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Going to continue on the mission series. So in December, after my wife and I came back from our sabbatical, we focused in on the remission of sins. We're leading in from December to January into February, when hopefully Brent's back will be fully healed and he'll be back for the Sermon on the Mount series. And in that time, we're basically going from the birth of a king through the life of a king, to a mountain where a king starts to lay out the kingdom decrees. And so today, I want to take a look at believers and apprentices.

See, a lot of times where I come from in Christianity, we use the term believers as being bad. It's like, well, they're just a believer or they're, you know, they're not a true believer. And we use negative terms in that capacity. Yet I remember as I grew up, I. I remember being in multiple different churches, whether it was the Baptist church or the Nazarene church or in the Presbyterian Church.

When somebody said, hey, I have become a believer, we rejoice. We were excited. That somebody who was a lost sheep, somebody who didn't profess that Jesus was their salvation, that somebody who lived a life, whether it was for themselves or for other gods, that somebody at that point had made the declaration, I don't wanna be my king anymore. I need a king. And that king is Jesus.

I remember exciting being excited. I remember rejoicing in those times. And yet, isn't that the goal of all people in the world is that they would have the profession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah? Isn't that the first thing that we want? You know, when we think of where we're at as a church, when we think of our talk on the commandments and we think of our talk on all these different things, why do we do what we do?

Well, it's first, because we believe that Jesus is the Messiah, right? Yeshua Yahshua, Yehoshua, however you want to say it, we believe that God took on flesh Emmanuel with us and came and dwelt with us. A believer is a person who believes that Jesus is the Christ that, like Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:22 23, says that he was born of a virgin, that he suffered on the persecution of Pilate and was crucified by his own people in Mark 15, rose from the grave, conquering death and freeing them from their sins. Mark 16, Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20. Then once we profess with our lips, Jesus is Lord, we go a lot of different ways.

There's A lot of different doctrines, There's a lot of different theologies, There's a lot of different denominations. There's a lot of different churches out there. I would venture to believe that almost everybody in this room has been in and out of multiples in their life. I think it's fairly normal. As you profess with your lips that Jesus is your Lord, then you start to try to understand, well, what do I do with that?

How do I take what I believe and how do I implement that into my daily life, into my home? And that looks different all the time. In my opportunity to meet with a lot of you and have dinner or have coffee and those types of things, I get to hear your testimony of where you've come from. Most of you have come from many, many, many different denominations. And I actually think that's a great thing because I think the ability for us to get to see how different believers at different points in their journey, walk, their walk, talk, their talk helps us keep our hearts open to the mentality that the Lord should be every day working in and through us.

Being a believer is not a bad thing. We want everybody to profess Jesus as their salvation. Yet once we do, then the question is, what do we do now? Obviously, we don't believe that you can sit idly. Obviously we don't believe that just, okay, we've attained everything the Lord wants us to.

Jesus is my salvation, and I can just sit. We don't believe that. We believe that because of the profession of faith, the Scripture tells us there's something we should do after that. We're not just to consume the Word, we're not just to consume the Holy Spirit, but we are to allow the Holy Spirit and the Word to consume us. And we're to bear fruit, multiplying the Word through action and deed to make apprentices.

After all, you ask most people, it doesn't matter what their denominational background is. If you ask them what is the Great Commission, it is to go make disciples of all nations. Some will say in baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But as a whole, they'll say it's to make disciples, it's to make apprentices of Jesus. So as we move forward over the next couple weeks, leading into the Kingdom series with Brent on the Sermon on the Mount, I want to define some terms, because definitions are important.

One of the things I've experienced in walking in and out in all these different churches and house groups and stuff like that is most of the times if we get sideways with somebody, or most of the time if we don't understand something, it's because we haven't first defined a terminology. And so we could say one thing means one thing and then we assume that the other person has the same definition as us. And then by the time we get down the road we realize, oh, wait a second, they don't. So one of the most basic terminologies in Christianity is the law. For some groups that means it's the first five books of Torah.

For some people it's the Torah and the prophets. For some people they call it the Old Testament, and for some people they call it just the teachings of Christ. And there's groups of people in all of those different places. So some people believe that the law is just the law of Christ, that the other law of Moses is non existent. It doesn't have any relevancy to our life.

Obviously, if you've listened to anybody who's ever preached in this church, that's not where this church is at. But the law that terminology means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So we need to start thinking through the lens of what other people think and we need to be able to understand what their definition is before we just assume what that is. Why? Because terminology and definitions matter.

It helps us to communicate, it helps us to walk, and it helps us to grow together as a body of Christ. Now I also wanted to find three terms that we're going to use in the next couple of weeks. And listening to Matthew Day on Tuesday night. How cool is it to finally being two, three years into a place where we've got deacons who are now raised up into a place where they can start leading Bible classes and Sunday school classes and Brant and I can just come and we can sit and we can be a part of it and watch them thrive. How cool is that?

Like, it's one of the coolest things for me to be able to see that. But in some of these classes you'll hear terminology like doctrine, theology, philosophical thoughts, philosophy, and sometimes we just let them all go together. It's like, well, we're talking about doctrine and philosophy. And it's like, well no, we're really just talking about philosophy. So for this church, this is how I would like for us to think about the definitions of these words.

Doctrine. Doctrine is a set core belief system. It's a set of teachings. Some churches have those on their website. This is our core beliefs as a church.

Some churches who have been around, especially some of the older denominations, they have what's called creeds. You'll hear Matthew from time to time. Talk about that, whether it's at the Bibles in Bourbon and Sukkot or it's in the Bible classes. We have the Apostles Creed, we have the Nicene Creed, there's a lot of creeds. And so it is a core statement of belief for a church that these are the core beliefs of what we believe.

I believe every household should have a doctrine. They should have a core set of what do we believe. And then ultimately a church should have those and then a regional and a community and so on and so on. How does two walk together unless they agree? Theology.

Theology relates to doctrine in that it explores ways in which we understand our core beliefs. It tends towards the study of how do you actually implement something. So if we all said together we believe as a core belief Jesus is God, theology relates to that doctrine in what do we now do with our walk and our thought because of that belief. And then we have philosophy, which is the love of wisdom that comes from the implementation of our core beliefs. So like we talked last week, everybody in this room has what they believe to be commandments, closed handed things from the Lord.

What we do in the implementation process will either bear good fruit or bad fruit. And Paul outlines that. The Proverbs outlines that the entire scripture is talking about whether something is positive or something that's negative. So we know the commandments are positive. We know that this fruit over here is positive.

So the implementation, the theology part, the how do we think and walk? We have a lot of say so in. And so if we get to a place where we're not bearing the fruit of our belief in the commandment, then it's on us to go before the Lord and continue to be refined. We can't just say, well, it's the Lord who's the problem, it's not the Lord who's the problem. So same thing as we're implementing a core thought.

Well, we should learn wisdom. Well, how do you learn wisdom? Sometimes it's from doing the wrong thing. If you're like me, most of the times it's from doing the wrong thing and then you learn, probably shouldn't do it that way. That didn't bear fruit.

I should probably think of a different way. Another way that wisdom comes is through the older teaching, younger. This is a biblical principle we see. Why do older teach younger? Well, I can tell you this.

It's not because Brent's smarter than me, although I think he is. It's because he's been around life a lot longer. So, for example, just a real life example. I've been shepherding a church for nine years. I was horrible at it for at least seven.

It's not even a question. I was really bad at it. Like, bad. Like one plus one equals seven bad. Like, that's how bad it was.

So as I'm starting to walk in repentance for not being a good shepherd, as I'm starting to allow the Holy Spirit to mold and make me, I ask questions of men and women who've done it in many other environments for a lot longer. Why? Because when somebody complains, oh, the worship music is too loud, or oh, it's too hot, or oh, I really don't like the fact that you have a man bun, or all these other things that happen, it's a lot easier to go seek the counsel of individuals who've dealt with that before. Why? Because if I know in two times of handling a situation in my life, if I know that maybe once I handled it okay and once I didn't.

Brent probably has handled that same type of situation 30 to 40 times in his lifetime. So he has a better data pool of wisdom of what was successful and what wasn't. Now, in the end, our wisdom ultimately is not only from our experience, but from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit manifesting inside of us. And so I could be in a situation and this happens a lot. I lead this way a lot where I will gather all the wisdom of those who are around me, who've gone before me, and then I'll pray and I'll fast.

Is the Holy Spirit confirming the counsel I've gotten, or is the Holy Spirit not? And I try to live my life this way in every everything I do. And then what happens? You go back to your theology, you go back to your implementation. You go back to that place and you make an adjustment.

If the fruit you have is not good, if the situation isn't good, and we should be constantly doing this, whether it's in your marriage, whether it's in our relationship with other people, you should be doing it in your job at the corporate environment. You should be constantly looking at how your core beliefs are then implemented. And then what wisdom do you learn from that implementation? Recently I had a couple of people ask me about raising kids. And I always have to preface like, I can only speak about what's happened so far because I only have a 16 year old.

I can't tell you how to raise a teenager. I Haven't bore any fruit now. So far things are going great, but in the end, until my teenager is grown up and out of the household and I have multiple other ones go through, I probably shouldn't be giving advice to people on how to raise a teenager. I can ask a lot of questions, we can have a lot of conversations, but I'm definitely not the authority because I haven't even implemented it yet. So I don't even have wisdom from my implementation on whether it was good or bad.

And that's one of the things that for a type A personality like myself, I have to remember that God is God and I am not. And in those moments, if I don't have experience in doing it, I'm personally going to step back from it and I'm going to be in a position where I'm going to say, okay, Lord, I need you to use other men and women in my life and then move forward. All three doctrine, theology and philosophy are needed to be healthy in your relationship with the Lord. If we say any one of them, if we say all of our focus is on implementation, but we're never learning wisdom from the implementation. And we don't know exactly what we're implementing because we don't know exactly what we believe, well then you're going to keep spiraling.

The Bible says your ship on a water that's going to and fro. So your doctrine helps hold you grounded in what your core beliefs are. Then your implementation in the philosophy help you bear fruit through that. This was Jesus's model for us throughout life. Jesus grew up in a culture that was firmly rooted in their doctrine.

Remember, we're, we're Hebrew loving Christians in this room. But none of us live in Israel. None of us grew up in a synagogue with sages whose parents and parents and parents and parents and parents. So that culture was deeply rooted in what their doctrine was. They were also pretty deeply rooted in what their theology was in the implementation.

This is why you see the two major houses. This is why you say, well I was trained by Apollos in the New Testament because there was different ways to implement the core doctrine. But this was a culture that traditionally learned and passed down stories orally. You would hear, they would speak. Yet today we live in a culture that is predominantly visual.

This is why you see social media, this is why stuff like Snapchat and Instagram and all these, this is why they're so popular. This is why your little daily scripture verses are so popular. And there's like 3, 3.8 billion ministries out there. And somehow all of them get some sort of a. Like every day by posting a scripture verse.

It's because we're a visual society more than we are an oral society. Yet how many of us see a focus on creating disciples outside of just the visual? Because this was part of Jesus entire mission was to come and set the record straight on all the other wise people that had come before and say, this is what I command you to do and this is how you should do it. A guy in his 30s had far more wisdom than the sages who were running the culture at that time. There's hundreds of books, there's hundreds of programs, there's hundreds of different systems out there that you can buy or you can do and you can just implement.

Today it's software or whatever, classes and books and will make disciples. But Jesus was far more intimate with his people than a system. Jesus was far more intimate with his disciples and his followers than to just implement a system. Most of us would be fairly scared of something like that today because it would look more like a cult. Because when Jesus says, hey, pick up your stuff and we're going to go on to the next town.

And they're like, sure, we're going to do it.

Most of us wouldn't do that. Jesus says, hey, sell all of your belongings and follow me. How many of you would do it? I gotta tell you right here, like, I would be questioning, I'd be laying fleeces down like, lord, is this you? Cause I know when he woke me up in the morning and told me audibly, you're moving to Oklahoma, I knew that was him.

You know how I knew that was him? Cause there wasn't even 1% part of me that wanted to move to Oklahoma.

I had a comfortable job. I had all these things that were getting ready to happen. I didn't wanna move here. I'm not a big basketball guy. So it's not like I could be like, thunder up like, no.

And so I had to get my heart posture to a place where it's like, lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary because I don't wanna do what I know you're telling me to do. And yet I did it. And there's been good times and there's been bad times. Why? Because we have to learn as we walk in the implementation.

Not everything's going to be good, not everything's going to be bad. This is what Jesus was trying to model to them. It's really cool when Peter's rushing in, he's like, hey, Lord, guess what? There's like a thousand people out there. We should all go this way.

Or can you imagine their thoughts after he walks in and he's like, hey, we're going to do fishes and bread tonight, and I'm going to multiply this and then the next time they get to a place where somebody might be hungry. Because remember, the scripture tells us that not every miracle, not everything was recorded because there isn't enough paper or room on the entire earth basically to capture that. So we have some of the key ones, but there was many more. So can you imagine what would have happened at that time for his apprentices to say, lord, why don't you just do the fish and loaf thing again? And he was like, no, I'm going to move on to this next town.

He taught them to not fall into a system, to not fall into too many patterns, to allow the Holy Spirit to be present with them. Now, that's not saying, let's not swing the pendulum so far and say, well, this is why you can't have repetition in worship or whatever, because we know the throne room is repetitive. You don't really need to come up with eloquent words when you're in front of the Lord, because all you have to do is say holy. And even that's not like even kadosh isn't even enough. But he doesn't need our eloquence.

He needs our relationship and our obedience to him. And while I do believe that the Western church has done a really, really good job of making Jesus known and singing praises to Jesus and that, I do believe that we struggle corporately with actually making apprentices.

Because what we see is we see a lot of people will attend services or they'll attend online. We see that they'll participate in some elements of the church, whether it be a small group or the ladies group, or seems to be, if there's donuts involved, everybody's there, but they'll participate in that. But when it comes to actually doing life with each other on the regular basis, whether it's in good times or bad times, most of the attendance that shows up on a regular basis is not in those small groups. It's not going through that. And yet this is exactly what Jesus used to take the gospel to the entire nations.

But he went first to his house and then sent them out. After all, Matthew 28, Jesus commanded His disciples to make other disciples to go and do this. You've sat, you've learned, there's a time, there's a Season for everything. And now this season is one to go out. And then later on, there was a season where they were all basically running for their lives because everybody was trying to kill them for the message.

But there's a time for you to sit and learn, and then there's a time for you to sow. And that's literally different for every person. You can't say, like, you can't walk in and say, well, you know, you became a believer and in six months you're going to be ready to sow. Some people are ready to sow in two weeks. Some people are ready to sow in five years.

Some people never get to the place where they're trying to make disciples in their life or in the church. And so not everybody is at the same spot. And you shouldn't expect everybody to be at the same spot. We got to let Matthew be Matthew. We got to let John be John, we got to let Peter be Peter.

We gotta let Andrew be Andrew instead of trying to make them all Andrew's or all Peter's.

Historically, discipleship was apprenticeship. It wasn't just a system. It wasn't just a teaching, it wasn't just a collection, it wasn't just an outfit. It wasn't just a knock on a door and hand him a pamphlet. You got a minute to talk about the Lord.

Discipleship was like an apprenticeship. It was something that they did in every, every facet. It's a little bit harder to do nowadays because most people are uncomfortable with living in communal environments, I being one. And so we, we don't have the same thing Jesus had. Jesus would go from town to town and he would sleep in the same place as the disciples.

He'd eat in the same place that with the disciples. He'd minister in the same place with disciples. So it's a little bit harder for us nowadays, but it's absolutely possible for us to apprentice other individuals. It just takes more work because people have more boundaries. Takes more work.

That's okay. Jesus never said the calling was going to be easy. He never said you could just snap your finger and all of a sudden you could multiply the kingdom. He said, no, you have to till the ground and you have to. You have to actually plant seed.

You have to do something. I want to look at the medical field as an example. Doctors and surgeons spend countless hours studying, learning, being tested, going through school on how the human body works and whatever their specialty is, whether it's brain surgery or it's foot surgery or children's pediatric or Whatever. They spend all this time studying. They want to know how the body functions, how the body reacts, how the body ticks, how the body works.

Yet how many of you in this room want a doctor to perform your surgery the day they get their diploma? Is there anybody in this room who's willing to take that risk?

Okay, I was going to say I was just trying to test how rogue are some of our people. I mean, you never know. Hey, you know, you only live once. I trust the Lord. The first day they get their diploma, I want them to create.

You know, let them do brain surgery on me on that day. No, I'm glad nobody raised their hand, because we would want somebody who was trained right. Well, how does the training come? Well, they spend countless hours in a book. They spend countless hours learning, testing, studying, doing all of that with their colleagues in the classroom.

Then what do they have to do? They have to actually go on site. With who? An older, wiser person who's been doing the job. And they have to apprentice in that space for a period of time.

And even then, I would be uncomfortable. A couple years ago at Sukkot, I had a vision. I had a vision that somebody had gotten out of a truck, and so I was okay to hook up a trailer. That was not a vision of the Lord, because it didn't happen. The guy was still in the truck.

And as I reached down to put that trailer, I know Holly's over here going, as I reached down to hook up that trailer onto that hitch, the guy had not gotten out of the truck. And so. So the truck rocks and rips my finger in half so bad that immediately I put it together, looked at a buddy of mine who is an emt, and he was like, you rip your finger in half? And I said, yeah. And he's like, all right, let's go.

Now. He had a. Thank God he had a sense of humor, because I didn't in the moment. I was in shock. He had hot pink coban.

And so as I'm holding my finger together and trying to keep it there, he's like, wrapping it with hot pink coban way more than was necessary, just so that I had to walk around like this into the hospital with hot pink Cobain. Just looked like a Billy club on top of my finger. Now, why do I say all that? Because we went to Stroud Medical, which was the closest one, which. I don't know the people in Stroud.

I think every. You know, everybody is of the Lord, and they're beautiful. But the first thing that the person said, you're going to lose half your finger. Well, at this point in time, I'm not even calling my wife. I'm not telling anybody at this.

I'm like, okay, well, thank God it wasn't my guitar playing hand. You know, little Def Leppard over here tried to like. And so I'm there and they're like, but we need to send you to ou. Well, it just happens that the hand surgeon was at ou and they're like, we're going to send you to ou. So I've got a Taurus scroll in the back of my car.

I got a gigantic ark, and I'm about ready to drive to ou. And I'm like, hey, man, we probably need to go back to the campground, unload that thing and then go to ou. So we do that and we go down and I'm emotionally getting ready. I'm going to lose part of my finger. They're all going to laugh at me.

My kids are going to call me stubby. Like, I'm getting prepared for this. And when we walk in, the Receptionist lady goes, Mr. Frankie, we've been waiting on you. Come right back.

And they take me into this big gigantic room. OU is a teaching hospital. Like we said. You go to school and then there's a time where you actually have to be on the ground with wiser people doing these things. And so they turn on all these bright lights, like Area 51.

I'm sitting there, I'm a specimen in a room with lots of pain meds. The room was somewhat spinning and a guy who looked like Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell comes in. Couldn't have been any more than 30 years old. And he goes, Mr. Frank, you heard you hurt yourself.

I was like, yeah, I did. And he goes, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna stitch you up. We'll get you out of here in just a minute. I'm like, wait, I'm not gonna lose my finger. He goes, oh, no, this is simple.

Well, I was like, what about the bone shards that are there? He's like, ah, they'll take care of themselves, Themselves, whatever. And in comes a whole group of like 30 year olds to watch me get my finger put back together and get. I got a really beautiful manicure. I don't know.

But the tin foil they sewed into there was just really pretty. It really matched my eyes that day. But even in that moment, I had, I had a 30 something year old who was operating and I was like, like, where's the 60 year old. Where's the guy who's done 10 million of these surgeries? That's the guy I want, because I want movement in my finger.

I want to be able to do things again. I want the expert of the experts. And yet I was blessed. The guy who was in his 30s did a really, really great job. I have a fingernail.

It looks a lot better than I ever thought it would be. Every once in a while I can tell you when it's going to snow or it's going to, to rain because it gets real. Like the muscles are like. And so I was fortunate enough that this younger man who was the one who did the surgery had probably studied with a really good surgeon. But even then, I didn't want the 30 year old.

I wanted the guy who was in his 60s or in his 70s. And the reason why I wanted that man is because I knew that man was battle tested. I knew he had seen it all. I knew if something weird was there, he was gonna know what to do. This is pretty like this is counter to our current culture, though, guys, because we live in a day and age where the younger people are the smartest.

How do I know? Because I was there. And they're the ones who enter into the workforce, whatever that workforce might be. And for the most part, not all. There's always exceptions to the rule.

They come in and they're like, well, this is what you should do. And you should change this today. And you should change this today. And you should change this today. And you should do this and you should do this.

And they're there for three years and then they're on. Indeed, using that to leap to another position. Gone are the days of the seer's watch. Gone are the days of 70 years of service, and you retire at a party in a small pub in Milwaukee. Gone are those days.

Yet we have to understand that the biblical model was older, with younger. And as older or with younger, you should learn and you should grow. I have YouTube, but just because I can watch how to change a hose on a car doesn't mean that you should bring your car to me. Just because I can watch it on YouTube. Don't bring your washer to me.

Just because I can watch it on YouTube. No, you want to go with the person who has done it for years and years and years and years and can say, you know, that YouTube is really, really great. That's awesome. But it also might be this or this or, you know, that one time it was this really random thing. So they know what to do if it doesn't work.

This is part of creating disciples is that you have younger people, you have people in the middle stage and you have older people and you pass down that wisdom that helps change the implementation. We live in a society that wants change. We live in a society that spends millions of dollars on self care because they don't like whatever it is they have. Well, how do you change it? You follow the apprenticeship model of Jesus older walking with younger.

If you want change in your marriage, you're looking for people who've been married for many, many years to walk with them. If you want to learn a trade or a craft or a skill, I'm not going to call Philip and say, hey, Philip, I want you to teach me and I want you to mentor me on how to be an artist. That's not what he's done in his life.

You find those people to apprentice life with who have what you would like to see. And this is in every area. You know, Brent taught earlier on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. You don't go to a guy who's never spoken tongues and ask him to mentor you in tongues.

We laugh at that because we know how silly that might be. But what about when we're doing life on a regular basis? We laugh at it because it's tongues. But like, but what about, what about when we need to have a better prayer life? Or what about when we need to have, you know, more compassion or we need to be whatever it might be.

Every person struggles with something, and sometimes what we learn today will struggle with something completely different in the future. Which means we're constantly being apprenticed. Right. If we're truly walking in the manner of Jesus. Yes.

And sometimes it takes a different, wiser person to lead us in those areas than the one we were at for that season.

This is part of why I love that he says the helper will come because the helper was involved in every facet of creation and life. And so the helper can help us in so many different ways. But we also watch that Jesus as a young man, he followed in a similar pattern too. You know, a lot of times we look at some of the elements of Jesus and we see that he just radically changed things, and he did in some regards. Yet Luke 2 tells us that Jesus sat in the temple.

One greater than the temple was here, but he sat in the temple. His mom and dad had to come back and find him. Like, what are you doing? One who was greater than the temple did not come and Throw away the system by which he grew up in. He was respectful of those.

We also see this in Jesus. Following in the same profession as his father. He would not only have learned the tasks and how to do the tasks, but he would have learned about them. He would have learned wisdom from his father on them, and that would have helped him to be better at the tasks he had. And this is very unlike how our modern culture works.

Our modern culture is a knowledge based culture that gives us the ability to learn a bazillion things all at once on the Internet. And it's only getting faster. You can pop an article into AI and it can literally give you 3, 4, 5, 10 bullet points of what 25 pages say like that.

But what you do with the knowledge is something that you have to do in life. Because if AI says, hey, this is how you make a pizza, it doesn't mean that AI or the Internet or anything else can say, but your oven is actually five degrees off, which means there has to be two additional minutes to cook it. Otherwise it's too doughy or it's too burnt. It's actually a reminder for me to go home and adjust the, the dial on my stove. Those are things you learn by doing them in life.

And the more people you do them with, the more you learn, right? If you're on a baseball team, you can learn a lot of things. If you're on a football team, you can learn a lot of things. If you're playing football by yourself, you're only going to learn what you can learn in that environment. And that's important for us because we live in a culture where people have become consumers.

We consume at an alarming rate. We consume food, we consume money, we consume all kinds of things. And we also consume in churches. This is why we have so many arguments over, you know, well, what should the pastor wear? Or what are the songs we should sing?

Or should you have haze or no haze, or what kind of coffee should you you have? What kind of donuts? Because we're looking at it from a consuming mentality like we do all the rest of the world. God is not like the rest of the world. What God requires of us is not like the rest of the world.

What God requires of us is to be in a culture that we love him so much that we engage in that culture, we volunteer in that culture, were refined in that culture and there's a ton of them. It's not just here you can do it in many different places. We find the Holy Spirit in that culture, but it starts first and foremost by recognizing that the culture that you walk through the door should not be about you and it should always be about him.

But it actually starts before then. Because if your home is about you and not about God, then why wouldn't you make your office? Or why wouldn't you make your church about you? Why wouldn't you make your relationships about you? It's about God.

And so when we walk through the doors of this church, when you walk through the doors of your home, is God first? Because that's where we have to start. You can't apprentice under the Holy Spirit or you can't apprentice with Jesus. If Jesus and the Holy Spirit aren't first and foremost in your life worship team, you can come back.

I believe that volunteering in a church is vital. I believe that being engaged in a community is vital. I believe being present is vital. But more importantly, I believe allowing yourself to be pliable to the power of the Holy Spirit's refinement is the most important. And that's not something God's going to do.

He's not going to violate your free will. You're going to have to want to meet with him. You're going to have to sit with him, and you're going to have to allow the Holy Spirit to convict you and to lead you into all knowledge, understanding and truth. And then you will have to make habit adjustments in your home, in your relationship, in your prayer life, and how much you read the word of God, whatever it is, he's dealing with you on that moment. And it's something different for every person.

And I believe it's different in every season, too. I believe if you're growing, the seasons change.

So over the next couple of weeks as we come to wrap up this series and start to transition into the time where Jesus went up on a mountain and he sat down and he was giving the foreshadow of not only being the new Moses, the new king with the New Kingdom decrees, we're going to look at what does Jesus say? How does Jesus show us? How does Jesus model for us the foundational principles to build a culture where each and every one of us are apprenticing under him and learning and growing, where each and every one of us are pursuing him closer, harder, faster, to become a family on mission that radically alters the way we think, the habits we form to make sure that we're bearing the fruit by which the Holy Spirit is visible in our homes, in our relationships, in our jobs, in our community, so that we can take that Holy Spirit fruit out those doors and into this city, and we can reach the people who are hungry. See, our church does a lot of outreach. Passover will come up in a couple of months, and that's one of our biggest outreaches.

You know, rather than throwing away your food, we bring the food in and then we do the outreach. But while we feed people with physical sustenance, we must understand that without the spiritual sustenance of the power of the Holy Spirit in our life to fill us and to eat on, all of that is meaningless. I had a really great, great piece of bread this morning. It was awesome. And tomorrow I'm going to need another one one, because I'll forget about it.

But Jesus says, if you're thirsty, come to me and you'll thirst no more. If you're hungry, come eat of me and you'll be hungry no more. That's the bread I want.

I don't want to be hungry anymore. I want his. His love and his power to fill us so that we can radically alter our lives, so that we can make emotionally healthy, mentally stable and powerful apprentices that not only are seeing the power of God in here, but are seeing the power of God out there. Help and change lives.

Cam shared earlier today about the update about Penelope Horner. It's amazing to watch what God's doing. The fact that her blood count is where it is when it shouldn't be, the fact that she's able to do more treatments quicker when they thought it was going to be April before, they might do that.

But what good does it do us to talk about in this room that God is doing amazing stuff in a young lady who has cancer? If we don't go out and tell the person out in the world who literally has no hope in Jesus that he's not already already done it in here multiple times. We've seen it. But we have faith that he will do it for you out there to be the encouragement to be the witness of the testimony of the saving power of Jesus. And that takes every single day us to be allowing the Lord to build our life.

Will you stand with me and respond.