Citizen | Week 2 | Bill Bush

And so today what we're going to look at in the story of Noah is simply this big idea. And it's this, fix our eyes, not fix our world.

We must fix our eyes, not try to fix our world. And what I mean by that, fix our eyes, you're gonna see. It's fix our eyes on Christ. Keep our eyes fixed on on the Lord. And and the problem is when we try to fix our world, I I I mean that to an all expanse. I mean, it starts with us personally. We try to fix our world, meaning we think that the idea I come to church is Jesus is just kinda my self help guru, and I gotta come fix it up. And then the reality is I come to church because it's supposed to fix all my problems in the here and now. And the idea of having faith is to have this world work right, and I try to fix everything. Here's the problem is we're gonna see we are not mistakers that just need to fix a few things in self help. We are sinners who are broken in an evil world, and we're gonna see the world started off that way. The second Adam and Eve fell into sin, we're not gradually getting more evil, guys. We all started at the level of brokenness and evil right off the bat.

And and and and so when we think it's all about fixing our world, we get distracted. And the problem is we can't really fix our world. So when we realize we're out of control and we can't control ourselves, guess what the next best thing we do is? We try to fix everyone around us.

And that is why any one of you that's a parent realizes the thing that annoys you the most about your kid, that you lean in the hardest, that you try to beat out the most is when you're looking in a mirror. When they're exactly like you.

And and it's why we try to fix the people around. And when that doesn't work, we fight on social media and say if we can just fix the government, all of our problems will go away. And that's the point where you've gotten total dementia and you're not thinking straight anymore.

But so what we're supposed to do is fix our eyes on the Lord. Now that does involve us helping alleviate problems. God calls us to a mission that we are to love people. But the reality is our mission because last night, like I said, if we don't understand that our home is not here,

we're gonna live through this world either as tourists or prisoners. But we're supposed to be missionaries. We have a mission we're sent on, and we're supposed to embrace this mission.

And that mission is we need to point people to Jesus by loving them like Jesus. We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, and we help show other people to keep their eyes fixed on Jesus. We do it by loving them like Jesus, but loving them like Jesus is just the way we act as we do it. The mission is not just the alleviate the problem, showing them love.

The mission is for people to have an eternal relationship with the one who created them by being made right with God through His grace. And if we make the secondary part the mission, we end up missing the actual point.

And that's what we're going to look at. And here's where we see this. First we're going jump into Hebrews chapter 12 really fast. Because Hebrews 12 starts off kind of explaining

because of what happened in 11, here's what we need to do. It even actually starts off, therefore. I learned in seminary, paid a lot of money for this. When you see a therefore, you say, what's therefore there for?

Wasn't that cool? Aren't you glad I did all that money for that? And basically, means it's referring back to the last chapter. So therefore, based on what we just read, here's what we're supposed to do. Since we're surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses, all these people of faith, to the life of faith,

let us strip off every weight that slows us down. Quit getting distracted by the things of this world. Quit quit quit letting the sin and the stuff. He says, especially the sin that so easily trips us up, living for this world. And let us run with endurance, so we need to have this endurance, the

race God has set before us. See, God gave us a mission. He gave us a race. We're supposed to be in that. That's what we're supposed to do based on what faith is. And he says, we do this

by keeping our eyes on Jesus. We do this by keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus. He says, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. You realize he initiates. We don't run to Jesus and say, I'm gonna prove you prove myself to you, so you'll help me. It's he's the one that initiates it.

If you know the love of Jesus, you didn't find Jesus. Jesus found you. You just had to accept his grace. And he goes, because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross.

So that's he lived out a world. He lived the same way he called us to live faith. He saw the spiritual. He did the mission. He ran the race. He loved us in a way that the world thought was stupid. His own disciples were confused by it. It didn't seem like a practical way to help, but he died on the cross. The shame and the and the pain of that. But it says, now he's seated in the place of honor beside God's throne.

See, he lived now where he knew then is gonna be. He goes, think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people, then you won't become weary and give up. So the way we don't get weary is is you keep your eyes fixed on the example of Christ. You keep your eyes fixed on him.

So now knowing that, let's jump back to chapter 11, not bankruptcy, but Hebrews chapter 11 verse seven. It says, it was by faith that Noah built a large boat to save his family from the flood. He obeyed God, who warned him about things that had never happened before.

And by his faith, Noah condemned the rest of the world and he received the righteousness that comes by faith. That's gonna sound well, that last verse doesn't mean what you think of him. It's not like he was sitting there condemning like, get off my lawn. You're all going to hell. It meant he's the only one that listened to the message.

And therefore, he was saved. His family was saved. Everyone else died. But it says in first and second Peter, Noah was a preacher of righteousness. You got to know it. Are you guys familiar with the story of Noah's ark?

Some of you vaguely? Good. We're going talk about it. It took him about fifty five to seventy five years to build this boat after God talked to him. For those fifty five to seventy five years, he was preaching righteousness. He was telling people God's going to do something. And no one listened. But he, by faith,

obeyed God who warned about things that had never happened. Think about it. Never happened. That's that kind of faith that can see past. The future can become the present. Where I'm going becomes how I choose to live now. And because of that, he saw through the spiritual lens, and he obeyed God in a way that makes no sense. Because when it says things that had never happened,

you probably think it's Noah's Ark. He's just referring to a flood. The time we know about history at this time, the way the world was, and what we have as as as evidence is the things that were unknown was obviously a flood. You know why? They would have not known what rain was.

The earth was covered, and it was like a giant rainforest. It's one of the reasons people lived longer and stuff. It was it was you wouldn't have cancers and all that. And they had enough water in the air and all that. It didn't really rain. Kinda misted. So he would have said, what's a flood? What's rain?

And one more question, God, what's a boat? You realize that, right? That this was a lot of things. So he spent seventy five years building a boat that no one heard of, for this thing called rain no one had seen, to to defend from a flood that no one had no any idea what that meant.

So everything he did for seventy five years to everyone around him looked like a colossal waste of time until it happened.

So as we go into the story, I wanna I'm I'm just gonna I don't have much time, but I'm gonna run through the story. But I'm gonna challenge you to read the whole thing. It's several chapters. I'm only gonna pull out a few verses here and there from each part of the story. The story has three parts. Noah builds the boat. Noah gets on the boat. Noah gets off the boat. Okay? And there's three things we can learn from how he acted in all of these moments that we can apply to our lives to say, this is what it means to fix your eyes on Christ. There's some things that if I've fixed my eyes on Christ, I'm gonna fix my heart and my eyes towards these three things. But before I jump in, I don't have a lot of time, but I think I need to say this because I think some of it are naturally skeptics in here. And you wonder about this whole story going, yeah, we can learn some symbolic things, but did this really happen?

Three things you gotta know about how I believe this really happened. First of all, Jesus talked about it as actual history and it really happened. So if you don't think this really happened, then I guess you gotta think of Jesus as the preacher that tells the exaggerated stories that aren't really true. You know, that that that's not happened. See? This kid's all upset about about Noah and and this flood.

The second thing is, was it a universal flood? Was it a universal flood? Meaning a lot of people say, well it might have been a little flood, or here or there. And the truth is, there's a lot of evidence out there that you can go research this on your own. But it's not

Christians being stupid to believe that there could have been a flood that flooded the whole earth. They find fish fossils on every mountain in the world, including Mount Everest.

They there there's tons of evidence out there. There's, you know matter of fact, there's over 60 ancient cultures that have a flood narrative.

Now skeptics like to use that as, well, if they have these old stories, then they they they're fake because they don't all match, but they about 65, 70% of them have the same basic story. One family was saved by God because of the wickedness of the world. In every corner of the world, South America, everywhere.

That seems to point towards there's some truth to this. The second thing people have a problem with is could you really get all the animals on the boat? That's the easiest one to answer.

There's been experts that study and said, hey, but how many animals would you need? First, don't need any of the sea creatures, worms, anything that can live in the ground under the water. You don't need it. You only need the animals that roam. And they say, low estimate is 2,000 animals is all you need because you can get the base model without the extra trim on every animal and right there. But even if you didn't do that, you wanted two of every type, they say roughly 35 to 50,000 animals.

So let's take the big number, 50,000. You needed 50,000. The average size of an animal that roams the ground is the size of a sheep.

That even includes the big animals, even dinosaurs, if you wanna include them. They're they're they average out the size of sheep. Now first of all, god wouldn't be dumb. If these animals are gonna repopulate, you would bring little ones onto this boat, because they're on the boat for over a year.

So you would have small everything, which makes the average size even smaller. But if you leave it at the average size, the amount of square feet you would need, which by the way, the Ark was four fifty feet long, that's a football field and a half, 75 feet wide, 40 feet tall with three decks.

That is well over 100,000 square feet of space. This entire building, including the outside and the back house, is only 50,000 square feet of space. If you add in our old building that takes us to 74,000 square feet of space, this had well over 25,000 to 30,000 more square feet of space. To fold that many animals

would only take 37% of the space on the ark. You would have 63% left for extra food and one family. It is not mathematically far fetched. It's very mathematically accurate.

And the truth is there was enough room that I think God was showing a purpose in that. He knew this only He knew all things. He knew this family would be the only ones to get on the boat. But the offer was for other people. You could have fit a lot more people on this boat.

So I share that, that if you're interested, go study it. Christians aren't stupid. The Bible being literal is not dumb. It's the world doesn't want to believe, so they make other excuses. But you can check it out for yourself.

So with that said, let's dive in because I took way too much of my time on that.

So as we go to the story of Noah, first, why a flood? Well, in the story that I'm not gonna read, mankind had become so evil. It was already evil, but it's not that they were already broken. We we're not more evil than we were back then. You're either broken and far from God or you're not. Our inclinations are evil. They're against God. The problem was they were immediately became so violent. He talks about it. Violent, violent, violent, that the they were in danger of destroying themselves.

God doing Noah's ark was to preserve the world, is what it was.

So you gotta understand that. And then we're gonna see in the story of Noah these three things. The first thing that Noah kept his eyes fixed, even though what he was doing made no sense to the world, the first thing to keep his eyes fixed on God was, and that we must do, is fix our eyes on obedience.

So let's start off. Verse eight of chapter six says this, but Noah found favor with the Lord. He's talking about how evil the world is, but Noah found favor. You just look at that verse and you think, it sounds like Noah kind of was just a good guy. Everyone else was bad, but he was less bad.

But that's not what this means. That word for favor doesn't mean that he did good things and then God was gonna be nice. That that word favor right there, the Hebrew word, this is the first time in the Bible the word grace shows up. That's the Hebrew word for grace.

Noah found grace with the Lord. In other words, it's saying that God put his grace upon Noah. Noah just had to accept it.

Just like the gospel in the New Testament, the Old Testament wasn't you had to go figure it out and then God loved you. God put his fixed his eyes on Noah and gave him his grace. Noah accepted the grace and that changed everything. That changed everything.

Because look at the the the verse nine. This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, the only blameless person living on earth at the time, and he walked in close fellowship with God. So it says three things. He was righteous, blameless, and walked in close fellowship with God. He walked with God. Now that almost sounds like, woah, wait. You just said it was about God's grace, but now he was righteous and blameless. Is that why God gave him his grace? No. He got the grace first. It says he found favor,

then these things happened.

So the the grace of God unlocked these other three things. But you also understand what it means. Righteous doesn't mean he was already perfectly good. Righteous, the word there just means in right standing, in right fellowship. When you receive the grace of God, you are now declared to be right with God. So God made him right with him through God's grace.

And so now that he's in right standing, it says he was now the only one blameless among his people. That Hebrew word there for blameless, it's kind of a weird that we translate it into this word blameless because the the best translation

the best way to describe what that Hebrew word means in English is to use the word whole or complete. So he had God's grace, which gave him the right standing righteousness, and so now he's the only whole person in a broken world. And because of that, the last thing it said he did is he walked with God.

Out of the grace and the right standing and the healing and wholeness that God brought to him, he then chose to walk closely with God, spent time with God. It's

the same thing for us today, guys. If you accept the grace of Jesus, He's the one that puts you in right standing. He's the one that makes you whole. The choice we have to make is spend time with the great physician. We gotta spend time with Him. We walk with Him. That's why you read your Bible. That's why you pray. It's not to get them to like you more. It's so you can take the power from His Spirit and the powers of making you wholeness to be able to walk through life.

Pretty powerful how the gospel is just right there. It's almost as if God had a plan right from the beginning, Who'd have thunk?

And so after it says all this stuff, let's keep reading. It says, now verse 11, Noah saw that the earth God saw that the earth had become corrupt and filled with violence. God observed all this corruption in the world for everyone on earth was corrupt. Everyone. That includes Noah. So God said to Noah,

I've decided to destroy all living creatures for they have filled the earth with violence. Yes, I'll wipe them all out along with the earth. So he'd already done this stuff in Noah's life. The grace, all this stuff, he's walking with the Lord now, and he says, verse 14, build a large boat from cypress wood and waterproof it with tar inside and out. I've already told you about this as far as I'm gonna go on this part. But I wanted to say the first thing, because it says, he says you need to waterproof it. Another word is sealed or covered. If you looked in the English versions,

that word for waterproof, seal, covered, is a point I'm gonna make about what the ark is symbolic of. That's the word for atonement in Hebrew. So the ark, when you go into it, is you are covered by the atoning love and grace of God. And that's how you're saved. The Ark had one door.

God's the one that sealed the door. There's one way in and out. So when people say Christians are stupid because you believe Jesus is the only way. Well, just like the Ark you could say, Oh, you're saying that getting on that boat was the only way to survive the flood? Yes.

So what's that saying? The ark represents Jesus. He is the door. He's the only way in. So guess, there's only one way to be made right with God and have eternal life. Everyone says all religions are basically the same. They are. They all lead to hell except for a relationship with Jesus. I'm just telling you.

Because there's only one way, and we wanna get mad. But I wanna do it my way. We are all two year olds when it comes to religion. But I wanna do it my way. And you know whenever your kid says that, like, this is gonna waste time and money.

Every time a kid wants to do something their way in their room, it means you're replacing drywall or paint. You know that.

So it's so yeah. But what's interesting is so it says to build this, the waterproof, and then also the word ark, another reference to know how this is symbolic of Jesus in the one way. Is that word for ark? There's there's two words used in the Old Testament for ark. The particular word here is only used twice.

This story and one other. The basket that Moses is placed in is called the ark. Both time it's God saved his people through this floating container that had a living person in it that He protected. Jesus is our Ark. That's the whole point.

But if you look at it, He then tells them you're going to spend like it took them like seventy five years to build this thing Cause it was huge. And if you look down that sounds crazy.

You know, I don't know what rain is. I don't know what a boat is. I don't know what you know, I don't know any of this stuff. But in verse 22 of chapter six it says, So Noah did everything exactly as God had commanded him. He obeyed. Because he had the faith that the unseen was seen and the future was present.

How about you? When you say that you've got the grace of God, you've Jesus has come into your life and you've accepted his death, burial, resurrection on your behalf and now you have his grace, Do you like his grace but ignore his words?

If you keep your eyes fixed on him, what you look at is what you move towards. So if your eyes are really fixed on him, where do you need to obey him even though it doesn't make sense?

The second thing we need to do is fix our eyes on faithfulness. This is like that obedience that lasts. Because if you go into chapter seven, it says, when everything was ready, the Lord said to Noah, go into the boat with all your family. Now when you hear that

how many of you have probably been messed up by a children's bible or children's church? When you hear go into the boat, have you always imagined it being like, it's the last minute, it's already starting to rain? Maybe you've seen pictures where there's a little bit of water on the ground. Noah's hurrying the animals in, and he's like, come on turtles and snails.

Go. Go. You know? And and and you imagine that it was like he gets in there, then he shut the door, and then all, you know, hell breaks loose. That's what you imagine, isn't it? Go down to verse four now.

Seven days from now, I will make the rains pour down on earth, and it'll rain for forty days and forty nights until I have wiped from all the earth all living things I've created. So when he told them to get on the boat, they were already ready to go. I don't know how Noah did this. I can't even get my family to get ready to leave on vacation within an in hours of time. He has all the animals and all this ready to go. And when did God tell him to get on the boat?

Seven before there was a sprinkle in the sky. A week before anything happened. They went in there and got in his boat, and he sealed them in there. And it was built to not to sail, but to not sink. So there's only a little bit of opening in the top. It's dark. It it imagine all those animals,

and and and and and and and and it's probably stinky. And and could you imagine having to get stuck up in home with just you, your family, and your pets? I mean, who would have to do that? Who would ever wanna be locked down in that way?

Oh, wait.

Imagine hearing people outside mocking you,

Sitting in the dark. And it said God's grace was in no. We don't know about the rest of his family. They just came along for the ride. How many of them are like, really? You hear everyone out there? Nothing's changed. It's those moments when God says, Here's what I need you to do, and you obey Him,

and then nothing's happening? That's when you want to get weary and give up.

It's what it was talking about in Hebrews 12. The world's yelling at you, this is stupid. Why would you trust God with your time? Why would you trust God with your money? Why would you obey Him in that way? What has He done for you? As you're sitting here in this world, we're having fun, and you're over here struggling for no apparent reason, what's going on? And you hear that enough.

And wouldn't you want to just crawl up to that little window and rappel down the side and just leave? That's when we need to fix our eyes on faithfulness. Because in verse five it said, So Noah did everything as the Lord commanded him. Even in the darkness

he had the type of faith that he stayed faithful. How about you? What is it about obeying God that you're getting unfaithful because you're like, I don't like it sitting in the dark here. And the voice of the enemy, the voices outside are going, You're an idiot.

Because they're so shortsighted. Fix our eyes on faithfulness. The last thing is he had to get off the boat.

He had to get off the boat. But when you read through the next few chapters, if you do the math, Noah and his family was on the ark for one year and ten days. Three hundred and seventy five days they floated around. And yet he stayed faithful in his faith to God. Because it says in chapter eight verse 15,

after all that time, it says, Then God said to Noah, leave the boat, all of you, you and your wife and all your sons and their wives, release all the animals, the birds, the livestock, and all the small animals that scurry along the ground so they can be fruitful and multiply throughout the earth. So Noah, his wife, and his sons and wives left the boat, And all of the large and small animals and the birds came out of the boat pair by pair. So saying, he says, it's time to leave the boat. It's time to let the animals free and let them go. And so imagine, another thing that messes up in our our our childhood versions of when the boat landed, You imagine it's open. There's the rainbow in the sky. There's all these trees. The the animal look happy. I go, you realize that's not what the earth would have looked like.

It would have looked way worse than the last time they saw the earth. When they went in a week before the rain, the earth would have looked 10 times better. If you flood the earth and then God has uses the the power of his spirit to dry it out, it said it'd still be muddy, it'd still be gross. There

would be dead bodies everywhere. You'd have all this death. You'd only have a few plants that could survive in the water. There'd be seeds in that now are settling that'll grow again. But when you came out, it looked way more apocalyptic

than when you went in. It looked probably how are we gonna even survive this? I mean, it it looked like Tucson. That's how bad it was.

I'm just kidding. It didn't look that bad. But everyone from Tucson. I'm going back to where we don't landscape anything.

Sorry. I just felt like we've been too serious too long. No, but it would have looked terrible. It would have looked like a World War I trench warfare scene. Muddy bodies, blood, stench, animals, it would have looked like how on earth are we ever gonna survive? And God said, Let the animals go.

The only ones he had kept is the seven pairs of the animals that were clean. That means you can eat them and they could be used for sacrifices. So you're looking at your family. You're the only ones left in the world. There's nothing growing yet. There's only death. And you're letting all this food go.

And then look what he does. Wouldn't you be worried? There's a moment that God takes you this moment, you obey, you stay faithful. And then when he opens the door to what's new, I go, this looks worse than what we left.

And at that moment, instead of worry, need to worship. I need to fix my eyes on thankfulness. That's how you get through it. Saying thanks. Thankfulness.

Because look what it says in verse 20. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and there he sacrificed his burnt offerings, the animals and the birds that had been approved for that purpose.

And the Lord was pleased with the aroma of the sacrifice and said to I will never again curse the ground because of the human race, even though every day they think or imagine is bent towards evil from childhood. Wait. Wait. Wait. The human race is still bent on evil since childhood, even after all of this.

That judgment didn't fix the problem. It just saved human race and the world.

Think about it. He he gets out it. It's terrible. It's post apocalyptic, post apocalyptic. All the food's leaving, and he takes what little is left. And what's the first thing he does with some of it? Gives it to God. Why? Because that's what worship is. Worship is our weapon.

And we choose to to be thankful to God even in those moments it's scary. What we're saying is, I don't care how scary this looks. I know that I don't make it by my own power. I know it's not my job to support. I know it's not this that feeds me. I know it's only by you God. And that's why when you worship God, especially when you give of your time and your money, it's you give to Him first Or it's not worship.

It's not thankfulness. It is not faith. It's just, hey God, here's a little tip buy yourself something nice.

And the first thing I see with us in our culture is the second you get a little tight financially. The second we do that, that's the first thing we don't trust God with.

Which proves we don't trust God. And you're missing an opportunity to watch God provide. And when you see God provide in the impossible scenario, guess what? It gives you more confidence the next time something doesn't look good. That's the idea of worship and thankfulness. See, because here's the problem with worry.

Worry only focuses and fixates on the problem. Worship fixes its eyes on the answer. So when God says that you can worship Him, He's not like the gods of Olympus. Oh, if they don't pray and give me the money, I'm gonna be broke and lose my powers. Worship is for us

because we're declaring who God is and then by our actions saying, And I trust you more than I trust me. And that's when you see God show up. When your world looks post apocalyptic. When you're surrounded by death.

When you're worried about how to pay that next bill. When you're worried about how this relationship is ever going to work. When you're worried about whatever it is you worship.

Some people say I'm too worried to worship. It should be the other way around. When I'm really worried, I should worship more.

That's what Noah did. He fixed his eyes on the Lord, so it fixed his eyes on faithfulness, on obedience, on faithfulness, and on thankfulness. And it really goes back to this. Genesis six:eight again. When it says, But Noah found favor with the Lord. Have you found has the grace of God found you?

Because when God fixes His eyes on you with His grace, that now allows us to fix our eyes on Him. So if you're struggling, I think it goes back to do I trust the love of Jesus? I need to look to that no matter what. Always. Not just trying to fix the world.

I mean Jesus said it. I mean it's like yeah there's problems we're supposed to help alleviate as the church. We alleviate people that are poor. We alleviate people that are starving. We alleviate the problem, but we're never gonna solve it until Jesus comes out. Jesus Himself.

There was a woman that came and was so broken up by the grace of God she received that she poured expensive perfume on his feet. One of the disciples said, you know how many poor people we could have taken care of without money? And Jesus said, you know what? You're always gonna have the poor with you, but you only have me for a little while.

Didn't Jesus also tell us to love people by feeding the poor and clothing the naked? But now He says, You're always gonna have the poor? Did Jesus just get unwoke? What happened?

What he's saying is of course you alleviate that. But if you make the goal the elimination of that, then us as the church are only helping people live a little longer and a little bit more comfortable till they die for all of eternity.

We can't leave out the mission. And the problem is if all I'm worried about is living more comfortable and living a little bit longer, I don't really care about anyone else. Do I?

Sometimes what we're called to do is the thing that makes no sense. And sometimes the most loving thing we can do doesn't seem loving on the surface. I just had to do my CPR recertification. Anyone else have to get certified for CPR every two years?

Yeah. We brought someone in so I had to do it now. I realized I looked on the calendar. I went six months early. I was forced. I got gypped. But when you're sitting in CPR, there's always newbies.

And it's always interesting to watch how newbies react to what the leader is saying. Here's how you gotta do this when it comes to CPR and helping someone who's choking. Because everything you're supposed to do is so counterintuitive to what you think of as loving and caring.

For example, if uncle Louis is choking on something and you need to go help him, you don't give him a nice bear hug. You gotta go up behind him and you gotta grab him right here down low, and you gotta pull up with a force that makes everything that's in here want to come out here.

And would you go to the family reunion and go, hey, Uncle Lily. It's so good to see you. And you and that would be really, you know, inappropriate. And and and and if grandpa Tom keels over and his heart stops, and you gotta go give him CPR,

they tell you the biggest problem, most people will die from CPR because of insufficient pressure. Because if you do not press hard enough to make the the heart contract enough to expel the blood and then pull back so it can refill, you're not really helping.

So the problem is when you go on those CPR, they go, you gotta hit it hard. And a matter of fact, if someone's older especially, you most likely are gonna break some ribs in the sternum area when you do it right. So you go down and you gotta do that. You're like, that doesn't seem loving to go up to grandpa and go, hold on. Crack.

Crack. Crack. I mean, if you just randomly did that, you would be an idiot. And then the worst is if your baby is choking. Have you seen how you know they tell you gotta turn them over, and you gotta take the palm of your hand, and you gotta basically punch a baby hard.

And the and the the instructions always say, don't be afraid of hurting them. It probably will hurt them. In that moment, they're showing you gotta go whack. And I know in any other time, any other moment, you grab a baby randomly, turn them over and go whack, you're gonna get arrested. So

people actually don't wanna do it because they feel like I I gotta be nice. That would be uncool. You know what? That's what we do as Christians. When we're given a mission and God calls us to something, they're like, but the whole world says that's uncool.

The whole world says saying Jesus is only one in the cool. The whole world saying that we gotta work to this uncool. The whole world that says this is the way to go is is uncool and I don't want to offend anybody. I don't want to I don't want to I just I I just wanna make so I go after the route that says, I'm just gonna love people by serving the same way every charity does. I'm I'm gonna do everything that just makes their life nicer now. And when we do that, all we're doing is hugging a baby, hugging grandpa, hugging uncle Louie as they

die for all of eternity. And we're not loving.

That's what this is talking about. If we're gonna embrace being citizens of heaven, we have got to be people that fix our eyes, not just try to fix our world.

Amen? Father God, thank you, Lord. I thank you that you fixed your eyes on us with your love. And that, Lord, you you you went through all the shame, as it says in Hebrews 12, to die for us so we can live.

Lord, help myself, help everyone in this room to embrace that grace to such a level that we have right standing with you. You make us whole. And that we will walk with you so closely and clearly that we will run the race with endurance, with obedience, with faithfulness, with thankfulness.

The race that You laid out for us. That is my prayer for me, everyone in this room, and everyone watching online. And I pray it all in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.