs of the gatekeepers. But there was the gatekeepers at the house of the Lord. This goes way back to before the first temple was built, when they had the Tabern. And then Solomon built a temple and that one was destroyed. And now Zerubbabel built the temple in this day.

And the gatekeepers there had this job. Yes, they opened it up, but they also were the guardians of it. They were the protectors to make sure that people with evil intent didn't come in and pillage and rob it. But they also had to make sure that people didn't try to get past them to see into the place they weren't supposed to see. The Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was.

Their job is to make sure that nothing unclean enters the temple, that nothing defiles the temple. Now, one of the ways that we get wrong, and somebody actually spoke about this yesterday at our conference, was that one of the areas that we've been tempted to go wrong is to say, okay, so anybody that's got evil things that they're doing, we need to keep them out of the church. No, absolutely not. This is the place to come. This is the place to Be here.

But yet, at the same time, if somebody says, okay, this is how I'm living my life now, you should do it too. No, no, no. You don't get the platform for that. If you're preaching things that are antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ, you don't get a podium. You don't get a platform.

You don't get to be talked. You don't get to talk to us. And so these. These people, these gatekeepers, they recognize, like what Korah. Korah's sons had said, that it is better to be a gatekeeper in the house of the Lord than to spend a thousand days elsewhere.

I'd rather have the lowest job in the temple of God than to be living in palaces or the tents, the. The dwelling places of wicked people. All the things that sin can offer. I don't care about those. If I just get to even be a.

Literally, we have rubber doorstops that hold doors open. Like, I'd rather be a rubber doorstop in God's temple than to live in a palace of a king that's living in evil. And so the. The thing that I end up with this is I. I recognize and.

And this is maybe the thing that impressed me the most. Through this scripture, they purified. Did you pay attention? Like, gates and walls, physical things now. I worked for a stone mason.

I think I shared that last week for a little while. I worked for a stonemason for a little bit long time ago when I was, like, 19. And nobody ever purified those walls when we were done building them, maybe they should have known some of the, like, masons that worked there, you know, like, maybe it wouldn't have been a bad plan. I don't know. But they.

They never purified them. Nobody ever was like, okay, you know, holy water or waved a thing or burned incense. I don't know how you purify the walls, but they did it somehow. Nobody ever did that. But they did it here in Jerusalem.

And I got stuck on this for a while, trying to think, why would that be? And I recognized. I think my whole life, I've heard Christians say, well, the church is the people, not the building. Okay, you can have church anywhere as long as there's Christians that are there in the name of God. We can call that a church service.

And it can be. We could be meeting over at the burrito shop or whatever. You know, I know of a church that meets in a burrito shop, so it makes sense. Cool. Burritos, Jesus.

Let's knock it all out. At once. It sounds like a great plan. Right? Good times.

You guys aren't that excited about it. Okay.

I remember when a church burned down. It was actually the church my dad had gone to as a kid, and it was in Flint, Michigan. And I remember when this church burned down around Christmas time. Something to do with Christmas lights or a candle or something when somebody was gone overnight and it burned down. And of course, you know, the pastor or some church leader, they get on the news real quick and they say, well, the church is about the people, not the building.

We can rebuild a building, but the people are still here. And that's true. However, what if. And we don't have walls on our property, but what if as people were coming down the sidewalk, what if as they were driving into the parking lot, into this grass lot or the paved lot, what if when people were dropping their kids off at daycare throughout the week, what if as people entered this property, they said, there's something about this place. There's something sacred about this place.

Something because it's been consecrated. There's something about this. What if, as they entered into this building, they said, I don't want to leave. If they entered in this building, they said, I don't. I feel something.

I don't know what it is, but it's something I've never felt before. And we know it's the presence of the spirit of God. No, not the physical walls, but somehow the boundaries of this place. What if we said, yeah, it's about the people, but it's more than that. The presence of the spirit of God is there.

So who are our gatekeepers today? Who are the gatekeepers that are saying, we're inviting certain things in and we're keeping certain things out? I mean, for sure, we've got people that are greeters at the door. Like, if you see a threat coming in physically, you should probably, like, try to do something about that. But.

But. But it's not that I'm thinking spiritually, we need prayer warriors that'll say, you know what? It's my job. It's my job to pray that there will be this. This presence of the spirit of God here.

That no matter what day it is, no matter what time it is, that when people enter this property, when they park in the parking lot, even if they're coming to pick up their kids from the high school, like they do every afternoon during the week, and they fill this grass lot over here like just a swarm of locusts just all over the grass and no order or fashion to it. They're just all over there. What if they just said, there's something about this that's changed? Because the people of God have been praying, because they've consecrated themselves and said, we want this to be a consecrated property, a consecrated place where people experience the spirit of God, where they repent of their sins. And they say, lord, what is it that I must do to be saved?

See, the battle, men and women that we see all around us is definitely a spiritual battle. And each one of us has a place in that to serve there, to serve in the house of the Lord. There's no more important work than the work of being a gatekeeper, a person of prayer. So if you have a burden of prayer on you, a burden if. Even if it's a new thing for you and you say, I don't know how to do that, I'd love to talk with you and say, we have some.

Some ways that you can enjoin others in that and. And be part of those that are praying for the presence of God to fill this place so that all who walk through those doors leave change.