All right, across all of our campuses, I want to welcome you to worship together this weekend. We're going to be in Psalm 14. Before we jump in there, I do want to tell y'all about something that we have exciting coming up, kind of jumping from what we just heard during our generosity moment, which is that we have so many students that are college students, high school students, that are living on mission all summer, thinking about things like city projects, summer projects that they're doing, going to the ends of the earth to share the gospel. One of the things that we believe as a church is that we are on mission from our neighborhood to the nations, from our neighborhood to the nation. And so we're thinking about always what are the missional opportunities that we have to the ends of the earth, and also what are the missional opportunities that we have in our neighborhoods.
This fall, we have an incredible opportunity church. We're doing church at the ballpark, church at the ballpark on September 13th. The reason, one of the reasons that for something like this is an awesome opportunity for us as a church to gather all of our campuses. At one location, we'll be doing baptisms there. If you or somebody that you love has made a decision to place faith in Christ and has not yet displayed that in baptism, we would encourage you to sign up and do that at church at the ballpark.
But it also gives us an opportunity as a church to live on mission in our neighborhoods. There are people that go to your work, that are on your kids' sports teams, that go to your kids' schools, that live in your neighborhood, that maybe would never enter in to one of the campuses of Mercy Hill. Maybe you would invite them, invite them, and they would just never show up to a church building, but you would invite them to the grasshopper stadium for church at the ballpark, and they'll show up there. And so, we want to encourage you, already begin praying who are the people that you are going to invite to come to church at the ballpark this fall. Let's live on mission here in the neighborhood and all the way to the nations.
All right, we're going to be jumping back into our Psalms series, jumping into Psalm 14 as you turn. There in your Bibles. The words will be up on the screen as you need them. One of the things that I have enjoyed as a parent, and I'm sure many of you parents enjoy in the room, is coaching your kids, coaching your kids in various sports, different things that they're doing. I have noticed that sometimes I enjoy coaching more than my kids enjoy being coached.
I don't know if you've ever felt that as a parent, but one of the things that my son is interested in right now and trying to get better at is golf. And so we are, you know, I'm kind of coaching him. I'm a very average golfer. I did have a hole in one a few weeks ago. That is because I am lucky, not because I am good, just to clarify.
But I've been helping my son out with golf. And I've realized that, you know, it's time he probably needs some lessons. And I want him to get started well in it. Because one of the things about golf, and I assume baseball is the same way. My baseball career ended when I struck out at t-ball.
And so I don't know a whole lot about that. But I assume that this is similar: is that in golf, you have to have a good stance. A good starting point for you to actually be able to hit the ball well with consistency. If you're standing too straight up or you're leaned over too far, you'll never actually be able to strike the ball well with consistency. You may have a good shot here or there, but it's going to be more luck than it actually is you getting to where you want to go in terms of becoming a good golfer.
Now, think about this in terms of our lives. The starting point really matters. You see, some of us are dealing with issues we've been dealing with for years and years.
Okay, in our lives, they never maybe never experienced the growth that we were hoping for. Maybe things were going good for a season, but somehow things fell apart. And they don't feel as satisfying as you thought they would, and you're wondering: how did I get here in life? And just like a golf swing, if we're not careful, you try to make adjustments and you try to make tweaks to your life, but if the starting point wasn't actually right, there's actually no fixing it. And you're left to where there's a marriage on the rocks.
There's a sin issue. There's relationships that are broken. There's anxiety that grips you. No peace, no purpose, no direction. You see, the issue is that we have all started at the wrong point.
What the Bible actually calls in this text today foolishness. Foolishness. Life by our design without regard for God. Yet it also tells us in this passage that God is not content to leave us there. Which is our big idea for today.
God is saving a people from foolish living to life with Him. He is saving a people from foolish living. To life with Him. See, we've started on this path, this fool's path that we're gonna look at. But we're going to end with seeing the Lord's heart towards us.
All right, so wherever you're at in life, I want to encourage you to lean in, lean in, because while we are going to see just how bad off we are, we are also going to see God's incredible grace towards us. All right, let's jump in. Psalm 14:1. If you want to read it with me, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. They're corrupt.
They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand. Who seek after God? They have all turned aside.
Together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one. Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the Lord? They are in great terror. We'll start by talking through the fool's path.
The fool's path.
Now, what is a fool? What is a fool?
Well, foolishness is not childishness. It's not even low IQ.
Now, some of us in the room, that's really good news. We can be as dumb as rocks, and we can still not be fools, all right?
So, we've got some good news coming out of this, right? Wisdom is, the Bible describes foolishness in contrast with wisdom.
So wisdom is life with God by his design. Foolishness is life apart from God, rejecting His design. The problem is that life apart from God always leads you somewhere you never wanted to go. The Bible describes life by God's design, and that this way of life is for God's glory. It is for our good as well, it is for human flourishing.
It's actually one of the reasons we say in kids' ministry that the best life lived is the life lived for Jesus. The fool is simply the one who has rejected this life.
So, what characterizes a fool? What is at the heart, the essence, the essence or the core of what it means to be a fool? Let's look back at verse 1. It says, the fool says in his heart, There is no God. Foolishness is a heart issue.
A heart issue. At the core of foolishness is simply disbelief in God. It is looking at the world around us and saying to yourself, there is no one over all of this, there's no one in charge of this. But it's interesting if you look in verse 1, what does he not say? He does not say, the fool says in his mind there is no God.
It was not that the fool looked around and determined merely by reason and intelligence. that there was no God. It was a heart issue. Not a head issue. Foolishness is not an IQ issue.
It is a worship. issue. A worship issue. It's why you look around our world, you see some of the brightest intellectual minds on earth. And still The Bible calls them fools.
Because the heart of a fool is a good thing. is a refusal to acknowledge and worship. their creator. The fools started with a heart desire that they did not actually want God. Why is that?
Well, there's pretty big ramifications if there is a God. If there is a God, it means that someone other than me is in charge of the world. It means I have to answer questions about why I exist. And ultimately... It's outside of myself, and it means that I have to answer to someone.
So instead we simply say there is no God. And we do life our way. And we worship at the altars of everything and anything, but a God who made the earth and everything in it.
Now, I want to speak to the believers, followers of Jesus in the room, which is probably the majority of us here. Because you may start to hear a sermon like this. And this idea of foolishness. And the foolish path. And if we're not careful, we can kind of give ourselves a pass in dealing with a sermon like this.
If we're not careful, we begin to think in a passage like this: oh, that's not me. I'm a believer. I agree. It's not who God has saved you to be. And we're going to see that.
However, Are there areas of your life? where you are living as if there is no God. Are there areas of your life That you've made off limits to God. That you're choosing foolishness. Over wisdom.
That you're choosing your feelings. Over his word. Things like sexual relationships. Fear and anxiety. Control.
over your kids, over your money. over your future. How we think and talk about and treat others. Being quiet about our faith. Though the gospel and Christ tells us to be bold with it.
When we do this, we have become functional atheist.
Now we would never say there is no God. There's no way we would say that. But neither would the Pharisees in the Bible. This group of people This religious people that on the exterior they looked Like everything was fine. But Jesus calls them out because their hearts We're far from God.
They looked like it was good. But they were actually walking. The foolish path. You see, if God is God, then he is God of all. If God is God, if God is over all of this creation, if He is God, if He exists.
Then he created this thing and it is his. He is over all. That means this world, his creation, the universe, everything that's in it, it means your life and every area of it. If he is God. He is God of all.
And we hold back all their parts of our lives from God. We are choosing to walk the fool's path in that area of our lives. We chose the wrong starting place, and it's leading us to where we continue reading down this path of the fool. It says, They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
They have all turned aside. Together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even One. Foolish actions affirm a foolish heart. See, they are corrupt.
They do abominable deeds. Foolish actions are actually affirming what the fool actually believes, this heart of the fool. They're corrupt, doing this unthinkable evil.
Now, sometimes this is very easy for us to see. It's very public in nature. Very evident to us. You see a corrupt politician. And you think, oh, that's evil.
corrupt, abominable deeds. Over the month of June across our nation, you saw pride festivals all over the place that were celebrating the rejection of God's design for sexuality and gender. Corrupt. You see, spring break culture, which tells college students and high school students just go and get wasted and don't worry about anything and just go live your life however you want to live. You look and seen even over the media recently where there have been this mob culture in various areas of our country where people just take over in violence in different areas.
And we look in and we say, that is corrupt. There are abominable deeds. Very public, very evident. But then the psalmist says this. There's none who does good.
There's none who does good. Now maybe you're sitting there, you're saying, well... You can't say I don't do any good, right? I took out my neighbor's trash. I gave that charity.
That person who cut cut me off in the parking lot, I did not cuss them out. Right? Maybe the church parking lot this morning. You can't say I don't do some good, right? But here's the issue.
We play this comparison game. The issue is: who or what are you comparing yourself against? Y'all, I'm gonna be honest with you. I am not very fast. I don't know if I needed to say that.
Maybe it was very evident. But I'm not very fast. I'm not a track star. I'm not winning any great races.
However, a few years ago, a few years ago, our staff had the opportunity. We went to a Greensboro Grasshoppers game, and four of our pastors were called down to do a relay, a relay race. And I was one of the four. And I was teamed up. With Pastor Jonathan Yarborough, who our staff affectionately calls the albino rhino.
And if you know anything about rhinos, they are not called that because they're fast, they are strong. Not fast. All right.
So it's me and Pastor Jonathan, the albino rhino, teamed up against Randy Titus, one of our pastors, and Pastor Bobby Harrington, who just happens to be an ultra marathon runner. Right.
So we're not thinking our chances are very good. Me and Randy had the way this relay race worked, you had to get all these tubes from the end and bring them to your teammate, and then they had to run all the tubes together down to the end as fast as they could to see who would get to the finish line.
So me and Randy, we run, take off, get these tubes back. Randy unfortunately got there. He beat me because he's faster than me. And Bobby begins to take off with these tubes, going to the finish line. I finally get these tubes to Jonathan.
And if I'm lying, I'm dying. I feel like I heard the rocky music kind of start in this slow motion. Slow motion, Jonathan, the albino rhino, starts to pick up pace on Bobby, and by the finish line. Jonathan and one. That day We were fast.
We were fast. In reality, In reality, if there was any race for any extensive distance. We would stand no chance against Bobby. Right? But even you think about that, what if we were to race against somebody like Hussain Bolt?
or Noah Lyles, Olympic champions. You see, we like to compare ourselves against people that make us feel better. Then then. You look at these things that are very public in nature, and even if you look at the people around you, if you're not careful, you can say, well, I'm somewhat good because I'm better than them. But what the psalmist says here, and what God is teaching us.
is that the standard that God has set is actually perfection. It is His Holiness. And we don't meet it. It would be even worse than me racing Usain Bolt. See, Paul actually picks up Psalm 14 in Romans 3.
And he says, for by works of the law, by our works, by our abilities. No human being will be justified in his sight. It says, since the law comes through or through the law comes knowledge of sin. The idea being that foolishness flows out of us so that even at our best, apart from Christ, we cannot meet the standard that God set. We are all still sinners.
The reality is that we are born When we are born, we are all born on the path of the fool. Every one of us. None who does good. We reject God in our hearts. We long to be our own God.
We set up our own kingdom. We reject God's ways for our own. The Bible calls this sin. And sin has separated us from God, but has actually set us up against God as enemies of the one who made us. And then our actions affirm this choice again and again and again in our lives.
and it leads us further down the fool's path. In verse four. Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon the Lord? They are in great Terror. Foolishness ends in fear.
It ends in fear. It's a heart issue starting on the wrong path, affirmed then in our actions and ending in fear. It ends in terror. Because ultimately in this life or in the next, We will have a moment when we have to face the reality that there is a God who made us. To live life with him by his design, and we have chosen to reject him and his ways.
We've chosen our path. Walked it how we wanted, and it ends with... terror.
Now in the follower of follower of Jesus life While we don't have terror in the end of in the end and and eternity. I think in our lives, this can look like us playing God in areas of our life that we can actually handle, we think we can handle, better than He can. For example, you don't trust God for something in your life.
So then maybe you begin to say a lie about something. And that lie turns into two lies, turns into three lies, and then you turn around and you've made a mess of your life. Terror. living in fear and anxiety. Because of walking the foolish path in an area of your life.
Hey, whatever part of your life that you are not giving to him, it will set you on the foolish path in that area of your life. It will create anxiety and fear. in your life. But here's what happens to us. We don't want to deal with it.
We don't want to deal with what's going on.
So we create excuses and distractions. to keep us from having to face it. I think about this with my yard. Every spring, We clean up, we do count spring cleanup. We trim the trees, cut all the limbs, you know, different limbs down and stuff.
They make a big pile in our yard, and then we kind of get rid of them and stuff and kind of clean up everything.
Well, I got a little busy, but we did get this done.
So, this is our backyard. I did not build that play set, though I wish I would have. I would love to take credit for it.
However, the yard looks pretty good now.
Okay, it's kind of got all the limbs up, trees, trees are all pruned and everything.
So What you don't realize from this picture is that because I got busy and distracted and we ended up, instead of getting rid of all of the brush, the brush just got pushed behind the shed.
So if you were to look behind my shed, you would see this picture. Which is not quite as nice of a yard, right? But it got out of the way. It got out of the way.
So instead of me dealing with it. and just taking it somewhere. I have instead just shoved it behind the shed and I'm like, well, nobody's going to see it, so it doesn't matter. It'll live there for a little while. You may have a closet in your house that looks like this, where everything gets shut in until it all falls out.
The reality is, though, at some point, like if I me pretending it's not back there, it doesn't make my yard any cleaner. And at some point, I actually have to deal with it. Denying something's existence does not remove its reality. The atheist who says there is no God. You can deny God's existence.
But it doesn't remove the reality that there is a God that you will have to deal with in this life or in the next. Most of us will have to deal with the reality of choosing foolishness, whether it's when we've gotten all the world could offer and we realize that it was unfulfilling. or when it's all fallen apart because of our foolishness. And when faced with the reality of our foolishness against a holy God, we will all experience terror, fear. Immense fear.
You see, life apart from God will always lead you to somewhere you never wanted to go. This is the end of the fool's path. It starts. Heart disbelief in God. Affirmed actions around that heart that leads and ends up in a place of terror where you never wanted to be.
But what does God do with fools? I'm really glad the psalm doesn't end there. If you keep going in verse 5, we're going to see the Lord's heart. The backdrop of our foolishness. We see the Lord's heart towards his people.
In verse 5, the end of that, it says, For God is with the generation of the righteous. You would shame the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge. Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people. Let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel be glad.
So, how is it that we just saw that none is good? Yet within the same Psalm We see a generation of the righteous. Where do the righteous people come from? And what's interesting about how God characterizes, how David characterizes this group of people, what does he say about them? I encourage you if you highlight or you underline words in your Bible.
Go to that second part of verse 5. It says, For God is with. Underline that word with. He says that this group of people, this righteous people, are the people that God is with. These are the people whom God has brought into relationship with Himself.
And because God is with them, their hearts begin to change from rejection. to surrender and obedience. Who is with you? changes everything about you. Who is with you?
changes everything about you. I started dating my wife when I was 17 years old. I was an extremely immature, self-centered teenager. Who thought I controlled the whole world? I ran the world because I played sports and I had a Mustang GT.
I was not that great at sports. The Mustang GT was pretty cool. I will say that. By God's grace, and I've still got so far to grow, but by God's grace, I'm not that kid anymore. And God used this Jesus-loving, servant-hearted, praying woman.
to help me realize what life was really about. And she's been with me. for 19 years since then. Three kids later. A lot of trials, a lot of joys.
God has used her presence in my life. to change me. Because who you're with inevitably shapes who you become. Listen in the gospel. God is not just giving us forgiveness.
God is giving us himself.
Now, what does it mean for these people that God is with them? A few things. With God imperfect people. are called righteous. In Psalm 14, the term righteous simply means they are made right relationally with God.
It didn't mean that they did everything perfectly. but that their relational standing with God was intact. You look at Israel in the Old Testament. They had sin after sin. But they had one thing that no other nation had.
The Lord was with them. They also had this framework for being with God. The laws, the sacrifices, as a means of consistently restoring right relationship with God between the people and their God. In the New Testament, this right relationship. Is accomplished through the greater final sacrifice of Jesus Christ as the perfect Lamb of God.
who would pay for our sins. That everyone who believes in him would be made in right relationship with God again. It's why in this psalm David can say, there are none good. And then say there is a righteous generation. Not because they were good enough.
But because someone else stood in their place. Who is with you changes everything about you? With God. We have the all-powerful one as our refuge. The all-powerful one as our refuge.
It says in verse 6, you would shame the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge. The foolish put their hopes in the things of the world. But for those who are with God, We live in this upside-down kingdom. It doesn't make sense in the foolish ways of the world. You think about this.
We give different. We look at money differently. We look at our time differently. We're a little crazy to the foolish world. The idea of giving up your vacation to serve at the church at Kids' Week or to go across to the ends of the earth on a missions trip to share the gospel with people.
It's crazy to the foolish path, to the foolish world. We grieve different too. Paul says that we grieve as those, and not as those who have no hope. That we have a hope. We have a refuge.
He is with us. He is with us in times of need on the hills and the valleys. He is with us. He is our refuge. It doesn't make sense to the world, but it does to the one who has been saved by God.
That he is with us. And it changes everything. Who is with you? changes everything about you. And with God we have a sure salvation.
We have a sure salvation. David is looking forward to a day when salvation would come. when the Lord would restore the people's fortunes. For those that are with God, this is encouragement. The earth in its present state is the worst that it gets for a believer.
There is a restoration of all things that God will bring, where He will wipe away every tear from every eye. He will make all things new, and everything sad will become untrue. It means that when life is hard and we don't have, we don't understand. That we have hope. Because God is with us now.
And he is preparing a future ahead that is greater than we could ever imagine. It means that if you are with God, You may make a foolish decision. But he has taken you off of the foolish path. There is no terror in the end for you. Who is with you changes everything about you.
So we see that when God is with us, we're called righteous. We have this refuge. We have a sure salvation. While life apart from God, it leads you somewhere you never would want to go. Life with God, it leads you to somewhere you can never get on your own.
We can never make ourselves right with God. We aren't strong enough to be our own refuge. And we surely can't be our own Savior. But God takes us where we could never go on our own. But I think this passage still begs this question.
Why would God want to be with us? If you look back at verse two. Says the Lord looks down from heaven. His righteousness, his holiness. How far away he is from us, and he looks down.
And what does he see? Says nobody understands him. Says nobody wants him. No one seeks after him. And then it says No one does his will.
None does good. We all live the path of the fool. And when God says there's none that does good, no one gets a pass. We rejected his rule for our own way, and in doing so, we actually separated ourselves from the God who loved us and made us. And we've given him every reason to rightly destroy us as creation gone wrong.
To just scrap it, to call it quits. He's got every reason to do it yet. He does the opposite. Instead of being repulsed by us, he moves towards us. He wants to be with us.
Not that we would continue in our foolishness, but that we would see His great love for us and choose to surrender our lives to Him. In verse 2, you see the God who looks down from heaven. Rightly, so much higher, so much greater than we are, right? Holy, perfect. We are nothing close to that.
But at the end of the psalm, You see David pray this prayer. That salvation would come out of Zion. That salvation would come from the place where God dwelt. A thousand years later. God sends His Son from heaven to dwell among men.
You see the Lord who looked down Came down. He came down for addicts. He came down for adulterers. For proud religious people, For fearful mamas, For angry dads, For prodigals For self-righteous Pharisees, He came down for me. He came down for you.
He was not content to cast us aside. He sent a son as Emmanuel. Which means God with us. He entered into the brokenness of our lives with his presence. He healed the leper.
He welcomed the outcast. He stood up for the oppressed. He gave sight to the blind. He lived among us. The Holy One of heaven.
put his feet in the dirt. and then knelt down and washed the feet of sinners. Then he went to the cross. He knew it was the only way to make us righteous. to bring us back into relationship with God once again.
So his body was broken and he took your sin and mine on himself that he may save you from foolishness. to experience life with him. God's heart is seen. and his unrelenting desire to be with the sinner. God is not repulsed by your sin, by your foolishness.
He wants to save you.
So that you would be with him. And walk in his ways. which produced joy and freedom. fruit in your life. There's a couple things that we can be thinking in a sermon like this and i just want to i just want to speak to them One false thing that I think I've heard time and again.
that we can be thinking. We can think we have to clean ourselves up. before God wants to be with us. I've heard so many times.
Well, you know, if I can get into church more. If I can clean up this area of my life. Then, you know, then I'll start to walk with God. As if we can do something to make him love us. God came after you before you ever had a chance to clean yourself up.
He pursued you. In the middle of your mess. Walking down the foolish path. And he met you there and he wants to meet you there today. And he doesn't say, hey, clean yourself up before you come to me.
He says, Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and what? I will give you rest. I'll do the cleaning. The other thing I think that believers can falsely think. Maybe you're in this camp in the room.
We think we have to live perfectly for God to stay with us. We think that, oh, well, I trusted in Christ, but man, I really struggled. I really struggled with this sin. And so now I've got to get all my life together and I've got to get perfect so that God will come back and be with me. That is not the word of scripture.
Scripture tells us that he is the God who never leaves you. The God who never forsakes you. And what we do is, we have the brush pile. and we shove it behind the shed. And we pretend it doesn't exist.
We don't want everybody else to see it. We don't want to see it. And what God is saying is: hey, I know every sin that you're ever going to commit. And I've invited you to be in relationship with me, and I've paid for every one of those sins. And you don't have to hide it.
You can confess it. Because I'm committed to help you grow in the image of my son. God's response to our foolish living. was to give us himself. You see, Christianity is not primarily about escaping hell.
but about being brought back to God. Like a parent who would stop at nothing for their children. He stopped at nothing to save us. Even giving his own life to bring us to him.
So how do we respond? To a God who would show us such matchless grace. Such incredible love. A God who we rejected. walking the foolish path, and he would want to meet us there.
and do the work to bring us back into relationship with him. We respond by surrendering. By seeing his great love. and surrendering our lives to Him. Our application today is to start over.
by surrendering every part of your life to God. Start over by surrendering every part. of your life. to God. Thinking about coaching my son in golf.
and the starting point. And if the starting point's off, It's never going to be quite right. You can make the tweaks. You can try to make adjustments. It's never going to be quite right.
Sometimes the greatest thing a coach can tell somebody Is the start over? That you're never going to get where you're trying to go. on the path that you're on. Hey, if you're new here, you've been checking things out, or maybe you've been around church for many years. But you've never trusted in Christ.
as your Savior. I want to encourage you to do so today. You're on the foolish path. It only ends in terror. There is no neutral with God.
But today God is calling you to start over, to trust in Christ, to begin a new relationship with Him. You're not going to adjust your way into it. You're not going to work your way there. The only path is surrender. In the book of John, Jesus meets.
this religious leader. named Nicodemus. Nicodemus met Jesus at night, likely because Nicodemus didn't want anyone else knowing he was meeting with Jesus. kind of a faux pas for his group. Nicodemus as a religious leader.
Was doing all the right things externally. Right, he checked all the boxes. Church attendance, got it. Serving on a serve team. Got it.
I'm in a group. Got it. I give to people. Got it? He checked all the boxes.
It looked good. But what does Jesus tell them? Because he was on the fool's path. Jesus doesn't tell him, get better. He says you've got to get new.
He says be born again. Be born again. If you're here and you haven't trusted Christ. Doing all the stuff does not save you. It does not impress anybody.
You must be born again. Would you trust what Christ has done for you in the gospel? Would you place your faith in him? Would you surrender? to him as Lord of your life.
It's not about helping you, just helping you get on the right path. God actually will give you a heart. A new heart. that wants his path. Followers of Jesus in the room.
You may be asking the question. Maybe you've been walking the foolish path in areas of your life. Maybe it's all falling apart. Or maybe in the back of your mind, there is this fear. that grips you.
Because you're afraid it's going to. And you've begun to walk the foolish path in an area of your life. How do you start over? How do I begin again?
Well, it starts with a heart of surrender. And that area that you have not given over to him. Confess it to the Lord. You don't have to hide it behind the shed. You don't have to pretend it's not there.
Confess it to the Lord. He already knows. And he's already paid for it. Would you confess it to him? Say, God, I've been walking the foolish area, this foolish path in this area of my life.
But God, I know you have a better way. I want to be with you because you've wanted to be with me. God forgive me. And help me to walk in your ways again. I would encourage you the altar is going to be open at the end of the service.
Come forward. Confess it to the Lord. He already knows, he's already paid for it, and he's calling you to come. And then this week, Confess it to a believer that you trust. It might be your summer study leader.
It might be a group leader.
Somebody on your serve team? But confess it to somebody that you trust.
so that the church can walk alongside of you. As you walk in God's ways. It may feel weighty. May feel difficult. But there is freedom and joy.
on the other side.
So let's respond to what God has done for us. meeting us on the foolish paths. bringing us his presence. Bring us back into relationship with Him. Let's respond to him today.
Let's pray. God, we love you. You first loved us. God, we thank you that It is not by our works that we are saved. We would never be good enough.
But God, we thank you that in your grace You came to us. You met us in our brokenness. And you're saving us out of it. God, I pray for the people around all of our campuses that have not yet trusted in Christ. I pray that they would trust in him for their salvation today.
I pray that they would surrender to you as Lord of their life. I pray that you would put a new heart. And then. Give them a desire to walk the new path and help them get plugged into this church that they would walk it. over the next season.
God, I pray for the believers across all of our campuses, many, many believers that God maybe are just struggling with an area of their life that they're just walking in foolishness. They're walking as if you're not God over that area of their life. I pray that you would work in their hearts, that they would see their need to confess that to you. But God, also, they would see your glorious grace to them. That you already knew.
You've already paid for it. And I pray that that would give them incredible confidence to come to you. Because you love them. And you want to be with them. And I pray that you would help them this week to share that with somebody at this church.
That they would walk in freedom in the season ahead. God, we thank you that freedom. is what you have given us in christ that you have you have brought us to you to be with you. And God, we just praise you for that truth today. Pray it in Christ's name.
Amen. Mm-hmm.
