Good morning. How's everybody doing? There's about half of you going, who is this guy? And the other half, well, I don't none to know what you're thinking right now.

Better than you.

That's right. For any of you who may not know me, um, my name's Bill. And I am on the uh I am on the full-time team here at His Hands. Um I generally help out by managing our facilities, and I also have the uh honor and privilege of uh leading our young adult group. Um Steve is uh out and he will be back next week. We have uh something coming up in a couple weeks, I think, right? Um two weeks, May 2nd. Bless the bikes. There are cards on the back of the uh columns. If you know anybody who has a bike or that likes bikes or that has ever ridden even a bicycle, grab a card and hand that to them, and um it's a really, really awesome event. Uh last year we had about 120 motorcycles. It really felt like a bike show out there. It was cool. Um, butcher's block is going to be back with hamburgers and hot dogs. Anybody have had their blue cheeseburger?

Yeah.

Yeah. Um we'll rock some music outside. We're playing we'll pray a blessing over all of the uh the bikes and most of all the riders. And uh it's just a great day to hang outside and party together. Um I'm I'm personally really excited about Bless the Bikes. Um it's hard to see, but I'm a biker. It's true. I have the most important qualification, a motorcycle. Yeah. I figure I got a haircut that that meets the standard, right? I'm working on the shaggy beard. I need more leather, I don't have enough of that in my wardrobe yet. But we'll get there, we'll get there. Um I actually got my bike just a little less than a year ago. Um it's it's my first motorcycle, and um this will be my first Bless the Bike event, actually. Um and and in all honesty, last year's Bless the Bikes was kind of the the thing that got me wanting a bike. You know, it's uh I I was around so many of you gearheads, and um I started to get that itch. You know, I'm pretty sure it's in the same class of allergen as poison poison ivy. You know, you're like, man, I really Benadryl does not help at all. Um I get the hugging and kissing on so many of our uh awesome bikers, and I'm talking and praying with them, and and before you know it, I was like, I just had the rash, you know, it was all over me. I I tell you that because God has really used my motorcycle in some unique and and and God-type ways. Um He's allowed me to meet and connect with people I would have I would have never met. And um I've also uh grown exponentially in my trust that God will keep me safe as I navigate the streets of Metro Atlanta. Um and and my whole my whole bike story is really a weird God story. Um and he's just a huge part of me getting it. And I think that's kind of needless to say, but sometimes we take it for granted that God is big. I mean, that's big. I mean, he's he's so big that we really have a hard time understanding how big he is, I think sometimes. Um human being can fully, like Susan was saying just a minute ago, grasp an entire understanding of God's whole plan. Um we can only see small pieces of it. We each are in our own world, but the whole thing beginning to end, we we really don't have a clue. Um God's wisdom is beyond what any single person can understand or comprehend. But I think there's one man that kind of was the exception to that rule. I'm gonna give the good Sunday answer. Jesus, right? Of course, Jesus. But Jesus was completely human. He was completely human. The difference is he was not of man's lineage, he was supernaturally conceived by the Holy Spirit. It says in Matthew, this is how Jesus, the Messiah, was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became impregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her fiance, was a good man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly. As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. Joseph, son of David, the angel said, Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through the prophet. Look, the virgin will conceive a child, she will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us. So you see, Jesus was completely human, born just like every one of us. But he was from God's genetic lineage. Now, I I don't really get that, but I know that's truth. And a large part, much of who we are as people, is from our genetic lineage, right? We tend to look like our parents, have the same characteristics or personality traits. We can even carry the same weaknesses to maybe illness or addiction. Jesus' lineage allowed him to possess a supernatural understanding of God's wisdom. Even as a very young boy, Jesus' wisdom was observed. Jesus' wisdom was observed. Say that three times fast, right? Um in one noted instance, he was at a Passover feast with his parents. And for anybody who don't know, this was like a party. I mean, they partied hard in Jerusalem during the week of Passover. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would come to the city and they would they would celebrate for a week. And Jesus came probably yearly to this festival in the city. And you come as a whole family, it'd be like my family's kind of spell, but my wife's family is huge. It's the Chapman clan, you know, it's just like this whoosh, 99 people all invade a restaurant or whatever. It's kind of like that. And when they left the city as a family, Jesus' family, Jesus probably wasn't with necessarily Joseph and Mary. Maybe he was with Aunt Edna. I I don't know. But it was probably really commonplace for him just not to be right next to them. He was a small boy, but they trusted where he was going to be. And when they left the festival, at some point they had that home alone moment. Kevin! You know, Jesus! And it says this, it says this. When they couldn't find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him there. Three days later, can you imagine three days? They finally discovered him in the temple, sitting among the religious teachers, listening to them and asking questions. All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. His parents didn't know what to think, son. His mother said to him, Why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been frantic, searching for you everywhere. But why did you need a search? He said. Didn't you know that I must be in my father's house? What they didn't, but they didn't understand what he meant. Then he returned to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. And his mother stored all these things in her heart. Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people. Jesus was of God's lineage, born from man, but bound by the same limitations we have, but he had God's characteristics. For a man with that supernatural wisdom, like Jesus, to be an effective communicator to people like me and you. I was borderline obsessed. Um my wife was reading over my message, she goes, borderline? Um I had lined up a little bit of money, about 400 bucks to get started in my bike fund. And uh Brandon, uh my good friend, he's back there in the booth. Um he happened uh to come across a Craigslist ad um for a 1986 Kawasaki VN750 at 500 bucks. Um so I started to scheme. I started to hatch a plan. Um I begged my wife to let me look at it. I just want to look at it. We just want to spend a day out with the guys, just go, just go. She very hesitantly agreed after after some uh coercing on my end. And um because the problem is I really didn't have the money yet. I I had done some side work and I had some money kind of lined up my way, but it I didn't have it in hand yet. And uh but but despite all that, nonetheless, I I I came up with this fail-proof plan. Fail-proof. Brandon, uh, our friend Jimmy. Everybody has Jimmy in their life, the guy with the big truck. Um we all headed out towards Six Flags. I got a map quest map in hand, and just we ventured off. And the directions ended up us on this little road at this building that can be described with nothing less as a as an automotive junkyard. All right. It's one of those places that had the wreck cars everywhere, the old dog sleeping out front, you know, the engine block with the weeds growing out of it. Just like something you'd see out of a Heathcliff cartoon. It's like three people knew what that meant. And out in the very front of this building stood this dusty grime-covered shell of a motorcycle. Um the picture on Craig's list had had definitely been enhanced or something. Uh I got up to it and I'm like, wow, that's that's what we drove out here for. At that moment, I I had my doubts that it was a salvageable. I really did. Um and and whether they'll admit it, I I'm guessing maybe Brandon and Jimmy kind of had some questions too. Um, but make make this long story short, we managed to uh get it cranked up. We did. We got it kind of cranked up. And I offered the guy 400 bucks for it. I had the 400 bucks lined up, and and maybe I could rearrange some money or something. And uh he let me know he couldn't take less than 450. He had another buyer lined up, and first one to bring in the 450 could take it home. So I only had like one problem, which was I didn't have any money. Um so I figured at that point maybe I should just walk away. But there was that itch, you know, that that desire, that that drive to want to to want to get a bike. So Brandon just he's like an awesome friend, stepped to the plate and said, Hey, I'll loan you the money, which was really, really cool. Then I had to call my boss. I called home, presented the uh the offer, and somehow, somehow, she said yes. She said yeah. So um Jimmy Brandon and I, we load this bike up on the back of this truck, and it like barely will move. The brakes are completely locked down on it. It did not want to go where we wanted it to go, and we get it up this hill and managed to get it in and strap it down and start driving back home. At that point, um it was getting late. It was probably close to dinner time, and I had pressed my luck. We'll just put it that way. I had pressed my luck, so we loaded it in Brandon's garage. I said, I got a bike, awesome, I'm going home. Um and so I did, and and um it was good, I got what I wanted. I I had I had wanted it, I had pursued it, I hatched a plan, I collected the needed resources that I had to make that plan happen. I set out to satisfy my desire to ride. My problem? I couldn't pay for it. I needed help to complete my plan. Someone who could step in and cover those initial costs. Someone who could help me get that bike cleaned up, someone who who knew about motorcycles, someone to assist me in getting that bike ready to ride. Later that night, Brandon and um his wife sent me some pictures of my new bike. They posted them on Facebook. I think there's one. There you go. The bike that had previously looked unsalvageable all of a sudden looked pretty good. Difference was one, it was mine. I owned it. And two, Brandon and his wife Tiffany gave it a bath. That's kind of I think pre-bad. There's post-bath. They scrubbed off that external layer of crud and dust, and and at that point, you could just start to see all the potential in it. Not much had changed. The bike was unrideable. It was damaged. It was. It was damaged, it was abused. You can see the taillights were broken. Fuel and oil were tainted, it probably sat for years. Those pictures, though, it's hard to tell. It took us several more weeks to systematically go through that motorcycle and fix what we could fix. Repair what was minimally needed to get it roadworthy and its motor running well. We did get it running, and it was really rough at first to say the least. If you've ever repaired a motorcycle or a car or something, sometimes it's like pop. And you do that for like three hours. And eventually it starts to get fluids in it and starts getting going. It was a process. It was a process. Much like we did with that motorcycle, much like I did with that motorcycle, God pursues you. It doesn't matter where you are, it doesn't matter if you're broken, it doesn't matter if you're abused, you could feel unsalvageable. Maybe you're in a world of brokenness and damage. God's pursuing you. He desperately wants to pull you out of that world. He sent Jesus to pay the price, to pull you out of there. In 1 Peter, it says you call out to God for help, and he helps. He's a good father that way. But don't forget, he's also a responsible father. He won't let you get by with sloppy living. Your life is a journey, and you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. It costs God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ's sacred blood, you know. He died like an unblemished, sacrificial lamb, and this was no afterthought. God planned it. I mentioned that getting my bike into shape was a process. It is a process. It didn't happen overnight. It took time, it took understanding, it took research, money, tools, parts, whatever it took to get it to that rideable state. Together, not alone, together, Brandon and I got it going. And I paid him back just as I promised. What was his reward? He had no requirement, he had no obligation to do what he did for me. He he had nobody forcing him to do it. He did it out of his love for me. He did it because he saw potential in that motorcycle. He did it knowing the joy we'd share together when we got it up and running and being able to cruise down the uh the road together. You know, during that restoration process, our friendship grew in ways I can't even describe. We connected in in so close ways that I don't know that would have happened if that didn't bring us together. I'm not sure, but my guess is that when he sees my bike, his joy is almost equal to that of my own. You know, he was an essential, he was a vital part of its new life. Without him, my my desire to get out there and ride would have probably not been fulfilled. His reward was simply to be a part of the process. The love, the relationship that came from that process, that's his priceless gift. Jesus gets that same gift in us. He's the essential part of our restoration process. Only with him are we worthy to be in a relationship with the living God of all creation. I can personally recall one time in my life where I needed like major restoration. We've all been in different places, we've all done different things. Just this is a personal story. I was 18 and I had just been dropped off at this place called Parris Island, South Carolina. If anybody doesn't know what Paris Island, South Carolina is, it is the place where they hold the United States Marine Corps boot camp. I had been there uh several weeks and the drill instructors there were doing a fabulous job. They really were. You see, it's their job to break down young men and women, physically, mentally, to break them down. To put you through a systematic process of regulated abuse. That's true. A systematic process of regulated abuse in order to get you to a state where they can rebuild you into a marine. In the middle of that whole process, I personally hit a low. I mean, I was down. I missed my family, I missed my home, I hated doing push ups. I hit a low and I was just broken. I didn't know if I could get through that process. I really didn't. I needed help. And every week there was one place. There's one place where I could find relief. There's one place I could go and be my sanctuary, my place of rest. And that was church. It was church. On Sundays, we'd be allowed to go to church. And when I would go there, I could let down that wall of structure. I could bring down that wall of discipline just enough to let God invade my process. I'd cry. I mean, I cried like a baby. Mostly because I missed my family, and it was one of those places that just instantly reminded you of home, and you were just like, boom, it would hit. But when you can bring that wall down that much, it's like water. It just floods in. It floods in. But spiritually, I would cry too, but kind of in a different way. I would cry out. I would cry out saying, I need strength. I need help. I can't do this by myself. I needed strength to get me through that process I was just immersed in. Every time I needed that strength, every time I called for it, I got it. I got it. Whenever I was at that precipice of a breaking point, whenever I was standing on that edge of that cliff where I thought I was going to fall into failure, I'd start silently repeating Philippians 4.13. Sometimes I'd even whisper it to myself. And Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I was there in July, 110 degrees on a rifle range, wearing a charcoal line suit, doing fanfire 300 yards out on a range. Guys are dropping like flies because of the heat exhaustion. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I was in the tear gas chamber. They say don't breathe. I breathed. Your lungs fill with pain that's just beyond understanding. Your eyes are just going crazy. It's worse than pollen. It really is. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. During an unending session of push-ups in the pit, the pit's this giant sand-filled box. It's not fun. Because some guy messed up. And we're all doing push-ups. For as long as you can imagine. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. You see, God was always right there to restore my spirit. And he would strengthen my body and he would strengthen my mind. No matter what I was going through. That's what he does. That's who he is. That's how he works. I want to go back in one second and highlight something from my bike story. Mentioned in two weeks we got Bless the Bikes. Right? We got a May 2nd. There are cards in the back. I already told you all that. But two weeks after, Bless the Bikes, we're going to be doing something else really cool. We're going to have our baptism party. If you didn't know, there's this little window right over here, and that's our baptism, and we all hang out afterwards. And anybody who wants to get baptized has that opportunity. It's an opportunity to publicly state that you've been purchased and you've bought in with Jesus. When my bike got to Brandon's that very first night, he and Tiffany gave it a bath. Before that, it it seemed hopeless. It really did. But on Facebook, later that night, it made its first public appearance. And it had a bath. And it showed potential. It showed potential. The Bible says this about baptism in 1 Peter. The waters of baptism do that for you. Not by washing away the dirt from your skin, but by presenting you through Jesus' resurrection before God with a clear conscience. You see, just because you get baptized, it doesn't mean you're not broken. My bike didn't run. It doesn't mean you're not damaged or abused. It doesn't mean you're fixed up yet, ready to go hit the road with Jesus. It just means that you've bought in. It means that you're just ready to say, Father, begin your restoration process. I mentioned that I'm in process to becoming a biker, right? I'm closer now. Just a couple weeks ago, um, there was an incident. Steve had mentioned that you're not really a biker until you lay your first bike down. Yeah. It's kind of funny. Um I rode down to Northside Hospital to see a couple some friends. Brandon and I rode down to see some friends who had just had their baby. And um made it safely down I-75, rush hour traffic, made it 285 all the way over there, asked for done, no worries. Get in there, see the baby beautiful. Coming out in the parking deck of the hospital. I cut a U-turn a little too tight. I dropped my vision to the road, and whoop, down she went. I didn't even fall, I kind of just hopped off and did this kind of dance. Laid it down. Um without hesitation, I I picked it up. Brandon was kind of ahead of me, and he he kind of saw it, I think, in his his mirror, and he turned around. And and before he could even get back, I kinda had it up, I was fixing the mirror, really had a couple cosmetic dings, but it really it was really soft. I couldn't have been going more than two miles an hour. It was really stupid, but um I we just got back on and and we rode home. We just rode home. I no worries, no fear, no nothing. God has a sense of humor, obviously, because a hospital parking deck, yeah. The truth, the truth is though, I I didn't give up on riding my motorcycle right there. I didn't kick my bike while it was down the same piece of junk and and throw it in the garbage. I I got back up and I went home. I was probably a little embarrassed, but you see, when we're in a relationship with God, we're gonna mess up. We're gonna mess it up. We're gonna fall down. We're gonna feel embarrassed, maybe ashamed, maybe even ashamed. It's gonna happen. But he will never leave us stranded. He's always there, instantly ready to pick you back up, dust you off, and begin right back to where he was in his restoration process. If the worship team wants to come back up, and um thank you guys for letting me talk this morning. Really enjoyed it. Um I gotta clean it in. In case anybody was wondering, um I'm not quite done with my bike. Um it's still in process. Um there you go. That's in my garage this winter. Um I gave it a paint job myself. And um doesn't look like the same bike, does it? I got marine corps green. Marine Corps Green. It's actually out front if anybody wants to see it. It looks amazing. It looks a lot better than it did when I got it. It runs better. But you know what? I'm not done. I'm not done. There's a lot of things on it that I want to improve. There's always ways you can tinker and make it better and make it look cooler. Maybe run better. Um but like with my bike, you know, God, he has a plan for you. He has a plan for me, he has a plan for every one of us. It says in Ephesians 3.20, it talks about his plan. God can do anything you know, far more than you can ever imagine or guessed or request in your wildest dreams. He does it not by pushing us around, but by working within us, his spirit deeply and gently within us. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. Let's pray. Sound good. Dear Father, you are uh you're awesome and we love you. God, I thank you for uh for my restoration project. I thank you for for working within me and uh daily fixing me and loving me. I thank you for Jesus. I thank you for his love that he he paid a price that I can't imagine just to be a part of that process. God, I pray blessings. I pray for safety and favor over all the people here this morning. If anybody needs restoration, Lord, just have them cry out to you and you'll be right there to pick them up. We love you, and it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.