The Lord says, see, my servant will act wisely. People will greatly honor and respect him. Many people were shocked when they saw him. His appearance was so damaged that he did not look like a man. His form was changed so much that they could barely even tell he was human.

But now he will sprinkle. Many people. Kings will be amazed and shut their mouths. They will see the things they had not been told about my servant. They will understand the things they had not heard.

And who would have believed what we heard? Who saw the Lord's power in this? He grew up like a small plant before the Lord. He was like a root growing in a dry land. He had no special beauty or form that we should notice him.

There was nothing in his appearance to make us desire him. He was hated and rejected by people. He had much pain and suffering. People would not even look at him. He was hated, and we didn't even notice him.

But he took our suffering on him and he felt our pain for us. We saw his suffering, but we thought that God was punishing him. But he was wounded for the wrong things we did. He was crushed for the evil things we did. This punishment, which made us well, was given to him, and we are healed.

Because of his wounds. We have all wandered away like sheep. Each of us has gone his own way. But the Lord has put on him the punishment for all the evil that we have done.

He was beaten down and punished, but he didn't say a word. He was like a lamb being led away to be killed. He was quiet as a sheep is quiet while its wool is being cut. He never opened his mouth. Men took him away roughly and unfairly.

He died without children to continue his family. He was put to death. He was punished for the sins of my people. He was buried with wicked men. He died with the rich.

Though he had done nothing wrong. He had never lied. But it was the Lord who decided to crush him and make him suffer. He willingly gave his life. He was treated like a criminal, but he carried away the sins of many people.

And he asked forgiveness for those who had sinned.

We're gonna partake of these elements together. And in that we see in this passage so richly, so deeply. It looked to those who saw Jesus that he was being punished for something that he had done. But it wasn't his own punishment. He was sinless.

He had never even lied. And yet the punishment that we had earned was placed upon him. And he willingly, by the. By the plan of his father. He willingly died in your place.

For you, for your sins, for Me and for my sins. So what we're doing today is remembering that. So as you take this bread, may you eat it, remembering Christ's body that was broken for you.

And as you drink this cup, it's a symbol that reminds us that Christ's precious blood, the blood of the Son of God, was shed for you. No one else could do what he did. Only the true Son of God drink in remembrance of him. Let me pray over you. Lord, I thank you in this moment, in this day that your blood is real for us, that your blood was shed for us.

And that if we receive that gift, that we can walk in the true fullness of eternal life. Lord, we just praise you and thank you so much for that. And we ask that nobody would leave this place today without knowing that your blood is applied to their life.

Lord, help us to see clearly that what you want for us, the direction that you want us to walk in this world, the way that we carry your name to those that we come into contact with. Speak to us today, Lord, for your servants are listening. Amen.

As we look at this series that we've been in, it's All About Jesus. That's the sermon series we're in. And the unit that we're studying in our little sermon guides is called Kings and Prophets. We've looked at a couple different lives of a couple different kings recently in the Israelite history. And we're also looking at the prophets that God had sent.

We'll just have a couple of those. There's way too many to cover all of them. But this prophet that we looked at that we just read the scripture from today is Isaiah. And I believe the ministry of Isaiah was one that probably talked more about what to expect from the coming Messiah than any other prophet had spoken. Isaiah was, was very powerful in his message and he ministered when a lot of things were falling apart.

His ministry was during the reign of four different kings. And in one of these passages in Isaiah chapter six, he says, in the year that King Uzziah died, that was the first king. He had kind of ministered during that king's reign. And so in the time of, of a king who had been a long time king, he'd lived a long time. At the time when he dies, there's kind of some uncertainty about what's going to happen next.

We feel that every four years as a nation that elects new presidents and things like that, and we kind of wonder what's going to happen now. Are people going to get along with what's going on from the top down, are the people up top going to listen to what we the people are saying? And usually the answer is, is no, they're not. But this prophet was ministering during this time, and he recognized with each of these king transitions, he realized their hope wasn't going to come from a king. The next king wasn't going to be the one that would fix everything.

And in fact, he didn't. Even one great king that Isaiah was privileged to live under his rule was a king named Hezekiah, who started leading the people back to God. But even in his later years, he was failing at that in so many ways. And so Isaiah knew that God had something more for his people than what any earthly king could offer. He was looking ahead to the King of kings that would one day come.

And so Isaiah writing beyond his comprehension, I believe, because even though the Holy Spirit of God had put these words in Isaiah's heart, he couldn't fully understand what it would look like when the Messiah would come, when the chosen servant of God would come to this earth. Isaiah had no way of fully understanding what it would be like. And so he spoke of things that the Spirit of God placed within him. He spoke testimony to those things, and yet he didn't fully realize it until in his lifetime. He didn't realize that or see it happen.

But for sure, as we look back from our vantage point today, we can see the life of Jesus in the suffering death that he had in and see how well it lines up with so many things just in these passages alone. In fact, in your notes in the Sermon Companion Guide, you see that it starts in Isaiah, chapter 42, and it goes all the way through chapter 53. There are so many things that he is speaking about God's Messiah. He's telling us beforehand what to expect. He was telling the Jewish people whom he was part of and whom he was speaking to, what they should be looking for in the coming king, in the coming Messiah.

We have the ability from our vantage point to look back at it and to see the things that Isaiah said had come true in Christ. The way that they abused Jesus, the way that they punished him, the way that he suffered, the way that he died. And he died as a common criminal, hung on a cross between two other criminals. And yet he had done nothing wrong. There was no deceit in his mouth.

He had never lied. He had never done any, committed any sin or indecency. And then he was buried in the tomb of a wealthy man, a tomb that had never had a body placed in it, he was placed in that truly, Jesus knew suffering more than we can even understand. I stood in this place right here last night reading that scripture, and it brought tears to my eyes. I didn't want to fake it today.

And God didn't give me that beautiful thing this morning as I was reading it. But I'm telling you, every time I read this passage, it hits me hard because I can't read that without recognizing the pain that Jesus went through was for me. The suffering that he went through was for me. And every time that I sin and turn my back on God, it's as if I have made it necessary for the death of Christ to have happened. Now I don't crucify him all over again.

I've heard people say, oh, every time you sin, you crucify Christ all over again. No, he died once for all. He never has to die again. He has conquered death, and it can no longer have any grip on you. And yet it was for my sins that made it necessary for him to die.

The suffering that Jesus had was more than perhaps we even realize. I want to tell you a couple things that I noticed just looking over his life. Jesus was rejected by his own people. His family, the town, the town that he grew up in, the. These people all rejected him.

In fact, his own townspeople wanted to kill him. At one point, he was accused of being a bastard. The son of a woman who was pregnant before she was married. And that Joseph wasn't even his father. He was called a liar who was filled by demons.

He was at times homeless and without food. There were times where he was hungry and didn't have anything to eat. He was cast aside by the religious establishment. The religious authorities of the day rejected him. He was hated by many and loved by a few.

He was treated like a criminal and condemned to die. And so God was with him. Though through all of this, God was with Jesus. Through all of that stuff. You would look at Jesus and say, he must be somebody that's been cursed by God.

That's what Isaiah was telling us, he says. We looked on him and thought that God had cursed him. The scriptures even said, cursed is anyone who is hanged on a tree. So if that was the death that somebody was given, it must be that God had accursed them. And so that would be the only logical conclusion.

And yet at Jesus death, even the Roman centurion, somebody that didn't care anything about the God of Israel, looked upon this man that they had just crucified. And he said, surely this man must have been the Son of God. What a declaration for truly a man who is what we would consider an atheist, a man who didn't believe in God. He. He wasn't truly an atheist.

He actually believed in tons and tons of gods, except for the one true God. You see, in our lives as people, there's so many times that we are tempted to believe in so many forms of salvation, except for Jesus Christ. Even for those of us who are Christians who have received his gift of salvation, it's so often that we might look for salvation in so many different things when Jesus is saying, I'm right here. I've already saved you, and I already have the plan for which you shall be redeemed from this current struggle, this particular situation that you find yourself in. And Jesus is ready to bring wholeness and healing to us in those situations.

But they rejected Jesus. Even some who had been close to him rejected him. At the final moments, his closest disciples denied him. One of them, Judas, who had been with him through his whole ministry, decided to turn Jesus in. Jesus wasn't who he had wanted him to be.

It's for our punishment that he did this. They mocked my Jesus.

They made not just a crown of thorns, they made a helmet of thorns and they beat it into his head. They mocked him verbally. They hit him with their fists. They spit on him. They hit him with.

With their sticks. They whipped him with something called a cat of nine tails. It would rip bits of flesh every time they struck him with it. They did all these things to him. Finally, they nailed him to a cross, mocked him some more, took his last garment from him and cast lots for it.

They gambled for it to see who would receive it. They put a sign up above his head that mocked him and made fun of who he was. And after he died, they poked him into his heart with a spear. And they were content to leave him there dead, hanging there on a cross until his body naturally fell off. Fortunately, there were two men that had been too timid to say or do anything up until that point.

A rich man named Joseph of Arimathea, who owned the tomb, and a religious leader named Nicodemus, who had met with Jesus earlier, you can see that in John chapter three. And they talked to the leader named Pilate, and they said, pilate, can we have his body? And he said, I can't believe he's dead already. Sure, you can have it. Do what you want with it.

They wrapped him up and prepared him for burial and placed him in the tomb. And then it was Sundown and the day was considered over. They did all of these things. And we look at the suffering that Jesus went through throughout his life and especially on those last few hours, and we look at that, and if we see that and we don't think he did that for me, you've missed the whole point of the whole thing. Did it for you.

I'm not trying to be a downer here. I'm trying to get you into the reality of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on your behalf. We wonder, if God did this to him, why would he do that? Why would he ordain that kind of suffering for his son, his own son, his son that he loved? We wouldn't even want our children to go through suffering and pain.

A lot of times parents will kind of insulate and isolate their children from any form of pain so that they don't experience it. And yet our Heavenly Father saw fit for us to. To punish his own son, whom he loved, on our behalf. People have accused God of some type of malpractice for doing that, but they truly don't understand the gravity of what's going on. You see, without the salvation of Christ, without the gift that his death on the cross bought you, you are headed to hell.

And God's not okay with that. There are people that don't know God. They haven't had the salvation of Christ. They haven't received that with open hands, and. And they are headed to hell when they die.

And God isn't okay with that. He sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for their sins. And he's called us to be the ones that help carry that good news to those who haven't heard it. We have that mission. We have that job.

And so many times we think, well, it's a little bit optional. You know, I don't really have to do that much, right? Like, God already did all the work. Why should I have to do anything? And then you look around and you see your relatives that don't know Christ, your neighbors that haven't heard the gospel or they haven't accepted the good news of the gospel, your family members, your co workers, whatever it might be, these folks that don't know Jesus.

The reality of it is that by not choosing to follow God and by you not sharing the gospel with them, perhaps it will turn out to be that they die in their sins and. And that they are bound for an eternity in hell. And God looks at that and he says, I'm not okay with this. He's a God of love. And a God of mercy, but he's also a God of justice.

He demands holiness. And yet we aren't able in ourselves to live a holy life, a righteous life. And so he said, I want to be merciful, but I'm a God of justice. And so if I want to give justice, but I also want to give mercy, there's one way to do it. If there's one person that can die on their behalf, and all of the sins of everyone in the world can be placed on that one holy, righteous and innocent person, then they take the punishment for everyone, and everyone can be forgiven that way.

And that is what God did. And there was only one that could do that, and it's Jesus Christ. And he willingly came and died for you and for me. He wasn't hoodwinked by his father. He wasn't somehow lied to and fell into a trap.

Jesus Christ willingly went to the cross for you and me. I gotta tell you, I'm not willing to do that for you. I'm just not. I'll do a lot of stuff. I'll suffer in a lot of ways.

Sometimes I think I'll go broke trying to help. But I certainly won't give up my entire life for you. But Jesus did. Jesus did.

Wherever you're at, hearing this here in person, later, online, watching live on Facebook, it doesn't matter. I want you to know, I want all of you to know that you've probably heard preachers say it before. You've probably heard me say it before. It's like a little bit of a reality checkup that we all need. Because some of you have also trampled over that gift.

You've received it. And then you said, okay, I'm going to keep kind of doing life my way. I'm not fully ready to, like, let God have this little part of me. I want to kind of hang on to it. Because this area of my life, I don't want to yield over to Him.

I don't want to allow him to have this, this particular part, this time of the week, this time of the day. This is my time for me. I don't want God to have that. This area of my life, these talents that I have, I have something that I want to use them for. I don't want to give them over to God and let him use those talents that he gave me.

The money that I have amassed, the bank account that I have, I don't want to turn that over to God and let him have it. That's mine. All these things We've received his gift of salvation, and yet we say, but you've given everything to me, but I'm going to hold back on some of it. This doesn't all belong to you, Jesus.

I look at this passage of Scripture, I Look at Isaiah 52, 53, what we call the suffering servant, and I see in there that God has given everything to us. And all he asks in return is that we lay our life open to Him. The beautiful thing is he doesn't call for all of it at once. Has anybody ever been made, like, perfectly and completely holy all in one moment? Any of you?

Nobody's lying today. Good. So I was gonna say, if anybody's like, yes, that's me. No. No, it wasn't.

The beautiful thing is that God is patient with you. He's patient. You've received his gift, perhaps, and you said, okay, Lord, thank you for saving me. Thank you for forgiving my sins. Now, Lord, what do you want from me?

Whoever says that back to God, and the moment you do, he still doesn't say, I want all of it. He says, I'll take this. This part, this thing in your life, this is harming you. This is leading you to destruction. This is leading you away from the thing that I want to turn you into.

See, God is a God of loving acceptance, right? But there's an acceptance that the world preaches, a tolerance that the world preaches that is a whole lot more tolerant than Jesus is. Have you ever known somebody like that? They're more tolerant than Jesus. They'll allow you to do any and everything in your life.

Any and every sin is fine as long as you say, oh, Jesus saved me. Jesus ain't like that. Jesus says, I love you. I accept you as you. I created you.

Of course I love you and I've saved you. I've cleansed your sin from you. Now go and sin no more. He calls us to do that. He tells us how to live according to the way.

You got to read it, though. You can't just expect that. I'm going to tell you a few minutes a week and expect that. That's good enough. You got to open up your scriptures.

You got to open up the Bible, read the Gospels. And if you read them all through and you think I still don't get it, turn back around and read them again. It doesn't take that long and start studying those gospels and say, this is what Jesus has said for me to do. Don't tell me you don't have time to read your Bible. You Got time to mess around on, like, YouTube and Facebook and whatever you guys do.

I don't know. Like, some people use TikTok. I never wanted to get into that. I hate Instagram. I missed the whole Snapchat thing a few years ago.

Like, I don't care, but I know I get sucked into watching these short little videos on Facebook. We were talking about this yesterday in a group that we had about the attention span that people have today. You know what the attention span is? It's like, nothing. It's so short right now.

We watch these videos, and if it's more than like, a minute and a half long, it's like, I'm not watching that. You know, that's too long. I don't know about this. And so I understand that now. You want to come into church, you want to sit here and listen to this guy yak at you for a while, and you're like, I don't know, this.

Can we just make it like five minutes maybe? That's a long attention span these days. So thank you for listening. But Jesus says he wants us to yield over our things, even those little digital addictions that we have, and spend some time studying his Word. As we dwell on the words of Christ and the actions of Christ and how he lived and what he has called us to do and to not do.

We begin to recognize as we allow the spirit of God to. To penetrate our lives and our hearts and say, I want to pull this out of your life. I want you to give that over to me and allow me to lead you and guide you in the paths of holiness. You can't live a holy life, a sinless life on your own. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit within you.

And so you have to yield your life over to God. There's a story in the New Testament that I say it. If you're a woodworker or just whatever you understand the word dovetailing is like if you bought a good dresser or kitchen cabinets, and the wood is, like, fit together with these nice little things in the back. It holds together real solid. It's not like the cheap ones, where they just kind of nail it in there, you know, it dovetails.

There's a scripture that dovetails with this so well. It fits so perfectly. See, there's this guy named Philip. Philip was one of the men that was an apostle of Jesus. He was one of his disciples.

And Philip had been with Jesus throughout his whole ministry. And he's on the road. Well, no, he's in bed at first the Holy Spirit wakes him up, sends an angel to talk to him, says, I want you to go down to this one road. This road that leads to Gaza. Yeah, that was a place back then too.

Interestingly enough. They've been fighting over that land for like, you know, thousands of years. Not just the last couple. And so he says, and once you go to the road that goes down to Gaza, and that road goes not only towards Egypt, but it can branch off and go towards, towards Africa, towards Ethiopia and I know Egypt, part of the continent of Africa. I get that.

And so he says, I want you to go to that road that leads to Gaza. So Philip gets up and the word if you were to kind of read, which I don't, but I have things that help me understand this. If you were to read it in the Greek language, that the scriptures were written in the New Testament. This is in the book of Acts, chapter eight, by the way. I think I forgot to say that in Acts chapter eight, Philip is going, is told to go meet this guy.

The word that is used for get up is like, not just like somebody that's been kind of sitting down and it's time to get moving. It's like wake up and get out of bed, that kind of get up. So he gets startled awake with the command to get up and go, get up and go, go to this road down here. He says, okay. So he throws his tunic or whatever on, gets out there.

What now? All I was told was to be here. And he says, well, you see that chariot? Now that, now this, the voice is speaking to him again. You see the chariot?

Yeah, go stand close to it. So he goes over by the chariot. Now there's this guy there, he's from Ethiopia. He doesn't look like Philip. He's really dark skinned.

He's in a chariot. This is obviously probably an important guy. If he's in his own personal chariot. That's pretty cool, right? Like he wasn't walking or riding a donkey.

He's got a chariot that's, that's like a sports car, you know, that's pretty cool. So here he is, he's in a sports car chariot. And he's just. I don't know if they're just slowly going along or if they've stopped for a minute. And the voice tells him, go stand next to the chariot.

So he does. And you know what he hears? The man is reading from the scroll. Yeah, they didn't have like. Well, they did have some books, but most of the time you would buy the Scripture on a scroll.

You had to have a lot of money to buy your own copy of the scripture. Most people didn't have their own personal copies of them. Thank God. We can and do. By the way, we have more opportunities to read and study the Word of God today than at any other time in the past.

We have more personal opportunity to read and know and understand the Word of God than any other time in history. And yet we are less biblically literate than many generations before us have been. We have more opportunity, and we utilize it less. Shame on us. So this man, this eunuch, he was a eunuch is what it was called.

And we talked about a couple eunuchs last week with the Jezebel thing. Remember? Remember that? Okay, she was thrown out the window because she was wicked and evil. And King Jehu said, the word of the Lord says she's got to go.

And he says, who is on my side? He looks up where Jezebel's, like, batting her eyes. She's curled her hair, and she's looking at him thinking, maybe I can woo him over, you know, be part of his harem and still live. And he says, who's on my side? And two or three eunuchs looked out the window.

If you don't know what that means, there's some stuff cut off, or not a full man, so to speak. Anyway, these guys have been kind of emasculated by her, and they were tired of this, and so they said, okay, you know what? I'm done with this woman. She's wicked and evil. I don't like what she did to me.

And so, yeah, I'll throw her out, you know. So they threw her out. She hits the ground dead. They run over her, just to make sure. Double dead.

Today. We've got another eunuch in the story, though. And I'm not just picking stories that have eunuchs. It really works. It dovetails, trust me here.

This eunuch had gone up to the temple to worship God. Now, he says that he was a personal servant of a woman. Either her name was Candace, or more likely, it was a title, but she was the Queen of the Ethiopians, and she had allowed him to go up to Jerusalem to worship. Now, you might wonder, how did he even know about this? I have a theory about it.

A long time ago, in the reign of King Solomon, he had been in love with a woman. At least legend tells us that the scripture doesn't directly say it. He had been in love with a woman who had visited him, the queen of Sheba which was from that region. And so there's a good understanding or good belief that somehow she had taken back when she went back to her kingdom after meeting up with Solomon and spending a lot of time with him, that she had carried knowledge of the word of God home with her, perhaps even a whole bunch of the writings of the law. And that somehow, through all those centuries later, up until this New Testament time, that they had a knowledge of the God of Israel, and that this man had somehow had faith in God, that he wanted to go to the temple of God in Jerusalem, make the journey in his chariot, probably with other guards and other attendants with him.

And he wanted to go up to Jerusalem to worship. And now he's sitting in his chariot reading this passage from Isaiah that we just read this morning. And as soon as Philip, he's heard the voice say, get up. Go to this road. And then he says, now what?

Go over to the chariot and stand there. As he hears the man reading it out loud, he says, I got it from here. I know what to do now. He goes up to the man and he says, do you understand what you're reading? And the man answered more honestly than most people who are reading the Bible.

They say, no, I don't. How can I understand it unless somebody will explain it to me? Do you hear that call? How can we understand it unless someone will explain it? Folks, God is saying, I want you to learn the word of God.

I want you to study the word of God, because you're going to come across somebody's path. Maybe God will send you to that person. And they'll say, I don't understand this. Can you help me? Can you show me what this is meaning?

And so this eunuch says, this guy that's writing that he's a prophet. Was he writing about himself, or is he writing it about someone else? So Philip begins explaining it to him. Now, here's something interesting, something that you might not have picked up on or maybe you've heard this. This eunuch had gone up to Jerusalem to worship God.

He wanted to go to the temple of God and at least pray there and hope that he had found favor with the God of the people of Israel and that he would have favor with that God as he went back home and served in his home country. There's one problem. He's a eunuch. He's emasculated. And there was a scripture in the Old Testament that said that nobody who had been emasculated would be allowed inside the temple.

And so this man would have made this long journey hoping to connect with God. And as soon as he gets into the temple, he sees a sign that essentially tells him that he isn't welcome there. I don't know if he found a gift shop or where he found a Bible, a scroll of Isaiah, but somewhere he bought himself a copy of it. I mean, I visited a couple places in Washington, D.C. and they'd sell you like, little, like, declarations of independence and constitutions and stuff. And you buy these little trinkets.

It's cute. Maybe he found a Bible store, you know, and he's buying his copy of the Bible or just the scroll of Isaiah. Either way, his mission to go worship God in the temple of God was denied to him. And yet he doesn't go home. Totally, totally let down.

He says, I'm going to read the word of God. I have my own copy of the Scriptures now. I can connect with this God on my own now. And so he's on his way. Philip meets him, says, yeah, I'll explain it to you.

And the beautiful thing is, even though he had been rejected from the temple, God showed that he had accepted him, that this man wasn't beyond the scope of the salvation of Jesus Christ. And so from this passage in Isaiah, what we call the suffering servant passage, Philip was able to open it up to him, to explain it to him. And you know what the man said? I see some water here. Stop the chariot.

Is there any reason that would keep me from being baptized? I don't know how he understood about baptism. I'll be honest, I've never been able to figure that out. Nobody's explained it to me. Maybe we'll figure it out later.

We can talk about that in our Sunday school class. That's the beautiful thing about our class. After service, we go down to this room over here and we talk about whatever questions we have. And sometimes it's like, see if we can get Pastor Nick to find something he doesn't know the answer to, like stump the pastor. And those are exciting times for me.

So I invite you to come down to that if you want the word kind of explained and opened up a little more. Your time to dialogue back and forth. That's your opportunity to do it. So I invite you to come to that class. We go from a few minutes after service ends until about noon.

Philip shared the gospel with him. The man pulled the chariot over, got baptized, and. And then, by the way, I love this part, too. The man says, is there any reason, anything that would keep me from being baptized? Crickets, Nothing.

There's no reason to keep from being baptized. The man didn't go through a baptism class. He didn't sign up in advance and have a conversation with the pastor. He just went straight to it. He's like, yeah, let's do it right here.

He baptizes him. And you know what happens right after that? Philip gets taken away. I was looking something up online about this, and there was. You know how when you Google something, sometimes it'll have, like, other questions that people have asked?

And I love those because it's like, you know, sometimes you think, did somebody really ask that question? How I'm glad I'm not the dumbest one around. You know, there's some really dumb people here that ask some of these questions. But one of them, it made me laugh. It said, how far was Philip teleported?

And I'm like, that's how you want to understand it? I guess that's fine. You know, like the beam me up, Scotty kind of generation, I guess, is asking this. I don't know. But it's like, you know, here he is, he's there.

He baptizes the guy and he pulls him back up. And then the spirit just takes Philip and he takes him to another place called Azotis. Doesn't matter. You don't need to know where that is. He takes him there and the guy is like, was that real?

Was there really just a man here? Yes, there was. Like, he asked his guys around him. There was a guy here, right? Yes, there was.

Alright, cool. He didn't worry about that. It says he went on his way rejoicing. Why did he rejoice? Because even though the religious establishment, the temple, had rejected him, God had received him.

God had found him worthy of salvation. And the truth of the matter is, no matter what you've been told, no matter how you've lived, God has found you worthy of salvation here today. You are part of God's purpose in sending his son, Jesus Christ, so that you might receive that salvation. You can rejoice today like that Ethiopian eunuch did, because you have been counted worthy to be saved by the blood of Christ and not just saved from your sins, but he wants you to live to the utmost of your human potential. This flourishing that he has wanted humans to live in ever since he created them.

See, we've been living under the curse of sin for so long. We have been willing to accept this mediocrity in our human lives. Jesus Christ died so that you can not only have life, but life to the fullest, full life, eternal life, both in heaven and here on earth. So as Pastor Kendall comes up, I'm just going to close with this last line.

I said it earlier and I want to say it again. It's like giving receiving a present for your birthday or for Christmas. You say, oh, thank you for that, and then you just take it. You don't ever open it. You just set it aside.

The gift is beautiful. The bows are pretty, the wrapping paper is nice. I don't want to mess it up. That unopened gift is unrealized, folks. If you don't receive that gift and open it up and receive it into your life, the gift of Jesus Christ has not been applied to you and you are still what the scripture tells us, dead in your transgressions.

Don't leave today without accepting Christ. Pastor Kendall, if you would lead us in a prayer that recognizes our need for salvation and invite people to that. Thank you.

If you're joining us online but you have never attended in person, let us know that you're watching by leaving a comment. And please give us a thumbs up on the video. If there's any way we can pray for you, or if you would like to know a little bit more about this church or relationship with Jesus, text us at 833-339-7926 and be sure to check out our website at cfnfamily.org thanks for watching and we pray that God blesses you this week.