Future Grace | 1 Peter 1:13–2:3

Well, as many of you know, I just started here at 180 in February. So February 1st, we're almost at exactly three months. We just crossed over the 90-day threshold. The last church that I was at, I was at for almost four years. It was called Anchor Church. And the Lord really blessed our hearts, grew us there, and blessed the ministry that he allowed us to be a part of there. I worked in a couple of different areas at that church, but one of the primary areas of responsibility that I had was with our high school and junior high students. So I loved it. I mean, these guys got energy. It was incredible. One of the things he put on my heart just a few months after I started there was to start a student evangelism conference for our region. Not just for the kids at our church, but for the churches in our surrounding area. Because the next generation, they're going to be the ones who are going to reach their generation for Jesus, right? I mean, as much as even somebody like me, I mean, Summer was like, you're so old, right? She just told me that. These kids think so even more. Summer really didn't say that. I just like to give her a hard time. But these kids, I mean, I couldn't believe the first time, you know, it was like I had a kid who was born in the 2000s, and I was like, oh my goodness, this is crazy, I really am getting kind of old. But they're the ones who are going to be able to reach their generation. So we had it for the first year, and we really focused on methods and tools to really help them feel more confident and equipped to embolden them to get out into their school and in their families to proclaim the gospel. Additionally, the next year, the second year, we focused on apologetics. Get the weapons in their hands to be able to fight against the arguments of people in the world faith and as much incredible work as the Lord did through those two years after the second year we looked back and we said how much are they really getting out and doing this it still seems like they're so timid and they have the methods they have the tools we're showing them how to do it and they're learning how to do it they can do it but they're still not getting out there and actually doing it why And what we came to the conclusion was that so many, if not most of them, really had not tasted of the goodness of God yet. They had been in proximity to God, but they had no intimacy with God. Even somebody like Samuel, I've been reading 1 Samuel recently. He's in the temple, he's serving the Lord when he's young, but he still did not yet know the Lord, and so he didn't recognize his voice. There had to be a transitional moment in his life where he came to an intimacy of knowing of him. And what we started to see was that so many of these kids did not have that yet. So we could give them all the tools and the methods and the techniques of how to share the gospel, but if they didn't have a heart for Jesus, it wasn't going to overflow into their lives. So we took a step back and said, how can we help train them to enter into God's presence in their own lives, to truly know him so they come into relationship with him, and everything changes. Our key verse was, taste and see that the Lord is good. Because when you taste how good God is, you can't help but invite other people into it. This is why David says, come magnify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together. It's an invitation into the intimacy you're already experiencing. See, there's something to really tasting of God's goodness and his grace that not only sets our eyes on the future and the hope that we have that's stored up for us in heaven, but radically shifts the way that we live today. We saw so many students over the past two years now who entered into that experience and are reaching their schools and are doing things I can't even believe some of these kids are doing. It's unbelievable. And I want that for every person in this room here as well. So the focus of our sermon today is gonna be on future grace. Future grace, the grace that is to be revealed in its fullness when Jesus returns. Future grace is this, it doesn't just secure your tomorrow, it transforms your today. It doesn't just secure your tomorrow. I have the grace of Jesus that covers me, so I know I have a seat in heaven with him, but it transforms today. It's the catalyst towards change in our lives. So let's jump into 1 Peter. Today, we're going to see five dramatic changes that future grace fuels today. I want to read the first verse really quickly. It's 1 Peter 1.13. 1 Peter 1.13 really cements us into what the whole passage talks about. He says this, Therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully... on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Guys, this is a war. He says you need to set your mind fully on this. You need to be sober-minded. Sober-minded. Prepare your mind for action. Set your hope fully on the grace that is to be revealed at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Recently, I feel like I've been fighting discouragement in a way beyond what has been characteristic for my walk with Jesus, really with no rationale for it. And what's happening is in my mind, I'm fighting against thoughts that are against the truth. And what happens when you don't take those thoughts captive to Christ is they start to control and consume you, and you go from sober-minded thinking to swerving thinking. You ever been in a lane of traffic on a highway and somebody's swerving into different lanes? Maybe they're falling asleep or maybe they're under the influence of something. It's a scary thing. But when we're not sober-minded in our thinking, when we're not grounded in the truth and specifically when our eyes are not fixed in the grace that is to be revealed to us, we fall into that same swerving thinking. So future grace is this. Future grace is the unshakable certainty that God's full favor and power will be unveiled in complete, overwhelming fullness when Christ is revealed. That coming flood of grace fuels present obedience because what is absolutely guaranteed then is already sustaining us now. When that future is crystal clear, it recalibrates every decision, breaking the power of lesser desires and compelling us to live radically different. That's powerful, right? Pastor Carl preached this message last week at the Northwest Campus, and that's a quote that he brought forth. I think that is so powerful. It fuels us. To have present obedience because of the guarantee of the grace that's to come, but also the fact that it is sustaining us now. So we need to set our hope fully on the grace that is to be brought to us when Jesus returns. Let's jump into the first thing that is fueled by future grace today. The first thing is the pursuit of holiness. The pursuit of holiness. Holiness. Let's jump into our passage. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy. He calls us to be obedient children. Anybody in this room ever not been an obedient child before? You know what it's like. Come on. Or maybe you have a child who is not obedient. Children struggle with that. But our father calls us as his children, who he paid the price of his son's blood to make us his children to be obedient. He says, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. This is the contrast to what it means to be conformed to the character of God who is holy. Because holiness is not just a list of rules to follow. It's a God that we worship. He is holy, so he calls us to be like him. So it's not a list of rules we conform to. It's his character that he invites us into conformity to so that we might experience the fullness of life that he enjoys. Because if you're looking for life and trying to find it in a way that God himself would not walk in, I'm sorry, you will never find it there. It is empty. It will never satisfy you. But if you do seek in those areas, what it will do is it will steal your appetite for God. from you because you're trying to consume other things to fill a void that only he can. So he says, don't be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. When our hearts were not shaped by the gospel, shaped by the cross, shaped by his truth, shaped by his instruction, shaped by his love, he says, don't allow your life to be patterned after those passions and desires. And we know that's a fight every day, isn't it? That doesn't happen through passivity. Paul says, put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit. But the thing is, God is trying to work out of us something that he's already put inside of us. He's not calling you to just pull up your bootstraps and change everything about you. He's saying, let me take control of you so that my light shines through you. The holiness of Jesus is already living in us through the Holy Spirit. In our two kids' rooms, Ezra who's six and Shiloh who's three, we have these things called blackout curtains. Anyone ever have those? Maybe you're not a kid who's six or three, but you're like, I literally need that so I can sleep until noon. I don't know why you're sleeping until noon, but it would definitely allow you to, because what it does is it takes the light that is naturally pouring through the windows and it shuts it out completely. It does what normal curtains don't do. They just don't move all the light like that. I think there's some things in our lives when we conform to the passions of our former ignorance and we're living according to the flesh and for our sin, they become like blackout curtains. to the light of God, the holiness of God shining through us. He says, let your light shine among men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father as in heaven. But when we are sinning, the very holiness he's placed in us through the Spirit is no longer shining through us because we've veiled it with blackout curtains of sin. He calls us into this once again, not just because he commands it, but because he is it. He is holiness and he wants us to be like him. And guys, this is not a suggestion. It's an expectation. But it's also a gracious invitation. Holiness is not giving up the fun things of this world to sit in a monastery and have no human interaction Holiness is where the joy of God is experienced It's an invitation as well that we might be set apart that's what it means to be holy to be set apart to be different from the rest to be consecrated to be holy to be sanctified and Set apart from the ways of the world, but also set apart for the purposes of God. If we want to be vessels, like Paul says in 2 Timothy 2, who are used for honorable use, we can't continue to allow our bodies to be used for common sinful things. He wants to use you. But he's calling you to become like him and walk like him in holiness. That he might do so. The members of our body are like instruments. I like to play the piano. Okay, but here's the thing. The piano is here and there's no sound coming out of it. Well, I guess it's not turned on either. But there's no sound coming out of it until somebody presses it. It's an instrument, but it has to be played by somebody in order for sound to come out. So who are you presenting your bodies as instruments to? To God to be used for righteousness or sin, which produces unrighteousness? What is playing the melody that your life is producing? Because he calls us to a pursuit of holiness. The second thing that future grace fuels is reverent fear. Reverent fear of God. I want to take this section in chunks. The first part of it says, and if you call on him as father... Remember, because he's already called us to be obedient children. If you call on him as father, who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourself with fear throughout your time in your exile. So he says, you are now strangers in this world. Your home is no longer where you live. It's in heaven. You're citizens of heaven. So while you're here on earth, he says, conduct yourself in fear, in the fear of the Lord. And his reasoning in the beginning of this is this, because he impartially judges according to each one's deeds. The beginning of Peter's argument towards a fear of the Lord is that God is holy, he's perfect, And he is also perfectly just and righteous, which means that he cannot allow sin to go unpunished. And because all of us are sinners, we are worthy of his judgment and of his wrath. And even now, as believers, if that was all that was to motivate us towards the fear of the Lord, it would be enough. To know that every deed that we do without the blood of Jesus covering us would be worthy of eternal damnation. That should stoke fear in our hearts. But Peter takes it further than that. The fear of the Lord is certainly rooted in his holiness and his judgment and wrath that comes upon all sinners. And that should stoke a fire of motivation in our hearts. But that is secondary in comparison to the primary stimuli of response for the fear of the Lord, he says in this passage. Because after that, he says... If you call him father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourself in fear throughout your time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. This doesn't change his holiness. This doesn't change our worthiness of judgment. But we should fear the Lord because in spite of all of that, he loved you so much that he was willing to pay the price of his own son's blood so that he could forgive you. So that you could have eternity in heaven with him. So that you could live a life free from the bondage and the power, the chains of sin. Do you understand that? Jesus didn't die just to forgive you of your sin. Jesus died to release you from the power of sin. You've been ransomed, which means you've been bought from a slave market. So how can we go back to living that way? When that was the price he paid so that you could be free. So that I could be free. And yet we slide back into it. Why? Because we lose focus on the hope of He's promised us the future grace of the gospel. We lose focus on the beauty and the depth and the magnitude of God's grace and glory in the gospel because we get distracted by the things of this world and we forget. Our hearts get inflated in pride. Pride. which smothers the fear of the Lord in our heart and then blinds us from seeing our sin, hating it, and fleeing from it. So the solution, if maybe you feel like you're in that place right now where you say, I just feel like I don't have a fear of the Lord. Like, I can't even envision what my heart's response would be like if he was in this room, physically present, sitting on a throne before me. I can't even imagine that. And I know it would be different if he was right there, but I can't seem to muster up the imagination to even get myself there, let alone respond to it. If that's you, the call is to welcome yourself back into his presence. We need to have our eyes open to him. We need to be reminded of the glory and the grace of the gospel so that it can captivate us and compel us forward. We have to set our hope on the future grace that's to be revealed to us and that he desires to empower us now. Because the thing is, if we've tasted of how good the grace is that we're going to receive fully when we're in heaven, we're going to want more of it now. We're going to want to live from that grace, not just the covering grace of God, but the enabling, empowering grace of Jesus. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest in the last times, listen to this, for the sake of you. Why did Jesus come to earth? For you. for your sake, so that your life could be changed, so that your eternity could be changed. He came for you. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you, who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory so that your faith and your hope are in God. This is the gospel, guys. Jesus loved you so much. He came for you when you were a rebel, when you were an enemy. He loved you then. How much more does he love you as beloved children now? He paid the price, the blood of his son. My dad passed away when I was nine years old, and one of the things that I treasured most from him was a 1958 Mickey Mantle card. It wasn't like one of the cards, you know, that are worth like hundreds of thousands of dollars. This card was worth like 500 bucks when he got it for me in 2000. A few years after he passed away, you know, I kept it in a little safe in my closet with the key that was in it. But there was a cleaning lady at my parents' house who went into Safebox and stole that card and a couple other things that were super valuable to me as well. I was devastated, you can imagine. I mean, the thing is, you could have gone on eBay and purchased another one, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't worth the four or $500 to replace it because the value wasn't just in a card, it was in that one because of the memories and the significance that was associated with it. You see, something's value is determined by what a person is willing to pay for it. So when that lady took this card and maybe brought it to a pawn shop or a card shop, she probably got a couple hundred bucks for it. But for me, I would pay far more than that for this thing because of how much I valued it. I get chills just thinking about this. But think about that with what the Father paid for you. How valuable are you in the eyes of God the Father if he was willing to pay for your salvation with the blood of his Son? Not gold, not silver, but the blood of Christ. Do you see yourselves in light of that? Is that shaping your identity of who you are? When we fall into sin, the enemy wants nothing more than to cloud and distort our judgment so that we don't live from that because you guys are the dangerous ones and the power of the spirit living from and according to the grace of God, you can do anything in this world that he's calling you to, but the enemy wants to distort your mind so that you don't. Root yourself in his love. The third thing is a fervent love for others. Future grace fuels fervent love for others. Peter says, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart. Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable through the living and abiding word. For all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you. I really want to focus in on those first two verses. It says, And then he calls us to something, but he's assuming this is happening. And this isn't just a once for all, I believed in Jesus and now my soul is perfectly purified functionally. Obviously, he's justified us. He sees us as perfectly righteous, but he's still working on the inward parts of us. At least he is for me. Am I alone in that? He's working on our hearts. He's chiseling away the pieces of our heart that don't look like him. Michelangelo was an incredible sculptor. And it said that he was asked about this statue of David. How did you do this? I mean, 16 feet tall out of marble. And he said, David was already in there. I just had to remove everything that was not him. How beautiful is that? That's what God is doing with us. The parts of us that are not Christ, he's removing. He's chiseling away. He's hammering out little by little. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes we don't want to let go of these pieces. Sometimes we're trying to glue them back on. But he is chiseling away every part of us that is not like him to make us holy, to make us like him, not just for the sake of looking like him, but that we might love others like him. This is what is on the table. If we are not becoming like Jesus, we cannot expect that we are going to love others like Jesus. And if we're not loving like Jesus who gave his life for the world he so loved, how are we going to reach this world? Not just with words. People see through that facade if our words are empty and they're not backed up by love. all spiritual formation that happens, the transformation that happens in our hearts is for the sake of others. So he says, having purified your souls, now listen to this, by your obedience to the truth. We come to learn the truth, and it's one thing to know it intellectually. It's another thing to say, man, God is speaking to me through Peter today. This is confronting my heart. I need to change this. I can't do this anymore. And as you walk in obedience to the truth, your desires, your trust, your affections for other things are going to start to be changed, which is going to enable you to, out of the overflow of your heart, genuinely love other people. It says, having purified your souls by the obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, that's the purpose. Now the command, love one another earnestly from a pure heart. One of the things I love about this church is the love that you have for one another. It is so evident in everything that you do. It's so clear. On Sunday mornings, Week after week, what I see, what I hear from others who have been here far longer than I have been, what I hear from almost every new visitor that comes in here is, wow, this church is a loving church. They welcome me. They see me. I feel at home. This is family here. But if you're like me, there are also parts of your life functionally where you're not consistently loving well. I feel like recently at home, I've been tired. It's just been a long season. I'm exhausted. And I know one of the things I can tell, I need a refresh when I start getting irritable and impatient. Because that's not typically what characterizes me. And I just, I kind of feel like I've been in a funk recently. Just like, I can't snap out of it. And the result is that I don't love Nikki and the kids as well as I typically do. And it breaks my heart. I hate it. and I fight against it, and I'm relying on Jesus for it, and the beauty of that is when we genuinely see our weakness, are willing to expose it to the light, even share it with others, make confession, even like I'm doing right now, it puts us in a position to be empowered by the grace of God to change. But if we don't address it, if we don't confess it, if we don't acknowledge it, it will just continue to grow deeper and deeper and deeper into our hearts. So what is it in your life that is preventing you from being the loving person Jesus calls you to be? Jesus has some powerful words in Matthew 24, 12. He says this, of the end days, which, guys, we're living in the end days, and whether Jesus is going to return in three weeks, three years, 30 years, we're getting close. And he says this of the end days, not of the world because the world is always like this, but of the gathering of his people. He says this, because lawlessness will increase, the love of many will grow cold. Because lawlessness increases, the love of many, the hearts of many will grow cold. Because when lawlessness increases, lovelessness increases. Because when we're living our lives in accordance with the flesh, in accordance with our own personal, selfish, sinful desires, we get stuck inwardly. We're not thinking of serving God. We're not thinking of loving and serving others. So our obedience to the truth is essential if we want to be the loving people he's calling us to be in the lives of one another. Don't you want to be those people? For your family, for your co-workers, for our church, for the South Loop, for the city, for this world, we need to rally for Jesus. The fourth thing that future grace fuels is the ruthless removal of sin. The ruthless removal of sin. Peter commands, so put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. These are all relational sins. So what happens as he's kind of building these stair steps in this passage? When we're not becoming like Jesus in holiness and we don't have a fear of the Lord that's rooted in the cross as we look towards our hope of eternity, if we're not learning the truth and obeying it and loving others, what's going to happen is we are going to get entangled in relational conflicts with one another. Whether it's personally between you and a spouse or you and a friend or groups, having schisms in the church or whatever it is. When we're not living in accordance with the truth, walking in obedience, becoming holy like Jesus, loving others like Jesus, what happens is we sin against one another. The past couple of weeks, Nikki and I have been working a lot in the garden. And when we moved in... There was this like, I thought it was like ground cover because I know nothing about gardening. And I was like, man, this stuff is kind of pretty. It like covers all this area. It's kind of nice. You know, and Nikki was like, I don't think that's ground cover. I'm pretty sure that's a weed. You know, we were focusing on a lot of different things. And so that first year, we didn't really do anything about it. A couple years later in being at the house, now we are focused on the garden. We're planting things outside. We had these beautiful ferns that somebody gave us that we planted out there. We had these beautiful hostas. And these things, after three and a half years of being at this house, are overtaken by this nasty, decrepit thing called bindweed. Anyone have that? It was just like, oh, no. Oh, my goodness. It's a disaster for gardeners. I'm not a gardener, so I just, I don't know. But this thing destroys everything it touches. So these ferns and hostas that were beautiful and thriving, now we had to remove them because there was no hope of recovery because these things had literally bound them and were sucking out the nutrients from them. And if we want to rid ourselves of these things, I mean, it's like a multiple year process of getting rid of this. I think sin can be very similar in our hearts. Maybe at the beginning it looks tame. It looks calm. It doesn't look like it's going to cause a whole lot of issues. But over time, as it starts to choke out the good things in your life, destroy relationship, change the trajectory of your life, You say, I have to deal with this. And the thing is, it's usually not a quick process of just cut it off and it's done. It takes hard work. It takes commitment. It takes community. It takes prayer. But we have to ruthlessly, by the power of the Spirit and the grace of the Gospel, remove sin from our lives. The souls of others are at stake. What God is calling us into is at stake. We have to take our sins seriously. As I said earlier, I've been reading in 1 Samuel in my devotional time, and the Lord just wrecked my heart yesterday with a passage in 1 Samuel 15. This is when Saul, the king, has disobeyed the voice of the Lord. He's conquered the Amalekites, and he's told them, bring them to utter destruction, ruin, don't save anything. None of the men, the women, the children, the animals, the goods, nothing. Devote it all to destruction. Saul conquers, but what he does is he saves the best things, the sheep and the treasure. And when Samuel comes to confront him, he makes it kind of seem nice and spiritual. You know, I was saving it for God. We wanted to save these things for him. Don't you smell the incense offering, the burnt offering we're giving? In his confrontation of Saul, the king was this. God Desires your obedience, not your sacrifices. You have disobeyed the voice of the Lord. And this is the part that hit me. He said, for rebellion is as the sin of divination. And stubbornness as the sin of idolatry. The word in Hebrew is terebinth. It spoke of like little household idols. So what is he saying? He's saying your rebellion, your disobedience to the Lord is just the same as if you were practicing divination and trying to reach another God and hear from them so your life could be directed by it. Because you're not being directed by him, so you're being directed by somebody else. Your stubbornness, your unwillingness to move forward. The Hebrew word is like a pecking, like a bird that's pecking over and over again. Change, Stephen, change. Come on, this is what I'm calling you to. I'm calling you to change. And if there's this callousness of heart, he says this is literally like you have a household idol that you're worshiping, that you're serving, that you're looking to. You're trying to please so that it will give you favor. That's how serious rebellion, stubbornness, and sin is to God. But I don't know if we see it like that. I was thinking about going to a shop to buy like a little Buddha or a little Hindu idol to bring in. And literally just like the thought of going to a store to purchase one of those things, even for the sake of bringing in for a sermon illustration to smash with a hammer. I like couldn't bear thinking about going and doing this. Like what will people think if I'm purchasing this little idol? But I was like, man, do we think of our sin like that? Do we think of our rebellion like that, that we carry around in the Sunday services and into our days? Day by day, we carry these things around with no shame. But God is calling us to ruthlessly eliminate sin from our lives. He has so much better in store for us. He wants to release us from these things. He paid the price to release us from these things, and he wants us to walk in the freedom that he has gained for us through the cross. The last thing is a hunger for the word. This is a dramatic change that future grace feels today, a hunger for the word. Grammatically, this passage is connected to the verse that's right before it. In the ESV, the verse one is translated, so put away all malice, but more accurately, it's probably having put away all malice and slander and envy, having done this, now what? like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. So he says, when we've put these things away, when we're not living lives in accordance with sin, in our desires, our appetite is not being met by the things of this world, what we then are commanded to do is to long for the pure spiritual milk. And this is not in the same way that Paul describes it. In another place, Paul says, you're still having milk when you should be eating meat. Talking about kind of the beginnings of the things of the word in comparison to being nourished by even other things. You know, the meat. He says you're still like newborn infants on the milk. That's not what Peter is saying here. He's saying the word, which is not just the Bible. Specifically in this passage, he's saying this is the gospel that has saved you. But the gospel, the word of God, God himself, this is the spiritual sustenance and nourishment that we need. But I think we can all admit we've gone through seasons of ebbing and flowing with actually craving and desiring it. Maybe you're in a place right now where your desire for these things has dried up. You're saying, I know I should be doing this. Maybe even I desire to do it because I want to change, but I don't even have like the innate internal desire to move towards it. This is why we need a future looking focus. And the grace of God that's to be revealed. To taste once again of the goodness of the gospel. The goodness of God. And to let it move us towards him again. Because that gospel, the word of God that brought us to new life and caused us to be born again is the exact same thing that sustained our life now. We need it every day. It's our daily bread, it's our manna, and we know where to get it, but God calls us to approach him, to seek him day after day and find it. I'm gonna call the worship team back up at this point. When we are not tasting of the real thing, we can gain an appetite for what is false. If you'd never tasted of an orange before in your life, the first time you taste it, it's like, oh my goodness, this is incredible. But I imagine if you fall into a pattern of eating orange Starbursts and drinking Orange Crush, you're gonna lose your taste for the real orange flavor. Why? Well, they're chemically engineered to produce that desire for more in it, and the unnatural artificial sugars are gonna cause you to crave these things. But the very thing that when you didn't know anything different, you didn't know a fake form of it was so good to you, becomes almost gross if you're tasting of the fake orange flavor. I've experienced this before. I know that I am eating too much sugar when things like strawberries and blueberries, raspberries don't taste sweet to me. Because my taste buds have become way too accustomed to the things of the world. The artificial things where man has added to it. What God gives himself, he is the true sweetness and sustenance that he calls us to. So I don't know what for you of these five is the area where you feel like the Lord is calling you to, but what we want to do is just give you a few minutes to reflect. We want to call you to a why in the road. And in fitting with this scripture, which calls us not just to know the truth, but to obey the truth, rather than do nothing with it, I wanna ask you the question, which change needs to most happen in your life today? Which one is it? Is it the pursuit of holiness? Is it a reverent fear of the Lord? Have you lost your fear of him? Is it a fervent love for others? Is it a ruthless elimination of sin? Or is it a longing for the word? What is it for you? In this time, we wanna come back to him and ask him to do what only he can do, to make change in our hearts by the grace that is promised to us in the future and available to us in power.