1 P a g e. Introduction

Transcription

1 Introduction I am glad to see you here today. If you re a mom, we do hope that you got some of these gifts as you came in today. We have a carnation for our moms and also a bookmark. On one side, there is a prayer for mothers, and on the other side is a poem that is one that actually I chose. It s a poem by a man named Calvin Miller. Calvin Miller passed away this past year. He was a pastor and a mentor from afar for me. The title of the poem is Two Lovers, One Will. It s about his relationship with Jesus and his relationship with his mom. I would love for you to have these two small tokens, given to each of you ladies today. If you didn t get one on your way in today, you can grab that on your way out this morning. We are in the midst of our series entitled Bless This Mess. We are talking about just how it is that God comes into the messy areas of life and how He meets us there. It seemed fitting that on Mother s Day we would talk a little bit about parenting. We re going to talk about the messiness of parenting and how the Lord enters into that with us today. This morning we ll be coming out of Deuteronomy chapter 6. For those of you who are longtime members here at Houston Northwest, you know that traditionally what we would do is we would take one passage of Scripture and we would walk through that we would exposit that and really spend the majority of our time in that one passage of Scripture. Through this series, we are taking a little bit different approach. What we re doing is we re starting in a passage, but we re looking at what the whole Bible, the whole counsel of Scripture, has to say about very broad topics. So today we ll begin and end in Deuteronomy 6:6-9, but we ll move around and look at different passages today. I m excited to see what the Lord speaks to us about and how He addresses this area of parenting this morning. Let me pray over us and then we will jump in with Deuteronomy chapter 6. Lord, we love You and we need to hear from You right now. Father, some of us need to hear from You today because we are struggling with grief. I know there s got to be ladies sitting here right now that have had a miscarriage this year, and Mother s Day is painful for them. Or there are ladies who are seated here that they desperately want to have a child and, for whatever reason, that has not happened. Father, there are people in this room that lost their mom this year, and this is their first Mother s Day that they re facing without getting to call and say Hi. Lord, on top of that, there are just the worries and stresses of life that many of us are facing right now: illness, financial pressure, family concerns, stressed out at work Lord, whatever those things are, I pray that You would push them aside and You would create a space right here, Lord. We want to create a spot where Your Holy Spirit could drop like a bomb on our little church playground and move among us and change us. God, we want to hear from You. We welcome Your Spirit in this place, and we pray all of these things in the Name of Your Son Jesus Christ. Amen. Deuteronomy chapter 6, starting in verse 4, is a famous passage known as the Shema. Shema is this passage that actually Jesus quotes several times in the Gospels where He reminds us that the greatest command that we have in Scripture is to love the Lord our God. So if you look in Deuteronomy 6, starting in verse 4, you ll see that reminder... then, starting in verse 6, a direct command to parents with regard to the Shema itself, so let s start there with that. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Scripture is very clear that parents have a duty to their children with regard to loving God. So I want us to begin today by starting with that idea of loving God with all of our heart and with all of our soul and with 1 P a g e

2 all of our might because it s my contention today that if you want to be the very best parent if you want to see your children as a gift then I think that you want to start with the place that God commands us to start which is the love of Him Himself. You see, the best parents out there in the world are the parents that don t actually start with parenting strategy, but they start instead with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and knowing that they have been forgiven and redeemed by Jesus. I believe that last week, as we talked about sexuality, we spoke about the fact that sex, in context, always reflects the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Church, according to the Book of Ephesians, chapter 5. We see that really all of reality, all of the universe, when orchestrated and when lived out according to Scripture, always reflects back the Gospel, and I believe that the family is no different from that. In fact, if we want to know what a family ought to look like, it should, in some way, reflect the gracious Gospel of God. Now, some of you today are here today are saying, Steve, I don t think you know my family. My family does not reflect the Gospel. We put the fun in dysfunctional if you know what I m saying. We re just not that kind of a family. And I can understand that. Some of you here today might be saying, Steve, my family history does not point toward anything that resembles the Gospel at all. And fair enough, on all of those statements. I want to simply say this. The family, when lived out as Scripture intends for it to be lived out, will indeed reflect the Gospel. That s why I want us to start and notice the relationship that God has with each of us and the terms that God chooses to use when describing each of us. God chooses the terms of family for those who come to faith. The Book of Ephesians: You were predestined as sons. Paul uses sons because he wants to let even the ladies in the congregation know that they get a full inheritance as only men did in the ancient world. He says, There s no difference between men and women in the inheritance rights of children of God. In Ephesians chapter 2, we have this beautiful passage where Paul says, You were dead in your trespasses. You were children of wrath. You were destined to be destroyed. You were aiming for alienation. You were under condemnation but God, through His rich mercy God rescued, God redeemed, and when He did so, the term that He used to describe each and every one of us who came into a relationship with God was not anything that was far apart, anything removed, nothing like an employee relationship no, it is a family relationship. He says, When you place your faith in Jesus Christ, you become a member of the family. And families are ruled by love. The Scripture describes God as love: God is love. The Bible says that people will know that we are actually truly believers because when they look at the way that we relate to one another the way that we love one another they will say, There has to be a God, based on this rich, vibrant, loving relationship that these people have for one another. That s why we re always encouraging people in our congregation Be in a Life Group. You don t just need to be in a large group like this, but you need to be in a setting where you can practice the One Anothers of the New Testament: Love one another; exhort one another; encourage one another; admonish one another; serve one another. You can t do those things unless you have a small group relationship where you can practice the ways of Jesus Christ. This beautiful family relationship, the Church it reflects the Gospel, the grace that God has poured out upon us. That s why so many people they may come to church for preaching or for music, but they stay because they sense the love of God in the place. You see, what happens over time then is that we must understand that the family must reflect this very same Gospel. It must reflect love. The highest value in the home is not being organized. The highest value in the home is not how much stuff you get done. The highest value in the home is not how beautiful it appears to those on the outside, how well it is decorated, or the relationship with your neighbors. The highest value within the home is love. That is the defining value. You see, the church is a family, but the family is a family, and the family is a family because it is defined by the love of God love that God has given in grace. 2 P a g e

3 That s why these words are given to us. All through Scripture, this is certainly not an exhaustive list, but just a few. Listen to these: II Corinthians 6:18: I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me, says the Lord Almighty. Ephesians 1:5: In love, He predestined us for adoption as sons. John 1:12: To all who receive Him, who believed in His Name, He gave the right to become children of God. Romans 8:15: You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by who we cry, Abba! Father! Galatians 3:26: In Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God, through faith. The Best Parents 1. Know Their Relationship To God. This is the contention and the argument I want to make this morning. You will be a better parent when you start personally with the truth that you have been received, loved, and adopted by God into His family. Because only when you revel in the grace, when you soak up the lavish love that God has given to you, only then can you truly know how to love someone else. Only then can you truly raise them in gracious love as well. So today, let me start with this truth: You have been sought out by God, and the weight of your sin the weight of my sin that s something that God has been teaching me lately in Scripture that I was indeed under condemnation I deserved wrath and punishment and alienation. I deserved that and every individual in this room deserved that as well, but God gave you grace and forgiveness at the cross and the empty tomb. Because God gave you that, you ve been brought in. Now listen that ought to make us celebrate and shout. That s why we sing, because there s more to sing about in this world than, Oh look there s a pretty woman. There s something to think about, which is the rich, incredible, gracious, powerful, pursuing love of God. When we recognize that and it changes us, that will move us to sing and to worship, and we have to start in that spot before we can ever truly learn how to love anyone else especially our children. 2. Revel In Grace. (Grace vs. Performance) So we begin there today. You ve been adopted into the family of God, and you need to revel in that gracious and glorious truth. I think then, once we start there, then we can understand how to then move that sort of grace out to our children. I want to start with the grace of God because whenever we understand the Gospel of God and we understand that we have been graced by the Heavenly Father, it s then that we can start to push that grace out into our homes. It s tough to be gracious with your kids isn t it? It is. It s alright. We can talk. You ve been in those Parent-Teacher conferences and that teacher is looking at you like, Mmmm you are not getting it done. You want to go home, and the thing that you want to do is not, I love you unconditionally, son. What you want to do is to kind of get after them there. Or maybe you look at your neighbor s kids, and you re always comparing your kids to your neighbor s kids. You re like, How do they do that? It s like they are actually living out Leave It To Beaver in the 21 st century right next door. (Laughter) Do they use extra-whitening toothpaste? How do their smiles stay so perfect? They re always perfectly dressed; they are always perfectly behaved. My children are nothing like that. They are posting photos on Instagram. You re secretly throwing your phone against the wall because it looks like those people have it all together. Or maybe you re sitting down and you do the quick math and you recognize that the rate that you re contributing to your 403B versus college tuition yeah that s not 3 P a g e

4 working in your favor. You re just falling further behind as things go, and you start to put pressure on yourself. You realize, If I don t raise a world-class athlete or the second-coming of Albert Einstein, there is no way that my child is going to be able to go to college. (Laughter) You start to begin to put pressure on yourself, and what subtly begins to happen, through our relationships, through our neighbors, through expectations, through things that we put on ourselves do you know what happens? We don t parent from grace, and do you know where we parent from? Performance. We start to expect our kids to live up to a standard that we could never live up to ourselves. The crazy thing is that so many of us will come to church on Mother s Day Sunday, and we ll start here and we ll say, God, thank You for the grace thank You for the way that You pour out your love on me, God I m so thankful that You ve forgiven me I m so grateful for the fact that I don t have to do anything to receive Your love that You just give it freely, and then we ll turn around and we will expect our children to do things so that we ll give love to them. You see, the thing is that there s a disconnect between many of us when it comes to the Gospel that we so freely receive and then the practices that we employ in our homes. What begins to take place is that we believe that God has freely graced us, but we don t allow that to transform us so we live it out around our kids. Instead, we put the pressure of performance on them. Why? Because you say to yourself, I don t want my kid to be a failure. That s why verses like this happen Ephesians 6:4: Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Colossians 3:21: Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged. Those were directed at fathers because in the ancient world, the father was the protector of the family reputation, but it s the same for you and for me, even here now, even here today mothers you know this same thing. You re out there protecting wondering what people think about you based on your kid. Right? You ve had this conversation with your kid. Whenever you do that, that reflects back on me. There s truth in that. But are you subtly communicating, I don t love you whenever you do those things? Sometimes my kids have done some things pretty tough stuff that has upset me. As a father, there have been times when my sons have done things that have so upset me that I would almost become ashamed and that I would almost become angry. In relating to them, God began to teach me some things. Let me tell you one of the first things that He taught me. One of the first things that God taught me was, Steve, do you know why you re angry? You re not angry because of what they have done. You are angry because what they have done sullies what you believe to be your good reputation out there in the world. What you re really more concerned with is how their performance reflects on you than you are on your children. I was like, Whoa It was true. You see, the simple truth was that I cared more about how I looked in raising my children. There s a thing that s out there that says, If you don t raise kids who do such-and-such or so-and-so, then you re actually a failure, not in any other way, but as a parent. Here s the truth that I want you to hear today: There is grace abundant, not just for your children but for mommies and daddies as well. Listen to me mom and dad: God gives you grace, even when you feel like you have completely failed, and your reputation is not based on what your children do because you are received in Christ. Period. End of story. That s it; that s the truth. 3. Embrace Discipline. (Discipline vs. Permissiveness) The second thing that God began to reveal to me was a reflection and extension of the Gospel itself. It was that oftentimes the anger that I felt and that I wanted to express and show toward my children with regard to their behavior and their performance needed instead to be tied to the Gospel itself. I needed to actually show them grace. I m going to talk about this in the second. That doesn t mean that I don t discipline my children. In fact, it s quite the contrary. What it means is this: It means that my discipline is not simply targeted toward behavior modification. Discipline is, instead, a reflection of God s grace; it s an attempt to 4 P a g e

5 draw my children back to God s heart. You see, the grace that God gives, I must revel in that so I can model that back to my children because my children need to know that God loves them and receives them always. They also need to know that because my kids need to know that I will always love them and always receive them, no matter what they do. Why? Because I am the closest earthly picture that my children have of a Heavenly Father. Moms you are a massive reflection of God s love for your children. When you put condition on your love, whether explicitly or implicitly, your children know it they sense it they feel it. You must love freely and unconditionally, so that they know whenever you preach the Gospel to them, that this God loves you freely and unconditionally, that it s true. They have to say, That matches up, that jives with my experience in my home as well. Some of us need to stop linking our children s performance to our success as adults and instead simply speak the truth that we are received and they are received in Christ no matter what. Now I can hear some of you there I know, because I m a recovering performance addict so I understand what you re thinking right now. So we re just going to let the inmates run the asylum, huh? Just let them do whatever they want to do? Just let it go crazy? Everything is going to go nuts out there. No that s actually not what I m saying today because I want you to understand this: That grace leads to gratefulness and to excellence and freedom in ways that actually guilt and manipulation and behavior modification could never even achieve. Beyond compulsion and forced labor, there is something that s beautiful and it s called worship. Whenever I sense God s grace, it will change my heart. Listen. Scripture argues over and over for discipline. Here are some verses from Proverbs: Proverbs 29:15: The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. Proverbs 13:24: Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. Proverbs 29:17: Discipline your son and he will give you rest; he will give delight to your heart. Proverbs 19:18-19: Discipline your son, for there is hope; do not set your heart on putting him to death. A man of great wrath will pay the penalty, for if you deliver him, you will only have to do it again. You see, discipline is actually encouraged and even commanded by Scripture, but many of us have decided that we want to be gracious toward our children I m going to put that in scare quotes because it s not actually grace. You see, grace without discipline is no grace at all. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor who lived in Germany during World War II, called grace without discipline cheap grace. In fact, he described it like this: Cheap grace is justification of the sin without the justification of the sinner. In other words, there are many people out there who, whenever people do activities or actions, do you know what they ll say? They ll say, Well, I ll forgive that act I ll forgive that sin, but they don t ever translate that to the fact that if that sin has been justified or forgiven, that the sinner too must be transformed. As a man, I have many sins for which I have been forgiven, but that justification that God has given to me also permeates me and must therefore transform me. Out of gratefulness, out of worship, I say, God, I must be changed. God has poured that grace on me so that I, too, might be changed. Discipline works in the same way in the home because discipline operates from a position of love. I know that God loves me because sometimes God corrects me and draws me back to Him. Listen to this: Hebrews 12:7-11: It is discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they (our 5 P a g e

6 earthly fathers) disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He (God) disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. God gives discipline. Sometimes God will allow painful circumstances to come into your life. Do you know what happens in those painful circumstances? It typically starts like this: Why is this happening to me? This isn t fair. Then the next thing that happens is it begins to drive you back to God to your knees crying out to Him, Lord, I love You. I depend on You. I will only follow You. He uses that discipline, those painful circumstances, to turn our hearts and draw us closer in to Him so that we lean into Him, that we press into Him. That s what discipline is. That s what discipline does. It is what God uses to draw us from the far country back to His heart and to get in alignment with His will. Sometimes He says, I m going to press you a little bit; I m going to squeeze you a little bit so that you ll come back to Me. That s what discipline is. Did you know that earthly discipline with children is actually, when done rightly, the same thing? It s not to hurt them it s not to cause pain in your children s life. What is discipline for? Sometimes I allow painful circumstances to come into the life of my sons. (Laughter) Why do I do that? Because I want to draw them back. I want to draw them back to my heart, and I want to draw them back to the gracious heart of God. You see, I want them to listen to my instruction and to hear the instruction that comes from God. Sometimes the only way that I can get them to hear me is to allow things that are not what they would consider optimal to enter into their lives. God does the same thing spiritually with you and with me, and He allows circumstances that are not perfect to come into our lives and then to slowly draw us back. Many of us have called permissiveness grace. Hear me today. Grace and permissiveness are not synonyms. Grace is when God gives me what I don t deserve and do you know what I don t deserve? Him lovingly bringing circumstances into my life to draw me back to Him. I don t deserve that. Sometimes I use discipline to draw my children back in. I know this would be controversial to say, but they don t deserve that but I give it to them anyway. Why? Because I love them and I want them to know the heart of God in their lives. 4. And Know The Goal. (Making Disciples) You see, the goal of discipline and the goal of grace are the same. Grace and discipline are two sides of the same aspect of God s character, intended to draw us back toward the very nature of who God is. When parents actually don t base their children s love on performance, they model grace. When children are given discipline in the home by parents, they are also seeing the grace of God, both drawing them back toward who God is so that they might know God s purposes for their lives Which leads to the final thing that I want to say today. Back in Deuteronomy 6, we read this great word in verse 6: These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. Why am I being so obsessive today about grace and discipline? This is the reason why: I believe today that many in our culture have been confused. They are convinced that their job is to raise a worldclass athlete, a world-class artist, or a world-class musician. That is not what your job is today. Your job is to raise one thing: a world-class disciple of Jesus Christ. You are not charged anywhere in this Book to raise even and I want you to hear me on this This is a phrase that we use a lot in our culture I use it; you use it I want to suggest (it s not a bad term but we need to be aware of the dangerous language implications whenever we import this into our terminology). You are not charged to raise a good kid. Have you ever heard the saying, The road to hell is paved with good intentions? I would say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and highly trafficked by people who were known as good kids. Here s the thing: You are not commanded in Scripture to raise a kid who has good manners and really high social 6 P a g e

7 skills. You are commanded to raise someone who loves Jesus Christ. This is the thing that I want you to understand more than anything else Today, if you simply settle for raising a good kid, you are selling yourself and your child short. The goal of the Church is to exhort the parents that are present here today: don t raise a good kid, don t buy into the lie of our culture but instead raise a kid that knows God, loves Jesus Christ, and commits his ways and his steps to Him the rest of his life. (Clapping) Proverbs 22:6: Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it. Your job is to raise your child up in the way of the Lord. My job is to train my sons. One day when they leave my house, they will have to make the decision on their own: Will they commit and follow Jesus Christ? One day when they re married, will they lead their wife and then their children, eventually, into the house of the Lord on Sunday mornings? I can t make that decision for them, but do you know what I can do? I can talk about these things when we rise. I can talk about these things when we lie down. I can talk about these things as we go on our way, as we walk beside the side of the road. I can talk about these things as we sit down to eat. My children can know that in our house, the greatest and most important thing is serving Jesus Christ. I can echo the words of Joshua and I can say, As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. One day, sons, you will have to decide in your own house what will be real. I can t decide that for you, but I can train you up in the way that you should go. Parents, hear me today, do not let there be any confusion in your house. When Sunday rolls around, you say, It s time to go to church. Why? Not because of legalism. No it s discipline. You re bringing them in. Do you want to know what a disciple is? A disciple comes from the same root word as discipline. You are disciplining people to walk in the gracious knowledge of God. You re training them to know who He is. I want you to know that the ultimate goal today is that you would raise up a disciple in your house. Everywhere you go, you see that beautiful scenery? That s a reflection of God s gracious provision. Did you see that incredible play that guy just made on the basketball court? That s a reflection of God s beautiful provision in creating the human body that s capable of such amazing feats of strength and agility. Everything that you see is an opportunity to teach your child about the gracious goodness of God to reflect back to the Gospel that God graciously loves us, receives us, pulls us in, chases after I love what Pastor Jay does in our children s ministry. He s working faithfully to slowly-but-surely build a resource library for parents and grandparents. This is what I want you to know. Mom and dad listen to this: Jay and I were talking about this and we figured it out. If you are the most involved parent at Houston Northwest (are you ready for this?) and you bring your kid to church every time the doors are open over the course of a year, your child will be at church I m talking, if you re here every time 150 hours, in the course of a year. You get thousands of hours with your child every year. You tell me Who is in charge of discipling your kid? It ain t me. Here s the thing. Many of us have been hiring private coaches for athletics. We send our child to private music lessons. We even send our kids off to college so that they can be educated and trained. We are a culture that is accustomed to outsourcing things we are not experts in. There is a mindset in Western culture that we ought to simply outsource the spiritual development of our children to the paid experts that s me or the pastors here at the church. That s the mindset. Let me tell you the problem with that mindset: 1. I m not with them as much as you are. 2. You had better be an expert in the Gospel. You see, if you re outsourcing that, it s because you feel like you don t really know the grace of God. Well, guess what? You need to know it. You ve got to be the one in the Word. You ve got to be the one on your knees in prayer. You ve got to be the one grabbing hold tightly to who God is because when you speak those words every day, guess what? Twenty years from now, they re probably not going to seek me out 7 P a g e

8 when they have a problem. They re going to go to you. You are going to be the one to speak the truth of God to them. Or you re going to say, I don t know. Get in the Word. Know the Word. Know your God. Know His grace because you are the most important person when it comes to their spiritual development. Luke 1:17 says, He will go before him in the Spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children. You see, this is your goal: Teach your kids that they, like you, were under condemnation but they, like you, have been pursued by God that they, like you, are loved by God that they, like you, have been rescued and redeemed by the cross of Jesus Christ and that they, like you, now have the powerful Spirit of God living in them because of the empty tomb. I ve got a few resources that I m just going to tell you about: If you say, Man, I ve got to get some resources. I ve got to know how to parent my child toward Jesus. I m going to give you some things here: Parenting Beyond Your Capacity by Reggie Joiner. It s about working with the Church to parent your child. Long Story Short by Marty Machowski. It takes the entire story of Scripture and puts it into these short devotional formats. At the Table by Christopher Hudson. This is just a daily devotional. Actually my family uses this one. It s designed to be read at the dinner table at night. It s an easy way to start spiritual conversations among your children. The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones. If you have small children, this is a great tool to teach your small children the Gospel. It s a great overview of Scripture. It weaves the story of Scripture together. One that I thought of in the last service I didn t write this down. I have young men in my house, and one of the ways that we wanted to awaken them to Scripture was for them to see that Scripture had a story that was beautiful and action-packed. There s a book that s out now called The Action Bible. I don t know if you ve seen that, but it s like this sort of gritty, comic-book rendering of Scripture. It s awesome. My sons loved it. I would highly recommend it. Parenting in the Pew by Robbie Fox Castleman. Now listen, you can go to Lifeway or whatever book store. They have all these resources. If you say, Hey, I need parenting resources to help teach my child how to walk in the Gospel, they re going to give you all kinds of stuff. It s not really the books that make the difference. What makes the difference? We re back to where we started, aren t we? Where did we start? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. You see, when you make this faith your own Mom Dad when you start with that, guess what happens? Then next it begins to overflow, and it begins to touch the children in your house. That s where I want to end today. I want to ask you today Are you able to parent from grace? Are you able to parent from discipline? Are you able to encourage your children to become a disciple? You can t answer Yes to that until you yourself have openly and freely received the grace of God in your own life and in your own heart. So today, this is my exhortation to you: If you have received that grace, get intentional about teaching it and weaving it into your family s life every single day. If you re not a believer if you have yet to say Yes to Jesus Christ start now. Say Yes to Him because that s the way that your kids are going to be changed. 8 P a g e

9 Let s pray. Every head is bowed; nobody is looking around. I want to start with this. If you re here right now and you would say, Hey, Steve do you know what? I heard what you said today, and I have never once placed my faith in Jesus Christ. I want that grace, that faith, that discipline to not just be something that s an idea but it s a real reality, and I want that in my own life so then I can begin to learn it and teach it to the people in my house. If that s you today, you can say Yes to Jesus right now. I want to simply pray for you. Who s ready to say Yes to Jesus today? Would you just raise your hand? Who s ready to say Yes to that grace today? Alright there s a hand. There s another hand right there. Who else? Raise them up so I can see them. Who else? There s another one back there there s another one over there. Who else? There s another one back there. Who else? Let me pray over you right now. Lord, all of these who have raised their hand today, I thank you for their courage. Number one, it took courage for them to admit that where they ve been has not been where they need to be, and they need to turn and repent. God, secondly, I just want to pray over each of them right now and ask that You would draw them to You that You would draw them to You. God, I want to pray also for families in this room. I bet there are a lot of families that would say, It s time for me to get serious to turn my own family s heart toward Jesus. Wow. I need to get intentional about that. Lord, I pray that You would draw them right now. Father, I m thankful for who You are. Thank You for rescuing us, and thank You, Lord, for speaking to us today. I pray this in the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen. 9 P a g e