Freedom | For Good Works

Hey, listen, listen, if anyone ever asks you, like, why does Southland Christian Church do Jesus prom, just turn in your Bible to Luke chapter 14 and tell them what Jesus said, because he said, when you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives. And some of you are like, I'm in, I'm already in for that, or your, or your rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you'd be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you'll be blessed because they cannot repay you. My friend Brewster McLeod, about 25 years ago, had a dream. He was like, what if, what if we just actually did what Jesus said? And that's what we've been doing ever since. And that's what we try to do around here. We read the Bible and we try to just do what the Bible tells us to do. So one more time, awesome job this, uh, this year with Jesus prom. I think, I think it might've been one of the highest attended ones ever. It was, the registration was through, through the roof. Participation was huge. Let's do this. Let's pray as we dive into the scriptures today. Father God, thank you that we don't have to wonder where to turn. We don't have to wonder who to turn to, but we can turn to your word and we can turn to you.

So as we open up your word today, father, I pray that we not only be receptive to it, but I pray that we'll also be responsive to it. Father, I pray that you'll open up our hearts as we open up your word and that you will do something new in us and through us today. It's in Jesus name I pray. Amen. Yeah, if you got your Bibles, go ahead and go right to where we left off last week. You're going to be in Galatians chapter three. We'll get there in a couple of minutes. And your key word again today is, is of course freedom. A couple of weeks ago, uh, one of my sons was in the, was in the living room and he had the remote control in his hand and he said, Hey dad, do you want to watch a movie with me? And I was like, sure. What do you want to watch? He was like, I was thinking about watching this movie about this family that has a pet chimp and the chimp goes crazy and rips everybody's faces off. And I was like, that sounds awesome. Let's watch that. And my wife, my wife who was also in the room was not very happy with our, with our movie choice. And this is something that, that happens all the time, especially if we have like the whole family there, because that brings seven of us now, because I've got a son-in-law who also weighs in and everybody's got all these different opinions on what movie to watch.

And my son-in-law the other day, Jack, he won, he carried the day, he suggested we watch this movie called Interstellar. And again, my wife was not happy because she doesn't like what she calls space movies. And I was willing to withhold judgment. So for like the first 45 minutes, I was totally in. I thought it was really, really good. And it's all about this whole idea. You've seen it many times before in different ways where, hey, human beings have trashed the planet. We got to find another planet to live on. So we got to figure out how to get everybody to it, or at least enough people to it so that we can inhabit this new planet and all that kind of stuff. But after about the 45 minute mark, it started to make me do something that I don't like to have to do when I watch movies. It started making me have to think a lot. And I'm at a stage in my life where, man, I don't want to watch a movie to think. I want to watch a movie to be entertained. So after endless discussions about black holes and time travel and wormholes and the theory of relativity and gravity and all this kind of stuff, at about the two hour and 15 minute mark, I raised my hand and went, hey, when's this thing over? Like, how much longer is this movie? And the answer my daughter gave to me was, it's got a lot longer, Dad. And she was right. It's got about 45 more minutes.

And so when it was done, I was exhausted. I just went to bed. But my youngest son, Beau, I thought had the best synopsis of it when he said, yeah, at the end of the day, I would just rather watch the movie Armageddon. And I was like, exactly. Amen. Now, if you don't know Armageddon, this is a quintessentially 90s movie, much more entertaining, very, very simple premise. Big rock flying at the earth, going to kill us all. Solution, Bruce Willis, right? Like, just send Bruce Willis to the big rock. That's easy, right? Just land on the big rock, drill a big hole in the big rock, drop a nuclear weapon in the rock, save mankind. Bruce Willis is the best. Like, that's the idea I can get my brain around. Now, again, whether you were a Star Trek fan, you were a Trekkie, you're a Star Wars fan, or whether you're like my wife and you don't like space movies, whatever it is, the premise is always relatively the same. When we boldly go where no one has gone before, what are we going to do once we get there? Like, what would we do with a new chance for a new start? And the question I want to personalize for us today is simply this, what would you do with a new you? Because that was the question before the Galatians. That's what we've been studying for the past couple weeks. Remember, Paul came into town and he started preaching a

very simple gospel that went like this. Jesus plus nothing equals everything. And they could have freedom and they could have life and they could have joy, and so what were the Galatian people gonna do with this new beginning? And their new beginning was being threatened by these false teachers who were rolling into town saying, actually, Paul was wrong. It wasn't Jesus plus nothing equals everything. It's actually Jesus plus observance of the Old Testament law, then you can be saved and then you can have a new life. So they're being threatened. And man, this was such good news, and Paul doesn't wanna see this good news be ruined, and it was specifically good news because the Galatian people came from a really rough background. One of my favorite historians is a man named Tom Holland, not to be confused with the actor who plays Spider-Man, different dude, and he's written a lot. But one of my favorite books that he's ever written is one called Dominion. And I highly recommend it if you're a history buff, if you love to read. Now, be forewarned, 550 pages, lots of footnotes, so don't get mad at me and email me when you order it, and it's this big, it's this big, all right? But it's really, really cool, and it's a page-turner, and he gives us five things about the Galatian people that I think are really important to bring into the mix

as we continue our study, because it's gonna help us understand more about why Paul's gonna write the things that he writes as we dive in today into Galatians chapter three. Number one, he says this, they had a violent heritage. And this is how he describes them. The Galatians, for most of their existence, had been a people largely defined by their aptitude for violence. Three centuries before the death of Augustus, 20,000 of them were migrants from distant Gaul, and they swarmed across the Straits from Europe into Asia Minor, which was land celebrated for the wealth of its cities, the softness of its citizens, and the talents of its celebrity chefs. Here in the central highlands of what is now Turkey, the Galatians had quickly carved out a new home for themselves, and what the mountains lacked in resources, they had more than made up for in location. Barren though Galatian was, it was ideally placed for launching raids on neighboring kingdoms. Watch this, tall, red-haired, and prone to fighting in the nude, the Galatians had made their living out of their talent for inspiring terror. Now I gotta tell you, that feels like a tactical error to me, all right? Fighting naked just doesn't seem like a wise decision, albeit a terrifying one, I totally get that.

But imagine this being like what you knew about your family tree. Like, great-great-granddaddy used to live up on top of that mountain, he was tall, he was red-headed, he would run down off the hills naked, and he would pillage neighboring towns. And some of y'all are like, that's kind of my heritage right there, all right? So you can relate to that, but that was what was in their background. Number two, Rome changed everything. When the Roman legions came into town, they just wrecked shop, they leveled the place, and then they did with it what they wanted, so they put everyone under the reign and rule, and in Galatia specifically, a lot of Roman soldiers retired there, and they were there to keep the peace and build cities and establish roads, and again, Tom Holland says this, now the Galatians lived in marble cities of the kind that their ancestors had delighted in writing in a province dotted with Roman colonies where the common language was Greek. They would fly into town and raid these types of places, now they live in these types of places. Number three, Caesar was worshiped as the son of God and the savior of the world. That was what they called him, the son of God and the savior of the world.

Specifically, Caesar Augustus was the one who was in highest esteem among the Galatians because they believed he had basically ushered in this new world order, this utopian ideal where there was gonna be unity and peace from that point on. So it says, to visit the cities of Galatia was constantly to be reminded of the sheer scale of Augustus' achievements. His birth had set the order of things on a new course. War was over, the world stood as one. Here so, inscriptions proclaimed to a grateful people was euangelion, which means good news. If you're keeping score at home, different gospel, that's what good news means, euangelion, different lord and savior, Caesar Augustus. Number four, there was profound paganism. The word pagani described people who lived out in the country who weren't civilized. They didn't worship the Roman pantheon or Caesar like the civilized Romans did. They worshiped a bunch of brutal pagan deities and they were brutal. There was lots of witches and priests that roamed the land. Again, Holland says this. He says, fearsome deities such as these were perfectly at home amid the wilds. Bands of itinerant priests dancing as they traveled and playing flutes and kettledrums were a common sight on Galatian roads.

That feels kind of Monty Python-ish to me. That's for free. Some were famed for working themselves up into a lather of prophecy by indulging orgiastic rites. But there could be no copulation for the most celebrated of them all, which were the gali, which were men dressed as women, servants of Sibyl, the mother goddess who sat enthroned, we just sang a song about someone else being enthroned, amid the highest peaks of Galatia and the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable of all regions gods was the severing with a knife or a sharp stone of the testicles. Don't ever forget this, false gods only take, they never give. They demand sacrifices, but they would never sacrifice. for their people. Number five was the presence of the Jewish people. There were many of them, scattered all throughout the region of Galatia, and they didn't fit in with either the Romans or the Pagani. They were viewed as quite a nuisance and kind of weird, in fact. Tom Holland says this, only the Jews, with their stiff-necked insistence that there existed just one single God, refused as a matter of principle to join an acknowledgement of the divinity of Augustus,

and so perhaps it was no surprise in the decades that followed the building to him of temples across Galatia that the visitor there most subversive of this cult should have been a Jew, and guess what that visitor's name was? Paul, who wrote this epistle, this letter to the Galatian churches, and so doesn't that all make sense now? Like when you did your homework, and I know you did your homework a few weeks ago when I told you to read Acts chapter 13 and 14, that Paul faced such violence when he was in Galatia because they were violent people. That was what they were all about. Is it no surprise that when Paul preached there, he preached Jesus, Jesus, and only Jesus, Jesus plus nothing equals everything, because he was amidst a group of people that they just believed everything and everyone was a God. Is it no surprise then that he was so adamant against his own fellow Jewish people? No, no, no, no, you don't get to add something to this gospel, it's not Jesus plus observance of the law that saves people, it's Jesus plus nothing equals everything, and so as these false teachers infiltrate the church that he had so labored to preach the gospel in, no wonder Galatians chapter three begins with such strong words when he says,

"'O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? "'It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ "'was publicly portrayed as crucified.'" In other words, he's saying this, "'When I came and I stood in front of you "'and I preached my guts out, "'I preached Jesus Christ and him publicly crucified. "'That's what I preached to you.'" So let me ask you only this, and these are meant to be rhetorical questions, but in our minds, we should be answering the questions. Let me ask you this, did you receive the Spirit by works of the law? What's the answer to that? No. Or by hearing with faith, what's the answer to that? Yes. Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, that you are now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain? If indeed it was in vain, does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does he do that by works of the law? Answer, no. Or by hearing with faith? Answer, yes. Just as Abraham believed God and that was counted, some translations say credited to him as righteousness. And we'll circle back to that passage here in a few minutes.

Now remember, these false teachers, they were trying to convince these new believers they needed to do some more stuff in order to be real Christians. The men needed to be circumcised, everyone needed to observe the Jewish laws, and Paul calls that very idea, he calls it out and goes, man, y'all being bewitched by a false teaching. Now in the ancient world, to use that word bewitched was to tap into this ancient superstition that a lot of people held, and especially in Galatia, that if a witch or a sorcerer gave you the evil eye, that they would cast a spell or a curse on you. So don't miss what Paul is saying here. He's saying these Jewish false teachers infiltrated your ranks with their propaganda campaign to get you to add the law to the gospel. They are guilty of a demonic perversion of the gospel. As bad as any witch doctor out there. I mean, you talk about strong words. Back before the message, paraphrase of the Bible, became very, very popular, before that was a paraphrase of the Bible called the Phillips paraphrase. Some of you who are older like me may remember this. A man named A.B. Phillips, I think, captured the sentiment of Paul so well in the way he translated this. When he said, oh you dear idiots of Galatia,

who saw Jesus Christ the crucified so plainly, who's been casting a spell over you? And then he goes on. Says, I'll ask you a simple question. Did you receive the spirit of God by trying to keep the law? Of course not. Or by believing the message of the gospel? Yes, surely you can't be so idiotic as to think that a man begins his spiritual life in the spirit and then completes it by reverting to outward observances. Basically he's saying, surely you don't believe that you receive grace through faith in Jesus and then from that point on go, I got it from here, God. That's what so many do. Has all your painful experience brought you nowhere? I simply can't believe it of you. Does God who gives you his spirit and works miracles among you do these things because you've obeyed the law or because you believe the gospel? Ask yourselves that. That's a faithful translation of what Paul is saying. So here's the fundamental question before the Galatians. What are you gonna do with the new you? And man, that's a good question to be asking today, especially if you're one of the 509. and although we added some new brothers and sisters of Christ in the last service today across our campuses, I don't know how many yet,

but it was 509 before we began worship today. New believers this year at Southland Christian Church. And so again, let me just remind you, don't run back. Don't go back, don't drive your car into the same ditch that you were in. Don't throw yourself into the same water that you were drowning in. Stay the course, embrace this reality of the new life that you have in Jesus and walk in the freedom that he has for you. But here's another question I think is equally important to be asking today, whether you've been a Christian for five months, five years, or 50 years, what have you done with the new you? What have you done with the new you? Has your life been aligned with the new beginning that you were given? What's your marriage preach? It's supposed to preach the gospel. You know marriage is not for us. It's not to make us happy. You know what it's for? To demonstrate the reality of Christ's relationship with the church. So do our marriages preach the gospel of Christ's relationship with the church and the church's relationship with Christ? Does your marriage preach the gospel? What about your parenting? Does your parenting reveal that these kids are your gods

or that you have one God and his name is Jesus? Because kids make terrible gods. They can be great kids, but they're terrible gods. What about your integrity? Do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Does your spiritual life and your physical life align with one another because God doesn't separate them. He says we're whole, we're one. We worship him with our body. We worship him with our mind. We worship him with our heart and our spirit, not just our thoughts and our feelings like we so often wanna say that we do. What does the way that we spend our money say about what's most important? That does reveal our functional savior, you understand? Jesus's words, not mine. Our money reveals where our heart and our treasure is. Does the level of generosity that we express tell the story of all stories, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ? The question I'm asking and we should all be asking is simply this, am I a Christian in name only? Am I a Christian in name only? Please understand, this is not meant to heap guilt. This is meant to motivate moving forward. Maybe somebody's bewitched you and said, you know what being a Christian's all about? Attendance, church attendance,

1.9 times a month to be exact. Maybe someone has bewitched you into believing that the best God has for you is like a mediocre marriage and a family life where everybody just pretends everything's okay when it's really not okay. Perhaps you've come here today with a vague memory of the excitement and the joy that you had when you first became a believer, but that seems like a distant country that you vaguely remember visiting once and the joy of the Lord being someone's strength doesn't seem even attainable to you. Or maybe you've been bewitched into believing that the word Christian is an adjective to describe the school that your kids go to, but you forgot that it's a noun. It's who you are. At your core, it's your identity. So the question is, what have you done with the new you? And Paul loves to reference this man that we're actually gonna study a lot this summer and then we're gonna study him some more next year, but his name was Abram and then his name gets changed to Abraham and he always likes to reference back to this and that's what he does. We've already looked at it once today, but look at it again. Just as Abraham believed God

and that belief was counted to him as righteousness. So Abram, if you know his story, like he's living in this culture that they are incestuous, moon-worshiping people and then God comes to him and says, you gotta go, you gotta leave. You gotta leave your father's home and Abram's left going, okay, where are we going? He goes, I'll show you later. And he's at a crossroads at that moment, like am I gonna believe God or am I not gonna believe God? And the text tells us and the story tells us that he believed God and that belief, that faith, that trust that he had in God was counted to him, this is an accounting term, as righteousness. In other words, Abram wasn't morally or spiritually neutral. He was at an absolute deficit. He owed God, but when he placed his faith and his trust in God, the righteousness of God was credited to his account so that he had a surplus. That's the way God always saves people. He was not righteous, but the righteousness of God was imputed to him, which has massive implications, not only for Abram, but for us. Know then that it is those of faith, that's you if you've placed your faith and trust in Jesus, those of faith who are the sons of Abraham and the scripture foreseeing that God would justify, we've been learning so much about that word lately,

the Gentiles, those who were far away from God, how do you do that? He did that by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, in you shall. all the nations be blessed. In other words, what Paul is saying is, hey, in the family line of Abraham was going to come a Messiah who was gonna throw the gates of heaven wide open to everyone, and in so doing, welcome those who are far from God to be near to God, and we, looking back, know that his name was Jesus, but Abram, looking forward, didn't know his name, so he had to put his faith and his trust in the promise of God. So then he makes this radical claim, and it was as radical back then as it is today, when he said, so then, and whenever you see so then in the Bible, you need to pay attention, circle it, be ready for what's coming next. It's those who are of faith who are blessed along with Abraham, who was the man of faith. So here's Paul, a Jewish man who knew the Old Testament frontwards and backwards. He was in the biological family tree of Abraham, and he says this, only those who have faith in Jesus are the true children of Abraham. Radical notion. And the question before us today, and before the Galatians back then, was this. Are we, by faith, going to walk in the freedom

that Jesus has secured for us, or are we gonna run right back into slavery? What are you gonna do with the new you? And here's what you need to know. You won't do it perfectly. Abraham certainly didn't do it perfectly. Like I said, we'll get into his story. The Galatian people are definitely not doing it perfectly right now. That's why Paul's having to write the letter, and you're not gonna do it perfectly either. But there's this part later in Galatians three that we wanna fast forward to, because this is where we need to spend the rest of our time today, because the implications of this are massive. Skip down to verse 23, where Paul says, now before faith came, we were held captive under the law. We were imprisoned, we were enslaved. All the law could do was reveal that we were slaves to sin. That's the only thing it could do. It could reveal our desperate need, but it could not save us. And we were imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was like our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith, but now that faith has come. We are no longer under the guardian,

for in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God. And we've talked so much about why that's a profound sentence. Through faith, for as many of you who are baptized into Christ and put on Christ, now watch this, there's neither now Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus, and if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to his promise. You see, their framework prior to Jesus in embracing the gospel was that all these distinctions that we have this side of heaven had implications for your value before God or with one another. So their frame of reference was to look at image bearers of God and say, actually, you're less than this person over here, and I'm greater than this person over here, and those were the distinctions. But because of Jesus and through Jesus, what Paul is saying is, listen, hey, you Greeks that you see Jewish people as less than and strange and weird, that's no longer the case for you. In Christ, you're all equal. Jews, you see Greeks, you see Greek people as being unclean, unworthy, unable to know God. Now we're all one in Christ.

Slaves, you got your identity through being a slave, and you had this oppressor, oppressed narrative in your mind all the time, and now you're set free from that. You have just as much value as the person who owns you. Free people, you once saw yourselves as better than people who were owned by others, but because of Jesus, you need to know that Jesus has torn down that wall, and you are equal to everyone. Men who viewed women as less than, who were objects for use and abuse, nothing more, nothing less, maybe a useful addition to life, but certainly no one to be treasured or adored or loved, no more in Christ do you view women that way. Women who viewed men as like you were to be tolerated and feared and manipulated, and no, no, no, now, because of Christ, can be respected. Jesus tore down all the walls of separation. He came to make a way for all of those differences and distinctions to have absolutely no impact on your value before the living God. So it didn't matter if you came from like a Jewish heritage and you excelled at obeying the law or you were like a dropout. It didn't matter if you came from like a blue collar background and everyone looked down on you. Jesus elevated you. It didn't matter where you found your worth and your value before because now your worth and your value were found in Christ.

It didn't matter if your past was full of a family tree of bullies who taught you to push other people down so that you could get ahead. You know now that Jesus got below everyone so that you could be lifted up because of what he did for you You, Jesus changed it all. It was truly a new beginning, a whole new identity for a whole new group of people who were far more than Christians in name only. This was their very identity at their core. Couple weeks before Easter, I was coaching baseball and it was a cold day. So I had like a toboggan on, ball cap over it, sunglasses on, long sleeves, and I'm sitting on a bucket down the third baseline and our team is in the field and I'm already in a bad mood early in the game because we're just getting the brakes beat off of us. And I gave some instructions to my third baseman and the gentleman who was coaching the other team at third base took exception to my instructions and so he barked some stuff at me. And then this will shock and amaze you, I barked some stuff back at him. Y'all don't have to laugh that loud. Easy, easy, judgmental crowd today. And so we're kind of going back and forth. Everything's calm, but we're just having some words with one another. And then like an umpire who's about 18 years old

decided to make an example out of us, stopped the game, yelled at us, tried to shame us, the whole nine yards, it was very interesting. And then the game went on, we lost, and then we go through the handshake line and he and I approached one another, we're fine, we'd already made offenses and all that kind of thing. We give each other a big bro hug and he says to me, loud enough for the other coaches around to hear, hey man, please don't put me in your sermon tomorrow. And I said, you're in luck because I'm not preaching tomorrow, man, so you're off the hook, but I didn't promise anything about the day. So the other day, last Sunday, get done preaching, do the podcast, hustle to the ball field, a couple innings in, I get there and we're winning three to two. And so I walk into the dugout and I look at the head coach and a couple of the assistant coaches and I go, looks like y'all got this handled, I'm just gonna sit on my bucket and be quiet. One of the assistant coaches, a friend of mine, went, man, you're lying, you ain't never been quiet a day in your life. Here's the point. Jesus came to save us, not make us soft. He came to make us new,

he didn't come to make us nice. He did not come to lobotomize you and remove your personality, he came to redeem all the things that are present in your unique personality and gift mix. So let me ask you one more time, what are you gonna do with the new you that he's given you? And here's the realities that should shape your answer. You became a Christian by grace through faith in Jesus. You remain a Christian by grace through faith in Jesus. You live as a Christian by what? Grace through what? Faith in who? Jesus. Those realities should shape our entire life. So let me ask you a couple of really invasive questions with the rest of our time today. What is it in your life that is only explainable by the grace of God? What is it? Take some time this week and reflect on it if it doesn't immediately come to mind. But what is it in your life that puts on vivid display my favorite verse in the Bible, Romans 5.8, with those awesome words, but God. But God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While you were still weak, while you were still at your worst, while you were still at a moral

and spiritual absolute deficit, Jesus said, I'll take it, I'll become it, and I'll give him and give her my righteousness. I'll take their sin and their shame. So what is it in your life that you go, this is only explainable by the grace of God in me? And for some of us, we're like, well, that's easy. I'd be dead, but God. I'd be divorced, but God. I'd be addicted, but God. I wouldn't have a relationship with my kids, but God. For some of us, this is super easy. For others of us, we're gonna have to spend some time thinking about it. But here's the other question and maybe even more pressing is this, what in your life is only explainable by your faith in God? What in your life is only explainable by your faith in God? Like imagine that conversation that Abram had to have with his dad. Daddy, I'm leaving. Where are you going? Don't know. Well, who told you to go? God, which God? The one true God. Didn't make any sense, but God. What is it in your life that if it wasn't for those words, but God, wouldn't add up, wouldn't make sense on the pro-con side of the ledger,

like all of it's con, but God says go. God says go. What are you doing right now that is only explainable by faith in God? Twice in my life, me and my wife made decisions that made absolutely no sense to anyone. The first time was in 2006. We left Southern Christian Church to go to. Flatirons Community Church in Colorado and spent 11 years. Didn't make any sense to anyone. The second one was when we left Flatirons Community Church and came back to Southland Christian Church in 2017. Nobody understood it but God. And here's what I'm here to tell you today. Living like that has a word that you can use to describe it and that word is called freedom. And let me remind you, Southland Christian Church, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. So stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Let's pray. Father God, thank you for who you are that you would set us free. Father, we are here today because we wanna live out that freedom, we wanna walk in that freedom. Father, we don't wanna run back. We don't wanna go back to the sin that enslaved us, the things that tripped us up, the messes we made, the relational damage we caused. We don't want to go back.

But Father, so often we find ourselves drawn to turn away from you and to turn back to sin. And so Father, we wanna anchor our hearts and our hopes in your word and obedience and faith today. And so as we continue to celebrate you today, Father, I pray that you will continue to work on hearts and minds across our rooms and our campuses, that they will be responsive to the Holy Spirit's call in their heart and their mind today. And Father, my prayer today is that we'll get to witness new life. As we already have earlier today, Father, I ask for it again that we would see new life today in the form of people submitting to baptism. Father, I pray that people here today will be able to look back at this very moment on this day and go, that's the day that everything changed because that's the day that I placed my faith and my trust in my Lord and Savior, Jesus. And from that point on, everything changed. That's our hope and that's our prayer today, Father, for one more to come home today, and we will celebrate with all of heaven as it happens. In Jesus' name, amen.