Spirit-Filled Workers

Well, good morning. Good morning to everybody. This is one of the sweetest the sweetest sounds that you can have in a local church is everybody getting to chat and talk. If you are a guest with us this morning, I just want to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you for entrusting your children with us this past week at VBS, and thank you for coming back, not just to let your children be part of the fun here on stage, but also getting to see the other side of who we are. Quick disclaimer: our church prayed for years for the sounds and the movements of the little ones that some of y’all are bobbing right now. They will not bother us whatsoever. If they coup during the service, you’re totally fine. So, just wanted to say that.

If if I haven’t gotten to meet you yet, my name is Jeremy. I get to be the pastor here at Sauldam Baptist Church. And if you are new with us, then what we’re about to do is probably going to be very new for you. We spend a portion of every service every Sunday morning just praying. We don’t just want to be a church that prays. We want to be a praying church. So we dedicate just a small little portion of our time where I’m going to invite you to grab a neighbor, possibly the one right beside you that you just met, not the one across the room that you just met. Okay? Just grab a neighbor and we’re going to pray one more time for VBS like we’ve been praying for the month leading up to it. We just want to pray for lives changed. You know, I had reached out to a couple of the families that brought their children to VBS this past week. I was talking with them and I said, you know, my prayer for VBS is that it would help foster hearts and souls for Christ for years to come. You know, we got to spend 15 hours of facetime investing in your children, but we’re praying that those 15 hours would lead to 15 and 30 and 45 years of them walking with the Lord. So, we’re going to pray one more time for VBS, asking that God would use VBS to change the lives of the kids. So, grab a neighbor and pray for that and I’ll put a bow here on it in a moment. Thank you, guys.

Holy Spirit, we know that You work just like Mr. Johnny attested to a few moments ago. You are active. You are constantly stirring up the good stuff. We know that You worked and You were speaking to the hearts and the souls of the children that we just got to be with over this past week. And I’m begging that You would not stop. I’m begging that the seed of the gospel that was planted would take root. It would find good soil. That the fruit of repentance would spring up. Not just that we would have a lot of really good kids, but that generations of faith would come from VBS. Not just that our church would gain a few new families, but that outsiders would come into Your kingdom. Not that we would just tell kids that they need to live for God, but that we would or that those children themselves would inspire others to glorify Your name. God, I beg that of You. Please use VBS to change lives, eternal lives. God, use this morning to do that. Father, I can I can study Your word. I can put some notes on a paper. I can coordinate with Donnie to throw some stuff up on the screens, but only You can save. Only You can convict. Only You can transform. God, I’m asking that You would do what only You can do. God, this past week, You’ve called me to do what I’m supposed to do. And now I’m calling on You to do what You’re supposed to do. That You would save, that You would transform, You would get a hold of this next few moments. Please, God, we love You. We give the next few moments to You. And it’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen. Amen.

Well, if you do have your Bible, your copy of God’s word, I invite you to open it up to Ephesians chapter 6 as we continue our study through Ephesians the Ephesians chapter 6. If you’re still learning the road map of the Bible, you just split it right in half. You probably land in the Psalms or some funny sounding names like Daniel and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. You take A right from there, and eventually you’ll hit Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And I want you to go just a few more pages, and eventually you’ll hit Ephesians. If you’ve made it to Revelations, you’ve gone too far. I need to do a U-turn. Ephesians chapter 6.

Man, some things are just so easy to celebrate. And VBS, man, easy to celebrate. Really, so, so proud of Christa. She is not in the room right now, or else, man, we’d be giving her a bouquet of flowers and we’d be bringing her on stage where she does not like to be the center of attention by any means. But man, it was a, it was a really good time.

I want to take a moment. If you volunteered for VBS in any capacity, from clicking slides to preparing snacks to teaching the Bible, if you are a senior citizen that’s been doing it for years, or if you’re a middle school student that did it for the very first time, if you served with VBS in any way, can you please just stand up for us? Man, thank you so much.

Th- this is, this is just a portion of the 40-plus people it took to pull off that week where we got to love on some kids and we just got to sow into them. You know, we do things like VBS not just as a form of daycare or child care during the summer. We do this as an intentional way to invest in the spiritual lives of kids because we know that kids can be full disciples of Jesus, not partial ones. It’s not that adults get to be the varsity team and kids get to be the JV team. That’s not how this works. That all people could be full disciples of Jesus. In the kingdom of God, no one is overlooked and no one is unimportant. And today’s passage will proclaim that truth as well as we will see God give some specific instructions to folks in positions of authority and positions under authority.

So this is Ephesians chapter 6, verses 5-9. If I picked and chose the books or the passages of the Bible that I would preach on every week, this is not one I would choose. But what we do here is we just preach through books of the Bible. So by God’s grace, this is where we’re at. Ephesians chapter 6, verses 5-9.

Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your heart as you would Christ. Don’t work only while being watched as people pleasers, but no, as slaves of Christ, do God’s will from your heart. Serve with a good attitude as to the Lord and not the people, knowing that whatever good each one does, slave or free, he will receive this back from the Lord. And masters, treat your slaves the same way without threatening them because you know that both their master and yours is in heaven and there is no favoritism with Him.

No matter who is in charge over you, no matter who you may be in charge of, there is a central truth that everybody must take away from the text this morning. Jesus is the real master. What I want everybody to know today is that Jesus is the real master. For us to get there, we need to unpack a couple words. So, let’s just start right there. Let’s just get it right out, right out of the gate. Slaves and masters.

For us in 2025, when we think about slavery, we have a particular image of that in our minds. We are thinking American colonial period child slavery. Bunch of folks from Africa are being bought and sold and those they were coming over here working plantations, things like that. When Paul is talking about slavery right here, that’s not what he’s talking about. The type of slavery that was being practiced in the city of Ephesus under the Roman Empire was not that way.

Slave in this context, I will say it means this: a legally subordinated servant who is owned by a master. Slaves were regarded as legal possession. However, this is where it departs. Slaves held personhood in this time. Slaves. They could marry, they could have kids, they could own and start businesses, and eventually they could purchase their freedom because they were being paid a just wage most of the time. And a slave’s status was not tied to the fact that they were a slave. Their status was tied to the that of their master. If their master was a big business guy in the city, then they got to be under that status. They were the big business guy’s slave. If their master was just an average Joe like me, then their slave would just kind of be attached to that. The status as a slave is totally tied to the status of their master. We’ll come back to that.

A master that is someone in position of authority who owned a slave. Oddly, the word for master here in the Bible is curios. We would translate it Caesar. It’s also attributed to Jesus. Jesus is our curios and savior. He is our Lord and Savior. Jesus is our master.

Now, socially, masters not just were the owners of slaves, but they were responsible to oversee the well-being of those slaves and the entire household network. When we think about our home, we’re thinking about a potential wife and kids. It was different then. For them, their home was everybody in their family plus the servants or the slaves and their families that would have been under your care. Whenever your slave gets sick, it’s your job to take them to a doctor. Whenever your slave needed something, it was your job to get that taken care of. To own slaves was to take on a type of responsibility that you wouldn’t have had if you did not have slaves. Once again, we’ll come back to that here in a moment.

Now what we need to know is that in a major city like Ephesus under the Roman Empire as many as one-third of the population would have been former or current slaves. Every interaction you would have had with somebody that would have been in the back of your mind is this person free or are they a slave or not?

Now the Roman Empire what they did with slavery was very different under the ancient near east. Once you were a slave, you were a slave for life. Under Greek, under Greece, once you were a slave, you’re a slave for life. Under Rome, you got out at 30 years old. If you were a slave at 30 years old, you’re emancipated. You’re done. You’re free. In fact, becoming a slave was not actually the worst thing that could happen to you because you came under the care and the responsibility of a master. If you were free, you had to figure out all that stuff for yourself. It’s like starting your own business. Going into slavery was a way of coming under the employment and the care of somebody else.

Now, slaves were able to hold white collar jobs as well as blue-collar jobs. Slaves could be physicians. They could be teachers and business owners and managers as well as street sweepers, just normal day laborers and even dock workers. To be a slave did not automatically put you at the bottom drags of society. Once again, it was attached to the status of your master.

Now, some people were born into slavery. Maybe mom and dad are slaves, and they give birth to a child, and that child automatically then as a slave. Some people were sold into slavery, and this is where it starts to get icky for us. Mom and dad maybe can’t take care of their child the way they think their child deserves, so they sell them under the care of a good master. Some people sold themselves into slavery to give themselves some stability because they knew at 30 years old they were done. Other people would sell themselves into slavery to pay off a personal debt. Maybe I borrow a lot of money from you and I can’t pay you back. So I sell myself to become your slave and I work it off for the next 20 or 30 years. Some people, however, were trafficked into it, pulled out of their homes, taken across state lines, and sold. Some people were even enslaved as a legal punishment. Maybe they had committed heinous crimes against the state, and the state took them on as slaves, and that was a different situation altogether.

Now, we don’t support slavery in any form. The fact that the Bible mentions it does not mean that the Bible supports it. What the Bible is, it is a supernatural text written in a current cultural moment. Slavery was an aspect of the Roman Empire. So for the church to spread, for the church to be what the church needed to be, God’s holy word needed to address this topic. And that’s what Paul does here. We don’t support slavery in any form. Certainly not the pure child-based form of our own country’s colonial period, nor this employment form of the Roman Empire. The Bible clearly says, “We love our neighbors. We don’t own them. We treat others the way we’d want to be treated.” And the gospel itself is a message of freedom from bondage. So to intentionally keep others under bondage in any way is to go against God’s heart for setting us free.

Yet God does address slaves. Why would He do that? What He is doing here, and this is where I want us to really hone in. Paul by addressing slaves in this church in Ephesus is legitimizing their role as followers of Jesus. Just like we did with BBS this past week, we looked at a bunch of kids and we said, “Hey, you may be four years old, but you can be a full-fledged follower of Jesus Christ.” Paul is looking at these slaves. He’s saying, “Hey, you may be the legal property of another person, but you can be a full-fledged follower of Jesus Christ.”

In fact, if you are here this morning, I want you to hear me say, no matter who you are, no matter where you are in life, no matter what you have done, no matter what has been done to you, you can start following Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior today. God looks at us damaged goods and all, and He says, “I want them. I want them so badly. I will send my prized son who will make Himself a slave of punishment under the sin that people have committed in their place.” God sends His son Jesus Christ to ransom us out of our slavery to sin.

God loves you. No matter what you did last night, no matter what you will do later, God loves you. No matter what’s been done to you when you were a child, no matter what will happen to you in the workplace this week, God loves you. If you are here this morning and you have any question about whether or not Jesus is for you, you need to know this. While you were still a sinner, Christ died for you. He did everything necessary for you to have new life in Him.

When Paul is addressing these slaves, he is saying, “Hey, you are not second-class members of that church in Ephesus.” Kids, fifth graders in the room, eighth graders, the students, high schoolers, the single adults, the empty nesters, the seniors who never got to marry. You are not second class in God’s family. We are all first class before the cross of Jesus Christ. Before Jesus, we are all standing on equal footing.

It’s interesting over the past three Sundays, the text of Ephesians has addressed three particular groups of people that would have all had a lesser form of privilege under the Roman Empire. Did you catch it? Two weeks ago, I talked about wives and husbands. Women in general would not have been seen with the same respect as men. Last Sunday, we talked about parenthood with children and parents. Kids would not have been seen with the same respect as adults. And this Sunday, we’re talking about slaves and masters. Slaves would not have been treated with the same amount of respect as their masters.

The past three weeks, God through the Apostle Paul to the church in Ephesus has been saying, “You are all fully legitimate in my kingdom. No one’s overlooked. No one is devalued. You are all equal before me.”

In fact, in Matthew chapter 19, Jesus embraced the kids whenever the disciples wanted to shoo them away. In John 13, Jesus did a slave’s task by washing the feet of the disciples before He was betrayed. And in Luke 23 and 24, guess who were the first people to see the empty tomb? It was not the men. It was not the religious leaders. It was women. It was women.

What God had been doing all along was fully legitimizing the identity of potential Jesus followers with the very groups of people that society would have said are less than. So for you this morning, just one more time, no matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter your lack of life experience, you can start following Jesus with everything you’ve got. The circumstances of your life may change. But your ability to walk with God does not have to.

By addressing slaves, Paul was legitimizing their identity as Christ followers. He was bringing them up in status. By addressing masters, Paul was downplaying their prestige. And by addressing slaves and masters side by side, he was calling them equal.

Imagine you’re sitting in that church in Ephesus. You’re a slave. You probably have a good master because you’re sitting in church with them. But nonetheless, you are not free and they are. At any point, they get to decide whatever you do. You’re sitting side by side. Probably actually not. There’s you’re probably relegated to the back corner while all the masters are sitting up front and the guy that’s reading this letter from this guy named Paul all of a sudden he says, “Hey, slaves,” and your ears perk up. You’re like, “Whoa, hold on, we’re in this thing. I’m just here because my master wants me here.” And Paul talks about how you ought to obey your master and something about obeying Jesus Christ as well. And then the guy that’s reading the letter says, “Hey, masters, treat your slaves the same way.” Imagine the type of comfort and the joy that would have come from being a slave knowing that your master is going to be held to a higher standard than you.

So what I want to do for the next few moments, because the way slavery was practiced in the Roman Empire, because there was so much about like an employer-employee relationship, and by God’s grace we don’t have this happening for us right now, I want to make some applications for everybody based off of that sort of paradigm. Okay? So, that’s where we’re going to go.

What you need to hear me say is that your status in the in the church, in God’s kingdom, depends on your relationship with Jesus and not what the world thinks about you. Your status in God’s kingdom depends on your relationship with Jesus, the real master, and not what the world thinks about you. So if you find yourself under the authority of someone else, if you are an employee, if you are a child, then here’s the deal. God wants you to work for Jesus. Verses 5 through 8 teach this. It proclaims this. Work for Jesus. Let me read it again. Verses 5-8. “Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your heart as you would Christ. Don’t work only while being watched as people pleasers, but as slaves of Christ. Do God’s will from your heart. Serve with a good attitude as to the Lord and not to people, knowing that whatever good each one does, slave or free, he will receive this back from the Lord.”

Now, to work for Jesus comes with three descriptions that Paul lays out for us. We are to work respectfully, work wholeheartedly, and to work willingly. We’ll just take those each in turn.

To work respectfully. Paul says, “Obey your human masters. Obey them with fear and trembling.” The deal is we ought to obey the authorities. If God puts an authority over you, you ought to obey them. When they say, “Hey, I need you to X, Y, and Z.” As long as it doesn’t go against your conscience or against what the Bible says, you just probably just need to do it. As we obey those earthly masters that God puts over us, we though should be focused on the heavenly master that’s above them. If we are committed to obeying Jesus, I guarantee you we naturally will respect the people who employ and lead us. If you are committed to obeying Jesus, an overflow of respect will come out to your earthly masters.

We are to work respectfully, but we’re also supposed to work wholeheartedly. Paul says, “Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your heart as you would Christ. Now, don’t work only while being watched as people pleasers, but as slaves of Christ.” Paul says, “Work wholeheartedly, man. Flat out work hard.” Whether your boss sees you or not, whether it advances you or not, whether it helps you get promotions or kickbacks or not, just work hard. I am a firm believer that followers of Jesus, we ought to be exemplary in everything we do. I’m not trying to say let’s make it a competition with the folks that we work alongside that don’t know Jesus. But man, if there’s ever a question about do you or does your non-Christian neighbor work harder, please let it be you. Let your work ethic be a testimony to how seriously you take your faith in Jesus. Let the way you live be a spotlight not on you, but on your master and your savior.

Work wholeheartedly, but also work willingly. Verse seven says, “Serve.” That means slave away. Slave away with a good attitude as to the Lord and not to people. Man, work willingly. When we do the details of our job, man, are we just kind of like, man, just dragging our feet from responsibility to responsibility that we signed up for or are we like joyfully with a good attitude carrying out the tasks? Here’s the thing. Wherever you work, God has placed You there. And until God places You somewhere else, God’s will for You is that You would do that job well with a good attitude. So what your job requires, man, just do it with some some gratitude. Do it with some thankfulness to have a job. See, Jesus is the real master. Jesus is the one that has placed you in that role. And the way you carry out that role can either help somebody come into the kingdom or it can make them real hard. It’s going to be very difficult for you to have a legitimate testimony as a follower of Jesus at your work if you’re constantly complaining about your boss. If you’re constantly complaining about the things that you get paid to do, people will not believe that you have an indescribable joy inside of you for the gospel if all they see is complaining. The fruit of the spirit is not grumbling, always frustrated, scowlling. The fruit of the spirit is kindness and goodness and self-control and gentleness. Man, no matter what you do, let’s do it respectfully, wholeheartedly, and willingly. No matter what you do, housewife, farmer, teacher, doctor, student, we can all do all that we do for Jesus. And as we work for Jesus, He has an incredible promise that He wants us to trust in. Look at verse eight again with me. This is wild. This is absolutely amazing. Whatever good each one does, slave or free, he will receive this back from the Lord. Whatever good you do, slave or free, if you have done good for the Lord, God will give that back to you. You see, here’s the deal. Nothing is lost on God. Your boss may not see you staying an extra 15 minutes to take care of a mess that somebody else made, but God sees. Your boss may not see you trying to go the extra mile to take care of somebody, but God sees. Your husband may not see all the extra work you do to take care of the kids and make sure that they are fed and make sure they are taken care of, but God sees. Your wife may not see you taking out the trash and cleaning up something and helping out a neighbor, but God sees. God sees everything and any good thing we have done for Him. And because of Him, God will reward us for later. Sometimes, rarely, He rewards us now. Most of the time, normally He rewards us in the next life. Man, there’s a way of doing things for God, but it’s really for you whenever you just want your name to be celebrated because of what you’ve done for God. We’ve all been there, right? Where we did the nice thing for the neighbor or the family member and you pick up the phone immediately and you call so and so it’s like, “Hey, guess what, miss whatever? She just got new tires for her truck or whatever it is.” And the person’s like, “Oh, that’s incredible. Who did it?” And you’re like, “Me.” And it’s like, man, as well-meaning as the phone call may have started, it really becomes about you. That’s not what Paul’s talking about. What Paul is talking about is the good that we do for Jesus, Jesus will give back to us. Man, there’s a theme in the Bible of what we sow, we reap. In Matthew 16:27, Jesus says, “Take up your cross and any sacrifice you make for my name, I will reward you later. If you leave land to follow me, you’ll get land in the kingdom. If you leave family to follow me, you’ll get a new family in the kingdom.” In Romans chapter 2:6-8, Paul says that eternal life and eternal punishment will be doled out according to our hearts here and how we have carried ourselves here. If you have done good, then you’ll receive eternal life. If you have done bad in response to the gospel, you will receive eternal punishment. In 2 Corinthians 5:10, God says that our good and our evil is always being watched by the real master. And what we have sowed into this world, we will reap back on ourselves. Jesus is the real master. Your boss may act like he or she is God, but there is only one God and His name is Jesus and He sees. No matter who you work for, Jesus is watching. And because He’s the real master, we work for Him. Now, if you are in a position of authority, what you need to hear is this. Lead under Jesus. If employees are supposed to work for Jesus, bosses, you’re supposed to lead under Jesus. See, good bosses according to verse 9 show justice and kindness to their employees because that’s what God has done to them. Look at it with me. Verse nine. Masters, treat your slaves the same way without threatening them because you know that both their master and yours is in heaven. There’s no favoritism with Him. Did you catch that? Paul is addressing free people and calls them slaves. Paul says their master and yours. Remember what I said earlier, a master is a slave owner. So, hey slave owners, there is a you have a slave owner in heaven and He is watching you. There is no boss, there is no employer, there’s no company, there is no government that is out from under the watchful eye of God Almighty. There is no boss who is equal to or beside or above God. Every boss is under God in His economy. God is the real master. So if you’re a boss, your calling is to lower yourself. Is to intentionally recognize that Jesus is the real master, not you. God is always watching His workers and He’s always watching His bosses. It reminds me of that TV show Undercover Boss. Y’all remember that? Is that still on? >> I don’t know. We just watch sports in my home. So, I don’t I don’t really know. But it’s this TV show. It is. Thank It’s this show where like the CEO or a marketing director or whatever of a company, they pretend to just be like an entrylevel employee of some company. My favorite episode was one about Moe’s, the Southwestern restaurant, because it was a lady from Columbia where we were living at the time. I was like, “Oh, cool. I’ve never met this lady. I’ve never eaten at that Mo, but I feel some affinity for her because we’re from the same zip code, you know.” And she goes and she’s just pretending to be, you know, Vanessa who’s just working the guac line at the most. And this boss gets to see firsthand how well or how poorly all the employees are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And it’s this crazy thing because at the end of the episode, the same thing always happens. They put on their official CEO kind of corporate garb and they they march the employees in. There’s always this confrontation. you know, you’ve always got this kind of a upstart employee who badmouths all their other managers and maybe their boss and some of the other employees. And then you got the kind of like the the sad story like the the single mom who’s working five jobs and needs to put a kid through college. It’s always the same thing, right, Paula? Me and Paula like watch all the same TV. Apparently, we’re vibing on this thing. And what these employees don’t understand is that the boss is watching. I think sometimes as Christians we forget, man, the boss is watching. He’s watching to see what you do. He’s watching to see how you treat people. He’s watching to see what you’re going to do with that popup on your phone. He’s watching to see how you’re going to handle that emotion. He’s watching to see how you’re going to handle that conversation. Jesus is the real master. Just like how God sees the slaves and He gives back to them what they give to Him, God sees masters. He sees the bosses and He returns on them what they’ve given to their people. Now, here’s the deal as I start to close it out. Whether you are a boss or an employee, a lifelong churchgoer, or you’re just trying it out, we are all slaves of something. We’re all slaves of something. At the end of the day, you’re either a slave of sin or you are a slave of Christ. Here’s the good news. The good news that we just shared with all these kids at VBS that God has brought you here to hear this morning is that God has made you for a love relationship because God is wild about you. Whether you’re in fourth grade or you’ve been walking with God or you’ve been hearing about Him for 40 years, God is wild about you. God created people so that we would have a specific and a a personal walk with Him where we could get to know Him on an intentional relational level. One where we could walk and talk with God. But the very first people, they they messed it up. They broke the rules. They went against the guidelines. And because they were our representatives, because they were our leaders, Adam and Eve, every single person that’s ever been born ever since then has also fallen into the situation where we are separated from God. While God was supposed to be our master, we submitted to a different master, sin. And every person ever born, including you and your grandmother and your best friend, we have all been born as slaves and servants of sin. And there’s no way out of that. We can’t buy our way out under this system. There’s no amount of good works we can do because before God, all of our good works are filthiness to Him. There is no amount of eternal payment that we can offer to God because we are under an eternal debt to God. Our sin has placed us in a position of slavery against Him.

So God sends Jesus to free us, to purchase our debt, to clean us up, to be righteous and holy and perfect in our place so that we can be freed from the domain of sin and be brought into the kingdom of God to enjoy eternal life starting now, going on for forever. That’s why you’re here today is to hear the message that can free you from your slavery to sin and make you a slave of Christ, a master whose status is above every name. His name is above every name. He is above every ruler, every power, every dominion. Jesus is the real master of this universe. It was by His word that everything was created. Not a single thing exists that He did not make. He is the master. And you can either be attached to Him and have all the privilege of being yoked to the one who rules everything, or you can be attached to your sin and one day begin to pay an eternal debt of unending days of separation from God’s grace. And you get the choice.

Do you want to be here separated from God forever, awaiting a day where you take your final breath in this life and you wake up in the next and you begin eternal punishment? Or do you want to accept the grace of God and be freed to live a life now filled with joy that will give way and blossom into an eternal life of harmony and peace with God and others? You please just bow your head and close your eyes with me. If you have never given your life to Jesus and you see that you are a slave to sin, you are just yearning for power and money and approval and control. You are living for experiences. You know that no amount of good works can help you because you’ve been trying and it’s just not working. And you want freedom. You want eternal life. You want joy. You want gentleness. I pray that you would pray these words after me.

God, I admit that I am a sinner. I have gone against Your way and I do not love You. I believe that Jesus is Lord. I believe that He is Your Son. I believe that He came and lived a perfect life in my place, that He died a sacrificial death on the cross, and that He did not stay dead, but He came back to life. I believe and see. I confess You as my new Lord. I place my young faith in You.

If you prayed that prayer this morning, my request is that you would tell somebody before you leave. If you want to pray that and you’re not quite sure how, I would love to talk with you after the service. I’ll be down front during the final song as well. Let me pray for us one more time.

Lord God, this is not a passage that I would just have cherry-picked for a Sunday morning message, but it’s in Your word, which means it’s good. It’s good for us. I thank You, Jesus, that You’re the real master. That no matter who signs my checks, I work for You. I thank You, Jesus, that there is no boss who could ever rival You, that can ever dethrone You, or that could ever do anything that You cannot undo and redeem. God, for anybody in this room that doesn’t know You yet, I’m asking that You would please call them right now, like that phone is calling somebody. God, I’m asking You get a hold of them, that You would help them to pray that prayer of giving their lives to You. Please God, Your word says that anybody who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. It’s with our mouth that one professes and it’s with our hearts that we believe. God, I pray that somebody Would do that right now. I pray that we would all turn our eyes upon Jesus. Please, God, thank You.