Podcasts about corporately

he Gundam Team is BACK as LJ joins Dee & Jay to discuss Bandai's recent Gundam 50th Anniversary Project announcements. Between announcements for upcoming Gundam entries like the Mobile Suit Gundam Remaster, new Gundam Wing animated project, Gundam SEED Freedom ZERO theatrical release and more, the crew give their thoughts on all of Bandai's latest teases to determine whether Gundam's 50th Anniversary is shaping up to be a hit or a major miss. Follow The Lookout Network on Twitter: @TheLookoutRNCFollow Dee on Twitter: @DeeWeTrustFollow Jay on Twitter: @VersaceVegeta_ Follow LJ on Twitter: @onlyatlj

05-03-26 Ken Forrest "Confessing To God Corporately "

Doug Hundt, President of Vermeer's Industrial division, recently shared with me how Vermeer began with core values to remind their team of Vermeer's foundation of faith. But as the company grew, they needed to make their beliefs practical corporately, so they developed a Character and Behaviors document with related training. Their actions resulted in their ... The post Spreading Faith Corporately appeared first on Unconventional Business Network.

03-08-26 Ken Forrest "Praising God Corporately"

Ready to take a deep dive and learn how to generate personal tax-free cash flow from your corporation? Enroll in our FREE masterclass here and book a call hereShould you build your next investment property in your personal name or through your corporation?If you're a Canadian business owner sitting on retained earnings or personal capital, figuring out how to fund your next real estate investment can feel like a high-stakes puzzle. Should you leverage your HELOC or dip into your corporate cash? Does owning the property personally offer more flexibility—or should it live in a holding company for tax benefits and liability protection? This episode dives into a real-life case study to help you navigate these exact decisions with clarity.By the end of this episode, you'll learn:The key tax and long-term planning trade-offs between owning investment property personally vs corporately.Three practical funding strategies—including when to borrow from your HELOC, your corporation, or a third-party lender.How to plan for future capital gains and use corporate-owned insurance to prepare for estate taxes without losing liquidity.Press play now to confidently map out the smartest path for funding and owning your next investment property.Discover which phase of wealth creation you are in. Take our quick assessment and you'll receive a custom wealth-building pathway that matches your phase and learn our CRA compliant tax optimized strategies. Take that assessment here.Canadian Wealth Secrets Show Notes Page:Consider reaching out to Kyle…taking a salary with a goal of stuffing RRSPs;…investing inside your corporation without a passive income tax minimization strategy;…letting a large sum of liquid assets sit in low interest earning savings accounts;…investing corporate dollars into GICs, dividend stocks/funds, or other investments attracting corporate passive income taxes at greater than 50%; or,…wondering whether your current corporate wealth management strategy is optimal for your specific situation.Canadian business owners seeking financial freedom and early retirement are rethinking how they approach property development, corporate structures, and long-term wealth strategies. Whether you're weighing HELOCs vs. corporate borrowing for funding investment properties, or deciding between salary vs. dividends in Canada, every financial decision shapes your broader Canadian wealth plan. This episode explores how to use retained earnings strategically, optimize RRSP room, and implement tax-efficient investing through corporate wealth planning. You'll gain insights inReady to connect? Text us your comment including your phone number for a response!Canadian Wealth Secrets is an informative podcast that digs into the intricacies of building a robust portfolio, maximizing dividend returns, the nuances of real estate investment, and the complexities of business finance, while offering expert advice on wealth management, navigating capital gains tax, and understanding the role of financial institutions in personal finance.

In this podcast episode, host Favour Obasi-Ike sits down with international conflict management expert Dr. Nashay Lowe to reveal how AI can serve as the ultimate mirror, reflecting our hidden biases and transforming how we communicate.Episode SummaryThis conversation delves into the strategic importance of understanding Artificial Intelligence not merely as a technological advancement, but as a transformative tool for enhancing professional communication, streamlining problem-solving, and fostering profound self-reflection. Dr. Nashay Lowe guides us through the necessary mindset shift required to harness AI's power, moving beyond skepticism to see its potential as an indispensable partner in complex human endeavors.The discussion charts a journey from initial resistance to a nuanced appreciation of AI's role in the modern workplace. Favour Obasi-Ike and Dr. Nashay Lowe dissect the common fear that AI will replace human jobs, reframing the technology as a "power tool" that augments human capability rather than rendering it obsolete.Dr. Nashay Lowe states that the real professional risk isn't being replaced by AI, but by a colleague who masters it. The conversation culminates in a powerful central metaphor: AI as an objective mirror. As Dr. Nashay Lowe states, "Conflict reveals who we are, it doesn't create our divisions it reflects them." In the same way, AI offers a unique ability to reflect our communication patterns and strategic gaps without the inherent lens of a human observer.Ultimately, the episode reveals that AI's effectiveness is entirely dependent on human guidance. Through skillful prompting, critical questioning, and a commitment to ethical use, professionals can leverage AI to see their challenges, and themselves, with unprecedented clarity. This episode provides a compelling roadmap for anyone looking to integrate AI thoughtfully into their work.These are the essential insights you need to navigate this new landscape.Key TakeawaysThis section distills the most critical and actionable insights from the conversation with Dr. Nashay Lowe. These takeaways serve as foundational principles for any professional seeking to adapt to and thrive in an increasingly AI-integrated world, transforming a complex technology into a practical asset for growth and efficiency.AI is an Evolutionary Tool, Not an EnemyResisting AI is akin to resisting the adoption of computers or smartphones—a futile effort against an inevitable technological evolution. The true professional threat is not being replaced by AI itself, but by someone who masters AI as a tool to work more efficiently and effectively. Adaptation is no longer optional; it's a core professional competency.AI Serves as an Objective MirrorThe most powerful application of AI in subjective fields like conflict management is its ability to act as a mirror to our own communication patterns, biases, and choices. By analyzing language and scenarios without a human's inherent emotional or experiential lens, it can reveal subtle tensions, repetitive biases, and strategic blind spots that we might otherwise miss.Human Input Dictates AI OutputThe value of AI is not in the technology alone, but in the user's ability to guide it. Dr. Nashay Lowe emphasizes the necessity of iterative prompting, asking critical questions, and providing specific context to achieve nuanced results. A generic prompt yields a generic answer; a thoughtful, challenging prompt unlocks a deeper level of analysis and creativity.AI Can Augment, But Not Replace, EmpathyWhile AI lacks genuine consciousness or empathy, it serves as an invaluable diagnostic tool. Dr. Nashay Lowe powerfully argues that AI can remind us where empathy is missing in our strategies and communications. It can highlight a failure to consider another perspective or identify language that lacks warmth, prompting the human user to inject the necessary emotional intelligence.The User is the Ultimate Guardian of PrivacyAs AI systems become more deeply integrated with our personal and professional data streams, the user's responsibility grows exponentially. The conversation highlights the valid paranoia around connecting AI to sensitive information. The key takeaway is that the user must proactively manage data connections and maintain confidentiality, for instance, by using anonymized scenarios rather than identifiable information.These core principles provide a framework for leveraging AI not just as a machine, but as a partner in professional development.Detailed Episode Timestamps & NotesThis structured guide provides a detailed breakdown of the episode's key moments and discussions. Use these timestamps to navigate directly to the topics and insights that are most relevant to your professional journey.[00:00:00] Introduction: The Power of Human ConnectionHost Favour Obasi-Ike and Dr. Nashay Lowe reflect on their meeting in Las Vegas, emphasizing how valuable real-world, in-person connections are for creating professional opportunities, including this very podcast episode.[00:02:15] Meet Dr. Nashay Lowe: Proactive Strategy Over Reactive Problem-SolvingDr. Nashay Lowe outlines her background in international conflict management and her current mission. She applies global frameworks to local conflicts in academic and nonprofit sectors, aiming to shift leaders from "putting out fires" to implementing proactive strategies. Her goal is to create long-term, healthy habits rather than relying on ineffective "one-off" workshops.[00:04:30] Navigating AI Skepticism: A Necessary Mindset ShiftDr. Nashay Lowe addresses the common resistance to AI, framing it as a crucial mindset shift. She draws parallels to the initial skepticism surrounding cell phones and computers, arguing that AI is an evolving tool that will inevitably become integrated into every aspect of our lives. Adaptation is key.[00:06:45] The AI & Human Partnership: More Power Tool, Less ReplacementThe conversation reframes AI not as a replacement for humans, but as a tool that enhances efficiency. Dr. Nashay Lowe shares a powerful analogy from her partner, comparing the evolution of work to building a house with a hammer and nail versus a power tool, the goal is the same, but the right tool makes the process faster and more efficient.[00:10:10] AI in Conflict Management: Reflecting Our DivisionsThis segment explores the episode's central thesis. Dr. Nashay Lowe explains, "Conflict reveals who we are, it doesn't create our divisions it reflects them. And so artificial intelligence to me works much of the same way." She argues that AI can serve as an objective mirror in the subjective process of conflict resolution, identifying patterns and biases that a human mediator, operating through their own lens, might overlook.[00:14:00] The Emerging Frontier: AI as a Therapeutic ToolDr. Nashay Lowe notes the surprising trend of people using generative AI like ChatGPT for therapeutic purposes. She shares an anecdote about users having "meltdowns" on TikTok after a software update made the AI seem less "nice," underscoring the complex, human-like relationships people are beginning to form with the technology.[00:17:30] Using AI Responsibly: The Art of the PromptThis section focuses on the principle that AI's output is only as good as its input. Dr. Lowe explains the importance of prompting AI to challenge your assumptions ("Don't confirm what I'm already telling you") rather than simply validating them. Responsible use involves an iterative process of refining the AI's output with specific human feedback.[00:20:45] Privacy vs. Progress: The Security DilemmaDr. Nashay Lowe addresses the valid security and privacy concerns surrounding AI's integration with personal data like emails, calendars, and financial accounts. She contrasts this risk with a practical strategy for maintaining confidentiality in her work: using anonymized scenarios ("Person ABC") to analyze conflicts without exposing personally identifiable information.[00:25:00] Crafting Dialogue: A Masterclass in SpecificityDr. Nashay Lowe provides a masterclass on using AI to develop communication scripts. Her method involves giving the AI a specific persona ("You are a 25-year vet in conflict management") and, crucially, directing it to pull information from credible, specific sources like peer-reviewed journals. She continually refines the output with detailed feedback until it meets the desired tone and substance.[00:30:10] Dr. Lowe's Core Message: A Reminder Where Empathy is MissingDr. Nashay Lowe delivers her powerful final takeaway. She concludes that AI can never replace essential human qualities like presence, listening, or humility. However, its greatest strength is its ability to "hold a mirror to our communication patterns and ask without judgment, 'Is this how you're meant to show up?'"Learn more about this episode's insightful guest in the section below.About Our GuestThis episode features the expert insights of Dr. Nashay Lowe, a strategist dedicated to transforming how leaders approach conflict and organizational health.Dr. Nashay Lowe is a specialist in international conflict management who applies global frameworks to solve local challenges. She works primarily with academic and nonprofit leaders to help them shift from reactive problem-solving to building proactive strategies for long-term success. With a focus on creating healthier, sustainable habits within organizations, Dr. Nashay Lowe is currently exploring the cutting edge of her field by integrating Artificial Intelligence as a tool to foster more objective, effective, and positive change.Resources & Ways to ConnectConnect with Dr. Nashay Lowe:Website: https://www.loweinsights.comPodcast: The Resolution RoomInstagram: @loweinsightsLinkedIn: Nashay LoweNext Steps for Booking A SEO Discovery Call | Digital Marketing + Done-for-you SEO Services:>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Need SEO Services? 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This conversation was the second part of a discussion where the pastors explained the reasoning behind the structure of their corporate worship service. They began by discussing the introduction of the Pastoral Prayer, detailing its purpose and structure. The conversation then moved to the sermon, covering topics such as its ideal length, the practice of standing for the reading of scripture, and the importance of preaching the gospel every week. They also explained why they do not practice traditional altar calls, citing concerns about manipulation and false assurance. The discussion concluded by covering the final elements of their service: communion, the closing song, and the final commissioning or benediction, explaining the theological and practical reasons for how each is conducted. Will's TGC articles: 5 Reasons for the Pastoral Prayer: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/reasons-pastoral-prayer/?queryID=2f7e994564e002a86c4d04e32112f6e4 Why I Lead a Sinner's Prayer Every Sunday: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/sinners-prayer-sunday/

The Lord is calling out to the church in this hour. He is asking us to rise up once again in the activities of heaven that matter most. The Lord seeks those who will seek Him. He looks for those who will honor Him with a sacrifice of self in His presence to obtain His presence.This call is: Pray, Church! Pray, Church! Pray, Church!The time has come for the church to begin to pray again. The call and cry that resonate deep in my spirit is a summons from the Holy Spirit to enter into the secret place and come before the King of all Kings. We cannot neglect our prayer and hope to win the battles that are coming against us, and certainly, we will not win the battles that are about to come against us unless we pray.The church must pray. Prayer is how we fight! Prayer is the battle mode of the church that releases the kingdom of God upon our circumstances, problems, and worries. Prayer unleashes the kingdom of God against demonic forces bent on harming our communities, families, and our nation. Prayer is the posture of power in the Kingdom of God.Nothing compares to prayer in its importance and scope. Praying will unlock doors and move mountains. Praying will touch the heart of God and cause His hands to be moved. Prayer releases every force the kingdom of God has against the enemies of the kingdom.So, again I say: “Pray, church!” It is time for the church to pray again, getting into battle mode and fighting stance.Ironically, as we pray, we are not facing off against demons ourselves. Instead, we are coming to worship the King, speak His words over our lives, intercede for the longings of His heart, and pray for the peace He decrees in our lives and on the earth. As we pray for leaders, nations, lost sons and daughters, and the hopelessness we see people walking in, the Spirit of God comes and begins to battle against the enemy's plan. God releases resources, help, provision, strength, and power as we pray. Angelic activity is ignited as the host of heaven hears the words of God being declared in prayer by the saints. These mighty angels go to war on our behalf at the command of the King.All of this is happening behind the scenes as we simply become the connection point from earth to heaven.When we open our hearts and our mouths to pray, it releases the divine purpose and passion of Christ's heart. He is revealed, and He is magnified. Church, the Lord would say to you, “Your prayers matter!” When you pray, it makes a difference for eternity. It's not about you feeling it or even sensing it, although when we do, we are thankful. But prayer is about facing the Lord in faith, boldly worshiping His name, and declaring His beauty and holiness, coming to Him with thanksgiving in our hearts and seeking His face. Prayer is a connection point to the Kingdom of God, and it releases the power of His Kingdom in our hearts and in the earth.Scripture plainly tells us the plan of God for our prayers—“on earth as it is in heaven.”Matthew 6:10 TPT—[10] Manifest your kingdom realm, and cause your every purpose to be fulfilled on earth, just as it is fulfilled in heaven.I would submit to you that the more you pray, the more of His presence will enter your life and transform you and your situation. Even if you do not realize it's happening, it is.And so if you've ever felt dead or dry in your spirit, this is for you. Maybe the Lord has allowed you to reach that place so that you will begin to search for Him, to seek Him, to look for Him, and to allow the Holy Spirit to come in. I believe that He is calling out to the church in this hour to seek His face.He is urging us to pursue Him actively, to follow Him, and to press into Him in greater and deeper ways because a harvest season is here. It's not only coming; it's upon us. It's moving in the earth, and we are meant to take part in that—prophesying into the atmosphere and over our spheres of influence, including our families, cities, and towns—all to see the harvest of the Lord come in and to reach out and work.I believe God is calling out to His remnant people in this hour to begin seeking His face, to open our hearts to His presence, and to allow the extension of His power to touch our hearts deeply, igniting our hunger, desire, and thirst.Friend, we need to pursue and press deeper into the Lord than we have before. If we're going to make bold and courageous stands in our culture, we cannot do that without the presence and Spirit of God. We need a working relationship, not just knowledge of God, but an intimate relationship with His presence, Spirit, and power.We can't be a bold voice for Jesus in our culture, in our city, in our town, in our family, in our nation, or on Earth unless we have the voice of God inside us, speaking to our hearts in His presence, igniting us and pressing us forward. So I'm speaking to you right now—as a friend and as a fellow believer—saying, let's press in like we haven't before, and let's allow the Holy Ghost to ignite our hearts with a new hunger, a new thirst, and a new passion, so that there is a drive and a force from God that pushes us into the things of the Lord and the purpose of God.Prayer is the extension of His touch in your life. As you seek Him, He pours Himself through you.Let me just say this too: God is so faithful.As you begin to search for Him and seek Him out, He will be found by you. He will not hide or keep Himself at a distance from you. He is so faithful to come in and fulfill His work, His word, and His promise in your life. He will do that. One of the things I turn to when it seems like the presence of the Lord has begun to slip in my life, and maybe I can't feel Him as deeply as I once did, is this: if I will just get on my face before God—and I mean truly make a sacrifice to do so—and remain in that place of prayer, I know that if I stay there, God will meet me.Even if I don't feel it, I know He's working.And if He's working, then I have everything I need. Because when God is working, the Bible says He will work in us those things that are well-pleasing in His sight. That's what He's doing right now. So don't be discouraged, friend, but press in.We are to embark on a quest to explore the depths of the Holy Spirit.Not long ago, I received this word from the Lord about the Holy Spirit:“My people are meant to be led by my Spirit and taught by my Spirit. You may follow someone's faith, but mentorship comes through a life-giving relationship with the Holy Spirit. He is the one who will guide you into all truth, for He will take of mine and declare it unto you. He is the voice that you hear directing your steps, saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.” The Holy Spirit is the great director who orchestrates and performs my plan on the earth and in your life. Lean into His voice and cherish His words, for the Holy Spirit delights over you with great joy. He will fill you with my joy as He escorts you into my presence.”It is time for the Church to pray again!This is the call to the remnant who are about to rise into revival!Any great move of the Spirit of God, any significant revival or outpouring of the Lord that has ever happened on the earth can be traced back to men and women on their knees.Corporately:2 Chronicles 7:13-15 NKJV—[13] When I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people, [14] if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. [15] Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to prayer made in this place.Personally:Jeremiah 29:11-13 NKJV—[11] For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. [12] Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. [13] And you will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.How to seek the Lord:Have a secret place with the Lord.Matthew 6:6 TPT—[6] But whenever you pray, go into your innermost chamber and be alone with Father God, praying to Him in secret. And your Father, who sees all you do, will reward you openly.Sacrifice more time in prayer.Luke 6:12 TPT—[12] After this, Jesus went up into the high hills to spend the whole night in prayer to God.1 Thessalonians 5:17 TPT—[17] Make your life a prayer.An example of the need to devote more time to prayer can be drawn from understanding a marriage relationship. The more time you spend with your spouse, the more deeply and intimately you come to know them. You reach a point where you understand how they think and feel. You may even be able to finish their thoughts because you've become closely aware of their perspectives and desires.Sacrificial time in prayer produces a knowledge of Jesus and an awareness of His presence that comes in no other way.Intercede for your cities and towns.Colossians 4:2-4 TPT—[2] Be faithful to pray as intercessors who are fully alert and giving thanks to God. [3] And please pray for me, that God will open a door of opportunity for us to preach the revelation of the mystery of Christ, for whose sake I am imprisoned. [4] Pray that I would unfold and reveal fully this mystery, for that is my delightful assignment.Act as watchmen and prophetically call for awakening, warn the people of God, call out sin, intercede, hear a word from the Lord, and declare it—over your family, your community, your nation, your spouse, your friends, and your children.Isaiah 62:6-7 NKJV—[6] I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; They shall never hold their peace day or night. You who make mention of the LORD, do not keep silent, [7] And give Him no rest till He establishes And till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.Isaiah 62:6-7 TPT—[6] Jerusalem, I have stationed intercessors on your walls who will never be silent, day or night. You “reminders” of Yahweh, take no rest, [7] and tirelessly give God no rest, until He firmly establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of all the earth!Ezekiel 3:17 NKJV—[17] “Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; therefore hear a word from My mouth, and give them warning from Me:Thanks for reading and listening to the podcast, friend!Please share it on your social media and subscribe for more!Thanks for reading StrongFaith.co! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.strongfaith.co

Ask the Pastors S7 E4: "Why do we corporately worship the way that we do? (pt.1)” by West Hills Church

Title: Living a Life that Lasts: WorshipText: Matthew 28:16-20; 2:11; 4:10; 7:21-23Chris HefnerThree Questions about Following Jesus Through Worship1. Why worship? a. We must worship Jesus because he is King, Judge, and God.2. How does worship help us follow Jesus? a. Christ-centered worship is the beginning and the end of the Christian journey. b. Christ-centered worship is the proper posture for the follower of Jesus.3. How do we practice Christian worship? a. Personally. Say or sing praise to God daily from Scripture and in prayer. b. Corporately. Engage intentionally in gathered worship. (Gather weekly, sing joyfully, listen attentively, take notes, give generously).

After releasing a prophetic word, off the cuff, in a recent monthly membership call, Margaux was prompted to share with the greater Breathing Underwater/ Permission To Reign community. Which is YOU! Corporately we can sense that God is doing a NEW thing, something we have not known before which can create all kinds of discomfort, fear, and brings to the surface the “old” things that are time be rid off. Are you perceiving the new things God is doing or do you old lenses on? Are you dealing with unbelief, road blocks, insecurities…. Well you're not alone and this is actually a part of us being brought into the new thing. In this episode Margaux shares some of her recent revelation around “returning to “ who we are designed to be vs. “becoming “ who we are designed to be and the work of renewing the mind and removing lenses to fulfill all that we were intended. Through the message of Isaiah 43: 18-19 God reveals 3 keys for us in this time of transition and returning, and orients us to the season we are truly in.We are going TOGETHER: BREATHING UNDERWATER MEMBERSHIPSMore on Breathing Underwater Memberships HEREJoin the Community and Newsletter: HERE Email: margaux@permissiontoreign.comInstagram: @permission_to_reignIntro Music by Coma-Media from PixabayImage by Claire Fischer from UnsplashOleksii Kaplunskyi

"The After Party" is our series at Fusion Christian Church on the book of Acts. Follow along as we explore what happened to the church after Jesus ascended to heaven. In this sermon, Pastor Matt teaches about what caused the early church to explode in growth and why God cares about the numbers.God Cares About the Numbers!Sometimes churches and the people in them become too caught up in the numbers, but the opposite can be just as much a problem. At Fusion Christian Church, we care about how many people attend because each one of those "numbers" represents a person who Jesus died for. God loves people, and by reaching more people we show God's love to more people. If we stop caring about the "numbers" altogether, we limit how many people we can love on God's behalf. We do not want high numbers simply to have them, but because numbers represent real people who need the gospel.A Church that Gives God the Glory Continues to Grow.God draws people to himself when Jesus Christ is lifted up. This means both that Jesus draws people through his death on the cross, and that Christians can help with this. When we glorify our God, we lift up Jesus and point our attention toward him. This helps direct others toward the one who can save them, and the Father draws them into the church.A Unified Church Continues to Grow.Unity does not mean that we agree on everything, it means we agree on the most important things and are gracious in everything else. Many people confuse unity with uniformity, thinking that because Christians are not completely uniform in all things, we are not united. This is not the case. Complete uniformity is usually the sign of a cult group, whereas true unity accommodates a wide range of practices and beliefs. If we believe in "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all" (Eph. 4:5-6) then we have unity on the essentials.A Generous Church Continues to Grow.One thing that united the early church was their willingness to give what they had to provide for others. Generosity is a tangible expression of the love Christians should have for everyone, but most of all for each other. When we give to the church, we help ensure that its needs are provided for. Giving to the local church is a primary way to facilitate this.A Church that Gathers both Corporately and in Small Groups Continues to Grow.The early church would meet regularly both in large and small gatherings. They met daily in homes, but also met in larger groups at the temple. Both types of gatherings are valuable for the health of the church. Those who go only to large meetings and not small groups are unable to develop the close relationships that help bind the church together. Those who only go to small groups and not large meetings miss out on the larger vision of the church.Every person in the church is essential. When you are not active in your church body, not only are you missing out on the church, but the church is missing out on you! You have something to offer God and to offer the church. Don't deprive the rest of the body of Christ of your unique gifts and abilities!

Bearing the Fruit of Christ (audio) David Eells – 4/23/25 Saints, The Lord told me a few days ago that the Man-child and Bride are not quite ready for all He has planned.  He indicated the time would be soon, but they need to “…Behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord.” This is justification by faith and also is how the power to manifest Christ in us comes. 2Co.3:18 But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit. Today I'm going to talk to you about bearing the fruit of perfection in Christ. We have learned that we were sanctified and perfected. (Heb.10:14) For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. We shall be manifested in these things. We receive sanctification and perfection by this position in Christ Jesus. Now we need to cooperate with God to manifest what we've received by faith. (Heb.11:1) Now faith is assurance of [things] hoped for, a conviction of things not seen. We want the evidence to be made manifest in our life so that Christ can live through us in this world. I usually study the Parable of the Sower out of Matthew 13, but I would like us to look at Luke this time. (Luk.8:4) And when a great multitude came together, and they of every city resorted unto him, he spake by a parable: (5) The sower went forth to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden under foot, and the birds of the heaven devoured it. (6) And other fell on the rock; and as soon as it grew, it withered away, because it had no moisture. (7) And other fell amidst the thorns; and the thorns grew with it, and choked it. (8) And other fell into the good ground, and grew, and brought forth fruit a hundredfold. As he said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. (9) And his disciples asked him what this parable might be. (10) And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to the rest in parables; that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.  (11) Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. (12) And those by the way side are they that have heard; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word from their heart, that they may not believe and be saved. (13) And those on the rock [are] they who, when they have heard, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, who for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away. (14) And that which fell among the thorns, these are they that have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of [this] life, and bring no fruit to perfection. So obviously, we're talking about the manifestation of perfection, which is to bring fruit to perfection. Notice, even though they were receiving the seed, they didn't bring the fruit to perfection. (15) And that in the good ground, these are such as in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it fast, and bring forth fruit with patience. These bring forth fruit unto perfection. Glory to God! That's our hope, that the Lord Himself will manifest His fruit in us. It's the seed that brings forth the fruit unto perfection; it's not us. It's the seed, the Word of God in us, that has power. One of the points is that we have to hold it fast, hold fast the seed. We see that the seed is being sown in the heart (verse 11) and the seed is the Word of God. If the heart holds it fast, it will bring forth fruit unto perfection. (12) And those by the way side are they that have heard; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word from their heart, that they may not believe and be saved. Here the Word is not held fast so that it bears fruit; this is a miscarrying womb. The heart is the womb that brings forth the fruit, just like the womb of a woman has to hold fast the seed in order for that seed to come to birth. (1Jn.3:9) Whosoever is begotten (the word “begotten” here is the same word for “born”) of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him…. In other words, it stays, it's being held fast, it “abideth in him.” He cannot sin because he is born of God. So, when the seed abides, it can come to birth, it can bring the fruit to perfection. And we know, since the seed is the Word of God, and Jesus is the Word of God, that the fruit that is born in us is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col.1:27); that is, Christ manifested in His people. We know that we were perfected at the cross, that His life was given for ours, and that we don't live anymore – Christ lives in us by faith. But as we hold fast the promise in the midst of the many trials of riches, temptations, and so on, as we hold on to the Word, that Word will bear fruit. Many times in the trial, our mind wants to revert back to the things of the world. Our mind wants to walk by sight instead of by faith, but in the trial, we have opportunity to hold on to the Word and not turn it loose, so that it bears the same fruit of Jesus Christ in us, the same faith, the same miraculous power, the same sanctifying power, manifested through His saints. When we're in the midst of the trials, we have to hold fast to the Word and cast down everything else. (2Co.10:5) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. That's the whole point: we are to hold fast to the Word and cast down every other word that empowers the curse. We must cast down the seed of the devil, which is his word and thoughts. Cast it down, cast it out of our mind. We only want the one seed that can bring forth the fruit of Christ. That's the only seed we want to accept and we have to hold fast to it, because the devil is seeking to take away the seed that's been sown in our heart. He desperately has to do that, or we will bear fruit and it will be too late. We have to “hold fast the confession of our hope that it waver not.” When you're in the fiery trial and you know what the promise is, remember that promise is the seed that you have to hold to in order to bear the fruit. We don't want to have a spiritually-miscarrying womb. Remember, Jesus said, The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life (Joh.6:63). Any other word besides the Word of God is also spirit and is also life, but not the spirit and life of Christ. We don't want another life. We don't want to have “strange children,” as the prophet spoke: (Hos.5:7) “They have borne strange children”. They have to look like the father. If you have a child who looks strangely different from the father, you wonder, “Now, whose seed is this?” It wasn't the seed of the father. Well, so it is today. We read the Scriptures in order to become familiar with the Father, Jesus said, He that hath seen me hath seen the Father (Joh.14:9). In other words, Jesus manifested His Father. He was a seed which was in line with His Father, and we have to also be such a seed. The fruit in us has to also be a seed, which is in line with our Father's Word. There is an example in Leviticus 19 that points this out pretty well: (Lev.19:19) Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with two kinds of seed…. In other words, each seed brings forth after its own kind; you don't want a mixture here. I remember my father-in-law told me one time about how he planted a row of hot peppers too close to a row of bell peppers and his bell peppers became hot. I can imagine, in some cases, hot bell peppers might be pretty handy, but if you want bell peppers, you want bell peppers. What the Father is looking for is Jesus. He's not interested in anything else. He has planted that seed in His field and He wants Christ. (Joh.3:13) … No one hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended out of heaven…. The Lord wants Jesus, so we don't want two kinds of seed sown in our field, because this is going to be a mixture; it's not going to be the fruit of Christ. Any mixture takes away from the fruit of Christ. (Lev.19:19) … Neither shall there come upon thee a garment of two kinds of stuff mingled together. That's a good example of “putting on the works of Christ” along with putting on our own works. “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to [fulfil] the lusts [thereof]” (Rom.13:14). The problem is making sure that the seed is the true seed of the Father, which is the Word of God, making sure that we hold fast to the seed, and making sure that we don't have a spiritually-miscarrying womb. Leviticus 15 speaks about that in another verse: (Lev.15:19) And if a woman have an issue, [and] her issue in her flesh be blood (notice that it doesn't say “in her body”; it purposely says, “in her flesh”), she shall be in her impurity seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. This is a parable and, therefore, types and shadows. There's nothing unclean about the natural thing that this is speaking about. But the spiritual revelation here is that it's very unclean. (1Co.10:11) Now these things happened unto them by way of example; and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come. So what we see here is something concerning a miscarrying womb, because of the issue of blood, where what's in the blood represents our nature. (Lev.17:11) For the life of the flesh is in the blood…. The life, the nature, the soul (“soul” is sometimes translated in the New Testament as “nature”) has been passed on to a person through the blood of their parents. This nature of the “old man” is our enemy; it's the whole problem we're fighting against. It's struggling with us and there's a war going on, but the Blood of Jesus represents His life, His nature, His soul, and bearing fruit is to bear the fruit of the Spirit and soul of Christ in us. That is what the Word manifesting itself in us is all about. We see here that, if a woman has an issue of blood in her flesh, this is impurity. Why? Because the blood of the old life washes away the seed, and the seed doesn't bear fruit. The woman is not fertile. In fact, it says here that she will be impure for seven days. She's not going to be fertile until the eighth day. The eighth day is a new beginning. So in a spiritual way (the verse is not talking about natural women), the “women” spoken of refers to sects and divisions of God's people, as Scripture speaks about them. (Isa.4:1) And seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name…. These “women” are the seven churches doing their own thing. Women can also be local churches. (2Ti.3:5) Holding a form of godliness, but having denied the power thereof: from these also turn away. (6) For of these are they that creep into houses, and take captive silly women laden with sins, led away by divers lusts, (7) ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. So they're studying, studying, studying. They continue receiving seed, but they're never coming to the knowledge of the truth. It happens all the time. “Silly women,” as the Scripture calls them, these sects of God's people who don't grow up in Him are led captive by these men making disciples of themselves. (Lev.15:19) … She shall be in her impurity seven days…. (Mat.15:6) … Ye have made void (“of no effect”) the word of God because of your tradition. We see from this that the blood of the woman represents her carnal nature, by which she rejects the seed of Christ (the Word of God), the seed that is to bring forth the life and nature and fruit of the Husband. The Jews were doing just that. They were like a menstruating woman, who were not going to bring forth fruit, because their old nature had determined that they were going to walk after their traditions – those things that were pleasing to their natural life and to their flesh. Therefore, when the Word of God comes along, which sometimes is crucifying to the “old man,” they reject it. It gets washed away by their own nature. Jesus rebuked them and He told them, Not that which entereth into the mouth defileth the man; but that which proceedeth out of the mouth, this defileth the man (Mat.15:11). Their thinking was coming out of their mouth. That was what was defiling them because they were rejecting the true Word of God. They were making of no effect the Word of God by their tradition, making the seed ineffectual in bringing forth any fruit. (Lev.15:19) And if a woman have an issue, [and] her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be in her impurity seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. Note that the word used here for “unclean” is the same word for “defiled.” Remember Revelation 14:4: “the firstfruits unto God and unto the Lamb.” It says they “were not defiled with women.” This is talking about them not being defiled with those sects of God's people who are rejecting the true Seed of God. If we're not holding fast the Word, then we're washing it away with our own unclean, fallen nature. (Lev.17:11) For the life of the flesh is in the blood…. As we read on down, we see: (Lev.15:24) And if any man lie with her, and her impurity be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days…. Well, we know who it is who “lieth” with these women. It is those who are supposed to be sowing the Seed of the Lord. Paul said, For though ye have ten thousand tutors in Christ, yet [have ye] not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I begat you through the gospel (1Co.4:15). In other words, Paul sowed the Seed of the Lord God, and it brought forth the fruit of Jesus in those early disciples, and so on. But we see here that those who lie with the woman who was not willing to give up her old life, to give fertile ground to the seed, then that man is unclean, too. (2Ti.3:6) For of these are they that creep into houses, and take captive silly women laden with sins, led away by divers lusts, (7) ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Jesus said the same thing, “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to the rest in parables; that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand” (Luk.8:10). Jesus wasn't going to sow the seed in that infertile ground. He wasn't going to give the true Word of God to those people who had no respect for it, and who would just wash it away, like throwing pearls before swine. It's that same way today. The true Word of God will not be received by many apostate Christians, and a person wastes their time trying to give it to them. Those apostate Christians will disrespect God's Word and will cast it to the ground. So the woman with an issue is going to stay in her impurity and the man who sows seed in her is going to stay in his impurity seven days. These people have the unscriptural idea that they're going to escape by flying away and miss the seven days of the Tribulation. They're not going to do it. (Lev.15:28) But if she be cleansed of her issue, then she shall number to herself seven days, and after that she shall be clean. We're coming to the time when people need to be cleansed so that at the end of the seven days (the seven-year Tribulation), they'll be ready to meet the Lord. (Lev.15:29) And on the eighth day she shall take unto her two turtle-doves, or two young pigeons, and bring them unto the priest, to the door of the tent of meeting. (30) And the priest shall offer the one for a sin-offering, and the other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make atonement for her before the Lord for the issue of her uncleanness. (31) Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness, that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is in the midst of them. Now we see here that we're talking about a defiling of a tabernacle, a body of God's people, a temporary temple of God's people. This tabernacle is being defiled because they've cast the Word of God to the ground. They have been caught up in the traditions of men, so that their own opinions and their own ideas are more important to them than receiving the Seed of the Word. I'm reminded of this: (Isa.32:9) Rise up, ye women that are at ease, [and] hear my voice; ye careless daughters, give ear unto my speech. (10) For days beyond a year shall ye be troubled, ye careless women; for the vintage shall fail, the ingathering shall not come. The ingathering harvest (the Rapture) that they're all expecting to be at the beginning of the seven days won't come until the end of the seven days. Why? Because they're defiled. The vintage did not bear fruit. (11) Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones; strip you, and make you bare (in other words, take off those mixed garments), and gird [sackcloth] upon your loins. And when does He say they are going to bear fruit? (15) Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be esteemed as a forest. The wilderness is called the Tribulation in Revelation chapters 12 and 17. The “firstfruits” in Revelation 14 “were not defiled with women.”  So we see these women who are defiled, have to go through the Great Tribulation in order to be purified. God's plan is going to be fulfilled. For those of you who are walking undefiled now, that's great, and praise be to God when we come to respect God's Word above our own thinking and the traditions of men. It's going to take a pure Word. Jesus said to these people, “ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world” (Joh.8:23). We can't have the mixture of two seeds in our field. There can only be one seed that is not of this world and brings forth the fruit of Jesus Christ. Remember the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares? The word there for “seed” is the word sperma, letting us know this is not just talking about plants here. The Word, sperma, is what's going to bring forth this wheat. When a person sows good seed in their field, the Lord's sperma is there. Who sowed those tares among the wheat? Jesus said, “an enemy hath done this” (Mat.13:28). There's not supposed to be two seeds sown in the same field. The field, here is in the Kingdom of God on this earth. But in our life, it's up to us to make sure we cast down the bad seed, which is, “imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God” (2Co.10:5). Receive only and hold fast to the good seed because the good seed will bring forth the birth. In Luke 8, we're told, (Luk.8:15) … that in the good ground, these are such as in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it fast, and bring forth fruit with patience. I pointed out that in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, the Lord used the word sperma. The sperma only brings forth after the nature of the Father, so that's using a human analogy. Jesus does the same thing again in this chapter: (21) But he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these that hear the word of God, and do it. Jesus also said, (Mat.7:24) Every one therefore that heareth these words of mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man, who built his house upon the rock. And He said that the wind and the storm and the rain that comes will not tear down that house because it's built on the Rock (verse 25). So we see that to be Jesus' brother, we must be from the same Father and through the same “mother.” And to be His mother, we must bear the same fruit. We must bear the fruit of Jesus Christ. His fruit must be born in us. We must hold fast to the Seed of the Word of God, so that His fruit will be born in us. When the disciples came to Him and they said, “Thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to see thee” (Luk.8:20), He responded, (Mar.3:33) “Who is my mother and my brethren?” He always wanted to bring things to a spiritual level. (34) And looking round on them that sat round about him, he saith, Behold, my mother and my brethren! (35) For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. We have another example in Luke 11 of a woman on a natural level who came to Jesus: (Luk.11:27) And it came to pass, as he said these things, a certain woman out of the multitude lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the breasts which thou didst suck. (28) But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it. This woman could have been a Mariolater, of Mariolatry in our day. It was important to her to know who the physical mother of Jesus was, but He said, “No, that's not important,” because God could have picked anybody to do that, in that she was the mother of His flesh, not the mother of His spiritual “man.” The important thing is that this parable is fulfilled in our day. Who should bring forth Christ now? Those who hear the Word of God and keep it. So when we think about the mother of Jesus, Jesus applies this to us. In Isaiah 7, we see this parable: (Isa.7:14) Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign (The word “sign” here is owth and it means “omen,” which is a sign of something to come. Now this is the sign of something to come.): behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son…. How is it that Mary was a sign of something to come? Most importantly, she was a virgin. There was no seed of man; it was the seed of God that brought forth the fruit of Jesus Christ in her. In Revelation 12, we see what appears to be a virtuous woman with the 12 stars around her head, standing on the moon (in other words, reflecting the light of the Son), and she's clothed with the sun (she has put on the Lord Jesus Christ), and she's bringing forth, or birthing, the “man-child.” So, that woman must be a virgin. Just to fulfill the type and the shadow, she has to be a group of people who are rejecting the word of man. They're rejecting the seed, or sperma, of man. She must be a virgin. So, therefore, in these end-times, at the time of the birthing of the man-child, there is a group of people who are rejecting the seed of men. There are two things about that little parable in Revelation 12: one, I think, that is individual and the other that is corporate. Each one of us, as the mother of Christ, must be rejecting the seed of man: what man has to say, what man has to think, what this man in whom we walk thinks and believes with his sight and with his feelings, and so on. We're to reject those things in order to believe, to stand on, and to hold fast to only the Word of God, so that it bears fruit. Corporately, there is a body of people who are at this time rejecting the words of man, the seeds of man, and they will bring forth a corporate man-child who is the firstfruits of those who walk in the steps of Jesus Christ in the coming days. We see here that this sign is that they have to be a virgin: (14) … A virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (God with us). Jesus wasn't just with them; He's just as much with us. He is still Immanuel, God with us. In fact, every Christian carries Jesus, as God, with them, because they're all pregnant with Jesus. They have all been pregnant with Jesus because of the Word of God, to which they highly respect and hold fast. They're going to bring forth His fruit. In Luke 1, we see the story of Mary, which is that sign. The angel Gabriel came and appeared to Mary, saying to her, (Luk.1:28) … Hail, thou that art highly favored (or, indued with grace), the Lord [is] with thee. This is very similar to what we saw about “Immanuel” or “God with us.” “The Lord” here is the word kurios, which is “lord” or “master,” and is used all through the New Testament. The Will of the Lord (Who is “God with us”) is being fulfilled through the type and shadow of Mary in His church and in His people, because everyone who hears and does the Word of God is like Mary. They are like His mother. Then Gabriel says, (30) … Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor (or grace) with God. Mary wasn't the person that a lot of Mariolatry religions want to make her out to be. She had to have grace; she had to be saved; she had to be filled with the Spirit, and she had other children after Jesus, after she fulfilled this type. It goes on: (31) And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb (this is the Word of the Lord going through the angel Gabriel, God's leading messenger angel), and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS (which originally meant “YHWH is salvation”). He is “Immanuel” – “God with us” (Isaiah 7:14) but the promise to Mary, as the mother of Jesus, was that she would bear the fruit of Jesus. This was the promise, and that's the promise to us, too. The Bible says the same thing about us, that we will bear His fruit: (32) He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. Once again, a firstfruit is coming forth in this day who will sit in the throne of David. It is Jesus Christ in a body of David, just like it happened in Luke at that time. (33) And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. (34) And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Well, there it is. We see she had not known a man; it was not a man's seed that would bring forth this Son of God, obviously. Each seed brings forth after its own kind. If it's the seed of man, the only thing she could have would be man. Jesus said, “Ye are from beneath; I am from above” (Joh.8:23). He is born from above. No seed of man can bring forth anything from above, and so, she knew not a man. She was a virgin. (Luk.1:35) And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power (dunamis) of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also [it says in the Numerics, “that which is born”] shall be called holy, the Son of God. That's a better translation than in the ASV text, which reads, (35) … wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God. (36) And behold, Elisabeth thy kinswoman, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that was called barren. The next verse is very enlightening, especially in the original wording, which says, (37) For no word from God shall be void of power. You see, Mary had a Word from God, a Word that by itself could bring forth in her the Son of God. Now I know some translations say, “Nothing shall be impossible with God,” but the word here is “no word (rhema) from God shall be void of power (paI dunateo).” “Impossible” does not represent the original wording there. Everything that God says has the power; it is the Seed that has the power to bring forth itself in a fertile womb. So the Word of God in our heart has the power to bring forth Jesus Christ in us. It is His sperma. It has the power. All we have to do is give it fertile ground. We are Mary if we give the Word of God, which comes down out of heaven, which is not from man, fertile ground. And what did Mary say? (38) And Mary said, Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word…. In other words, she was in agreement with the Word of God. “Let it be so, Lord.” “Just as You say.” “I agree with that.” “I accept that, Lord.” Many people today are just washing the seed away. They argue with the Word of God, thinking that they have a right to their own opinion. We don't have a right to have our own opinion – we're dead. Dead men don't have their own opinions. We died with Christ and He now lives in us. We have His opinion, so believe what He says. Mary was in agreement with the Word that came from the Lord. Every word from God is powerful. It has the power to bring forth what it says. (38) … And the angel departed from her. She said, “be it unto me according to thy” rhema, and he “departed from her.” (39) And Mary arose in these days and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah; (40) and entered into the house of Zacharias and saluted Elisabeth. (41) And it came to pass, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit; (42) and she lifted up her voice with a loud cry, and said, Blessed [art] thou among women, and blessed [is] the fruit of thy womb. And the same is true today: blessed is the fruit of the womb of this natural life that brings forth the fruit of Christ. (43) And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come unto me? (44) For behold, when the voice of thy salutation came into mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. (45) And blessed [is] she that believed; for there shall be a fulfilment of the things which have been spoken to her from the Lord. The things that were spoken to her from the Lord, the Word of God, shall not be void of power. And, because she believed, there was a fulfillment of the words of God – all the words of God. Many Christians believe that these words of God are just naturally going to be fulfilled. However, they won't be fulfilled if a person doesn't have faith. The Word of God has power, but Mary had to agree with what was promised to her by the Word of the Lord: (45) And blessed [is] she that believed; for there shall be a fulfilment of the things which have been spoken to her from the Lord. Yes, the Lord says, For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified (Heb.10:14), but there may never be a fulfillment of that for us, unless we believe, as Mary did. Belief gives fertile ground to the seed, which will bear fruit when a person agrees with it, accepts it and walks in it by faith. We fight a battle with the devil, who has an ally, the old carnal nature, working with him and against us. The devil can steal the seed because he has agreement in the carnal nature, which washes the seed away. The carnal nature won't let that seed be held fast, so that it can bear fruit. We're like Mary only if we hold to the Word of God, as 2 Thessalonians says: (1:10) When he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed (because our testimony unto you was believed) in that day. Why? “[O]ur testimony unto you was believed.” Jesus is coming to be glorified in His people because that testimony of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” will be believed “in that day.” This is talking about the time immediately before the coming of the Lord; look at the text. So, right before the coming of the Lord, God's people are once again going to believe in the Gospel that has been spoken to the “woman” church. Remember what Jesus said: (Mat.9:29) … According to your faith be it done unto you. (Mat.8:13) … As thou hast believed, [so] be it done unto thee. Do you believe that the seed of the promise of the Word of God can bring forth Jesus Christ in you? If you do, it will happen. We hear all the time in the churches that we can't be perfect, but there's no such verse in Scripture. We're going to read over and over in the Bible what it has to say about perfection before we're through with this teaching. What we have to agree with is, “Okay, Lord. You said it and I believe it. If, at the cross, You perfected me forever, as Hebrews 10 says, then I accept that Word. Be it unto Thy handmaid, according to the Word of the Lord.” Believe it; receive it. If God says it, it's yours. When you believe it, (Luk.1:45) Blessed [is] she that believed; for there shall be a fulfilment of the things which have been spoken to her from the Lord. We believe it. We receive it. In Colossians, we read, (Col.1:25) Whereof I was made a minister, according to the dispensation (or, the word is actually “stewardship”) of God which was given me to you-ward, to fulfil the word of God. In other words, even though God has made this promise, He sends forth ministers (a messenger) to share the truth of this revelation with us, just like the messenger who came to Mary. And it's the same message of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Now, when we believe that, blessed are we who believe, for there shall be a fulfillment of the things which have been spoken to us from the Lord. Some people say, “Well, I don't believe that. We believe we're sinners saved by grace.” Now that's not in the Bible! That's a tradition. The Bible says, “He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Heb.10:14). “Sanctified” means “separated from the world.” If we are separated from the world, then we believe what God says: (Col.1:25) … (A stewardship) of God, which was given me to you-ward, to fulfil the word of God, (26) [even] the mystery which hath been hid for ages and generations; but now hath it been manifested to his saints. So, in the time of Paul, the wonderful revelation that he was about to share was made known. And, though they lost it shortly after that, in our day, once again, it is being made known. And what is that wonderful revelation? (27) To whom God was pleased to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. We have no hope of glory outside of Christ in us. The seed brings forth the fruit of Jesus Christ. The part of us that was original, this old man, this old life, is just the dirt in which the seed was sown, but the seed is what brings forth Christ. Each of us must hold fast the seed and not be a miscarrying womb. (27) … Christ in you, the hope of glory: (Col.1:28) whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ. In other words, this is talking about manifestation. We preach the wonderful mystery of “Christ in you,” the holding fast of the seed of the Word, as the mother of the Son of God – being manifested in us and soon to be seen of men. “Present every man perfect in Christ.” Some may say, “But I thought we were already perfect?” Yes, we are by faith, and now Scripture is talking about manifesting that faith. Faith is the substance of the thing hoped for while the evidence is not yet seen, so faith gives us this substance, as a position in Christ, until the manifestation comes. It's like believing for a healing – it's a whole lot better to get one. The faith is just a meantime substance. God wants us to manifest that healing, that deliverance, that provision to us, and that is Christ in us! That is what we hold fast, what we're not shaken away from. We're not going to let the devil steal it from us. It's our right in Jesus Christ. Amen! Paul goes on to say, (29) whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily. The Lord is working in us to bring this to pass, as the Lord was working through Paul, His minister, to share this wonderful mystery, this revelation with the disciples in those days. Now we're entering into a time when God is going to share this wonderful revelation in these days with His people. He's going to work mightily through His ministers and He's going to work mightily through His people to manifest Christ in them. It's a wonderful revelation and it's a wonderful fulfillment! Christ is once again going to walk in this earth because God's people are going to believe. (2Th.1:10) When he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marvelled at in all them that believed (because our testimony unto you was believed) in that day. Paul was saying that he didn't think it was completely believed in his day: “Our testimony unto you was believed … in that day.” In other words, God is going to share special grace with His people to believe once again this mystery of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Glory to God! We are the mother of Christ! We hear and do the Word of God. We're not hearers deluding ourselves, beholding our natural face in the mirror: (2Co.3:18) But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit. We accept from the beginning that Christ now lives in us, that we no longer live. We accept it by faith, and because we accept it by faith, God says it is going to be manifested. So glory be to God! This is the perfection that we have in Christ and it will be manifested through us as we abide in Christ. This is “that perfection.” Also, we have this word: (Luk.8:14) And that which fell among the thorns, these are they that have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of [this] life, and bring no fruit to perfection. The word “perfection” here is a strange word not used anywhere else in the Bible. It's the word telesphoreo. There's a common word for “perfection” – teleios – but this word is telesphoreo and it means “to bring to perfection” or “end in view.” In other words, we have to see the end from the beginning. We have to call these things that be not as though they were. We're “beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord” (to look in the mirror and see Jesus; that's having farsightedness) and “are transformed into” that “same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.” And Paul prefaces that with, “But we all, with unveiled face,” so this telesphoreo we see from the beginning. We're seeing it, accepting it and we're walking toward it, and we're going to receive it by faith. Isn't it awesome? This is God's promise to us! Oh, praise be to God! Listen, saints, get into the Word of God. It's the only thing that brings forth Jesus. Love the Lord. Don't be distracted. Cast down the words of man.

Recorded March 9, 2025 Morning

Send us a textToday we celebrate Let's Talk with Sanctuary's 100th EPISODE!!! As we launch into a brand-new year, we see that there are some challenges before the Church, and understandably so. Scripturally, we know it's slated to get a little tougher, the closer we get to the coming of our Lord and Savior. Spiritual leaders must prepare themselves, and rally others, to be ready for Christ's return. So, what does it take to sustain until the end? And how does the minister of the Gospel prepare the way, cultivate an environment where the Spirit of God can do what He desires, and remain steadfast in our convictions, belief systems, and daily living in a way that pleases God? Let's talk about it all! In this episode, host Bridgette Tomlin welcomes her husband, Chresten Tomlin, back to the podcast to talk about a variety of things—subject matter that makes up the couple's conversations on the back patio, hot tea and coffee in hand, solving all the world's problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------Connect with today's featured guest, Chresten Tomlin:Website: www.ctministries.comEmail: ctministries98@gmail.comFacebook: @chresten.tomlin Facebook: @tomlinministriesFeatured:Earn a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card by giving Let's Talk with Sanctuary a Rating + Review on Apple podcasts!Launch or attend a Let's Connect gathering in 2025!Join Sanctuary's private Facebook group for ministry wives.Follow Sanctuary on Instagram @sanctuarym2mwMany thanks to our host, Bridgette Tomlin, and engineer Justin Lynn of Justin Lynn Music. Learn how you can capitalize on all Justin can do for your small business, church, or ministry by clicking here!

John 1:19-34,19 And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” 20 He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” 21 And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” 22 So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 23 He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,' as the prophet Isaiah said.”24 (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) 25 They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” 26 John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, 27 even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” 28 These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.29 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.' 31 I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” 32 And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33 I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' 34 And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” Today we're gonna talk a lot about John the Baptist, and I'll admit it feels a little bit strange because John the Baptist was so much not about himself. I think that if John the Baptist were here he'd tell us to Hurry up, move on, don't spend too much time on him — But we're still gonna talk about him because the Bible talks about him, and here in the Gospel of John he's not just in Chapter 1 but he also shows up in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 and Chapter 10. John the Baptist is an important person in this Gospel, so we're gonna talk about him, but true to the wishes of John the Baptist, I'm gonna try to keep the part about him brief and I'll end with why he matters for us as a local church in St. Paul, in the year 2025. So for the sermon, I got two things about John the Baptist and one thing about us. Father, thank you for your Holy Spirit and for the Holy Scriptures. And thank you that as your people we can gather together for worship. As your children, this morning we have come eager and expectant. We want to hear from you. Speak our hearts, we pray, in Jesus's name, amen. First thing about John the Baptist …1. John the Baptist is a bridge. Remember the first time John the Baptist is mentioned is back in verse 6. Almost out of nowhere verse 6 says:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.The purpose of this mention in verse 6 is the same as the purpose of the mention in verse 15:John the Baptist is the one who brings the news of the eternal Word into history. Remember this Gospel starts in verses 1–5 with this tremendous explanation of the Word — the Word is God, is life, is light — and this is deep and wondrous and it stretches our minds, and then John the apostle, the narrator, he interrupts this depth with verse 6 to tell us that God sent a man named John … and John came to tell us about this Word. Verse 14 picks back up the wonder of this Word, telling us that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” — and we saw this last week: this is a profound statement — this is dense theology; it's full of Old Testament allusions — and then, Boom, again, there's John in verse 15! Same guy from verse 6! John bore witness about this Word made flesh.Mining the FitAnd I know that in some of our English translations verse 15 is put in a parenthesis, but it doesn't have to be. Verse 15 actually fits nicely with what comes after it and I want y'all all to see this. So look with me. Chapter 1, verse 15 … 1:15.Verse 15:John bore witness about him [Jesus], and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.' ” 16 For [or because] from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. “Grace upon grace” — now what's that mean? Well, let's keep reading …Verse 17:“For [or because] the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”Track with me here, okay? Verses 15–17 are a series of explanations: Verse 17 explains verse 16 explains verse 15. Verse 17 is a contrast between the law (which came through Moses) and grace and truth (which came through Jesus). These are two different moments in the history of redemption: The ‘law/Moses' is a stand-in for the old covenant; and ‘grace and truth in Jesus' is the new covenant. And that explains that phrase “grace upon grace.” Another way to translate that little preposition “upon” is to say “in the place of.”John is saying: From the fullness of Jesus we have all received grace in the place of grace, because the law (which was one grace) came through Moses; but grace and truth (a better grace) came through Jesus Christ.John is saying in verse 16 that in Jesus we have received new covenant grace in the place of old covenant grace.And remember verse 16 is supposed to explain verse 15 about John the Baptist. But how?Well, it's because in the movement from old to new, John is the bridge. A Foot on Both SidesWhen John stepped onto the scene of what became the First Century, there's no doubt that he was an Old Testament prophet. It had been a long time since Israel had seen a prophet, but John was sent by God as a prophet to Israel with a message. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John the Baptist is this “Elijah figure” who was prophesied in the Book of Malachi — the other Gospel writers tell us that John the Baptist literally dressed like Elijah. He was an old school prophet leading a Jewish renewal movement. Even within Islam, they recognize John the Baptist as a prophet. Historically, this is a fact. Josephus, the Jewish historian, described John the Baptist as a moral-political troublemaker — which is prophet material.So John the Baptist was this Old Testament prophet and he came at an extremely important historical juncture. It's like John the Baptist has got one foot in the Old Testament and one foot in the New. He's got one foot in Promise and the other in Fulfillment. Imagine it like this: Say you're going on a hike. We've got some hikers in here, right?You're going on this hike, and it's a long one — there's a lot of ground to cover. It starts with a nice garden, but then there's a big river (or two) to cross, there's a high mountain, there's a desert, at times it gets really dark and quiet, and kinda spooky. There are some signs along the way pointing you forward, but this terrain goes on and on (for 39 books).But then you come to the edge of this thing, and there's like a ditch between you and the other side. And you look over at the other side and it's full of color, and they're having a party over there — it's a 27-book long party! But you're not exactly sure how to get from where you are to there. And that's when “There's a man sent from God whose name was John” — he's standing where you are but then he's able to reach one foot over to the other side and he says, “Come on!” He becomes a bridge.John the Baptist is the biblical bridge from the old to the new. That's what he is: a bridge. That's John the Baptist as a category. The second thing to know is that …2. John the Baptist is a voice.Verse 19 brings this all down to the ground even more. This marks the beginning of the official testimony of John the Baptist, and it starts with questions. John the Baptist was making a splash; he was gaining a following within the Jewish world, and the Jewish leaders wanted to know what's going on, so they send a delegation of men to look into it (we learn in verse 24 that it's the Pharisees who sent this delegation), and that's important because the Pharisees were a sect of Jews who were looking for the Messiah. They were devoted to the Hebrew Bible and they knew it said a Messiah would come, so they have that anticipation, and it's reflected in the questions these men ask John. They ask five questions and he responds to each one. That's verses 19–23, but I want to situate these verses within the whole of Chapter 1. Altogether, in Chapter 1, the identity of John the Baptist is referred to eight times (either by himself or by John the apostle). Seven of the eight mentions of John the Baptist are either negative or a deflection. The overwhelming majority of the times John the Baptist is talked about it's either about who he's not or it's about how great Jesus is — He ranks before me! I'm not worthy to untie his shoe! The only time we actually see a positive statement about John's identity is verse 23. Y'all look at verse 23.Just a VoiceThe delegation that's asking him questions basically gives up. In verse 22 they say, Okay, look, you keep telling us who you're not, but we gotta tell our leaders who you are. What do you say about yourself? (What a question! We're gonna come back to that!)But look what John the Baptist says, verse 23:23 He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,' as the prophet Isaiah said.”John the Baptist tells us that he's getting this from Isaiah, and we can turn back to Isaiah 40, verse 3, and we can read where Isaiah says this. Isaiah 40, verse 3,3 A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”John the Baptist is saying: That's me. I am the voice. Y'all know that singing competition show called The Voice? …It really has nothing to do with this. Except that, as I understand it, when that show started, the difference between that singing competition and all the others was that the judges could not see the contestants, they could only hear them. The genius was that they were de-emphasizing physical appearance, and focusing completely on the sound of the voice. So it's called “The Voice” as in just the voice. And that's what John means here — except that he's de-emphasizing his person entirely! He's solely focused on what he has to say. The voice is defined by its witness to the word. The Word is what he wants you to hear!So hear him — The Word, Jesus Christ, he is before me! John says …He's higher than me! I'm not even worthy to touch his feet! He is that great. Behold, he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! He's gonna baptize with the Holy Spirit. John is saying that Jesus is bringing the kingdom of God — the promised end-time kingdom, where the Spirit is poured out, where God judges and saves — Jesus is bringing that here. So you better get ready! All of y'all better get ready!Preparing the WayThat's what Isaiah was talking about when he said a voice cries “prepare the way of the Lord.”He doesn't mean prepare the way for the Lord as in Jesus's way to us needs to be prepared. Isaiah is taking about our way to Jesus. Jesus doesn't need any help. We're the ones who need the help. In the context of Isaiah 40, Isaiah is prophesying about the end of Israel's exile. He's saying the road from exile to restoration should be made straight. Clear the way. Level the ground. Make the pathway from a dark exile to a restored Zion CLEAR — he's not talking about how the Messiah gets to us, but it's about how we get to the Messiah. That was the mission of John the Baptist. He was a voice — just a voice — sent for our sake. He's a bridge and he's a voice — two things about John the Baptist. Now one final thing about us. 3. We should be like John the Baptist.Within all of redemptive history, John the Baptist is the model witness to Jesus Christ. He's the paragon that every witness to Jesus thereafter is supposed to look to. That's why he matters to us as a local church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2025.We want to have a voice like his, and there are two things especially that standout. These are two things from the example of John the Baptist that I pray would be true of us. 1. We should clear the way for people to get to Jesus. And I'm thinking first corporately: Cities Church — are we clearing the way for people to meet Jesus or are we getting in the way?That's a question worth asking. Jesus is the cause of our existence. We are here by him and for him, and he's everything to us. And we want more of him. We want more of him for ourselves and we want these cities to have more of him through us. Corporately, we want Jesus to take our utmost — all that we've got, all we can give — we want him to take our utmost for his highest. We're a church committed to his fame. We want him to be impossible to ignore in the cities. We want people to know Jesus. Amen?So are we doing that? Are we helping people know Jesus? What about people who currently don't know him? Does our being a church make any difference for the people in these Twin Cities who don't know Jesus?That's a question for our church corporately, but what about you as an individual Christian? Does your life — does the way you live, the way you work, the way you interact with neighbors and others — does your life forge a path for people to get to Jesus or does it put obstacles in the way?Hey, let's be like John the Baptist!Let's make straight — in this 21st century post-Christian land — let's make straight a highway to our God! Every valley lifted up, every mountain and hill made low, uneven ground made level, rough places made plain — let us resolve, altogether and as individuals, to do everything we can to clear the way to Jesus, not be in the way.2. We should remember it's Jesus people must get to, not us. I'll say it like this: we want to clear the way for people to get to Jesus while also remembering that we're not Jesus. This gets back to that amazing question in verse 22. They asked John the Baptist: “What do you say about yourself?”This is the question: how do you understand who you are? Everybody has some kind of self-understanding, so what is ours as a church? What do we think of ourselves as a church and what would we say about ourselves if asked?Well look, the first thing John the Baptist says when he's asked this question is “I am not the Christ.” Don't rush past that. This is really important. It is absolutely essential to know that in the work of being a witness it is not yourself you are pointing to. You need to know that right from the start. If you're planting a church, you need to know that. And I can't think of a better time to remember this than on our 10th birthday, which is today (we're gonna celebrate next Sunday, but it was this Sunday, ten years ago, when we first gathered to worship as a church). We've been doing this ten years. Ten years. And ten years is a milestone, because now we're way past imposter syndrome. We feel pretty legit, and maybe we stand a little straighter now. Maybe we can start to think, Hmm, look at us. Maybe we feel a little increase in our self-understanding. STOP IT. Don't go there. Remember who we are and why we're here. It's not for ourselves. The goal is not our comfort. It's not that people would know us. Hey, we are all about Jesus. Who the Twin Cities need is Jesus Christ, not Cities Church. Jesus must increase, we must decrease. We show him. We point to him. We clear the way for people to get to Jesus. Clearing the WayAnd I want to end like that: if you're a guest with us this morning, or if you're here and you don't know Jesus, I want to tell you about him. Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came to this world as man to reveal and redeem. He came to show us what God is like, and he came to reconcile us back into a relationship with God. The short way of saying it is that Jesus came to save sinners, which is all of us. We were condemned because of our sin, but Jesus went to the cross in our place: took our sin upon himself, he suffered the punishment we deserved. He was crucified, dead, and buried, and then on the third day he rose from the grave in victory. Jesus defeated sin and death, and now in Jesus forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. If you turn away from trying to be your own savior, and if you put your faith in Jesus, he will set you free. He will make you alive. You will become a son or daughter of God — not because you've earned it, but because of what Jesus has done. So trust him. I'm trying to clear the way right now. If you've never put your faith in Jesus, put your faith in him now. Say to him: Jesus, I can't save myself and I'm done trying. You died and rose to save me, and I trust in you. Put your faith in Jesus. And if you have, if you are a Christian, we now come to this Table to remember what he did. The TableAt the Lord's Table, the bread represents the broken body of Jesus, and the cup represents his blood. Together, this is a symbol of his sacrificial death for us. So when we eat the bread and drink the cup, we are saying This is our hope. We have been united to Jesus by faith, and we eat and drink to give him thanks. So if you are a Christian this morning, if you have put your faith in Jesus, we invite you with us to this table.

The birth of Christ occurred under the noses of and in the presence of many people, and yet so many of those people missed it. The innkeeper missed it. The incarnation and birth of the Son of God, one of the most significant events in salvation history, occurred near or even on his own property, and yet he missed it. Maybe he was too busy with travelers or too concerned with the stuff of earth, and he missed the birth of the eternal king. The religious leaders knew all the prophecies concerning Christ, and yet when he came, they missed it. They weren’t looking for a Savior because they didn’t think they needed a Savior. In the coming days, we will celebrate the coming of Christ who died for our sins and provided salvation, and yet so many people will miss it. Maybe like the innkeeper, they are too caught up in the earthly business of life. Maybe like the religious leaders, they miss the celebration of the Savior’s birth, because they don’t think they need a Savior. What about you? We are in a similar position today when it comes to waiting for Christ. Will we be like Simeon and Anna in Luke 2:21-38? Waiting in faith for the promises of God to be fulfilled? Do we even know what the promises are? Are we walking in the Spirit and clinging to Scripture? I pray you will join us this weekend for worship and next week for one of our Christmas Eve services. Corporately and prayerfully, we will turn our attention to God’s Word. We will ask the Spirit of God to open our eyes, hearts and ears to His truth that we might grow in our anticipation for Christ. That, like Simeon and Anna, we would wait upon the Lord, watch for the Lord, and walk in the Spirit as we anticipate the blessed appearing of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. The joy of seeing Him will be inexpressible!

The birth of Christ occurred under the noses of and in the presence of many people, and yet so many of those people missed it. The innkeeper missed it. The incarnation and birth of the Son of God, one of the most significant events in salvation history, occurred near or even on his own property, and yet he missed it. Maybe he was too busy with travelers or too concerned with the stuff of earth, and he missed the birth of the eternal king. The religious leaders knew all the prophecies concerning Christ, and yet when he came, they missed it. They weren’t looking for a Savior because they didn’t think they needed a Savior. In the coming days, we will celebrate the coming of Christ who died for our sins and provided salvation, and yet so many people will miss it. Maybe like the innkeeper, they are too caught up in the earthly business of life. Maybe like the religious leaders, they miss the celebration of the Savior’s birth, because they don’t think they need a Savior. What about you? We are in a similar position today when it comes to waiting for Christ. Will we be like Simeon and Anna in Luke 2:21-38? Waiting in faith for the promises of God to be fulfilled? Do we even know what the promises are? Are we walking in the Spirit and clinging to Scripture? I pray you will join us this weekend for worship and next week for one of our Christmas Eve services. Corporately and prayerfully, we will turn our attention to God’s Word. We will ask the Spirit of God to open our eyes, hearts and ears to His truth that we might grow in our anticipation for Christ. That, like Simeon and Anna, we would wait upon the Lord, watch for the Lord, and walk in the Spirit as we anticipate the blessed appearing of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. The joy of seeing Him will be inexpressible!

The birth of Christ occurred under the noses of and in the presence of many people, and yet so many of those people missed it. The innkeeper missed it. The incarnation and birth of the Son of God, one of the most significant events in salvation history, occurred near or even on his own property, and yet he missed it. Maybe he was too busy with travelers or too concerned with the stuff of earth, and he missed the birth of the eternal king. The religious leaders knew all the prophecies concerning Christ, and yet when he came, they missed it. They weren’t looking for a Savior because they didn’t think they needed a Savior. In the coming days, we will celebrate the coming of Christ who died for our sins and provided salvation, and yet so many people will miss it. Maybe like the innkeeper, they are too caught up in the earthly business of life. Maybe like the religious leaders, they miss the celebration of the Savior’s birth, because they don’t think they need a Savior. What about you? We are in a similar position today when it comes to waiting for Christ. Will we be like Simeon and Anna in Luke 2:21-38? Waiting in faith for the promises of God to be fulfilled? Do we even know what the promises are? Are we walking in the Spirit and clinging to Scripture? I pray you will join us this weekend for worship and next week for one of our Christmas Eve services. Corporately and prayerfully, we will turn our attention to God’s Word. We will ask the Spirit of God to open our eyes, hearts and ears to His truth that we might grow in our anticipation for Christ. That, like Simeon and Anna, we would wait upon the Lord, watch for the Lord, and walk in the Spirit as we anticipate the blessed appearing of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. The joy of seeing Him will be inexpressible!

Interview with Sean Roosen, Founder & CEO of Osisko Development Corp.Our previous interview: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/osisko-development-building-tier-one-gold-and-copper-mines-5487Recording date: 17th September 2024Osisko Development Corporation (TSXV:ODV) is advancing its flagship Cariboo Gold Project in British Columbia, positioning itself as a compelling investment opportunity in the gold mining sector. The project, nearing final permitting stages, represents a significant near-term gold production prospect in a tier-one jurisdiction.The Cariboo Gold Project boasts impressive fundamentals:2 million ounces of gold in reservesOver 3 million additional ounces of gold in measured, indicated, and inferred resourcesHigh-grade deposit averaging 3.78 g/t goldInitial production target of 4,950 tons per day, yielding approximately 220,000 ounces annuallySean Roosen, founder of the Osisko group, emphasizes the project's exploration potential: "We're averaging 14,000 ounces per vertical meter that we've gone down. For every 100 meters that we've gone down, we've averaged 1.4 million ounces." This metric suggests substantial room for resource expansion, with the deposit tested to depths beyond 1,000 meters.Osisko Development is implementing innovative technologies to enhance operational efficiency. The company pioneers the use of an all-electric roadheader, potentially reducing development costs by around $1,000 per meter. Access to low-cost hydroelectric power (approximately $0.05/kWh) further positions Cariboo as a potential low-cost producer.The project's scalability is a key attraction. Management envisions expanding production to 10,000 or even 15,000 tons per day in the future, potentially doubling or tripling annual gold output. Roosen outlines the company's ambitious goals: "Corporately, the big target for me is to set the stage to be a $1 billion company. We have the asset base to do that."From a financial perspective, the project's economics appear robust. The initial feasibility study, using a conservative $1,700 per ounce gold price, yielded an internal rate of return around 20%. With current gold prices much higher, the project's potential returns could be significantly enhanced. An updated feasibility study using a $2,000 gold price is expected by year-end.Investors in Osisko Development gain exposure to a management team with a proven track record. Roosen previously led the development of Canadian Malartic, now one of the world's largest gold mines, and founded Osisko Gold Royalties, a $4.3 billion royalty company.Near-term catalysts that could drive share price appreciation include:Final permitting approvals (expected in late 2024 or early 2025)Results from the planned bulk sample (scheduled for October)Updated feasibility study incorporating higher gold pricesOngoing exploration results potentially expanding the resource baseWhile the investment case is compelling, investors should consider risks such as execution challenges in mine development, potential capital cost inflation, gold price volatility, and regulatory hurdles.In the current macroeconomic environment, with strong gold prices and increasing M&A activity in the sector, Osisko Development represents an attractive opportunity for investors seeking exposure to a large-scale, high-grade gold project on the verge of production in a top-tier jurisdiction. The company's significant insider ownership provides some insulation against hostile takeover attempts while potentially positioning it as an attractive M&A target for larger producers seeking to replenish reserves.View Osisko Development's company profile: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/companies/osisko-developmentSign up for Crux Investor: https://cruxinvestor.com

Corey Davis is the founder of Core Blend Training, a semi-private tranining gym with 3 locations in Georgia. We were recently introduced by a mutual colleague and I was interested to see how (and why) he decided to corporately scale his locations within a regional market. https://www.coreblendtraining.com/ —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Want to increase your business IQ by 100x for only $50?  Get enrolled in Microgym University - the only online business school that teaches you the best practices and business frameworks from some of the most successful brands in our industry and then lets you decide which ones to install in your business. New courses are added every month.  ⁠www.microgymuniversity.com⁠  —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Need help leasing or buying a building? I created the Gym Real Estate Company so that gym owners had someone who could go beyond the duties of a typical real estate broker and actually advise them on business aspects as they relate to site selection, market location fit, operational capacity, facility layout, pre-sell marketing, and more. If you're looking for help with your next lease or if you want us to help you along the journey of buying a building - ⁠head over to www.gymrealestate.co and book a Discovery Call. —-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14-Day Trial of GymsSudio — the last member management software you'll ever need. GymStudio is a gym and studio management software for businesses that want to deliver a frictionless member experience.  Our intuitive platform was designed to re-think how traditional gym management platforms organize memberships, payments, schedules, bookings, and more. GymStudio is utilized by small and medium-sized fitness businesses ranging from strength and conditioning gyms to yoga and pilates studios around the world.  We offer a 14-day trial and a concierge "transition service" when switching from another gym management platform. This all-in-one platform provides this and much more for less than $150 per month. https://www.gymstudio.com/ —-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Macrostax is the #1 nutrition management software that helps gym owners, personal trainers, and other fitness professionals offer customized nutrition plans to their clients without lifting a finger.  This scalable, hands-off approach to nutrition saves time, generates additional revenue, and allows them to add an extremely valuable offering to their fitness businesses. With over 1,500 gym clients across the US, Macrostax Team solves a missing yet essential puzzle piece for many gym owners that want to help their members reach their goals. Try Macrostax Team, FREE for 30-days with this link.

Why do we sing? Is singing so essential that a church service would be incomplete if it were not done? Does God instruct us to sing? How does singing serve a Christian?Blog Link: https://kuzaapp.com/why-we-must-sing-corporately/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kuzaapp Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kuzaappTik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kuzaappBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/kuza--3674993/support.

Psalm 100

Recently, a popular boutique group fitness brand out of NYC, Fhitting Room, announced it was closing most of its locations. This video is my response to this news and a few industry insights. —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The only two group fitness franchises I would invest in… Industrious  If you want a well-organized, high operational capacity, barbell-based group fitness experience (aka CrossFit without the stupid shit), then you need to look into Industrious.  Click here and I'll personally connect you with the Industrious franchise team to learn more. MADabolic If you're looking for one of the fastest growing brands in the boutique fitness space that leverages gritty branding, strength-focused programming (but without the barbell and other space suckers) and has over 30 opened locations nationwide, then you'll definitely want to get in touch with the MADabolic franchise team by clicking here.  —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I solve problems in your business and make you more money.  Guaranteed.  For over a decade I've been working with gym owners (via one-on-one consulting) to help create tailored solutions to solve their business problems, engineer the game plan and empower them to execute the strategy. Stop wishing your business problems are going to magically go away.   Invest in your business and let me solve your problems and optimize your business fast and efficiently.  We'll work together daily/weekly, with a monthly call until the problem is solved and then I want you to fire me.  Because this is YOUR business, I'm just here to solve a specific problem and then get out of your way. Learn more about what it's like for us to work together. —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Want to increase your business IQ by 100x for only $50?  Get enrolled in Microgym University - the only online business school that teaches you the best practices and business frameworks from some of the most successful brands in our industry and then lets you decide which ones to install in your business. New courses are added every month.  ⁠www.microgymuniversity.com⁠  —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Need help leasing or buying a building? I created the Gym Real Estate Company so that gym owners had someone who could go beyond the duties of a typical real estate broker and actually advise them on business aspects as they relate to site selection, market location fit, operational capacity, facility layout, pre-sell marketing, and more. If you're looking for help with your next lease or if you want us to help you along the journey of buying a building - ⁠head over to www.gymrealestate.co and book a Discovery Call. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wtfgymtalk/message

Corporately, relationally, and internally- those among whom God dwells must be holy

Corporate Responsibility. You hear that phrase often. But how many businesses truly follow through on being good corporate citizens? On today's episode of Fostering Change you will meet one organization that does just that: Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's Indiana Medicaid Health Plan. In fact, this organization was Comfort Cases' very first corporate sponsor - we are celebrating working with them for six years!You will hear Rob Scheer speak with April Lam, Chief of Staff for the health plan. April has a strong connection to Comfort Cases' mission, as she not only works closely with non-profit organizations, but has also been a foster parent and adopted a child out of foster care.Since the partnership with Comfort Cases began 6 years ago, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has packed more than 7,000 Comfort Cases® to support youth living in foster care.The partnership between Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Comfort Cases has grown since 2018. Since the expansion, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's affiliated health plans have hosted 24 packing parties across 16 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico, providing over 12,000 Comfort Cases and XL duffel bags to youth in foster care nationwide.To learn more about Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Indiana, please visit: https://mss.anthem.com/in/indiana-hom...To listen to previous episodes of Fostering Change, please visit: www.comfortcases.org/podcast or your favorite podcast outlets.If you have any comments, questions, or guest suggestions, we'd love to hear from you! Please write us at info@comfortcases.org.Thank you for listening and we'll see you next Tuesday! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can we grow from engaging tensions in our world? Vanessa Maleare shares her story of being shaped by tension in living out her calling, while reflecting on the story of Peter living in the tension of past failure and present affirmation.  [John 21:18-22]   Reflection Where in your life are you fleeing from tension? Which of these unresolvable tensions calls to you the most?? Which of the unresolvable tensions feels most pressing to engage in personally? Corporately? Resources Book: Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown

A new MP3 sermon from Hopewell Associate Reformed Presbyterian is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Corporately Giving by Grace What We Have by Grace to the Glory of Grace Subtitle: Biblical Theology of Diaconate Speaker: James Hakim Broadcaster: Hopewell Associate Reformed Presbyterian Event: Sunday School Date: 7/16/2023 Bible: 2 Corinthians 9 Length: 35 min.

Derek Strokon is a Human Resilience researcher. Derek is the #1 International Best-Selling Author of “Stop Stalling Start Selling”, and recently launched his second book “Human Being Human”.  He is a leader and business consultant whose practice focuses on resilience development and process implementation.  His award-winning approach to sales excellence is driven by a team-centered approach of ‘Strength Through Vulnerability'.  His relentless passion for evangelizing the ‘Human Journey', is both inspiring and contagious.   Derek received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Simon Fraser University and is a Certified Professional Coach from World Coach Institute.  Corporately recognized in 2018 as the National Sales Force Grow Leader, among many other accolades for sales excellence, he also attained his LLQP Full, MFDA, Labour Sponsored Fund, and Branch Managers Course certifications.    In this episode, Derek emphasized the power of just being yourself, and how we can start enjoying a life of contentment. He also shared about breaking away from manifesting hero culture. He provides honest feedback on why using the statement "You are where you are" is more powerful than "You are where you need to be". You'll get to learn more about experiencing the human journey in the present.   Connect with Derek Strokon LinkedIn YouTube Sacred Line Consulting TEDx Talks Amazon - Stop Stalling Start Selling Amazon - Human Being Human   Connect with Mike Szczesniak Instagram LinkedIn YouTube

May 31, 2023 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stjohnrandomlake/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stjohnrandomlake/support

"You do you." "Just follow your heart." "You gotta be true to yourself." These are common phrases we hear in today's world, but are they accurate guidance for us as followers of Jesus. In this episode of UNSCRIPTED we discuss how we have all been created with an individuality, but, as followers of Jesus, we want to express our individuality in unity with other Christians.   

"You do you." "Just follow your heart." "You gotta be true to yourself." These are common phrases we hear in today's world, but are they accurate guidance for us as followers of Jesus. In this episode of UNSCRIPTED we discuss how we have all been created with an individuality, but, as followers of Jesus, we want to express our individuality in unity with other Christians.   

What is the secret to leading transformation? Sope Agbelusi is an executive coach, international speaker, husband, father of two, and the founder of MindsetShift, a leadership development company focused on developing authentic leaders. Corporately, he is sought after for his ability to help shift perspectives and install new mindsets that create lasting transformations. He has worked with respected global brands such as Google, Spotify, Morgan Stanley, Philips, KPMG, Yale University, HSBC, and more. As an innovative leader himself, Sope contributed to generating $800M+ with several teams in the automotive and engineering industry. His valuable insights have been featured on BBC World News, BBC Radio 5 Live, talkSPORT, BusinessCloud, and SOCIAlight among others. He is also the host of the Everyday Leadership Podcast, where he explores the leadership experiences of real people and how they lead from the inside out, not just the outside in. Today we discuss the biggest mindset shift needed right now, transforming the stories we tell ourselves, knowing your value and boundaries, why work-life balance doesn't exist, and how to truly lead from the inside out and create lasting transformation in your organization. What We Discuss in This Episode with Sope Agbelusi  The biggest mindset shift needed right now How COVID impacted our mindset Self-awareness and leading from the inside out Moving from Nigeria to the UK as a teenager Stepping into the fullness of who you are Having the courage to make the necessary changes in your life What does it mean to be an authentic leader Knowing your values and boundaries The key to building your self-confidence Demonstrating leadership at home Dealing with conflicting values in the workplace Embracing new career possibilities Why work-life balance doesn't exist How to create psychologically safe environments using harmony Episode Show Notes: https://leadersoftransformation.com/podcast/leadership/446-leading-from-the-inside-out-sope-agbelusi 

We are multipliers! We are a Great Commission Church and we are an equipping center for disciples. We are multipliers! Individually, we are all responsible to disciple those younger in their faith and invite those far from Jesus into a life-giving community. We are multipliers! Corporately, we are called to plant churches, pastor cities, and father and mother leaders to multiply the Kingdom impact. We are multipliers!   Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20 NLT   But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts of the Apostles 1:8 NLT WE BELIEVE AS A CHURCH IN THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST, OR IN OTHER WORDS THE FACT THAT JESUS IS COMING AGAIN! After saying this, he was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him. As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why are you standing here staring into heaven? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!” Acts 1:9-11 OVER 300 REFERENCES IN N.T. OF JESUS' RETURN 216/260 CHAPTERS IN THE N.T. REFERENCE JESUS' RETURN 23 OF THE 27 N.T. BOOKS REFERENCE JESUS' RETURN But because God was so gracious, so very generous, here I am. And I'm not about to let his grace go to waste. Haven't I worked hard trying to do more than any of the others? 1 Corinthians 15:10 MSG   Here's what I know great vision takes three things: It takes a Praying Church, a Selfless Church, and a strategic Church.   But the leader in charge of the synagogue was indignant that Jesus had healed her on the Sabbath day. “There are six days of the week for working,” he said to the crowd. “Come on those days to be healed, not on the Sabbath.” But the Lord replied, “You hypocrites! Each of you works on the Sabbath day! Don't you untie your ox or your donkey from its stall on the Sabbath and lead it out for water? This dear woman, a daughter of Abraham, has been held in bondage by Satan for eighteen years. Isn't it right that she be released, even on the Sabbath?” Luke 13:14-16 NLT   GOD IS LESS INTERESTED IN WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND MORE INTERESTED IN WHY YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.   Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. James 1:27 NLT   The Lord is more pleased when we do what is right and just than when we offer him sacrifices. Proverbs 21:3 NLT   But Peter took him aside and began to reprimand him for saying such things. “Heaven forbid, Lord,” he said. “This will never happen to you!” Jesus turned to Peter and said, “Get away from me, Satan! You are a dangerous trap to me. You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God's.”   Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul? Matthew 16:22-26 NLT   “Paul and Silas have caused trouble all over the world,” they shouted, “and now they are here disturbing our city, too. Acts of the Apostles 17:6 NLT   Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does. 1 Corinthians 14:1-2 MSG   Give yourselves to the gifts God gives you. 1 Corinthians 14:1-2 MSG   Most of all, try to proclaim his truth. 1 Corinthians 14:1-2 MSG     But because God was so gracious, so very generous, here I am. And I'm not about to let his grace go to waste. Haven't I worked hard trying to do more than any of the others? 1 Corinthians 15:10 MSG

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic BostonChurch. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston ordonate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com. We are continuing oursermon series today called Committed. We've been talking about the essentialhabits of an abundant life and what we've been saying over and over throughoutthis series is that we are taking a look at some of the essential,nonnegotiable and just super practical commitments that every Christian needsto make in order to grow in their faith and persevere through life and toexperience and to enjoy the abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give. And if you were here last week, our teens director, Tyler, did an awesome job talking about our commitment to Scripture and I hope that that sermon just left you with a greater appreciation, a greater trust, a greater hunger and appetite for God's word. It's amazing that we worship a god who speaks, a god who has chosen to reveal Himself to us as His creation and we should never take that for granted, right? If God has something to say, we want to hear it. We want to listen. And it is awesome to think that we have access to the word of God recorded for us in Scripture. We worship a god who speaks. We also worship a god who listens. And this is what we are going to be talking about today as we look at the topics, the commitments of fasting and prayer. Like so many of the things that we've talked about in this series, this is not something we do, it is something we commit to, that fasting and prayer, they're not going to happen by accident, they're not going to happen on their own, that these are things that like the early church we need to devote ourselves to doing. And for some of us, maybe that feels like hard work. I don't know about you, but sometimes prayer could begin to feel like a grind. It could feel like something that you have to do or something that you're supposed to do when really we should view prayer as something that we get to do. And as we learn to do these things properly, even if at times they might feel like a grind, they might feel like a drudgery, they should become our delight, that as we practice them persistently, we find in them a great reward. And I use that word because that's the word that we're going to see Jesus used over and over in our text today when He talks about fasting in prayer. He keeps using this word reward. And so is that a word that you use? Is that a word that you think about when you think about fasting, when you think about prayer? Before we begin this morning, I want you to do something for me right now. I just want you to mentally do a quick evaluation of your prayer life. Rate yourself, scale of one to 10, 10 is everything's great, you've got an abundant, flourishing, vibrant, rewarding prayer life. One is it's dry, it's a grind, barely existence. Your prayer life is on a life support. Does prayer feel like a requirement, like a drudgery, like something that you have to do or does it feel like a reward? Does it feel like a delight, something that you get to do? Wherever you just rated yourself, none of us are a 10, we've all have room to grow and so my hope today is that we can all go up in our rating together. And so if you just said, "Well, I feel like I'm a two or a three," well, what would it take to get from a three to like a seven or to get from a five to a nine? What would it take for us to all grow to have a prayer life that's more like that of Christ Jesus? And lucky for us, this is something that Jesus' disciples wondered as well and they at times would ask Jesus, "Hey, Jesus, can you teach us how to pray?" And He did. On multiple occasions, Jesus taught His disciples how to pray and one of those is the text that we're going to be looking at this morning. It's Matthew chapter six, verse five through 21. This is a part of the sermon on the Mount. And Jesus spends a considerable amount of time teaching His disciples about this topic of fasting and prayer. So we're going to walk through this text together. It's a bit of a long text and we're going to just go through it section by section. And as we do, I want us to look at five commitments that are going to help us to avoid some of the pitfalls of prayer and fasting that we could potentially fall into, but also to just have an increasingly vibrant, abundant, powerful and rewarding prayer life that God wants us to have. So if you have your Bibles, we are in Matthew chapter six, beginning in verse five. The words are also going to be up here on the screen. This is what Jesus said, "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray and stand in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by others. And truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who's in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. Pray then like this, 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day 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 evil.' For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They just figure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where mouth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." This is the reading of God's holy word for us this morning. Would you please join me in prayer for our sermon today? God, we pray that we would learn to treasure You as we ought. And God, we pray that You would forgive us for not praying as we ought. Lord, You warned Your disciples in the garden to watch and to pray that they might not enter into temptation for the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is so weak. And God, we confess our weakness to You and we praise You that Your strength, Your power is made perfect in our weakness, that Your grace is greater than our failures. And so Lord, we ask today that You would to teach us to pray as we ought, teach us to live continually in Your presence, experiencing the blessing of knowing that You are always with us and You always hear us, that we can come and we can talk to You at any time. Teach us what it means to be anxious about nothing but to pray about everything because we know that You are with us, You see us, You hear us, You love us and You are able to provide for our every need. Lord, You are the God who hears and I pray that we would marvel at that reality today and we give You thanks and glory for it now, in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, before teaching His disciples how to pray, Jesus first we see, He teaches them how not to pray and He gives them two examples. He says, "On the one hand, don't go and don't pray like the hypocrites. Don't pray like the Pharisees, the religious people." And on the other hand, He says, "Don't pray like the Gentiles, like the lawless pagans either." And so let's start with the religious people that with the Pharisees in verse five, Jesus says, "When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray and stand in the synagogues and not at the street corners that they may be seen by others. And truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Now, first of all, we need to understand Jesus isn't condemning public prayer. He's not saying that there's never an appropriate time for Christians to pray in public with one another. Corporately, we see it in the New Testament that that is something that the early church was devoted to doing, that it is a good thing for God's people to come and to pray together publicly. But what Jesus is telling us and what we all need to be cautious of is this, that if we find in ourselves that we can go to church and pray with other Christians or we can go to community group and we've got a lot of things to say to God and we can pray with lofty words and eloquence and everything sounds very polished, but then we go home. And when we're alone with God in secret, we've got nothing to talk about, well, He says that's a problem. That's a symptom of a pretty serious illness in the diagnosis that he gives is hypocrisy. I think of it like this. I don't know if you've ever been over at a friend's house like hanging out and then somebody you don't know, one of their friends comes in and joins you. Maybe it's a coworker or neighbor or something like that. And at first, everything's great. You're having a good time, hanging out. The conversation is going well and everybody seems friendly and then your friend gets up and leaves the room and now you're trapped in this awkward deafening silence. And a moment ago, we thought, "I thought we were all friends, but now that they're gone, I realize that was an illusion. You are not my friend. I don't even know you. You're a stranger and we've got nothing to say to each other." Well, don't be like that with God. If you are like that with God, that is a cause for concern. If you find it easy to talk to God when other people, other Christians are around, but you can't talk to Him in private, oh, maybe you've fallen into the same pit as the Pharisees and maybe you've figured out how to look really religious and sound really spiritual when other people are around, but there's no real relationship there with God. He says, "Don't fall into that pit. If the pathway to prayer is this narrow road, you've got this dangerous ditch on the one side that the Pharisees fell into," but he says, "But there's also this other ditch on the other side that the Gentiles fall into. So he says, "Don't be like the pagans either," and this is what He talks about in verse seven. He says, when you pray, "Don't just heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words." He says, "Don't be like them as your Father knows what you need even before you ask." See, unlike the Jews who were monotheistic, they believed in one God rightly, the Gentiles believed in a pantheon of gods and their relationship to these gods was not particularly healthy. The gods were seemingly mostly motivated by their own selfish self-interest. And so the people envisioned their gods as these kind of powerful but moody beings and they needed to be appeased. They needed to be persuaded, even maybe bribed in order to care about the plights of mortal people. And their hope was that if they used the right words, if they prayed to the right god with the right words, in the right place, at the right temple with the right idols and the right sacrifices, well, maybe they could get somebody's attention out there. And so they would babble and they would heap up all of these words, as Jesus said, because they were just trying to cover all of their bases like, "If I just do this enough, maybe something will happen. Just throw a plethora of prayers out into the cosmos and hope that maybe somebody out there is listening." And Jesus says, "Don't be like that. Don't be like the Gentiles. The Gentiles weren't just a little-stitious, they're more than a little-stitious. They were superstitious. He says, "Don't be superstitious about prayer. It's not some magic incantation that you need to figure out. Prayer is not a way to tap into some higher power or manipulate some spiritual system. Prayer is just simply a conversation with God. And God is not a system. He is not a power. He is a person." And so I said we'd look at five commitments of a rewarding prayer life. And the first one is that, before anything else, we need to commit to this. We need to pray to God with God as a person. And I use the word with. We often talk about praying to God. Not necessarily anything wrong with that, but I'm using the word with here intentionally for two different reasons. First of all is because the Gentiles prayed to their gods, but they can never really be sure if the gods were listening to them. They could never be sure if anybody out there was hearing that they send their prayers off like an email and who knows? Maybe it just wound up in someone's spam folder. Maybe it just got deleted right away. They could never be sure. But we don't pray like that, that when we pray to God, we pray to a god that we know we have confidence, we have assurance that He is with us, that God is all knowing, all seeing. He is omniscient, omnipresent and all powerful. He always hears all the prayers of His people. And eight times in this passage, Jesus refers to God in a very specific way that shows the intimate relationship that we are to have with Him. He refers to Him as our Father. I mentioned earlier that this passage, it comes from the Sermon of the Mount, and later on in the same sermon, Jesus comes back to this topic of prayer in Matthew chapter seven and He's talking about the relationship of us praying to God as a father. And in verse seven, he says this. He says, "Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you. For everyone who asks, receives and he who seeks finds and to Him who knocks the door will be opened." And he says, "Or which one of you, if his son asks for bread, we give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, would give him a serpent? If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, well, then how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" I don't know about your dad's situation. Some of you had very good dads, maybe some of you didn't. The point that Jesus is making here though is that even the very best of earthly fathers seems evil when compared to the goodness, the kindness, the grace of our God, our Heavenly Father." And God wants us to know Him as a good Father, as a father who is so good, so loving, so attentive that He not only sees us, He knows what we need even before we ask Him," Jesus says. And Jesus calls God our Father. We need to relate to God as our Father. He also calls Him our Heavenly Father, that we can approach God with the affection and the intimacy of a father, but we must also approach Him with the reverence and the honor and the respect due to a Heavenly Father that our God as a father is perfect in His goodness. He's also perfect in His holiness. He teaches us to pray, "Our Father who arts in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." And so what does it mean to say that God is holy? It means that He is morally perfect in every way. He is completely pure without compromise, without contradiction. He is utterly distinct and set apart with no rival, with no equal for His glory, for His righteousness. And actually when you look at Scripture, what you see is that God is so holy, he is so righteous that anything unrighteous is unable to even stand before His presence, that even the angels of heaven, and when Isaiah has his vision, that they cover their faces before the holiness of God, that God is so righteous that anything containing even an ounce of sin, even the smallest imperfection, it would be destroyed before His holy presence as quickly as a shadow under the direct exposure of the sun. Hebrews 12:28 says, "Therefore, let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence in awe, for our God is a consuming fire." Well, this is true. How can we, as sinful people, hope to stand before a Holy God in prayer? Well, I mentioned earlier, there's two reasons that we need to not just pray to God but with God. And the first is simply that God is with us as a father, but the second is that we cannot pray to God without God helping us to pray to God, that we cannot come before the Father without the power of the Holy Spirit, without the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is what I mean, when we pray to the Father, we do so in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of Jesus Christ and we're able to, therefore, come boldly before the throne of God and stand before His righteousness, not because we're righteous. If we did that, we would die, but we are able to stand before His presence because, and only because, we have been covered by the righteous blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, that by grace through faith, the righteousness of Christ has been accredited to us. It covers us and we are able to stand before the Holy Father now and not just live, but to actually be loved, actually be welcomed into ... He looks at us and He sees us in the perfection of Jesus and welcomes us into His presence. And this is what it means to pray to God. It's really profound when you think about it. It is a Trinitarian experience, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit allowing us to come and experience just the awesome transcendent reality that our prayers can be heard by a Holy God. And that as they are and as we do, we realize that this Holy God is also our loving Father. And so commit to that, commit to having that mindset as you approach God, that you are speaking with God for the person that He is, both loving and holy, perfect in His holiness. Secondly, commit to pray with a plan. Jesus says in verse nine, He says, "Pray them like this." He's like, "I'm going to teach you. This 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 and give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not unto temptation, but deliver us from evil.'" I think one of the reasons that Christians maybe don't pray as often as they should is because they lack that vision of God and who He is and the person of God that they are communicating with. I think if we had that mindset and we realize what an awesome privilege that is, we would pray more. But I think another reason that a lot of Christians maybe struggle with prayer is that they don't have a practical plan. And so really quick, I just want to look at four super practical things that if you're not doing them already, I would say start doing them and you'll find I think that these are going to help you with your prayer life because Jesus doesn't just say, "If you pray." There is a sense in which we are continually living in the presence of God, praying without ceasing. As we go about our day, we should have this mindset that God is with us. We are talking to Him throughout our day, that we have access to Him at any time, but then we should also plan specific times where we are going to sit down and focus and spend time with God in prayer. And that's not going to happen on its own. You need to have a plan. So first of all, you need to determine a time and a place. If you're a busy person, I don't know if there's busy people that live here in Boston, but if there are, you might need to put this on your calendar. You might need to schedule it. You need to plan ahead and say, "At this time of day, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and I am going to pray and I'm going to have a time, I'm also going to have a place." Where are you going to do it? When are you going? For me, personally, I literally go into my bedroom, I go into to our closet and I close the door. And especially if you got kids, sometimes that's the only way you're going to get any kind of privacy. And I close the door and I pray. And I pray out loud. I don't know why. I started doing this at some point and it helps me to stay focused. It helps my mind not to wander and I'm having a conversation with God, so why wouldn't I pray out loud? Hebrews 5:7 says, "In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplication with loud cries and tears and to Him who was able to save Him from death and He was heard because of His reverence." I don't think that there's anything wrong with praying silently to God, but if you haven't tried praying out loud, I would say it's helpful for me, maybe it will be helpful for you, but the main point is determine a time and a place. Be intentional about it and make it happen. Secondly, use a template. It's not cheating to go into your prayer time with a plan of the kind of things that you're going to pray about. And I know there's a lot of different templates out there and maybe you've used a variety of them throughout your life. One that's really popular that I've heard about is the ACTS model, like the Book of Acts, and they turned it into an acronym, adoration Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. And so that's great. That's a good model. You begin adoration. You just spend some time praising God for His attributes like offering Him worship for who He is. A confession, you lead into a time of repentance where you're asking God for forgiveness and confessing your sins to Him. And Thanksgiving, you thank God for His mercy, for His grace, for all of His provision in your life. And then supplication, you bring your requests to God. You lay your heart before Him and you bring Him all your worries, all your concerns, all of your anxieties. Philippians 4:5-7 says, "Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand, so therefore, do not be anxious about anything but in everything. By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." So that's one model that people like to use and that's great. Me personally, I like to use the Lord's Prayer that we just read. The Lord's Prayer is a beautiful prayer on its own. You should memorize it. As Tyler said last week, you should internalize it. And I don't think that Jesus gave us this prayer to just memorize and then just like mindlessly recite over and over. I think He gave us this prayer as a good template, as a good model of the kind of things that the Father loves and wants to hear from us about. And so that's what I do. I pray through the Lord's Prayer and then I go back through it line by line, theme by theme and get more specific in my prayer time with God. Just personally, I find that really helpful. And then along with that, number three, is keeping a list. And so you've got your template. You keep a list. For me, I just do this in the little notepad app on my phone. Got it with me wherever I go. I got a list of general things that I'm praying about all the time. I pray for my wife, for my marriage, for my kids. I pray for Mosaic. I pray for the pastors, the staff, the community groups, the members of the church. And then as specific things come up in my life and the church's life and the life of people in our community group or whatever, I just add those to that list. Got it with me wherever I go. You do these things, pretty soon you find out you've got plenty of things to pray about that you need to be praying about with God. And fourthly, and this is really important, as you do this, as you make it a priority, you've got your plan, your template, you've got your list of things you're praying about, I record and remember. Sometimes you got to write things down that you're praying about, so that your future self is going to be able to look back and see and remember God's faithfulness throughout that time in your life. And I could give countless examples of this from my life, from members of our community group, but I think this is a good thing to do. Psalm 77 says, "Then I said I will appeal to this. I'll appeal to the year of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember Your wonders of old. I will ponder all of Your work and meditate on Your mighty deeds. Your way, O, God is holy. What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders. You have made known Your might among the peoples." As Christians, we believe this, we know this to be true, that our God is a god who always hears and who always answers all of the prayers of all His people. Nothing gets by Him, nothing gets unnoticed, nothing slips past Him. He always answers our prayers. Now, that doesn't mean that He's always going to say yes to our prayers. He doesn't always answer yes, but He is always going to answer best. He's always going to give us what is most and needed most glorifying to Him. And so when He does, don't just forget it and move on. How many times have you maybe prayed for something and then it happens and you're like, "Oh, probably a coincidence. No." No, don't just move on. Write that down, record it, remember it so that the next time you're praying about something, you can rely on it, so that you can look back because there's going to be some points in your future whereas the psalmist said you're going to need to remember the deeds of the Lord so that you can face the fears in your future with the blessed reminders of God's faithfulness in your past, so that you can then stand firm there in the present. Not because you're strong, but because you know that God is faithful, that He is with you, that He has upheld you and that His hand is upon you. First Peter 5:68 says, "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that the proper time, He may exalt you, casting all of your anxieties on Him because He cares for you." So commit to pray with a plan. Number three, we see in this passage is we need to commit to pray with purity. Jesus says in His prayer, "Forgive us our debts as we've also forgiven our debtors and not and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," and then he stops and he gives some commentary on this. And in verse 14, he says, "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours." And now we got to be clear, Jesus is not teaching a model of works-based righteousness here. He's not talking about forgiveness in the context of our justification. We cannot save ourselves by forgiving others. We cannot lose our salvation by failing to forgive others. Jesus, that's not what He's talking about here, but what Jesus is talking about here is He's talking about forgiveness in the context of prayer and in the context of our relationship with God, and therefore, also our relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. And the warning here is that things are not going to be right and good between you and God the Father if things are not right and good between you and your brothers and sisters in Christ. If you are holding a grudge, if you're holding onto anger, resentment, bitterness, you're refusing to forgive somebody. So don't be surprised then if your prayers are hindered. I guess as a father, I picture it like this. Remember Jesus, He shared that parable, "Hey, if your kid comes and asks for something to eat, you're not going to give them a stone." No, of course not. Why would a good parent withhold something good that their child needed? But let's back up and add some context to that. If your kid came to you and said, "Hey, dad, can I have some dinner?" but on the way to the dinner table, they pushed their sister and suplexed their little brother off of the couch and then they're standing there before you. It's like, "Well, hold on a minute. We got to talk. Yeah, we can talk about food. We can talk about dinner. We got bigger things to talk about like why you just smashed your little brother's face into the coffee table." You get the point. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mountain, just the chapter before this, in chapter five, verse 23, "If you're offering your gift at the altar and there remember your brother has something against you," he says, "leave your gift there and go. First be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift." This is how important, even if you're in the middle of worship, you're preparing to offer your gift at the altar, you're in the middle of praise and you're in middle of praise is stopped, first go be reconciled, then come and offer your gift. In Psalm 66, the psalmist said, "I cried to Him with my mouth and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened and He has attended to the voice of my prayers." The Apostle Peter talks about this in his first letter, both in chapter three, verse seven and in chapter four, verse seven, Peter says this. First, he speaks to the husbands. He says, "Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that," what? "So that your prayers may not be hindered." He says, "Husbands, if you want your prayers to not be hindered, well, then you would better be treating God's daughter with the honor, with the tenderness, with the consideration that she deserves." And then in the next chapter, he speaks more generally to all Christians and he says in chapter four, verse seven, "To the end of all things is at hand, therefore, be self-controlled and sober-minded again for the sake of your prayers." Now, earlier when I asked you to rate yourself, your prayer life, if you were finding, if you were saying, "Ah, that's not so good. I'm like a two. I'm maybe a three," you need to maybe stop and ask yourself, "Could this be the reason why? Have I been cherishing iniquity in my heart? Have I been harboring sin, resentment? Have I been holding a grudge? Is there someone that I have been refusing to forgive or is there someone that I need to go to and ask for forgiveness?" Because when you got stuff like this in your life, the last thing that you're going to want to do is go and talk to God in prayer because you know that God knows, and you know that God's not going to let it go. He's going to press you on it. He's going to tell you, "You need to go and you need to deal with this right away." And so you begin to avoid God or you begin to put up a front to mask things, but you know that he sees straight through all of that. So if you're struggling with prayer, be honest. Ask yourself. Are you just going through the motions? Are you avoiding God and could the reason be that there is sin in your life that you know need to deal with, that you've been avoiding? The only way that you're going to dig yourself out of that ditch is to just stop hiding, stop running from God, stop putting up a front, wearing a mask. You just got to go to the Father in faith. You got to go to the Father. You got to just trust. You got to trust that God is going to be more satisfying than whatever sin, whatever iniquity you may have been cherishing in your heart. You got to trust that His way is going to be better than your way, that when you go to Him and you turn and you humble yourself and repent, He's not going to push you away, that He is going to welcome you back with open arms. But we need to commit to pray with purity, without hypocrisy, so that our prayers may not be hindered. Number four, Jesus begins talking about fasting. So committed to pray with fasting. Verse 16 says, "And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. And truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Prayer and fasting, oftentimes, we talk about hand in hand. Unlike prayer, fasting is not something we do continually, unceasingly for practical reasons. You will eventually die of starvation if you try to do that. Fasting is a more occasional practice, but just like prayer, Jesus doesn't say, "Hey, if you fast." He says, "When you fast," he expects, he assumes that His disciples are going to fast and the question is not then, "Should we fast." The question is "When we fast, how should we fast? What should be the posture? What should be the motivation of our fasting?" The Pharisees were experts at fasting and many of them fasted multiple times a week. And they made a big show about it as they did and Jesus called them hypocrites for it because they fasted for attention. They fasted for clout, that the fasting of the Pharisees, it was really just another way for them to spiritually manipulate the people around them. They wanted to appear so strong and so self-disciplined and so holy and righteous and committed and spiritual that nobody would begin to question them or their authority. And so on the outside, everybody looked up to them. They looked so godly, they looked so devout, but Jesus saw right through them. He saw that they were really twisted and sick. And that's not like something I think many people encounter in our culture today. There's not like these religious, spiritual elites going around bragging about their fasting, but it's interesting that fasting has made a resurgence in our culture recently. Not so much for spiritual reasons, but for health and wellness reasons because there are. There's a lot of health benefits to fasting if you do it properly. And I'm not going to say anything too much about that in general. As long as you are honest about your motivations and as long as you're not trying to impress, show off, as you can stay humble, there's nothing wrong with a person fasting for health or wellness reasons. Now, there are a lot of benefits to it. There is, however, something deeply wrong for doing that, for fasting for those reasons by trying to make everybody else think that you're doing it because you're so super spiritual. And this is what ... God's not dumb. He knows you. He knows the motivations of your heart. He knows if you're fasting for Him or if you're fastening to get abs, right? If you're fasting for God or if you're fasting for like a god-bod, you're not going to pull one over on Him. And what does it profit a man if he gets washboard abs and loses his soul? We're all going to have shredded abs in heaven and that's great. There's nothing wrong with trying to pursue that right now, but be honest with yourself. If you're fasting for those reasons and fasting becomes a part of that process, just be honest about those motivations. Don't be a hypocrite, right? Don't do one thing and say something else. Don't try to create this image of yourself before others. Don't fast for attention. Don't fast to flex your spiritual maturity on the one hand and don't fast to flex your physical self-discipline on the other, trying to make people think that you're great, that you're strong because fasting is not about strength. Fasting, it's not about influence, it's not about clout. That's what the Pharisees got wrong. True fasting is about weakness. It's about brokenness. It's about repentance. It's about reliance on God. It's about awakening yourself physically to the reality of just how weak and dependent on God you really are. So when you fast, and Jesus assumes that you will fast, when you fast, the purpose is to humble yourself spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically. And as you do that, the goal is you're just pulling the curtain back on reality enough to see things as they really are, to see how really utterly weak and dependent on God you are. And when you're doing that properly, you're really not going to care if anyone else even notices because your true motivation is you're wanting that intimacy, that closeness, that reliance on God. Matthew 4:1-4, "Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry and the tempter came to Him and said, 'If you're the Son of God, well, then command these stones to become loaves of bread.' But he answered Him, 'It is written. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" And if you haven't fasted before or if you haven't fasted recently, I would encourage you to make it a commitment to do so soon, but as you do this, this should be your prayer. You should be praying, "God used this time to humble me, to bring me to a place, to help me feel and experience the reality that I am more dependent on You, on Your Spirit, on Your word than I am on the food that my physical body is hungering for right now." Because in reality, that is what is true. And so commit to pray with fasting. Let that become part of your spiritual life. And Jesus says, "In doing so, your Heavenly Father will reward you." Number five, looking at today, is to commit to pray with perspective. Jesus concludes, he goes on, he says, "So therefore, do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also." Now, I included this last passage here because I think a lot of times we don't think about this in the context of prayer and fasting, but that's the context in which Jesus delivered it. This is a transitional part of Jesus' sermon. And so on the one hand, He's talking about literal treasures. He's talking about possessions and material things, but it's clear that He's talking about more than that. He's talking about immaterial things as well. He's talking about the Pharisees, the religious people who were in their practices storing up for themselves treasures on earth and really missing the point of what they were pursuing. Now, the Pharisees were very devoted. They were devoted to memorizing Scripture. They were devoted to giving to the poor. They were devoted to fasting and prayer, but as we saw, their devotion was motivated by the wrong things. Their devotion was motivated by love for attention, love for authority. They were treasuring their image in their influence. They were storing up these treasures on earth, and in the process, they were selling their souls for things they couldn't keep. Now, the painful irony is that these treasures that they were holding onto, they were really becoming to them like millstones tied around their necks, sinking into the sea, pulling them further and further away from God the Father. And meanwhile, the greatest treasure of all, the treasure that they actually needed, the treasurer that the Father had given was standing right there in front of them, Jesus, the Son of God, the treasure of heaven, our mediator, the one, the only one who could bring them back into the presence of the Father, was standing right in front of them. They couldn't even see it. They were blinded by their self-righteousness. And Jesus told His disciples in John 14:6-7, He said to them, He says, "I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Me." And then He said, "If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also. And from now on, you do know Him and you have seen Him." This is what the Pharisees couldn't see, that when you know Jesus, you know the Father, that when you know the Father, you're going to treasure the Father because as you seek this Father, you find the Father that treasures you. You find the Father that gave His greatest treasure to seek you, to find you and to bring you back home. He gave up His own beloved Son, Jesus Christ, so that you could be saved. This is why Paul in Romans 8:31, he says, "Well, then what shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?" Do you have that perspective when you pray to the Father? You are praying to the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, holy and sovereign and He loves you like a father that would give His greatest treasure to have you be reconciled to Him. I decided not to write a conclusion to the sermon today. It felt almost silly to stand up here and talk to you anymore about prayer when we could just spend these last few moments together talking to God together in prayer. And so we are going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to be throwing you a curveball right now, so brace yourselves for it. For the next several minutes, we are going to just be spending time together in prayer. If this like weirds you out, if you've never done anything like this before, don't be nervous. I will give you a pass if you are really uncomfortable praying with other people. You can stay by yourself in your seat and pray silently, but I would encourage you to just step out of that comfort zone this morning. And I want us to just kind of circle up in groups of five, six, seven, eight people and spend a few minutes praying together. And if you've never done this before, don't freak out. You don't need to sound polished, you don't need to sound eloquent. God doesn't care about that. Just relax. It's having a conversation together with our Heavenly Father. And so nobody's going to judge you, don't freak out and we're just going to get together. And as we do, this is what I want you to do. First of all, if you have something in your life that you need prayer for, share that with the people that you're praying with, but then really just spend some time praying for one another, pray for our church and pray for the things that Jesus taught us to pray. The words of the Lord's Prayer are going to be up here on the screen and just meditate on them and pray for these things. And when you look at this, Jesus, He's telling us, He's like, "I want you to pray to Me about the most seemingly insignificant and mundane things, your daily bread. There's nothing too small. Just bring it to Me." And on the other hand, He's telling us, "I want you to also pray for the biggest, most transcendent things that you can even think about. Pray for that God's kingdom would come and that His will would be done here on earth as it is in heaven. Pray about these things together." And so I'm going to close us in prayer. We're going to just split up with some people around you, get into some groups. We're going to spend some time praying together. After a while, the band will come up back up here and lead us and worship. But if you're with us, let's pray and then we'll continue in prayer together. Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. But as I said earlier, I pray that You would teach us to treasure You as we ought and to understand the price that You paid so that we could have a relationship with You, that we could stand before You and know that our prayers are being heard. God, I know that there are people here in this room that have things going on in their lives right now and I know that there are things going on in our world right now that are so big and so complex that they seem hopeless apart from a mighty movement of You, of You working miracles, working wonders among us. And God, we praise You that You are the God who can do just that, that you are the sovereign God of all the universe and You hear us right now. And so, Lord, I pray that You would help us to become a people of prayer. Help us to be a church that knows You and loves You and deeply relies on You as we come together right now. Lord, we do so in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, our advocate, our mediator, our good shepherd, our great high priest. We come to You in the name of the One who has overcome Satan, sin and death, is now seated at Your right hand, ruling and reigning from His throne in heaven. Jesus, we pray that You would pour Your Spirit out upon Your church, that You would bring us now into the presence of our Heavenly Father and do so knowing that You are able to do abundantly more than we could ask or even think according to the power that has worked within us. And so Lord, to You be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic BostonChurch. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston ordonate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com. We are continuing oursermon series today called Committed. We've been talking about the essentialhabits of an abundant life and what we've been saying over and over throughoutthis series is that we are taking a look at some of the essential,nonnegotiable and just super practical commitments that every Christian needsto make in order to grow in their faith and persevere through life and toexperience and to enjoy the abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give. And if you were here last week, our teens director, Tyler, did an awesome job talking about our commitment to Scripture and I hope that that sermon just left you with a greater appreciation, a greater trust, a greater hunger and appetite for God's word. It's amazing that we worship a god who speaks, a god who has chosen to reveal Himself to us as His creation and we should never take that for granted, right? If God has something to say, we want to hear it. We want to listen. And it is awesome to think that we have access to the word of God recorded for us in Scripture. We worship a god who speaks. We also worship a god who listens. And this is what we are going to be talking about today as we look at the topics, the commitments of fasting and prayer. Like so many of the things that we've talked about in this series, this is not something we do, it is something we commit to, that fasting and prayer, they're not going to happen by accident, they're not going to happen on their own, that these are things that like the early church we need to devote ourselves to doing. And for some of us, maybe that feels like hard work. I don't know about you, but sometimes prayer could begin to feel like a grind. It could feel like something that you have to do or something that you're supposed to do when really we should view prayer as something that we get to do. And as we learn to do these things properly, even if at times they might feel like a grind, they might feel like a drudgery, they should become our delight, that as we practice them persistently, we find in them a great reward. And I use that word because that's the word that we're going to see Jesus used over and over in our text today when He talks about fasting in prayer. He keeps using this word reward. And so is that a word that you use? Is that a word that you think about when you think about fasting, when you think about prayer? Before we begin this morning, I want you to do something for me right now. I just want you to mentally do a quick evaluation of your prayer life. Rate yourself, scale of one to 10, 10 is everything's great, you've got an abundant, flourishing, vibrant, rewarding prayer life. One is it's dry, it's a grind, barely existence. Your prayer life is on a life support. Does prayer feel like a requirement, like a drudgery, like something that you have to do or does it feel like a reward? Does it feel like a delight, something that you get to do? Wherever you just rated yourself, none of us are a 10, we've all have room to grow and so my hope today is that we can all go up in our rating together. And so if you just said, "Well, I feel like I'm a two or a three," well, what would it take to get from a three to like a seven or to get from a five to a nine? What would it take for us to all grow to have a prayer life that's more like that of Christ Jesus? And lucky for us, this is something that Jesus' disciples wondered as well and they at times would ask Jesus, "Hey, Jesus, can you teach us how to pray?" And He did. On multiple occasions, Jesus taught His disciples how to pray and one of those is the text that we're going to be looking at this morning. It's Matthew chapter six, verse five through 21. This is a part of the sermon on the Mount. And Jesus spends a considerable amount of time teaching His disciples about this topic of fasting and prayer. So we're going to walk through this text together. It's a bit of a long text and we're going to just go through it section by section. And as we do, I want us to look at five commitments that are going to help us to avoid some of the pitfalls of prayer and fasting that we could potentially fall into, but also to just have an increasingly vibrant, abundant, powerful and rewarding prayer life that God wants us to have. So if you have your Bibles, we are in Matthew chapter six, beginning in verse five. The words are also going to be up here on the screen. This is what Jesus said, "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray and stand in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by others. And truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who's in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. Pray then like this, 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day 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 evil.' For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They just figure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where mouth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." This is the reading of God's holy word for us this morning. Would you please join me in prayer for our sermon today? God, we pray that we would learn to treasure You as we ought. And God, we pray that You would forgive us for not praying as we ought. Lord, You warned Your disciples in the garden to watch and to pray that they might not enter into temptation for the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is so weak. And God, we confess our weakness to You and we praise You that Your strength, Your power is made perfect in our weakness, that Your grace is greater than our failures. And so Lord, we ask today that You would to teach us to pray as we ought, teach us to live continually in Your presence, experiencing the blessing of knowing that You are always with us and You always hear us, that we can come and we can talk to You at any time. Teach us what it means to be anxious about nothing but to pray about everything because we know that You are with us, You see us, You hear us, You love us and You are able to provide for our every need. Lord, You are the God who hears and I pray that we would marvel at that reality today and we give You thanks and glory for it now, in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, before teaching His disciples how to pray, Jesus first we see, He teaches them how not to pray and He gives them two examples. He says, "On the one hand, don't go and don't pray like the hypocrites. Don't pray like the Pharisees, the religious people." And on the other hand, He says, "Don't pray like the Gentiles, like the lawless pagans either." And so let's start with the religious people that with the Pharisees in verse five, Jesus says, "When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray and stand in the synagogues and not at the street corners that they may be seen by others. And truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Now, first of all, we need to understand Jesus isn't condemning public prayer. He's not saying that there's never an appropriate time for Christians to pray in public with one another. Corporately, we see it in the New Testament that that is something that the early church was devoted to doing, that it is a good thing for God's people to come and to pray together publicly. But what Jesus is telling us and what we all need to be cautious of is this, that if we find in ourselves that we can go to church and pray with other Christians or we can go to community group and we've got a lot of things to say to God and we can pray with lofty words and eloquence and everything sounds very polished, but then we go home. And when we're alone with God in secret, we've got nothing to talk about, well, He says that's a problem. That's a symptom of a pretty serious illness in the diagnosis that he gives is hypocrisy. I think of it like this. I don't know if you've ever been over at a friend's house like hanging out and then somebody you don't know, one of their friends comes in and joins you. Maybe it's a coworker or neighbor or something like that. And at first, everything's great. You're having a good time, hanging out. The conversation is going well and everybody seems friendly and then your friend gets up and leaves the room and now you're trapped in this awkward deafening silence. And a moment ago, we thought, "I thought we were all friends, but now that they're gone, I realize that was an illusion. You are not my friend. I don't even know you. You're a stranger and we've got nothing to say to each other." Well, don't be like that with God. If you are like that with God, that is a cause for concern. If you find it easy to talk to God when other people, other Christians are around, but you can't talk to Him in private, oh, maybe you've fallen into the same pit as the Pharisees and maybe you've figured out how to look really religious and sound really spiritual when other people are around, but there's no real relationship there with God. He says, "Don't fall into that pit. If the pathway to prayer is this narrow road, you've got this dangerous ditch on the one side that the Pharisees fell into," but he says, "But there's also this other ditch on the other side that the Gentiles fall into. So he says, "Don't be like the pagans either," and this is what He talks about in verse seven. He says, when you pray, "Don't just heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words." He says, "Don't be like them as your Father knows what you need even before you ask." See, unlike the Jews who were monotheistic, they believed in one God rightly, the Gentiles believed in a pantheon of gods and their relationship to these gods was not particularly healthy. The gods were seemingly mostly motivated by their own selfish self-interest. And so the people envisioned their gods as these kind of powerful but moody beings and they needed to be appeased. They needed to be persuaded, even maybe bribed in order to care about the plights of mortal people. And their hope was that if they used the right words, if they prayed to the right god with the right words, in the right place, at the right temple with the right idols and the right sacrifices, well, maybe they could get somebody's attention out there. And so they would babble and they would heap up all of these words, as Jesus said, because they were just trying to cover all of their bases like, "If I just do this enough, maybe something will happen. Just throw a plethora of prayers out into the cosmos and hope that maybe somebody out there is listening." And Jesus says, "Don't be like that. Don't be like the Gentiles. The Gentiles weren't just a little-stitious, they're more than a little-stitious. They were superstitious. He says, "Don't be superstitious about prayer. It's not some magic incantation that you need to figure out. Prayer is not a way to tap into some higher power or manipulate some spiritual system. Prayer is just simply a conversation with God. And God is not a system. He is not a power. He is a person." And so I said we'd look at five commitments of a rewarding prayer life. And the first one is that, before anything else, we need to commit to this. We need to pray to God with God as a person. And I use the word with. We often talk about praying to God. Not necessarily anything wrong with that, but I'm using the word with here intentionally for two different reasons. First of all is because the Gentiles prayed to their gods, but they can never really be sure if the gods were listening to them. They could never be sure if anybody out there was hearing that they send their prayers off like an email and who knows? Maybe it just wound up in someone's spam folder. Maybe it just got deleted right away. They could never be sure. But we don't pray like that, that when we pray to God, we pray to a god that we know we have confidence, we have assurance that He is with us, that God is all knowing, all seeing. He is omniscient, omnipresent and all powerful. He always hears all the prayers of His people. And eight times in this passage, Jesus refers to God in a very specific way that shows the intimate relationship that we are to have with Him. He refers to Him as our Father. I mentioned earlier that this passage, it comes from the Sermon of the Mount, and later on in the same sermon, Jesus comes back to this topic of prayer in Matthew chapter seven and He's talking about the relationship of us praying to God as a father. And in verse seven, he says this. He says, "Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you. For everyone who asks, receives and he who seeks finds and to Him who knocks the door will be opened." And he says, "Or which one of you, if his son asks for bread, we give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, would give him a serpent? If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, well, then how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" I don't know about your dad's situation. Some of you had very good dads, maybe some of you didn't. The point that Jesus is making here though is that even the very best of earthly fathers seems evil when compared to the goodness, the kindness, the grace of our God, our Heavenly Father." And God wants us to know Him as a good Father, as a father who is so good, so loving, so attentive that He not only sees us, He knows what we need even before we ask Him," Jesus says. And Jesus calls God our Father. We need to relate to God as our Father. He also calls Him our Heavenly Father, that we can approach God with the affection and the intimacy of a father, but we must also approach Him with the reverence and the honor and the respect due to a Heavenly Father that our God as a father is perfect in His goodness. He's also perfect in His holiness. He teaches us to pray, "Our Father who arts in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." And so what does it mean to say that God is holy? It means that He is morally perfect in every way. He is completely pure without compromise, without contradiction. He is utterly distinct and set apart with no rival, with no equal for His glory, for His righteousness. And actually when you look at Scripture, what you see is that God is so holy, he is so righteous that anything unrighteous is unable to even stand before His presence, that even the angels of heaven, and when Isaiah has his vision, that they cover their faces before the holiness of God, that God is so righteous that anything containing even an ounce of sin, even the smallest imperfection, it would be destroyed before His holy presence as quickly as a shadow under the direct exposure of the sun. Hebrews 12:28 says, "Therefore, let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence in awe, for our God is a consuming fire." Well, this is true. How can we, as sinful people, hope to stand before a Holy God in prayer? Well, I mentioned earlier, there's two reasons that we need to not just pray to God but with God. And the first is simply that God is with us as a father, but the second is that we cannot pray to God without God helping us to pray to God, that we cannot come before the Father without the power of the Holy Spirit, without the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is what I mean, when we pray to the Father, we do so in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of Jesus Christ and we're able to, therefore, come boldly before the throne of God and stand before His righteousness, not because we're righteous. If we did that, we would die, but we are able to stand before His presence because, and only because, we have been covered by the righteous blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, that by grace through faith, the righteousness of Christ has been accredited to us. It covers us and we are able to stand before the Holy Father now and not just live, but to actually be loved, actually be welcomed into ... He looks at us and He sees us in the perfection of Jesus and welcomes us into His presence. And this is what it means to pray to God. It's really profound when you think about it. It is a Trinitarian experience, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit allowing us to come and experience just the awesome transcendent reality that our prayers can be heard by a Holy God. And that as they are and as we do, we realize that this Holy God is also our loving Father. And so commit to that, commit to having that mindset as you approach God, that you are speaking with God for the person that He is, both loving and holy, perfect in His holiness. Secondly, commit to pray with a plan. Jesus says in verse nine, He says, "Pray them like this." He's like, "I'm going to teach you. This 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 and give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not unto temptation, but deliver us from evil.'" I think one of the reasons that Christians maybe don't pray as often as they should is because they lack that vision of God and who He is and the person of God that they are communicating with. I think if we had that mindset and we realize what an awesome privilege that is, we would pray more. But I think another reason that a lot of Christians maybe struggle with prayer is that they don't have a practical plan. And so really quick, I just want to look at four super practical things that if you're not doing them already, I would say start doing them and you'll find I think that these are going to help you with your prayer life because Jesus doesn't just say, "If you pray." There is a sense in which we are continually living in the presence of God, praying without ceasing. As we go about our day, we should have this mindset that God is with us. We are talking to Him throughout our day, that we have access to Him at any time, but then we should also plan specific times where we are going to sit down and focus and spend time with God in prayer. And that's not going to happen on its own. You need to have a plan. So first of all, you need to determine a time and a place. If you're a busy person, I don't know if there's busy people that live here in Boston, but if there are, you might need to put this on your calendar. You might need to schedule it. You need to plan ahead and say, "At this time of day, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and I am going to pray and I'm going to have a time, I'm also going to have a place." Where are you going to do it? When are you going? For me, personally, I literally go into my bedroom, I go into to our closet and I close the door. And especially if you got kids, sometimes that's the only way you're going to get any kind of privacy. And I close the door and I pray. And I pray out loud. I don't know why. I started doing this at some point and it helps me to stay focused. It helps my mind not to wander and I'm having a conversation with God, so why wouldn't I pray out loud? Hebrews 5:7 says, "In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplication with loud cries and tears and to Him who was able to save Him from death and He was heard because of His reverence." I don't think that there's anything wrong with praying silently to God, but if you haven't tried praying out loud, I would say it's helpful for me, maybe it will be helpful for you, but the main point is determine a time and a place. Be intentional about it and make it happen. Secondly, use a template. It's not cheating to go into your prayer time with a plan of the kind of things that you're going to pray about. And I know there's a lot of different templates out there and maybe you've used a variety of them throughout your life. One that's really popular that I've heard about is the ACTS model, like the Book of Acts, and they turned it into an acronym, adoration Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. And so that's great. That's a good model. You begin adoration. You just spend some time praising God for His attributes like offering Him worship for who He is. A confession, you lead into a time of repentance where you're asking God for forgiveness and confessing your sins to Him. And Thanksgiving, you thank God for His mercy, for His grace, for all of His provision in your life. And then supplication, you bring your requests to God. You lay your heart before Him and you bring Him all your worries, all your concerns, all of your anxieties. Philippians 4:5-7 says, "Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand, so therefore, do not be anxious about anything but in everything. By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." So that's one model that people like to use and that's great. Me personally, I like to use the Lord's Prayer that we just read. The Lord's Prayer is a beautiful prayer on its own. You should memorize it. As Tyler said last week, you should internalize it. And I don't think that Jesus gave us this prayer to just memorize and then just like mindlessly recite over and over. I think He gave us this prayer as a good template, as a good model of the kind of things that the Father loves and wants to hear from us about. And so that's what I do. I pray through the Lord's Prayer and then I go back through it line by line, theme by theme and get more specific in my prayer time with God. Just personally, I find that really helpful. And then along with that, number three, is keeping a list. And so you've got your template. You keep a list. For me, I just do this in the little notepad app on my phone. Got it with me wherever I go. I got a list of general things that I'm praying about all the time. I pray for my wife, for my marriage, for my kids. I pray for Mosaic. I pray for the pastors, the staff, the community groups, the members of the church. And then as specific things come up in my life and the church's life and the life of people in our community group or whatever, I just add those to that list. Got it with me wherever I go. You do these things, pretty soon you find out you've got plenty of things to pray about that you need to be praying about with God. And fourthly, and this is really important, as you do this, as you make it a priority, you've got your plan, your template, you've got your list of things you're praying about, I record and remember. Sometimes you got to write things down that you're praying about, so that your future self is going to be able to look back and see and remember God's faithfulness throughout that time in your life. And I could give countless examples of this from my life, from members of our community group, but I think this is a good thing to do. Psalm 77 says, "Then I said I will appeal to this. I'll appeal to the year of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember Your wonders of old. I will ponder all of Your work and meditate on Your mighty deeds. Your way, O, God is holy. What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders. You have made known Your might among the peoples." As Christians, we believe this, we know this to be true, that our God is a god who always hears and who always answers all of the prayers of all His people. Nothing gets by Him, nothing gets unnoticed, nothing slips past Him. He always answers our prayers. Now, that doesn't mean that He's always going to say yes to our prayers. He doesn't always answer yes, but He is always going to answer best. He's always going to give us what is most and needed most glorifying to Him. And so when He does, don't just forget it and move on. How many times have you maybe prayed for something and then it happens and you're like, "Oh, probably a coincidence. No." No, don't just move on. Write that down, record it, remember it so that the next time you're praying about something, you can rely on it, so that you can look back because there's going to be some points in your future whereas the psalmist said you're going to need to remember the deeds of the Lord so that you can face the fears in your future with the blessed reminders of God's faithfulness in your past, so that you can then stand firm there in the present. Not because you're strong, but because you know that God is faithful, that He is with you, that He has upheld you and that His hand is upon you. First Peter 5:68 says, "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that the proper time, He may exalt you, casting all of your anxieties on Him because He cares for you." So commit to pray with a plan. Number three, we see in this passage is we need to commit to pray with purity. Jesus says in His prayer, "Forgive us our debts as we've also forgiven our debtors and not and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," and then he stops and he gives some commentary on this. And in verse 14, he says, "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours." And now we got to be clear, Jesus is not teaching a model of works-based righteousness here. He's not talking about forgiveness in the context of our justification. We cannot save ourselves by forgiving others. We cannot lose our salvation by failing to forgive others. Jesus, that's not what He's talking about here, but what Jesus is talking about here is He's talking about forgiveness in the context of prayer and in the context of our relationship with God, and therefore, also our relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. And the warning here is that things are not going to be right and good between you and God the Father if things are not right and good between you and your brothers and sisters in Christ. If you are holding a grudge, if you're holding onto anger, resentment, bitterness, you're refusing to forgive somebody. So don't be surprised then if your prayers are hindered. I guess as a father, I picture it like this. Remember Jesus, He shared that parable, "Hey, if your kid comes and asks for something to eat, you're not going to give them a stone." No, of course not. Why would a good parent withhold something good that their child needed? But let's back up and add some context to that. If your kid came to you and said, "Hey, dad, can I have some dinner?" but on the way to the dinner table, they pushed their sister and suplexed their little brother off of the couch and then they're standing there before you. It's like, "Well, hold on a minute. We got to talk. Yeah, we can talk about food. We can talk about dinner. We got bigger things to talk about like why you just smashed your little brother's face into the coffee table." You get the point. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mountain, just the chapter before this, in chapter five, verse 23, "If you're offering your gift at the altar and there remember your brother has something against you," he says, "leave your gift there and go. First be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift." This is how important, even if you're in the middle of worship, you're preparing to offer your gift at the altar, you're in the middle of praise and you're in middle of praise is stopped, first go be reconciled, then come and offer your gift. In Psalm 66, the psalmist said, "I cried to Him with my mouth and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened and He has attended to the voice of my prayers." The Apostle Peter talks about this in his first letter, both in chapter three, verse seven and in chapter four, verse seven, Peter says this. First, he speaks to the husbands. He says, "Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that," what? "So that your prayers may not be hindered." He says, "Husbands, if you want your prayers to not be hindered, well, then you would better be treating God's daughter with the honor, with the tenderness, with the consideration that she deserves." And then in the next chapter, he speaks more generally to all Christians and he says in chapter four, verse seven, "To the end of all things is at hand, therefore, be self-controlled and sober-minded again for the sake of your prayers." Now, earlier when I asked you to rate yourself, your prayer life, if you were finding, if you were saying, "Ah, that's not so good. I'm like a two. I'm maybe a three," you need to maybe stop and ask yourself, "Could this be the reason why? Have I been cherishing iniquity in my heart? Have I been harboring sin, resentment? Have I been holding a grudge? Is there someone that I have been refusing to forgive or is there someone that I need to go to and ask for forgiveness?" Because when you got stuff like this in your life, the last thing that you're going to want to do is go and talk to God in prayer because you know that God knows, and you know that God's not going to let it go. He's going to press you on it. He's going to tell you, "You need to go and you need to deal with this right away." And so you begin to avoid God or you begin to put up a front to mask things, but you know that he sees straight through all of that. So if you're struggling with prayer, be honest. Ask yourself. Are you just going through the motions? Are you avoiding God and could the reason be that there is sin in your life that you know need to deal with, that you've been avoiding? The only way that you're going to dig yourself out of that ditch is to just stop hiding, stop running from God, stop putting up a front, wearing a mask. You just got to go to the Father in faith. You got to go to the Father. You got to just trust. You got to trust that God is going to be more satisfying than whatever sin, whatever iniquity you may have been cherishing in your heart. You got to trust that His way is going to be better than your way, that when you go to Him and you turn and you humble yourself and repent, He's not going to push you away, that He is going to welcome you back with open arms. But we need to commit to pray with purity, without hypocrisy, so that our prayers may not be hindered. Number four, Jesus begins talking about fasting. So committed to pray with fasting. Verse 16 says, "And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. And truly, I say to you, they've received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Prayer and fasting, oftentimes, we talk about hand in hand. Unlike prayer, fasting is not something we do continually, unceasingly for practical reasons. You will eventually die of starvation if you try to do that. Fasting is a more occasional practice, but just like prayer, Jesus doesn't say, "Hey, if you fast." He says, "When you fast," he expects, he assumes that His disciples are going to fast and the question is not then, "Should we fast." The question is "When we fast, how should we fast? What should be the posture? What should be the motivation of our fasting?" The Pharisees were experts at fasting and many of them fasted multiple times a week. And they made a big show about it as they did and Jesus called them hypocrites for it because they fasted for attention. They fasted for clout, that the fasting of the Pharisees, it was really just another way for them to spiritually manipulate the people around them. They wanted to appear so strong and so self-disciplined and so holy and righteous and committed and spiritual that nobody would begin to question them or their authority. And so on the outside, everybody looked up to them. They looked so godly, they looked so devout, but Jesus saw right through them. He saw that they were really twisted and sick. And that's not like something I think many people encounter in our culture today. There's not like these religious, spiritual elites going around bragging about their fasting, but it's interesting that fasting has made a resurgence in our culture recently. Not so much for spiritual reasons, but for health and wellness reasons because there are. There's a lot of health benefits to fasting if you do it properly. And I'm not going to say anything too much about that in general. As long as you are honest about your motivations and as long as you're not trying to impress, show off, as you can stay humble, there's nothing wrong with a person fasting for health or wellness reasons. Now, there are a lot of benefits to it. There is, however, something deeply wrong for doing that, for fasting for those reasons by trying to make everybody else think that you're doing it because you're so super spiritual. And this is what ... God's not dumb. He knows you. He knows the motivations of your heart. He knows if you're fasting for Him or if you're fastening to get abs, right? If you're fasting for God or if you're fasting for like a god-bod, you're not going to pull one over on Him. And what does it profit a man if he gets washboard abs and loses his soul? We're all going to have shredded abs in heaven and that's great. There's nothing wrong with trying to pursue that right now, but be honest with yourself. If you're fasting for those reasons and fasting becomes a part of that process, just be honest about those motivations. Don't be a hypocrite, right? Don't do one thing and say something else. Don't try to create this image of yourself before others. Don't fast for attention. Don't fast to flex your spiritual maturity on the one hand and don't fast to flex your physical self-discipline on the other, trying to make people think that you're great, that you're strong because fasting is not about strength. Fasting, it's not about influence, it's not about clout. That's what the Pharisees got wrong. True fasting is about weakness. It's about brokenness. It's about repentance. It's about reliance on God. It's about awakening yourself physically to the reality of just how weak and dependent on God you really are. So when you fast, and Jesus assumes that you will fast, when you fast, the purpose is to humble yourself spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically. And as you do that, the goal is you're just pulling the curtain back on reality enough to see things as they really are, to see how really utterly weak and dependent on God you are. And when you're doing that properly, you're really not going to care if anyone else even notices because your true motivation is you're wanting that intimacy, that closeness, that reliance on God. Matthew 4:1-4, "Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry and the tempter came to Him and said, 'If you're the Son of God, well, then command these stones to become loaves of bread.' But he answered Him, 'It is written. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" And if you haven't fasted before or if you haven't fasted recently, I would encourage you to make it a commitment to do so soon, but as you do this, this should be your prayer. You should be praying, "God used this time to humble me, to bring me to a place, to help me feel and experience the reality that I am more dependent on You, on Your Spirit, on Your word than I am on the food that my physical body is hungering for right now." Because in reality, that is what is true. And so commit to pray with fasting. Let that become part of your spiritual life. And Jesus says, "In doing so, your Heavenly Father will reward you." Number five, looking at today, is to commit to pray with perspective. Jesus concludes, he goes on, he says, "So therefore, do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also." Now, I included this last passage here because I think a lot of times we don't think about this in the context of prayer and fasting, but that's the context in which Jesus delivered it. This is a transitional part of Jesus' sermon. And so on the one hand, He's talking about literal treasures. He's talking about possessions and material things, but it's clear that He's talking about more than that. He's talking about immaterial things as well. He's talking about the Pharisees, the religious people who were in their practices storing up for themselves treasures on earth and really missing the point of what they were pursuing. Now, the Pharisees were very devoted. They were devoted to memorizing Scripture. They were devoted to giving to the poor. They were devoted to fasting and prayer, but as we saw, their devotion was motivated by the wrong things. Their devotion was motivated by love for attention, love for authority. They were treasuring their image in their influence. They were storing up these treasures on earth, and in the process, they were selling their souls for things they couldn't keep. Now, the painful irony is that these treasures that they were holding onto, they were really becoming to them like millstones tied around their necks, sinking into the sea, pulling them further and further away from God the Father. And meanwhile, the greatest treasure of all, the treasure that they actually needed, the treasurer that the Father had given was standing right there in front of them, Jesus, the Son of God, the treasure of heaven, our mediator, the one, the only one who could bring them back into the presence of the Father, was standing right in front of them. They couldn't even see it. They were blinded by their self-righteousness. And Jesus told His disciples in John 14:6-7, He said to them, He says, "I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Me." And then He said, "If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also. And from now on, you do know Him and you have seen Him." This is what the Pharisees couldn't see, that when you know Jesus, you know the Father, that when you know the Father, you're going to treasure the Father because as you seek this Father, you find the Father that treasures you. You find the Father that gave His greatest treasure to seek you, to find you and to bring you back home. He gave up His own beloved Son, Jesus Christ, so that you could be saved. This is why Paul in Romans 8:31, he says, "Well, then what shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?" Do you have that perspective when you pray to the Father? You are praying to the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, holy and sovereign and He loves you like a father that would give His greatest treasure to have you be reconciled to Him. I decided not to write a conclusion to the sermon today. It felt almost silly to stand up here and talk to you anymore about prayer when we could just spend these last few moments together talking to God together in prayer. And so we are going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to be throwing you a curveball right now, so brace yourselves for it. For the next several minutes, we are going to just be spending time together in prayer. If this like weirds you out, if you've never done anything like this before, don't be nervous. I will give you a pass if you are really uncomfortable praying with other people. You can stay by yourself in your seat and pray silently, but I would encourage you to just step out of that comfort zone this morning. And I want us to just kind of circle up in groups of five, six, seven, eight people and spend a few minutes praying together. And if you've never done this before, don't freak out. You don't need to sound polished, you don't need to sound eloquent. God doesn't care about that. Just relax. It's having a conversation together with our Heavenly Father. And so nobody's going to judge you, don't freak out and we're just going to get together. And as we do, this is what I want you to do. First of all, if you have something in your life that you need prayer for, share that with the people that you're praying with, but then really just spend some time praying for one another, pray for our church and pray for the things that Jesus taught us to pray. The words of the Lord's Prayer are going to be up here on the screen and just meditate on them and pray for these things. And when you look at this, Jesus, He's telling us, He's like, "I want you to pray to Me about the most seemingly insignificant and mundane things, your daily bread. There's nothing too small. Just bring it to Me." And on the other hand, He's telling us, "I want you to also pray for the biggest, most transcendent things that you can even think about. Pray for that God's kingdom would come and that His will would be done here on earth as it is in heaven. Pray about these things together." And so I'm going to close us in prayer. We're going to just split up with some people around you, get into some groups. We're going to spend some time praying together. After a while, the band will come up back up here and lead us and worship. But if you're with us, let's pray and then we'll continue in prayer together. Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. But as I said earlier, I pray that You would teach us to treasure You as we ought and to understand the price that You paid so that we could have a relationship with You, that we could stand before You and know that our prayers are being heard. God, I know that there are people here in this room that have things going on in their lives right now and I know that there are things going on in our world right now that are so big and so complex that they seem hopeless apart from a mighty movement of You, of You working miracles, working wonders among us. And God, we praise You that You are the God who can do just that, that you are the sovereign God of all the universe and You hear us right now. And so, Lord, I pray that You would help us to become a people of prayer. Help us to be a church that knows You and loves You and deeply relies on You as we come together right now. Lord, we do so in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, our advocate, our mediator, our good shepherd, our great high priest. We come to You in the name of the One who has overcome Satan, sin and death, is now seated at Your right hand, ruling and reigning from His throne in heaven. Jesus, we pray that You would pour Your Spirit out upon Your church, that You would bring us now into the presence of our Heavenly Father and do so knowing that You are able to do abundantly more than we could ask or even think according to the power that has worked within us. And so Lord, to You be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

What is Influence – Week 4   INFLUENCE   WE ARE MULTIPLIERS   LOVE   THE CHARACTER OF POSITIVE INFLUENCE   How not to be a negative influence   How not to be negatively influenced   How to become a person of Influence   A Person of Influence has integrity with people A Person of Influence Nurtures People and Relationships A Person of Influence Has Faith in People A Person of Influence Listens to People A Person of Influence Seeks to Understand People   How to Become a Person of Influence   All we need is interaction to influence   A person of influence connects with People   When you connect with people you come alongside them   “Soon a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Please give me a drink.” He was alone at the time because his disciples had gone into the village to buy some food. The woman was surprised, for Jews refuse to have anything to do with Samaritans. She said to Jesus, “You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?” Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.” “But sir, you don't have a rope or a bucket,” she said, “and this well is very deep. Where would you get this living water?…” Jesus replied, “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” “Please, sir,” the woman said, “give me this water! Then I'll never be thirsty again, and I won't have to come here to get water.” “Go and get your husband,” Jesus told her. “I don't have a husband,” the woman replied. Jesus said, “You're right! You don't have a husband— for you have had five husbands, and you aren't even married to the man you're living with now…” When we see people as God sees them, have faith in them, nurture the interaction, listen with the intent to understand, and build an intentional connection we unlock the opportunity for God to shine through. …Then Jesus told her, “I Am the Messiah!” Just then his disciples came back. They were shocked to find him talking to a woman, but none of them had the nerve to ask, “What do you want with her?” or “Why are you talking to her?” The woman left her water jar beside the well and ran back to the village, telling everyone, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he possibly be the Messiah?” So the people came streaming from the village to see him….Many Samaritans from the village believed in Jesus because the woman had said, “He told me everything I ever did!” When they came out to see him, they begged him to stay in their village. So he stayed for two days, long enough for many more to hear his message and believe. Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not just because of what you told us, but because we have heard him ourselves. Now we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”” John 4:7-42 NLT   1.     Don't take people for granted 2.     Possess a “Make a difference” mindset   Can we reach the masses better apart or better together?   3.     Look for common ground   4.     Recognize and have respect for difference in personality   “The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ…we have all been baptized into one body by One Spirit, and we all share the same spirit. Yes the body has many different parts, not just one part. If the foot says, “I am not a part of the body because I am not a hand,” that does not make it any less a part of the body and if the ear says, “I am not part of the body because I am not an eye, would that make it any less a part of the body? If the whole body were an eye, how would you hear? Or if your whole body were an ear, how would you smell anything?” 1 Corinthians 12:12-17 NLT   5.     Communication comes from the heart   As people of influence we need to be wall climbers not wall builders   6.     Once Connected, move forward, be intentional, and lean in   A Person of Influence Empowers People   When we empower others, we are not influencing just them; we are influencing all the people they influence When we empower we multiply   1.     Evaluate the strengths of the person   No amount of knowledge or skill can drive someone to make an impact if they don't desire to do it themselves   2.     Give People Permission to succeed   3.     Be there for support and feedback   “You're never good your first time.” John Maxwell   4.     Release them to continue on their own   A person of influence multiplies other influencers   “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.” Matthew 9:37-38 NLT   “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.” Matthew 9:37-38 NLT   MULTIPLIERS   We are multipliers! We are a Great Commission Church which means we are multipliers. Individually, we are all responsible to disciple those younger in their faith and invite those far from Jesus into a life-giving community. Corporately, we are called to plant churches, pastor cities, and father and mother leaders to multiply the Kingdom impact. We are multipliers!   Everyone has the potential to multiply influence by multiplying influencers   1.     Be a person of character and integrity 2.     Nurture your relationships and interactions 3.     Have faith in people 4.     Listen to people 5.     Seek to understand people 6.     Connect with people 7.     Empower People   THEN   8.     We can multiply  

As the Church of the West, we are far more familiar with the God of the mountaintop than the God of the wilderness. When suffering crashes into our lives we often wonder where God is, and Lent is an annual practice that teaches us to find His presence in our wilderness. The Wilderness is a place of harsh clarity, an uncluttered discomfort, where our hearts are laid bare before God– and we discover one that is always there. As the people of God, tell time differently. Whether we are aware or not, our calendars shape us. As the Church, our calendars are patterned after the life of Jesus. In each season, we are guided to reflect on a different moment in the life of Jesus. This is a guide that year over year shapes our identity, our practices, and our story. Advent & Epiphany – God with us.Lent – God prepares us.Easter – God for us. Pentecost – God in us. Ordinary Time – God through us.Lent is a season of preparation; dedication to repentance, abstinence, and fasting in order to prepare one's heart for the celebration of Easter. Lent is a season of preparation in the wilderness. The Wilderness in Genesis“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”–Genesis 1:1-25 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. –Genesis 2:5–6.cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” –Genesis 3:17-19Genesis 3 closes with humanity leaving the Garden and returning to the wasteland of their own making. The Wilderness in Exodus16…‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” –Exodus 7:16. And in their idolatry and stubbornness, they live as nomads in the wilderness for forty years. The Wilderness in 1 Kings 19“Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” 8 And [Elijah] arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God. 9 There he came to a cave and lodged in it. And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He said, “I have been very jealous for the LORD, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.” 11 And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. 12 And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper [or a thin silence]. 13 And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”–1 Kings 19:7–13.There Elijah confesses his distrust of God; he repents of his mischaracterization of the God of Israel. God meets him in the wilderness, but that's only after Elijah abandons his post and gives ups. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the biographers of Jesus, each tell the story of our Messiah's experience in the wilderness of Judea. “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan [river] and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days being tempted by the devil.” – Luke 4:1-2And that ancient serpent makes an appearance again; tempting Jesus to turn rocks into bread, to give in to ambition, and to take power for himself. Jesus patterned His life off the story of scripture and the love of his Heavenly Father. In response, may we pattern our lives after the one who overcomes the wilderness. And Lent is an annual practice that stips back distractions and teaches us to find His presence in our wilderness.The main theme of Lent is repentance. “return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning.” So rend your hearts and not your garments, and return to the LORD your God. For He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger,abounding in loving devotion. And He relents from sending disaster.–Joel 2:12-13 (ESV)Fasting is the practice of going without food and drink(excluding water) for a period of time. Abstinence is the practice of creating margin in our daily schedule for the purpose of reorienting our lives towards Christ.Corporately we will practice this on Ash Wednesday and every Sunday with 15 minutes of preservice prayer.

  So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” John 13:34-35 NLT   “You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father. Matthew 5:14-16 NLT   If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn't love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal 1 Corinthians 13:1 NLT   “You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father. Matthew 5:14-16 NLT   We are multipliers! We are a Great Commission Church which means we are multipliers. Individually, we are all responsible to disciple those younger in their faith and invite those far from Jesus into a life-giving community. Corporately, we are called to plant churches, pastor cities, and father and mother leaders to multiply the Kingdom impact. We are multipliers!   God's purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Ephesians 3:10 NLT   When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” “Well,” they replied, “some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.” Then he asked them, “But who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “You are blessed, Simon son of John, because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you. You did not learn this from any human being. Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means ‘rock'), and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it. And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven.” Matthew 16:13-19 NLT   1. A PERSON OF POSITIVE INFLUENCE BREAKS THE DISEASE OF ME.   This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. John 15:12-13 NLT   But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:43-45 NLT   2. A PERSON OF POSITIVE INFLUENCE WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO SEE THEIR LOVED ONES HEALED   Soon the house where he was staying was so packed with visitors that there was no more room, even outside the door. While he was preaching God's word to them, four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn't bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, so they dug a hole through the roof above his head. Then they lowered the man on his mat, right down in front of Jesus. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “My child, your sins are forgiven.” Mark 2:2-5 NLT   “Your life is like the morning fog—it's here a little while, then it's gone.” James 4:4 NLT   “Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered — how fleeting my life is. Psalms 39:4 NLT   (God) who wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth. 1 Timothy 2:4 NLT   Then Jesus said, “What is the Kingdom of God like? How can I illustrate it? It is like a tiny mustard seed that a man planted in a garden; it grows and becomes a tree, and the birds make nests in its branches.” He also asked, “What else is the Kingdom of God like? It is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.”Luke 13:18-21 NLT   We are multipliers! We are a Great Commission Church which means we are multipliers. We are multipliers!      

In 2 Samuel 26, we learn that when we gather together to worship God there is so much more happening than what our eyes can see. 

To access a FREE collection of resources, go to www.RealGritVault.com   Learn how to break the barriers holding you back in this episode with Amy Ransdell as we talk about transformative ways to personal growth, self-improvement, and the impact of belief systems and emotions in our careers. Don't miss this talk to discover your potential and elevate your quality of life!   Key Takeaways From This Episode The role of religion and belief system in your upbringing Why you should trust your intuition  Importance of self-improvement in business Challenges that high achievers face in their lives How positive and negative emotions influence our brain What makes a person a high achiever?   References/Links Mentioned Powerhouse Deals in the Atlanta Real Estate Market with Amy Ransdell   About Amy Ransdell The tenacious REBEL heart behind Rules ReWritten™, Amy is obsessed with optimizing performance by helping clients defy limitations and redefining the rules to reach indomitable heights in business and life.  A Behavioral Transformation Coach, and leading expert in Peak Performance, Amy has worked with thousands of coaching clients over 20 years helping them craft daring and extraordinary lives. Clients include Inc100 executives, highly successful entrepreneurs, influencers, and leaders.  Corporately, Amy worked in Human Performance Training & Development and Executive Sales. She has served on boards and as the CMO of an 8-figure international service provider. Amy also has over 20 years of active entrepreneurial ownership in businesses within real estate investing, portfolio management, brokerage ownership, high-volume sales teams, strategic consulting, warehousing fulfillment, online content platforms, and top-tier coaching programs.  During all those years Amy has obsessively pursued the study of behavioral sciences, behavioral educational psychology, behavioral therapies, integrative psychology, neuroscience, neurochemistry, biochemistry, NLP, hypnotherapy, altered state sciences, meta-health, athletic performance, leadership development, and sales psychology. She is master certified in multiple modalities to help clients unlock, unleash, and elevate human performance, integrating that into the experiences of every client, student, trainee, and team member.    Connect with Amy Website: Rules Rewritten Instagram: @amyransdell_coach   Neil J. Timmins is on a mission to make a deep personal impact in the lives of his team members and business partners through his work as a real estate investor and mentor. He started as a traditional real estate agent where his team was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as a Top 100 team. Eventually, he made the transition from Realtor to full time investor.  Over the course of his career, Neil has been involved in over $300,000,000 in real estate transactions. Neil's portfolio depth includes assets ranging from houses to industrial properties. Recently, Neil and his team launched the Legacy Impact Partner Program where they partner with fix and flip investors from around the country. Neil's team brings capital to fund and fix rehabs, operational expertise, and years of experience catapulting their partner's business to new heights. Want to partner? You can learn more and book a call with Neil at www.LegacyImpactPartners.com.   Connect with Neil Website: Real Grit LinkedIn: Neil J. Timmins Facebook: Neil Timmins

In episode 8 of Volume 4 Greg talks life, love, the universe, and all things music with comedian, presenter, and podcaster LEE PEART!!!Lee Peart is a comedian, presenter, broadcaster and actor. Lee gigs at all the major comedy clubs across the UK, and has previously supported Jason Manford on tour.He is the resident warm-up artist for ITV's Loose Women, having worked there since 2017. He has also worked as warm-up for Strictly Come Dancing on BBC1, Netflix's Dance Monsters,Love Island: Aftersun on ITV2, Ruth & Eamonn's Do The Right Thing for Channel 5, and was the main stage warm-up for This Morning Live& Loose Women Late​.He has been a regular contributor on BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Manchester, Gaydio and talkRADIO, discussing the morning papers and providing insight and comedic commentary on the latest news.He has his own podcast 'Let's Talk with Lee Peart' - on it he has interviewed the likes of Lorraine Kelly, Tom Allen, Nadia Sawalha, Gloria Hunniford OBE and more. He also has a weekly podcast called 'Fab Life with Lauren & Lee' which was featured in OK! Magazine and The Sunday Express as podcast pick of the week.Corporately, he has worked as a presenter for companies such as Movember, Gillette, Google, Investec Bank, and has hosted Manchester Pride's Big Weekend main stage for 5 years, introducing acts such as Sir Ian McKellan, Texas, The Sugababes and Alison Moyet. He has also hosted the Pride Parade, and was the host of Disneyland Paris Pride. In 2016, Lee played the part of Mark in the national tour of Three Days and Three Minutes with Larry, a new play written by Chris Mellor about the late, great Larry Grayson - one of his comedy heroes.Lee's WebsiteTwitterInstagramFacebookYouTubeLee's PodcastsSUPPORT THIS SHOW

This week we shift gears into the world of finances. Financial stress takes a toll on our health and well-being, the average person is living paycheque to paycheque or only $400 away from needing to borrow money for an emergency expenditure. Nate shares how he created a wealthy, and healthy, life and why he devotes his time now to helping others thrive and experience freedom. Want to watch a video portion of this episode? Click HERE. Nate Scott is the author of “Life Is Rich: How To Create Lasting Wealth” and CEO of Life Is Rich Global, LLC. Life Is Rich Global is a B2B company that delivers value through leadership & sales coaching and customer acquisition. Nate is a combat enlisted soldier, West Point graduate, and former Infantry Officer/Ranger. Corporately, he was a licensed financial advisor at a global wealth management firm and the Chief Financial Officer for an INC500 Fastest growing company. As an entrepreneur, his single largest real estate acquisition has been a 40-unit apartment complex, and he owned a tax franchise business. Nate is a man of faith, a husband, and a father. Follow Nate on IG and Facebook: @AskNateScott. Podcast: Life Is Rich with Nate Scott. To learn more, visit www.CoachingwithNateScott.com www.LifeIsRichGlobal.com www.LifeIsRichToday.com Hypnobabies now has Hypnosis for a Better Life available! Whether you want to reduce anxiety, increase focus and concentration, develop good habits or have a peaceful sleep this option is for you! Please click the link to learn more: https://www.hypnobabies-store.com/product-category/hypnosis-for-a-better-life/?ref-hyp=Chrissycord Come find me at www.girlwithaflare.com Instagram: @girlwithaflarecoaching FB and Twitter: @girlwithaflare Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel where I share video portions of the podcast episodes. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lifeisrich/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lifeisrich/support

In this conversation, KP talks with Pastor Len Burdick who has been leading worship since the 80s, in contexts of every kind! Len has a doctorate in Pastoral Leadership and Master in Worship Studies and has taught at Word of Life Academy. He's currently the Worship Pastor at Victory Church in Winchester, VA Helpful links: Connect with Len - @lenburdick "Clear the Stage" by Scott Wilson - https://amzn.to/3DsKEOD Get my book - www.worshipologybook.com The Worshiplogy Community (coaching for worship leaders) - https://bit.ly/3cUYGhj  

Pastor Wayne Van Gelderen preached this sermon at the 2022 Extreme Love Conference at Falls Baptist Church in Menomonee Falls, WI. It was delivered on Thursday afternoon, March 3, 2023.Dr. Wayne Van Gelderen, Jr. is Senior Pastor at Falls Baptist Church in Menomonee Falls, WI and President of Baptist College of Ministry. For more information about the Extreme Love Conference and other Victory Conferences, please visit victoryconf.org

This first section of Joshua is about God's preparation of His people for His work – a hard work that requires great sacrifice and leads to great blessing. Joshua emerges as a powerful leader for a difficult time because he has spent so much time engaged with God's preparation plan for him. Corporately and individually, we can emulate such preparation so that we too are the right leaders for our homes, businesses, nation, and church.