Run a New Race | Crossroads Church

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Yeah, God, it's amazing to see somebody who runs their race and runs it well. And I know you've got a bunch of people in here who you've got to race for us. Some of us are already on the race. Some of us have been sidetracked. But I am thanking you that you give clarion calls that bring clarity. And that's what I'm asking happens today.

Thank you for choosing me to articulate these things. And I never want to take that for granted, God. Help us become who you want us to be. And I pray these things according to the character and identity of Jesus. Amen. So we're going to talk today a little bit about Saul, who was later renamed Paul, as you just learned. We're not talking about Paul Bunyan. We're not talking about Paul George. We're not talking about Paul Bearers. We're talking about the person of Paul who is responsible more than anybody for penning more of the New Testament than anybody else. This was a guy who, if you research him, whatever list you find, like who is the most influential person in the history of the world, number one will always be Jesus, because we date time after him. He did more than anybody. He was on your close number two. And the Apostle Paul will show up anywhere in the top five or top ten because he impacted Eastern and Western culture. This was a guy who was on mission. In the book of 1 Corinthians 8, verse 24, he gives a metaphor that we're going to tap into for the next five weeks, that I'm introducing those to today. He says this in 1 Corinthians 9, verse 24, Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run so that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we, an imperishable. Go into the race as if to win it. You ever felt like something's just off? You ever felt like, you know, the gears of life just aren't meshing right?

You ever felt like you're spitting your wheels and you're not sure why you're spitting your wheels? You ever feel like there's a fog that won't lift from your eyes or from your perspective? It's just not the way it seems like it should be. You ever feel like you just can't break through whatever the breakthrough is? Like there's just something, you know what I'm talking about? Am I with anyone? Like you're just a fry short of a happy meal, you know? I think it's because this metaphor is trying to speak to us. We're, we don't know if we're in it. Am I in the right thing? Am I going the right direction? There's three kinds of people, three kinds of people. Those who can count and those who can't. And of the three, all of us are going to be one of those three. Some of us need to change our race. We're in the wrong race. We're on the wrong direction. Some of us need to run the race we're in right now and we need to have more intensity. We need to run harder. And some of us need to just know, what's the finish line of the race I'm in? Is it just an ongoing grind? What's the finish line? So let me talk about each of those. All of us are in one of these categories. First, some of us have to change our race. Paul, the Apostle Paul, he had a race. His race was to be the best and most fanatical Jew on the planet, and he was. And he was running that race really, really hard. What race are you in?

Do you know the race that you're in? All of us are in one right now, whether you've identified it or not. But what is it? What's the default race that we're in? Maybe you're in the, maybe you're younger and you're in the just get a good job race. I say just. That's an important race. Maybe yours is a, man, find some close friend race. Maybe you're in the find a spouse race. Maybe you're in the, I need to get some kids race. Maybe you're in the, I need to have less annoying kids race. Maybe you're in the, I have to maximize my potential and maximize my earning power race. All of these races can be fine and good, and maybe God wants you to do all of these races. They're good races. But unless they're focused on the truth and identity of God, and He's commissioned you to be in that race, and you know He wants you to be in that race, and that race excites you to exert yourself, life is just not going to be as fulfilling as it could be. You're not going to be as close to God as you could be. The Apostle Paul was doing really well in his race before he was an apostle, which means one who was sent. Before he was sent to Gentiles to help them understand who God was, he was doing really great in his race. He was excelling. He was exceeding as a Pharisee, part of the ruling class of religious people who would invent laws for people to keep, and he would keep them himself. And he's on the road. We have these sayings in our country that we forget.

We don't even know what they are. The road to Damascus. He's on the road to Damascus, not the yellow brick road. He's on the road to Damascus where he's going to do his thing. What's his thing? Get to that city over there where there's more Jews who are deluded that Jesus is the Messiah. He was convinced that Jesus was not the Messiah, that this was not what the Savior was going to look like, and he was taking out his convictions on people with violence. Let's go ahead and read. What happens as he's on the road to Damascus? That's his race that he's running. Says this in verse three. Now, as he went on his way, he approached on Acts chapter nine, excuse me. Now, as he went on his way, he approached Damascus and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him and falling to the ground, you heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, which is a previous name before he gets changed to Paul. Saul, Saul. Why are you persecuting me? That's interesting. Let's pause right there. Interesting. This is Jesus saying, why are you persecuting me? Saul wasn't overseeing the persecution and killing of Christians until Jesus left. Why did he say, why are you persecuting me? I don't know if you've ever heard before that if you're part of the body of Christ, part of the family of God, if you made a decision to receive Jesus into your life, you receive the Spirit of God, specifically you receive the Holy Spirit. And when you receive the Holy Spirit, it doesn't come into the world until Jesus leaves the world. And the Holy Spirit comes into only those who have received him.

And we band together and we become the church, which has been known as the body of Christ. Or it's also been known as the hand and feet of Christ because so many of the world's problems get counteracted by us because we're his hands and feet. And Jesus says, why are you persecuting me? Meaning, these people over there, they're me. They're me. Jesus takes it personal when you have a hard time, when things are not going your way, because you are him if you're a follower of Christ, if you've received him. Pretty cool. Pretty interesting. So he goes on and continues and says this. Hearing the voice, but seeing no one. God cuts in on Paul's race. He's going one way. He's very confident and God cuts in. Have you ever had something happen where your race gets changed, where you think you're going the right direction, but all of a sudden something happens and your plans detonate? Where you think this is what God wants you to do, but all of a sudden God slaps you another way? Where you're confident this is who you are and where you're going. And all of a sudden you realize, I have no idea where I'm going. You ever had a time where God gets your attention, however He gets it? Through some pain? Gets your attention through a word that someone gives you? Gets your attention through a dream? Gets your attention through just noticing my life is just going nowhere? Whatever it is. Paul has this moment and God gets his attention by striking him with lightning. Actually, it says a light has come and engulfed him.

Could have been lightning, could have been some other thing. But all Paul knows is all of a sudden he could see and now he's blind. He had a purpose and now he has no purpose. He has an encounter with the living God and he is in darkness. He cannot see. His way of life has ceased to exist. The things that he could do before, he can not do anymore. And it happens, it happens because God had to get his attention because he was running the wrong race. God will get your attention when you're running the wrong race. One way or another, He will. As he's struggling in blindness, God gives another person instruction. He says, Ananias, I got a race for you to run. Here's this race. This race is just going to take you like an afternoon. But you need to enter this race, you need to run this race. It goes to Ananias, who's a Jew, who lives in Damascus, who believes that Jesus is the Messiah. And he says to Ananias, you're supposed to go to this guy Saul and you're supposed to bring him to understand who Jesus is. You're supposed to tell him the truth. And Ananias just doesn't like this idea at all. I don't know if you've ever been put into a race and you just don't want to be in it. I don't want that to be my race. Well, that's Ananias here. Let's see what happens. It says this, And the Lord said to him, Rise, in Galatians verse 11,

Eyes and go to the street called Straight at the house of Judas. Look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. For behold, he's praying. He's praying. He's been in a vision. He in a vision with a man and he has seen, excuse me, he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight. So Saul's already seen this. This is what's going to happen. But Ananias, he hears this. Ananias answered, Lord, I've heard from many about this man. How much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name. But the Lord said to him, go where he's a chosen messenger of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. Yeah. Yeah. Ananias doesn't want to do this. This is going to be very uncomfortable for him. He goes, this guy might kill me. I don't like this guy. Don't like him at all. God says, no, this is what you got to do. And you got to tell him that he's got a new race. And part of his race, part of his race is to suffer for my name's sake. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a race that none of us want, and that's a race that some of us have been deluded into thinking that when you're suffering, something is wrong. No, what's wrong is us thinking that we're not going to suffer.

That's what's wrong. This is not called a nature walk. It's called a run. It's called a run. It's not an ecological stroll to look at glaciers and just enjoy things and pick the posies and smell things. No, it's a run. It's a run. You know anybody who runs? You run? Freaking hard, isn't it? You don't want to do it, do you? If you're going to be any good at it, you got to get used to being in pain, having a level of suffering if you want to actually win a race. And this is the reason why many of us feel anemic. This is the reason why many of us feel like we're not getting anywhere. It's because we've been deluded into thinking that when God gets a hold of my life, my life gets easier. We've been deluded into thinking that if I come to know God, He's going to smooth everything out in my life. The history of the world, people who are spiritually great, the one thing they have all in common is suffering and it's difficulty. All of them. And the lid on your life and my life, the lid is always how much difficulty you can bear. So if you can bear this much difficulty, that's the lid of your life. You can bear that much, that's the lid. You can bear this much, that's the regulator. Maybe God was, we don't know, I'm just supposing we don't know these things, but maybe God was calling Paul because Paul had a really high suffering index.

In his previous life, he was up for doing hard things. In his life, he'd always been doing the hardcore stuff. And you're not hardcore if you haven't learned how to live with difficulty and tension and trials and strife and suffering. Maybe this is why God wanted him to do a new thing, which was go after the Gentiles. It's crazy. You're a Jewish guy who's all about Jewish things all the time, but he's going to redirect them to go after Gentiles. Crazy. All I'm saying, friends, all I'm saying is this, you and I have got to make peace with suffering. We have to make peace with difficulty. We have to make peace with hard things. And if you're not going to make peace with it, you will not win. You cannot win. You cannot have a life that's full and fulfilling. A life that's easy maybe, but not full and fulfilling. The Apostle Paul gets converted in the book of Galatians 1.13. He talks about his drive. He says this, He is just hardcore. He is go, go, go. Maybe again, we don't know this. Maybe God called him to this race because God looked at the 12 disciples, the remaining 11 disciples, and just goes, man, none of those guys have what it takes. None of them, they're all Jewish. None of them can shift. None of them can really shift to really embracing Gentiles. None of them have the fire in the belly that I need.

I don't know, I'm just guessing, I don't know, I don't know. But God says, that, that fire, I want to redirect that. It's interesting. When God comes in your life and gets a hold of your life, He does not give you a new personality. If you're type A right now, when God gets a hold of you, you will be type A afterwards. If you are type B right now, when He gets a hold of you, you will be type B afterwards. If you're an extrovert now, you'll probably always be an extrovert, unless you're a male who ages, we become more and more introverted as men, as we age. I don't understand why that is. I don't know if it's the case with women or not, but I can speak, that happens. If you're an introvert, an extrovert, if whatever your spiritual gifts are, God channels and uses that. He tends to not give you a whole personality makeover to do the race He wants. And He wants, He wants Paul's piss and vinegar. He wants it. He just wants to put it in the right direction. Paul gets converted. Now, I want to show you a video, a story of another guy who experiences this, this ugly word, this, this crazy word. This word, I just, I just said it. It's like a four letter F word, the word converted. In our culture, no one wants to be converted. We don't want to convert anybody.

We just want to live and let live. You be you, you identify as you want to, you be your true self. And what that means is, no, you never change, never change. No, you don't, you don't divert your path. You just justify why you are the way you are right now. Because changing has too much difficulty and too much suffering. You don't want to do that. You just want to justify the way you think right now. Just have to justify where you're going right now. And when God gets a hold of you, like He converts you, He converts your energies to a different direction. That's why spiritual growth is hard, which is why many of us don't spiritually grow. As soon as the crossroads says something you don't like, you leave. As soon as there's something you read in the Bible that God wants you to hear, you're like, nope, got to find some place that ignores that. Because you, no, you don't want, you don't really want to work hard at it. You just want easy affirmation. And therefore, that's why something is always off. Because you're not, you can't win the race that way. No one can win anything that way. Here's a guy who grew up as a Muslim in a Muslim country. We're going to hear more from him in the next five weeks when we start the journey. Nerula, and let's hear about his story. Just a conservative Muslim who was just trying to do, like, his five times of prayer every day and, you know, his religious stuff. But also he wanted us to be raised with enough knowledge to understand why we were doing what we were doing. Actually, my dad was against TV even, so he didn't allow TV at home. So all I could do at home was to read religious books about the prophets,

reading Quran and learning my faith. And I was pretty devout because of that. I even was a kid who was trying to impress his dad by memorizing, like, multiple chapters a day. I was so devout, for example, because according to traditional Islam, music is haram. And so I would not listen to any music. I had a small iPod, but I would only listen to Quran recitations in Arabic. Or when I was playing basketball with my friends, I would be the only one who would stop playing when I heard the call of prayer and go to the mosque, pray and come back and continue playing. Because in Islam, there is this idea of making God happy or, like, you know, like, doing things that he wants you to do and kind of completing your tasks every day. So it's more like a ritualistic and, like, earning your salvation kind of way, right? So I was, like, trying to be a good Muslim. When I reached high school, it is when my kind of horizon widened. Because until then, I was living in the same neighborhood with the same friends, with the same people around me. It was like a bubble, right? But in high school, this is where a lot of people from different backgrounds come together. And that's... Although I knew, for example, the term atheist, I've never met someone who actually identified themselves as atheist, right? Who were saying that, I am an atheist, I don't believe in God. So for me, that was a shock, actually. I was like, wait a minute, like, these people actually exist. I'm so lucky because that's how Muslims say when you ask, like,

what do they believe in? They say, I'm lucky I was born in a Muslim country and, like, in a Muslim family. But what about a Christian kid who was born into a Christian family, thinking that that is the truth? for themselves and they will live with that for their whole life and then they'll go to hell because of that. So I wanted to understand like how it was possible for that kid to be saved as well in a way, right? I was also trying to imagine a person in my head, really, a person who has never heard about Islam or Christianity. So like if that person decided to look at both religions and both faiths and the evidence for them, what would they conclude? What I discovered that was in favor of Christianity that actually like shook me was the historical Jesus and how it is not just a faith-based thing but how it is evidence-based from history and not just Christian sources as well. So not just from the Bible, it's not like you have to believe in the Bible to believe Jesus lived and died by crucifixion but there are external sources that also has witnessed that even though like those were written by people who did not believe like Jesus's divine nature, being able to trace the Bible, you know, back to the original authors and all made me feel happy and excited about, okay, there is a way to reach the truth objectively and intellectually and I'm getting there. I became convinced and I was a teenager, right? I was in high school so I didn't know how to reveal the news to my parents either and my parents also didn't know how to receive such such big and serious news, right? So my dad had a very like aggressive reaction. He kicked me out of the house. In my head, I'm like, I'm so convinced that this is the truth. I'm so, you know, I think I've found it for myself so that is very important to me and I'm just gonna kind of shove it in their face and like slap them with the truth kind of, you know, and I was just doing it also very aggressively which was not easy especially for my dad who had a different vision for me. I longed to also meet with actual like Christians and I didn't even know if there were that would be Turkish Christians like me. So one evening I actually decided to google a church in Gaziantep and what I at least hoped to find was a historical church, right? That I could go to a visit like maybe it's a museum now and all and then this Turkish number came up and I decided to give it a call and it was this American pastor who has founded a church in Gaziantep. I went and I met the pastor and he and the church, the whole church was amazing. He was the one, the pastor who later on baptized me as well and that's kind of how my spiritual conversion started. When I saw a church

you can pray and worship in your own language and that like I can speak to God and God speaks back to me and like we can have this, it's like you don't even need anyone else. You worship as a community but you don't need anyone else in that moment. You can just communicate directly with God. That was so deep for me. At some point I received a calling from God that now with my background I think I could convey these messages and so I started making videos for YouTube. I share about what we Christians believe and what Christianity is all about. I try to show even like the arguments for the existence of God. People from the West come to Turkey to experience the Christian history. I of course share about like how in the Bible like for example the seven churches of Revelation, they're all in Turkey or like the route that Paul took through Turkey. Also here like the fairy chimneys, Christians actually hallowed some of these out to use as houses to run and hide from persecution. Because of my background I believe that like I could create that bridge for them to cross because I ask the same questions or similar questions that they are asking now. My dad recently I was on the phone with him and he said you know people come to me sometimes and they see your videos online and they say yeah your son is still a Christian. Like what do you think about it? I tell them my son has become a man, a better man, a better person. That for me was very very valuable. Every good thing that we get from following him and through him I think it's just awesome. So I wouldn't change it for anything else you know so yeah. That's good stuff. We'll hear more from Nerula over the over the next five weeks. But Nerula and his story that's a classic macro conversion story. But there's other conversions that we have to undergo by changing our race. One, one conversion or one race that's changed for me over the last years, I've, I've realized envy had been seeping into my life, looking at other people who I identified with or were peers of mine, and I would see them get opportunities or things that I wasn't getting. And I was measuring and comparing myself to them and, and allowing my fulfillment and my joy to be based on how I was doing relative to them. And I wasn't feeling very good because they were doing better than me, better than me in my own mindset. I realized, God, hold on, I gotta, I gotta get converted from that. I'm, I'm not going anywhere with that.

Maybe there's a conversion or a changing of the race from being fixated on your savings to being fixated more on your giving. Maybe it's a drive from relational separation to relational integration, that we actually start spending time on the relationships around us. So some of us, some of us have to change our race. Some of us, secondly, have to, have to run our race harder. You're in the right race, you just got to run harder, like more intense. Warren Buffett said this, intensity is the price of excellence. The Bible would put it this way, disciplines, discipline is the price of winning. That's the Bible's words on this. In the book of Philippians chapter 3, the Apostle Paul talks about how his intensity just got refunneled. Here's what he says. If anyone thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I mean confidence in our own ability to do things in and of our own power, that's the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day, that was a Jewish law, check, got it. Of the people of Israel, that's me. Of the tribe of Benjamin, a supreme tribe, that's me. A Hebrew of Hebrews, like say I'm an American, I'm American of Americans, that's who I am. A Hebrew of Hebrews, as the law of Pharisee. Then just know the law, kept it perfectly and even made up laws. Made up laws be more extreme. As to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. He's got an intensity, he's got a zealousness about him. One of the most depressing things I've streamed in the last year, I don't know if you saw it or not. I found it depressing, maybe you didn't. Was a two-part, I think it was a two-part documentary on Charlie Sheen. It just made me sad. You know, here's this guy who's amazingly talented and has been amazingly successful in many ways. And yet he's battled with addiction and destructive behaviors for decades. And I don't know, it was just, it was a bummer really, it was.

When he was in the midst of one of his addictions, one of his addictive periods, what pulled him out was his dad, Martin Sheen, who was an alcoholic and has firsthand exposure to what, the kind of intensity it takes to run the race towards sobriety. And Martin Sheen said this, he said, nothing ever gets done unless it's done by a fanatic. People who are just like, I need to be mellow. Let's be reasonable. Let's just, let's just be balanced. Never get anything done. It's those who go, this is where I'm going and I'm going to be intense. I'm going to actually run it. The word zealous is even a horrible word, another horrible word in our culture. Like zealous, you really don't want to be that. Rather be a zombie than being a zealot. The Bible talks about sleeping. Wake up, oh sleeper. And the Bible talks about running. So let's contrast these for a moment. The life of being a runner or a zealot. Paul was a zealot, he just had to redirect it. Or the life of being a sleeper and being a zombie. If you're a runner, if you're zealous, you're moving towards something. If you want to be a sleeper, be a zombie, you're staying away from something. You might even know right now, I know the race I want to be in, but I don't want to do it. If you're a runner, you are focused on the future. If you're a sleeper, you're focused on yourself. If you're a runner, you're fighting darkness. If you're a sleeping zombie, you're actually living in darkness and you're fine with it. If you're a runner, you're moving when it is hard. And if you're a sleeper, you're only moving when it's easy.

There's two different worldviews, two different states of being. And those of us who actually want to win are going to choose to fight it. I've had a number of these things in my life. I'll share with you two. One was, gosh, one of my early experiences where I had to harness energy. I was a pretty late bloomer as far as intensity is concerned. When I was in high school, I definitely had an intensity around working out. and football and actually partying. But then when I, when I came to know Christ, I went on this like laissez-faire thing. Maybe it was the people I was hanging around with that just kind of, I don't know, I just had this thing like this, mellow out, just chill. And I ended up losing my way, which is a big part of why I was so horrible in school. It took me seven years to get my four-year degree. I just didn't have an intensity to study at all. And my dad was paying for it, so I took advantage of that. When I was 24, I'd been married for two years, in year six of my educational quest, I was at this church, I was serving as a student pastor, and a church about 400, and you could go forward in the service, and we had these steps at the front of the stage, and during this one part of the service, if you wanted to go forward and pray, you'd go and pray. And I chose that day to go up and pray, knelt on the steps, and I was praying about,

I don't know why I went forward to pray, but there was some reason I went forward to pray. And then God spoke to me. When I say spoke to me, there was a idea that came to my mind that was so out of my mind space, that I don't know where it came from. I don't know where it came from, and it was the kind of thing that God would approve of, and the thought and the prompting from God was, Brian, you need to go to seminary. I came home and told Lib, and she virtually laughed in my face, because she had been married to me for two years now, and she saw how much I sucked at school, or at any level of discipline, any level of intensity. It's like, she's thinking, you can't even knock off your degree here. Now you're going to get a three-year MDiv Master's of Divinity degree? Yeah, no, no. But I got more intense. There was a new thing that happened, a new race. I was a late bloomer with that, as far as I was concerned. And that continued to grow. My intensity started continuing to grow and get reshaped. And there was another critical moment at age 35. We had, Crossroads had been going for about five years. We had rented facilities at a public school. We came over, bought a old lumber warehouse,

which is that direction, original building, 1,200 seats. And we found our church after we moved into it. We doubled in three months and we tripled in six months, which was in some ways really awesome. It's kind of affirming, like, hey, we're on the right path. Maybe it felt like I had a little bit of job security, you know? It felt like you were winning, like things were happening well. But at the same time, it wasn't good. I found myself in the atrium, this concrete atrium that's out there, in the middle of the week, by myself, processing with God. And I said, God, this building is full now. It's full. I just went through, led the church through a campaign, which leads somebody through something. You have to be a leader in it. So Lib and I cast out everything we had, gave away all our kids' toys and did the whole thing. And did all that and then expended all of our energy on hiring architects, building the thing, getting people to build it, getting banks to make up the gap with mortgage. And through all that stuff, I had literally fried my adrenal glands. They were fried. I asked some docs, what's going on? I fried my adrenal glands. And so here I am at 35 years old, and I said, God, what, what, what? We're supposed to have another campaign? Give away money I don't have? Have more architects, more complexity? And more people build things and yet have a higher mortgage? And now what?

We're going to fill that up in another campaign? And I said, God, if this is my life, I don't want to do this. I can't do this. And God redirects, like, boom, out of nowhere. Comes to me, and I sense this thought. Again, I describe it as God talking to me. It's like a thought that comes out of nowhere. That's not the kind of thought I would generate. But it's the kind of thought that Jesus would approve of. Comes out of nowhere, and God says, what if instead of you try to, what about instead of building crossroads, you build the kingdom of God? Oh, I want crossroads to grow. We work really hard for crossroads to grow. I want more people to be blessed and deep in our church. I want that. But like, okay, that's a different thing. Like, okay, so it's not just endless treadmills of like building more buildings for building's sake, getting more people for people's sake. But like, if we can take us as a team and throw it into the kingdom of God and have the kingdom of God become more to look like what is in heaven, in the communities we're in, that'd be amazing. And that was the day crossroads changed. We brought our intensity. We still want to grow, obviously. We're still doing all that stuff. But the intensity to do things like tutor and mentor kids who are at risk. Like put tens of millions of dollars. at this point into CityLink, a center that brings people out of generational poverty. And we started that and put it in the order like Compassion International. We take prime time on the weekend, all services, every so often,

and make us aware of this organization called Compassion International that takes kids and educates them and feeds them for their entire childhood. And we've done 17,344 of those kids here in our church. 21 million dollars that doesn't even go through our books that we all do. Girls rescued out of sex slavery, out of prisons, hundreds of thousands of people being reached in prisons. All these things, I could go on and on and on and on and on, but these things were that moment of, OK, let's be intense about other things and use the energy for that. That was a different race. Same intensity, not like, OK, just back off and just relax, enjoy your life. But bring intensity for things that matter. And then finally, last one I'll say is this. Some of us need to know what the finish line is. There is a finish line. You're in a race right now, and it does end. You're not in it forever. Maybe some of the confusion you might be feeling is you were in a race and that one ended and maybe you won. And now what I'm doing, right? That's what the Apostle Paul is saying. He says, do you know in a race all the runners run, but only one receives prize? So run that you may obtain it. You obtain it how? Because the race is over and you won it. The way you survive the grind, there's a grind to life, right? The way you survive the grind is going, I'm in the grind. But there is a finish line. I'm in the grind, but it's happening. This is one of the things that God's worked on me on over the last year or so. Like, I want to finish well. And the general pattern seems to be for people like me who have my kind of job, eventually you screw up and have a public scandal.

So then I can start to feel like, OK, that's the point. Just get to the end of however long I'm a crossroads without having committed scandalous sin. And I'm all for getting to the end and not committing scandalous sin. That's great. I don't want to be DQ'd. But that doesn't mean that I'm finishing well. That doesn't mean that I've run the race. Like, what's my end point here? When do I know I'm done? When am I done? You have to know what your finish line is. There's a race that God has you in, but there's things He wants you to do. But at some point you finish that one, it's on to another one. No, we also have to finish the race of our life, get the end of our life, running through the tape, having served Christ if you're a Christian. That's true, but there's other, like, mini sprints. You have to know where the end of it is. See, this stuff that we're talking about right now, this is really out of the box of what many Americans want to live, which is why America's mental health is as bad as it is. It's why America's spiritual health is as bad as it is. These are things that Tony Robbins is not going to make money off of. These are things that are counter to our culture of your life should be easy and your spirituality should just buttress your life and give you good feelings. Yeah, there's great feelings that come when you're connected with God, and you're sweating, and there's a point, and there's a purpose, and that's what makes it really fulfilling. And that's why I'm so excited for the next five weeks. We get to dig in on this. Five weeks. We get to do this.

We put some of our best creativity in the weekend services. Next five weeks, top, top-notch creativity we're bringing. Resource, spending a lot, a lot of money to bless all of us with a personal guide, doing all we can to make it possible for you to be around actual people and be sharpened. That's one of the reasons I need this during just the next five weeks. I've realized I've kind of gotten diverted in my race. I've become way too accustomed to wasting too much time streaming mindless stuff that's never going to positively impact my life. I'm fine doing some amount of streaming mindless stuff, but not as much as I'm doing right now. So I'm excited. OK, Wednesday nights with my group that I just got formed and invited into. Yeah, OK, I've got one less night I'm going to be tempted to stream. That's good stuff. I'm going to actually be talking to real people. I'm going to be actually hearing real problems and having real celebrations instead of scripted problems and scripted celebrations. I'm saying all of this for you, please, please. We don't need anything for you the next five weeks. We want something for you. We don't need anything from you the next five weeks. We want something for you. Take advantage of this thing that's been created for you for us. Your life, your future just could be different if you exert yourself for five weeks. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be meaningful. God, thank you for who you are and what you've done. And we ask that you would meet us in our race. Some of us are in the locker room. Some of us are at the starting line. Some of us are panting from the last race that we finished.

God, we trust you meet us. And you fuel us for the run that we have yet to run. And we thank you for these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.