We've been going through, we started in the Old Testament, we've been working our way through. We're in the Gospels now, and we're looking at how the entirety of Scripture is pointing us to Jesus Christ, illuminating his life and his mission and ministry, and then also showing in the time after the Gospels how Christ was and is at work in the world through the power of, of the Holy Spirit. So what we've been doing is we've gone through this, this is a year long thing, 52 weeks of messages on that theme, and it's broken down into different units. And this one being the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So Jesus life, we really haven't spent many weeks on it.

You would think if it's all about Jesus, a lot of these messages would actually be about the life of Jesus. Well, that would make some sense. But I wanted to cover so many other things leading up to it and then the effect of his life in the days after he ascended into heaven and then leading up till now and what the mission of the local church is along those lines.

Okay, so Jesus, we're kind of, we've skipped over a lot of what Jesus said and did. I mean, just a couple weeks ago we were looking at his very first miracle of turning water into wine and how that was significant and what that had to do with anything. What that had to do with the idea that wine for them symbolized new life and the blessing of God. And this newly married couple had run out of wine three days into their wedding ceremony. It's supposed to be seven days long.

And so what does that mean in if you run out of wine, does that also mean you're running out of God's blessing? But then when Jesus, when he had that wine served to the guy that was in charge of the wedding banquet, he tasted and says, this is the good wine. Why did you wait until now? Nobody does that. And what we see is that Jesus was saying, like everything that you had before, all your religious experience with the law of Moses and all your synagogues and chief priests and all these teachers and everything, all that stuff was just the little taste of it.

But now what you're getting is the good stuff. The kingdom of heaven is among you. And so Jesus ushered that in. I had a couple meetings, several meetings this week. Sometimes I'm like, can I just eat a meal at home?

You know, everybody was like, can I take you to lunch or this or that? I'm like, yeah, I appreciate that, that's great. And then it's like, oh, man, have I eaten any meals at home this week? You know? And so anyway, I'm at.

I don't even remember which one. I think it was just a coffee shop. But I'm at this meeting, and there's this guy that I met, and he said something about how Jesus called his mother woman sometimes, you know. And I said, yeah, the first time was at the wedding in Cana. And it hadn't occurred to me.

He calls her woman Now. There might have been. You could probably dig into, like, what did that mean culturally? Did a man usually call his mother woman or something like that? I call my wife woman a lot of times.

You know, like, woman, I'll do that in a store if I can't find her, because, like, it's very, very specific. And I get some looks sometimes, and I'm just like, mind your own business, you know? Anyway, it's a term of endearment in our household. So anyway, Adam called his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living. I figured that's the job, not the job of a woman, but that is a thing that only women can do.

We actually can define what a woman is, you know? Anyway, some people in the world can't do that these days. It's weird. So. So anyway.

So no, I'll call her woman, you know? Anyway, Jesus calls his mother woman. And it's like, wait a minute. Something changed in that moment. See, Jesus was just attending a wedding.

She wants him to get to work. She's like, you're the Messiah. You've got power. You're the Son of God. Like, you should do something about this.

And at that point, something changed in their relationship. Now he's the Messiah. I mean, he always was, but he's, like, moving into his work phase, you know, his ministry phase. And so now there would be something different later on. Jesus, mother and sisters and brothers would show up because they thought he had gone a little bit off the deep end.

Some of y' all might have been at that point, at some point in your life. You're like, I don't even know who I am anymore, you know? They thought that Jesus had lost touch with reality, and so they went to retrieve him. They're like, he needs a little bit of a retreat. He needs to come home where we can keep an eye on him, where we can kind of level him back down a little bit, I guess in our day, we have, like, Baker acting.

You know, the police will take you to a clinic and they'll put you on some medication for three days. And then send you home and be like, there. That'll fix it. Like, it never does. So anyway, yeah, so Jesus, he says to them, they said, hey, your mother and sisters and brothers are outside looking for you.

He says, oh, really? Who. Who are my mother and sister and brothers? It's you who are learning my words and following God. According to them, you guys are my mother and sister and brothers.

In other words, family runs deeper than blood relationships. Family involves this shared commitment of faith. And so Jesus, his relationship with his mother changed in that moment. And then we looked last week at the confession of faith that the disciples made, specifically Peter. And how Peter had.

When Jesus said, who do you guys believe that I am? Like, who do these people say I am now? Who do you believe that I am? And Peter makes that bold confession of faith. And you can picture the other apostles kind of nodding, saying, yeah, he nailed it.

You're the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. You're the hope of Israel. Like, we've been looking for you throughout the time of King David and the prophets. And all these years, we've been waiting for this day, and now we are living in it. What a beautiful time to be.

What a beautiful place to be. So Jesus life, though, those are just a couple snippets of what he did. And I haven't really covered anything about his teachings, the things that he taught. Haven't even talked so much about his miracles. The people that he healed, the people that he cleansed from leprosy, the people that he drove demons out of, the people that he got to walk that had never walked or to see that had never seen.

And Jesus is doing all these things, and we didn't really talk about them in. In this sermon series. We're actually going to get into some of that later on in the summer and fall. But Jesus, he did so many different things. He does all of this, and we skipped over a lot of it because I wanted to just focus on a few things in his life and then move to what the point of his life was.

The sacrifice and the death of Jesus Christ. Jesus taught the crowds in so many different places. The Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain, teaching in synagogues, teaching at the temple, teaching in small towns and in homes and in gatherings, grabbing a man that climbed up a tree and said, zacchaeus, I need to eat at your house tonight. Then he partied with tax collectors and sinners, the ones that everybody hated, and he gathered with them, and he says, I'm going to spend time with you because you are as important to me as anybody else is. And so he was welcomed in all places, and he welcomed all people to Himself.

And so as Jesus did these things, he was performing these miracles, and he was doing all of this. But every miracle he performed was to be a sign of who he was. It was to be a sign of the power of God that was in him, that he was utilizing that power to make a change in the world around Him. In fact, what he was doing was he is ushering in the kingdom of heaven. And the kingdom of heaven is.

Is the reign and rule of God here on earth. And we look at that and we think, if Jesus brought that in, why do we still have the problems that we have today? If God was bringing in his kingdom, then why in the world do we still have pain and suffering? Right? We all ask that question at some point, right?

You guys can even vocalize it. You can say yes or amen or yeah, I have. Those are appropriate responses at times like that. And so anyway, Jesus was. He's doing all these things, but his point of bringing in the kingdom of God is not saying, I'm going to fix everything right now, but that I'm one day going to renew and restore this world to what I had created it to be.

And that I'm giving you a taste of it, even though I'm telling you the kingdom of heaven is in your midst. It's not fully arrived yet. The kingdom of heaven hasn't fully, fully shown up. We just see bits and pieces of it, like standing at a train station and seeing the train coming, and you're like, oh, the train is here. And yet it's still pulling into the station.

The train isn't fully there. And that's what the kingdom of heaven is like to this day. So Jesus had everybody listening to him. They're following him. If you read the Gospels down towards the end of them, each one of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, tells a different vantage point or different viewpoint of what they saw or witnessed with Jesus.

Or for a couple of them, they weren't direct eyewitnesses. Mark and Luke, they weren't direct eyewitnesses to the things of Christ, but they were friends with somebody that was one of his disciples. And so they were kind of following what they had been taught. So they did investigations into this, especially Luke. Luke tells us from the beginning, he's like, I'm like an investigative journalist here.

I mean, he doesn't use those words, but that's what he was doing. He's like, I dug into this stuff. I interviewed people for years and years and years, and now I wrote it down so that you can have this, so that you can know that Jesus Christ is who he said he was. So as we read these different Gospels, we see near the end of each of them that there's a kind of a winding down or a winding to the end of it. But it doesn't get boring or slow.

It actually, the intensity of it ramps up. Instead of just kind of broadly covering what might have been several years of the life of Jesus in just a short amount of time. Now, the last few chapters, it's like time slows down and they give more details about things that Jesus said, places that he went, people that he was with. And in these. In this kind of winding up of the Gospels, you see different things being said.

And if you're paying attention to different characters in the scripture, things like maybe who are the chief priests and what they said and did? Who were the Pharisees, who were the Sadducees, what was the group called? The Sanhedrin, all these different things. And I'd be happy to talk about those in our Sunday school class after the service if you'd like. But they're looking at all these different.

If you're looking at all these different people and you're looking at them and you're saying, what were they saying and what were they believing about Jesus? How were they wrestling with who Jesus is? You start to pull a little bit of a portrait together. And what I believe was happening was that many of the religious leaders of Jesus Day were starting to believe that Jesus was somebody sent from God. They keep even asking him this.

They're like, tell us plainly. Because he wouldn't give them a straight answer on it. Don't you hate it when people do that? Like, oh, man, just tell it to me, like, quickly and cleanly. And he wouldn't do that.

And finally they nail him down. They're like, are you or are you not the Son of God? He's like, yes, I am. And you'll see me beside the Father. Like, he can't just give the short answer.

He gives this long answer to it. It's beautiful. I love it. I learned from Jesus in the way I give answers. I'm sorry.

Some of these leaders, they're looking at Jesus and they realize something. If Jesus is who he claims to be, then that changes everything. It changes our power structure, changes our authority. It changes the nature of the temple, it changes the sacrificial system. All of these things won't be necessary.

We will be irrelevant if Jesus is who he says he is. So they got together, they had their little meeting, and they said, well, we allow this to continue. Rome is going to come in and take our position and our power and our authority away from us. Because, you see, Israel was a Roman province at the time. They had a Roman leader in charge over the city of Jerusalem.

They had a Roman king in charge over different parts of the area, divided up between different guys. They had Roman taxes they paid, and then Roman funding that would come in, much like we do today, we pay taxes. Some of it goes to the state, some of it goes to the federal, some of it comes back down from the federal to the state, to the local. It's ridiculous. It's like, why don't we just cut all that out and we'll take care of stuff locally if we need to, you know?

Anyway, nobody wants to do that. So they don't. There's no money in it, literally. So Jesus, he has these leaders plotting against him, and they start to figure out that if they want to maintain their authority, that they have to do what's wrong, what's immoral and illegal, and they have to get rid of Jesus. The interesting thing is, I think, in our lives so many times, if we truly believe Jesus is who he says he is, and if he is not just our Savior, but also our Lord.

In other words, he's not just the one that saves you from your sins and affords forgiveness for you, but he's also the one that you answer to. You have to submit to Him. And as you submit to him, and as you listening to the Holy Spirit speaking to you and telling you how to live your life as a Christian, if you truly believe that your life will change, there will be things that are different in your life. There will be some things. Like as you're reading this book, as you're studying the Word of God, as you're looking through it, you're gonna find some things in there that the Holy Spirit's gonna kind of perk your ears up to, and he's gonna prick your ears and say, this is for you right now.

I want you to live according to this. It might be that he tells you, kind of illuminates in it a sin that is in your life and says, no more of that. I want that gone. It might be that holiness or entire sanctification for you means, as you're listening, as you're reading the Word of God and listening to the Holy Spirit, he says, there's something that I want you to go do. There's a place that I want you to go.

To some people that's literally meant moving to a different place, maybe going on a mission trip, maybe simply just knocking on your neighbor's door and saying, like, hey, we haven't really talked much, but I'd love to get to know you better. You know, maybe it's inviting that person to church that you just, you know, you're just not sure what they're going to say, and you're kind of scared to do that, but you say, I'll do it anyway. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is going to speak to you personally as you're studying the Word of God, as you're spending time in prayer. But if you really believe Jesus is who he says he is, both Lord and Savior, it will change the way you live. And sometimes it will remove some of your own autonomy or authority.

You do that voluntarily, by the way. You can say no. You can turn God down. You don't want to do. You don't want to do it, though.

So the tide begins turning here, and the religious leaders are starting to figure out that they need to put an end to Jesus. Let's read the scripture. We're going to be in Mark, chapter 14, and we're going to look at the first 11 verses. I think I wrote 10, but we're going through 11. I do have a couple typos in this book every now and then.

Okay. Two days before the Passover, then the feast of Unleavened Bread, the chief priests and experts in the law were trying to find a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him. For, they said, not during the feast for their. So that there won't be a riot among the people. Now, while Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the Leper, reclining at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of costly aromatic oil from pure spikenard.

After breaking open the jar, she poured it on his head. But some who were present indignantly said to one another, why this waste of expensive ointment? It could have been sold for more than 300 silver coins a year's wages, is another translation. And the money could have been given to the poor. So they spoke angrily to her.

Can you believe if those same people had been there when the magi showed up to give Jesus these gifts? Like, oh, can you imagine this waste given to a baby? They, ah, they can't. They can't enjoy anything in life. They spoke angrily to her.

But Jesus said, leave her alone. Why are you bothering her? She has done a good service for me. For you will always have the poor with you. And you can do good for them whenever you want.

Zing. But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She anointed my body beforehand for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, where what she has done will also be told in memory of her.

Then Judas Iscariot, one of the 12, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus into their hands. When they heard this, they were delighted and promised to give him money. So Judas began looking for an opportunity to betray him.

So here's what's recently happened in this telling of events. There was this man that was born blind. Jesus meets up with him. And it's on the Sabbath day, the day when you're not legally allowed to do any work as a good Jewish man or woman. And so Jesus, he stoops down, he spits on the ground and makes some clay out of the dirt, and he puts it on the man's eyes.

And then he says, now go to the Pool of Siloam wash. The Pool of Siloam, by the way, is very interesting in a couple ways. One, it's siloam means sent. Go to the scent place. He sends him to the place, meaning sent.

But also in the last couple years, they started uncovering, archaeologists did a pathway and the pool. They've started digging up the site where the original Pool of Siloam was. And allegedly from there, I don't know. I've never been to the Holy Land for a tour yet. I got to see this stuff.

I want to go there someday. But they have this. The Temple Mount is way up here in the city. Remember, Jerusalem is up, the Temple is up. Elevation wise, it's the highest thing around.

And so coming down from there, there's this stone step walkway. And a lot of it is original, like it was there at the time of Christ. And they have unearthed it now, and you could, but you walk down it and then it ends at the Pool of Siloam. And so this would be a place where travelers as they're coming to the temple for sacrifices, for festivals, for things like that, there was flowing water that came down from the mountain dating back from the time of Hezekiah. You can read that, where Hezekiah dug a tunnel for water to flow through.

And so that water's flowing down, still does to this day, goes to where the Pool of Siloam was because if you wanted to baptize yourself or wash yourself, it had to be in running and flowing water, had to be in water that was moving so that it would literally wash the impurities and the dirt away. So Jesus sends the man, a blind man, but he sends him on a trail. He's like, you can find your way there. Go down to this pool and wash. And the man is washed clean. He shows back up, and he's in.

He goes up to the temple, and there he is. And people are like, huh? You're the guy. Yeah, I saw you outside. You're the guy that's been here, like, your whole life, begging.

You're blind. You're not blind. What's going on? Like, you don't have your cane anymore. That's how they knew, you know?

Sorry, Ben. Okay, so, like, I don't think he had the red and white cane yet. I don't think that was a thing yet. Anyway, they're like, you're not blind anymore. What happened?

And he's like, there was some dude. He spit on the ground and made mud. They're like, well, that's gross, you know? And, like, put it on my eyes, like. But I don't care because he sent me to Siloam and I washed, and now I can see.

Yeah. Hallelujah. And then they're like, now everybody is loving this until the religious leaders get ahold of it. And they're like, ugh, I can't believe it. It's a Sabbath day.

He made mud. And that's like, work. What? Yeah, he worked on the Sabbath. He can't be a righteous man.

There's no way a righteous man would do this. And they have this argument between them, and some of them are like, yeah, but I mean, can a sinner open the eyes of the blind? Only somebody with the anointing of God can do that. And so this is where some of this back and forth goes with the religious leaders, and they're going back and forth. And while the chief priests are having their argument, worried about their authority from Rome being revoked because somebody greater than them is there, the Pharisees are worried about, like, if we say that this guy's the Messiah, and we didn't foresee his coming in the scriptures, we didn't see how he lined up with scriptures, that then the people won't have any trust in us to lead them anymore, so we pretty much have to denounce him.

There was a couple Pharisees that were on the side of Jesus. One of them was a guy named Nicodemus that we had seen in John chapter 3. You know, the John 3:16 verse was spoken with Nicodemus. He was one of the Pharisees that believed in Jesus. And yet, because of peer pressure, because of his brothers that denounced Jesus, he was scared to make a stand for him.

We've all been there at some point, too, by the way. I don't mean when somebody's like, hey, do you like this politician that I like. They seem to be more. A little bit more palatable for a Christian to be on their side. And it's like, I'm not talking whether you're gonna engage in that.

I'm saying, like, where Jesus did something in your life, something you prayed for, and he answers that prayer, but instead of giving him glory and sharing that testimony with others, you just say, thank you, Lord, and you keep it to yourself. Share what Christ has done for you. This man, he ends up getting in an argument with the Pharisees. It's beautiful. They're like, okay, seriously, tell us who did this.

He's like, really? You guys are like, kids, I already told you and you didn't listen. Do I need to tell you again? And he tells them, and then they're like, why are you lecturing us? He's like, if you want to keep hearing about it, are you sure you don't want to become one of his disciples too?

And it says, they scoffed at him. They said, we're disciples of Moses. You're disciples of this guy. We don't even know where he comes from. He's like, oh, isn't that interesting?

He's a prophet, and yet you don't know where he comes from? They're like, no, he's a sinner. He's like, sinners don't open the eyes of the blind. So they throw him out. He's had one day to enjoy worshiping God at the temple, and he gets kicked out.

How do you like that? We just took in new members. Should we start kicking them out? No, it's like their first day as a member. But.

But this guy, he gets kicked out because they're like, you don't match up with what we're trying to teach these people. Well, anyway, Jesus, he's. That's right. So here's Jesus. He's just done that.

And then when they're. They find Jesus, they start questioning him, and they start talking to him, and they're like, are you the Messiah? And he says, yeah, I am. They pick up stones to throw at him, to stone him. To kill him with rocks.

And he slips out from among them because it wasn't yet his time. But he went from there to the place where his cousin John the Baptist had initially started his ministry baptizing people out by the Jordan River. And Jesus goes out there. I think he was kind of touching base with where it all began, where his ministry had kind of started. Yeah, he was born as the Son of God.

Yes, his identity was to be Israel's Messiah from. From birth. I understand that. But nothing really started. Like his preparation years was one thing.

But everything starts in high gear when he got baptized at the place where John was ministering. And so I think right there as he knows that it's the wind down to the time where his public ministry is over. And now he'll move into the phase where it's his death on behalf of all people, for all time for sinners who would repent that as that time is coming near, he just went there where it had all started, at the place of his baptism, where he had heard his father say, as the skies opened up, he said, his father from heaven said, this is my son, whom I love. And with him I am well pleased. Sometimes you guys need to remember, God is pleased with you.

Like you might be tempted to look back at some sin in your life or something that you had gotten wrong and say, there's no way God is happy with me. You need to know that your heavenly father loves you. And if you don't know the love of God yet, because you have never allowed him to cleanse your heart, you've never allowed Christ in you as your Lord and Savior. I'd tell you, you need to do that. You need to know that God loves you and he's not angry with you.

I think Jesus went to that place not because he doubted that, but just because he needed to remember it for a minute. People were trying to kill him. People were accusing him of being evil, a sinner, a demon possessed man.

And after this, Jesus goes. He goes into town, into a place called Bethany. Now I gotta back up. I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. He'd been out by the water there.

His disciples are with him out by the river. And somebody found him and sent word. They said, you, friend Lazarus is really sick and he's probably about to die. Can you come and heal him? Jesus stayed there two more days and Lazarus died.

And one of Lazarus sisters is mad at Jesus for this. When he does show up, she's like, lord, if you had just been here, my Brother would still be alive. How could you do this? You weren't far away. It wasn't hard.

Sometimes, sometimes people don't necessarily realize just how much somebody like that is going through. You know, somebody that you've got, somebody that's serving and they're giving of themselves. And then they run on this compassion fatigue, this burnout where it's like, I just feel like I don't have anything left to give and I've got to get away because I'll be no good to anybody if I don't just spend some time away from the crowds. And that's what Jesus was doing. People that work in outreach and compassionate ministries go through this all the time.

People that work like in medical profession, working 16 hour days all week and they ask you to come in on your day off, run on that, where that just runs you out. You're like, I don't know what else I can do anymore. That's what Jesus was going through. So finally he does leave. He shows up at Bethany.

Lazarus has been dead four days now. He raises him to life. Cutting the story short, he raises him to life. And everybody's happy about that. The word about it spreads.

Bethany's just a couple miles from Jerusalem. And so the religious leaders of the temple, they're all kind of starting to hear stories about this man that raised somebody from the dead. And as that's spreading around now, people are like, we've got to kill Lazarus too. We can't just kill Jesus. We got to kill Lazarus.

Because everybody's starting to believe something great about Jesus on account of him. Well, not everybody felt that way yet. The tide was starting to turn, but it wasn't there yet in the hearts of the people. The hearts of the people were still with Jesus. The leadership has turned against him.

The people are still with him at this point. There was this guy named Simon, not the apostle Simon Peter, but another guy named Simon who had been a leper. He had leprosy. It was a rotting skin disease that was supposedly incurable. And yet Jesus healed many people with leprosy in his day.

And there was this guy, Simon the leper. And Simon, he had, you know, allegedly been healed. We don't know for sure, it doesn't say that directly, but the they were meeting in his house and a leper wasn't allowed to live in the community of people. They had to live outside of the town and they had to live usually in other colonies of lepers. And so this man Simon throws a party in Jesus honor, probably because he's thankful that Jesus has healed him and now he can live with his family in his home.

And also because they wanted to honor Lazarus who had been raised from the dead. So they're like, let's bring everybody together for this celebration. And so they brought them all together, and. And they're at this. This is the part that we were reading in Mark 14.

Jesus is there. They're having this meal. There's people that showed up. And including in that is the sisters of Lazarus. He had two sisters, Mary and Martha.

And they show up there, and Mary brings this perfuming ointment that we read about Martha. It says she was serving. Now, Martha served. There's a couple times where this has happened. There's another time where they were having a dinner and.

And Martha was serving, and Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus, which is where a disciple would sit, somebody that's learning from a rabbi. And she's sitting there, and Martha's in the serving mode, and she's all angry, like, why? Why won't my sister help me? She's serving out of compassion. But she's also kind of gotten it misplaced, where she's, like, doing it out of duty rather than, like, compassion and love.

It hasn't become a gift yet for her. But I believe here that what has happened is Martha, if you were reading at this banquet, she's serving. And so there's a gift. It's her gift that's going on. Actually.

I don't think it says it in Mark. I'm thinking it was in another gospel. That's what I get for studying all of them. Yeah, it's one of the other gospels that says that Martha was serving and that Mary was the one that broke open the jar. Here it just says a woman.

We read in the other gospels that that woman was Mary, the sister of Lazarus. And so now Martha is showing her love for Jesus by serving at this banquet. Mary is showing her love for Jesus by breaking open something that was very costly. A year's wages. This perfume was very aromatic.

It filled the entire house. Most likely, Jesus would have smelled like this for days, perhaps right up to the time that he was put on trial to be crucified. And it would have been a scent that would have been very emblematic of somebody of royalty, almost like a king. So when he's standing before Pilate, the Roman governor, a few days later, the Roman governor who's like, hey, you know, are you a king? Like, you smell like a king should smell.

Who's been anointed as king, crowned as king. And so she didn't even have any idea of what was going on. She just knew that God had told her to give something extravagant to Jesus Christ. And so as she did that, she did that out of her love and her gratefulness for what Jesus had done for her. Not only had he probably that she understood that he had saved her from her life, but also that he had brought her brother back to life.

He had changed the whole course of how her family lived. And so she was so grateful that she took this thing. Perhaps it had been something that she had been inherited or saved up for. Maybe it was a dowry that would have been as part of her marriage, should she get married. We don't know for sure what it is.

There's all kinds of explanations. But the point is we. When you break open a jar that's made out of stone, that stone is broken and you can't cap it again. It's broken open and the whole thing was given to Christ.

So I got two thoughts, two thoughts on this whole thing. The first is that there is a lot of people that are going to decide that to follow Jesus means giving up a lot of things in their life, and they're not willing to do it. And they're going to walk away from Christ. They're going to walk away from the life that he has gifted to them, that he has called them to live. And maybe they won't totally walk away from Him.

Some of them will still call themselves Christians. There will be some pastor that does their funeral and say, yeah, they were in church every week. They were a Christian. Maybe we even know the date. They gave their heart to the Lord, but they never fully broke themselves open and submitted themselves to Christ.

There's going to be a lot of people that live that way. Satan's working overtime trying to keep you from fully committing your life to Jesus. And he's going to give you all kinds of reasons why. Don't take that bait. Don't listen to that from Him.

But there's another aspect of this. You know, we're talking about this turning tide of how people believed in Christ.

And I see a turning tide in a few different segments of our country today. I see people that are turning to Jesus. They're not listening to what some of these people are saying. I listen to sometimes these podcasts. They'll have, like, a scientist on there.

And you know what's funny is I'll see people that say, like, oh, you know, Christians don't believe in science. You don't know history, do you? Christians are actually the driving force behind most scientific advancements that have ever happened. There's hardly been anything in science that happened outside of somebody who had belief in Jesus Christ. Many of the scientists today that are prominent in their fields are believers in Christ, but they don't talk about it a whole lot because they won't ever get funded or published by the people that are financing their work.

And so they keep their faith quiet, but it drives what they do and who they are.

It's a vocal minority that is the ones that are out there promoting junk science that tries to eliminate God as the supreme authority in this world. And so I listen to these guys talking about it, sharing their faith and what they're discovering in the fields of science. And it's like Christianity, the word of God is not opposed to science, it's just opposed to junk science that tries to alienate God from our worldview. And so I see a turning tide in those areas. I see a turning tide in that people that are prominent in different areas of business and politics, even though I'm still not ready to trust most of them, but they're talking openly about their faith in different ways and in ways that actually start to sound genuine at times.

And so I'm seeing that tide turning. I'm seeing a tide turning in younger people under 40 years old. I'm not in that crowd anymore, but younger than 40 years old. A lot of people are starting to dig back into the faith and say, you know, I think there's something there. I think there's something about this Bible, about the Jesus of scripture that I need in my life.

And so we've got to be about those things. We have to place an importance on that. Just the last few days over at Southeastern University in Lakeland, have you guys heard about this? They had a revival that broke out. They scheduled some services with a speaker that was there, but they had a 30 hour long service.

It just didn't end like they didn't plan that. They planned on having a couple hour long service and these kids just wouldn't leave because they were confessing their sins out loud, vocally confessing their sins, repenting of their sins before God and just crying out before him. And they keep praying and they keep singing and it goes on and on and on. Every night they're having services still. It's not far away.

They have it on their website where they would welcome the community to come join them if you would like. And you can watch their livestream as Well, I was doing some of that last night, but revival is breaking out among young people especially, and it always tends to revolve around people confessing their sins, getting on their knees before Christ and allowing him to change them. The tide is definitely turning in this world. Satan is going to try to turn you away from knowledge of Christ and salvation. Don't take that bait.

The world is going to try to tell you to just kind of keep your faith to yourself, keep it tamped down and tame and mediocre. Don't take the bait for that. Allow yourself to be caught up in Christ, to be swept away by following him in every way that the Holy Spirit leads you to. Amen. Our church is sitting at an important place.

Many of you heard, and I don't know how much we've talked about it on Sunday, I forget, but we've operated a daycare for a number of years, about 15 years or so, and the time has come for, for the doors of the daycare center to close. There are a lot of reasons behind that. It's closing at the end of this month and a few people have said, well, what are your plans for that building? We don't have any yet. That wasn't like we weren't just looking at the building being like, okay, if only that was available.

We hadn't done any of that. And so we don't know. It's a beautiful opportunity that we have to say, okay, we what season is this congregation in? As we look at an 80 year anniversary, what is it that God is going to do over the next 80 years? I think it's a beautiful thing that we had all these members come and join today and we're looking at this kind of turning point, crossroads and saying, okay, what is it that God is calling us to do?

Sam.