Who Are You Becoming? | How Wisdom Shapes Your Life | Josh Leake

And the topic is wisdom. Everybody say wisdom. Wisdom. So when we're talking about wisdom, conventional wisdom is advice or principles that are designed to guide your life and to prevent things that you might regret to wisdom that the majority of people holds. So I ignored, in 10th grade, a piece of conventional wisdom. And that wisdom is listen to your parents. So in 10th grade, the style was if you were a musician to wear skinny jeans. People in my generation, you'll remember seeing kids, punk rock, that era. If you were older, you might remember looking at that and being like, what on earth is going on. The wisdom I ignored for my parents was actually because of different wisdom that I got on the school bus from a friend of mine who was very into this scene, the punk rock music scene. And she told me, she was like, you can actually make your own skinny jeans. There's some wisdom for you. Yeah. So I thought, having no sewing experience, this sounds like the greatest idea ever. So I sewed my own skinny jeans, having no idea what I was doing. I could barely fit them on my body. So I waddled down the stairs in self-sewed skinny jeans.

And my parents saw me about to leave the house, and they said, what are you doing? And I was like, this is the style. Now I made them myself so I don't have to spend the money. My dad said, you are going to regret that someday. And I was like, I don't care. And I left. Guess you regretted it, this guy. Thankfully, there are no pictures of this. There's no pictures remaining. That would-- man, that would be-- I'm going to spare you all. There it is on the screen. No, there's no surviving pictures of that day. But I ignored the conventional wisdom of listening to parents. Wisdom is all about keeping your life on track. It's about preventing things we regret living in a way where we're making good decisions. And it's all about fundamental, unchanging principles in reality. So you'll know some of them. All good things come to those who wait. That's a saying of wisdom that's designed to guide your life and prevent things you'd regret. Or principles like delay of gratification. Or patience or trust that keep us on the road so we don't drive our life off a cliff. Because every one of us has regrets. Every one of us has made decisions, have said things that we wish we could take back,

done things that we wish we could take back. Wisdom is designed to help guide our life. And wisdom is different from intelligence. Because you can have somebody with a PhD who makes horrible decisions. It's very different from knowledge. You can have somebody with a lot of knowledge, very intelligent, and yet blows up their life financially, relationally with their kids, destroys trust. Wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence. Wisdom is fundamental to living the kind of life that we don't regret. But one predicament that we have today, that all of us probably feel is there are so many voices yelling with wisdom. If you tune in digitally at all, there's so many opportunities to hear insight and wisdom from so many people. There's books and podcasts and influencers, celebrities, you name it. There's so many different sources, and don't get me wrong. There's a lot of really good stuff out there. But what I want to challenge us with this morning is I think we can easily tune into the voices of wisdom everywhere else except the Bible. Because we can often see the Bible and God as in a spiritual category. Spiritual truths of how we connect with God, but it's largely disconnected from everyday reality. I think this is how any of us could see it.

It's disconnected from everyday decisions of how I'm going to live my life. So a lot of Christians tend to look primarily to other sources for insight and wisdom of how to live their life. It's not that we don't look to God at all. We look to him for some things, but then for the rest of how to live, we look everywhere else. So I want to study today what is biblical wisdom? Because if you're a follower of Jesus, if you want to be a disciple of Jesus saying, this is what I live for, we should be extra invested about what God has to say about how we live every day. We should be extra invested in what does God say about wisdom, how to live everyday life, how to make good decisions so we don't live a life that we regret someday. So we're going to study Proverbs chapter one. If you want to turn there, Proverbs chapter one. And we're just going to do the first couple verses here of Proverbs chapter one. So let's jump in together. Proverbs one says this, the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. So this is a collection of-- who we'll talk about later, has collected. First two, for gaining wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight. So this is about perception, to grasp truth to make good decisions. Verse three, for receiving instruction

in prudent behavior, which basically means careful consideration about the choices you're gonna make, doing what is right, just and fair, forgiving prudence to those who are simple, knowledge and discretion to the young. So the simple and young is talking about inexperienced and young who may be gullible or more easily manipulated, learning wisdom. So you don't live a life that you someday regret. This intro of the book of Proverbs, collection of wise sayings, is making a big claim here. The claim is you can live a life that you don't regret. It can be guaranteed to you if you learn to grasp the insight and wisdom that's being offered from God. Because God does offer wisdom for everyday normal decisions, even though we don't tend to see it that way. And it's based off of understanding the fundamental principles of reality that God has set up. And we don't always think of the world in reality this way, but if you think about it, there are principles, again, that are always true. There, you can't touch them, you can't measure them, but principles like trust and honesty. Those are embedded into reality. It's not like gravity, gravity as a physical force, you can measure trust and honesty are very real. We all know this.

We've all experienced the consequences of violating these before. And we know if you try to build a relationship on dishonesty 100 times out of 100, trust is gonna break. It's every time it's a law of how reality works. I like to think of it, this is the image that was coming to my mind like a rubber band, right? There's, if you think about trust and honesty about these principles that God has embedded into the way that reality works, you can push against them with these principles of reality that God has designed. You can live a life or make the individual decisions that are dishonest or that break trust, but eventually there's a snap back. And yes, that hurts when I do that. There is a snap back moment when we choose to go against God's wisdom in the way that he has set up the world that will eventually recoil and causes us or people around us damage. C.S. Lewis talks about this idea. He illustrates it in a way that I love. He talks about what is fair. So fairness is a principle that God has set up. When we say that's not fair, nobody is saying, I don't like this. What we're saying is there is a standard

that we all agree to, something called fairness, and you are violating that standard and it causes a snap back. It's a fundamental principle of wisdom. There's principles that God wants to train us on, but again, there's a massive disconnect that I see in Christians today. It's the disconnect between we see God and the Bible is helpful for certain things, certain realities, especially when it pertains to spiritual things, but then it's largely disconnected from how to live everyday life. So we go to God for some things, but then for everyday decisions, when there's a difficult person in our life, or when we're faced with a decision about what to do moving forward with our family or our finances. Typically, we don't see God as involved in that, he's involved in certain things, but then we quickly run to other things. So Christians will run to podcasts, or I don't know what decision to make, so I'm gonna run to AI and type in my situation and see what it says, or go on social media, and there's a person who's famous, who's gonna give me some insight or influence. There's nothing wrong with a leadership podcast that gives wisdom. That's not the point.

The point is where we're primarily running for our source of wisdom and how we see God's source of wisdom. Here's the first point that'll help the message kind of moving forward. We can embrace spiritual truth of Christianity without allowing God's wisdom to shape how we live. This is a really big disconnect in Christians is we can embrace the spiritual truths and connect with God in that way, and yet overlook responding to God's wisdom for how we should live everyday life, and instead we run primarily to other sources. Many Christians, we look to God for some things, but for everything else we have our set list of things for wisdom that are our first place to go to. So I wanna talk about what is God's wisdom and what's our response to it. We're gonna keep going as it talks about wisdom. Proverbs chapter one, the beginning of it, the very first verse talks about the collector of this wisdom, this guy Solomon. Solomon was the son of King David. King David was the shepherd boy who was launched into being the king of Israel, wrote a bunch of the book of Psalms. Solomon is King David's son and has becomes king at a very young age. A lot of people think that Solomon was only 20 years old when he took the throne.

So Solomon is thrust into this leadership position at a very young age. And in first Kings chapter three, it says, God appeared to Solomon in a dream. Said to him, Solomon, you can ask for whatever you want for from me and I'll give it to you. Solomon says, I'm super young. I don't know what I'm doing. So give me a wise and discerning heart. And God loves this response. I wanna look at the Lord's response to this first Kings chapter three, verse 10. Here's what it says, the Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for this. So God said to him, since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have you asked for the death of your enemies, but for discernment and administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart so that there will never have been anyone like you nor will there ever be. Solomon is famous for being known as the wisest person who ever lived, but I want you to see here, God developed Solomon into a person of wisdom. It's not that God always just kept providing answers one by one to Solomon because God isn't interested in keeping you only dependent on getting external answers. He wants to develop godly wisdom in you. So yes, God wants to give us answers when we seek him.

That's true, but so often this other side of the equation, there's a disconnect from the fact that God wants to develop wisdom for everyday ground level decisions in life. If you rewind to a message we talked about last month, we were studying divine partnership in the book of Acts, and we talked about Philip who was elevated to be a leader in the food distribution ministry. The widows were being discriminated against so they chose seven different guys to lead this food distribution ministry. And there was two things, two criteria for how they selected. That's pop quiz to see if you remember. You didn't know you were getting a pop quiz this morning. Two things, what was it? It was full of the spirit and wisdom. They looked for people who had both of those things, two separate things, full of the spirit and wisdom. Wisdom is about, or full of the spirit means connected to God partnering with him, being aware of where he's leading you, but wisdom is about who you're developing into. Wisdom starts with who are you becoming? Here's the main point of the message today. Our response to God's wisdom shapes who we become and how we live. And so often our response is to overlook or primarily to look other places. And then again, what ends up happening is when we run to God for some things,

but then run to other sources for everything else, we don't ever develop Godly wisdom and we make decisions that go against how God wants us to live. And there's a recoil effect. We end up hurting ourselves, hurting our families, making poor choices, fine. But nobody sets out to do any of these things. Nobody sets out to live a life where they're gonna get married and I'm gonna, I hope this ends in divorce. Nobody has kids where they're, they say, I hope my kids grew up to resent me. Or makes a financial choice and it's like, man, I hope this buries me in debt. Nobody makes, nobody sets out for those choices, but every day we end up making one decision after another and we either look to ourself or to other sources and without realizing it. Even Christians go against Godly wisdom and make decisions that cause a recoil effect and cause damage to us and to other people around us. So we're just going to talk about how do we respond to Godly wisdom? Three different responses to Godly wisdom. And I think that this message may great on some of you a little bit. Here's why I think it might. It helps when we have something that we're gonna leave and act on.

When we have a lesson that we're saying, this is the thing that I'm going to leave and I'm going to do, this message is we're just saying typically we don't even respond to what God already has. Let's evaluate what our response is. Because we can say we're a Christian, but then we choose other sources or we choose self-direction and we don't pay attention to how God wants us to live So we're gonna look at our response to everyday wisdom from God. Again, our last series is how to be full of the spirit, how to partner with God. This week and next week, we're talking about how do we become people of wisdom? You can actually be really interested in God's supernatural activity and neglect his ordinary everyday process for developing wisdom. You can be super interested in the supernatural and neglect looking to God for developing normal everyday wisdom. And a lot of Christians, I think of, a lot of Christians, I think relate to God in a way that's sort of like waiting for a lightning strike. I've had this conversation with a lot of people where they seek God for an answer about something. Big decision. God, show me what to do. Sometimes they feel like, man, it just feels like

it's so hard to hear from God. It feels like God is silent. Sometimes there is a waiting period. But then, you know, there's a lightning strike. Well, I got an answer from God. Man, it was so clear, I feel like God answered me of what I'm supposed to do. And then we develop this weird theology of God where we see him as largely distant from normal everyday life until these big lightning strikes come. And when you just have to wait for the next one and we look to other sources for everything else, and then when another moment comes, we wait for the big lightning strike. And big direction sign moments from God are good, but we can be so focused on big directions from God that we overlook the wisdom that he wants to develop in us, the people that we're becoming, the life that we live out of that. And following Jesus isn't just about getting external answers about the next decision. It's about developing Godly wisdom for how to live everyday life. Both being full of the spirit and wisdom are important, but we want to look at how do we respond to Godly wisdom. So let's continue in Proverbs here, Proverbs chapter one verse five, says this, "Let the wise listen and add to their learning and let the discerning get guidance

for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise." Here's a really important verse verse seven, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." So we're saying our response to God's wisdom is gonna shape who we become, and that's gonna shape how we live. So three responses to God's wisdom. The first one, this one gives us the starting point. So it says in verse seven, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fear of the Lord's, our first response that shapes us who we become is reverence." This is what fear of the Lord means. That's number one is reverence. So it's not literally being afraid, this is an attitude. It's a heart posture before God, where we respect him, we hold him in his ways and the way that he set up the universe in the highest regard. So why is fear the fear of God, reverence, called the beginning of knowledge or wisdom? This almost in and of itself sounds like a riddle. Growing up, it always sounded a little bit like a riddle to me. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It doesn't immediately make sense. Why is the fear of the Lord at the beginning of knowledge? It's about your attitude towards the source of wisdom. So a parallel example is if you think about your attitude

towards a coach, or if you think about your attitude towards a teacher, if you have a really frustrated attitude towards one of those figures, a mentor, coach, teacher, you're gonna have a very hard time receiving from them. And likewise, your attitude towards God directly affects your ability to receive wisdom from him. So making good decisions about your future and your family and your relationships starts with your attitude towards God. Can I tell you one of the biggest pieces of wisdom that my parents passed on to me? It's something I've been especially reflecting on now that I'm a parent, having three kids. Oh, this is about to turn 10 in a couple of months with it, crazy to think about how fast it went. But one of the pieces of wisdom, my parents passed on to me that I'm grateful for is protecting the respect of parental figures. I remember when I was younger, there were a lot of shows that I wanted to watch that all my friends watched and I wasn't allowed to, and it was super frustrating. I couldn't name for you the shows that I was left out of. And it was super annoying. All my friends are watching these, why can't I watch them? And a lot of the time, because it makes the parents look stupid. As a kid, I'm like, I don't care. I wanna watch the show. But as I get older, I realized a pattern in media,

which is that there is a targeted effort to discredit and undermine healthy attitudes towards parents. What I notice it, especially with fathers, if you look at a lot of TV shows, you'll see so many fathers portrayed as incompetent or unintelligent. It's a targeted attack to have a healthy attitude towards parental figures. Why does this matter? Your attitude and your posture towards sources of godly wisdom has a profound impact on you. And that includes on God himself. So responding in reverence means acknowledging that God and godly sources of wisdom, God knows so much better than me about everything. This is the first acknowledgement. The fear of the Lord reverence means God, you set up everything. You created every principle of the way that the world works, the way that the world works. You're outside of time. You know everything. You know is so much better than me. So many times, again, we can get disconnected from this, response, because we live in a very individualistic culture that encourages self-direction. So we come to church for spiritual truth in connecting with God. But then when it comes to wisdom for everyday living,

we lean more on self-direction. But reverence says, first, God, you know better about everything. So if you need wisdom, if you're in a situation where you're struggling with a difficult person or situation or figuring out what to do next, a good place to start, the best place to start. Actually, the Bible proverb says the only place to start is to respond with a posture that honors God and says, you know so much better, reverence. So the first response is just to say to godly wisdom and all of the sources of godly wisdom in our life, a responsive reverence towards God. Our response to God's wisdom shapes who we're gonna become and how we live our everyday life. First response is reverence. For the second one, let's look at Proverbs chapter one, verse eight, here's what it says. Listen, my son, to your father's instruction and do not forsake your mother's teaching. Look at the parental relationship. It's being held as sacred here. They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck. It's a gift from a sacred parental relationship and the child has to have a posture of humility or teachability, that's the second response. Number two is humility. Humility is the recognition that God's instruction of how to live everyday with wisdom

is not just helpful, we die without it. So one more passage I wanna look at from Proverbs illustrates this concept that we die without submitting to God's wisdom, Proverbs 132 says this, for the waywardness of the simple will kill them, waywardness, self-direction, I choose. And the complacency of fools will destroy them, meaning the self-satisfaction with my way. Verse 33, but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease without fear of harm. If we don't develop Godly wisdom, what happens is we live out of touch with reality of the way that God has designed things. And every time we're gonna make decisions that go against the principles that God has put in place and it's gonna hurt and destroy us. Instruction and teachability, after reverence, this is the posture to say, I need to learn, I need instruction, I need correction, I need feedback. And here's the thing about all of those things I mentioned, instruction, feedback, correction, all of those things are fine until we disagree with them. Have you noticed that feeling? Feedback is fine as long as I agree with it. But the second it hurts my pride is when it's a real test. At some point, God's wisdom and God's instruction is gonna disagree with you. Actually, it probably will happen a lot.

If you're serious about following Jesus, there are going to be a lot of times where what God asks or commands you to do is going to be very different than your preference and my preference. Generally, generally, again, we are very bad at knowing when we are responding and talking. when other people are being prideful. We can notice that, but we're not very good at knowing when we're the ones being prideful. But a great test of humility and teachability is how you respond to godly wisdom and sources when you don't like what they're saying. So our response could be a lot of things. Maybe it's just uninterested in what's being offered. Or maybe it's defensive because it hurts our pride. So we shield it or stubborn. I don't want to, I don't want to choose this way. I want to choose my way. But you can't separate the response of humility from teachability, which is the desire for feedback correction instruction. So many people block the development of wisdom because of the pain to our ego. That will happen if you're going to develop wisdom, is it will hurt our pride and our ego. But this is what Proverbs is emphasizing value, the teaching and input from godly sources, even when you don't like it or it hurts your pride. Let me tell you a story about 10 years ago, I called my dad up for some wisdom. So I know many of you know, probably almost everybody in the room. But in case there's someone who's new or visiting, my dad was the lead pastor here for 35 years. He passed away earlier this year. And he was always the first one I would go to for wisdom, him and my mom. So I called him up 10 years ago. It was in a new season of life 10 years ago. I was newly married, taken on new things of life. We were about to have a kid. And I was dealing with a situation with some people where I didn't know what to do. I was really frustrated. So I called my dad and I was just complaining to him. I was frustrated and I was like, I need you to help me figure out how do I set up expectations so that they know how this should go and so that I'm kind of guarding how this relationship works. And I expected him to agree with me. But he responded and said, yeah, I remember when I used to have that attitude. He said, yeah, he said, you know, if you drop the selfish attitude now, your life will get a lot easier. It's like, ouch, that doesn't feel good. But I'll tell you what, I am a much better

person and a much more joyful person because of that advice he gave me. Because he told me, he was like, I went through years of having a super selfish attitude and I paid the price for it. You're going to mess up some relationships in your life and it may be easier in the short term. But if you just die to yourself now, just drop the selfishness and love them and serve them, it'll serve you so much better in the long run. Now that hurt my pride. It hurt my ego, but it was good for me. And it taught me from a godly source of wisdom to live in tune with how God has set up the world to work. And again, things like that, we often choose the path of police resistance because it's easier to resist teachability. But then in the end, what we do is we choose our way and it stretches the rubber band until there's a snapback effect and it comes back on us. This is what I love doing with my dad is my dad was the wisest person I knew. My dad was superstar church planner. He planted all these churches. He wrote these books. He was amazing. But if you knew my dad, you also knew he was super humble. He did not think he was a big deal. He loved people. And I realized something so important about my dad, which is that the depth of my dad's wisdom was directly connected to his humility. His willingness to say, I don't know, I need wisdom and instruction and feedback and correction from different sources of godly wisdom is how he developed into be a person of wisdom. Our response of teachability to wisdom shapes who we become and how we live. So we want to respond in the correct way to godly wisdom. First of all, with reverence, with the fear of God to say, God, you are the highest and greatest, you know, so much better. And with humility to say, I need instruction. I need correction. I need feedback even when it hurts. Here's the last response. Number three is hunger. Are you seeking it out? Do you really want it? Feedback, guidance, correction, instruction, because nobody can want it for you. One of the most important things you can do is to identify and prioritize sources of God's wisdom in your life. And what I fear is for so many Christians, disciples of Jesus that we can be connected with the spiritual angle. because it's so much easier to do this. I speak from experience. I know it's so much easier when you need a quick answer. You can find, first of all, people who agree with you on anything at any time. This is the beauty of the internet.

There are always people who agree with what you want to hear, whether or not it goes against how God wants you to live. So we have to be very careful. Can I just give you this pastoral challenge here? We have to be very careful of the inputs that we allow into our life. There are things that we run to first. Maybe they don't even always bad. I think sometimes they are. But we run to first when we need an answer, because it's a quick fix. Makes us feel good. But actually what it's doing is in the long run, it's stretching us away from how God wants us to live. What you need and what I need is to identify what are the godly sources that I can sit across from and look in the eye. The first one is obviously just the word of God. This is God's primary way of communicating with us. So if you're serious about following Jesus, again, my encouragement is you have to get into the word of God. And there's ways to make it approachable. If you have always struggled with this, man, I just have a hard time reading the Bible. There are ways that we would love to help you understand it as your pastors and leaders in this church. There's Bible plans on your phone that give you just a little bit every day so that you can start to understand and dig into the primary source of God's wisdom.

But then, let me just ask you, who are the spiritual voices of wisdom in your life? Everybody needs a spiritual mom and dad. Everybody needs that. It doesn't even have to be your actual mother or father. Sometimes it is. Everybody needs a spiritual mom and dad that can look him in the eye and say, you need to drop your pride. Everybody needs somebody who can challenge them that is further ahead in life that can guide them. So again, our response, first of all, is God, you know better than I do about everything. And I need instruction. So Lord, help me to identify. Rather than running to the easy sources, primarily Lord, help me to identify and to hunger after your sources of wisdom so that I live in tune, not with the way that the world works, not the world's wisdom, but the creator of the universe, the way that you have set up life. I live according to your wisdom and I develop into a person of wisdom. As we get ready to close the message, I just wanna say, the most important decision first step of wisdom is putting your faith in Jesus Christ. Actually, if you ignore that, nothing else matters. Because this is why you were put on the earth. You're not here on accident.

You're not here to live for temporary pleasure, to build a business, to make money, to live for pleasure and then to die. You are not an accident. You were created with a purpose by an all-powerful, but personal God. And some of you, I think, desperately need this reminder that life is not just about your little world here. Life is not just about temporary pleasure and success. There is an eternal, all-powerful creator who crafted you, who knows you, and who wants to be in relationship with you. And the first step to a real wisdom is understanding the purpose of your life. Jesus Christ was God and human flesh came down to earth because He loved us. He saw the disconnect that we could never be in right relationship with God because of the infection of our sin. But God Himself lived a perfect life and then was tortured, crucified on a cross, to take our place to absorb the cost of our sin so that you and I can be free, and you and I can live in right relationship with God so that when we breathe our last breath, we know we spend eternity with God in heaven rather than separated from Him and help. If you're in the room and you've never made that decision today's your day. Okay, would you buy your head to close your eyes with me?

If you're in the room and you're saying, I've never asked Jesus to forgive me and to be my Savior, the primary purpose of life. To know the God who crafted you. If you're in the room and you've never made that decision, I wanna give you that opportunity. When I count to three and you're saying, yeah, that's me, I want you to raise your hand. I ask you to do this because the most important decision you ever make, it's important that it's an act of your will, that you're a little bold with it. I'm not gonna ask you to do anything else, but I want you to just be bold now. If that's you and you're saying, yes, today, I know I need to put my faith in Jesus. I need to ask Him to forgive me to make Him my King. If that's you, when I count to three, be bold, now raise your hand, ready? One, two, three, say, yeah, yeah, that's me today. I wanna put my faith in Jesus. I want Him to be my King, my Savior. Repeat after me. Say, "Dear Jesus, I'm so grateful that you love me. Thank you that you died for me, even though I didn't deserve it. Lord, I need your forgiveness. That's why you died. To offer forgiveness and a right relationship. So Lord, I ask you, forgive me of my sin. Be my Savior. Be my King. I pray that in Jesus' name. Everybody said, amen, amen. Give it up for those that made that decision for the first time. If you prayed that prayer, you put your faith in Jesus. This is where what the Bible calls salvation. Real life starts. If you made that decision, we would love to meet you. Come up to one of our pastors. We have an area in the back right outside these double doors. After service, we have some pastors out there. Stop by there. We would love to meet you and help you take some next steps. We've got some resources there.

But let's stand to our feet as we get ready to close. Band's going to lead us in a song of worship here. We're just going to practice response number one. Remember response number one? It's fear of the Lord. It's reverence. So if you're going through something this morning, if you need wisdom, the first step is how you posture yourself before God. Would you join me? Put your hands out in front of you as we get ready to sing this as a way of offering yourself to God. Lord, you are all powerful, all knowing. You're perfect and yet you love us. We offer ourselves to you in worship. Let's sing together. God, I love to you. I won't be overwhelmed. Give me vision. To see things like you too. God, I love to you. You're where my health comes from. Give me wisdom. You know just what to do. You know just what to do. God, I look to you. I won't be overwhelmed. Give me vision. To see things like you too. God, I look to you. You're where my health comes from. Give me wisdom. You know just what to do. And I will love you, Lord, my strength. I will love you, Lord, my shield. I will love you, Lord, my rock, forever all my days. I will love you, Lord. I will love you. I will love you, Lord, my strength. I will love you, Lord, my shield. Oh, I will love you, Lord, my rock, forever all my days. I will love you, Lord. I will sing hallelujah, hallelujah. Our God reigns, you reign. Hallelujah, our God reigns. Hallelujah, our God reigns forever. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, all forever you reign. Hallelujah, our God reigns. Hallelujah, our God reigns forever all my days. Hallelujah. Before we close the service, would you just do this with me? Close your eyes, tilt your face up to our God. Let's just steal ourselves before Him for a minute. We believe, Lord, that you are in this room and that you stand outside of time and you stand outside of human problems. You're not worried about how things are going to go. You're not anxious. There's no fear in you because everything is within your control. Lord, we just posture ourselves before you to remember, you're the center of everything.

We're so grateful to know you, for the privilege of knowing you. And we remember that you are so much greater and higher than we can think, and your name. Yeah, and before we go, I just want to share something that I felt like God was impressing on me to share with you before we go, is in the middle of frustrating situations, sometimes we can kick back against what God is doing in us. So sometimes we're supposed to pray for the miracle, and we're in the middle of needing wisdom or needing something to come through. We pray for an answer from God, but sometimes what happens is God is developing something in you in the middle of that painful, frustrating situation. And we can actually despise the very thing that he's using to develop wisdom in us. So I want to invite you. The team's going to stick around for just a few more minutes. If that's you, God may just be asking you to stick around for a minute and just to practice that response of saying, "God, I trust you in the middle of everything." Before we go, just stretch forth your hand like this. Let me pray over you. I pray this week that the favor of God would rest upon you and that you would be filled with the knowledge of the all-powerful Almighty God, who is a personal God, who knows you, who knows every breath, every moment, every situation, he knows everything that will happen, nothing is a surprise or a mystery to him, and yet you are held within the palm of his hand. I pray that the Lord would bless you with that reminder and that you would be carried through this week with grace, that the peace of God that transcends our understanding with God's your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ. I pray that over you. In Jesus' name, everybody said, "Amen, amen." Thanks for being here. Feel free to stick around and worship. Have a great week.