The Lord's Prayer

Thank you. It's a joy.

It's a joy to be here. I do regret to tell you that Pastor JD couldn't be here today because he's recovering from being struck by lightning for lying about his age. He and I actually have a, we have a pretty long history together. We go back about 35 or so years. We attended the same church in college. Actually, I was in college and he was in preschool.

Let that be a lesson to you. Be nice to the kids in the nursery. They might be your boss one day. It is a privilege for me to share with you today really something that God has been stirring in my heart and doing in me for a very long time and that's calling me. Calling me to spend time with Him in His Word and in prayer.

So I want to share about that today and challenge you to that end. You know, if you've been around for a while, you'll know that we've been in an extended series through the book of Acts. And it's honestly been encouraging and challenging, I think, to all of us. We've marveled at what the early church experienced. They were joyful in pain. They were bold in sharing their faith. They were fruitful in seeing people come to Christ. And they were unified and filled with love across racial and cultural barriers like nobody had ever seen before. And I'm encouraged because I see that happening in us. I see the fruit of that. I see God doing those things in us but I'm challenged because I think we've only begun to see the tip of the iceberg.

I think there is so much more that God wants to do. A couple of weeks ago in Summit Kids, our kids studied the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Three guys who were persecuted for their faith, thrown into a fiery furnace but miraculously, God brings them out untouched by the fire. Now I have a five-year-old and a six-and-a-half-year-old. And on the way home, they were in the car with their mom and Hudson, my six-year-old, says, Mom, that kind of stuff doesn't happen today, does it? Just back in the old times, right?

And you know what? I'm afraid that too many of us might read the book of Acts and internally say that kind of stuff doesn't happen today, just back in olden times. But listen, I want you to know, I want my kids to know that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And what he did in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, what he did in the people of Acts, he longs and is willing to do in us today. So why don't we experience that? What's the difference between us and them?

What keeps us from that? Acts 2 42 says that they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. You see, they did this in response to the gospel, and as they responded to the gospel in this devotion, every facet of their lives, corporate and individual, was impacted by the power of God because they were devoted to him. They gave themselves to knowing and experiencing God. They were each one devoted to him. This wasn't the staff's devotion.

It wasn't the special ops team's devotion. This was everyone's individual devotion to God. And their collective individual devotion is what produced a dynamic corporate experience.

You know, it wasn't the other way around. Their corporate experience was not what fed their devotional time, it's not what led them to be devoted to God, it was their devotion to God that led them to experience these things together. And it's the same for us. It has to be our collective individual devotion that will lead us together to a dynamic corporate experience.

I have one goal this weekend, only one. That is to encourage, stir, provoke, and challenge you, every single one of you, to pursue devotion to the word of God and to prayer. And listen, I say pursue devotion because devotion to anything has to be cultivated and developed.

It just doesn't happen to you. You don't just wake up in the morning and suddenly find yourself devoted. You seek it.

You go after it. Devotion is giving yourself wholeheartedly to something, abandoning other things for the sake of this thing, disciplining yourself for the purpose of godliness. Listen, walking in lifelong devotion is cultivated by intentionally choosing devotion day by day and step by step.

Can you hear me say that again? Walking in lifelong devotion is cultivated by intentionally choosing devotion day by day and step by step. On the way in today, you got a copy of a new resource we've created, 30 days, kick start to your daily time with God. Now this is not the time for you to go flipping through it, checking it out, seeing what's in there.

There's some blank pages. You can open those, open to those and start taking notes because in just a minute I'm going to chastise you about that and if you're already doing it you can feel smug about the rebuke to the people next to you. But I'm going to ask you, I'm going to ask you to take this and use it. I'm going to challenge you to test God and see if He will meet with you as you draw near to Him. So if you would join me this morning and turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6, we're going to look together at an experience between Jesus and His disciples that I think should inform our approach to God as we go after Him daily in His Word and in prayer. Matthew chapter 6, I'm going to read verses 9 through 13. The context here is that Jesus' disciples have asked Him, Lord, teach us to pray.

And so this is His response. Matthew 6 verse 9. This then is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. Y'all, I believe in this short prayer as an outline for what our daily time with God should look like. This is not a prayer for us to repeat.

There's nothing inherently wrong with saying it. But listen, Jesus didn't say pray this. He said this is how you should pray.

And don't miss that because they're fundamentally different. Repeating it will lead to ritual. Praying like it cultivates and shapes a relationship. So as we look at this together, let me see if I can show you four ways that I think this prayer should inform or influence your daily time with God.

All right, you ready? Number one, our daily time with God should celebrate and cultivate our relationship with Him. Our daily time with God should celebrate and cultivate our relationship with Him. That's why Jesus began this way. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. This has to be the place where we begin all of our time with God. If you and I can start our approach to God with a right understanding of God as Father, then I think everything else will fall in place. Oswald Chambers said, we have to pray with our eyes on God not on our circumstances or our difficulties. To the disciples, this would have been a revolutionary idea. You see, we don't have a problem with it.

We don't even think twice about it. But up to this point, nobody called God Father. The idea of referring to God or even addressing Him in such a relational way was unheard of. But Jesus is underscoring an essential truth here for them and for us. Listen, we have access to God because we are His children. By faith in Jesus Christ, you and I are adopted as sons and daughters of God. Would you just let the wonder of that seek in on you just for a moment?

What an incredible privilege. In Christ, you are beloved child, precious daughter, favored son. And our praying ought to be on the basis of that. And everything about our praying ought to be for nurturing and developing that relationship, not getting something from God. He's our Father.

He's not our vending machine. He wants to know us. He wants us to know Him. Jesus said, great praying is rooted in understanding our relationship to God as Father.

But part of the problem is that our daily relationship often doesn't reflect the kind of closeness and engagement that ought to be there between a Father and a Son. We feel distant from God. We feel removed from God.

Y'all, that's not God's fault. He hasn't abandoned us. He hasn't neglected us. On a regular basis, on a daily basis, many of us neglect Him. We've abandoned Him.

God is not an absentee Father. We are absentee children. Not too long ago, my boys were having a conversation, which sometimes their conversations are really quite entertaining. I mean, you know, they're five and six. So the stuff they talk about and the way they phrase it is, it's hysterical sometimes.

Sometimes it's scary. So in this particular occasion, they were having a conversation that was precipitated by the fact that we had denied them the opportunity to engage in some of their favorite activity, which is we and iPad. And so our five-year-old looks at the six-year-old with this little gleam in his eye, and he goes, Hudson, if Mom and Dad were dead, we could play iPad and Wii all the time.

My first response to that was, maybe we need some counseling, followed by, sweetheart, do you think we should start locking our bedroom door at night? Listen, my four-year-old has no idea how much he needs me. He can't comprehend what life would be like if I weren't there to provide for him, protect him, teach him, instruct him, love him, lead him, play with him. All he can see is that sometimes I stand between him and what he thinks he really wants to do.

And you know what? The truth is that could be said about us. We have no idea what would happen to our lives if God were suddenly taken out. We don't have a concept of how desperately we need him, how utterly and completely dependent we are on him.

And far too many times we in our hearts will think, you know what, if God were out of the picture, if I didn't have to deal with him, I could do whatever I wanted to do and I wouldn't feel guilty about it. Y'all, we need to learn what the psalmist said in Psalm 63. Oh God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you.

My body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Listen, y'all, there is nothing that God could do for me or give me apart from himself that would satisfy me. I don't need something from God, I need God. And that's why so much of our time with God needs to be focused on who he is. You see, too often when we approach God, we have a better understanding of our problem and our circumstance than we do of the God we're praying to. We have a clearer view and a better ability to express the need than we do to declare the greatness of the God we're praying to.

And it's upside down. We're more familiar with our peril than we are with our Father. And so you and I have got to learn to feed our prayer with praise and thanksgiving. We've got to saturate our time with God with worship.

Can I make a very simple suggestion to you about how you do that? You take this God that we're giving you this weekend and inside it are some instructions and some places for you to begin to build a vocabulary of praise and adoration and thanksgiving. Look, feed your praise. Would you just write down what God is teaching you about himself?

Put it in a sentence, write it on a page, go back to it and thank him for that, adore him for that. Go back over your sermon notes. Yes, you should be taking sermon notes and pull out where you heard God speak and where you saw the glory of God. Listen, y'all, I'm afraid you don't know, you don't even have a concept of how blessed you are to sit in this place week after week and have the Word of God unfolded, have the character of God extolled to you, have the promises of God given to you and you hear them and by 3 o'clock they're gone.

You've forgotten them because you don't write them down. And you and I need, need, we need to ingest that, we need to take it in, we need to speak it back to God because we need to feed our praise, we need to nurture our understanding and our knowledge of who God is. You need to make a list of the goodness and kindness and mercy and love of God in your life and you need to give him thanks. You know what, there's nothing more annoying than an ungrateful child.

Is that you? Do you feed your gratitude? Do you remember to recall the simple things, the daily, the mundane, the places where God's goodness is poured out on you and you're so obsessed with what you don't have that you can't see what God has already done? Come on, stir up gratitude and thankfulness in your heart by writing it down.

Be specific. Build something that builds something for yourself that increases your faith and causes you to remember the greatness of God and something that turns your attention away from your obsession with yourself. Alright, number two, our daily time with God should reorient us toward his kingdom and his purposes. Our daily time with God should reorient us toward his kingdom and his purposes. That's why Jesus said, pray this way, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now let me give you this warning, this is not a phrase at the end of your prayer, a caveat to cover all of the things that you said previously that might be your selfishness and your agenda and outside the kingdom and will of God, okay? This is not a covering for your prayer, this should instruct your prayer. What's permeated our preaching and our teaching here at the summit, what forms our mission and vision for this church, which is the gospel and the kingdom of God advancing, now needs to make its way into our praying. You know what, you and I need a gospel revolution in our prayer lives. Can I just be confessional with you? One of the things God has exposed to me is that way too much of my praying, way too much of my praying is focused on and motivated by my desire for comfort, ease, relief, and pleasure. That's me.

Is that you? Is your prayer life saturated with this obsession with comfort, ease, relief, and pleasure? Listen y'all, I have lived long enough and walked with God long enough that I should know by now that those things are not God's primary agenda. That is not what God is most concerned about in my life. God is working to conform me to the image of his son, to redeem me, to restore me, to reconcile me, and to remake me to be like Jesus.

That's what he's concerned about. And you know what, often that will come at the expense of my comfort, ease, relief, and pleasure. And if I'm going to pray the will of God, if I'm going to pray your kingdom come, your will be done kind of prayers, I've got to get in touch with that. Recently we were reading the Gospel Storybook Bible with our kids at night and I would just say to you, if you have kids, it's a resource you ought to own. I think you can get a copy of it at our Next Steps area or you can order it online or pick it up at a Christian bookstore. It's a wonderful resource.

Even if you don't have kids, you would do well to read this. It is a beautiful description of its Bible stories and it helps you see the Gospel all the way through. But this particular night we just finished the story of Cain and Abel. Now, some of you may remember the story of Cain and Abel.

They bring sacrifices to God. The sacrifice of Cain is unrighteous, unacceptable to God. The sacrifice of Abel is pleasing to God.

And Cain, in a fit of rage and jealousy, kills his brother Abel. Now, my six-year-old Hudson has a finely tuned sense of justice. Y'all, this little kid can smell unfair from a mile away. And y'all, it makes him mad. He's passionate about it.

I don't know where he gets that kind of stuff, but he's passionate about it. So we get to the end of the story and you can see it in his face. You can see it in his eyes. He's mad.

He's furious. And he blurts out, Mom, it's not fair. It's not fair that Cain killed Abel. It's not fair that he killed him. He didn't get to live his real life.

He had to go up to heaven and live some fake life. Don't laugh too hard because that's how you and I pray. We act like this is real and that's fake. We pray like this is what's going to last. This is what matters. Forgetting that in the moment, in the twinkling of an eye, this is going to be gone. And that's what's eternal.

That's what lasts. Listen, from the moment sin entered the world, from the very instant that sin entered in, God's purpose in everything has been to redeem, reconcile, and restore us to himself. From Genesis to Revelation, it's the story of the Bible, the gospel. When God killed an animal to provide a covering, a garment for Adam and Eve in the garden after they sinned, God was pointing to the day, even then, that one day he would slay his only son, the Lamb of God, to cover our shame and our sin. Redeeming, reconciling, restoring, remaking us in the image of his son, this is God's eternal purpose. So can I ask you, are you praying that way? Are you praying that direction? Is that what you pray for your children? Is that what you pray for your boss? Do you pray that for your co-workers? Do you pray for your roommate and your classmates that way?

Do you pray for your neighbors that way? Listen, God's primary agenda is not our comfort. God's primary agenda is bringing us into a rich and abiding relationship with him. And it's a waste of my breath to pray in ways that don't reflect his agenda. Listen, I'm not going to talk God out of his plan and into mine. God wants me to want him.

And he is working to draw me in that direction. So practically speaking, again, you and I need to build for ourselves a bank of your kingdom come, your will be done things to pray. This doesn't come naturally to you. This is not the first thing in our mind. Y'all, the first thing we think of is God fix this, God get me out of this, God make this work, make this go away, give me this, take that away.

That's where our mind and heart leans. So we have to teach ourselves to pray the gospel. We have to teach ourselves to pray about the kingdom. So start a list for yourself, again, of the promises of God. Listen, you can be pretty sure if God promised it, he wants to do it.

So why don't you ask him for it? Write down prayers that are recorded in scripture, repeat those back to God. The gospels tell us that Jesus said, if you ask anything in my name according to my will, you can be sure that you have what you ask. Well, how do I know that what I'm praying is within the will of God? Well, I can pray the promises of God and I can pray the prayers of the Bible and be pretty dang sure that's the will of God. So pray those things, write them down, build a bank.

And what about lost people? Be intentional about praying for people you know who have not come to faith in Jesus Christ. Pray for nations and rulers and people groups that don't have access to the gospel.

Listen, y'all, I'm weary of all the posting, all the railing, all the speculating about Putin and Russia and how they might inconvenience us or how they're, what they're doing might have an impact on our freedom. Have you prayed for Russia? Have you prayed for the advance of the gospel in Russia? Have you prayed for Putin that his heart would be redeemed and reconciled and restored to God? Listen, that's what God's about. God's not about keeping us safe and prosperous as a nation. That's not his agenda.

His agenda is saving and redeeming and restoring. So get on your knees and pray that direction. And stop being so obsessed like I am with your comfort, ease, relief and pleasure.

Come on. Y'all gonna make me come on my own sermon. And I will. All right, number three, our daily time with God should affirm our dependence on him. Our daily time with God should affirm our dependence on him. He said, pray this way, give us this day or give us today our daily bread.

You know what? This is the most fascinating phrase in the whole prayer to me. What did Jesus mean when he said I should pray that way? You know, it's the first real ask in the prayer.

It's the first time that the prayer seems to reflect the common definition of praying, which is me getting something from God. So why did Jesus say this? When God delivered the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he provided for them. He supplied food for them, daily bread. Every morning, God made it rain potato flakes, manna from heaven. And when Jesus said, pray, give us this day our daily bread, he's pointing back to that.

Here's what's important about that. The children of Israel had no other way to sustain themselves. Y'all, they weren't walking through the fields or the desert and seeing pre-planted crops that they could harvest to eat. There were no grocery stores or Walmart super centers for them to go in and buy groceries for the week. They were dependent on what God supplied and God supplied enough for every day, one day at a time, they had no alternative way to sustain themselves.

So when Jesus says daily bread, he's pointing us and the disciples back to fundamental principle. I am in every way, in every physical way, utterly and completely dependent on God. Y'all, I don't keep myself breathing. I don't make my heart beat. I don't even take the food I eat and cause it to give nourishment to my body.

I don't keep myself alive. God is the one who sustains me and if I'm gonna live, I need him to do that moment by moment, day by day. This isn't a prayer for abundance or excess. It's a call to humble reliance on God.

But you know what? I need more than just physical bread. I need more than just my body to be sustained. Jesus said I am the bread of life. I need Jesus. In another place, he would say man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Jesus' instruction to his disciples and to us is to remember that we aren't only dependent on God for physical sustenance, we're absolutely dependent on him for sustaining our souls. You just don't need bread for your body. You need the bread from heaven to feed your heart and your soul and your mind.

I am, you are, in all ways physical and spiritual, utterly and completely dependent on God. And not only should my prayers reflect that, but my pursuit of God in his word should position me to receive that daily bread. Listen, the manna in the desert didn't do the Israelites a bit of good until they picked it up. If they left it laying on the ground, it was of no value to them.

If they didn't take it and use it and ingest it, it would not have sustained them. You and I need to learn, that's why the psalmist in Psalm 19 would say the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The decrees of the Lord are firm and all of them are righteous. They are more precious than gold than much pure gold. They are sweeter than honey than honey from the honeycomb. Can I ask you a question? Is that how you see God's Word?

Perfect, reviving, renewing, sustaining, joyful, firm, absolute, secure, sweet, precious. Listen, y'all, when I'm weary and worn out, I need to be recharged. When I'm at the end of my understanding and I don't know what to do, I need wisdom. When I'm discouraged and broken, I need joy. When I'm confused, I need clarity. When I'm in the dark, I need light. When I'm insecure, I need a firm foundation to stand on.

And when I am left wanting by the best the world has to offer, I need to be satisfied in Jesus. And according to Psalm 19, that happens, all of it, in the Word of God. It doesn't happen in a vacation. It doesn't happen in recreational pursuits. It doesn't happen in relationships. It doesn't happen in stuff. It doesn't happen in things.

It doesn't happen in changing your status. It doesn't happen in getting out of one marriage and getting into another. It doesn't happen in having kids. It doesn't happen with getting rid of kids. It happens because you're feasting on the Word of God. Can I just be honest here? Most of us have filled our lives with so much junk that we don't perceive we have a need or a hunger for God.

You're like my kids. You want to eat goldfish and pretzels and raisins all day and then when it comes time for dinner you're not hungry. You think you don't need the Word of God because you're saturated with things that mask your real hunger. We say we don't have time. We don't know where to start. The Bible doesn't make sense.

Can we be honest here? What we're really saying here is it's just not that important. We're not convinced it's valuable.

So we avoid it. When you neglect time with God you know what suffers? It's the life of Christ in you. Believer you need to understand this. Christ by faith is born in you.

He has come to dwell in you, to live His life in you. But that life of Christ has to be nurtured. It has to be fed. That fire has to be fanned. The flame has to be fanned.

And the way that happens is when you and I spend time with God in prayer and in His Word. Listen, I'm worried about some of you. I'm deeply concerned about you. It's why you're spiritually weak. It's why you're unfruitful. It's why you're depressed. It's why you're contemplating doing things that you know are outside the will of God.

Because you're not feeding on the Word of God. You waltz in here on Sunday morning. You don't run. You waltz in about half the time half of your late. For God's sake get here on time. You don't show up to a movie or a concert or a ball game that way. You park early and run.

So come on. Run to God. Act like you're hungry. Act like you want to see God do something in your life. But remember it's not somebody on this stage's responsibility to feed you like a once a week feeding would keep you alive. You need to pull yourself up to the table and feast on God's Word seven days a week. You need to let Him nourish your soul. You need to act like you're hungry and if you're not you need to get rid of things that mask that and go after God.

I'm going to make some of you mad and I'm just fine with that. If you spent half the time you spend on Facebook or a third of it and you gave that to the Word of God what would happen to your relationship with Jesus? If you shut off Twitter, text and email for fifteen or thirty minutes and sought God how much better would you know what's happening in God's arena than you know what is happening with everybody else that doesn't matter. Why don't you follow these people anyway?

What in the world are they doing for you? God of the universe sent His only Son to die for you to redeem you and you act like that's not important but some fool in California, some celebrity you got to follow everything they say. And listen you can clap for me but get off of your rear end and get in the Word of God. I'm not interested in your applause I'm interested in you doing what God wants you to do which is seeking after Him. And if I sound forceful I am because let me tell you this I think your life in God depends on it.

I think some of you are dying, you're withering spiritually because you're not feasting on the Word of God. You haven't tasted for yourself to see that God is good. You're letting somebody else taste it for you and tell you about it. Listen if I go to the Angus barn I don't want to sit there and have somebody else describe it to me.

I want to eat it myself. But spiritually that's what we do. We don't feast we come sit in here and let JD tell us about the meal. Come on! Get in God's Word.

Whew! Alright number four daily time with God should lead us to receive, give, and rely on grace. He said forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not to temptation but deliver us from the evil one. Y'all I need daily time with God to connect me to grace. Listen we've got blind spots, we've got faults, we've got errors, we've got a bent towards sin that we can't see or we don't want to see and it's when we put ourselves under the magnifying glass of God's Word that our sin and our rebellion is exposed and y'all that's God's grace to us because when it's exposed we can confess and repent. We can experience 1 John 1.9 if you confess your sins He's faithful and just to forgive you sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. And that's not just saying I'm sorry that's owning your wrong, that's owning your rebellion, that's agreeing with God that what you did is what He says it is. Sin, rebellion, adultery. Listen in our house we've tried to avoid letting our boys get away with just saying I'm sorry.

You know why? Because most of the time they're just sorry they got caught. I want them to own their wrong. I want them to identify it, to say what it is, and to confess that they did it because if they do then they have a chance to repent.

Then they have a chance to walk the other direction. 1 Timothy 3 16 says all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. Y'all the Word, the Word warns me. The Word exposes me.

The Word corrects me. And y'all that's God's grace to me. Listen we live in a culture that thinks rebuke is hate. And they think that exposing sin is intolerant. But the Bible tells me that those the Father loves, He disciplines. That's not hate, that's love. I tell my kids all the time when I discipline them, y'all son if I didn't care about you, if I didn't love you, I'd let you do whatever you wanted to.

That's hate. If I didn't care what you did, I'd let you do whatever you wanted to. But because I'm trying to nurture and protect life in you, I'm going to instruct you, I'm going to teach you, I'm going to discipline you, and I'm going to correct you.

That my friend is love. And when you receive that kind of grace and that kind of love, it has got to compel you to give grace. Jesus makes a pretty strong statement here. He says Father forgive us as we have forgiven our debtors.

You understand what He's doing there? Jesus is assuming that a real experience of grace and forgiveness from God would lead us to freely extend grace and forgiveness to one another. Listen, how can I stand in this place and sing my sin, all the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin not in part but the whole is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more? How can I sing that and still refuse to forgive you? How can I sing that and hold a grudge? How can I sing that and want justice for you? How can I want grace for myself and justice for you?

I can't. If I do that, I declare by my actions and my heart that I don't really understand what it means to receive grace from God. There's one more piece of this that I want to highlight before we close and that is that this connection to grace, time in God's Word teaches me to rely on grace. Y'all, the grace of God isn't just for my past.

Praise God, it's gone. My sin is nailed to the cross but the grace of God is for my present and my future. Y'all, I've been a Christian a long time. I've been a pastor of this church for almost 28 years and can I tell you that today I need the gospel and grace just as much as I did the first time I heard it and the first time I received it. I don't need it less, I need it more because I am like the hymn writer said, prone to wonder, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for your courts above. I can say what John Newton said in the hymn Amazing Grace, through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come and there are more coming. Tis grace has brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home. How am I gonna be directed away from temptation? How am I gonna say no to the desires of the flesh?

How am I gonna overcome the enemy who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour? How? Grace. Grace. Remembering God's grace. Believing God's grace. Soaking myself and saturating my heart with God's grace. Giving grace. Grace. Grace and that's why I need to be with God. I need to be connected to grace. Y'all we desperately need, we desperately need time with God. Time that celebrates and cultivates our relationship. Time that reorients our perspective towards his kingdom.

Time that helps us recognize our dependence on him and positions us to receive from him and time that saturates us in the gospel and grace. So will you do it? Will you go hard after God? Will you draw near to him? James 4-8 says draw near to me and I'll draw near to you. Together. Can we embark on this journey and run hard after God, daily seeking after him, drawing close to him. Pray, listening to his word.

Just a moment. Our campus worship teams are gonna come and lead you through a guided prayer time. But before they do would you let me pray over you and for us. God, how thankful we are for your grace in our lives. We read it and sang it earlier. When we were dead in our transgressions and sin, you made us alive. You poured out love and mercy on us.

Great love and rich mercy. So because of that God, we need you. We want you, God, stirring us a hunger and a desire to draw near to you. And then God fulfill your promise to us that if we would, you would draw near to us. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.