The Exile Commands

Well, we are in a series right now called Together We Endure. It is a study through the book of 1 Peter in the Bible in the New Testament. So grab your Bible and turn there if you have not yet.

In fact, if somebody right there in your living room, if you're with other people, if they don't have their Bible, just look at them and shake your head in disgust and say, just because pastor can't see you doesn't mean that you shouldn't have your Bible. All right, so grab your Bible and let's talk for a minute while you're getting that about the theme Together We Endure. 1 Peter was written to a church. It was a letter to a church that was going through an especially difficult time. Persecution had scattered them to regions all around the world, miles away from their homes. The apostle Peter explains in 1 Peter how to endure in such situations. And a key component of the fact is that they are to do this together. The people to whom Peter was writing weren't physically together, but they were united by a hope that bound them together even when they were isolated. Well, of course, that is true of us also.

We may not be scattered like they were around the world, but many of us are going through a difficult time of isolation. And by the way, maybe your difficulty started long before the lockdown started. You're in a bad marriage. Your job is just not going that well.

You've got health problems. There's something that you're struggling with that just won't go away. And your problem just makes you feel isolated.

It has for a while. You feel alone. Together We Endure. We want to come together and press into this common hope that Peter is unfolding for us.

Recently, one of the coaches at the gym where I work out, CrossFit United, used this illustration. He said, when a herd of cows senses a storm coming, they run away from it, scattering as they go. Of course, the storm always catches up with them because cows are not too speedy and it's especially hard on them because they're now alone. They were in the herd.

Now they're alone. Buffalo, by contrast, when they sense a storm coming, they instinctively do the opposite. They huddle together and actually walk into the storm. I'm sure that their cow cousins think that they're crazy for walking into the storm, but that gives them at least three advantages. First, it shortens the length of the storm for them because they're literally walking through it. Second, they find additional protection from being huddled together.

Third, the fur is thicker on their front sides than on their back sides, which gives them extra protection and extra warmth. Now, I'm not sure, I'll be honest, about how that illustration is supposed to motivate me to do more burpees, but I know that it illustrates what we're going after in 1 Peter. Together We Endure. We're not going to run away from these problems. We're going to press into them and we're going to do it together.

All of the Christian's armor is designed to protect you when you engage the battle from the front, not when you run away from it. Last week, we introduced the book by explaining the key identity in 1 Peter. Do you remember what that identity was? I'll give you a hint. It's one of these four. A, believer, B, exile, C, beloved son or daughter, or D, stupid sheep.

Which one was it? Write your answer there in the comments or turn around and tell somebody you're sitting next to, you got 10 seconds. Go, give your answer.

The correct answer, here's your hint, rhymes with textile. That's right, exile. Peter calls the people to whom he is writing exiles. An exile is somebody from one place that is temporarily taking up residence in another. An exile, I explained, is not an immigrant. An immigrant wants to make their new place of residence their permanent home. An exile is not like that. They may have to live in this new place for a while, but their heart still belongs to their home country. An exile is also not a tourist. A tourist just passes through a new country with little concern about the people around them.

Maybe they have some sense of bemused curiosity, but that's it. Peter says we shouldn't be like tourists either. We are exiles. We temporarily take up residence. We make our dwelling place in this new place that is not our permanent home. We care for it. We invest in it, but we never lose our longing for our true home.

What we saw last week was this. If you live as an exile, do you know what that means that you will be in the society you're living in? Different.

You know how exile is spelled in Greek? W-E-I-R-D. Weird. You are different. How can you not be different? You're from a different place. You speak a different native language.

You hold a different set of values. I said this last week, so let me say it again. Sensitively but seriously, if you've been spending time with lost people and they cannot tell that you're not from around here, well, honestly, maybe you're not. If somebody tells me that they grew up in eastern North Carolina but they don't say y'all and they don't care about college basketball, a lick, and they think barbecue is gross, I'd probably say, well, I doubt that you're actually from eastern North Carolina.

Either that or it's been so long that you've completely forgotten your roots. If someone would describe you and the word different doesn't come out of their mouths, you got a legitimate reason to doubt your salvation. Have you actually been born into this new birth Peter's talking about? All right, let me use these nine verses, verses 13 to 21, to give you the six commands that Peter gives to an exile. Number one is get dressed. Verse 13, therefore, he says, with your minds ready for action, be sober minded. With your minds ready for action, the old King James version that I first memorized this verse in translated that verse as this, gird up your loins for action, which is literally what the verse would say in Greek if you just translated the words directly.

Gird up your loins. In other words, get dressed for battle. You ever shown up somewhere dressed totally wrongly? When the last Star Wars came out, my family had one extra ticket, so we invited one of our single student leaders to go with us.

I won't tell you his initials, but his name was Parker McGoldrick. I told him that the one catch was that we were all dressing up like Star Wars characters, so he should also, which of course we weren't dressing up like Star Wars characters, so he showed up at the restaurant in full Star Wars costume and we were all just sitting there in regular clothes. In fact, he walked up to the table and he's like, hey, where are your costumes?

And we were like, gotcha. Now that's all fun and games, but showing up somewhere dressed wrongly could really hurt you if it's in the wrong situation. I mean, imagine if a friend asked you to come over and help him do some construction and you show up thinking he's invited you to a dinner party. You get on your loafers and a sweater vest and what you really need is work boots and jeans. The worst would be, of course, to show up for battle dressed for leisure. Your opponent is suited up with all kinds of gear and weaponry and your loins are girded about with a towel and your feet are shod with flip-flops. You wouldn't just feel silly in a moment like that.

You'd be putting yourself in mortal danger. Yet this is exactly what many Christians do when it comes to spiritual things, Peter says. They just don't take the battle that seriously. They're lazy in their approach to scripture. They rarely pray and plead for God's strength and situations that they're going through. They don't take temptation seriously. They have no accountability with sin in their life and they flirt with sin often.

They treat sin and areas of compromise in their lives lightly. You know, the bad thing with most sin is not the action itself. It's that you give Satan a foothold into your life. By the way, I know that I'm talking to somebody out there right now that is entertaining a sin. Right now you're in compromise.

You're looking at porn. You're in a relationship that your godly friends are all worried about. You're starting a relationship that's wrong or you're doing something unethical or whatever. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but you've given a foothold to the devil and he is going to destroy you with it. I'm telling you from the Holy Spirit, do not play around.

That's what Peter is saying. You need to have your minds girded, your heart guarded with truth. There is a lot of Christian parents that don't take seriously the battle that is going on for their kids' hearts. I don't care if your kids are in public school, private school, or home school. God holds you, the parent, responsible for the shaping of their hearts.

That's never something you give away to somebody else. He's holding us responsible to protect our kids from the lies that the enemy is trying to seduce them with. Peter is going to say in chapter 5 that Satan walks about in our society like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Listen, if I knew that there was some kind of predator on the loose in my neighborhood and I let my kids go out completely unsupervised, how would I not be considered a delinquent parent? Listen, a far more dangerous enemy than any sexual predator is hunting your child and mine.

That predator is named Satan and he is using the winsome lies of the culture to destroy them. Peter says, wake up and get dressed. Clothe your mind in scripture.

Bathe your heart in prayer. The second command in the second part of that verse, if you'll look there, is lift your eyes. Set your hope, Peter says, completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. We spent a lot of time last weekend talking about this, but Peter is urging us to set our hope exclusively on what God has promised to us as our eternal inheritance.

And what is that, do you recall? That we will know Christ, that we will be like Christ, and that one day we get to be with Christ in a place where there's no more crying and no more pain and all sad things come untrue. Peter says, set your hope completely on those promises.

Don't cut it or water it down with anything. You ask, how do Christians water it down? Well, they set their hope or their happiness on other things that God needs to provide for them in order for them to be happy.

I'm glad. I know Christ, you might say. I'm glad he's making me be like Christ and I'm glad I have the promise to be with him one day, but I also really, really need you to provide me with good health, with good kids, a great marriage, lots of money. And then when God doesn't come through with one of those things, we accuse God of letting us down. Let me just ask you to consider, what do you feel like God has to provide for you in addition to the promise to know Christ, to be like Christ, and to be with Christ?

What else does he have to provide for you in order to fulfill his promise to you? In fact, before I teach on this any further, why don't we just take one minute and why don't you answer this question for yourself? Why don't you reflect on it? Write it down. Tell it to somebody sitting around you.

Whatever. Figure out what that thing is. What has to happen in your life for you to feel like God loves you and is keeping his promise to you? Okay, now that you know what that is, I want you to consider this. There's a lot of things that I want God to provide for me. I hope he gives me health. I hope that he gives me success in my job.

I even ask him to give me prosperity financially. And God is a good, good Father, so I anticipate that he may give me a lot of those things. But my hope, my hope is exclusively in knowing Christ.

It's being made like Christ, I mean with Christ. And so if in God's sovereign plan, I do without some of those things that I would love for him to give me or I suffer, I can still be satisfied because my hope is in who God is for me and what he is doing in me and through me. You know, Christians love the verse Romans 828, and we know that God has promised to work all things together for good to them that love God who are called according to his purpose.

But you have to ask, what is that purpose? Well, Paul answers the question in the next verse. You know, sometimes I want to do a series on the great verses that come right after the great verses we memorize. There's a lot of verses that we memorize, and the next verse actually explains the real meaning of the verse that we gravitate toward.

This is one of those cases. Paul says, here's God's purpose. Here's the good thing that he's pursuing in all these things. Those that God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son. His purpose is for you to know Christ and to be made like Christ. That is how all these things are working together for good. Lots of Christians memorize Romans 828, the all things work together for good part, but they don't go on to memorize the next verse, which tells you that the good purpose that God is after in everything in your life, and that is to make you know Christ and to conform you to his image. So yes, pray and ask God to bless you and take care of you now, but put your hope, your hope exclusively in knowing Christ and being made like Christ and being with Christ.

And if in a particular season that's all that he gives you, you can be satisfied with that. Here's command number three, don't look back. Here's what he says, as obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires of your former ignorance. You know, before you came to Christ, your life aspirations arose out of a wrong way of looking at the world.

Peter says, calls them the desires of your former ignorance, wrong desires that grew out of wrong ways of looking at the world. You thought, for example, that making lots of money would make you happy. And then maybe you saw that the people who made the most money didn't seem to be the happiest, or maybe you thought romance was the key. If you could ever just find that special person and the love of your life.

You know, I saw an interview recently with the hip hop star Drake, where he said one of the most profound things about the human soul. Here's what he said, there was a point where I felt like I needed to keep the company of a different woman every night. I was trying to fill a void, but in those moments after sex, I'd know that it wasn't working. Those quiet moments are the realest moments that a man will ever have in his life. The next day I would convince myself to do it again.

But during that time, I always knew it wasn't working. Similar thing, Matt Dillon said, he's the Hollywood star. He said, most Hollywood people are relationship junkies. You get, you get high off a new relationship like a drug, and then you crash off of it.

And so you go from one hit to the next. Maybe you thought that being liked by others was the key. So here I'm reminded of what Katy Perry said last year on Instagram, a hundred million digital singles and still insecure. Or maybe you thought you'd find this by being the best, you know, like everybody else right now, I'm watching the Michael Jordan documentary, the last dance.

Here's a guy who is literally the best that there ever was. And it didn't lead him to happiness. It led him to emptiness and to a, to an unsettledness that you can to see come through in these interviews, you assume maybe that that life with you in charge was just going to make you happy, but something woke you up to the fact that it just wasn't true. Or maybe, maybe you just considered the cross. You know, if Jesus Christ is true, then the way of rebellion against God leads only to death. That's what the cross shows you.

Real life is found only from the resurrection. And so when you realize that you turned your back on your self-willed way of living and you surrender to Christ, you demonstrated that by being baptized, declaring that you were being buried to your old way of living and raised to new life in Christ. But what Peter is recognizing is that even after that profession of faith, and even after that realization, that aha moment, even after that conversion in your baptism, it's, it's easy to fall back into those old ways of thinking that you, for example, you sent some unhappiness or you're, you're, you're discontented. And, and the first impulse you have is I just need some more money and then I'll be okay. I just need a different living situation.

I need to get vengeance on somebody. And Peter says, remember, you recognize once that, that that doesn't work. Don't go back there. You were, you were buried by baptism into death to those old things.

Don't go back there. Those old desires came out of ignorance. And about 10 years ago, I developed an acid reflux problem that kept me up throughout the night with a really upset stomach. I didn't know it was acid reflux.

I assume that was something only babies got. And so I just assumed it was an upset stomach that came from eating too much meat or too much spicy food before bed. I just thought I needed to eat something else right before bed to settle my stomach and popcorn and yogurt felt right. So I just ate that every night, literally every night.

It, it made sense to me. It's what my stomach desired. Um, I did that for a few months and of course eating those things was not really helping the problem. It was just making me gain weight. Well, later when I went to the doctor, he told me what the real problem was and he gave me a prescription for it and that cured it immediately. Now at night, if I feel like I have an upset stomach, I, I shouldn't go back to the popcorn and yogurt. I know better now, right? You had desires that came from wrong ways of, of thinking about the emptiness in your heart.

And Peter says, don't go back to your old way of ignorance. Don't assume I just need more money. I just need out of this marriage. I just need to get married.

I just need to get even with this person. If you're unhappy, press into the hope of knowing Christ. That's what the cross and resurrection show you about happiness and purpose that there you're going to find your purpose of knowing Christ and being made like Christ and, and being with him one day. Hey, why don't we just take a minute and, and let's confess this to God. I'm going to put here a little prayer on the screen and I want you just to take a minute and, and either write it out or, or, or call it out. Okay. God forgive me for continually running back to, and you fill in the blank. Command number four is be weird. Now, some of you have instinctively been obeying this command from birth and you don't need any kind of admonition, but I'm talking about a different kind of weird.

Okay. Verse 15, but as the one who called you as holy, you also are to be holy in all of your conduct. Verse 16 for it is written, be holy because I am holy. Quoting from Leviticus 11, holiness, holiness. That is a strange word for most Americans. And to be totally honest, it's not very attractive to most Americans because the word conjures up images of something sterile and boring, bright, white, colorless light, or maybe sanctimonious, pious, prudish religiosity.

That's just no fun. But think of holiness as wholeness, w h o l e n e s s, which is actually where we get the English word holiness. Holiness is holy, perfect goodness, holy, perfect justice, holy, perfect integrity, holy, perfect love. Now, we're all attracted to those things, right? Perfect justice, perfect beauty, perfect love.

Who wants a government that is partially unjust? No girl wants to marry a guy that is only partially truthful or partially faithful or partially loving. God is pure goodness. And so things like injustice and impurity and deception are repulsive to him. Habakkuk 113 says that God is of such pure eyes that he cannot even behold evil.

That doesn't mean that evil is invisible to him. It means he can't look on evil with neutral emotion. I mean, think about watching something that you find repulsive, a torture or some kind of injustice.

You see something presented a movie or a documentary on cruelty or abuse or the damages of marital infidelity or racial injustice, and you just can't watch it and feel neutral. You react viscerally. That's what God is like with all unholiness. And Peter is telling us to be like God in that.

The Hebrew word for holy is the word kadesh, and it means literally to cut away. You're cut away from the world. You're separated. You're totally different. You're going to seem weird to everybody around you now because you're literally cut from a different cloth. So again, I will say to you, if you don't seem weird to everyone around you, isn't it possible that you're more like the world than you are God? Isn't it possible that you're not actually born again, that you're still a member of the world's family and not actually a member of God's?

If you are holy, if you are separated, it's going to show up in differences. Let me ask, financially, are you out of sync with this world? You know, I've explained this before, but if you're doing with your money what God says to do, you're going to be at least three steps behind the people who make the same amount of money that you do.

Let me explain. The average person in the triangle carries, they say, about $15,000 in unsecured credit card debt. God tells us as much as possible to live without debt. So if we're following God's counsel, we're not spending above our income for the latest TVs or nicest cars or to go on the best vacations. God also tells us to give away at least the first 10% to him, which of course the world doesn't do. And he also tells us to save wisely, which again, you think of as about 10%, which also most people do not do. If you do those three things the Bible tells you to do with your money, that puts you at least three steps behind everybody else who makes the same amount of money as you do.

And let me tell you, that's noticeable. You're going to drive a different car. You're going to go on a different level of vacation. You're going to live in a different kind of house. You're going to wear different clothes.

If your spending habits don't differ from everybody around you in big ways, again, you might be more like the world than you realize. You have reason to question if you're actually a citizen of heaven with the new birth. You know, in the book of Leviticus, where Peter's quoting from with this command to be holy, God commanded the Israelites to leave the edges of their field unharvested. They were only to harvest the middle of the field and leave the edges easily accessible for the poor so the poor could glean from those sections for themselves and eat. Now, nobody else in the ancient world did that. Farmers in those days would, like most business owners today, try to wring out every last cent of profit from their yield.

Right? It's just smart business. But God wanted Israel to be different so that when foreigners would walk past Israelite fields, they would say, hey, why didn't you harvest the edges? And then they could say, well, it's because we serve a God who cares for the poor and shares with them and we do also. Listen, to be wealthy is not to be sinful, but you need to have edges.

You've got bigger fields so you can harvest more, but you should also have bigger edges. Sexually, are you out of sync with the world? I've always loved the words here of Saint Augustine who said, Christians are most out of sync with the world in their relationship with three things, money, power, and sex. The world is stingy with its money and with its power, but it is promiscuous in its sex. Christians, by contrast, are promiscuous with their money and power, which means they just give it away, but they're very guarded with their sex. You even use the word stingy, meaning that it's just reserved for one person, which is the exact opposite of the world. We do that, see, because we know that sex represents a love like God's love, where you give yourself entirely to somebody. So that's reflected in how we approach sex.

We know that our resources are to be used like Jesus's, which means that they're poured out to bless and help others, so we're crazy generous with our money. Are you out of sync with the world in how you handle your anger or frustration? How do people in the world handle their anger? Well, they rage, or they go for vengeance, or they just avoid conflict and harbor grudges and gossip. What did Christ do? Well, he never sought vengeance. Often he confronted, always selflessly and patiently, but he confronted and then forgave and moved on.

He kept no record of wrongs. Peter's saying, be holy. Be so separate in how you act that people will notice the difference. He's going to get into this in chapter three. They're going to ask you, what motivates you? It's going to show that you have a different hope and a different judge and a different perspective on life than everybody around you, so much so that they ought to have to ask. Command number five, verse 17, stand amazed.

If you appeal to the father who judges impartially according to each one's work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence. By the way, many translations there will say fear, which is literally what the Greek says there. You will live in fear during your time as strangers. Literally what he is saying there in Greek is live in fear, which sounds like the opposite of what we usually say the gospel message is. We say in 1 John, perfect love cast out fear, and that's true, right? But the best way to think of fear here is not in contradiction to that.

Think of it as all, which is why the CSB translators wrote it that way. Why are we to stand in awe? Well, Peter says it's because we serve a God who judges impartially. Everybody is going to be judged fully and impartially based on what they did and why they did it.

Nobody's getting away with injustice. God is not a respecter of persons. But Peter goes on, verse 18, for you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life, inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, verse 19, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.

What Peter is saying is, here's why you stand in awe. The same God who will judge everybody impartially gave Christ for you to satisfy God's judgment against you. Though our deeds and our motives were bad like everybody else's, God was not showing us partiality, God redeemed us by suffering judgment in our place. To save us, it cost God something immense. He didn't save us through some trifling gesture, a wave of a wand or the uttering of a spell or a set of rules that he just dictated for us to follow.

To purchase our salvation, he had to give his own son to be cursed and humiliated and tortured in our place. And that ought to make us stand in reverent awe. I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus, the Nazarene, and wonder how he could love me, a sinner condemned unclean. See from his head, his hand, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love or sorrow meet or joy composed so rich a crown? Were the whole realm of nature mine?

That would be a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. King David said the same thing this way in Psalm 130. He says, there is forgiveness with you, oh God, that you may be feared. Usually you think, well, forgiveness means you don't have to fear.

But again, he's talking about all there. Same thing Peter's talking about. Meditating on the price of our salvation, thinking about how great the judgment of God was against us, how right that judgment was, how much God paid to redeem us. That ought to make us stand in wonder of God. It ought to make us afraid from ever being apart from him again and make us stand in awe of the treasure that he has now given us. It's fear and awe, but it's a confident fear.

A fear of what your life would be like without God and in awe of how secure you are with him. The price of our forgiveness makes us stand in awe. There is none like our God. There is none besides him. He is worthy of all the praise we could ever bring to him. So why don't we just pause and just declare through song our great joy in God.

And then we'll come back really briefly for Peter's final command. Jesus. Jesus, the name above every other name.

Jesus, the only one who could ever save. You're worthy of every breath we could ever breathe. We live for you.

You're holy and holy. There is no one like you. There is none beside you. Open up my eyes and wonder and show me who you are and fill me with your heart and lead me in your love to those around me.

Oh Jesus. Jesus, the name above every other name. Jesus, the only one who could ever save. You're worthy of every breath we could ever breathe. We live for you and only you.

Cause you're holy and holy. There is no one like you. There is none beside you. Open up my eyes and wonder and show me who you are and fill me with your heart and lead me in your love to those around me. Oh holy, no there is no one like you.

There is none beside you. Open up my eyes and wonder and show me who you are and fill me with your heart and lead me in your love to those around me. I'm not sure I can control you. I trust in you. So I will build my life upon your love. It is a firm foundation and I will put my trust in you.

And I will not be shaken. Oh holy, no there is no one like you. There is none beside you. Open up my eyes and wonder and show me who you are and fill me with your heart and lead me in your love to those around me. Cause I will build my life upon your love. It is a firm foundation and I will put my trust in you. There is no one like you.

There is none beside you. Open up my eyes and wonder and show me who you are and fill me with your heart and lead me in your love to those around me. Okay lastly, Peter's last command, number six, is to love extravagantly. Look at verse 22. Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other from a pure heart, love one another constantly. The last command that he gives us is to love.

We do that because we're part of a new family. You're united by a common salvation and a common hope. The gospel gives us remarkable ability to love people. The gospel gives us patience, for example, with the flaws of others because we recognize in the gospel that we had a bunch of flaws of our own when Jesus saved us and forgave us. The gospel frees us from the tyranny of needing other people to be happy so that we can stop using them and start loving them. You know, when you're codependent on somebody, you can't really love them.

You use them. Or when you need somebody else to recognize you so that you can find meaning in their admiration and that causes you to be nice and kind and good so they'll recognize your goodness. Well, that means that you're not nice and kind and good out of your own goodness. You're doing it because you want to win their affection and that's selfish. Your good deeds are serving you, not loving them.

When you need to be the best in order to feel valuable, well, that puts you always in competition with everybody else. You can't love them because you're competing with them for a sense of self-worth. The gospel gives you the ability to love. It makes you complete in God so that you can be free to love others. It shows you patience and love so that you are compelled to show it to others.

We can love, John says, because he first loved us. So there are our six exile commands. Obedience to all these commands flows out of the hope in this imperishable inheritance. Obedience is fueled by our hope in Christ. Look at the last verses in this chapter, verse 24. For all flesh, he says, is like grass, all its glory, like a flower of the grass. The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever. That's a quote from Isaiah 40. Everything else he's saying that we live for is going to fade.

Every other hope, every foundation is going to crumble. But Christ, Peter says, Christ is eternal. His love went farther for us than anybody else has ever gone for us. His love will endure longer than everything else on earth will endure compared to his love.

Even the most permanent things on earth are like the grass that appears one week and it vanishes the next. Peter's question to you is, have you found this hope that makes obedience to these commands easy? I think a number of you have had your foundations rocked in the last few weeks and maybe God has finally gotten your attention.

For some of you, I will tell you, he's trying to get your attention. The greatest invitation ever given came from the lips of Christ. He said, come unto me, all you who are laborer and just feel heavy laden and crushed by the weight of the world and I will give you rest. If you give your life to him, he can forgive your sin. He can give you new life, a new birth. He promises to bear you up under all your troubles. He will be your guide when you feel lost. He'll be your support when you feel broken.

He'll be your comforter when you feel overwhelmed. Has he been speaking to you since quarantine started? Has he been inviting you to come to him?

Is he doing that now? Why not give into that now and receive that invitation? So before we sing and just declare our hope in Christ and before we worship, could you just take a minute and just pray with me? Right now with your head bowed, if you know God has been drawing you and you want to surrender your life to him, say, God, I'm ready to give my life fully to you. Say it to him in your own words. I receive the offer of salvation and forgiveness of sins that you purchased for me and Jesus.

Say it to him in your own words. I receive your offer of salvation and I surrender my life to you. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for saving me. Hey, listen, if you prayed that, would you let us know? Just prayer at SummitRDU.com. Let us know you made that decision and we'd love to follow up with you.