Amen. Well, good morning. How's everybody doing today? Well, hey, I want to start by by saying thank you so much for being here and thank you for take this how I mean it, for being guinea pigs in a sense, because today's our very first day of having a parking team. And uh and I want to say just uh ahead of time, thank you for for like being patient as we learn that and figure that out. Uh seven or eight years ago, when I first started here, we had a big Christmas Eve service, or it was eight, it was Easter something, and for some unknown reason, they put me in charge of the parking lot. This was like I was like 23 years old, and they're like, well, Justin doesn't have anything to do, so do the parking lot. And I was like, okay. And I got out there and I was directing people and I had no idea what I was doing. Um and it was it was hard, it was hard. And so uh one of the one of the great things about this church is that God brings us amazing people. And so to have people here that'll say, hey, we're gonna figure this out, we're gonna make it work, we're gonna make it flow really well, we're gonna tweak it each week until it's exactly what it needs to be, and listen to feedback and all that. Uh but what I love is that we have a church of people, you know, all of us as a family that are just excited about about whatever it takes to make room for more, to make room for more people to know Jesus. So thank you for that. Um and uh and and give us your feedback. You know, if you have any thoughts or anything like that, I'm I'm sure we do. Um always do. Feedback's good. Sometimes people use the prayer request box as a suggestion box. I'm not offended. God might be, but I'm fine. No. Um if it's your first time here, I want to start by saying welcome. Uh this is what his hands is all about. We exist to love people to Jesus. We believe that people best experience Jesus when they experience his love. And that's why we do everything we do. It's to help people get his love, grow in that love, and then be at a point where they can give that love away. And everything that happens here exists for those reasons. Uh, if you ever want more information about us, you can go to the info desk and get some info there. Uh, we also have a newcomer Q ⁇ A coming up in just a couple weeks, so listen up for that. It's a chance for you to come and ask whatever questions you have. We're we're open books and we're excited to tell you the story, tell you whatever you want to know about what God is doing here. I have a few really quick announcements before we jump into the message. I want to start by saying that home groups are coming up very soon. They're starting back next week, and that's really exciting because home groups are the best way to get to know people here at his hands. If this is your church, if this is your family, but you don't know many people here, you don't feel very connected, home groups changes that. And I think we grow best when we're surrounded by other people who are committed to helping us grow, to helping us move forward in our faith. And that's what happens in my home group. I'm blown away by the people I have that challenge me and pray for me. And um, we had a couple join our home group right before they got married, which was very smart because they had an amazing shower. Um, you know, it was like very strategic. Another couple joined ours and said, Hey, we just happen to be moving in three weeks. We're like, okay, we'll help you move. Smart, you know. Take advantage, take advantage of work the system. Um but home groups they're amazing. You can sign up today in the lobby at the Connect Desk, right in the main lobby. There's people there to help you get connected. We have groups for men, groups for women, groups for married couples, we have life stage groups, we have interest groups. There's definitely a group that meets at a time and at a place that is right for you. Uh, so take advantage of that, sign up today. Baptisms are coming up here in just a few weeks. And if you are ready to get baptized, you can sign up at the infodesk. We'll give you all the details there. We are excited about celebrating that moment in your life with you. We're excited about being part of that with you. And so if you're ready to go all in with Jesus to make that statement public, then let us know so we can be ready for that day for you. It's gonna be really exciting, and all of us to be here in a few weeks and celebrate with everyone, making that step in their relationship with God. I thought that was clapping, but it's not. And it's okay, you can clap. I was studying that as a child running in their footsteps, just clapping. That's what happened. Interesting. Um, high school students. Uh, our high school fall kickoff is this Wednesday night. And if you are a high school student or a parent of a high school student and you're not connected to our high school group, it's incredible. I mean, honestly, we have unbelievable teenagers, we have unbelievable leaders and mentors that pour into our students, and and and you need to be there. It's Wednesday at 7 o'clock over in the student area, the arena. It's on the right side of the building, over by the basketball court. So just be there at 7 and uh and get ready to make some friends you've you've never known you have, because they're they're incredible, incredible people. Uh, I want to talk for just one second about date nights. This is something I'm really excited about. Uh, if you were here back in March, we did a series on marriage, and we talked about how, as a church, we want to be committed to helping all of us in that aspect of our lives. Marriage, relationships, if you're if you're single and dating, same thing. And one of the things that helps so much when we are in a relationship and we have kids, those of us that have kids that have grown, we can remember back to this point, is just to have a night where you can go out and have your kids taken care of. And sometimes it's hard to schedule those nights. There's a lot of logistics there. So we did three date nights back in March. You brought your kids here at no cost, you dropped them off, you went and had a date with your spouse, a boyfriend, girlfriend, and then you came back and picked up your kids and they had a blast, and it was awesome for three straight weeks. We're gonna be doing that every single first Friday of the month in September, October, November, December. Um, so that's a ways off, it's several weeks away, but I want you to put it on your calendar. So if you have children and you need a date night, you need a night off, I don't know, um, just sign up online. We'll have those sign-ups start up in a couple weeks, and you'll bring them here every first Friday, and we'll watch your kids. They'll have a blast, and you can have some time to invest in your relationships because that is so important, and we're really excited as a church just to offer that and to do that. So uh put that on your calendars. Last thing I want to say before we pray and jump into the message is just a big thank you to everybody who's helping us out financially. You are such a generous group of people. You guys who serve and you give and you pray, you do all these things that make this church possible. And for the last few weeks, I've been sharing with all of us what happens when we give. What are the results of our generosity? You know, if you're new, we don't pass a plate or anything like that. There's four columns at the back of the room where you can give. You can give online at hishandschurch.com. There's a lot of different ways to do it. It's an opt-in thing for all of us, but when we all do this, when we commit to giving a percentage of what we have to a cause that's so much greater than ourselves, amazing things happen. And we give 10% away back to the community. I've shared some stories the last few weeks about some incredible results because of that, that 10%, because we've been able to give away almost $80,000 this year to people in need, which is really, really cool. It's really exciting. But but I want to make sure that as we talk about all the things outside of our church that are happening as a result of our generosity, we don't lose touch with what happens here. Because what happens here is it's unbelievable. Scott Case is a volunteer that helps out in our kids' area in our elementary school. He's taught over there for five years. He owns a business, he's very successful, but he has given up every other Sunday for five years to teach our kids. And my son is now in the group that Scott's in, that he teaches, and my son absolutely loves it. I got a text from Scott after the first service a couple weeks ago saying that nine kids accepted Jesus as their savior at the first service. Nine kids. And yeah, that's exciting. But Scott tells me that that one of them happened to be my son Liam. And so I was all excited, and I went to talk to Liam because Liam, he's grown up in church, he knows who Jesus is. We read Bible stories at night. I mean, we pray with him. He he really loves God, he really loves Jesus. So I just wanted to hear him, in his words, explain what was going through his head because we haven't had this moment with him yet where we've really said, okay, do you really get it? You know, we don't want to force that on him. And so uh so I said, Hey Liam, so Mr. Scott told me that you raised your hand and accepted Jesus. And Liam said, Yeah, if you raise your hand, they give you a free Bible. So, you know, that's my boy. That's my boy, five years old, he's finding loopholes and all kinds of things, he's working it. But uh, you know, in the second service that day, Scott said we had 15 kids that accepted Jesus. And I'll tell you, this is just a bragging on Scott because we have such amazing people. All those Bibles, Scott buys those and and he gives them to the kids constantly, and so we've given away hundreds and hundreds of Bibles to kids, and it's exciting that they they want that. It's exciting that you know my son's willing to work the system to get a Bible. That's a good thing. Um but but all jokes aside, one of the biggest, the biggest reason that I give. I love what happens outside of the church. I love that we support a lot of ministries and charities. I love that. But every single Sunday, every single week, there are people, young and old, children, teenagers, those of us in the early stages of adulthood, those of us that are halfway through our lives or past that, whatever, every single Sunday, people are falling in love with Jesus. People are finding who God really is, they're experiencing God in their life, and their life is changing, and that is because of you. That is because you give, you serve, you pray. So thank you. Keep it up, keep being faithful and trust God with it and just watch what happens. Watch the result. Okay, let's pray. Let's jump into the message this morning. Jesus, thank you so much for this incredible group of people. God, thank you for for all the volunteers that we have today. God, thank you for everyone helping out with the kids right now, for our welcome team, our coffee team, our our ushers, the people that stay after to clean up the trash. Thank you for our brave souls in the parking lot who are willing to be the first ones to figure this whole thing out, God. And thank you for giving us a church that is so worth inviting people to that we have to figure out a solution for the parking lot. That's awesome. God, I pray that you would speak to us now. I pray that you would share with us what you have for us, that you would show us who we really are. And I pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen. Amen. Well, if you were here last Sunday, we started a brand new series called Who Do You Think You Are? It's not an accusatory question. We're not saying, hey, who do you think you are? What gives you the right? Nothing like that. This is a real question, though. Who do you think you are? I have a good friend who's who's been a mentor in my life for the last 10 years almost. And he told me several years ago, maybe five years ago, he said, Justin, there is nothing more ins uh more dangerous than insecurity. Nothing more dangerous than insecurity. And I thought that was a pretty bold statement. Because there's a lot of dangerous things in the world, right? Insecurity, is it really that dangerous? And so I kind of questioned him on it. So, what do you mean by that? He said, Well, think about it. How many of the mistakes that you've made in your life, how many of your most regrettable decisions, came out of a place of insecurity? Came from you trying to compensate for the insecurity you were dealing with. You weren't comfortable with who you were, you didn't feel like you were successful enough, authoritative enough, whatever. And you tried to do something to compensate for that, and it went poorly. And as I looked at my life, I'm like, yeah, that I can see that. I can see that in so many of my decisions, that insecurity is a very dangerous thing. And by definition, insecurity is just not knowing who we are, it's not being confident with who we are right now. So we're asking that question: who do we think we are? Because our understanding of ourselves, it informs every decision in our lives, it affects the people we choose to be our friends, it affects the scope and the size of our dreams and our goals and our aspirations, who we believe we are, it determines so much. So this question is vital. It's vital because I believe we can never become who we're meant to be if we don't know who we are. How do we get to a destination if we don't realize where we're starting from? This question is crucial. And if you've ever lived believing that there has to be more for your life, that your life is meant to be more than what you're experiencing right now, that maybe you're meant to be more than who you are right now, it's because you are meant for more. God says this in Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10. We are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. You are, according to God, his masterpiece, the best thing he's ever created. And you have a purpose for your life. You are meant for more. You are meant for great things, for good things that God has planned for you. We can't know what those things are if we don't know who we are, so we're asking this question. And we can answer it in a variety of different ways. We can come to conclusions about who we really are in so many different ways. We can look, we can look inward, right? We can look within and answer that question for ourselves. We can do some soul searching, some self-reflection, and it's a really good thing to do soul searching, self-reflection. It's great. Sometimes you hear this phrase used where people go to find themselves. We've heard that. That would not work for me. I can barely find my keys in my wallet every single morning, and so if I have to find myself, it's not gonna work. There have been people that have had amazing experience with that. Um, Henry David Thoreau is a famous author from the 1850s, and and he was a thinker in American culture, and he went for two years. Two years he went to the to live in the woods at Walden Pond, he wrote about it, and it was a time of self-discovery. He found himself at Walden Pond over the course of two years living there remotely away from everyone else. Two years. I get 10 paid vacation days a year. So I do not have the option of finding myself in the way that Thoreau did. I need a different approach. We can look outside of ourselves, we can go to other people. And man, there are people in my life that have noticed things about me that I would never have noticed had they not brought those things up. It's very valuable to have people in our lives that have the permission to tell us the truth. Because they will help us see things we need to work on. Yes, but but if we rely on those people, even people we love and trust, to be the ones that define who we are, we might be disappointed. We might find that their opinion of us maybe isn't as high as it should be, that their ideas about who we can really be isn't quite as lofty as we might hope. And I know exactly why that is, or at least I know why that's true. I can prove it here, just let me ask a question. I want you to be honest. You can raise your hand if it applies to you. Anyone feel overvalued this week? Anyone? Anyone at work this week going, oh man, everyone I work for, they just think I'm so intelligent, they think I'm so capable and so talented, everyone believes in me. Everyone thinks I can do anything I put my mind to, and I'm just overpaid and you know, I need a pay cut and a demotion because I'm overvalued. Right? Anyone overvalued this week? You're dealing with that? No? How about how about overappreciated? Anyone had a week where you were just massively overappreciated? Everyone in your family notices all the little things you do for them that make their life better. And they don't just notice them, they acknowledge it. They thank you. You're tired of all the thank yous that you're getting. Because you are over-appreciated by the people in your life. Anyone? One person. Everyone, shut up. Stop saying thank you. I'm sick of it. That's what's if I asked for a show of hands about those of us who felt undervalued or underappreciated, I'm guessing there would be a drastic difference. And that's just because people are people. I I undervalue people all the time, not on purpose. I underappreciate people that I love. I fail to recognize all the things that make them who they are, all the things that they contribute to my lives. I do that because I'm a person. It's why Jesus said, Don't look at the the splinter in someone else's eye until you remove the log from your own. Jesus recognized that we have a tendency to look at other people, to see their negatives, to see their problems, to look past our own. And as a result of that, we underappreciate people we love. We undervalue them sometimes. Not on purpose, we just do it. I learned that in my marriage. I have an amazing wife who I have definitely overlooked at times, things that she does. And I'm blessed to have a wife that is so good at reminding me of the things that she does. Because otherwise I'd miss it so often. The first year in our marriage, Megan was a teacher. She decided to teach, and I thought that was strange because, in my opinion, we were getting out of school. School was a chapter in our life that was now over, and that was a good thing. And why would you want to go back to school, right? I wanted to take the corporate world by storm. I was working at this marketing company, I was gonna be some hot shot executive or something like that in my mind, and and I thought that was that was the right approach. The school thing that Megan was doing, it was silly. Then summer happened, and she had two months off. Two months off. And I did not. I mean, I had I had my 10 vacation days, I used some of it the holidays, we were looking forward to having like a three or four-day vacation or something like that, but she had two months off. And at first I was fine with it. I'd leave work, I'd say, Where are you, what are you gonna do today, honey? And she'd say, Oh, I'm just gonna go to the pool or shop or something. I'd be like, Awesome, cool, yeah, that's great. Three weeks in though, three weeks in, I was, I was resentful. I mean, I was resentful. I was I was walking out every day mad that she was just asleep, you know, and relaxing. We didn't have kids yet, so she had all this time, and I let it affect me in some really, really negative ways, kind of developed this victim thinking as a result of that, and I started to, and you're gonna see where this is going really fast. I said to myself one day, I was like, you know, because we both work, we have divided up the household responsibilities, and rightly so. We both work, we both contribute, but it's summer, and I'm still working and she's off, so wouldn't it be fair if just for the summer, okay, just for the summer, she took on some of that stuff that I'm supposed to do because she's got so much more free time. That that would just be so nice. Laundry was one of the things I was doing, and I'm like, oh man, if she could do the laundry, she has all the time, she's she's got the summer off. So I decide, because I'm wise, to have a conversation with her. And and I I've always believed I'm pretty good with words. So here's here's what I said with confidence. I said, honey, I think there's a bit of an imbalance in terms of the weight that we're each pulling at home right now. Right. Right. And Megan said, oh really? And so I then began to explain my perspective. Very, just you know, I was back, I was defensive at that point. I'm like, nah, just hear me out, just just for the summer. Don't, I mean, don't you think if you if if I was off, I would totally do all your stuff. I would obviously do that out of the kindness of my heart. She didn't say much to me for the next like 36 hours, and um and the next day I get home from work and I open the front door, and there's a sticky note on the wall right in front of the front door, and I thought, well, that's odd, and I walk up to it, it's bright pink, couldn't miss it. And on that sticky note was a statement by Megan letting me know something that she does around the house that I fail to notice. So I got the message and I walked into the kitchen to get something to eat, and on the refrigerator was another sticky note, reminding me that she buys the groceries and she's the one that plans our meals, and I don't have to worry about what we're having for dinner, or I don't have to think about the whole week. What are we gonna do? Because she takes care of that. And I'm like, okay, yep, yep, missed that one too. I opened the refrigerator, and there's a sticky note inside the refrigerator. It says, I clean the fridge. And she was right, I never clean the fridge. My version of cleaning the fridge is eating the things in the fridge, right? But Megan actually wipes things down and organizes things, and when I shut the fridge, I had this terrifying thought. I just thought to myself, how many of these are there? Right? Because Megan was not home, she was away, and so I start going through her house and I'm scouring, and they are everywhere. They are everywhere, they're in every room, they're on every surface. There was one spinning around on the ceiling fan and said, I dust the fan. And so I'm panicked at this moment in time, right? Because I know I'm in serious trouble. And Megan calls me and I pick up the phone, and you know how those conversations go. I said, Hey, honey. She said, Hi, are you home? Yeah, yeah, I am. She said, Did you get my notes? Yeah, no, I I got I got all 72 of your notes. You left. Very thorough. Uh and then she said, uh, you still feel like I'm pulling you're pulling too much weight? I said, no. She said, What are you doing right now? I said, Laundry. Right? And I I still do the laundry and I love it. I love it so much. It's my favorite thing in the world. It smells so fresh. Every day. And see, here's here's the truth. I I I totally underappreciated my wife. I totally did. I missed so many things that she did. And I love her, and I believe I love her more than anyone else in the world. I love my wife. I think so highly of her. She is so capable, she is smart, she hears from God. I'm this person that loves her so much, and yet I missed so many things. I undervalued her. And if she allowed me to be the person that most informs her understanding of who she is, she'd be in trouble. I can't do that. I can't answer that question for her. Not in a way that puts her where she really needs to be. See, I believe the only person that can do that is God. So what if we what if we look purely to God to inform our understanding of who we are? What if we said, God, you tell me who I am? I mean, if the only way to know. Who we're meant to be is to understand who we're created to be. The only person who can tell us that is the one who created us. And like it said in Ephesians, He created us to do good things that He planned for us. If He's the one that made us, if He's the one that's planned it, He's the one we need to ask, Who do you think I am? And what we find in Scripture time and time again is that when God speaks into someone's life, when God tells someone who they really are, it is always, always God lifting them higher. You do not find stories, I mentioned this last week, you don't find stories of God saying, Hey, here's who you are, and people saying, Hey, God, I think you've overlooked some things. Here's 72 sticky notes that uh I want to bring to your attention. You don't see that. What you see is God saying, Hey, here's who you are in my eyes, and people going, Whoa, you have vastly overestimated me. But God is always right. God lifts people up, He tells them who they are, and it's always more, it is always greater, it is always better than they think they are. A great experience of that, a great, a great example of that, rather, is the story of Gideon. Gideon is an amazing story. It's one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I learned it as a young kid. It probably has some emotional impact because of that. It's an amazing story, though. Gideon is an awesome guy. He's got a great, a great story. It starts in Judges chapter six. So I just want to read this. Judges 6, 1. The Israelites did evil in the Lord's sight, so the Lord handed them over to the Midianites for seven years. The Midianites were so cruel that the Israelites made hiding places for themselves in the mountains, the caves, and the strongholds. Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, marauders from Midian, from Amalek, and the people of the East would attack Israel, camping in the land and destroying crops as far away as Gaza. They left the Israelites with nothing to eat, taking away all the sheep, the goats, the cattle, and the donkeys. These enemy hordes coming in with their livestocks and their tents were as thick as locusts, they arrived on droves of camels too numerous to count, and they stayed there until the land was stripped bare. So Israel was reduced to starvation by the Midianites, and then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help. This is a recurring theme in the Old Testament. The Israelites would walk away from God, they would worship him, then walk away from him, and forget about him. And when they walked away from God, they were also walking away from the promises God had made them promises of protection, promises of security, and then they would be in trouble. They'd cry out to God. God never forgot them, he never abandoned them, he doesn't do that, and so he would come back. And we see that happening here. The next verse says, When they cried out to the Lord because of Midian, the Lord sent a prophet to the Israelites, and he said, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. I brought you up out of slavery in Egypt. I rescued you from the Egyptians and from all who oppressed you. This is God leaving his sticky notes. I drove out your enemies, I gave you their land, I told you, I'm the Lord your God. You must not worship the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live, but you have not listened to me. Then the angel of the Lord came and sat beneath the great tree at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash, the clan of Abusur. Gideon, son of Joash, was threshing wheat at the bottom of a winepress to hide the grain from the Midianites. This is where we meet Gideon. And he is threshing wheat in a winepress. Now, you do not have to be an archaeologist or a historian or a biblical scholar to go, I wonder if you're supposed to thresh wheat in a wine press. Okay, the answer is no. You threshed wheat, you threshed wheat on a threshing floor. Threshing floors were these huge, wide-open spaces where they would take the wheat and they would thresh it, meaning they would throw it in the air and wind would come and blow the chaff away so that only the wheat remained. That's how they that's how they handled that. You had to do that in the wide open places. Threshing floors were not places you could hide. If you were threshing wheat, everyone would see you, everyone would know. And Gideon doesn't want to be seen. He's hiding from the Midianites, he's afraid, and so he goes to a wine press to thresh wheat. Winepresses were holes in the ground. They would dig out holes in rock because when they crushed the grapes to make wine, the wine would drip down into the holes, and that's where it would be stored. So Gideon is literally hiding in a hole in the ground. That is what he's doing when the angel of the Lord walks up to them. It's not Gideon hanging out, and the angel walks up to him and they're standing side by side. Gideon is in a hole in the ground, and the angel of the Lord walks up and looks in the hole. And what is the angel gonna say? Hey man, what are you doing in the wine press? You're not making wine. The angel gonna point out the cowardice inside of Gideon, the fear, the lack of faith, whatever it might be, that's not what happens. This is what the angel of the Lord says to Gideon. Verse 12. Then the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, Mighty hero, the Lord is with you. Mighty hero. Here is a man hiding in a hole, terrified of the Midianites, and the angel of the Lord, God's messenger, says, Ah, you're the one I'm looking for. You're the mighty hero I've come to talk to. Gideon does not see himself as a mighty hero, and we see this in an exchange he has just a few verses later, verse 14. Then the Lord turned to him and said, Go with the strength you have and rescue Israel from the Midianites. I am sending you. But Lord Gideon replied, How can I rescue Israel? My clan is the weakest in the whole tribe of Manasseh, and I am the least in my entire family. Then the Lord said to him, I will be with you, and you will destroy the Midianites, as if you were fighting against one man. Gideon's got a really good answer as to why he cannot be this mighty hero, as to why there's definitely a mistake. He's gotten the wrong guy. He says, I'm the weakest in my clan and my family, and my family is the weakest in the whole tribe of Manasseh. What Gideon did not mention is that Manasseh was the weakest tribe in Israel. Manasseh had territory that was on the east side of the Jordan River, which made it very difficult for them to defend themselves because they did not have a body of water or some landmass, a mountain or anything like that to use as a defense. They were exposed. And they just happened to be the tribe that was hit the hardest by the Midianites, so they have been weakened to the point of disaster. Manasseh is weak. And Gideon says, I am the weakest in my family. My family is the weakest in Manasseh, and Manasseh is the weakest in all of Israel. I am the weakest of the weakest of the weakest. I am the last person that anyone should choose to lead Israel. Gideon's saying, I'm the bottom string. Anytime I hear the story of Gideon, I think back to a friend of mine in college, one of my best friends. He was one of my groomsmen. His name's John. John and I went to William Jewel College, William Jewel Cardinals. It's okay. You've never heard of the school. It's all right. I hadn't either until I went there. William Jewel's a really small college in Kansas City. I checked it out online today. The enrollment's the same as it was when I was there. 1,043 students at William Jewel College. Very small school. And William Jewell had a football team. Okay? We were not a football powerhouse by any stretch of the imagination. Very few 1,000 student schools are. That's smaller than your average high school. Okay? So John was on the football team. I want you to think about this for a moment. A thousand students. It takes about a hundred guys to field a football team. That meant that 10% of the entire student population was on the football team. Gets better though. 43% of the population was male. That means one in every four guys was on the football team. Twenty-five percent of the guys that went to our school played on the football team. And I'll tell you from experience, 25% of the guys that went to our school did not deserve to be on a college football team. They did not look like a college football team. They may have made junior varsity at the local high school, maybe, but it was rough. Football games were rough unless you were the other team. If you were the other team, your fans were there to watch a massacre. If you were a William Jewell student, you did not go. Because it was unwatchably bad. It was so bad. And John was on the team. He was on the team and he didn't play. He wasn't first string, he wasn't second string. I don't know how many strings there were, but John was the last string. And John, if you're listening to this later, I wouldn't have even made the team that needed 25% of the guys on campus to feel the team. I wouldn't have even made the cut, so he was way ahead of me. But John was bottom string. He didn't get to play. I didn't go to the games, but he'd come back to the room after each game and I'd say, hey man, did you play today? And he'd be like, No, didn't get in the game. This happened over and over again. And then one day, John comes in and he looks a little different. And so I'm thinking, okay, maybe he got in the game. I said, John, something happened today. Did you play? He said, Well, I was standing on the sidelines, coach calls my name. And so he's excited, right? He thinks this is his Rudy moment. Some of you are too young to know what that means. Just Google Rudy later. You'll know. Rudy, he's gonna have this moment where he is the underdog that's gonna come in and win the game and get hoisted up and everyone's gonna celebrate him. He thinks it's his moment. He runs up to the coach, ready to go, right? He's standing at attention. He's like, Alright, coach, what do you need me to do? And the coach says, I need your helmet. John says, Excuse me. The coach said, Yeah, one of the starters' helmets broke, and we looked at the equipment roster, and you have the same size helmet. So I need you to take your helmet off and give it to him. So John did that. And you know, yeah, you can say, Oh, I mean, he ran out for the team. It's, you know, he kept just teasing. John, he does that. As if there, there's like no chance of him playing with the helmet. Now he's sitting there without a helmet, and there's zero chance. And so John was just like dejected. And here's the thing, though, we didn't win that game or any other games. And so maybe, maybe the coach should have taken a book out of the Bible or a page out of the Bible and put John in. Who knows? It couldn't have hurt because it was bad. It was bad. John was he was bottom string. He was an awesome guy. He was a great guy, but he was not the one that when you needed to win the game in football, you'd say, hey, put him in. He was a killer ping pong player. I do want to say that. Killer ping pong player. Unbeatable in ping pong. Gideon was bottom string. Gideon is the last guy anyone would choose, and yet God says to Gideon, You are mighty. You are mighty. And God was right. Gideon went on to lead Israel against the Midianites. They were victorious against impossible odds. Gideon has gone down as one of the greatest leaders, military leaders in Israel's history. He was this mighty hero that God saw in him. He didn't realize it. No one else would have realized it. He would not have won a vote for someone to lead the army, but God knew who he was, and God says, You are mighty. I wonder how many of us think about ourselves and would say, I'm mighty. Who do you think you are? Oh, I'm I am mighty. And let's be honest, I mean, the angel of the Lord has never shown up in my life in person and said, hey, you're a mighty hero. So maybe mighty isn't for everybody. Maybe mighty is something that a few people are called to be, but are all of us mighty? Is that something that all of us share? Is that a shared identity, or is it only meant for a select few? I believe, I believe that scripture makes it very clear that all of us, all of us, are called by God, are chosen by God, and equipped by God to be mighty. Romans chapter 8 is one of the most beautiful chapters in all of the Bible. If you've never read it, you need to, it'll take you five minutes. Start to finish, it's amazing. At the end of it, Paul, who wrote this, he is, he's going on this tirade, he's impassioned. And it reads like a battle speech. And he's talking about all the things that all the believers have had to endure to bring the message of Jesus to the world. All the things they've had to go through, all the resistance they faced, and he's telling everyone that they're never gonna stop, that nothing's ever gonna defeat the mission of Jesus. And his words are powerful. Romans chapter 8, and we'll start in verse 31. You have to understand, you have to read this with passion because it's what he's doing. He's so excited. What then shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? If he who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, along with Jesus, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus, who died more than that, who was raised to life, is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword, as it is written, for your sake we face death all day long. We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. No. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love that God has that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Come on. Nothing can separate us from God. And he uses this incredible word in the Greek that gets translated more than conquerors. He says, We are more than conquerors. And it's the word hyper-Nikomen. Hyper is the first part, it's where we get the word hyper from. And what it means is a lot. Growing up, teachers always told my parents, Justin is a good student, and then that was always that was always a segue. It was never a period at the end of that sentence. It was always the start. Justin is a good student, but he is a little hyper. And what they meant was Justin is a lot. He's a lot to deal with. And I was, and still am, and it's okay. That's what hyper means, right? If you have a child who is hyper, you know what it means. That they're they're a lot. That's what hyper is. It means exceedingly, it means overwhelmingly. The next word Nikomen in the Greek, it means conqueror. So what Paul actually said is we are hyper conquerors. That means when we conquer something, when we have victory, it is overwhelming, it is exceeding victory. Are you mighty? God's word says you are. God's word says that you are a hyper-conqueror, that you are meant to have overwhelming and exceeding victory in your life through Jesus Christ. You are mighty. And this is this is so important for us to realize that this cannot fall on deaf ears because the relevance of God telling us that we are more than conquerors, the relevance of God saying that we are mighty, is that is that's the opposite, opposite, can't be any far further from the message that our culture gives us. This is as counter-cultural of a message we will ever hear that we are mighty. We do not live in a culture that tells us we are mighty. We don't. We live in a culture that sells us an identity of powerlessness. It's just really good at selling. So it uses some great semantics to make us feel like the powerlessness it's offering is actually power, but it's not. Jesus saying, You are mighty. God's saying, you are powerful, you are more than a conqueror. It is so countercultural to the world we live in. I'm 32 years old, so I started kindergarten in 1989. Okay? 1989, it's a good year. And I used to hear people say things, people much older than me, they would say things like, we need to bring prayer back to school, we need to bring God back to school. I never knew a time when that was a thing. Anyone from my generation, that school, that was never a thing. It was completely separate from God, separate from anything related to God. So for me, that was just what school was. It wasn't something that needed to be restored. That's just all I ever knew. And the predominant worldview that affected the school system I grew up in and our political system and our culture for the last 50, 60 years is a worldview called secular humanism. Uh, if you don't know what secular humanism is, you actually do. Don't worry, you you know you may not know the term, but you know all that it's about. If you Google it later, after you Google Rudy, priorities, okay? Rudy first, secular humanism, it'll be a very wide-ranging day of research for you. Um you'll read about it and you'll go, oh yeah, I totally know that. That's that's what our culture tells us all the time. That's it's become ingrained in our culture. Secular humanism, just to boil it down to a statement, basically says this you don't need God or anything related to God to be all that you can be as a human being. That was one of the driving ideas behind removing God from schools and from government, all this stuff. We don't need God or a belief in God or anything related to God to be who we need to be as people. So we can get all that stuff out of the way because we can just be all we're meant to be without God. That sounds very promising. That sounds like it has a high idea of humanity. We can be all we are meant to be without God. The problem, though, is that the all we're meant to be is not very much. In that worldview, all we're meant to be as people, it's not much. It's not high, it's not humanity being lifted to a place it's never been before. It's kind of as low as it can go. I'll give you an example. Romans chapter 8 begins with this, so we've read the beginning and the end. You've got to fill in the blank later today. It's a great, great chapter. Romans 8 begins by saying this, verse 1. So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. Okay, the power of God in your life through Jesus, when you accept him, when you say, God, my life is yours, God makes his home in your heart. Okay, it's it's it's spiritual, it's powerful, it's real, and the power of God becomes active in your life, and you're gonna start to change. It's very frustrating. Romans 6. 5 and 6 says, Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ. So that sin might lose its power in our lives, we are no longer slaves to sin. One of the lessons taught in Scripture is that we have a nature. And it's a sin nature. That word sin gets a bad rap. All sin means, the word itself means missing the mark. It's an archery term in the Greek. Sin just means not hitting the bullseye, Jesus hit the bullseye, and if that's the bullseye, I am nowhere near it. That's what sin is. And the Bible says that we have a nature for sin, that naturally, apart from God, on our own, we will we will sin. We will choose selfishness, we will become greedy, we will focus on what we want versus what other people want. That is our nature. And the Bible says, it's kind of audacious, it's not very PC, the Bible says we are a slave to our sin nature. The power of God in our life, the power of Jesus, can come into our life and free us from that, that's the change that starts to happen. We become freed, we get a new nature. But without that, we are a slave to our sin nature. Now, if I went onto the street and I conducted an informal survey and I walked up to people and said, Hey, just want your opinion. Agree or disagree with this statement. I'm a slave to my sin nature. Overwhelmingly, in our society, people would say, No, no, I'm not a slave to my sin nature. Honestly, that's offensive. How dare you say such a thing? So I might I might tweak the language a little bit, because I don't want to I don't want to offend people on purpose or anything like that. I might say, hey, how about this? Agree or disagree with this statement. I am powerless against my nature. I am powerless. I am a powerless human being when it comes to my nature. And again, overwhelmingly, I believe, from just the world I see, that people would say, no, no, that's wrong. I am not powerless, I can quit anytime I want, right? I'm not powerless against my nature. People would say that's that's that's horrible, you can't say that. But what if I what if I change the language just a little bit more into something more familiar? Things we hear all the time. If I walked up to someone and said, hey, agree or disagree with this statement, I cannot change the way I feel. I think you'd have a lot more people going, yeah, yeah, I think that's true. You really can't change how you feel. What if I said this, hey, agree or disagree with this statement? I can't control who I'm attracted to. I think you'd have a huge majority of people perhaps say, yeah, you can't control who you're attracted to. That's out of your control. What if I said, hey, I'm compelled to follow my heart? I have to follow my heart. That that's in Disney songs, so it must be true. Okay. People would say, yes, you gotta follow your heart, man. You if your heart's telling you, you gotta obey your heart, follow your heart. What if I said, hey, agree or disagree with this statement? I can't change who I am. I can't change who I am. Overwhelmingly, people would say, Yeah, spot on, I can't change who I am. It is I can't change the way I feel, I can't control who I'm attracted to, I have to follow my heart, and I can't change who I am. Is that any different than saying I am a slave to my nature? It's not. It's the exact same thing. Thing. It's just that the semantics of our culture and our world twists things, and those statements sound very noble. They're not just accepted as true, they're celebrated. When in reality, the theme behind every single one of those statements is powerlessness. I am powerless. I mean, it's crazy because it's become the dominant outcry of our culture right now. It's a culture that screams with pride. I can't. I can't change who I am. I can't control who I'm attracted to. I can't change the way I feel. I can't control my heart. I can't. That is the battle cry of our culture. I can't. We celebrate that, but but God would look at us and he would say, Who told you that? Who gave you such a low view of yourself that you believe you're powerless? You're more than a conqueror? I did not create you to be ruled by your emotions. I didn't create you to be dominated by your thoughts, by your desires. You are not at the mercy of your feelings. Who told you you can't change? Who told you you can't control something? Who told you you can't affect the way you feel? This is what God says about us when he creates us in Genesis 1.26. Look at the view that God has of you, that God has of humanity. He says, Let us make human beings in our image to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and all the animals that scurry along the ground. In other words, everything. So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them. Then God blessed them and he said, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground. God created us and he says, I made you to rule. I made you to reign. You are meant to be subject to me and nothing else. So don't say you can't. Don't say you can't control yourself. Don't say you can't change the way you feel. Don't say you can't affect your emotions. You are not made to be ruled by those things. I created you to rule and to reign. You are powerful, you are mighty. Do not buy a worldview, do not buy an idea of powerlessness, because it's not who you're meant to be. That's who we are. Personally, there's nothing that breaks my heart more than seeing people settle for an identity that is so much less than the one that God has for them. And the crazy thing about our world sometimes is that people believe that God is the one that wants to push us down, to make us less, to make us subject, but God is not the one saying we can't. God is not the one saying we're weak. Because that's what those messages say. I'm powerless, I am too weak to control my feelings, my emotions, my heart. I can tell my heart to shut up because my heart has told me to do some stupid stuff. Like tell my wife she needs to pull more weight around the house. That's my heart talking. My heart's an idiot. What would happen? What would happen if just the people in this room decided to live like the mighty people we are? Took ownership of our real identity, the more than conquerors identity that God gives us, and said, you know what, I'm not going to be ruled by my emotions. I'm not going to be held captive by my feelings. The order does not go God, the world, and us. The order that God established was God, us, the world. And that's not prideful. It's prideful if we're the ones trying to overtake the order that God created, but God actually said, no, no, I made you to reign, to reign over the world you live in, and to reign over yourself. I will give you power. You are mighty. See, Jesus, he calls us to surrender. He loves us. He calls us to let down our guard and to surrender our lives to him, to his love, to his power, to his mercy, to his grace, to his knowledge, to everything he has for us. He says, Look, I love you. You need me. Surrender. And we surrender to him and we let him in. He changes everything. And I joked a few moments ago that it's annoying. Sometimes it is because he messes with stuff, not in the order you want him to. Like I have a list of things I want God to work on in a certain order, and he keeps changing the list. But he's always right. And he changes us from the inside out. He makes us into a person we can never be without him. And he calls us, he says, surrender to me. And if anyone here hasn't surrendered to Jesus, stop. Here's why that's so powerful. Because when you surrender to Jesus, you never have to surrender again. We surrender to God, and then we never surrender to anything else. The world says you have to surrender to your emotions, you have to surrender to what's popular, you have to surrender to what's going on in culture, you have to surrender, surrender, surrender. Just go with it, stop fighting it, just go with it, accept a position of weakness and powerlessness. But God says, no, no, no, surrender to me and then never surrender again. Because I will make you mighty. That means you are mightier. You are mightier than the way you're wired. You are mightier than your addictions. You are mightier than your problems, you're mightier than your relationship issues, you're mightier than your financial struggles, you're mightier than every circumstance that comes at you. Those things are not meant to rule you. You are meant to rule them. I'm not saying life is easy. I'm not saying things don't happen to us that seem like they're way too big for us to handle. But we are mighty. Last night we had a celebration here for a man named Bill Patterson. I don't know if Bill's here right now, but Bill's amazing. He's one of my favorite people. I don't know if he's somewhere. Bill's awesome. If you know Bill, and so I know I've shared Bill's story before, but I was just so reminded of this last night because if you want to talk about mighty, more than a conqueror, Bill embodies that. You wouldn't think about it if you met him for the first time and you didn't know his story. See, Bill, five years ago, was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. His God story is on our website, it's a great story. Five years ago, the doctors told him five years ago, you have six months to live. Five years ago. So Bill went into remission, it was amazing. Stage four brain cancer is too large to operate. He went to remission, cancer gone, but then it came back. He went to remission again. Because he's a fighter. And see, the amazing thing about Bill is that it wasn't a situation where everyone was trying to encourage Bill, where he was freaking out. And man, if he had, fine, rightly so. I mean, who can blame him? To hear news like that. It wasn't like Bill was in the depths of despair and everyone was saying, No, no, man, come on, God can do anything, and there's you have great doctors, and we're blessed to live in this country. I mean, come on, keep your chin up. It was the opposite. Everyone else was like panicking, and Bill was the one saying, guys, God's got this. I mean, my favorite moment is when the doctor looked at Bill, and keep in mind, he had just woken up from brain surgery. And the doctor looked at Bill and said, You have six months to live. And Bill said, You don't know that. You don't control that. Come on. Bill said, If if if six months is when God says I go, fine, but that's not up for you to decide. That is up to God. And I believe God has more time for me. Bill volunteers in our office uh twice a week. If you're on the nursery team, Bill has called you. He's the one that calls you and says, Hey, are you coming this Sunday or not? He's that's Bill, right? He's awesome. He works in the office and he volunteers and he does whatever he's asked to do. And it's it's funny because Bill's quiet and he's very easy to sort of not pay attention to because he just sort of puts his head down and works. But every once in a while I'll be in the office and I'll turn and where I sit in the office is just faces Bill a lot and I'll get a glimpse of Bill. And I just I get blown away by the power of the man that I'm looking at. This man who has stared something so intense in the eyes and said, I am mightier than you. Because I have the power of God in my life. It's not his own strength, it's not his own ability, it's not pride, it's actually the opposite. It's complete humility and trust in God. But that is that is open to all of us. You have the power of the living God available in your life. You are mightier than you know. And I believe it's time for God's people to refuse, to refuse to accept an identity of powerlessness when we have the power of God in us, working through us. You are mighty, you are powerful, you are meant for more. Pray with me. Jesus, thank you so much for this incredible, incredible group of people. Thank you, God, for all you do, thank you for all you are. You are so good to us, you love us so much, and Lord Jesus, we are utterly blessed to be in your presence. God, every single one of us here is facing something right now that is trying to convince us that it is stronger and mightier than we are. Every single one of us has a personal army of Midianites coming at us in our lives. It might look like disease, it might look like financial struggles, it might look like a marriage that's falling apart, it might look like a child in our life that's on a path we don't like. It might look completely different for everyone here, but every one of us has something that's trying to make us believe that we are powerless, but we are not. We are mighty in your eyes, and we're mighty because you say so. You love us, you accept us, and you empower us to be mighty warriors, to have overwhelming and exceeding victory, to be hyper conquerors in your kingdom. We love you, Jesus. We ask all this in your name. Amen. Amen.