To some, God is discoverable everywhere. To others, nowhere. Much depends on the seeing eye. 

Jesus is our sink, the fountain of youth, our cup of salvation. My cup overfloweth and fills. Yes, Jesus feeds. He is the breath in our lungs, the joy in our hearts, the crow’s feet in our smile. Yes, Jesus loves. Look for yourself. You will find, in the long run, only loneliness and despair. Look for the risen Christ and you will find Him, and with Him, everything else thrown in. To be loved is to be known, to be known is to be loved. You know me. You pave the way in accordance with the Scriptures and as proof to the promises of the prophets, You conquered the grave. Most importantly, You rose.

It was great to be able to share and look at some of the things we did together last week when we honored Jesus, His death, and resurrection together as a community. So many people serving, doing their best to honor God with their art. It was a very special and beautiful time that we spent together. For me personally, I felt very gratified by it because I was so proud of everyone and the way in which we tried to honor Jesus. You can watch that now. It’s been posted on our website. You can pass it along if you want to. They’ve got the full edited version there. If anyone wants to revisit the presentation, it’s there and good to go. 

Last week was a tough week for me personally. I know it was special, but about 10 to 14 days ago, I got a cold. I still sound like I’m recovering from one, as I am. Then heading into Good Friday service, I started getting really bad and it was in my chest. It was so bad that by Friday, after the Good Friday service, someone said, “You need to go to the doctor. You need to go to the emergency room.” I grudgingly went that night. They said, “It’s good that you came in because you’ve got bronchitis.” They said, “We’re not sure if it’s a viral or bacterial. We’re going to do some tests here, give you stuff to take, and put you on a breathing mechanism. You probably need to take about four or five days and do nothing. You need to let your boss know that you’re not coming in.” I said, “I don’t know if that’s going to work. My boss is pretty busy on Easter. I don’t think so. Do the best you can with me and get me through.” It ended up being a victory. If I sound a little bit off, I’m getting better but still recovering. I am really happy about where we’re going.

Maybe that’s not the right word to use. I’m excited in the sense that I believe this will be an important little mini-series that we share together. It will equip us to have a more effective, fruitful, and wisely lived life for Jesus, if we do this right. I’m going to pray a blessing and share about where we’re going in the rest of our time together. Lord, I thank you for the opportunity to be able to share your words, which alone is a gift. I pray a blessing over everyone who’s here, everyone who’s come, everyone who’s listening. Each one of us has our own stories. I pray that you meet us where we are in life. Life by its very nature is constantly changing. What wasn’t there one week is now present this week. We can’t always tell what a day will bring, but we know that you are with us. We thank you so much for that. We ask for your blessing to, even now, as we’ve invested into this time, have great meaning and value. May it help us at a spiritual soul level. I ask this in Jesus’ name, amen. 

On Easter, we were able to talk about the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus as we often call it. The gospel is essentially the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, what that means for a person, and what He calls us to. One of the things that we sometimes think about is the cross. If I were to ask most people on the street what they identify as the symbol of the Christian faith, by far and away, everybody would say the cross. It would be true in the sense that it’s clearly the most recognizable symbol associated with Jesus. That is amazing in its own right when you think about it. People wear the cross around their necks, have different artistic expressions, and get tattoos. The cross itself was a Roman instrument of death. They got it from the Assyrians. They perfected it. It was a point of torture to teach people lessons.

Jesus is so identified with the cross that that instrument of death is now associated with life. The life that God gives us in Jesus. The cross is the expression of the life of Christ given for us. God so loved this world that He gave His only begotten Son. Whoever believes in Him will not die, will not perish, but have life. It’s about God doing for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. Jesus pays the price. You and I couldn’t pay for it. We couldn’t get to God. God comes to us. The very symbol itself of the cross, horizontal and vertical is the idea of heaven touching earth. He meets us where we are. He comes to us. He pays a debt we couldn’t pay. I owed a debt I couldn’t pay. How can I repay you for that debt, Lord? I give you back myself, my imperfect self. Part of that cross represents His love, the relentless love, sacrifice, and lifeblood that He spilled. We glory in the cross. It means so much. Yet, if the cross was the only symbol we had it would be sad. If all there was, was the cross and that was the end of Jesus’ story, it would’ve been nothing more than a beautiful life that had a very bad and tragic ending.

The key symbol, if we think about it for the faith, for anyone who follows Jesus is not necessarily the cross, as meaningful as it is. It’s the empty tomb because the resurrection changes everything. Jesus conquering death means that life wins. Love wins. Without that, it’s nothing more than a good example to follow in a life that doesn’t mean anything and isn’t going anywhere. His conquering death changes the human equation. It changes everything. It means that what often looks like hopelessness is anchored in hope. That’s not just a pipe dream. That’s true and we talk about it. Many times, it’s something in the future. Heaven’s in the future. Heaven’s real. I get that. The older we get, the more it means. It’s true because anybody who lives long enough, you don’t have to live long to realize this, but our bodies won’t last forever. They don’t. They’re this earth’s earthly tent. It endures over time. It erodes and can’t contain the life that’s in it.

Eventually, it goes back to meet its Creator in some way. Jesus said, “I give you a bridge of life. If you’ll have me.” The humility of God. Having said that, Paul, initially Saul of Tarsus, was not a believer. To call him a believer would be to do a disservice because he was a passionate, hostile disbeliever. As such, after his conversion, after his meeting Jesus, after the meeting that he described as being apprehended by the living Jesus on the road to Damascus, his paradigm was utterly altered. He became someone totally committed to Jesus. What Paul remembered, he felt clearly that everything mattered, was that he had seen the risen Jesus. He said, “I was an apostle born out of due time. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I saw Him.” 

This is what Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians. “Look, if our hope is in Christ only for this life, then we’re more pitied than anybody else in this whole world.” The older version says more miserable than anybody. Paul says, “We’re basically living a life after a pipe dream that means nothing.” He puts everything on the resurrection of Jesus. He puts everything there. He says, “Otherwise don’t even bother. Don’t waste your time. It doesn’t matter anyway.” The fact that He lives and rose, oh, that changes things dramatically. When Jesus talked about His rising, He didn’t just talk about it as something of an event that would allow us to get to heaven. He talked about it as an event, a moment, something that would occur that would change the very way He could relate to us. He talked about it as something that would allow Him to come to us by virtue of the Holy Spirit in a way that was very different from what had been. Part of what we’ve been celebrating and honoring in His resurrection is the idea that Jesus, the resurrected life that He has, wants to bring that life into our life. 

When we talk about Life Apps, we’re really talking about allowing God’s life to play itself out in our life. The reality of Jesus showing up in our lives. We’re being asked to welcome Him in. I really believe this. The Lord invites us to welcome Him into every detail of our life, to our everyday-ness. Not just for an hour or so a week, but into the everyday-ness of our life. Into our public environment, into our private environment, into our personal place, into the place when we’re with a lot of people, in the place when we’re all alone. He wants His life to be present with us, always. “Lo,” he said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” That’s a great promise for all of us. That means the Lord wants to be involved in our lives. He wants us to involve Him in our lives. He wants us to take His undying life and let that life flow into our life so that He’s with us in our highs, lows, defeats, and victories. 

I found that sometimes He’s most present to us in catalytic transformative ways in those defeated places when we’re more open, vulnerable, and broken. Blessed are the broken, for you can be healed. I think about where we’re going again next month and how we want to see the life of Jesus in us in such a way that we can live it out. We want to live out His life on His behalf by allowing more of His life to fill us. We want to live for Him, through Him, and in Him. We’re calling this series “Life Apps, Version Two.” Some of you may not have been here for version one. We shared it at the beginning of last year. It was something we were pretty excited about. I know in that series, we laid out the idea of what a platform and apps were meant to be. You’ll notice in your handout that we have a little description.

I want to point a couple of things out because we’re talking about where we’ve been. Life App One had to do with the idea of building on the platform that Jesus gave us. Building and understanding His life platform. Jesus talked about the most important thing a human being can do. When they asked Him the question, “What is the greatest thing we can ever do with our lives? What is the number one thing that matters to God?” Jesus answered the question. You can see it here in Mark 12. He talked to them about a passage that many of them would’ve known already. He changed it slightly, but for the most part, it was a combination of two key concepts within the Old Testament.

He said, “The greatest thing you can ever do in this life to be successful is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, and with your body. To love Him, to genuinely love God, and seek to be open to the love that He wants to bring to you. Secondly, love people. Love others. Love your neighbor as yourself.” Basically, Jesus is talking about our relationships. He’s talking about loving God first, then loving people. Love God, love people. We fleshed that out in our second Life App because Life App One was laying that platform. Life App Two is the idea of loving people to our best. How do we do that? How do we implement that? How do we go at it? Some of us have an easier time loving people we don’t know as well. We struggle with loving people well that we know the best.

You’ve heard me say countless times that we should never allow intimacy to be an excuse, to be somehow more mean-spirited or less responsible for our words. But that’s what happens sometimes. The Lord wants us to first learn how to love ourselves. We call that one of the first. We call it the circle of love in a proper healthy way. Not either arrogantly or shamefully thinking of ourselves more or less than we are, but to see ourselves identified in Jesus as one loved. Loving ourselves, loving the key people in our lives and our critical relationships. The next circle is the relationships that we’re connected to. Maybe at a workplace or in other social circles. Fourthly, people we don’t even know. Fifthly, the hardest in some ways is what Jesus modeled at the highest level on the cross, loving our enemy. It’s so hard to do. Loving to our best.

We talked about the idea of celebrating. Life App Three was celebrating life gifts and surprises. We focused on the parable of the prodigal son. In Particular, we talked about the celebration of the father when his lost son, who squandered everything, and was so sad and ashamed, came home to his father. Just like some of us come back to God, he was accepted and loved. With compassion, he was celebrated. God shows us that not all days are the same kind of days. We have to be able to mark things in our lives. We zeroed in on one part of that parable. We talked about the older brother’s reaction and how he could not celebrate. He was angry and unhappy with his brother being blessed. He felt that it wasn’t right and  just. He wouldn’t go in and celebrate. We talked about it and played it out.

We finished by talking about growing in our seasons. You can see that in Life App Four or growing seasonally. Growing seasonally was trying to identify the seasons that we’re in our life. All of us think of life in terms of the natural season; spring, summer, fall, and winter. Where are we? Someone may ask, “Where are you in terms of the season of your life, in terms of natural season analogy?” Some of us say, “Oh, I’m right there, given a natural lifetime.” Each season has an opportunity. Each season has a moment of growth. Each season has a thing that God’s calling us to move into. Those transitional places are sometimes more obvious than others in the season. You can’t always tell when one season goes to the next, but at some point, you know you’re in it. In each season, God has something new He wants to do in our lives. We talked about all of those things. 

One of the pieces I’m most excited about is the first one; staying young at heart. We can be young and have an old tight heart. We can be old and have a very young and soft heart. I’m saying, staying young at heart at a spiritual level is not necessarily how old we are or what stage we are in life. It’s more about a decision we make to cultivate a heart that is resilient and capable of welcoming Him into the rhythms and contours of our life. With His grace, learning how to live lightly and with wonder. Learn how to not get beaten down by the things of life, the offenses, the hurts, and the wounds. The one thing I will say is that the older we get, the easier it is to become cynical. That’s true because we see things that disappoint us more and hurt. We can start to create a veneer that keeps us from being open to the new things God wants to do.

We’re going to talk about that. I’m very excited about that. Another thing we’re going to get to is the idea of juggling life’s responsibilities and surprises. It has to do with the things that hit us that we weren’t expecting. What we’re talking about is how to navigate life. How the Lord wants us to take His life and teach us how to implement a skill-set into our lives based upon His wisdom that allows us to negotiate some of the harder, challenging, or surprising places that life brings us to. We’ll all get there.

Thirdly, cultivating our minds and our bodies. How do we pursue optimum health in a very toxic culture and environment? I say that as part of the culture. How do we keep our bodies as healthy as possible? How do we keep our minds in a good place? There’s a connection between the body and the mind. Jesus said, “Take care of your thoughts and watch your words.” The Scripture also taught us that as a man thinketh, so he is. Much of the battle is won and lost in the mind and our thoughts. So much of where we get sidetracked, discouraged, beaten down, or so many of our victories can occur right in our thought life. Lastly, we’re going to learn who among us does not have seasons where we make mistakes and where we experience failure. How do we recover from that? How do we redeem that? How do we let God help us do that? There’s a lot to learn, a lot to sit with. I’m very excited about where we’re heading.

I want to talk a little bit more about the platform of Jesus that He gave us. Jesus talked about it in His message He shared. We call it The Sermon on the Mount. It’s Matthew 7 in which Jesus talks about a specific idea. Jesus spoke on the hill by the Sea of Galilee. In that message, Jesus said, “Anybody who wants to be a truly wise person, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does it.” Hearing and implementing are two different things, aren’t they? I can hear something and not act on it, or I can hear it in such a way that it causes me to respond. He says, “The person who hears what I’m saying and then implements it into their life, that person I will say is a wise person. I will say, this person is like a person who builds their life or house on bedrock. When the storms of life hit, and they will, when the rains come down and the flood rises up, and the winds start to howl and beat on that house and part of it starts to buckle, it will hold because it has a foundation on a rock. The person who hears what I’m saying and doesn’t do it, this person I will say is like unto a foolish person.” He’ll later say that is like a foolish person, and that person will build their house on the sand. When the rain falls and the floods rise and the wind hits, it cannot endure, because foundationally, it does not have soundness or integrity.

God wants to teach us how to hold. I’m convinced we will all have storms in life. Some are easy to get past. They’re quick. It’s like our weather patterns, they might come and go. It was tough weather. We got through that. Others are so devastating to us that they alter our landscape. The person we are going in, is not going to be the same person coming out. They were different people. Things happen in those hurricanes in life. God wants to teach us how to prevail. Platforms matter. Foundations matter. We’re going to talk about this. In a minute, we will hear from someone in our church who’s the co-writer on this project with me, my friend, Rusty Roof. Rusty’s going to share the idea of platforms and apps. He will give us a different way of thinking about it so we can understand where we’re going.

One of the things about Rusty is pretty cool. He has served, along with his wife, Patty, in our children’s ministry for well over a decade, faithfully committed, loving our kids. Part of the great teams that work together to do that. Not only that, Rusty has a lot of other things that he’s involved with. He’s someone who has a significant amount of experience in the marketplace. Not only that, he’s involved in circles of art, technology, and politics. Rusty, for example, serves on President Obama’s advisory committee on the arts. Rusty serves as a board member of Glassdoor. He’s involved with the Grammy Foundation, and Act Theater. He’s involved with a lot of startups. He’s got a book called Purpose Working and a blog that he does also called Purpose Working. He’s got an amazing expansion of involvement. He has a lot to share with us about this idea of platform and apps. I want us to be able to hear what he has to say about it. 

Rusty Roof: Here we stand on the stage of one of the great theaters of San Francisco. This theater was built just after the 1906 earthquake. It stood the test of time, including the 1989 earthquake. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here because a theater is a great metaphor for understanding the difference between a platform and an application. What we’re calling an app. You see, this stage is like a platform. It’s the foundation of a theater that all else is built upon. Without the stage, there wouldn’t be a place for actors to practice their craft, nor a place for the sets or the props to be placed and to be used. The stage carries all the weight. The stage can be counted on. The stage doesn’t go away. The stage is the platform for a theater. All the rest can be considered applications. The sets change, the scenes change, the actors change, the costumes change, the lights change, the plays, or the musicals, change often. With the sets, costumes, and makeup, we can create whatever we desire.

Pastor Terry described our life platform and how our faith becomes the one constant and truly sustainable part of our life. How do we live this platform out throughout all of our life? What about the things in our life that are part of every day that aren’t built upon the right platform that then become a problem and a conflict? We have to consider those things as applications too and we must be sure they are built upon a firm, strong and consistent platform. Things like our occupation, job, friends, relationships, interests, hobbies, politics, education, geography, fashions, finances, health, emotions, and even our age. Yes, it changes every day, as does and will our physical appearance. All these come and go. They’re like the apps on our phones or on our tablets. They’re here today, needing an update tomorrow, or maybe even gone tomorrow, but our platform, no, it doesn’t come and go. It stays. It stands the test of time and change. It bears all the weight of the apps that are built for it. The platform we can depend upon. The apps, while seemingly so important at the time, get installed and removed, and are only as good as the platform underneath them.

Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take the next few weeks and go deeper into the ways we can extend our life platform into many life apps so that we can learn to make the right choices. To live our lives fully as God has desired for us to do. We’re going to explore how our platform can sustain and strengthen each of our life apps. Taking them with us each week into the world, outside of the church walls, to our workplaces and our homes. But for now, let’s remember we must actively accept and build our life platform upon God’s platform, and then build our life apps on top of this and this only.

Pastor Terry: All right. I’m going to do something a little bit different today. I have my friend and co-writer on this project Rusty with us. Can we give him a warm hand? We were talking about the whole idea of platform, apps, and something that you and I have been discussing a lot. How do we stay focused on the right platform? How would you talk about that? Is it hard to do that?

Rusty Roof: You know, I’d say this, Pastor. I’ll go out on a limb and I don’t think there’s been another time in the history of man that it’s been harder to stay focused than right now. We have so many things hitting us all the time. Has anybody got one of these phones? When they first showed up, you know, they were big bags and things. It was a phone. Then someone said, “You know what? Let’s put a camera on this.” Then, we started to get little games and things. Now, Apple introduced it. Google and everybody else has just about anything in the form of an app. When Apple said, “There’s an app for that,” it was true. There’s either an app for it or somebody’s building an app for it.

All of those things on that phone are basically trying to grab our attention. It’s why in the tech world it’s called the attention economy. They’re trying to grab us. They push notifications, constantly asking us to update. Trying to get us to get that app on our front page, our front screen. It is extraordinarily hard to focus in today’s world, especially on the platform when all of these apps are constantly trying to grab our attention. The good news is that our phones let them turn it off. Hard to do, but we can turn them off and we’ll let the notifications go away. The apps of our world, you can’t turn them off. It’s advertising, entertainment, and music. It’s the messages that we get at work from others. It’s those people who are close to us saying, “This is what you ought to be. This is what you have to do to be successful.” Those get really hard to shut off.

Pastor Terry: If I’m hearing you correctly, then, part of what you’re saying is that to curate what we do in terms of our life, what comes in and what comes out, part of that, we have to almost be intentional about it. It’s not just keeping things out. It’s also cultivating the good things in our lives. How do you, in terms of our spiritual life, think it’s good to be able to keep our focus? Are there some practical things that you think we can do that help us focus on the best things on the platform of Jesus?

Rusty Roof: First, we have to have the discipline to try to turn off those things that have come into our lives that have started to influence us and sometimes start to control us. Last weekend, before the Easter service, those of us who were here knew that you asked us to do something. It was a very simple thing. You said, “Can you turn your phone off?” You said, “Don’t be that guy that interrupts.” Lo and behold, still what happened though? In some of our services, people’s phones rang.

In my own life, I’ll tell you, those are those things. Those things that have crept in that I know shouldn’t be there, I would tell you I’ve turned them off. I’m sure of it. They’re not going to show up. Then at certain points in life, they ring right when I least want them to. I think it’s not only the discipline of trying to keep out those things. I think it’s also making sure that we understand that those things can overtake us and we have to bring our focus back to the platform. The way I think about it, I’m so far from perfect, Lord. I’m a sinner saved by grace. I will tell you that what I try to do, is every day in my personal life, I try to live a life, the life that Jesus asked us to do.

I think about it in two ways. First, I never walked into this thinking that this way of following Jesus was going to be easy. Even though God says to us, “The yoke I give you will be easy.” If the way in the path was broad and not narrow, it would be easy. It’s not. Any of us would work out, I’m a runner, you go to the gym. Before we go into those exercises, we don’t say, “Oh, this is going to be great. It’s going to be easy.” If we did, we know it wouldn’t be good for us. I start from a place of, okay, it’s not going to be easy. I need to have barriers and boundaries around me. I use two verses. 

The first verse I use is Romans 12:2, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think, then you will learn to know.” The key is “then.” “Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” This is the verse that we hear, we are in the world because we are, but don’t “be” of it. If we transform and copy the ways of the behaviors of the world and we become that, then we are going to miss out. The other one I use is I use 1 Corinthians 7:31, which is “Those who use the things of the world,” and it doesn’t say, “Don’t use the things of the world,” it says, “Those who use the things of the world,” which we all do, “Should not become attached to them, for as this world, for as we know, it will soon pass away,” which is what your message was earlier. The eternal focus. The rest of it will pass away.I have to be reminded to keep these priorities right. It’s as if I have to let God’s notification be turned on in my life for me to be able to keep the focus.

Pastor Terry: When we talk about the world, what we’re talking about is the culture that we live in. The values, the things that are constantly bombarding us. I think some of us feel compelled. This is our world, this is our reality. This is the place where we live our lives. There are so many wonderful upsides to it. You’ve mentioned some of the downsides to it. But, when it comes to you representing the Lord in the circles that you’re in because you’re not advocating escaping culture into this life of secretive piety, you’re talking about engaging the real world. You do it regularly. What you’re saying is that we have to have a very stable core and platform. Maybe you can comment on how you do that because you’re engaging people all the time outside of these walls.

Rusty Roof: We have to because part of the message of Jesus was to go forth and spread the good news. If we just stay within these four walls, we can’t do that. When we go into the workplace and work life, we have to be engaged. I think about it this way, and you said it, we have to fill ourselves in order to be fulfilled. We have to start there. I start with what I would say are my disciplines. Reading God’s Word, staying in God’s Word, staying consistent in prayer time, and making sure that I’m in God’s house on a regular basis to take in the teachings and learn to serve. That’s why we serve in the children’s ministry. When I serve, I feel like I get twice as much as what I give. It comes back to me. Being faithful in my giving. Also my small group time. My small group time is really important to keep me accountable. Those things are the things that remind and keep me grounded in a way. So the more I fill up my life with those things, the harder it is to fill up life with the wrong things.

Pastor Terry: Almost like a displacement.

Rusty Roof: It is like a displacement theory. It’s why you see in these Life App videos that we do, series one and version two, I come up with these little pithy things. Try to remember, like in version one, we had the LOVE app, the L-O-V-E app. We had our life gift app. We have our life seasons app. I think we have to be reminded, at least I have to be reminded over and over.

Pastor Terry: I know we don’t have a lot of time, but I do want to ask this. Is there anything that you would be able to help us with? Some of us are in environments where it is not that easy to always live out our faith for Jesus. We may sometimes feel reluctant or even intimidated by it, based on what we’re experiencing. How can we take this idea of the life of Jesus and have it at a core level? How do you operate with that challenge? How do you move into the marketplace? How do you move into these circles that you’re involved in representing the Lord’s heart? Is it easy? How do you do it?

Rusty Roof: No, it’s not easy. I wish it was. It’s about trying to live out the example. Jesus gave us an example. One of the great things about Jesus is He didn’t just sit on a cloud and say, “Worship me. You can’t reach me, but I’m up here on the cloud, just do what I say.” He came and walked on the same earth that we walked on. He came into His environment, the marketplace, into the workplace, into all those things. He gave us an example of how to do that. That life example is what we can do. To me, it comes back to the verse which is the great commandment. Love Jesus first, love Him with all your heart, mind, and spirit, and then love others. If you hold onto those two things, then the things we do or try to do in our life are to represent that. Sometimes it’s the little things. We get bombarded in the workplace. I’m going through some contentious stuff right now with one of my companies. How I conduct myself makes it different. The fact that I just pray and say, “Lord, give me grace, give me mercy. Don’t let four-letter words come out of my mouth.” I read your Word, and I don’t see any place where you ever used a four-letter word.

Pastor Terry: Love.

Rusty Roof: Love. Yeah. That was a good one. That’s good. 

Pastor Terry: I know what you meant.

Rusty Roof: You know what I mean? Also, how we love others. To show up for others when they’re in times of need. To be there with them when they’re hurting. Be the one person when everybody else is off trying to take care of themselves, to try to stop and take care of others. There are a lot of little examples, but the little examples make a difference. Unfortunately in our faith, in some ways, everybody wants to see us stumble. They would love to see us stumble. They would love to say, “Oh yeah, see, you’re one of those guys that go to church on Sunday. You say you teach Sunday school, but you act in a whole different way.” I see that as a huge responsibility because I don’t want to be hypocritical. I don’t want to be someone that represents one thing on Sunday and a different thing on Monday. It’s a bigger game than that.

Pastor Terry: That’s a perfect note for us to say the goal that we have is to be able to enhance our capacity to appropriate the life of Christ and allow us to live increasingly as He did. There was no gap between the words of Jesus and the way He lived. Therefore, He had utter authority. I think the Lord wants to help us to be able to have consistency between what we believe, what we say we believe, and how we live it out. We desire to equip everyone. The real desire is for all who come and are going to hear these words and messages, it is designed to get us thinking about how we can improve our game if you will. How we can be more effective, more courageous, and more whole people who represent His heart. Never perfectly, but increasingly in ways that speak of His grace and life. That’s our goal. Now, I want to pray over what we’ve just shared. We’ll have our time of giving. Our closing song focuses on the idea of making Jesus the focal point and the platform. Let me go ahead and pray over what we’ve just shared and where we’re going in the weeks ahead.

Lord, I thank you for this time. I thank you for the opportunity to engage your words in a different way. To think about this idea of building on a healthy foundation. I know that you’re inviting a lot of us to a place of growth and expansion in our lives with you. For some of us, it’s going to show up in our private lives. For some, it’s going to show up in our personal lives, our relational lives. For others, it’s going to show up in our public and work lives. You’re calling us to places of upgrade and strengthening. We welcome you in. We welcome your grace. We welcome your power and life. I ask for this blessing over all of us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.