Amen. Good morning. That is a good way to start a morning. Wow. That was awesome. There's just moments sometimes where I'm just proud to be in this room. And that is definitely this morning. So glad that you're here. If it's your first time at His Hands, welcome. My name's Justin. We are excited that you're here. We are a church that exists for one main purpose. We exist to love people to Jesus. We want to love people, to love this community in such a way that people get a taste of God's love for them. So everything we do falls into three categories. It's get his love, grow in it, and give it away. And really, if you think about it, that's a cycle. Everything we do is to receive or grow so that we're at a place where we can give love back to people so that they get to experience what we have experienced. And there's a few different ways that we can do that specifically this morning because we're entering into this season, uh, getting close to Christmas, that is gonna be filled with opportunities to help, to serve. Uh, a few are coming up really soon. Number one, Help Portrait is this Saturday, this upcoming Saturday here at His Hands. Uh, we talked about it a little bit last week. Um, it's a really, really cool event. Uh, we have a man that goes here named Tom Meleshko. Tom is a photographer, and he has brought this event to his hands. We've done it for I think the last four years, but but it's very simple and powerful. There are people uh that are in need, and photographers and people that do photography and editing photos and makeup artists, you name it, come together and they provide at no cost these unbelievable free family portraits for people who cannot ever afford doing something like that. And you wouldn't think that that would be that big of a deal in a world full of smartphones and cameras and Facebook and all that, but it it touches people in such an incredible way because it shows them that they are important. And so uh it's a great thing to be involved in. If you want to sign up to be part of that, Tom will be at the desk over by the source in the lobby whenever we're done. Uh, you can just come be a greeter, pray with people, whatever it is. Uh, we're gonna love on a lot of people this upcoming Saturday. Christmas Angels uh kicks off today. We've done Christmas Angels as a church for the last seven years, I think, eight years, and uh really, really simple. There are children in this community that will not have Christmas in terms of Christmas gifts unless we step in. And I think last year we did close to 400 children, which is uh really incredible. So, way to go. Uh we just we get these from the schools, the local schools. Uh it starts there. Uh they let us know who's in need. The kids get Christmas lists, and you can grab one today if if you want to decide today to do a Christmas angel. You'll go to room two, which is in the main hallway. Can't miss it, it's right past the prayer room. Um, grab a star. That that star is your commitment to buy Christmas, to provide Christmas for that child. You do not have to buy everything on the list. There are many things on my son's list this year that he will not get. Just don't tell him that. Um he he went big this year with some requests. That's good though. That shows faith. That's a good thing. Um, it's just that I'm not God. So anyway. But but what we want to do is make sure that if we take one of those, we're we're committed to doing as much as we can and to filling out that list as much as possible. Usually that means $100 to $125. You know, if you're someone that's really good at finding deals, you can probably do a lot more. Um But what an opportunity that we have to say to families and to children alike in this community, hey, don't worry, we've got you. Don't worry that the church is here, and that's why we exist. That's an opportunity to give love. So grab a star today in room two, as soon as we're done, if you'd like to. And on that note, just thank you for being generous people. If it's your first time at his hands, uh, we believe that God has given us what we have to give to people who need it. And so everything we do here as a church goes to that 10% of everything that comes in here goes back to this community. There's four columns at the back that you can give through or you can give online, but either way, thank you so much for being the people you are because you guys are unbelievable. All right, let's pray. Jesus, thank you so much for uh for being in this place right now. And God, I just know that there are some of us in the room that uh that feel your presence right now. And that may seem strange to some of us, but uh, but I think we we understand that if you are real, if you are real, if you are active in our lives, then we have moments that we can we can step into your presence, we can feel you move, and our hearts can can sort of beat to your rhythm. And that's what we want to see happen today. So, Lord, as we as we look into your word, as we look at what you have told us and taught us, help that process happen. Help us just line up with you. And we pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen. Amen. Well, hey, for the last five weeks, we have been in a series that we have called defined. We're exploring a very simple concept, one that is simple to understand but difficult to live out at times. And it's this our lives are not defined by our circumstances. Our lives are defined by our decisions, by the way we choose to respond to our circumstances. And Jesus' life was no different. His life was defined by the decisions that he made. And we have this unbelievable opportunity to look at Jesus and know what God would do if he were a person. Because that is the story of Jesus. So we can look at the decisions that Jesus made at the way he chose to live his life, and we can follow suit. We can follow his example and live a life defined by the things that defined his life. That was love, that was passion, that was purpose, that was meaning. We want that kind of life. And this morning I want us to look at a decision that all of us can make that I believe affects our day-to-day, everyday lives more than any other decision that we could possibly make. It's the decision of perspective. Now, we don't tend to think of perspective as a decision. We don't think of it as a choice most times. Our perspective is just what we have, it's just the results of the life that we've lived, the way we're wired and whatnot. But look at what Philippians 4.8 says. Now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, on what is honorable and right and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. In other words, Paul, who wrote this, is saying, choose the perspective you're going to live with. Choose the perspective that you're going to have. Decide how you're going to think about life. You decide. If there's good, find it. That's what Paul is telling us to do. We have the ability to change our perspectives. And this is really good news because we cannot control our circumstances all the time. We can control our circumstances some of the time. We can we can work out, we can lose some weight, we can get another job, we can we can cut back on our spending to change some of those types of circumstances. We have control of our circumstances at times, but we have control of our perspective all the time. In fact, our perspective is the only thing, it is the only thing that we have control of all the time. And if you want to see change in your life, if you want to see an area of your life change, just change your perspective, change the way you think about it. Because if you change your perspective, everything else changes. Now that's easier said than done, though, right? There's not some switch that we just flip that says negative, positive. All right, good. I'm good. No more complaining, no more worrying, I've got a new perspective. That's not how it works. Changing perspective is hard. It is so difficult. And we hear this phrase in our culture: perception is reality. That's something that our world believes. So we might hear people say, hey, that might be true for you, but it's not true for me. That is your truth, but it's not my truth. And I understand that, I think like that. We live in a world that says there is no absolute truth. We've all heard that. I love that statement, by the way, because it's an absolute statement. And so if that statement, there is no absolute truth, is true, it means there is absolute truth. But whatever. In a world where everyone believes that there is no absolute truth, that all truth is relative, perspective is what rules the day. So people believe that if they think it's true, it must be true. Even if the evidence overwhelmingly says to change your mind, you've got it wrong. I often care more about my truth than the truth. But what happens when my truth is wrong? Because God invented this thing called a wife to remind me that often my truth is wrong. All the time. It takes a lot to change our perspective. In fact, I had someone explain it to me this way. They were working with me, helping me see things differently in my life, and the person said, Justin, most of the time you think thoughts. There are times that I do not, but most of the time you think thoughts. But if you think a thought long enough, it becomes a belief. And if you believe something for long enough, it becomes crystallized in your mind and you hold it as truth, even if it's not, even if it's just a belief that came from a misplaced thought. When that happens, when our beliefs crystallize, when our perspective cements, it is difficult to change. And we'll come up with all kinds of ideas and theories and ways to justify the way we think. I'll give you a great example. I'm going to show you a picture of some bears, which you probably didn't see coming. These bears. Okay, if you if you grew up reading children's books, these have been around since the 60s, you probably know who these bears are. Now, would you mind just participating? Can you tell me the name of these bears? Berenstein bears, correct? Alright. Now, what if I told you that these are not the Berenstein bears? Because they're not. They're not. You might be saying, oh, is it the Barenstein bears? Because it wasn't Einstein or Frankenstein, right? It was Stein, but no, they're not even the Barenstein bears. They're actually the Bernstein bears. If you look at the words, it's Barenstein. And I know some of you right now are saying, no. I clearly remember Berenstein. It has always been Berenstein. Someone messed with that or they changed it. And when I was a kid, it was Berenstein, because when I picture it in my mind, it's E-I-N. Anyone with me? Anyone? Yeah, right. It's crazy, but it's always been this way. Always. From the first book that was ever published, it's been Barenstein. And my mind refuses to accept that. It's interesting if you go on Google and you type in Berenstein Bears, it'll autocorrect it to stain because that's what it is. But some of the first pages you're gonna see, this is real, there are theories that people have come up with that we are living in a parallel universe, in an alternate reality where the only thing that has changed is the spelling of the Berenstein Bears. There are physicists, I'm serious, there are physicists who have contributed to these articles saying the fact that millions of people, because you're not alone, millions of people swear it was Berenstein, is evidence that we might be living in a parallel universe. Or we could have been wrong. Those are the options. But I I love sci-fi and I don't like to be wrong, so I think the parallel universe theory it's a good one. I makes me feel good about myself if I can think I wasn't wrong, some crazy theory like that. It's hard to change a perspective, it's hard to change the way we think, but the ability to change the way we think is absolutely key if we want to have a healthy, successful life. And God wants that for you, by the way. God wants your life to be blessed. He knows it's not gonna be perfect, he never promised it's perfect, but he does want your life to be blessed, to have meaning, to have purpose. He wants you to have joy in your life, and the ability to change the way you think is necessary for that to happen. Because perspective affects everything. The wrong perspective can ruin almost anything. It really can. You can look at scripture, you can find amazing men and women. Amazing men and women in the Bible that messed their lives up, that got in these huge messes because of their perspective. A great example is Abraham. Abraham was this incredible man of God. Before he was known as Abraham, he was Abram, and when his name was Abram, God shows up and he says, Abram, you, you are the one I'm gonna make a nation out of. Your children, your ancestors will become this nation, and I'm gonna use that nation to reveal who I am to the world. Jesus came through that nation. Imagine the kind of person you would have to be for God to look at you and say, Yes, you, you're the one person whose bloodline I want to work through. That's that's insane. But sometimes Abram was an idiot. He made some, he made some boneheaded decisions. Genesis 12 tells us one of these stories. I love this. Verse 10. At that time a severe famine struck the land of Canaan, forcing Abram to go down to Egypt, where he lived as a foreigner. As he was approaching the border of Egypt, Abram said to his wife Sarai, Look, you are a very beautiful woman. Now at this point, Sarai is probably loving this, right? She's on her camel, her donkey, she's turning, saying, Aw, thank you. I've been doing some things differently with my hair. I'm glad you noticed. But then, as men often do, he he goes in a different direction and it ruins everything he's just done. He says, When the Egyptians see you, they will say, This is his wife. Let's kill him, then we can have her. And we might look at that and go, that's preposterous, but you gotta realize this is 4,000 plus years ago. Sometimes people will read things that happened in the Old Testament and say, Wow, that seems really barbaric, and it's because it was. They were barbarians. Literally, they were barbaric people. And so he's got the right mindset in the sense that, yes, that could happen, but but here's what he says. So please tell them you're my sister. Then they will spare my life and treat me well because of their interest in you. And sure enough, when Abram arrived in Egypt, everyone noticed Sarai's beauty. When the palace officials saw her, they sang her praises to Pharaoh their king, and Sarai was taken into his palace. And then Pharaoh gave Abram many gifts because of her: sheep, goats, cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. She gotta have camels. See, God has to step in and fix this mess, and he's good at that. He's willing to do that. He's done it in so many of our lives. He steps in and he moves on Pharaoh's heart. He actually shows Pharaoh what he's done, and Pharaoh kind of freaks out, gets afraid, sends Sarai back to Abram, and they have a reunion, and it was probably the most awkward conversation ever had between a husband and a wife. She was, I mean, can you imagine the look that she got that she gave him? I mean, come on. If it looks good, but it was intense. And see, that the problem is that Abram was operating out of a perspective of fear. He saw life through the lens of fear because we don't see objectively. Perception is not reality. He was looking at life through the lens of fear. See, God had told him, I am going to bring a nation into existence through you, through you and Sarah's children, Sarai's children, not through Sarai and Pharaoh, but through Sarai and Abram. Sarah and Abraham, as their names became later. But rather than have the trust in God to go into Egypt and say, look, I know God's gonna protect us because he's made us a promise and he keeps his promises. Abram looked at life through the lens of fear, and he made a really misguided decision. We can look at so many examples of this in scripture. In fact, Abram did this twice. Years later, they went to another country. He did the exact same thing, had the exact same result. It was bad. Maybe it was good because he kept getting camels and donkeys. Maybe this was a plan, I don't know, but I don't think so. We can look at example after example from scripture, or we can just look at our own lives and think back, probably not that long, to the last time we made a poor decision because we saw things incorrectly. We had the wrong idea, the wrong point of view. The wrong perspective can ruin almost anything, but the right perspective. The right perspective can fix almost anything. Jesus is the only person that ever lived life with the right perspective all the time. He saw the world the way God sees the world. He looked at life through the lens of God's point of view, and that means that Jesus saw things very differently than we tend to see things, to the point where people just think Jesus is nuts at times. That he says things that don't make sense. I mean, even those of us who call ourselves Christians and we read the Bible and Jesus says things and we nod our heads and we say, Yeah, absolutely, turn the other cheek. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. That works in the real world. If someone steals something from you, give them something else. Absolutely. Good point, Jesus. No, in the back of our minds, we're going, this isn't heaven, Jesus. This is not how things work here. Sometimes Jesus says things that are so counterintuitive, they just seem wrong. They seem upside down. It's because his perspective is completely different. But if you think about what he has said, if you take it in, if you let it penetrate your mind and your heart, your spirit, you realize over time that no, no, no, Jesus is not upside down, everyone else is. It's just that if he's the only one right side up, he looks like the crazy one. Jesus lived life with a completely different perspective. We get a little taste of that in Matthew chapter 6, when Jesus is talking about possessions, about money, he says this. Verse 19 don't store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them. And where thieves break in and steal, store your treasures in heaven where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be. Jesus is saying, hey, look, you might see money and possessions as security. You see wealth as protection. I see rust. I see decay. I see something that is fleeting. That's not the way our world works, but how many of us have put our hope and our trust in our bank account and been very disappointed by the result? Because money is not loyal. And Jesus saw things differently. You could describe his perspective by saying this: Jesus lived with an eternal perspective. We tend to have temporary perspectives. We see the here and now. We can maybe see a little bit further. But Jesus lived his life with an eternal perspective. We see that in a really powerful way in Luke chapter 8. There's this story where a man named Jairus comes to Jesus for help. This is a big deal because Jairus was the leader of the local synagogue. And if you read the story of Jesus, Jesus and the synagogues didn't really mesh. They didn't like the way he taught, they didn't like the new ideas he was presenting, he didn't fit the system, and so they asked him to leave the synagogues, and Jesus went out and he taught in the wilderness. The people who led synagogues were aligned with the religious leaders, the Pharisees. They were trying to kill Jesus. So Jairus is a man who has probably spoken out against Jesus. But something changes in his life. His daughter becomes ill. And she is on her deathbed. And so he, in desperation, goes to Jesus. And Jesus is good. Jesus doesn't say, Look, I know who you are, I know what you've said about me, I know that you've opposed me, so I'm sorry, but my help is not for you. That's not how Jesus is, that's not how God is. And so Jesus goes with Jairus. But on the way, some friends of Jairus show up and they they intercept them. They say, Jairus, I'm so sorry. But while you were out finding Jesus, your daughter died. And so there's no reason, there's no reason to bring Jesus. Jesus, you don't have to worry about this, go fix some other problems that can be fixed. And Jesus says something to Jairus that, depending on your perspective, and I imagine from the perspective of Jairus' friends, must have seemed insensitive. Because Jesus says, no, I want to go. Don't worry, Jairus. She'll be fine. She'll be fine. I mean, can you imagine the reaction? At least what was going on in the minds of those friends that came and delivered the news? Jesus, don't give this man false hope. Don't say she'll be fine. She's dead. She has passed away. I know that medical knowledge has advanced a lot in the last 2,000 years, but 2,000 years ago, they knew the difference between alive and dead. And they had that one figured out. And Jesus says, She'll be fine. I want to go. He gets there to the house. And the funeral has already started. That may seem really strange to us, a little hasty, but in those times you were buried the day you died. And so people have come over. We pick up in verse 52 of Luke chapter 8. The house was filled with people weeping and wailing. But he said, Stop the weeping. Jesus yells out, Stop crying. She isn't dead, she's only asleep. But the crowd laughed at him because they all knew that she had died. Now, death is a horrible thing. It is. We're not meant to die. That was not God's purpose for us. Jesus showed us that life extends beyond death. He backed that up when he got back up. But the fact that death does not sit well with us, it's because we weren't meant for death. And our spirits are absolutely eternal. But our bodies are not. And so death is something that we experience. Death is something that Jesus himself experienced. So maybe Jesus is saying she's asleep. Maybe he's trying to soften the blow. And we do that because. Because death is harsh. The word dead is a harsh word. So we tend naturally as people to comfort other people in hurting. We say passed away. That's softer. Maybe Jesus is saying asleep. In his culture, it was common to refer to the dead as being asleep. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 15, 18, Paul refers to people who have passed away as being asleep. But there was a word they had in their culture for that. It meant sleep, but it meant sleep in the context of death. It was the word koimeo. And coimeo meant to sleep, but in kind of a permanent sense. And so our word cemetery actually comes from a Greek word koimaterium, and that word meant the place where people sleep. But Jesus did not say coimeo. He didn't say she's asleep in that context. He used a different word. It was the word cathudo. And cathudo meant being asleep, falling asleep, taking a nap. He is literally saying to these people, the exact word he uses is she's not dead, she's only napping. And they laugh, and rightfully so. And then Jesus goes and he does what he does. He raises this girl back to life. Because Jesus is so powerful, his life is so powerful that when he's around, death it just doesn't know what to do. She comes back to life. And it's amazing. This is an incredible miracle, but to me, it's not the most fascinating part of the story. To me, the fascinating part is when Jesus made the decision to keep going to the house. Because let's be honest, he didn't have to do that. If Jesus had said, Oh, I'm so sorry, I let me comfort you, let me pray with you, and and I wish you could have found me sooner. No one would have held Jesus at fault for this girl's death. No one would have blamed Jesus. It wouldn't have been a failure on his part. In fact, it was a big risk for him to go there. So why did Jesus decide to keep going? It was because Jesus lived with a different perspective. Because to Jesus, death isn't permanent. To God, death isn't permanent. I have a son that hates sleeping in the dark. In fact, I could just shorten that sentence by saying, I have a son that hates sleeping. Every night he sneaks into our room. I wake up and he's in our floor. This morning at 2 30, I woke up to Liam slowly pushing me over in my bed to crawl into bed with us. And I'm just tired and I wake up and I say, So what are you, what are you doing? He said, The floor is not comfortable. I'm like, I know. That's why we put a bed in your room, and every night we put you in it. Because we love you, we care about you. But he just he hates it, and his biggest thing is darkness. He does not like darkness. Darkness is a big deal to kids, right? Because kids see everything through a temporary perspective. That's why, if you have children, if you say the word ice cream, you better be pulling into a drive-thru to get ice cream, right? Because if you say ice cream and you mean three hours from now, after the grocery store and some other errands, we're gonna go get ice cream. No, no, no. No, it might as well be years later from their perspective. You gotta be careful because kids see everything through the lens of right now. That's how they see darkness. But as parents, we see it differently. We have we have a different perspective. We know that the sun is going to rise again. We know that the darkness is temporary, and so there is nothing to fear. That is the way that God sees death. His perspective is different, he has an eternal perspective because he's eternal. Jesus lived with that perspective, and and it's the reason that he had hope when other people felt despair. The more temporary your perspective, the more permanent your problems feel. The more temporary your perspective, the more permanent your issues, your problems, and your difficulties seem. But if you can live, if you can live with an eternal perspective, if your perspective can align with God's and you can see the world through his eyes, everything changes. Problems become opportunities. Impossible doesn't mean anything anymore. Mountains that stand in your way, they become movable objects. When you see life with an eternal perspective. And if we can live that way, if we decide to live that way, every area of life improves because your perspective affects every area of your life. So if you want to see a change in your finances, you need to change the way you look at money. You need to see it the way that Jesus sees it. You need to realize that God loves you, that everything you have, you have because he's given it to you. And if you live life viewing and using money the way God sees it, God will trust you with more. It's what he promises. If you need to see a change in your marriage or in a relationship with your parents or a sibling or a coworker, you name it, you need to see that person the way God sees them. You need to see them through the lens of God's perspective. Because if you can do that, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, anger and resentment and bitterness give way to patience and to love. Because you see them for more than who they are right now. You see them for who they can become. That's the way God sees them. If you need to see a change in your career, in your understanding of what you're meant to do, you need to see your life with God's perspective. So often we face these decisions and they're momentous for us, and we don't know what to do, and we're confused. But listen to what Proverbs chapter 3 says. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take. In other words, do not depend on your own perspective. Don't live that way. Seek His will. Find out what God's perspective is and live through it. And all the sudden, difficult decisions have clarity. Maybe what you need to change today is you. Maybe the biggest need you have is for internal change. You need to see yourself through the lens of God's perspective. You need to know what you look like to him. King David got a taste of that in Psalm 139, verse 13, he says, Oh, yes, you shaped me first inside, then out. You formed me in my mother's womb. I thank you, high God, because you're breathtaking. Body and soul, I am marvelously made. And we may read that and say, Wow, David was a confident guy. I don't look in the mirror much and go, marvelous. Absolutely marvelous. I usually look in the mirror and go, what happened? See, if you see yourself the way God sees you, marvelous is the right word. That's his perspective. It doesn't mean that there aren't things that need to change, absolutely. But if you can't see yourself through God's eyes, you don't have an accurate view of who you are. The more eternal our perspective, the less permanent our problems and our frustrations become. I love the way Paul said it in 2 Corinthians 14. He said, For our present troubles are small and they won't last very long, yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever. That's what life looks like when you live with an eternal perspective. So how do we do that? Because, like we said a few minutes ago, you can't just flip a switch. There's not a temporary to eternal switch in your brain. How do we change our perspective? How do we live with God's perspective? And really, we have two options. Very simple. Either something can happen to us that changes our perspective, or something can happen within us that changes our perspective. Sometimes things happen to us that are so big, that are so obvious, that have such an impact on us that our perspective immediately changes. We've all had that happen. I saw it happen with my wife a few months after we got married. We've been married a little over 10 years, and we'd only been married for a couple months, and Megan was having a bad day. You ever wake up and the day is bad from the moment you open your eyes? She was having one of those days. And I'm a guy, and so I think my job is to fix it always, even if I don't understand it. Why, as men do we try to fix things we don't understand, right? Because we don't understand women, it's proven. So I decided I'm gonna fix this. I have the solution. You just need to get out, you need to go out and to be part of the world today. And she said, No, I need to stay here and cry. And I said, No, that's not that's not gonna fix anything because I forgot she doesn't want it fixed, she just wants to feel things. A concept as a man, I don't understand. So I finally pull her out of the house, not physically, but I just kept persuading her and badgering her until she caved. And she went with me on some errands. Now I had told her, hey, I just have a few errands to run. It'll be really quick, really painless. What will get in, get out, will be good, but it did not go the way I planned. What was supposed to take a few minutes took hours. Megan's day was getting worse. I was a big part of the reason why. And we're walking outside after this horrible, horrible mess of a day. And Megan stops and with tears in her eyes, she looks at me and says, Justin, this day cannot get any worse. And I want you to understand something. I am not making this up, okay? You can ask Megan a second, maybe two seconds, after the words, this day cannot get any worse, came out of her mouth, a bird flew over and and dropped a present right on her shoulder. So I'm looking at my wife, and she says, This day can't get any worse, and then, like, boom, that happened. That happened. And I laughed because how could you not? I mean, what do you do? But her perspective changed. She knew that second that yes, indeed, the day could get worse. It was like God was up in heaven and, hey, Megan just said this day can't get any worse. Oh, it can. Boom, here's a bird. I mean, prove the existence of God to me. There's just no way the timing, there's science trajectory, and I mean, come on. Some things can happen to us that instantly change our perspective, but we do not want to be people that have to wait for something to happen to us to change. You do not want, you don't want God to have to send a bird to change your perspective, okay? God's preferred way of changing us is the inside out. He wants something to happen within us that creates change in the way we live, in the way we think, in the way we see things. And so, really, if you want your perspective to change, if you want more hope, more joy, more passion, what you really need to do today is repent. Now, when I say that word, I know that no one gets excited. Because we think repent and we picture someone screaming at us because we watch Disney movies or something stupid like that, or someone standing holding a sign, yelling at us, shaming us. And I'll be honest, one of the one of the things that makes me the most angry at religion is that it has robbed us of some beautiful words and some beautiful concepts. Because the word repent does not mean turn or burn. The word repent literally means rethink. Change the way you think. When Jesus said repent, for the kingdom of heaven is here, he was not yelling at people, he was not guilting people, he was challenging them to change the way they think, to change their perspective, to rethink. In fact, we have a word in our in our culture, the word pensive, it means thoughtful. Someone is pensive, they're thinking, pensive comes from the same root word as repent. It means rethink. We can do that. We can choose to have ourselves and our minds be open to God changing the way we think. That is what biblical repentance really is. In fact, Romans 12, 1 and 2, we read this last week, but it's a beautiful picture of what repentance really looks like. And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he's done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don't copy the behavior and the customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by what? By changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. And so I have a question for you today. Do you want to know God's will for your life? Do you want to know what God wants? Do you want to go where God leads? I'll be honest, certain times of my life, my answer would be no. I want to go where I want. But I have found that where I want to go is usually not a place that I really want to go, but where God has taken me. Those have been some places that I could never have imagined I could ever be. You want God's will for your life. I'll take it a step further. You need his will for your life because his will is what? It is pleasing, it is good, and it is perfect. And you experience it by changing the way you think. Changing your perspective allows God to change you. So let's be people that are willing to admit that perception is not reality. Let's be people that are willing to admit that sometimes our perspective is wrong. But let's be people that recognize the fact that God has a way for us to think and a way for us to look at life that brings hope when there is none. And it changes everything. If you can get your perspective to consistently align with God's, every single aspect of your life will improve. Because that's what your perspective affects. So let's repent this morning. Pray with me. Jesus, thank you so much for being our guide, for showing us the way, for being the example for us to follow. Jesus, thank you for giving us a picture of what it looks like to live with an eternal perspective. God, sometimes you know us, you love us, you're patient, you know that our problems, they feel permanent. We have a difficult time seeing past the issues in front of us, but if we can learn to see things from your point of view, that all changes, and we need that, God. All you ask us is to give you, to give you ourselves, to commit our lives to you. And so this week, Lord, help us do that. Help us remember every single day that we belong to you. If someone here hasn't made that decision, God, I pray they do right now, in this moment, that they just say to you in their heart, God, I'm yours. Change the way I think. But for all of us, God, we want to see life the way you see life. Because the way you see life, it's good. So, God, help us do whatever we can this week, whether it's spending time in your words so that we just become absorbed and knowledgeable about the way you think, the way you operate. God, help us spend time with people this week that help us be inspired, that help us see life the way you see life. God, make us people that think like you so we can live like you. And we pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen. Amen.