I Have Decided

We are coming to the point of our service where we do a little congregational prayer. So I look forward to hearing those voices yet again as we pray on behalf of our community. And I can’t think of anything better for us to pray about than all the communities being affected by the hurricane and the tornadoes that have been rolling through our country over the last few days. I’m sure you’ve seen all the images of towns up in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. And you might even have some family and friends like we do up in Columbia that are still, I think, without power or might have a tree or two lodged into their house right now. So let’s pray for folks that we know or communities we’ve heard about that have been so deeply affected by that.

Also this morning, Carter, you can come on up, man. Carter is actually going to be preaching for us today. I’m super excited about this. One of my greatest passions in ministry is developing other leaders and helping them cultivate their gifts. So long before honor was born, Carter and I looked down at the preaching counter and said, “Hey, man, you take your pick. Any Sunday in September, what would you like?” And he picked this one. So he’s been stewing on this passage and praying through it for a long time. So you all turn to your neighbor. You go ahead and pray for all the destruction and the families that are reeling from the hurricane. And Carter will be preaching for us in a moment. All right. Y’all take it away.

Lord, we just come to you today. And God, we thank you that you are our provider and our helper. Lord, you are our strength. God, we pray for those who have been affected by the storms. Lord, those who are without power, those who have had tree damage to their houses, those who, you know, might have had their roads flooded. Lord, all the damage done by the storm. God, Lord, we just pray that you would help them. God, be with them. Lord, please send help their way, whatever that looks like. God, help us to be your hands and your feet in any ways that we can help. God, we just pray that this morning, Lord, that we could look to you and see you as our great comforter and our great counselor, Lord. And, yeah, Lord, we just want to look to you this morning. So thank you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, good morning. I am super glad to see all of y’all this morning. And, yeah, just really excited to get up here. I don’t get too many opportunities to speak to y’all as one big group. But, yeah, I’m the youth guy here. And I’ve been here for the past four months. And I just want to say thank y’all so much for your support, your generosity, your time, your energy, everything that you have given to me because I felt so loved and accepted and just supported down here in this new role. And, yeah, like on behalf of the youth, I just want to say thank you. I truly believe that y’all know that the energy, the money, the time that y’all give to the next generation, it doesn’t just affect them like in their present lives, in their present stage right now, but will affect them for the rest of their lives. And so, yeah, for that, I just want to say thank y’all so much.

Yeah, so we’ve been going through this series in Nehemiah, and Jeremy has been leading us through this series called Revival and Restoration. And we’ve been looking at the life of Nehemiah, how Nehemiah had this high position as a cupbearer to the king. And he would make sure that the king’s food wasn’t poisoned or anything so that the king wasn’t going to die when he ate the food. And so he had a pretty important role, right? Nehemiah, he gets word that his hometown Jerusalem is in ruins, that the walls of Jerusalem were destroyed, and his heart breaks. And he wants to go check it out. And so Nehemiah goes to Jerusalem, and he sees all the destruction and all of the chaos that’s going on. And he says, “I want to be a part of rebuilding this wall in Jerusalem.” And so Nehemiah leaves his high position as a cupbearer to the king and goes to Jerusalem, and he starts rebuilding this wall. And we’ve been talking about how this, Nehemiah building this physical wall, it wasn’t just a physical project for him, but it was also a spiritual project. And Nehemiah Saw it as this wall being built as not only a physical thing, but that these people weren’t worshiping God. And so once the wall was going to be built, Nehemiah knows that these people can come back and worship God. And so Nehemiah leads this project in building the wall in Jerusalem. And last week, we talked about chapter 5 of Nehemiah. And Jeremy said that the message of Nehemiah’s life was that Nehemiah loved God and that he served others. And that as Christians, that should be the message of our life too, that we would love God and serve others.

And so this morning, we’re going to be in chapter 6. And so if you have a Bible, you can flip there with me. Nehemiah chapter 6. I’m going to be reading out of the ESV. But whatever version you have is great. It’s also going to be up on the screen. But before I get into it, I want to tell a few stories. I’m sure some of these you have heard before, but I know at least one you haven’t because it’s a personal story and I haven’t told anybody yet.

So the first one is of Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, if not the greatest, was cut from his high school basketball team. Like that’s crazy to think about. The greatest basketball of all time was cut from his high school basketball team because he wasn’t good enough. So he worked really hard the next summer and eventually made the varsity team. And we all know the story. He went to North Carolina, played for the Bulls, played all in the NBA, and became the greatest basketball of all time. He was committed to his mission.

Next, Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss, one of the most famous writers of children’s books, he was rejected by 27 publishers when he wrote his first book. He went to 27 different companies and said, “Please publish my book.” And all of them said, “No, your book’s not good enough.” But they made the wrong choice, right, because his books are super famous now. Everybody reads them. And, yeah, he was committed to his mission.

Now, any of y’all have a Ring doorbell? Maybe. Maybe some of you, maybe not. Okay, no one. Okay. Well, the Ring doorbell, it’s a doorbell where if you have it and whoever’s ringing the doorbell, you can see it has a camera attached. And so you can see whoever’s ringing your doorbell and also has a speaker. So you can talk straight from there. You don’t have to answer the door. You can speak straight out the door from the Ring doorbell.

And the founder of the Ring doorbell, he goes to this show, Shark Tank. Many of you guys probably watched it. He goes to these investors and he tries to get them to invest in his company. And only one of the people makes an investment. And the founder of the Ring doorbell says he went home that day and he cried because the offer was so low. And he knew that his invention was worth more than the offer that was made to him. But that next year, his net worth of the Ring doorbell was worth over $25 million. And so he was committed and he knew that his product had value.

Now for the personal story. This past week, I’ve been house-sitting at the N-Fingers house. They’ve been down in Florida. And they have three dogs. One of the dogs is good. But these two dogs, they’re about a year old. Their names are Sue and Tilly. And they’re Boykin Spaniels. I kind of like Boykin Spaniels, but now I don’t really like Boykin Spaniels. But they would not stop barking. Like I could not get them to stop barking at all. And you know what I really think it was? Like they have all these glass windows in their house. And so the dogs are looking out. It’s nighttime. They’re looking out. And I think they see the other one’s reflection. And so they start barking. The other one, not knowing what’s going on. Here’s the other dog barking. They just start going crazy, right?

And so I’m going to bed. It’s like 10:30. They won’t stop barking. And so I try a few different things. First, I try the classic pillow over the face method, right? Put the pillow over my face. Try to close my ears. Doesn’t work. Secondly, I’m begging them to be quiet, right? I’m yelling from my room to the room they’re in. “Tilly, Sue, please be quiet. Hush.” Saying it, saying it with a lot of authority. Begging them. All these things, right?

They’re barking more. They’re starting to whine because they want to get in my room. Now at this point, it’s like 1 a.m. Thursday morning. And I’m like, what am I going to do? I have to go to work. I need sleep. And I’m just sitting there just thinking. I’m like, what can I possibly do? You know? And then I remember I have this speaker in my car that I used to play music with. And so at 1 a.m. in the morning, I go out to my car and I get this speaker. And I hook it up to my phone. And I play the music as loud as possible. And I’m finally able to go to sleep. I was so committed to getting sleep. Finally, I did. I only got like five hours at night. But it was better than nothing.

So all these stories, they show commitment, right? They show commitment even in the face of opposition, right? And that’s what we’re going to be talking about this morning. How Nehemiah was committed to a mission. He was committed to the mission of God. And how revival actually takes commitment to the mission of God. And so I’m going to pray really quick and then we’ll jump into Nehemiah chapter 6.

Lord, just thank you for this day. Thank you, Father, for all these people that you brought here today. God, I pray that you would just speak through your word today. And Lord, that all of us could come out of today loving you more, Lord. Growing in our relationship with you and seeing you for who you are. A good God who loves us deeply and just wants the best for us, Lord. Let’s pray these things in your name, amen.

All right, so Nehemiah chapter six, here we go. This is verse one. Now when Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left in it, although up to that time I had not set up the doors and the gates, Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, come and let’s meet together at Hacaphirim in the plain of Ono. But they intended to do me harm.

If you’ve been with us the past few weeks, these names at the beginning of the chapter, they’re not new to you. Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem, they’re enemies of Nehemiah and they do not want to see God’s work and God’s mission accomplished. If you just look really quick at chapter four, verse seven, it says, but when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and Ammonites and Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry.

This is always their response to any time that Nehemiah is completing his mission. They’re always angry, they’re always frustrated, and they’re always trying to make up lies about Nehemiah and try to get him to stop working for God. And so the first thing that we see in this text is that there will always be opposition to God’s work. No matter what the work is, no matter how big or small it is, there will always be opposition to God’s work.

And I think that this opposition comes in three major ways. The first one is people. We see it here in the passage. People that are physically opposing God’s work and they’re lying about you. They’re trying to get you to not follow God, to not do what God says, and try to get you off the path of God.

The second is Satan. We live in a spiritual world where Satan and his power is very real. And so Satan wants to do everything in his power to get you to not follow God, to be distracted from God’s mission, and to do anything to just compromise in your relationship with God. He’ll let you go to church on Sunday morning. He’ll let you do a lot of Christian things, but he doesn’t want you to really follow God. He doesn’t want you to attempt great things for God. He really doesn’t.

And third is our flesh and our comfort. This one gets to me a lot. I know for me, I don’t know if any of y’all have this problem, but waking up early in the morning is really hard for me. And so, you know, I’ll go to bed that night, I’ll set an alarm and I’ll say, God, I’m super excited to wake up in the morning and read my Bible. I’m super excited to spend time with you. And I really am. But then the next Morning comes and I wake up and I am like not excited to read my Bible, right? I’m not excited to get out of bed. I’m not excited to spend time with God. And I’m like, man, what would 15 extra minutes of sleep do for me today? It would give me the best day ever. It never does, right? It’s always interrupted. I get like an extra two minutes of sleep. And, but our flesh and our comfort can just deceive us and be like, oh man, it would just be so much easier to not follow God and not do God’s will, not build my relationship with God right now.

And so what do we do with these things? Like during the opposition, even though God’s work and following God, even though we’re always gonna be opposed in it, opposition should make us press in more. What if as Christians, as followers of Jesus, when we’re faced with people who don’t want us to follow God, when we’re faced and know the reality that Satan is working as hard as He can to get us to not follow God, and when our flesh and our comfort just wants us to be distracted from God, what if we pressed in more, said, man, I’m making a commitment to follow God?

For me, that, for the alarm story, like it comes in the setting two alarms. Like I set the first alarm and I know that at 6 a.m. I’m gonna be tired and wanna go back to sleep. So every night before I set another alarm at 6.02 because I forget that I set that second alarm. And then I’ll go back to sleep and say, man, I’m excited for this extra 15 minutes. And then I’ll wake up two minutes later and be like, that’s why I set this other alarm because I knew that I was gonna be tired in the morning. We gotta make a commitment to follow God even though it’s hard and even though there’s opposition.

Look at verse three. And I sent messengers to them saying, I’m doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop? And I leave it and come down to you. And they sent to me four times in this way and I answered them in the same manner.

The second thing we see in this text is that Nehemiah was committed to the work of God. First, notice the nature of Nehemiah’s work. My translation said, I’m doing a great work. Other translators say, I’m doing an important work. Nehemiah saw that he was doing a great and important task for God. And maybe you’re like me. When I read this, I see that Nehemiah is building a wall for thousands of people to worship God. He’s building this wall around Jerusalem for thousands of people to come back to worship God and live there. And for me, I can say without a doubt, that is a great mission for God. That is a great thing. Nehemiah is getting to help thousands of people worship God.

But then I can look at my own life and I’m like, man, I live in Ravenel. Like I don’t got a lot of money. I’m 22 years old. Like, I don’t know if I’m really doing great work. Like, is it as great as Nehemiah? I just wanna encourage you this morning that the reason that Nehemiah’s work was great and important wasn’t because of the scale of his mission. It was because Nehemiah was serving a great God that had a great mission in the world. Nehemiah was serving a great God who had a great mission in the world for people to worship God. And so every single person, every single follower of Jesus has a role to play in completing this mission.

Jesus, He lays out the mission for us. It’s in Matthew 28. You guys probably know it off the top of your head. Matthew 28. This is what Jesus says. Matthew 28, 18 through 20. And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I’ve commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even until the end of the age.

Our work is great because we’re on a great mission of a great God. It’s not because we’re good and great in ourselves. It’s because we are on a great mission. And our mission is an eternal mission. When we’re working for Jesus and serving the Lord, when we’re Serving people in need, when we’re growing in our relationship with God, when we’re loving our family and our friends, that actually has an eternal impact. When we share the gospel with people, we are trying to get people to come from death, spiritual death to spiritual life. That is an eternal thing and has eternal weight. And so our mission, it’s not just a temporary thing. We see this morning that our mission is an eternal mission and is great and important because we’re serving a great God who has a great mission for all people to come to worship Him. And we all have a role to play in that. God has placed you in your workplaces, in your families, in your friend groups, in your activities, in your hobbies for a reason so that you could reach out to people and point people to Jesus, the only hope of the world.

And so Tobiah and Sanballat and Geshem, they lie about Nehemiah and they send a letter to the king saying, Nehemiah’s trying to rebel, he’s trying to become the king of Jerusalem. But all those things, they’re not true. They’re just lying about Nehemiah. And in the face of all this opposition, we’re gonna jump down to verse nine here. It says, You see, in the face of opposition, Nehemiah looked to God for strength. He didn’t look to himself for strength to complete this mission. All these people were lying about him, telling false things about him. But Nehemiah looked to God. He said, God, please strengthen my hands.

You know, back in chapter one, it’s talking about how Nehemiah goes to Jerusalem and he sees all the destruction of the city. And I’m sure, like he didn’t have any help at the time. And I’m sure this thought had to come through his mind. God, there is no way. There is no way that I can do this work. There is no way that I can rebuild this wall. And there’s no way a bunch of people are gonna come back and worship You. Nehemiah saw that this mission was a God-sized mission. He couldn’t do it on his own. And so for us, like, are you committing yourself to work that needs the help of God? Are you doing work that you can just do in your own strength? Because I know for me, like it’s easy to give my life to things that I know I can do in my own power. Because at the end of the day, like I know it’s on me. And man, like we’ll just do things that we can do in our own strength. It’s a lot easier to do things that you know you can do, right? No one wants to play a sport that they’re bad at. We all wanna play a sport and do things that we know we’re good at. But when God calls us to do a mission, He wants us to do it leaning on His strength. Because at the end of the day, God’s gonna get the glory for that. No one could look at you and say, man, you definitely did that. Because you’re doing things outside of your own power. And so God wants us to lean on His strength when we’re doing His mission.

The thing that comes to my mind is are we living a convenient life or are we living an obedient life? Because a lot of times, it’s easier to do the easier thing. It’s always easier to do the convenient thing. But doing the obedient thing and doing what God’s called you to do, man, that is hard. And those two things usually don’t go hand in hand. Jesus tells us to deny ourselves and follow Him. And so when we’re following Jesus, man, we have to make sacrifices. But Nehemiah thought that every sacrifice that he made for God was worth it. And so Nehemiah is lied about and he looks to God for strength in the face of all that opposition.

And then verse 10, Nehemiah goes into, sorry, I’m losing my place here. Nehemiah goes into the house of Shemaiah and Shemaiah says, Nehemiah, these people are gonna come kill you. Here’s what you need to do. You need to go into the temple and lock yourself in the temple so that these people can’t kill you. But look what Nehemiah says in verse 11. But I said, should such a man as I run away? And what man such as I could go into the temple and live? I will not go in. Nehemiah was willing to sacrifice for his mission. Nehemiah was willing to give everything for his mission. He believed so deeply in the mission of God, and so deeply that His work was worth doing that He was willing to give up everything for it. Jumping back to verse three, he says, “I cannot come down.” Nehemiah’s commitment actually changed the way that he acted, right? Nehemiah’s commitment and seeing the nature of his work, it changed his commitment. He physically wasn’t tied up to the wall, and they say, “Come on down, Nehemiah, we need to talk with you.” He says, “I’m tied up right now, I can’t do it.” No, he physically could come down, but his attitude was the same: “I can’t come down.” And that’s the type of effect that the gospel should have in our lives. It should change the way that we live, change the way that we act and think. The gospel should deepen our commitment to God and actually should change the way that we live. It shouldn’t just be things that we believe in our head; it should be played out in our lives. And Nehemiah saw that, and he was committed to the mission, even in the face of opposition.

Nehemiah was willing to sacrifice his high position as a cupbearer to the king. He was willing to sacrifice his comfort. We saw a few weeks ago that Nehemiah was willing to give up his own money to pay for all these officials to come and eat. His whole life revolved around the mission of God. And that’s the question for us today: Does our whole life revolve around God’s mission, or do we just have a little sliver of our life that kind of, we go to church Sunday and that’s it? God, God wants all of us. He deserves all of us. And the best life that we could live is actually the one fully given to God and fully surrendered to God.

Now we’re jumping down to verse 13. Right before this, Nehemiah has been—he says, “I can’t, I’m not gonna lock myself in the temple. I shouldn’t do that.” And then he finds out that this guy, Shemaiah, he was just hired by Tobiah. He was just a hired hand. And so Nehemiah discerns that he was just lying and that this actually wasn’t from God. So verse 13—or my bad, sorry. Verse 15: “So the wall was finished on the fifth day of the month of Elul in fifty-two days. And when all our enemies heard of it, all the nations around us were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that this work had been accomplished with the help of our God.”

I’ll give you some good news this morning: God wins in the end. God really does win in the end. Even in spite of all this opposition, starting in chapter one, Nehemiah coming to Jerusalem and seeing the city in complete ruins, from not having any help, to all these people helping Nehemiah build this wall, to Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem lying about Nehemiah and trying to get him to stop working for God. For all of the times that it was hot during the day, and that, man, these people that were working on the wall, like they didn’t know anything about construction. Like they were just helping out in any way possible. Like, I don’t know if you guys have ever used a tool that you didn’t know how to use before, but sometimes it’s super frustrating, right? You’re just like doing something random. It’s like backwards, and you’re just like getting all messy, all this stuff. Man, in spite of all of this opposition, God’s mission was complete. God wins in the end.

And notice what it says: that when the enemies heard of it, they were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that this work had been accomplished with the help of our God. So we talked about earlier: Are we spending our lives on things that, man, when God comes through, that people say, “Man, that wasn’t done in your own strength. God had to come through”? For us, are we committing ourselves to work that, man, we’re saying, “God, if you don’t come through, if you don’t show up, man, this is all just gonna be—this is all just gonna fail. God, I need You”? We’re spending our lives on those things that God has to come through, so that when He does come through, people will be able to see that that is from God. God wins in the end. You know, in our lives, we can take hope that God wins in the end. In the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, this is what it says. Revelation chapter five, verse 13. And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them saying, to Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and might forever.

God wins in the end because people, all the earth, will come to worship God. That’s what Nehemiah’s mission was, for people to come back to worshiping God. And that’s what our mission is, for people to come and worship God, for people to come into a relationship with Jesus. Because one day, all people will worship Jesus. This mission that God has been, that started in Genesis and it goes all the way through Revelation, it started at the beginning of history and is still going right now to reach people with the gospel and for people to come and worship God. Man, that mission is worth living for.

And that victory, that Jesus will get all the praise at the end of the age, when all things are said and done, Jesus will get the praise, that started with a commitment, commitment mission. You know, I told a story about Michael Jordan, how he was committed to playing basketball and being the greatest basketball player of all time. Told a story about Dr. Seuss. He was a great writer. He was super committed to writing good children’s books, story of Ring Doorbell, how this guy wanted to make a lot of money, how me, I was committed to getting a bunch of sleep at night.

You know, greater than all of those things, greater than all of those missions was the mission that Jesus set out on. And His commitment was greater than any of the people that I mentioned. It was greater than Nehemiah’s. Jesus was so committed to us that He was willing to give up His life for you. Jesus loved us so much that even though we have separated ourselves from God because of our sin and chosen, all of us have chosen to turn away from God and turn to our own way and say, man, God, I think that my way is actually better than Your way. I’m gonna go my way for a little bit. Even though we’ve all turned our backs on God, God loved you and me so much. He loved this world so much that He gave up His only son so that you and I could find life again and have a relationship with God again.

And Jesus, He faced opposition. He faced opposition for people during His lifetime that ended up killing Him and from you and me when we walk away from God and we say, God, I don’t want You. He faced opposition of Satan, of His power, of sin, of death. He faced great opposition and He faced opposition of His own comfort. Man, how much easier would it have been to choose to not go to the cross and to choose to just stay where He was and say, man, I’m gonna take a back seat on this so I’m gonna let someone else figure it out. No, Jesus was committed to the end. He was so committed to His mission and Jesus accomplished His mission because He rose from the grave. He didn’t stay dead. We serve a God who is alive and active and He is alive today and He is inviting people into relationship with Him.

So this is the greatest commitment story of all time. It’s the person of Jesus and what He’s done for you and for me, for all people that you will ever interact with. He gave up His life for them so that people who have been separated from God by sin, man, could come back into relationship with God, could turn from their sin, come back into relationship with God and live with Him forever. That’s what the Bible says. If anyone believes in Jesus, they will live with Him forever. That’s His offer to you.

And so, I think there’s a few application points today. First question, have you made a decision to follow Jesus? You know, I titled this message, I’ve Decided because we all have to make a decision about Jesus. At the end of the day, every single person makes a decision about Jesus. You’ll either choose to follow Him and give Him your life or you’ll choose to not follow Him and go your own way. Jesus’ mission, God’s mission that He’s on to save the world, man, are you gonna get on board? Are you gonna commit your life to Jesus? Because there is no greater commitment that you can make than to come into God’s kingdom and be a part of His mission. God has a place for each of you and your families and your friends and your jobs and your hobbies. God has a place for you to work hard for His mission and to commit to His mission. So have you given your life to Jesus? If not, me, Pastor Jeremy, any of the elders, we would love to have a conversation about that with you. What it means to follow Jesus. We’d love to take you out to lunch or coffee just to talk about that and begin that conversation.

Next question, if you’re a follower of Jesus in this room, man, what’s your next step? How has the Great Commission, God’s mission to save the world, how has it affected your daily life? What does it change about the way that you’re living? What does it change about the way that you spend your time or your money or your energy? It’s easy to go throughout your life and just live for yourself. It’s always easier to live for yourself. But man, this is a great mission that we’re on, to tell the world about Jesus and to shine in the darkness for the Lord. And so what’s your next step?

To work hard for the mission of God, it requires commitment and revival. If we wanna see revival in Ravenel, South Carolina, if we wanna see revival in South Carolina, in the United States and in the world, it’s gonna take commitment. We all have to play our part. We all have to commit to God’s mission, even in the face of great opposition. We have to be willing to commit to God’s work and know that every sacrifice we make is worth it.

You know, I’ll end with this. 1 John 4, verse 19 says this, we love because He first loved us. That’s the heart of all of this. We commit our lives to God because God first loved us. When you didn’t care anything about God, He cared about you and He loved you so much that He would give up His life for you. And so everything that we do in the Christian life is done out of love and obedience to God, seeing that He loved you first. Even when you have nothing to give to God, He loved you and gave up His Son for you.

And so what’s your step today? Is it to give your life to Jesus? Is it to commit your life to Jesus? Or is it to take a next step in working hard for the mission of God? What does that look like in your life? It’s gonna look like sharing the gospel once a week when you’re out at that grocery store saying, man, I’m gonna try to pray for one person before I leave here today. Is it, man, I’m gonna try to talk with this one friend I know who’s just going through a really rough time and try to encourage them. All of the commitments that we make, they’re hard. They’re never easy, but they’re always worth it because Jesus, He had the same attitude towards us. It was hard to do what He did, but He did it for us. He was committed to this mission.

And so what better way to celebrate that Jesus was committed to us and gave His all on the mission than to celebrate with the Lord’s Supper? So Jeremy’s gonna come up and we’re gonna take the Lord’s Supper. And so yeah, Jeremy, you can come on up. But yeah, we’re just gonna celebrate. Jesus gave up His body and His blood, gave up everything so that you and I could come into a relationship with God.

And so let’s pray real quick. Lord, I just thank You for this day and thank You for Your word. Lord, I pray that we could all just see Your love for us, Lord, and see that You loved us first. God, I pray that Your love for us would inspire us and motivate us, Lord, to work hard for You, to give everything to You, Lord. God, when we live our lives on mission for You, that’s not a wasted life. It’s a wasted life when we just live for ourselves, God, and live for what’s easy. So Lord, I pray that we could all make a commitment to follow You, Lord, with everything, whatever stage of life we’re in, whatever excuse might be in the back of our mind, God, I just pray that You would help us to follow You, Lord. And yeah, lead us in those decisions, God. Pray these things in Your name. Amen.