Thanks for listening to the His Hands Church podcast. If you're using the His Hands Church mobile app, please turn off the auto lock on your phone's general settings so that you can listen to the message uninterrupted. And thank you for being part of what God is doing at His Hands. If it's your first time here, thank you for being at His Hands. We we love you. God loves you. We're just a big family of people that love each other, love Jesus, and we want to worship and serve and grow alongside each other. So we're really glad you're here this morning. Got some announcements before we jump into what we're gonna talk about. A lot of exciting stuff's going on right now. Just a lot of exciting stuff. And so I want to start by saying if you got baptized or if your family got baptized a few weeks back, we had 62 people get baptized three weeks ago. Just still exciting to hear. We uh we have we have some DVDs available for you at the source. That's where you can get CDs and stuff like that. Just go to the source afterwards, those are free of charge. For anyone that got baptized, or if that was someone in your family, just ask for one. Uh, and if we run out, we'll just make more. So that way you can have that. You can have that memory and have it captured. Uh, want to talk a little bit about Christmas angels. We uh we said this last week. We had 245 kids adopted this year. So that's 245 kids having Christmas because of your generosity. And that is exciting. It really is. Um, few little details with that is this Sunday, so now, uh, and then next Sunday, that's when we need you to bring those gifts back. So if you adopted a star, if you took a star, bring those back by next Sunday, because we're gonna need about a week to get them all organized so we can get them ready for delivery day. That will be on December 15th. Delivery day. Even if you didn't take a star, you can stay after, and we all you know load up our cars with gifts and drive out and deliver those to the families. And it's just a huge way to bless this community, bless a lot of a lot of families. So that'll be the 15th, but we need the stars and everything with them back by next Sunday. If you can do that at all, that would be great. Um, I want to say a quick thank you as always to everyone who's supporting us financially, and just thank you for what you're doing because it's needed, and God is doing so much with it. We talked a little bit about what God's doing with our young people last week and just how worthwhile of an investment this is. And I mentioned that every single Sunday we give 15% of what we get back to this community. And uh and it's not because we just had 15% extra laying around one day and we were like, hey, what should we throw at this? No, it's uh it's us doing the same thing all of us are doing. We're giving and we're trusting God with that. And uh and so what happens is every Sunday we give 5% to the Hope Center, 5% to Papa's Pantry, and 5% to the Cherokee Family Violence Center so far this year, because of because of you guys, because of what we're doing, we've been able to give $91,000 to those three places. So that's that's exciting. So keep it up and just keep trusting God. You know, that's something that that he teaches my wife and I all the time is the more we trust him, and if he asks us to give and we give, even if it feels like a stretch, he's always blessed that. And we can we can trust him with that. Um got a a lot of big stuff coming up really soon. I mentioned Christmas Angels. We have another another event coming up. This is something we've been a part of for a few years. Tom Meleshko is a photographer here at his hands. He's really passionate about photography, and he is really passionate about this one sort of uh sort of movement in photography, and he's brought it to us here at his hands for the last few years. It's something called a help portrait. Really cool thing. It's very simple, but also really powerful in its simplicity. And the whole point really is this is the holidays we want to be able to bring joy to people. We want to be able to bring a smile to people's face. And there's a lot of different ways you can do that. You help someone financially, you feed someone, you can definitely accomplish it that way. But sometimes it is the most simple things that bless people. And so a lot of photographers kind of created this movement and they said, hey, we're just gonna we're gonna donate our services. We're gonna donate our professional photographic services to whoever wants, you know, their picture. Maybe it's a single mom who uh who has a couple kids and they can't afford to go get a professional, you know, family portrait, but they can do that through Hell Portrait free of charge, or it's a family or husband and wife, you name it, just anyone that wants that, those treasured memories that bring smiles to our faces, the kind of things that, you know, if something ever happens to your house, those are the things that that you're looking for, those are the things you're searching for. And so that's gonna be on December 14th, it's a Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. here over in the high school side of our building. We'll have a couple of sign-up tables in the lobby that you can sign up for if you want to sign up for an appointment to get one of those pictures, or if you want to help out. If you're a photographer, even an amateur photographer, if you are, you know, a stylist or you just want to say, hey, I'll do whatever. I just want to help some people, help some people have some joy this holiday season. Uh, sign up this morning right outside in the lobby, and we'll get you all the information you need. Tom will be out there, he'll tell you everything that you need to know. Uh, and on that note, you know, Christmas is coming very, very quickly. It's December officially now. We have trees with lights on them, and so that's that's how you know. It's it's time. It's time. And Christmas Eve, every single year, Christmas Eve here. It's like it's one of the highlights of my year. Bar, it's one of the highlights of my year. It's it's a it's amazing seeing so many people come in, so many people experiencing you know, Jesus and his love for the first time every Sunday morning, should be a taste of God's love for us. And a reminder of how how passionate he is about us. And if it's your first time here, we hope that's what this morning is for you. We know that's what December 24th is gonna be for a lot of people. And so there's a way that you can really help us out, help us spread the word. I talked about this a little bit last week. It's really simple. If you go to our website, that's what the homepage looks like. You click the Christmas Eve at His Hands link, and it's gonna take you to this little event page, really simple. It has some details, some information. But in the top left corner of that page, there's a few things you can click. And so there's an invite others link that you can click, and it'll let you put email addresses in and you can evite as many people as you can think of to come here and spend Christmas Eve here to either of our services. You can use Twitter, which is lagging way behind Facebook, um, and you can use Facebook. And this is what's really cool about like the Facebook link. If you click that, it'll post a link to our event on your Facebook page. And you can put any comments you want in there or anything like that. But if if a thousand of us, for example, if a thousand of us shared that, if that number got to a thousand, that would be the equivalent of about a hundred thousand people being notified and being told about this event. And so it's a really simple thing. This week, if you're just sort of you know on Facebook or you're just thinking about Christmas, just get on there really quick and click that link and it'll uh it'll spread the word. It'll be exciting. Let's go ahead and pray, and uh, we'll talk a little bit about what God's uh what God wants to share this morning. Jesus, thank you so much. Thank you so much for blessing us with such a great family. Thank you for your love. I just pray that you would speak this morning. I pray that, you know, in the busyness of this time of the year, I pray that you would you would just simplify our thoughts and our minds and our hearts and speak. And you'd speak your word, you would speak your love, and you would challenge us in love, God, to just have more of you in our lives. We pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen. Well, I know this is a busy time of the year for all of us. My wife and I are about to have an exceptionally busy week. We're moving on Thursday, moving to a new house, which is uh an event. I'm glad no one's clapping because you guys have obviously moved before. You know what that entails. Uh, you know, it's only a few miles away from where we live now. And it's funny, it doesn't matter if you've moved 50 times or if it's your first time ever moving. It is it is an event. It is an event. It is so busy, it is so stressful. The amount of paperwork, it's incredible. My wife's family has lived in one house since before she was born. They've never moved. My family has lived in 18 houses since I was born. So we are both on very opposite ends of the moving into different houses spectrum. But it does not matter. Every time you move from the paperwork to the moving, and just as a side note, my wife has been pregnant both times we've moved, so she's like, I can't lift boxes and all this stuff. And you know, it's it's it's a convenient excuse or something. I don't know. So, ladies, you can use that if you ever want to. You get pray, hey, it's a good time to move, you know, I'll just tell you where to put things. Um, but it's it's a stressful, exciting event. And it's interesting because uh you would think with so many houses on the market, it would be so easy to find the one. That one house that you know is home. Our our real estate agents, Lisa Walsh, I see her sitting back there with her husband Chuck. They're great. And she she did such an incredible job of showing us all these homes. It got to the point where I was just apologizing every time we go to a house, like, I'm so sorry you're still showing us houses. I promise, I promise we're not faking you out. We're gonna pick one. We have to. Um, and that happened about two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, we walked into the house. I mean, it was it. We had seen maybe 30, 40 houses, but we walked into this one, and this was our house. The second we pulled up to it, I'm looking at the outside, I'm like, okay, I like this. It was this little blue house, this beautiful little house. We we walked on the inside, it had been recently renovated. You know, it looked like something on HD TV. I mean, it was beautiful. You could take a picture of it, put it in a magazine. So we're we're looking at it, we're falling in love with this house. We're already picturing, you know, where our son's room's gonna be. We're having another baby in January, we're picturing where her room's gonna be, and we're even thinking about when they're teenagers. We'll shove them in the basement and we'll close them off and we'll we'll live, we'll live. It's gonna be so great. And so we got so excited, we got home from seeing that house. We sent pictures to my mom in Missouri, and she was you know emailing us back and saying, Oh, it's beautiful, I love it. Uh, we took a couple of my friends over, you know, to see it. I was driving with them, having fun, and we just went by and I said, This is our house, you guys gotta see this place, it's awesome. And then we went to see it one more time with Megan's mom, who only lives like a mile away from that house, and so we were like, Oh, she's gonna need to see this. She's gonna be so excited to have us so close. And the second time we went to see it, Lisa brought Chuck with her, her husband, who's a contractor. He helped us a lot with our house before we put it up for sale. And when Chuck came and saw it, he started to notice things that we hadn't noticed. Things that we couldn't notice. We just don't know that much about houses. I am not very handy, and so things I would never notice, and they were pretty serious things. In fact, Chuck noticed one thing, for example, he said, Hey, just I want you to know this. This is a pretty serious issue, and it's probably gonna take like $12,000 just to fix it. If you don't want water in your basement or something like that. Needless to say, this is not the house we're moving into on Thursday. But that day, man, when we walked in that day, it was the house. I mean, it was the one. But those new details, that new information completely changed our minds. And I'm glad because the house we found, we love, and it's gonna be great. But it's amazing how that happens, right? How we can have our minds made up, we can have a decision made. And in our minds, nothing could change it. But then we get some new information, something new happens, and everything changes. That happens all the time. I've I found in my life it happens a lot when I discover something is free. Free is good. So, for example, Lowe's across the street will occasionally have free barbecue. Let that sink in for a second. Okay? I love barbecue, so free and barbecue combined. I've lived in Memphis, I've lived in Kansas City, I like barbecue. Okay? So free barbecue. That's like the lottery to me. I mean, I I love barbecue. So free barbecue, it's incredible. You know, you guys aren't wrapping your minds around this concept, but it's okay, we'll move on. So Lowe's will have free barbecue. And what's strange is the last few times they've they've done that, just to thank their customers, I haven't found out about it until after I've eaten lunch. After. And I and I am I tend to eat till I'm full. And so I'm full. If you were to ask me, hey Justin, a bunch of us are going out, we're going to Taco Mac, we're going to Moe's, I love those restaurants, they're great. You want to go with us? I would say, No, I just ate lunch, I'm full, I can't eat another bite. But that said, when someone says, hey, Lowe's is having free barbecue, miraculously, room is made in my stomach. And it's immediate, it's strange. I go from being full to having enough room for two, maybe three pulled pork sandwiches, no problem. And it it makes no sense. It's a game changer, free barbecue. And that might not be a good thing to do for yourself, but you can't really blame me because it's free. It's just it's free. I'll give you another example. I fell in love with my wife when I was a senior in high school. I actually had a thing for her when I was a sophomore, but she had no interest whatsoever. So I waited it out a few years and then made another pass, you know, in my last year of high school, and that time it worked. And so it was right at the end of my senior year that we started to date, and I had already decided on where I was going to college. I was going to college a thousand miles away in Kansas City, Missouri, and her father seemed okay with that. And so immediately, immediately, Megan started looking into going to that college. And again, strangely, I don't know why, her father was not excited about that. It was if for some reason, for some reason, the the thought of his firstborn child, his beautiful daughter, going to college a thousand miles away from his supervision, where the only person he knew or she knew was a teenage boy, extremely attracted to her, made him uncomfortable. I don't know. But it did. And so he was at first resistant to the idea. It was a pretty expensive college, and uh, and he was, you know, hey, God, he actually said this: God's gonna have to give me undeniable proof. Undeniable proof that this is where you're supposed to go to college. That's what she told me. And Lewis, if you're here this morning, she was a teenage girl, so she may have exaggerated, but that's just that's what I heard. Undeniable proof. That's what we needed. So we prayed for that. Six months later, Megan got a full ride scholarship to the college. Room and board, tuition, everything. Free college. And his mind changed. Totally different. All of a sudden, yeah, sure, go. Go. Free college. And you can't really blame him because it was free. Sometimes one thing, one thing can change everything. One new discovery, one new detail. And this morning we're finally at the point in the story that we've been going through, been going through the entire story of the Bible. We're at the point where one thing is going to change everything. The whole picture is going to change. And if you haven't been here for a while, God gave Ben Sykes this really incredible picture of the entire story of the Bible. And it's very unique, it's very cool. It's a timeline, really, except it doesn't look like a timeline that you would ever see in a history book or something like that. And in fact, guys, I think we have a picture. There you go. So it that is the timeline. That is the timeline laying out the entire history of the Bible. It's a little strange if you're looking at it for the first time. It doesn't look like a timeline, it looks like a tree, and that's actually really fitting. That's really fitting because we at his hands have a thing for trees. We call our nursery the garden. We say our kids are the mustard seeds that are going to grow into these huge trees as they grow in their relationship with God. If you ever walk around the hallways, you'll see all these pictures of the tree of life that Marlon Yoders painted. Marlon goes here and he gets inspired to paint these pictures of the tree of life, which are kind of like our symbol of what we want to be as a church. We want to be about love and relationship. And so Marlon paints those. And just in case you're looking for something holiday-wise, just so you know, Marlon's got some of those for sale in the source, and he's got them at different sizes, different prices. So if you know someone that loves those, grab one in the source because Marlon, he'll be blessed by that. And uh I love his stuff. Liam has a little tiny one. He keeps it by his bed. It's awesome. Um, what was I saying? Okay, yeah, timeline. There we go. So, anyway, I get off track sometimes. That's okay. All of this started, though, this whole picture, it all started with a single dot. Just one dot. That's where it started. Okay? And so we're gonna kind of start from the beginning, we're gonna start from that one dot. And each dot that we're gonna see represents a different tree. It all represents a different tree. So it's not just a coincidence that this whole picture becomes a tree. One of the things that God showed Ben was that every single major kind of promise that God makes us in the Bible, there's a tree nearby, or there's a figurative tree that's talked about. And so all these promises God makes us that create these new chapters in our relationship with Him, they're like landmarks. And each tree is significant to us. And so we've gone chapter by chapter, we've looked at each tree. So the first dot, that's the tree of life. That's where God created us, and he created us to live, to have life with him. But we chose a different tree. We chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and when we made that choice, everything sort of spiraled out of control. And so the picture doesn't look like it's supposed to look. It gets off track. And death enters the world. Cain and Abel, that's your first instance of death, the flood. There's just a lot of death. And what God originally intended for life seems like everything's gone wrong. Well, there's still hope because God made a promise. He promised that one day death would be defeated, but at this point in time it hasn't been. So God shows up at another tree to a man named Abraham, and happened to be at the trees that were called the oaks at Mamre, and he makes another promise. He tells Abraham, I'm going to create a nation, and through this nation that you're going to be the father of, all the nations of the earth are going to be blessed. All the nations of the earth. He makes that promise. And sure enough, Abraham has a child. And his children have children, they grow into a nation, but they they seem like the least likely group of people to bless the world. They fight amongst themselves. By the time we get to the third tree in our story, they're in the midst of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. It doesn't look like this promise is going to be fulfilled. And that third tree is what we call the burning bush, as Bill Thrasher talked about a few weeks ago. It was very likely an acacia tree. And God shows up and he makes a new promise. This time to Moses, he says, Hey, I'm going to free the people of Israel from slavery. I'm going to set them up in their own land, and they're going to be a people set apart. In other words, they're going to be a people that can live rightly. They can live rightly by my standards. They're going to be set apart. And so God gives Israel the law. But again, things spiral out of control. Things go horribly wrong. Israel has no ability to keep the law. They end up worshiping other gods. They end up saying, we don't even want God to rule us anymore. We want a king. We want an earthly king. God gives them what they want, and it doesn't go very well. So he shows up and he makes a fourth promise. And this promise is for a perfect king. They've had King David. And King David wrote Psalm 1, and there's a tree in Psalm 1. It says that if we live our lives, if we live our lives connected to God, we're like a tree planted by a stream that's flowing full of living water. And God promises there'll be a king like that. And it'll actually be from David's family tree. But again, things go terribly wrong. Everything spirals out of control because none of the kings have the ability to be that man. There's a few bright spots here and there, but king after king fails. They're corrupt, they're selfish, they're sinful. And things get so bad that Israel ends up splitting into two nations. You've got Israel to the south and Judah in the north. Judah lasts a little bit longer. Israel gets conquered really soon, but eventually both nations are conquered. Now they don't even have a nation. How can you have a king with no nation? All these promises seem just hopeless. We get a lot of the interesting perspectives on that through the books of the wisdom and the prophets that kind of weave in and out through this story. And that's what Ben talked about last week. But up to this point, we've had all these promises, and none of them have been fulfilled, and it looks like everything is going wrong. But like I said this morning, we have one thing that changes everything. And that one thing is Jesus. I'm sure none of us saw that coming. It's Jesus. Jesus shows up and he changes everything. He completely encompasses, you'll see this, he completely encompasses all of the promises that God's made, all of the failures that mankind has made. He fulfills every single one of those promises. And as you can tell, the picture changes. Everything changes. So God promised that death would be defeated. Well, Jesus defeated death when he rose again on the third day. Death has no claim on Jesus. It tried and it failed, but Jesus did not keep that victory to himself. He passed it on to us. And now we don't have to live afraid of death. Because we know what's waiting on the other side. There's a verse in Job when Job's going through this horrible ordeal. And he's, you know, he's years and years before Jesus. He says, If only I knew that there was life after death, I would be a man of hope. He didn't know, but we know because Jesus died and he got back up. So when he promises us, when he promises eternal life, he can deliver on that promise. Jesus defeated death, so that promise is fulfilled. God promised that the whole world would be blessed through Israel. And for centuries, the Israelites falsely believed that salvation was for them alone, that the Messiah was for them alone. But Jesus made it clear his last charge to his disciples was to go tell the world who he was, to baptize all nations. So that promise has been fulfilled. God promised us that we would have a right relationship with him, that eventually his law would be written on our hearts, that it wouldn't be this list of rules we have to keep, that it would be something we would desire. And Jesus came and lived that life, and he lived it for us. And the Bible says that his righteousness becomes our righteousness, and our sin became his sin. So we get the righteousness that Jesus earned. And he becomes a part of us, the Holy Spirit becomes a part of us, and we can actually grow to desire to live right by God. Now we're in a new covenant where our right standing with God is not based on what we do and what we don't do, it's based on accepting that we are his children and just loving him. That's it. Promise fulfilled. He promised so many things, and he's delivered on those promises. He promised a perfect king. You can't get more perfect than Jesus. And he is our king. He came and he said, The kingdom of heaven is here. And the reason it's the kingdom of heaven is not because it's a place. When we think of the word kingdom, we might think of England. We might think of some kingdom we can think of. But a kingdom is only a kingdom if there's a king, and we have a king. The Bible says he is the name above all names. God has given him all authority. So he is that perfect king, promise fulfilled. Jesus has fulfilled every single promise. When we get to Jesus, everything changes. That's one of the things I love so much about this picture that Ben drew is that when you get to Jesus, it's just different. There's purpose in it. There's a plan. All of a sudden you look at it and you say, hey, maybe things weren't spiraling out of control like we thought. Maybe, maybe God knew what he was doing. Maybe there was a plan. The first time Ben showed me this was over a year ago. He was wanting to teach it with the junior high kids. I talked about that a few weeks ago. And up until this point, I mean, I thought it was cool. I was looking at it, it was spiraling. I was like, all right, this is this is interesting. But it's when it got to this point that I got excited. There were so many verses that I had heard growing up as a kid. And I believe in those verses, I believe those statements, but it wasn't until I saw this that it all kind of clicked for me, that it really made sense. I had some light bulbs go off, and that doesn't happen very often, so I'm excited when it does. For example, John 5, verse 39. Jesus says, You search the scriptures because you think they give you eternal life, but the scriptures point to me. When I saw him draw this, that made sense because you can see everything has just been pointing to Jesus. Everything that seems to be going wrong is just building up to Jesus. Romans 8. Romans 8 28 says, We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. Again, all these terrible things are happening, but God, He has the ability to take it and to move it and mold it into something good, and that's Jesus. Everything has been building up to Jesus. And because of Jesus, everything changes. And it all changes at another tree. And that tree is the cross. This is the painting that Marlon created this week. He's done a painting every single week for the trees that we get to, and this is his painting for the cross. And I love it. I'm gonna talk here in a little bit about something that the first time I saw it, it just spoke to me. It was awesome. But the cross, this is where everything changes. This is where all of history changes, really. It's the most important event in any of our lives. It seems kind of strange because it happened a long time before we got here, but it's true. It's at this tree that the whole story becomes something entirely new. In Mark chapter 15, we see Jesus on the cross. And he's near the end. He's been beaten, he's been mocked, he's been tortured. And we see this really interesting kind of exchange he has with God, and then there's this detail at the end that's strange if you don't know the context, but powerful if you do. Nathan kind of mentioned it earlier as he was he was leading the Lord's Supper. It says, at noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o'clock. And then at three o'clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabak Tani. I butchered that, I'm sure, which means, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Some of the bystanders misunderstood and thought he was calling for the prophet Elijah. One of them ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, holding it up to him on a reed stick so he could drink. Wait, he said, let's see whether Elijah comes to take him down. Then Jesus uttered another loud cry. He breathed his last. So he's died. And the curtain in the sanctuary of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. That's what Nathan was talking about when he said, The veil has been torn. And this is a really interesting thing. And if you don't know the context behind it, you're like, that's a strange detail to add in. There's a lot going on here. We have darkness covering the entire land. The Son of God is dying on a tree, and we're going to talk about a curtain. But you got to understand some things about this curtain. Because this is really significant. And I'll just start by saying this. This is not a curtain you could buy at IKEA. This is a very, this is a very unique curtain. In the temple in Jerusalem, there are all these different rooms, you know, as you go deeper and deeper into the temple. And the deeper you go in the temple, the more restricted your access is. So in the outer court of the temple, anyone can be there. Jews, Gentiles, slaves, free men, women, anyone can go to the outer courts of the temple and offer a sacrifice there. To go a little further into the temple, you had to be of Jewish birth. To go further, you had to be of Jewish birth and be a man. Eventually you could only be a priest. And eventually you had to be a certain rank of priest. And every single time you go deeper into the temple, you have to go through a ritual cleansing. You have to wash your hands. There's basins of water. All of it is this reminder of how unclean we are compared to God. And the very, very most, the very innermost room in the temple was called the Holy of Holies. And this is where the very presence of God dwelled. And only one man had access to this room one time a year for one purpose. That was the high priest on the Passover day to offer the official sacrifice for the nation of Israel. One man has access one day a year into God's presence. And it's only to offer a sacrifice. That's it. This curtain was what blocked the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. It was about 60 feet tall, 30 feet wide. It was four inches thick. Think about that. That's about the palm of your hand, the thickness of the fabric, four inches thick. It's estimated that it weighed between four and six tons. A curtain. A 10,000-pound curtain. You would need a chainsaw just to make a dent in this thing. And the moment that Jesus died on the cross, it rips in two from top to bottom. Jewish tradition says that it took over 300 priests to take this curtain down and to manage it. But when Jesus dies, it rips in half from top to bottom. And the reason is very simple. This was not just a practical barrier. It was symbolic of the separation between us and God because of sin. But the moment Jesus died on the cross, that sin was dealt with. And that curtain was useless. And so God destroyed it. And it's top to bottom, which I think is so significant, not bottom to top. It was not human effort. It wasn't something we did. It was God initiated. God did it. And He's saying to us, He's screaming to us, full access. I want you to have full access in your relationship with me. I don't want anything. I don't want anything keeping us apart. The sin that's kept us apart, it's dealt with. Put your trust in Jesus, you have full access. You are my child. You're my son, you're my daughter. This curtain just so happens to be one of the most significant things in our history because the moment that it went away is the moment that we have Jesus. It's the moment that we have a new relationship with God. It's the moment that everything changed. I think it's important as we talk about this, and this is important for me personally to remember that Jesus, it's not that Jesus was, it's that he is. So this morning it's not so much that everything changed, it's that everything is still changing. And Jesus is changing everything every single day. He is alive and he is working. I know it's easy for me to talk about Jesus in the past tense always, and forget that Jesus is still my king today. He's not a historical figure that lived and died. He's one that lived and died and got back up and is still alive today. He's the only one that did that. And so when we go to Jesus, we're not we're not praying to a man who existed, we're praying to a king and a God who exists. And so he's still changing everything today. And it's so important for us to remember that when we have a need, and when we need something, he's who we go to. He's our answer. Because Jesus is changing everything. Give you an example for my life. There have been a few times where my wife and I have found ourselves in uh in financial difficulty, thanks to my financial wizardry, um, mostly. I'm not the most organized person, sometimes that that comes back to haunt me. Uh, there have been a few times, though, that we've been really, really tight to the point where it's it's dangerous. And we've looked at our finances when that happens, and it's not that we have a bad plan, it's not like we were going off on a spending spree. I buy new shoes like once every six years. I mean, there's nothing like that. It's just that things were happening that we didn't account for, and all of a sudden we're stuck. A few years ago in particular, my wife lost her job. She was a teacher at a private school, and when the economy did what it did a few years back, she got let go. And then in the summer, after she got let go, they realized they fired one too many teachers. They had one classroom without a teacher, so they called Megan to hire her back. But they told her that because of the budget they had, they could not pay her a full salary. They could pay her half. But they needed her to work full time but get paid half. And the truth is, at the time, we needed that, and we prayed about it, and we felt like that's what we should do. So we went into that and we said, okay, and Megan was working, you know, full time, getting paid half a salary. And about three or four months went by, and our finances just got extremely, extremely tight. We looked at our bank account one day, and I don't remember the number that was in there. I just remember that my response was to laugh and hers was to cry. That's all I really remember. And that night, that night, we prayed together more purposefully about our finances than we ever had before. And our prayer was really simple. We looked at everything we could do. We looked at our plan, our plan was good. We weren't overspending. You know, we we could have cut everything, we were prepared to do it, but we looked at it and we said, God, we need you to do something. And I'm not exaggerating, I'm not making this up. The next day, the very next day, Megan's at school, she's putting up a bulletin board outside of her classroom, and the headmaster of the school walks by. He didn't have a meeting with Megan, he wasn't going to see Megan, he just happened to be going that way, and he saw her outside of her room, and he stopped. He said, You're Miss McTear, I just want you to know that on your next paycheck, we're gonna start paying you full time again. And we're gonna give you all the back pay for the last three or four months on that check. It was the next day. And that was Jesus. And it's a really simple thing. If you ever have someone say, Well, how do you know that's Jesus? It's because he's the one we asked. We asked Jesus. Next day it gets answered. We'll give credit to Jesus. And the thing is, a dead God can't do that. Jesus is. He is changing everything every day. That's why in Matthew 6, Jesus said, Don't worry about these things, saying, What will we eat, what will we drink, what will we wear? Those things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows your needs. Seek the kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need. Jesus is still working, he is still changing everything to this day. If you're in need, if you have a struggle, whether it's a sin, whether it's a practical need, go to him with it. And we have an amazing prayer team here at this church. People that are waiting in the prayer room, which is right in our main hallway, and they will wait as long as they need to to pray with whoever needs it. Don't let that pass by. If you have a need, go to God in prayer. You know, drop a prayer request in the columns in the back. We'll pray for you. That goes out to the whole prayer team. Take advantage of that. James says that the prayer of a righteous person, in other words, the prayer of someone that just loves God and is trying to live right by him is powerful and effective. So get prayer because it works. Jesus is changing everything. He will change whatever you need in your life. And if the worship team wants to come back up, we're about to wrap up. But I'll say this Jesus changing everything to this day still applies to the cross. That's why I love this painting that Marlon did. Because it looks like the cross is alive. There's almost a movement to it. And when you see it on the wall, soon when we hang it, you get a lot closer and see it even better. But but the cross is alive. It's still acting. Every single day, the cross affects our lives. It's not just a dead tree. You know, it's the most tragic moment in history, but the most beautiful moment in history at the same time. Every single day, Jesus is tearing that curtain down again because people keep trying to build it back up. You know, sometimes it's religion just creating a new curtain, a new list of rules of things we have to do to earn the occasional right to have company with God. Sometimes it's us, sometimes it's the guilt and the shame that we feel from our own sin, and we build those curtains back up, and that's okay because Jesus will just tear it down again. The cross is active every single day. So if you know Jesus, and if you've let yourself for a moment believe that what you do and don't do separates you from God, let Jesus tear that that curtain down again for you and remind you that he dealt with your sin. It's done. You have total access to God, he is your father. If you don't know Jesus, if you haven't gone to him yet and accepted what he's offering, life, forgiveness, grace, a relationship with him, a love that you cannot imagine, please do. I talked about the prayer room. You know, if you if you want to do that with someone, it's powerful to pray that with someone, to have it kind of cement for you in that way. You can go to the prayer room after and say, I just want to pray and receive Jesus, but you don't have to, you don't have to do anything. There's no ritual you have to go through. It's just a conversation with you and God. You don't have to fill out a card, you don't have to walk down an aisle. We won't make you raise your hand while everyone pretends to close their eyes. We're not gonna do that. Okay? You you just have to tell God that you love him. And tell Jesus that you love him and say, I want you in my life. I accept it. It's just accepting a gift. If you've never done that this morning, you need that. And no one's gonna blame you. You know why? Because it's free. That's right. And I don't say no to free barbecue. So there's no reason any of us should say, you know, no to free Jesus. I mean, that's so much better. Lightning might strike me. Okay. Um tell you what, let's pray and let's just go to him and worship again and thank him for who he is and what he's done for us. Jesus, thank you so much. Thank you that your grace, your mercy, it's new every single day. And what you did for us on the cross, it's not a moment in history. It's something that's affecting our life every minute of every day, that we have this constantly renewed forgiveness and grace from you, and it's completely free. Jesus, I just pray right now, if there's if there's one person in here that doesn't know you, I pray that they would they would. They would just accept who you are and the love you have for them. And for all of us, Jesus, no matter if we've been following you for a few seconds or for a few decades, keep tearing down those curtains that that we or other people build up. Keep reminding us that the cross changed everything for us. We have complete access to you and you love us. And we pray all this in your name, Jesus. Amen.