THREE WAYS GOD INFLUENCES HOW WE USE OUR TALENTS - T3 Does Not Equal Eternity Series Ben Rudolph

Transcription

1 (Introduction of by Pastor Bobby Conway on video) Good morning Life Fellowship. I hope that you are enjoying the worship service so far. While you are listening to this, I will be up in Albany, New York doing an apologetics conference that I will be teaching at a Pentecostal Church. Directly after that service I will rush to the airport and fly out to Little Rock, Arkansas to spend some time with one of our elders and Pastor Jason at our mother church. I am just so excited for the opportunity for us to go there because we are going to be talking about multiplication. And that leads me to this discussion point of a new hire with. Some of you have heard him speak about a month and half to two months ago for us and he did such a great job. Ben was the senior pastor at the church of Denver, North Carolina for many years and we are just so delighted to introduce you to him as our new Multiplication Pastor. Now some of you might wonder what in the world is a Multiplication Pastor? What is he going to be doing? What is his role going to look like? Ben is passionate about networking, so he is going to be helping us network with other churches in our area to help us further advance our one endeavor and one effort to reach the community. Not only that he is going to be helping us think about how to plant other churches so that we can plant our DNA and also plant other campuses whereby we can just reach the broader Lake Norman and Charlotte area. So we are excited about Ben and the role he is going to play. He is also going to be helping in the pulpit as both he and Pastor Dan are going to be doing some preaching with me as we are going to strive to build more preaching in the team based context. So I am just so excited to have Ben on board. He and his wife, Liz, have three children. He has been in the ministry for a long time. Would you please just give a nice southern welcome to. (Applause.) You know when this was played in the first service I didn t pick up that Bobby said southern welcome. I am from Pennsylvania so I am offended right now. (Laughter.) I am only teasing. I have been down here long enough in the south to totally know what he means. It means that you are inviting me to Chick-fil-A sometime other than Sunday. Page 1 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

2 I am so glad to be here with you guys this morning. I am excited to be joining the team here and joining with you guys on the mission because what we want to see is every man, woman and child in the Lake Norman area, the two hundred thousand plus people that call this area home, to have repeated opportunities to see, hear and respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that is why I am excited to be here joining your team. I wish my family were here because I would make them stand up and embarrass them, but they all got sick last night, so I am not able to introduce them to you, but hopefully I will be able to do that in the weeks to come. It is an honor to be here with you. So now let s talk about talents. Please turn in your Bibles to Ephesians Chapter 2 as that is where we are going to be this morning. We are going to be talking about three ways that God influences how we use our talents. Three ways in which God influences how we use our talents. Last week Pastor Bobby talked about time. Time is one of the three things we are talking about - time, treasure and talents. The three things these have in common are we receive all of them from God. None of us have those things in and of ourselves. The thing that is different between time and treasure and talent is that God gives different quantities with those than He does with the time. So this is going to be a little bit more personal than the message on time. We walked out of here last week thinking we all have time, but we need to make sure that we are not wasting our time. But when we talk about talent and treasure there is a nuance to our lives that God brings. Many of us have an idea of what talent is because we watch America s Got Talent. That is how we know what talents are. We mostly understand that talent is something that we describe as something we are good at. But we actually get the word talent from an ancient word that is in the Bible in Matthew Chapter 25 where Jesus uses the parable of the talents. And talent was at one point a monetary unit, a unit of money. You see gold and silver were weighed and that was how much something was worth. So talent is an understanding that we get something from God, something of value. And when we talk about talent we are talking about the gifts, the abilities, the passions, the strengths that God has given to us. There are a lot of passages about talents Page 2 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

3 in Scripture, but I think this is particularly a great passage. It is found in Ephesians Chapter 2 and verses 8 through 10. Now if you are familiar with church you are probably used to hearing Ephesians Chapter 2 and verses 8 and 9, but maybe not verse 10. But verse 10 ties into verses 8 and 9 and I want you to see this. Let s look at verse 8. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. Paul is describing that salvation is not earned, it is not something we can work for and we can t do anything to make God love us. It is only by grace through faith that we are accepted by Him into His family, into the church and into the body of Christ. It is just an amazing thing that God gives to us. But we can t just stop right there because God doesn t just save us to sit us in a room on Sundays. Okay? Look at verse 10. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. I am going to read that again. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. That means this - God saved us not just so that we could have a ticket to Heaven, He saved us to set us free for action, to set us free for life, so that we might display the good works that He wants us to do in our community and around the world. So we are to look at these talents that God has given to us. We are going to look first at the design of our talents, then the definition of our talents and finally the desire of our talents. First let s look at the design of our talents. We get this idea of design from the very word that is in here in Ephesians Chapter 2 and verse 10. For we are His workmanship. Workmanship is a very creative word in the original language. In fact in the original language it is the word poiema. And when you hear poiema what does that word sound like? It kind of sounds like poem and that is exactly where we get the word poem from. Poiema is this word that is used twice in the New Testament and it is used to describe a unique act of creation by God. Now think about that for a moment. That is really awesome. It is cool because what God is saying here is that every single one of us is a uniquely designed creation by God. God has wired us. God has put us together exactly the way He wants us to be, so Page 3 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

4 that what we do flows out of who we are. This is one of those things that if we don t understand our poiema we are not going to understand why God has us here, or the work that He wants us to do. I think the greater we understand the way that we are wired is going to give us a deeper sense of awe and worship of God. Because when we understand how God has given us all of these things, all of these spiritual gifts, all of these natural abilities, all of these Kingdom passions we can understand that God has given them to us for a reason. We need to understand that we are this unique design. Have you ever been in an art museum? I remember going to some great art museums when I traveled. I remember going to one in London just this past year with my son. We saw some Monet and some Rembrandt and they were just amazing. Sometimes when I look at a piece of art I wonder how in the world they could do that. I am just blown away. And I think that is what God wants us to understand, that we are this unique creation. This is important because here is one of the great struggles that I had. As I grew up I really didn t think God made me good at anything. Did you ever feel like that - that you are just this average person? I thought I was the epitome of average in school. When I was growing up I wasn t part of the most popular crowd but I wasn t getting shoved into lockers either. I wasn t flunking any classes but I wasn t into the honors program. I wasn t getting picked first in physical education class but I wasn t getting picked last either. I don t know if you have ever felt like that or not, but I did. I was just kind of average. I didn t know what I was good at. And that is a lie that I think we can fall into and it will keep us from really living out the talent that God has given to us. And poiema is saying that we are this unique creation by God. We have been singly designed by Him for some good work. Maybe we don t know what good work that is but I can tell you how we can figure that out. If you want to know what your design is, you will discover your design by doing something. Now listen, I am not sure how many of you have ever taken a spiritual gifts test, but I have taken all these tests. I have taken Strength Finder and personality tests and all kinds of tests. But let me tell you something. A piece of paper can t tell you what you are good at. What you have to do is get out there. Page 4 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

5 It could have been fascinating to see what would have happened if Michael Jordon never had someone roll a basketball to him and tell him to start playing. What if he had just taken a basketball exam in the 8 th grade and failed it and someone told him he wouldn t be able to play basketball then? No, someone put a ball in his hand and they saw what happened. For many of us what we need to do in order to discover who we are is just to go out and get our hands dirty in life. Start working with people. Go volunteer with the kids. And if you don t like kids, maybe you will like older people. Maybe you just need to can start working in some ministry just to discover what you are good at because we discover by doing. I think that is one of the challenges that we have to do. If we are just sitting on the sidelines waiting for the perfect condition we will never do anything. We will never be active. We have to start doing things and then as we do things we will discover the way that God has wired us. This is something I really focused on when I went away on my sabbatical for three months. I had been in ministry for a number of years. We were ten years into our church planting when God gave me this amazing gift of a sabbatical. And one of the things that I did with that was I told God that I just wanted to listen to Him for three months. And when I looked back at my life, and at my 16 years of being in full time pastoral work, I just wanted God to give me the lane that He wanted me to stay in. I had just turned 40 years old and I needed God to tell me what He wanted me to do in the second half of my life. So I just spent some time listening to God and to people who knew me and here is what I discovered. When it was clear to me what my gifts, my abilities and my passions were it became very important. And number one, we need to understand our gifts, abilities and passions in order to understand our limitations. We need to understand what we need to say no to. And we need to understand what we need to say yes to. It is very important that the more we understand the creativeness that God has given us, because then we can understand the lane we are to be in. We need to find our sweet spot whether it is in ministry, or in our job, or whatever it is that what God has created us for. I am not sure how many of you have ever seen the movie, Chariots of Fire, which is an old movie that was made in It actually won best picture that year. If you haven t seen that I would encourage you to watch that movie, or if you have seen it Page 5 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

6 to watch it again. There is a special moment where Eric Liddell, who is training for the Olympics, has this conversation with his sister. His sister thinks he should be a missionary over in China. And he goes on a walk with her and he tells her that he will go to China and be a missionary. She gets all excited and then he tells her that first he has to run in the Olympics. His sister then gets upset because she feels like he can t really serve God unless he becomes a missionary. He tells her, God has called mr to China but He has also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure. Don t you love that? There are things that God has created us to do that when we are running in that lane, we feel the pleasure of God. We know that is what He created us for. But unfortunately sometimes we can get distracted and just start saying yes to everything because we feel bad for everyone. We will volunteer for this and also for that when what we need to learn is when to say no and when to say yes. We need to learn to limit what we get our hands on. The second thing is this. We need to understand our gifts, abilities and passions to understand who we need around us. We can t do it on our own. In fact I love the first person plural pronoun in this passage, For WE are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for His good works. That is a beautiful picture of how much we need each other. God never created us to do this solo mission on our own. He created us to have people around us and that is why we need the church, that is why we need our spouses, and that is why we need our families. This really unlocked for me when I was taking my sabbatical. My wife and I took a Strength Finder test where we were supposed to find out what our top five strengths were. It was fascinating to me because my top five strengths were like in the bottom of my wife s. And my wife s top five strengths were in the bottom of mine. We looked at that and as we were being coached through it we discovered something. We had known this in bits and pieces but this was just a clearer picture that my wife is an amazing gift from God to me. I realized that I have blind spots, there are weaknesses that I have and there were things where I needed her perspective and her input. And I realized if I tried to make some decisions without her I could be making a bad decision. I realized that I was limited in some areas and I needed her voice and her wisdom when I have to make a decision on some things. Page 6 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

7 And here is what happens over and over in marriages. I have done a lot of marriage counseling in my 18 years of pastoral ministry and here is what I have noticed. A lot of the differences that are in marriages can drive each other crazy. Can I get an amen? I have been in these counseling sessions before with couples that are having problems and I am thinking if they could just understand the gift they are to each other, that God has put them together for a reason. But if you are operating your giftings and strengths in selfishness, or in your own way, you are never going to get it. What we have to do is in our strength we have to ask for God when we know what we are not good at. Does that make sense? The third thing is this. We need to understand our gifts, abilities and passions so that we can understand how we might do things without God s strength. Oh man, this is the scariest one for me. Now remember I said some of you may not know what you are good at. But some of you are not like that. And when you do understand what you are good at, when things kind of click for you, you are just waiting for the opportunity for someone to ask you to do something so you can say, YES, I will do it because I am so great at that. You let us know on Facebook every week so we know what you are good at. (Laughter.) Here is the scariest part of that. We can do a lot of things without God. And what we need to be very careful about as human beings is getting our hands on our talents and doing well at them. Here is what I have learned, we can do the things that we are good at, we can live our talents out, and do them well enough where nobody knows whether we are working or God is working. And we have to look at our lives and have a gut check time. We have to ask ourselves, Man, can people look back on that thing that I did, that successful thing that I accomplished, and wonder if it was God or me? One of the things that we have to be very careful of is, are we seeing God s hand in our strengths? Jesus said some very profound things when He walked this earth. One of the most important things He said was when He told His disciples in that upper room, Apart from me you can do nothing. And this is the struggle we can have because we can do a lot of somethings that equal nothing in the Kingdom. And that is because we are not operating through the power of the Spirit, we are not holding these things open handed before God and asking Him to take our gifts. We may sometimes do things in our Page 7 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

8 own strength but we should realize it won t compare to what He can do if we let Him guide our strengths. The next way that God uses our talents is by the definition of our talents. So first each and every one of us must define our talents. We are defined in the way that God has made us as poiema. The second one is the definition of our talents. Look what Paul says next in verse 10 of Ephesians Chapter 2. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. Now what does that word created mean? In II Corinthians Chapter 5 and verse 17 it says, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. That means we are born again, that when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior we are now saved and we have these spiritual gifts, all these good things that God gives to us. The second thing is this. So what is a good work? Notice if we go back up to verse 9 that we are not saved by works. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not of works so that no one may boast. And then in verse 10 it says we are created for good works. So what is the difference between works and good works? Here is what I know. You cannot make good works before you know Christ. But how do we know we are really doing good works? How do we know something is good? I will give you a couple of ways that we can know something is good or not. The first way is it is a good work if it is about the glory of Christ and not of you. I was just talking about some may do their strengths, their giftings in their own power. And one of the things that God is all about is His glory. God has not given us our gifts and abilities so that people can look at us and say, Wow. You don t look at a painting by Rembrandt, or Monet, or da Vinci, or Raphael and say, Just look at this canvas. Oh my goodness. Nor do we look at the paints and say, This is amazing. How that paint every got out of the tube I will never know. You can look at a house and think, Can you believe the bricks on that house. They are amazing. But we don t look at the tools that were used to lay the bricks and praise them. No, we look at what the artist, the designer has done. When God wired us and put us together it was not for our own glory, it was for His glory. So when we are working we have to make sure that whatever we are doing is Page 8 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

9 for the glory of God. I want you to listen to this in I Peter Chapter 4 and verse 10. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another. It is not about us. It is not about our own self-satisfaction. God has given us talents, gifts, abilities, passions and strengths not for ourselves but for Him and for others. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God s varied grace. Verse 11: Whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies. If you have a pen or a marker I would encourage you to circle that word strength, because that is the same word strength that is used in Mark Chapter 12 and verse 30, where Jesus says, And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. It is the same word, and our expression of love to God is to give it back to Him. So why do we serve Him as we speak and as we minister, as we do all these things? I Peter Chapter and verse 11 says, In order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To Him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. It is what we do with our talents that makes them good. And if we are not doing it for the glory of God, let me tell you that you may be doing a lot of good things, but you may not be doing a lot of good things according to God. God had to break me of this. There was a time in my life where I was doing a lot of ministry. I was leading a church, peoples lives were being changed, and they were saying, Ben, this is great, this is awesome. And listen, I didn t think I was doing it for me. Then I don t know when I crossed that line, when I got in the other lane, but there was a moment where God broke me and showed me my heart. And this is what the Holy Spirit said to me, Ben, all you want is a lot of people in a big room listening to you talk for an hour. And that wrecked me, because that is not what the Kingdom of God looks like. I had to repent; I had to confess. I told God that I wanted to make sure that whatever I did would go all back to Him. Listen, you can do a lot of things that people will be impressed with, but if at the root of that good work it is not for the glory of God, then those works are not good. The next way we can know if something is good is it has to be what God wants. Go back to the creative narrative, the creation narrative in Genesis Chapters 1 and 2. After every day what does God say about what He has created? It is good. God is the Page 9 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

10 one who defines what is good and what is not good. So what we have to be very careful of is that we are not the one who defines it but we have to let God define it. I think this is important because there are a lot of things that we might call good, that aren t good. Here is what we know. God s original creative intent was to have harmony between man and creation, there was harmony between man and each other, and there was harmony between man and God. Harmony existing in the world was God s original creative intent. And then what happened? SIN. There was the tree of knowledge of good and evil and Adam and Eve take the fruit because it says in Genesis Chapter 3 and verse 6, The woman saw that the tree was good for food. See the moment you try to find what is good, and not let God define what is good, you can get really distracted in life. What God really wants us to be involved in is the good in this life, and to bring harmony to things that are broken. Because once sin entered what happened? This harmony between man and creation, this harmony between man and each other, this harmony between man and God was broken. So we have this disharmony, and we see it every single day. We see it in our workplaces, we see it in our children, we see it in our homes, we see it in our neighborhoods and we see it in our schools. We see the darkness of sin around us and what makes a good work a good work is not when we just do our things in church. Listen, we need to do good things in church, I am not saying that. But what makes it really good is when we go out there in the community and we show the world that there is a real Kingdom of light. We are to go out there and show people that there is a King that sits on a throne and His name is Jesus. And how we make a good work a good work is when we give people a taste of the tangible rule and reign of Jesus Christ. No matter what environment we walk into, we don t run away from the disharmony, we don t run away from the brokenness, we don t run away from the dysfunction. What God has created us for is to be these ministers of light, to take the light of the gospel to dark places. That is what is the best work. That is what makes a good work a good work is when we bring the good of God to places that are broken. That is what makes it good. Page 10 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

11 So are you involved in good works? I don t know the answer to that. But let me tell you if you are doing it for the glory of God it is good, and if you are doing it to bring the good of Jesus Christ in dark places, that is a good work. We have looked at the design of our talents, the definition of our talents so now let s look at the desire of our talents. Again Ephesians Chapter 2 and verse 10 says this: For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. I knew it - there is that word should. I am waiting for the guilt trip. We are talking about gifts, about abilities and now there is the guilt trip because this is what we should be doing. Now we all love serving in this church, right? (Silence). That same response happened last service. Let me say it again - we all love serving in this church - right? (Audience responds loudly.) We get excited to serve but then we can allow guilt to come in. Some of you might be serving right now because you just feel bad, so you serve. That is not the way God wants us to serve. There is no guilt trip here. In fact I am going to set you guys free this morning. You don t HAVE to do anything. You don t have to. It was awesome to see a young woman give her heart to Christ in a way that she is serving this church. I mean that is awesome and if God is leading you to do that it is fantastic. We need help. There are lots of areas of need that we have in our church. But let me tell you something. If you are serving out of guilt, you are doing it wrong. Notice the word should again. That we should walk in them. When we think about how we should be living, how we should be walking, there are conditions around it. Should is a conditional verb. I am going to get a little geeky here but don t walk away. The Greek verb in this tense is not a present active subjunctive. Now most of you are thinking, Oh my goodness, I can t believe that. If it was a present active subjunctive it would mean this - that you should walk, you should live out your talents, you should live out these good works, based on the future conditions that you find yourself in. So all of us either do good works, or we do not, based on, Hey, I don t like working with that person. Hey, I just don t have time for that. Hey, I am in an age stage in life. And we limit ourselves in a lot of ways. Some of them are legitimate and some of them are not. But I know that if we wait for the conditions to be perfect we are never Page 11 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

12 going to do anything. This is not a present active subjunctive; this is an aorist active subjunctive. Now most of you are thinking, Are you serious? Yes, I am. It means that the condition of our walking out our good works is based on a past action. God is saying He created us for good works and He has prepared us for these good works that you should walk in them. Why? Because there are some events in the past that defines what we do and it is the cross of Jesus Christ. There are a lot of Christians doing a lot of Christian things for the wrong reasons and what we have to understand is that God wants us to not serve for love but serve from love. He doesn t want us to serve for love, like we have to work and earn God s approval. God doesn t look at our lives thinking we are wasting our time and our talents. But we should walk out our poiema because of our understanding of the cross, the gospel of Jesus Christ. We need to understand that God is the one who saw us in our desperate need, our need of a Savior who came and poured Himself out for us. There is nothing that we did to deserve it, and there is nothing we can do to work for it. There were no conditions that were perfect for God to act and move to save us. In fact the conditions were all wrong. The Bible says that we are enemies of God, that we are children of disobedience. The conditions were all wrong, but God made it right. And what we have to do is start serving, not for love or approval or from guilt, but serving from love, understanding that we are completely accepted by God, that we are totally loved, and there is nothing we can do to make God love us more or less. When you are motivated by love, your behavior or good works will know no bounds, no limitations. What we have to do is understand that the more we walk in understanding of the gospel, the more it sets us free to live out our talents. When we come to know Christ there is a gap between our understanding of our need of a Savior. Here is our understanding of our sinfulness and here is our understanding of God s holiness and there is a gap there. And the cross meets that gap. The longer I walk out my faith my understanding of my sinfulness increases. My understanding of God s holiness increases and as I am walking with Christ and as I am in God s word I am discovering the richness and the fullness of the gospel. What happens Page 12 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

13 is this - the gap between my own sinfulness and the greatness of my Savior is even greater today than it was 30 years ago when I accepted Him as my Lord and Savior. Some of you who have known Christ and been in the church for a long time your love has grown cold, because you have forgotten the richness of the gospel. And I am not trying to guilt you into serving so that you can feel better about yourself, no, what happens is people will serve when they are captivated by the good news of Jesus Christ. It will flow out of our lives until we have to walk in it, we have to serve, because of the way that Christ served us. It is a natural response, a natural reaction. So you may be sitting here thinking it all sounds great, but you feel distant, there is a lack of joy in your life. Listen, I want to take you all the way back to the parable of the talents. I know we didn t read it in Matthew Chapter 5, but I encourage you to go read it later today. Jesus gives three men three different units of talents. One He gives five talents, another He gives two talents and the last He gives one talent. And He does all of this according to each one s ability. The first person doubles his five and gets ten. The second person doubles his two and gets four. The last person buries his talent. And here is what happens. The guys who doubled their five talents and two talents were told, Well done good and faithful servant. The next line in that verse is so key: Enter into the joy of your Lord. See, some of you feel like there is just something missing, you kind of feel blah. It is not just about doing something; it is about understanding that when we do something from grace and the understanding of the gospel, there is a joy that comes from serving. And there is a joy that comes from pouring ourselves out for the Lord that we can t experience until we do it. There are a lot of things that can distract us and keep us from serving God. Don t let any conditions keep you from doing that. Don t let Satan tempt you to turn inward, to retreat from the body of Christ, to look to something else. I love that God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in Him. That means that God has a plan. And I love this passage in verse 10 where we have the poiema, where we have this beautiful creative language. Now some of you are planners, and some of you want to only follow the plan. And God has both of us covered. He is a creative God and He is a planning God. So whether you are left brained or right brained, we can make this work. That is the Page 13 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

14 beautiful picture God paints for us that He has designed us, He has created us for something, and He has a plan for us to walk this out in grace. So let me give you a couple of questions to think about as we tie this message up. Number one - how is the gospel shaping how you use your talents? Are you working for love, for approval, for acceptance, or from love? Because when you are working from love you don t need the praise of anyone, you don t need the recognition of anyone. So how is the gospel shaping what you do with your talents? The second one is this - how is fear or pride limiting how you live out your talents for Christ? Fear is an ugly thing, and many of us have stepped back from things, or maybe we have never stepped out because we let fear grip us and makes us afraid of failure. Listen, failure is going to happen, but it is what you do with failure that is what teaches us to stay in a lane. So how does fear impact how you are living out your talents? The third question is this - what life priority needs to die in order for you to use your talents for the advancement of the Kingdom? That is the dagger. Every time I approach God s word I have learned there is something in me that needs to die. Part of my plans, part of my will, part of the thing that I want to do has to die if I want to do what God wants me to do. So what is it that is thriving in your life that is all about you and not about Jesus? Number four is this - what is God calling you to begin doing? Listen, I am a starter, I am a church planter and I love thinking about church planting. And some of you may have a dream or there is a calling that God has put on your life years ago and you have walked away from that. You have put it on the sidelines. Maybe you have tucked it away in a corner, but in the back of your mind every so often you feel like God would want you to do this. Don t ignore that any longer. Step out. What does it mean to move forward? Maybe it just means having a conversation with someone about it, telling them that you have always had this dream for whatever it is. Just talk to someone about it. What does it mean to move forward? What is God calling you to begin doing? Don t deny or ignore what the Spirit is pricking your heart to do right now. Let s pray. Father God, we love you, we praise you, we thank you that you have created us in a unique way. I pray, God, that your poiema would be expressed in a thousand ways in this church and in this community. God, I pray that whatever we do we would do it for Page 14 of 15 pages 4/15/2018

15 the glory and the fame of the name of Jesus Christ. Set us free this morning, Father, to follow you in a way that we haven t before, to live open handedly and open heartedly to you. Take our lives, take our gifts and use them in the way you want to. I pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen. The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases. Page 15 of 15 pages 4/15/2018