Grace for Life | Grace to & Through | Part 3 | Pastor Jurie Kriel | Shoreline Church | Message

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Good morning, Shoreline Church. It's so good to see you guys, so excited about what God has for us today. Would you mind standing for a moment as we together say the Shoreline Creed? Some words we live by, some words that are worthy of remembering. Are you ready to say this out loud? You don't sound ready, but I'm going to trust you, okay? Here we go. I am loved by God. I cannot earn it. I cannot lose it. I am forgiven and made brand new. In Christ, I live with passion and purpose. I am empowered by the Spirit to be the church in the world and to live this love revolution. Amen? So exciting. You're welcome to take a seat at this point in time. Pastor Rob and Laura is ministering to our South Campus today, so they are richly blessed to have them there. And Pastor Rob has been taking us through the series on the book of Ephesians. We've been speaking about grace to and grace through. And over the last two weeks, as he's taken us through chapter 1 and chapter 2, Pastor Rob's taken us through this whole understanding of what it means to be found in grace and not just to be found in grace, but to be seated with Christ in grace, this position that we get to take up. So these first two weeks, chapter 1 and 2 of Ephesians,

speaks about grace to, what God has done for us. And then chapter 4 and 5 speaks about grace through, the outworking of what God has done for us, right? So chapter 1 and 2 speaks about grace to. Chapter 4 and 5 speaks about grace through. And then what is chapter 3 all about? Well, chapter 3 is actually about nothing, and it's also about everything, okay? Because chapter 3 is the bridge between grace to and grace through. Chapter 3 is where Paul loses it, okay? He doesn't lose it in a bad way, as in loses his mind, but he loses it in a very good way, as in he gets overwhelmed with chapter 1 and 2 before he gets to write chapter 4 and 5. And I'm trusting God that we'll be overwhelmed with an understanding of grace today that will transition us into living life out the way we should. Amen? Can you trust God with me for that today? God would come and shower His grace upon us to the extent that something will shift, something will change, something will just click for us. I was struggling with removing the drawer of a freezer yesterday, okay? So someone, unnamed somebody that shall not be named from stage, left the freezer door open ever so slightly. And so everything froze in there and started leaking. It wasn't Karin. For the record, it wasn't Karin. I just need to put it out there. People are looking at her, and she's like, what's up with this? It wasn't Karin. An unnamed somebody, okay? Don't worry about who it is. Just follow the story here, okay? Stop with the murder she wrote and just kind of come with me, okay? The reality was that the door couldn't close and there was some ice in the back, right, which kind of formed there. So what had to happen, says the internet, was I had to remove the thing and then I had to take the drawers out

and then, you know, we can get to the ice and switch off. It was a whole thing, okay? Long story short, to remove the drawer, there's a thing that you've got to click in order for the drawer to come out, okay? So I watched the YouTube video, I get my screwdriver, I'm going to get this thing to click. The clicky thing wasn't clicky as it was supposed to be clicking, okay? And I was just about to break something or throw a screwdriver somewhere, I don't know, do something, okay? I was about to lose it. And then suddenly, it clicked, and the drawer came out. Have you ever had a moment in your life where it just clicked? Have you ever had a moment where you heard about something, and you heard about something, and you heard about something, and then it clicked? You tried something, and you tried something, and you tried something, and then it clicked? That shift just happened. There's something about grace. that needs to click. There's something about what Christ has done for us that we don't have to do for ourselves. There's something about the experience of experiencing the love of God that just clicks, and when it clicks, it shifts you to a new place. It shifts you to a new perspective. There's something about living the Christian life that just needs to click sometime, and I'm trusting God for that click. And when it feels hard to grab ahold of today, I wanna encourage you to push through with me. As we keep on trying and we keep on trusting God for it to click in our hearts, because when it clicks, it changes everything. There's an experience that God wants us to have of grace

which is beyond our understanding of grace. There's something that happens in that moment. So Helen Keller was born with some disabilities, and by 19 months old, a lady called Helen Keller had no hearing and no sight, and she was unable to speak. So after 19 months of life, she was unable to see anything, she was unable to hear anything, and she was unable to say anything. So imagine for a moment having a perfectly normal mind that is trapped in a world that cannot experience or express itself to the outside world. This is Helen Keller's world, and as she grows up, the frustration inside of her starts to build and there's a nurse and a teacher, Anne Sullivan, that decides to become her nurse and to become her teacher. And what Anne does for Helen Keller is she starts teaching her to write at a young age. And what she does is she forms the water in Helen's hands and she writes W-A-T-E-R, water. And she keeps writing these letters and eventually Helen gets it, but it makes no difference. She can repeat the letters that Anne is writing in her hand, Helen can repeat those letters over, but she doesn't get it and she doesn't get it and she doesn't get it until one day, of which Helen would write later, that day awakened my soul, it gave it light, hope, joy, it set it free. There was a day when it clicked and the day was a day by the water pump

where as Helen had water running over her one hand, Anne took her other hand and she wrote in the hand, W-A-T-E-R, and suddenly it clicked and the whole world opened up for Helen. She couldn't see, but she could see. She couldn't see and she couldn't speak, but she could express herself. And for the first time in her life, it wasn't just what she knew, but it was what she could experience. And sometimes in our lives, it's the same with grace. It's the same with our understanding of God. It's the same with the things of God. We know about it, but we don't know it. We have an understanding, but we don't have an experience. We have ownership, but we don't necessarily have appropriation, right? Do you know that you can own something and not apply it to your life? Do you know that you can know something and not do it? Do you know that you can have assimilation without application, right? Sometimes in life, we go through these things. We have understanding without experience, ownership without appropriation, assimilation without application, right? We live in this moment, but we haven't quite, it just hasn't clicked for us. And maybe today is the day that God wants it to click for you.

Maybe today is the day that grace needs to click for you, that your understanding needs to go further because you are important to this process. You need to know your, there's a difference between knowing that you're forgiven and living like you're forgiven. How many of you know that? Sometimes we know that we're forgiven, but we're still living with a guilt and shame. Sometimes we know that we have a new identity in God, but we're still living to earn the favor of God. It hasn't clicked yet. You haven't gone from understanding it to experience it. You haven't gone from receiving it to actually making it a part of your life. You haven't gone from knowing that it's there or even bringing it into your life to actually applying it to your life. Sometimes that's all it takes is to just, for it to click, just that step. Knowing about grace and experiencing grace are two very different things. My prayer is that you wouldn't just know about it, but you'll have a Helen Keller moment where it goes from just something you know about to something that's truly a part of your life. it would click for you. Because when it clicks for us, something happens. So if you have your Bible with you or you have a Bible app that you like to use,

I wanna encourage you to open it up at Ephesians chapter three. We're actually gonna make our way through from chapter verse nine of Ephesians chapter three all the way to verse 20 in the next 20 minutes or so. So you might wanna just kinda refer back to that as we're kind of digging into it. It starts in verse eight, actually, with Paul writing and he says, although I am less than the least of all of the Lord's people, this grace was given to me to preach to the Gentiles the boundless richness of Christ. Now this is fascinating because what's happening here is Paul is actually writing to the church in Ephesus. He's writing a letter to the church in Ephesus and if you've ever had the experience to be in a place, you kind of understand the place better and there's a group from Shoreline that in a couple of months is actually gonna go to Greece and we're gonna step into the footsteps of Paul and go to some of these cities that he was at and something happens when you see it, right? Paul, as he writes to the church in Ephesus, he's been to Ephesus and if you go to the city of Ephesus to this day, thousands of years after it's been ruined, it's an impressive space. It was one of the richest cities in the known world at that point in time. The buildings to this day are impressive.

And I know this doesn't sound like a lot but there was a three-story library, the front of which stands to this day in the city of Ephesus. It was an incredible place with great riches and everybody there was really important. And you can see Paul's kind of writing to them. He's like, guys, I'm the least of all of these but I wanna tell you about the boundless grace of God. Have you ever been in a space where you felt inadequate to express what God needs? Okay, let me rephrase. Have you ever watched the news and felt inadequate to make a difference to what's happening in the world? Have you ever had a situation in your family that you wanted to help but you didn't feel enough? Have you ever been in a space in your neighborhood or at your kid's school where you saw the hurt of this world and you said, man, I wish I could do more. I wish I could show them the fullness of God. See, because that's exactly where Paul's at. You can see that feeling of him going, listen, God is amazing but I feel a little small in even telling you this. But then he starts with the end at the beginning, okay? So you've gotta hang with me as we get to verse 10 because he kinda shows what this can be and he makes this statement. He says that God's intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God

should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. Man, I love that. He's basically saying, listen, I'm little but God is great and God's plan is for His greatness to be revealed through the church. The manifold wisdom of God through the church. We are the revelation of God on planet Earth. The body of Christ is His body. It's His representation. It's His revelation. It's the visible form of God on Earth through us. God wants to show His majesty, that word manifold, many folds of glory, the manifold wisdom, the many fold over and over, wisdom upon wisdom upon wisdom, grace upon grace upon grace, fullness upon fullness, this incredible wholeness of God revealed through the church. That's awesome, but sometimes we just don't feel enough. But I love this word. The word manifold in English is great, but the Greek word is even better but harder to say, okay? So here's the word. Let's put it on the screen and see if you can pronounce it, okay? Before you laugh at me, okay? Polypoikilos, okay? Polypoikilos.

You wanna try? No, I don't want to either, okay? But here's the thing, polypoikilos is basically the combination of two Greek words. It's poly, which means many, and poikilos, which means colours or variety or textures or facets, right? So the multicoloured wisdom of God is revealed through the church. Here's the image. The image is that of a prism because the white light of God shines into the church and through the church, the light breaks up into its multiple colours of wisdom. Why? Because I'm a different colour than you and I express grace a little different than you and I've experienced God in different ways. But when you and I come together, the fullness of the light of God shines into the world and they see the wisdom of God in all of its magical colours. because each of us display it a little better and or a little different. Here's the thing, the prism doesn't have to do anything. The light does all the work. We just get to display it. We just get to live in it. We just get to walk it out. We just get to show it and and that's what I what I love about Ephesians chapter 3 because it's this bridge in the middle where Paul's kind of going well chapter 1 & 2 I told you all about grace. God's given you an identity of grace. God's given you forgiveness by grace and I'm about to tell you that this is what it looks like when grace goes through you when you live a life of

grace. But between hearing about it and living it there's this moment where it's got a click because God wants to do an amazing thing. He wants to display his wisdom through you but none of that can happen unless grace clicks for you and it's as if Paul then gets really frustrated or inspired. I don't know which of the two but there's this moment where he says listen though none of you can display the full spectrum of grace the point is that every one of you have a little bit but I'm I'm desiring for you to get it and then then Paul literally he literally says this he says he falls to his knees and and you know in other letters we learned that Paul didn't write himself he had somebody scribe while he dictated so I could just imagine the scribe Paul says I fall to my knees and he's literally falling to his knees because he starts praying and he's not saying God I so desire for things to click for them I so desire for this to fall into place for them and I share Paul's desire for this to click because I don't know about you but I sometimes feel like I don't live in this full spectrum of the grace of God this manifold wisdom this this new perspective this greater seeing I feel a little bit like Helen sometimes as if I'm struggling to communicate to the world outside and I'm struggling to see what's really happening around me I need a moment where what I know become real to the world that I live in where I can appropriate what I've heard with how I live and in Paul's prayer he's actually going to reveal how we fall short of this fullness of relationship that God is in mind for us this this fullness of understanding because the problem is we have limited perspectives of God and those limited perspectives of God is holding us back from living in the fullness of what God is in mind for us see because we we play our perspective of God into into a part of it you see the the heart was never for us to to to just be about the theological positions that we've retreated into the the home basis that we've retreated into see because in our limited perspectives we put God in a box and there's two primary boxes I'm sure there's more but there's there's two boxes that we tend to put God into right so the one box is the box of of what I know it's rationalism it's it's I'll serve God to the extent that I

can figure God out right it's the we need to understand the faith we need to memorize the scriptures we need to we need to work our way through in this box is the the God we can understand the God we can rationalize box and I'll serve God to the extent that I get to understand God and that's one box people place themselves in another box is the box of what I feel and some of us are limiting God to the box of what we feel we're we're putting God in the field box right and and and your journey with God goes something like this it's the it's the you love God because you can't figure him out and you don't care about figuring out but you love feeling God right so you you want to feel him in the moment and then you go to these mountaintop experiences where you where you're worshiping God you know God is in the moment and then Monday hits and you go where's God in this and then you long for the next moment where you can experience God and and and maybe if you're all about this space then you wonder at the amazingness of God but then you wonder where is God in the rest of your life and then you lean into the next experience and the next experience and you end up living like somebody with a daisy going he loves me he loves me not he loves me he loves me not he loves me he loves me not and your entire journey with God is he loves me he loves me not because you're all about the feeling you're all about the the moment you're all about the wonder you're all about the mysticism of it all or you're all about the rationalism of it all, what I can figure out and what I can do. And the problem is, sometimes we lean so heavily into this box, we put God in this box, and then we say, those guys don't really get it because this is the truth. And these guys are looking at those guys and they're saying, well, you don't really get it because I feel this, or you don't really get it because I don't feel it anymore.

And then we step out of relationship with others and we step out of relationship with God because we're so in our box of the way God is. And these guys are stepping out of relationship with others and they're stepping out of relationship with God because they're so about figuring God out. And the problem is, it never clicks for us because we're so busy putting God in a box, putting ourselves in a box, and putting other people in a box that we never fully live in the fullness that God has for us. Can I tell you something this morning? God is bigger than your box. It doesn't matter what your box is, God's bigger than that. It doesn't matter what box you think you've got figured out, God's bigger than that. I don't know what you're feeling and how you're defining God by feeling. God is bigger than your box. God is greater than the boxes that you've placed Him in. And the shift, what I'm trusting God for is that our boxes will shift and we'll understand that these aren't boxes. These are supposed to be two rails on the way to a relationship. These are supposed to be two rails. What I think and what I feel are things that should take me to a relationship with God. This is a means of transport.

I lean into what I know and I lean into what I feel, but both of these take me to a relationship with God. I'm not stuck in what I know and don't know, and I'm not stuck in what I feel or don't feel, but I lean on the one and I lean on the other one and I'm heading to a relationship with God. It's not either or, it's both and. I'm not gonna settle for dead religion and a bunch of rules, but I'm not gonna just be flaky and forget about the truth of the Bible either. I'm gonna do both and. I'm gonna lean on both of these to propel my relationship with God forward. Paul falls to his knees and he prays, and this is his prayer in Ephesians 3 verse 14. He says, Dwell in your hearts through faith and I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and how long and how high and how deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Man, I love this prayer. May it be so that we are strengthened in our inner being. May we remember that God has come to be with us. May we wonder at the majesty of the presence of the Lord in our inner being, but may we also be rooted and established in love.

May we be rooted and established in the truth that God loves you, no matter how you feel. No matter if you feel it, God is God and God will remain God no matter what. And even if you feel as if He's far away, He's not far away because the Bible tells me so. I'm a saint and not a sinner. Even when I feel like a sinner, I remain a saint because my life is hidden with God in Christ. This is my position in the truth. And then He prays and He says, The Greek word there is ginosko, which doesn't mean knowing, it means knowing. It means living it out. It means experiencing it. It means being on the rails together. You study and you surrender. You think and you kneel. You learn and you lean in. It's not one or the other, it's both and towards a relationship with God. May we lean into this truth and may it propel us forward into all that God has for us, not just one or the other. See, let me show you what I mean. If you, for imagine, were to think of, for a moment, were to think of rainforest, right? So think trees and leaves, maybe a little water, some some ground around, right? It's it's it's just that thing called the rainforest, right? But the words I use to describe can never fully cause you to understand or cause you to step into what this fully is, right? Because my my description is insufficient and you can never compare it to actually being there. See, because if you could be there, something would happen. You'd experience

something you haven't experienced before. The words tree and water and leave doesn't do it justice. But now imagine that you started to understand the rainforest a little more, the interaction between different sized leaves and different parts and how the one tree works with the other tree and how the whole ecosystem comes together and the chemical balances between the different parts and how one tree has the ability to communicate with another tree and they all grow together. And as you understand it more, your awe of it just goes to another level, doesn't it? That's the point with grace. There's some things that you need to understand, but there's some things that you just need to experience and you just need to lean into and you just need to understand that it's the one and the other. It's the understanding and the learning and the doing because just the fact that you know doesn't mean that you feel, but just the fact that you feel doesn't mean that you know. But when you know and you feel, then your knowing causes you to want to feel more and your feeling causes you to want to know more. And then the one builds on the other and the more you know, the more you wonder. And the more you wonder, the more you want to know. May this be true of us. May our knowledge of God lead to the wonder of God and may our wonder of God lead us to the knowledge of God. And then may the knowledge of God lead us to the wonder of God. May we learn, may we study, may we read the Word, but then may we fall on our knees and say, God, I'm not gonna figure this out in all my life. You are bigger than my words, but God, I'm gonna try and express into words what I think you are. But God, you are bigger than any words I could ever come up with. But Lord, I know that there's greater depths of you. It'll take us an eternity to not figure God out, but that's okay. That's the beauty. It's about the pursuit of God. Keep pursuing Him. Keep building that relationship, leaning to what you know. Experience what you experience, but don't stop moving. This mystery is not something to be solved. It's something to be leaned into. It's something to be embraced. It's something to grab a hold of. But don't let your perspective withhold you from learning from others' perspective. Do you guys remember the prism? How the white light of God comes

into the prism and then the manifold wisdom of God is made known, right? The multicolored wisdom of God is made known. Different people see God in different ways, experience God in different ways, but their different experiences add to our experience of the full picture of who God is. So don't let your individual experience hinder you from seeing the full picture. Some of you guys will remember this from 2015. A long, long time ago, there was a picture that broke the Internet, okay? Here's the picture, okay? This is the picture that broke the Internet. It's a dress, okay? And it is a dress that is made of two colors, okay? I'm gonna count to three and I want you to say loud what two colors are on this dress. One, two, three. You guys are quite confused, okay? Some of you are saying white and gold and some of you are saying blue and black. Let me see. Team white and gold. Where's the smart people? Okay, there's the smart people in the room. You can see. Congratulations. And where's the people in the room that's seeing blue and black? I don't know what's... What's wrong with you? Okay, moving right along. I can see some of you are like, really? Are you really seeing that? There's some marriages in trouble right now like mine. We're like, you know, it's white and gold. I told you yesterday, it's white and gold, right? You're with me. There's some people that, white and gold. It's definitely white and gold. Here's the thing. Believe it or not, it's both. It's both, because we're seeing it differently. We're interpreting it differently. That's what manifold wisdom is like, is it is the one and it is the other.

It's both and, and you can settle the debate later, not right now, because otherwise I'm gonna lose you for the rest of this time. But here's the reality, is sometimes we interpret things through our perspective or through our lens, and then we misinterpret it. And the problem is, if we've made a little camp in our box and we've said God is like this, and no matter what you say, I'm telling you that God is like this, and it's only God if it's the way I see it, and it's only God if it works the way I tell you that it works, then I wanna tell you we're limiting God because God is bigger than our box. God doesn't live in your box. God isn't limited to it. Now, I don't understand all the science behind that dress and why it aims to ruin my marriage, but the fact of the matter is that there is something there which I don't get. There's a little bit of wonder in that picture that makes me go, wow, there's some things about the way my eye perceives things which is beyond me. But if I go and I camp in white and gold or nothing else, then I'm gonna be in trouble because I'm not seeing the full picture because I don't get to dictate the way the world works. I'm not God. God is bigger than me, and that's okay. I don't have to understand everything

to experience everything, and I get to try and understand my experiences, but I can't just say that the world is the way I see it to be. This happened in a big way in 1976. NASA sends out this Viking probe, Viking 1, to Mars, and they get one of the first pictures of Mars. This is what it looks like, and this picture of Mars gets sent out on the Monday, and everybody sees the picture of Mars, and they say, look, look, Mars, the sky is blue on Mars. We can go live on Mars, and the newspapers go bonkers about it, and everybody's reading about it, and everybody's excited about the blue sky on Mars until NASA pulls the picture and says, sorry, we made a mistake. This is actually what it looks like. Do you know how they got it wrong? The guy who was editing the picture saw the picture on the right, and he said, that must be a mistake. The sky is blue, and he adjusted the picture for the sky to be blue because he believed the sky to be blue. How often don't we look at the world around us, and we limit the fullness of what God has in mind for us because we're saying that it's gotta be this way? How often are you in a conversation where your presupposition, your pre-established thoughts

about how people see you is being portrayed and masked into that conversation, and you're saying, I'm sure they're saying that because you're feeling this way, you're seeing that way. We've gotta come to the point where we realise the world is bigger than what we see. There is more to it than just our perspective. Some of us are living in a space where every time you see a certain type of person from a certain race, or a certain occupation, or a certain background, or a certain nationality, you're making some assumptions about them, which is your assumptions, which isn't true about them, but you're seeing it that way, and sometimes we've just gotta realise that there's more to this life than the way we see. Sometimes we need to fall to our knees and say, God, there's more than what I see. And sometimes we need to have the humility to understand that our views are tainted by our perspective, and our perspective, well, that's limited. Now, what colour is the sky on Mars? Well, the reality is, I don't know, because I haven't been. I don't know, because I haven't been. What does grace mean? Do you know because you've been, or is somebody just writing out letters on your hand? Have you fallen to your knees and experienced it for yourself, or have you just been going through the motions of going to church,

and you've got some wise, Answer that you, some definition that you wrote down somewhere along the lines. Recently, it clicked for Reid Wiseman. Reid Wiseman is a astronaut that got to be the commander of the recent Artemis II trip. So if you've been following it, they took a little nine day trip around the moon and back and they splashed down in the Pacific and the ship went out to go and pick them up and got them from the capsule and put them in the boat after the Artemis II mission that finished a little more than a week ago and they got them back on the boat and Commander Wiseman got into the boat and he did the press briefing and in the press briefing, he made a couple of statements about the fact that I was not a religious man or I'm not a religious man, he said. And as soon as the press briefing finishes, Wiseman asks to see the ship's chaplain and when he sees the cross around the neck of the ship's chaplain's neck, Wiseman breaks down into tears. You see, because when you see something which is bigger than yourself, you realise how small you are, which is incidentally the same thing that Jim Irwin said on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

He stood on the moon and he puts his thumb up like this and Irwin says, listen, I can cover the whole earth with my thumb, how small I am. And he came home and he founded a ministry to teach people how small they are in the perspective of a big God. Apollo 8, Frank Borman, 1968, made this statement. He said, an overwhelming feeling that there was a power greater than any of us, there was a God. You cannot see something greater than yourself and remain the same. And I feel like this is Paul in Ephesians chapter three. He's like, this grace is so amazing and my words are so limited. This is beyond, this is greater than, this is more than, this is bigger than my box. When you see things for what they actually are, you cannot help but be moved, you cannot help but be shifted, you cannot help but things to click for you. So Paul gets towards the end of chapter three of the book of Ephesians and this is what he writes in verse 20. He says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations

forever and ever, amen. Man, don't you just love that prayer? Now to him who is able to do immeasurably, immeasurably more than what we think. If you've got a thinking box, that's why he has that word in there. More than what we think but also more than what we could ever imagine or wonder. More than what we think and more than what we wonder, immeasurably far above to him be the power according to the power that is at work within you. Within you, to the God who is able, the God who is bigger, are you seeing God for who He is? Are you seeing God for who He is? Are you allowing Him to magnify your life? Are you allowing the prism of community, the beauty of church where the different gifts and the different colours and the different experiences of grace come together to show the fullness of God? There's an interesting thing about seeing colour. If you look at these screens and these screens and all the screens in this room and you zoom really deep into them, you'll find little pixels. And each pixel has three. It has a red light, it has a green light, and it has a blue light. And every pixel can show these three lights.

It can show the red lights, the green lights, and the blue lights, but you know what it doesn't have? No screen anywhere has a white light because it only has red, green, and blue. But when red, green, and blue shines together, you know what you see? You see white. It's the reversal of the prism. The prism takes the white light and it shows it in many colors. That screen takes the many colors and it shows us white. Why? Because there's many colors, there's many parts, there's many perspectives, there's many boxes, there's many different people, there's many expressions of grace. There's a lot of power, grace, judgment, fullness, healing, majesty, greatness, humility, jealousy, love, care, and compassion in God. And it's all these things together that shows us the fullness of God and God is bigger than your perspective of Him and His desire is that you lean into what you know and you lean into what you wonder about and then you lean into what you know and then you wonder a little more and then you know a little more, which makes you wonder a little more, which makes you grow closer to God as you do one and the other and you do both together.

Grace is beyond definition. Grace is beyond understanding and grace is beyond wonder but it's when all these different bits and pieces come together that we get to see God in His fullness. So here's my encouragement to you. Stop putting God in a box. Let God be God and live in relationship with Him, amen. Lord, we come before you today with our whole hearts, every part of who we are and Lord, I pray for people today who feel stuck. God, like I felt stuck with that fridge that I couldn't get it to click. Lord, I thank You that You brought them here today because You wanna shift them. Lord, because You want things to click. Lord, I know that there are people in this room today which feel stuck in their perspective or lack of perspective, Lord God and I thank You, God, that today You're gonna break them free from it. God, I thank You, Lord, that there are people today that's longing for an experience of You, that's about to have an experience of You as they lean into You, as they run towards You, Father. Lord, I wanna pray for those who feel like their relationship has been on again, off again, on again, off again. He loves me, He loves me not.

Lord, I thank You that the revelation of Your love and Your grace and Your forgiveness has come for them this day and things are about to click as they step into a deeper relationship with You. Father, I pray for a fuller revelation. Lord, I pray for a leaning in. Lord, I pray for an understanding that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God and in Him, we can know what we need to know about You and we can serve You with all our hearts. Lord, as we lean in today, I pray for a shift, I pray for a click, I pray for a next level of engagement with You. Lord, but I also wanna pray for those today, God, that has never said yes to what You've done for them. And I thank You that today is their day to respond to You. So I wanna invite You, if you've never accepted what God has done for you, maybe you accepted it, but you felt like you drifted away, today is an opportunity to make a commitment to Him, to accept what Jesus Christ has done on the cross when He did everything to forgive your sins and to reconcile you with God the Father. If that's you today and you wanna make that decision, would you mind just lifting up your hand, not just for me to see, but for God to know that it's you? I see hands going up all over. I see people saying yes.

Anybody else that needs to say yes today? Can we pray out loud and if you put up your hand, I want you to pray these words that you might hear them, but for all the rest of us, let's pray these words that we might reaffirm what we believe. Dear Lord Jesus, thank You. For dying on the cross for my sins I will live for you from this day on forevermore. Amen. Can we give them a great hand? If you've responded today by lifting your hand we would love to resource you with some resources and help you along this God journey. On your right there's a sign up there that says made brand new and if you go there we want to gift you a Bible and some resources that would help you along on this journey. For the rest of you I want to take a moment just to speak to the men and I want to tell the men that there's an incredible opportunity for you this Friday night to lean into knowing more than God. Pastor Rob's gonna bring a message that's relevant to every single man in this room and it's going to take your relationship with God to the next level. But also there's community, different colors light in that moment and a great experience of worship as we worship God together under the stars. Don't miss out on Friday night. Register as you leave here. May you have an incredible week. Thank you for joining us at church today. you