Back on Track with My Faith - Saddleback Weekend Service

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♪ Into your glorious day ♪ ♪ When you called my name, you called my name ♪ ♪ And I ran out of that grave, yeah ♪ ♪ Out of the darkness, into your glorious day ♪ One, two, everybody clap, come on. One, two, three, four, five, come on. ♪ Oh, the glorious day, oh, the glorious day ♪ Amen. There is only one name that can save us, and that name is Jesus. Let's sing to him today. ♪ I know a name that can silence roaring waves ♪ ♪ I know a name that can empty out a grave ♪ ♪ I know a name, it's the only name that saves ♪ ♪ The only name that saves, and it's worthy of all praise ♪ ♪ I call you Jesus, I call you, I call you healer ♪ ♪ Risen and reigning in power ♪ ♪ Something comes out of the grave, every time ♪ ♪ Every time I call you Jesus, I call you, I call you savior ♪ ♪ Worthy of glory forever, something comes out of the grave ♪ ♪ Every time I call your name, I'll have a king to his ♪ ♪ With dominion over death, and he holds the keys ♪ ♪ In his holiness our heads, he is the healer ♪ ♪ That has crushed a serpent's head, how resurrected made I am ♪ ♪ I call you Jesus, I call you, I call you healer ♪ ♪ I call you, I call you healer, risen and reigning in power ♪ ♪ Something comes out of the grave, every time I call you Jesus ♪ ♪ I call you, I call you savior, worthy of glory forever ♪ ♪ Something comes out of the grave, every time I call your name ♪ ♪ Chains break, dry bones weigh, every time I call your name ♪

♪ The gates of hell shake, every time I call your name ♪ ♪ Chains break, dry bones weigh, every time I call your name ♪ ♪ Chains break, dry bones weigh, every time I call your name ♪ ♪ The gates of hell shake, every time I call your name ♪ The Bible says that the same spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is now alive in those who put their trust in him. Let's sing today, Dead Things. ♪ Dead things come alive, dead things come alive. Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus! Dead things come alive, dead things come alive. Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus! Dead things come alive, dead things come alive. Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus! Dead things come alive, dead things come alive! Dead things come alive in the name of Jesus! Dead things come alive, dead things come alive! I call you Jesus! I call you, I call you healer! Risen and reigning in power! Something comes out of the grave! Every time I call you Jesus, I call you, I call you! Come on, let's praise His name, church. Can we give Jesus a standing ovation of praise? There's no name more worthy. There's no name higher than Jesus. There's no name greater. And so all together, let's lift our voices and let's sing this chorus together. Oh, praise the name because He's worthy of it. Come on, church. Let's sing. Oh, praise the name of the Lord our God. Oh, praise His name forevermore. For endless days we will sing Your praise. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord our God. I cast my mind to Calvary, where Jesus bled and died for me. I see His wounds, His hands, His feet.

My Savior, that cursed sinner. Come on, let's sing that second verse. His body bowed and drenched in tears. They lay Him down in Joseph's tomb. The entrance sealed by a stone. Messiah with a stake. Oh, Lord. He's worthy of praise, isn't He, church? Let's sing together. Oh, praise the name of the Lord our God. Oh, praise His name forevermore. For endless days we will sing Your praise. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord our God. Let's rejoice. Then on the third, at break of dawn, the Son of Heaven rose again. Oh, trampled death, where is your sting? The angels mourn for Christ the King. Church, let's sing it. Oh, praise the name of the Lord our God. Oh, praise His name forevermore. For endless days we will sing Your praise. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord our God. I love this verse. It says, He shall return in robes of white. The blazing sun shall pierce the night. And I will rise among the saints. My gaze will transfer on Jesus.

Are you looking forward to that day? He shall return in robes of white. The blazing sun shall pierce the night. And I will rise among the saints. My gaze transfixed on Jesus' face. Oh, praise. Oh, praise the name of the Lord our God. Oh, praise His name forevermore. For endless days we will sing your praise, oh Lord, oh Lord. Come on Church, one last time, with all our heart. Oh praise the name of the Lord our God. Oh praise His name forevermore. For endless days we will sing your praise, oh Lord, oh Lord. Our God, oh Lord, oh Lord, our God. Well, happy New Year, online community. We're so glad to see you. And what a great way to start out the year by worshipping together. It's going to be a great weekend because we're kicking off a brand new series called Back on Track. We're going to take a look at our priorities and take a look at our lives and see what matters most and see what we can put first in our lives. So we're so glad that you're here as we kick off this new series together. And if it's your first time joining us, we just want to say welcome. We're so glad that you decided to spend these next couple moments with us. And we would love to personally connect with you and help you to get connected and plugged into our church family. But it starts with you letting us know that it's your first time. So you can let us know by clicking the link in the description if you're watching on YouTube. Or you can download our Saddleback Church app, set your campus to online community, and then open the notes section to find the program there. And then let us know that it's your first time. But we can't wait to meet you and get to know you more. That Saddleback app is also going to be a great tool and resource to stay connected with all that's going on in our church family. And also it's going to help you follow along with the message notes today and the resources that Pastor Andy brings up in his message as well.

And something else we have coming up very soon is Activate. Activate is a one hour experience that we have designed to help you get plugged into the life of our church and find out more about how you can grow in your faith right here at Saddleback. And I want to take a moment to share a story with you about a woman named Paula. Paula first came to Saddleback carrying a lot of church hurt and carrying a lot of confusion about faith. She remembers growing up in an environment that had strict religious rules. And also it led her to feeling distant and isolated from others and from God. But through a mutual friend, she was invited to join for a Saddleback service. And she started to come every single week and she started showing up week after week coming to church. And through that, something in her started to change. She started to feel welcome and she started to feel a sense of wholeness that she hadn't in a while. And so she decided to take a next step by attending Activate. And through Activate, something for her clicked. She realized what faith was all about. She realized that she had a purpose in her life. And she continued to take more steps forward and realizing that she wasn't alone in her faith journey. She started to serve and now she's taking a next step of getting baptized. And that is what is available for you as well. Through Activate, we want you to grow in your faith. We hope that you realize that you're not alone in your faith journey. That church is more than just watching alone on the weekends. But it's being plugged into community and growing in our faith together. And so we would want to invite you to join us for Activate. We have one coming up next weekend on January 11th. And you can sign up and register through the Saddleback app. So we really hope to see you there. Well, church family, we are going to continue to worship by listening to this message from Pastor Andy. So let's join the rest of our church. It's so good to be together, church family. I want to welcome all of you who are joining us online, all of our campuses and extensions spread across the world.

We're in the first week of a new series. We're in the first week of a new year. I love the first week of the year with church. It's like the time of year that we most believe change is possible in our lives. And so we're starting this new series called Back on Track. And in just a moment, we're going to get into it. But you know, the other thing that's really interesting about Christmas and New Year is that no other time in the year does one week feel further apart than Christmas and New Year. Am I right? It's like it's this wall between the years. And sometimes you can jump into a new year and forget some of the things that happened in the last year. So many of you, I haven't seen you since Christmas, and I thought it'd be good for us just to celebrate what God did in our church family this Christmas. Here's some stories and statistics of what God did this Christmas. So many of you served, you prayed, you invited your friends to come. And I would like for you to know that that there were 1,548 people that either recommitted or made a decision to follow Jesus for the very first time. So we wanna celebrate those decisions. There were over 2,230 people that made a decision to come to church for the first time and let us know that they're new here. If you're one of those, we're so glad that you're back with us. Also, that means many of you invited your friends and family members and just a great sign of your hunger and desire for people in your life to encounter what God is doing in you. And then finally, we had 50,178 people show up

for Christmas services. So we wanna celebrate all that God did and just say thank you one more time for your faithfulness and serving and praying. You know, the other thing I do wanna say before we jump into today's message, there are a couple of big prayer requests that we have as a staff, that I have as a pastor for you this year that we just really have been focusing on as we move into the new year. And the first one is this, we wanna do our very best as a church family to serve you where you are, to help you in your next step in your journey of faith, to provide resources, come alongside of you. And the reality is, we can do that the more that we know you, the more that we know about your journey and where you are spiritually. And sometimes a church like Saddleback can feel really big. And our goal as a church family is to make it feel really small. And that happens as we personally connect. That's one big prayer request. The other one is that this year we've made a commitment. We wanna pray individually for every person in our church family. Like we want to see miracles of God's work in our midst this year that happens out of prayer. We believe God does things when we pray that he doesn't when we don't.

Here's a quick story. So last service, we had a family in the service and there was a mom and I asked everybody at the end of the service to write down a prayer request. And that mom wrote down a prayer request that this would be the year that her daughter gets baptized. And right after that service, her daughter came up and said, I wanna get baptized. How awesome is that? So as we think about that, I wanna ask you if you will, here's how we're gonna do this. We're gonna actually, this year, you have a card that is around you somewhere. And if you don't, you can raise a hand and one of our ushers or volunteers will get you one. But on the front, there's a place where you can tell us a little bit more about you. And at some point during the service, feel free to fill that out. But I really do wanna emphasize this backside as well. The prayer request, I'm gonna walk you through at the end of our time. I'm gonna invite you to pray a prayer of faith for God, to God this year of what you're asking God to do in your life. And this will help us to serve you better this year. Now, in addition to that, as we start the new year, this message series is called Back on Track. And I cannot help but think of those who grew up in the 1990s and watched Saturday Night Live

with Chris Farley and his famous, I'm gonna help you get back on track. Has anybody seen that before? Out of curiosity. Okay, if you haven't, go home, watch it, it's awesome. But you know, the whole idea of getting back on track is the reality. In our lives, we have a tendency to get off track throughout the course of our lives. And I wanted to share this by illustrating it through a story. So these two companies that are coming on the screen right now are two companies that at one time, both of them were dominating their industry. The one on the left is Nokia. How many of you had a Nokia phone at some point, out of curiosity? Hands going up everywhere, I see those hands. And now Nokia in the early 2000s, they were like the leaders with phones. And there was something that was happening with technology, things were shifting, Apple was growing, and Nokia was doubling down on what they had been doing for years. Well, in 2007, we all know what happened. Apple came out with the iPhone and everything changed. Nokia missed the window of opportunity, did not shift, did not make any changes, and as a result, they own 1% of the market today. They're like one of the worst phones on planet Earth,

and they're no more because they didn't shift. They didn't adjust in the midst of a culture that was changing. Now, the other company right here, I want you to see these guys again, Garmin. Now, if you look at Garmin, how many of you guys had one of their navigation systems in your car, out of curiosity? We're all aging ourselves who raise our hands right now. Nobody under like 30 knows what that is, but it was in the car, it was like a huge computer, and it helped you get to your destination. Sometimes when you go to get a rental car today, they still ask you, do you want a Garmin? You're like, no genius, this is 2026, okay? I don't need a Garmin. But Garmin, in the midst of this whole shift, they were a navigation company. So they had a technology that would help cars and airplanes and ships. navigate, and they noticed that their technology could work inside of watches. And so they said, hey, what if we actually put our technology inside of watches for people that like to run and hike and that they're outside all the time? What if we do that? So they started experimenting. They started making adjustments. And as a result now, they are dominating the sports watch industry. Show of hands, how many of you have a Garmin watch? Raise your hand up high. So we have lots of people that wear these watches. They dominate the industry because they adjusted. They made course corrections. They changed. And as a result, they stepped into a different reality. Now, many of us in our lives will find things that are off. But our natural tendency is when those things hit us in the face. We think that maybe if we just double down, maybe if we just stay the trajectory, somehow we'll get a different outcome. But this is very important. I want to

invite you to write this down. You don't change destination without changing direction. So if at the end of this year, I want a different destination than the end of last year. If you want your marriage to be healthier next year, if you want your kids and your relationship with them to grow, or if you want to have a deeper faith, you don't just end up at a different destination without shifting your direction. A new destination comes from a new direction. So we're going to talk for the next five weeks. How do you shift and get your life back on track with the core areas that ultimately God invites you to steward? Your whole life coming back on track with God's help. Now, I want you in your notes to see there's a little diagram there that will highlight these main areas of our life that we'll focus on over these next few weeks. And the first one is our faith. So we'll start with recognizing everything flows out of relationship with God. And then we'll talk next week about our health, both spiritually, mentally, physically, how our bodies are a vessel to be stewarded, to honor God. And then in the third week, we'll talk about finances and how to get back on track. Maybe you spent a little bit too much at Christmas and you're like, I need to get back on track with my finances. So we'll talk about that. And then we'll talk about relationships and ultimately our work. So how do you get back on track? Now, we could stop right now and this could be like a seminar at a business meeting. But I want to just say before I go in any further in this whole series, this whole year, this is not like an exercise of us conjuring up human wisdom and knowledge to make our lives better. The reality that when it comes to your life changing, there is a truth that is so powerful and fundamental that if we can grasp it at the beginning of the year, the beginning of this series, it changes everything. And it's found in Lamentations 3, 22 through 24. And I want to invite you, all of our campuses, if we can read these few verses aloud together with a big hearty voice, we start and it says, the faithful love of the Lord never ends. His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness. His mercies begin afresh each morning. So I will say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance. Therefore, I will hope in him. Now, here's the truth. Here's the very important truth about the front end of your year. What is true about January 1st and the very sense of energy and optimism that you feel the first day of the year. What's true once a year with the calendar is true every day with God. That there is an opportunity for a fresh start with God every single day of your life. So in front of you with this year, there are 365 opportunities to have a fresh start with God. So how do you get that fresh start? I thought that was great news that somebody would say,

amen. Thank God for a fresh start every single day. Because on January 1st, I woke up and my first interaction with my son for the new year was horrible. And I said, thank God January 2nd's coming and mercy will be new tomorrow. There is fresh mercy, fresh faithfulness, goodness from God. So in this new year, I believe there are going to be so many moments of God's faithfulness and his miracles and his healing that show up in your life. And so in this moment, what I want to do is stir up inside of you a faith to believe that God can do great things in your life and to renew your faith as you look at the new year. So here's a definition of faith for our time today. My faith equals my active trust in God. So how do we renew that active trust in God and putting our life into God's hands. Now, what I love about our church is we have people all different places in their journey spiritually. Some of you, this putting your life into God's hands gonna be the first time now in this season. Others of you, it's a renewal of that active trust in God. And so today to help us, we're gonna go to Genesis 4 in the Old Testament. Now this story, I've gotta give a little bit of a pre-warning. This is kind of a sad story. It's not really a chipper way to start a new year. But I love this passage of scripture. In Genesis 4, verses one through eight, we're gonna see the story of two brothers, Cain and Abel. Now these are Adam and Eve's two sons, the first four human beings on the face of the planet. It only takes a couple of people to have problems and immediately there's dysfunction in the family. And it always makes me feel a little bit better when I read the Bible and realize, God's kids had problems too.

It started right away in Genesis chapter four. So let's look at it. Now Adam had sexual relations with his wife Eve and she became pregnant. So this is the first time a human being has been pregnant. So Eve is pregnant and it says when she gave birth to Cain, she said, with the Lord's help, I've produced a man. Here's a child that came out of my womb, she's saying. And because of this being the first child, it's like, wow, here's another human being that I produced with the Lord's help, she says. So later, then she gave birth to his brother named Abel. So Cain and Abel grew up. And Abel, he became a shepherd or a rancher. And while Cain cultivated the ground and became a farmer. So you've got a rancher and a farmer. This is a true story at the beginning of time. So Cain and Abel, these two brothers, Adam and Eve's two sons are gonna have a moment between them and God where they both come to God with something, but God's gonna find favor with one thing that's brought or with one person and not with the other. So let's look what happens. It says when it was time for the harvest, Cain presented some of his crops. You might circle that phrase, it says some of his crops as a gift to the Lord. Now, Abel also brought a gift and it was the best portion of the firstborn lamb from his flock.

You might circle that phrase, it says best portion. And the Lord accepted Abel and his gift, but he did not accept Cain and his gift. And this made Cain very angry and he looked dejected. This is significant. Cain is being disobedient or even having this, the reserved spirit with God and now he's mad at God because he's not giving God his whole heart. And now that anger is gonna be transferred to his brother Abel. And it says, God comes to Cain and ask a question. Why are you so angry? The Lord asked. God has some very good questions in the Bible. This might be a good question for some of us today. Like, why is there so much anger in you? So Cain, he looks at God and God again says, why do you look so dejected? Will you accept? If you will accept, you will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out. Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you, to destroy you. The book of James talks about this cycle of death that comes from sin. So God is saying, it's after you. It's a force that wants to dominate and destroy you, but you must subdue it and master it. The Bible talks about this as the mortification

or the crucifixion of sin that we can do with the power of God, with his help to crucify those desires that war against God's best. So God here is giving a precursor to the power of sin. Now we know there's gonna be a savior that's gonna deal ultimately with sin so that we can be forgiven, but God is trying to help Cain understand there's a different path, there's a better way to do it. So one day Cain, after this whole conversation, he suggests to his brother, let's go out into the field. And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and he killed him. He's done with him. Like you are gone, Abel. So Cain in his anger, because he doesn't bring to God a gift that's favorable, he gets jealous and now he murders his brother Abel. So this story, happy new year, everybody. Great way to start the new year. This story gives us so much of a picture of our response to God and the significance of our faith back to him. Now, when you and I look at this story, the Bible actually only tells us what was in their hands. The Bible does not tell us what was in their heart. But what we know about God throughout the course of the scripture is that the Bible tells us that God

actually sees what's on the inside and the heart. So what they brought with their hands was evidence or expression of what was in their heart. Both of them understood that they should bring something to God. Now this is before the tithe, this is before any teaching in the scripture on honoring God with the first of what you produce. They just implicitly understood they should give something back to God. So they come with their gifts from what they've produced and Cain, he comes with some of his fruit and Abel comes with the firstborn of his flock. And there's a principle in here that is so important. So I wanna look back at that verse one more time. I want you to see it and underline these phrases if you didn't already. When it was time for the harvest, Cain presented some of his crops as a gift to the Lord and Abel brought a gift, the best portions of the firstborn lamb from his flock. The Lord accepted Abel and his gift but he did not accept Cain and his gift. Now, some of you maybe during Christmas, like my family, you ate way too much food. And that food starts to stack up and sometimes you get leftovers in the fridge and those leftovers stay and there's always a system of like how many days you eat the leftovers.

And then finally, after a few days, if they're still there, eventually you either throw them away or give them to the dog. You do not give them to the cat. You would not wanna bless the cat that way. Just bless the dog. And start the new year with a cat joke. So you would give those leftovers, you don't take and eat them after a period of time. And it's almost as if for Cain, what he's doing in this moment is he's coming with his leftovers to God. Some of his crops he's giving to God. But for Abel, there's this part of what he's doing where he is taking the first and the best of what he's produced and he's giving it back as an act of worship to God. So God, here's a very important principle and truth about renewing your faith. God, what he wants is he wants my whole heart. He wants every bit of who I am. God wants every room in my life. God wants every thought that goes through my head. God wants me to worship him with everything that I am. God wants your whole heart. So God is not after your discipline. God's not after your hustle and grind. God's not after your ability to create some list that you keep to somehow religiously obtain favor with him.

God wants your adoration and worship that flows from a heart of faith. And what we know about Hebrews, what we know about Abel from Hebrews is that Abel came through a filter or through a heart of faith. Hebrews 11, four says, faith by faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain to which he was commended as righteous. And God commended him by accepting his gifts and through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. So there was a faith component to Abel coming and bringing his whole heart, his whole worship to God. Now in our culture, it's hard for us to understand fully the concept of first fruits. Like in many cultures all over the world, they produce a crop and that first produce is like, it's not like going to Whole Foods and getting your first grape. It's like, it is a whole commitment of what comes into your hands. And you don't always know with your first fruit how much more is coming. So I'll explain it like this. In the Bible, there's 22 times the phrase first fruit shows up. I had a moment that kind of helped me understand this a little bit more. So one day I'm at the house, I go out to the front porch and there's this little blue bag

on my front doorstep on the threshold. So I go out, I pick up this little blue bag and I pull it out. And on the inside, there's a letter written from somebody who attends Saddleback. He knows where I live, so he attends Saddleback. And he writes this letter and he says, hey, we bought some chickens. And for the last few months, we've been trying to get our first egg. We have been like praying and we have been hoping that the coyotes don't eat our chickens. And we have been hoping, and this is our first egg ever from our chickens. And we are offering this back just as a way of saying, God, we're trusting in you with some kind of a harvest or produce that comes from these chickens. That was the one egg, the first egg without any other eggs that had come forth. That's what a first fruit or a first offering is, is it's saying I'm bringing something before anything else. Now, I thought that was pretty cool, but I did not know what to do with the egg. Like, do I eat the egg? Do I, you know, boil it and paint it? I don't know. What do I do? What do you guys think? Should I eat it? I'd eat it?

Or like David in the Old Testament where he dumps it out? I don't know. It's like, but anyways, here's a picture of the egg. I just thought you should see it. So, but if that's you, if you brought me that egg, thank you very much. I'm sorry I didn't ask for your permission to share this story with the whole church, but hopefully you get over it. You blessed thousands of people. Thank you very much. I love that example because it symbolizes what is happening with the first fruit. So Proverbs 3.9 says, honor the Lord with your wealth, with your first fruit of all your crops. So it's not just simply a financial aspect of our lives. It's the all-encompassing reality of your time, your energy, your attention, your money. It's saying, God, you will get first, you will get best. So the question I wanna encourage you to wrestle through is who or what is getting first and best in your life? See, your first fruit is going somewhere. No matter what you do with your life, when you get a paycheck, when you have a day, it goes somewhere. So the question is who or what is getting first in your life, and are you giving your first fruit to second-class pursuits? And the invitation from God is your whole heart.

It's like this year, God, I want you to have my whole heart. I wanna start my day with you. I wanna open your word and hear your voice. I wanna pray and seek your heart. I wanna be in church and prioritize you in first day of my week. I wanna put you first place. And if we're honest with ourselves, some of us last year gave God our leftovers. We said, God, I'm just gonna kinda casually do this journey with you. But friend, might I say, he's worthy of your whole heart. He's worthy of your whole life. And there's nothing on planet Earth that you could give yourself to that's better and greater than giving yourself to God. So today, you can make a commitment to say, God, this year, I wanna give you my whole heart. Now, this principle ties into another very important truth. With your whole heart coming to God, God responds to hungry people. God responds to people who get to a place of desperation in their journey and their need for him. And I think a lot of the challenge that we face, especially knowing we have international audiences, one of the big challenges we face here in North America is we have all of our needs met. You know, you don't have to worry about going to get your crop. You can click a button on Amazon

and it's there within 45 minutes. And if it's not, you're very angry about it. You're gonna give a one-star review for a 45-minute wait for blueberries. You know, it's like, and that natural tendency is when all of our needs are met, there's oftentimes in us a lack of desperation for God in our lives until we hit something like cancer or until you hit a divorce, your spouse walks out on you. And what if now, before you're in a crisis, you could stir up your heart in such a way that you say, God, I want more of you in my life this year. I want you to be the thing above every other thing that deep in my soul, I would hunger and thirst for your presence, that I would hunger and thirst to be near you and to know you and to accomplish your will. God, help me to feed that appetite deep within my soul for more of you. See, the reality is the appetite I feed is the appetite that grows. We know this. Like Christmas, little secret about Christmas. Church family gives us lots of sweets during Christmas. So I started doing the math on the calories that were coming through the door. And next year, I'm gonna start earlier and count all season how many calories come. I am confident we had more calories and sweets come as gifts this Christmas than people that came to church.

I am confident there were over 50,000 calories that came through our doors. It was enough to make everybody in our family put on 10 to 15 pounds. It was unbelievable. Now, we fed that appetite. And have you noticed when you feed that sugar dragon, that sugar dragon grows, and then January comes and you decide to do a sugar fast, sweet fast, and now all of a sudden that dragon is screaming, give me a cookie, give me chocolate. It's because that appetite has been fed. So how do you get your desire for God to grow so it's like a flame on the inside of you that burns deep within your soul? Well, in Joel chapter two, verse 12, listen to this. These words, the Lord says this, turn to me now while there's time. Give me your heart. And he says this, come with fasting, with weeping and mourning. So there's something about this dedicated season on the front end of a year when you're like, God, I'm gonna pursue you with prayer. I'm gonna let go of some things in my life, be it sugar or be it time or be it food for a day or two or a season or a meal for a season, a period of time, that I'm gonna come before you with fasting, weeping and mourning as a symbol to you, God, to say I want you more than anything else in this world.

I wanna know you. I want you to be the priority of my life. See, the reality about the ministry, I could preach on this one point for a really long period of time, and I might until I feel like you got it. There is so much in the ministry of Jesus that when Jesus touches people, it's not people that are like, oh, there's a teacher. He's cool, he's all. No, it's a mom who is crying out to God to say, Jesus, I will be a dog that will take a piece of bread that falls from your table if you will heal my daughter. That's how desperate. It's a dad crying out for his daughter who's dying. It's a woman touching the edge of his garment saying, I am desperate for one touch from God. We live our lives in this leftover version of faith. And might I just say, could we become a church this year that stirs up a hunger on the inside for more of God to say, God, I want more of you. I want more of you in my life. So let me tell you a couple things that we're gonna do this year to kind of stir that up together. First of all, we're gonna do a season of prayer for our whole church starting in just a few weeks. You're gonna see the dates come on the screen. 21 days of prayer and many of us will do fasting from January 26th to February 15th.

We're gonna do something we haven't done since Stacy and I have been here and I don't know of a period of time in recent history where this has been done. We're gonna call on the whole church to come and pray. Now, if you grew up in international church, this is normal. If you grew up in white upper middle class church America, this is not normal. This is not what we normally do. And it's like, no, we're gonna say, God, we need you. And for 21 days, we're gonna gather early in the morning with our church family, 7 a.m. and we're gonna seek God. I'm gonna invite you to come. Now, we're gonna stream it. Some of you parents, one has to stay home, one can come, but I'm gonna ask you to commit to a season as a church family to say, God, first thing this year, we are not after a year that we can accomplish with human wisdom and human power. We're after you moving. We're in desperation mode for our generation and our nation. We're coming before you, God, with a hunger for you to move in our lives. So that starts in a few weeks. We'll keep talking more about that, but that will lead into a sacred assembly with our whole church family called the Return Gathering. We did this last year, February 18th to 20th of the dates. I'm gonna tell you more in the coming weeks how you can sign up,

and that's gonna be one location stateside, and then all of our international campuses will together do one at their locations. But it's a moment for us to wholeheartedly as a church family return to God and cry out to him for our generation to be saved with his love and his power. Now, last year when we did this, there were stories of radical change. People got healed. There were marriages transformed. There were parents and kids that were reconciled. There were salvation stories. It was unbelievable. It was one of the most amounts of transformation I've seen in people's lives in three days in my entire ministry, and I believe God's gonna do it again. I believe he's gonna exceed our expectation. So we want to stir up that hunger and come desperate for more of God and asking him, God, will you do what only you can do in our midst? God responds to a kind of holy hunger in us. So let me give you one question to think about with this. When it comes to your life, what appetite has your attention right now? What appetite are you feeding? And my encouragement to you is to feed that hunger for more of God.

It looks like you on your face before God. It looks like you pacing in your living room, crying out to him. It looks like you opening a journal and writing, God, I need you, and that leads me to this last point. God loves to help the humble. God loves to help people who recognize their need for his grace. See, friends, this is the difference between Jesus and every other world religion. He's a. God that gives help to people that don't deserve it. Like I don't deserve God's mercy and grace, and yet he looks not at your perfection. He looks not at your performance. He looks at your humility. He looks at your heart to say, will you humble yourself before me and say, I need you, God. James 4, 6 says this, but he gives us more grace. And this is why the scripture says God opposes the proud. He opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. And God is looking for contrite, humble hearts of people that just say, God, I need you. I need you. I'm done doing it in my own power. I'm done doing it my own way. And you know, you don't have to get to this place where everything is unraveling in your life

to be desperate for God and to humble yourself before him and say, God, I cannot do this without you. I cannot do another year without you leading my life. And I wanna ask you this year, I wanna ask you to give God your whole heart. I wanna ask you to say to God, I will take a leap of faith unlike I ever have before, and I will trust you with my life at levels that I never have my whole life. And what that means is maybe for some of you, that's that first step to say, God, I'm putting my trust in you for forgiveness to receive the gift of salvation. Others of you, it might just simply be, I'm gonna join in with what God is doing in my church family and to say, I'm gonna give a year to Saddleback Church and plant myself here. And when there's a call for small groups, I'm gonna go to small groups. And when there's a call to serve, I'm gonna serve. And when there's an invitation to get connected, I will. So one great way you can step into that is next week with Activate to say, I'm gonna take a step to get connected into community. But my challenge for you, here's my challenge. My challenge is to give God and Saddleback one full year of your life. And at the end of it, if it doesn't work out and it's like miserable and everything's worse off, good news is you got the rest of your life

to do what you were doing before. So now in this moment, my challenge is that you would give God your very best this year. So in 2026, will I give God my best or will I give God my leftovers? And what you can know for certain about God is that God is a God who does not give his leftovers to us. In fact, the very word that was used about Jesus is that he was the firstborn of God, that he came as the son of God as a sacrifice for us, God's very best to us. And now that invitation from him is out of what Jesus did in his death on a cross and his resurrection from the dead, he invites us to respond and give our very best to him. And what he does is the moment you turn to God wholeheartedly he's there waiting. You may have been running for years and decades and he's right there. And God can do more in your marriage and a weekend than you can accomplish in 10 years of counseling. God can do more in your body physically than a doctor can do in years of trying to fix problems. God has the ability to solve every problem in your life with his grace, including the ability to give you the power to endure when it's really hard. And I love these verses because they give us hope for a new year. Joel 2.24, look at these verses. It says the threshing floors will be piled high again

with grain. This is Joel speaking to a nation that has been without crop. And he's saying there's a moment of God's, his grace and his power and mercy of fresh to the people of God as they return wholeheartedly. And he says the floors again will be piled high with grain. The presses will overflow with new wine and olive oil. And the Lord says, I will give you back what you lost with the swarming locusts, with the hopping locusts and the stripping locusts and the cutting locusts have take. I will give you what the locusts have eaten. The good news is that God can restore. What if this was your year to return to God and God's year to restore you? And I believe that. There's restoration that God wants to do in your life this year. Do you believe that? There's restoration that God wants to bring to marriages this year. There are some of you, this is your year that you get confidence back and you break through that addiction with God's power. This is your year to stand in victory with God's grace and his power, not based on human effort, but by fresh mercy from God, by fresh faithfulness from God. into your life, every one of these 365 days,

there's new mercy from God, there's new faithfulness from God for you on an individual level. So here's what I wanna ask of you, one more time, to return to Him with your heart today and to say, God, I need you. And there might be some area in your life that you're thinking, ah, I've been trying and it's not fixing the problem. Right now, I wanna ask you to pull out this card and on the back where it says, how can we pray for you? We're gonna pray bold prayers that God would do miracles in our midst this year. And we're gonna look back, everybody pull this card up and I'm gonna ask you right now to write down a prayer request that you're asking God for this year. It might be for God to heal your marriage, it might be for your son or daughter to come home, it might be for your parents who are still not following Jesus, it might be for God to do something in your career, it might be for your ministry, but there's something on your heart that you're just saying, God, I need you. And in an act of faith between you and the living God, I wanna invite you to write on this a prayer request. Now, in just a moment, I'm gonna give you about 30 seconds to write down a prayer request on this card and then I'm gonna ask you to turn these in. But as we go there, I just want one more time

to read this verse over you. Lamentations 3, 22, the faithful love of the Lord never ends and his mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness. His mercies begin afresh each morning. So I say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance, so therefore I will hope in him. So right now, in this moment, if you will, just take about 30 seconds to write on that card a bold prayer request between you and God. It might be like that woman in the last service that wrote down, I wanna see my daughter get baptized. Something in your life that you're saying, oh God, I need you. Let's write it down and I'll give you about 30 seconds now. I wanna ask you to take this card and just hold it in your hands and maybe even for some of you, you might snap a picture of it so that later in this year when God answers that prayer, you can look back and see the faithfulness of God. And in an act of adoration, worship, and faith, I'm gonna ask you just to say, this is my prayer request. We wanna pray over every one of these. I'm asking every person in our church family to turn in a card that just says, this is my bold prayer request before you, God. And in just a moment, at all of our campuses, there's gonna be a host that's gonna come out and kinda walk you through the rest of this card.

But I just, I wanna say one more time, if I can just get your eyes on the screen, just for a moment, just for a moment. I wanna speak over your life faith right now. I wanna speak over your life the same power of God that brought Jesus from death to life is alive on the inside of those of us who follow him and put our trust in him. And the same power and mercy of God that has been displayed to saints for generations is available to you today. And God wants this new year to be a year, not of leftovers, but your whole heart. And I believe, I just speak over your life, God's blessing this year. I speak over your family, God's blessing, healing in your marriage, blessing on your children, a year of faith that you put your trust in God wholeheartedly and your hunger for him grows. And there's a power to overcome sin that's unleashed in your life, that this is a year of God's favor upon your life and God's favor upon our church to say, there's gonna be thousands of people who come to faith in Jesus this year. There's gonna be so much generational transformation in our church, in our cities. We, by faith, believe the same God. He's ruling and reigning as the high king of heaven. He's not dead, he's not in a grave anymore.

He is alive, he is powerful, and he wants to move in our day. Do you believe that today? He wants to move in your life. He wants to move in our church. So in an act of faith, all of our campuses, let's grab these cards and a symbol of faith. God, we believe, we believe, God, that there are great things in store this year. We're coming with a sense of expectation, God, that you would stir up in us a hunger. God, we believe you're moving in our day, you're moving in our generation, you're moving in our nation, God, and we don't wanna be passed by. When you look, would you see a holy, hungry, humble group of people that are crying out for more of you, God, more of your power and presence, God, I pray for miracles in these prayer requests, God, that out of what we put before you, God, we would see you do the unthinkable in our lives. Oh, how we need you, God, how we need you. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen, amen, amen. Well, amen and amen. God can do great things in our lives when we prioritize him and we put him first. And just as Pastor Andy mentioned, we wanna know how we can be praying for you as we step into this new year together.

So you can fill out one of those get to know you cards by going to the Saddleback app, and we'd love to be praying for you. In just a moment, we're gonna continue to worship through singing and through song, and we're also gonna get the opportunity to worship through giving our tithes and our offerings. Just as when we sing, we get to worship God in praise, when we give, it's a form of worship too. It's a way of saying, God, I trust you, I put you first, I thank you, and I honor you. Just as Pastor Andy talked about the first fruits in our message, that is what tithing is. Tithing is giving the first 10% back to God. And so the first 10% of our paychecks, the first 10% of what we earn, we give it back to God. And we say, God, I honor you and I put you first in all areas of our lives, including our finances. And so we wanna invite you to give today. You can give by texting the word GIVE to 83000, you can open the Saddleback app, or you can give by scanning the QR code that you see on the screen. Well, church family, let's continue to worship right now. ♪ Oh God, my God, I need you ♪ ♪ Oh God, my God, I need you now ♪ ♪ Oh, I need you now ♪ ♪ Oh rock, oh rock of ages ♪ ♪ I'm standing on your faithful horse ♪ ♪ On your faithfulness we sing ♪

♪ Oh God, my God, I need you ♪ ♪ Oh God, my God, I need you now ♪ ♪ Oh, I need you now ♪ ♪ Oh rock, oh rock of ages ♪ ♪ I'm standing on your faithful horse ♪ ♪ On your faithfulness we sing ♪ ♪ You heard your children then ♪ ♪ And you hear your children now ♪ ♪ You are the same God, you are the same God ♪ ♪ You answered prayers back then ♪ ♪ And you will answer now ♪ ♪ You are the same God, you are the same God ♪ ♪ You were providing then and you are providing now ♪ ♪ You are the same God, you are the same God ♪ ♪ You are the same God, you move in power then ♪ ♪ God move in power now, you are the same God ♪ ♪ You can do it again now, you are the same God ♪ ♪ You were a healer then, you are a healer now ♪ ♪ You are the same God, you are the same God ♪ ♪ You were a savior then, you are a savior now ♪ ♪ You are the same God, you are the same God ♪ ♪ Oh God, my God, I need you ♪ ♪ Oh God, my God, I need you ♪ ♪ Forever and ever and ever over all the ages ♪ ♪ Oh rock of, rock of ages ♪ ♪ I'm standing on your faithfulness ♪ ♪ On your faithfulness ♪ ♪ Oh God, my God, I need you ♪ Thanks for watching!