Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign church. We are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes.newlife gillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:27] Well, good morning.
[00:00:29] I hope you are well this morning. I want to say good morning to everybody joining us all across the state of wyoming on Church 307 and to our extended family, really at the prison and at the jail. It's so cool that we get to be a community gathering in so many different places. And I'm so excited for all of you that gave up like a 75 degree and sunny summer day to be here this morning. We're going to be in John chapter six. John chapter six. If you got a Bible, go ahead and open up there.
[00:00:55] While you're turning, I need to put my cards on the table here. If I were to preach 100 sermons, this sermon would be 30 of them.
[00:01:05] The topic I preach it in a different way. We'd come at it from different angles and use different illustrations. But I believe personally the topic we're going to talk about this morning is maybe the most relevant and most important thing that we can talk about in 2025 in America. So now that I've raised the bar, hopefully I don't flop.
[00:01:25] John chapter 6, starting in verse 60 says this. On hearing it, many of his disciples said, this is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?
[00:01:35] Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, does this offend you?
[00:01:40] Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before. The Spirit gives life. The flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you, they are full of the Spirit and of life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, this is why I told you, no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.
[00:02:05] From this time, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
[00:02:12] You do not want to leave too, do you? Jesus asked the 12.
[00:02:16] Simon Peter answered him, lord, to whom shall we go?
[00:02:20] You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.
[00:02:27] Let's pray.
[00:02:31] Jesus, we are here for you this morning.
[00:02:37] Anything that's just my ideas or my opinions, God let us notice it. We're not here for my opinions, but if there's anything that we talk about over the next few minutes, that's consistent with who you are and faithful to your character. Would you plant it deeply in our hearts that we would become like you, Jesus, we love you.
[00:02:55] Amen.
[00:02:57] All right, I've got a question. Where are the dog people at?
[00:03:00] Dude? Yes. Amen. Amen.
[00:03:04] And the cat people, where are the cat people at? Not as many. I knew I loved Wyoming.
[00:03:09] Just kidding. Just kidding. My son's a cat person. My wife tells me I have to be nice to cat people because I made a cat person. So I'm working on it.
[00:03:17] I've got to try. I want to try something, though. I'm going to do my best to explain why a dog person loves dogs and why a cat person loves cats. All right, I'm trying. I'm trying to empathize and learn. So dogs. Let's start with dogs. So that's what I know. If you're a dog person, you probably love dogs, because first off, you are the king of a dog's world.
[00:03:39] You are. You are a dog's best friend. You know what the best thing that could happen to a dog is? You come home, maybe feed it, but you show up at home, that dog's like, I never thought I'd see you again. This is the best day ever. Does that happen with a cat? The cat's like, ah, you're back. Oh, cool. Whatever. Right?
[00:03:56] Right? You are a king to a dog, but a cat is a king to a cat. You are a serf in a feudal system, right? You're just there to feed it and keep its house clean.
[00:04:06] Dogs are wonderful. They love you. They're loyal to you. Dogs have jobs. Dogs aren't freeloaders. They're not just curled up in a corner eating. Dogs have jobs, right? Your dog can herd cows, maybe, or sheep. Your dog can work. Your dog can retrieve a pheasant for you. It can hunt. It can protect your home. Right? Dogs have jobs. Dogs work. You know, they're great. Dogs are pooping outside.
[00:04:36] If you have a dog, you don't have a box of feces in your home.
[00:04:41] You call it a litter box. Let's just call it what it is. It's a box of excrement. That's what it is. It's in a closet of your house, but there's a box of poop in your house.
[00:04:48] There's a lot of positives to having a dog, right? Dogs can go on walks with you, they can travel with you, Right? But most importantly, they are your best friend. A cat is a roommate you met on Craigslist. A dog is a best friend for your entire life, right?
[00:05:03] But here's what I would guess. All of you people who are cat people, you're saying like, yes, my cat is my roommate. It's the best roommate I've ever had. It's better than any other person roommate I've ever had. It stays clean. It doesn't get in the way. It's around when I want it to be around, and I don't even have to notice it exists when I don't want it to be around. Name a human roommate. Name a spouse who's like that.
[00:05:24] That was a cheap shot. Sorry.
[00:05:27] You're probably saying if you're a cat person, like, you know what, I'm not the center of my cat's world. But also, my cat doesn't knock over my grandma, jumping on her every time she comes over. My cat doesn't break my ankles because I'm trying to walk through the house and it's running through my legs. My cat, sure, my cat does have a litter box, but at least I don't have to carry around a bag to pick up poop every time I take it. And I don't even have to take it for a walk. Right? The cat is content in the house. And sure, your dog has a job, but you're telling me that that 120 pound lab has retrieved anything but a piece of pizza in the last 10 years off the counter? Absolutely not. Yeah, your dog might, maybe could have a job, but my cat's doing the same amount of work as your dog is. Does that sound right, cat people? That sound fairly accurate. I'm doing my best here. Here's the point. Here's the point of this. If you are a dog person, then the things you love about dogs are pretty much the same thing cat people don't like about dogs. If you're a cat person, the things you love about cats are exactly why dog people don't like cats.
[00:06:38] This phenomenon, we're looking at the same information, but we're interpreting it differently, is what we would call confirmation bias.
[00:06:48] Confirmation bias is basically this. We as humans tend to believe what we want to be true.
[00:06:56] We have biases, we have things that we want to be true about the world. And we tend to interpret the information we're given in a way that confirms our pre existing biases. This happens in a bunch of different ways. It happens in trivial ways. Like two people watch a basketball game. They cheer for different teams. The losing team thinks the refs blew it. The winning team thinks the ref Called a pretty fair game, you know, because you're interpreting the same information. But it happens in significant ways. It happens in politics, it happens in the Bible, it happens in world events. We read the same passage, but we go to Scripture. And we are much more likely to try to find a way to interpret scripture in a way that confirms what we want to believe than we are to be open to changing our mind, do the same thing in every area of life. Confirmation bias is a human problem. It's something that's existed for as long as there have been humans.
[00:07:55] But there's something else. There's something that's unique to 2025 in America or in the Western world that we need to talk about. And it's this right here that's on the screen.
[00:08:05] It's called expressive individualism.
[00:08:09] In order to figure out what expressive individualism is, we got to do a little bit of a history lesson. You guys didn't come to church to go to school this morning, but we're going to do a little bit of a history lesson. If you were to dial the clock back about 150 years and you were born in, let's say, a ranching town in Wyoming, you might grow up scared of horses, you might hate animals.
[00:08:33] But if you grew up in a ranching town in Wyoming, what are you probably going to do for a living?
[00:08:39] Ranching, Right?
[00:08:41] Probably you're going to get over whatever that internal feeling is and you're going to take the option that's in front of you for most of human history.
[00:08:51] Identity. Human identity has been found by community, by your surroundings. And what that meant was, as humans, in order to find our identity, we would change or alter what we felt on the inside to come in line with what was true on the outside. If you grew up in a ranching community, you couldn't just go to college in a different state and study teaching or become a doctor. Those options were not available to you. You couldn't just hop on a train and move across the country without severely risking your life a la the Oregon Trail. How many of you died of dysentery?
[00:09:27] Yeah, that's what I thought. We know that you risked your life or the only people who could really change their station in life for most of human history were extremely wealthy or extremely well connected or were willing to risk death.
[00:09:42] So most people didn't. If you grew up in a mining town, you became a miner. If you grew up in a farming town, you became a farmer. If you were a Viking in Europe and you thought, you know What? Maybe peace is better than pillaging and plundering. When you decided to tell your friend that, he said, ah, that's stupid. Take this ax. Go pillage and plunder. That'll fix you. That's how decisions were made. You were brought into the community. You didn't have the option to change your mind very much.
[00:10:10] Now you can imagine that that had some positive effects.
[00:10:15] If you grew up in a community that highly valued hard work, integrity, family, then it was hard to live a life that didn't value those things. People don't like to be outsiders. People don't like to be outliers. So most people would deny whatever feelings they had on the inside to come into line with the expectations of their community.
[00:10:40] You can also probably imagine that that had some negatives. If you grew up in, let's say, an atheist world, or in the Muslim world or in the Hindu world, the ability to change your mind was really difficult. It was very hard to come to a different worldview, to change your mind about anything, to take a stance that was different from the culture around you because it would have forced you to become an outsider. And your community was generally not welcoming to people of different opinions. So there was a positive that culture had a corrective.
[00:11:10] A culture, a good, healthy culture could correct our dangerous, sinful or crazy ideas.
[00:11:18] But also it was hard for us to change our mind.
[00:11:22] We found our identity by changing our inside to match our outside. But now we live in a globalized world.
[00:11:31] We live in a world where because of newspapers, libraries, the Internet, YouTube, social media, we have access to any community that we want, and we have access to any idea that we want. If you grow up in a ranching town and you're scared of horses, you can go to University of Wyoming and become a doctor. If you are in the city and you're tired of the city, you can throw everything you have in your car and find another town and try to make it in a different town. You're not guaranteed success, but you can change your community to match how you're feeling on the inside in our world today. Any opinion that I have about anything, I can find someone else who shares that opinion. I can probably find an expert on YouTube who will confirm my opinion. I can probably find a Reddit chain of other people who share that opinion. And I can feel like I'm part of a community. And if I want to, if I grow up in a home and I don't like the way my parents think, I can find a community online and then I can leave and go somewhere else. If I have a church and I don't like what the church is teaching, there are 15 more churches in town, so I can go find a different church.
[00:12:39] In other words, in our world today, we rarely have to change our mind about anything.
[00:12:46] Expressive Individualism tells us. And if you want to do some research about this on your own, the scholar Carl Truman wrote a really big book called the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But if you want to watch like a 10 minute TED talk about it, you can look up the New Tribalism by Seth Godin, where he described it as well, but. But Expressive Individualism says that identity is no longer found in my community, but it's found in who I am on the inside.
[00:13:12] So instead of changing how I feel on the inside to match my community, I'll just change my community to match how I feel on the inside.
[00:13:23] You don't like what's being taught there, there's somewhere else you can go.
[00:13:28] You don't like those ideas, go find a different friend. You have friends that don't like your lifestyle. Make new friends. You don't have to tolerate disagreement with anyone. You don't have to allow anyone to challenge you. Now, we need to take an aside here because I'm just guessing, but generally if you're over the age of 40 or so, then there's a good chance you're hearing this and you're thinking, yeah, those young people with all their gender identities and all of that kind of stuff, they don't let anybody tell them anything that's wrong and they won't change their mind about anything. They're just going to do whatever they want. And if you're under the age of 40, you're probably thinking, yeah, all those boomers, they haven't changed their mind in 50 years and all they do is watch the same news and talk about the same stuff. And they won't let anybody else challenge them or disagree with them ever. But here's the point. This is a modern American issue. If you are alive in the world today, then this issue has formed, this idea has formed our culture. We don't like for people to challenge what we think. We have a tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already believe.
[00:14:39] And we are able to just change our situation when we encounter people we don't believe. So we watch the same news stations and talk with the same people and read from the same theologians and watch the same YouTube and TikTok channels that confirm what we already think.
[00:14:54] We're starting a new series Today called Gravity. The logo is going to be right here on the screen. In this series we are talking about over the next five weeks or so, four or five weeks, we're talking about the gravitational pull of our culture around us. If you look at this logo, our world around us has these anchors that attach to us. And if we don't know it, the culture around us will shape the way we think about sex, about work, about idolatry, about worship, about all kinds of things. Now, for the rest of this series, we're going to talk about kind of the individual anchors that are drawing us away from the way of Jesus in our culture. But if you can see in this logo, you got the hand reaching up out of the water because these individual anchors are pulling us down.
[00:15:39] My job today is to identify what are the waters we're getting pulled down into.
[00:15:47] And what I want to tell you this morning is that the waters we're being pulled down into are confirmation bias and expressive individualism.
[00:16:00] We live in a world where we don't have to change our mind about anything if we don't want to, because we can just find someone else who agrees with us and will confirm our bias.
[00:16:19] In this chapter in John, chapter six, Jesus has just got done teaching what proved to be a very controversial thing. And I'm not going to get into all that he was teaching. That would be a whole sermon in and of itself.
[00:16:31] But he's teaching something that in both content and presentation style, is actually offensive to the people who are hearing him. He is intentionally challenging the assumptions and the sensibilities of the culture around him.
[00:16:47] And. And part of what he's saying is actually caught up in these verses that we read where he says, the flesh profits you nothing, only the Spirit gives life. He says, effectively, everything that you've spent your life working for, all of the righteousness you've built up for yourself, all the money you've made and the jobs and the careers and families, all of that doesn't actually give you anything of meaning. The only thing that gives you meaning in life is me, is Christ.
[00:17:12] So he says this thing that challenges the entire worldview of the people that are following him. And you've got to pay attention because it doesn't say that. The crowd around Jesus said, I don't like it, and they left. It says that in verse 66, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. These were people that had been following Jesus for a long time, people who had committed to Jesus teaching, but they found a teaching that was challenging that challenged their opinions about themselves, about the world around them.
[00:17:53] And that teaching was hard.
[00:17:56] And many of them turned away to the point that Jesus turns even to the 12 to his chosen leaders. And he says, are you going to leave too?
[00:18:06] Are you going to leave as well?
[00:18:10] My friends, what we have to realize this morning is that if you seek to follow Jesus with any sort of sincerity, if you genuinely want to follow Jesus, not just get a get out of hell free card, but to follow him as king, you will find a teaching that is hard.
[00:18:37] You will find a teaching that will challenge you. I will find a teaching that will challenge me.
[00:18:45] There will be an idea or an assumption, something about my lifestyle, maybe a sinful habit, or maybe a worldview, or maybe politics, or maybe my pre existing theology.
[00:18:56] And learning about Jesus, knowing Him more will challenge that thing that I thought or held dearly. It might be my own identity or my own view. And to get any closer to Jesus, I will have to reconsider that opinion. But the world around us tells us you don't have to reconsider any opinion.
[00:19:14] Just go find someone who agrees with you.
[00:19:18] The world around us says no. When Jesus challenges you, just go find someone who interprets the verse differently so that you don't have to be challenged.
[00:19:27] But what I want to tell you this morning is that every single one of us is going to have to ask the question, do I value Jesus or my opinion?
[00:19:37] Am I being formed by Christ or my culture?
[00:19:41] Where is my loyalty to what I thought or to what Jesus actually says? And I want to be as clear as I can here because I am not saying that I or anybody at New Life speaks on behalf of Jesus. You do not have to believe something because I say it or because Mike says it or anything like like that. That is not what we're saying. What we're saying is that we come to Scripture willing to have scripture change our mind about things.
[00:20:05] That we come to the word of God saying, Jesus, if this is true, I will lay down my expectation and take upon myself your expectation. Because I don't need to be right. I need to be righteous. I don't need to be right in my opinions. I need to be right with Jesus. Which means I submit my opinions to the kingship of Jesus. Yes, Jesus is our friend. Yes, Jesus is our brother, but he is also our king. And last time I checked, we don't get to disagree with Kings.
[00:20:37] When he is king, my opinion submits to him or my opinion rebels against him.
[00:20:43] There is no middle ground.
[00:20:47] So we don't come to Jesus believing everything, right? Right away, we come to Jesus saying, whatever you teach me, I will submit to.
[00:21:02] Whatever I need to let go of, I will let go of. Because you are king.
[00:21:09] Now, I want to make this as clear as I can because like I said, I think this is maybe the most important, important idea for our culture today because we have a buffet version of faith and life in front of us where if you don't think sex outside of marriage is a big deal, you can go on YouTube and find a pastor who will tell you sex outside of marriage isn't a big deal. If you don't think tithing is a big deal, you can find a Reddit chain of people who think tithing isn't biblical. If you, whatever you think about politics, if you're pro life or pro choice, if you're pro immigration or anti immigration, you can go find someone who will just tell you basically what you already think about that. And we, as followers of Jesus, have to learn to resist the urge of our culture and kneel to Jesus because he is king in our opinions. Listen, Jesus loves you and he forgives you. And every time we don't kneel, he forgives us, but he still says kneel.
[00:22:00] And we do not. We do not confuse his grace for a lack of command.
[00:22:09] So I've got some volunteers who are going to come up and help me. Grant, Caleb, where are you guys at? Welcome, my volunteers, my lovely assistants.
[00:22:17] Yes, thank you very much.
[00:22:22] While they're walking up here, I'm going to get some more water.
[00:22:25] All right. In these boxes, we have our opinions. Couldn't you tell these are our opinions now? Oh, don't drop your opinions. Not yet. That would ruin the illustration. Caleb, now you can notice our opinions are of different sizes and different values, different colors. We've got some opinions in common. We've got some opinions that are very different.
[00:22:49] Now, here's what's important.
[00:22:51] We are getting to Jesus. The big Jesus at the back of the stage, right? It's pretty on the nose for this illustration.
[00:22:58] We are all starting our journey towards Jesus from different places. Did you notice that?
[00:23:03] We're in very different places on the stage and we all have different opinions that we're holding. We at New Life say that we are a come as you are church. You know what that means?
[00:23:12] It means you can start following Jesus today, no matter what.
[00:23:15] You can actually come as you are. Jesus doesn't ask you to get your opinions right before you start following him. So today you can come to follow Jesus. Are you A Muslim, you can start following Jesus today. Hindu, you can start following Jesus today. Gay, straight, start following Jesus today. Today. Pro life, pro choice, start following Jesus today. Do you think the Bible is a book of myths? Start following Jesus today. You don't have to get your opinions right. The only opinion. I want to say this as clearly as I can because this might seem a little bit controversial. There's only one opinion you have to have, right, to start following Jesus, and that is that King Jesus, who is God, died for our sins and rose again to give us new life.
[00:23:50] If you believe that you can start following him. There is no other requirement.
[00:23:57] There's no other requirement, which means the first thing we have to do is not look at other people and say, grant, come over here. If you're going to follow Jesus, you got to come over here and stand with me.
[00:24:08] Because the goal isn't to come to me, to go to Jesus, but as we go to Jesus, as we start walking, what you realize pretty quick is that some of these opinions, you can't get any closer to Jesus and keep holding onto him.
[00:24:28] The farther you try to get, the more it's going to pull. And you're going to have to decide whether you're going to get any closer to Jesus or whether you're going to keep holding that opinion. Here's one of my opinions that I'm currently trying to let go of. I'm a cynic.
[00:24:41] Can I be honest about that?
[00:24:45] I have a really hard time believing that things get better and believing the best in people.
[00:24:54] Been through enough hard things in life that it's easy for me to just think, well, life's tough, so you better be tough or get out of the way.
[00:25:01] Just figure it out.
[00:25:04] It's not going to get any better, so figure out how to get through it.
[00:25:08] And that really ruins my compassion because when someone tells me their life's hard, what I think is, well, you better get tough because I can't tell you it's going to get any better.
[00:25:19] And, man, it causes me to be so cynical about people. Recently, a friend of mine from college or a guy I knew, we weren't close, but in college, got a book deal and started speaking at all of these big churches all over the U.S. you know what the first thing I thought was?
[00:25:33] Sell out.
[00:25:35] Honestly, that's the first thing I thought. He's a believer, preaching. Preaching the gospel. But I thought, wonder what he compromised to get that. Big deal.
[00:25:43] No one can do that and be sincere.
[00:25:47] It's really hard to believe the best in people when you're a cynic.
[00:25:51] It's really hard to celebrate the gospel going forward when you don't believe the best in anyone. I've realized in First Corinthians 13, Paul wrote that these three remain faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. But hope and cynicism don't work very well together.
[00:26:07] So I have to let Jesus keep me from being a cynic if I'm going to get any closer to him.
[00:26:12] But here's the thing. We start letting go of our opinions, and here's our temptation. Our temptation is to say, hey, Caleb, I don't think you should be allowed to have these opinions.
[00:26:22] Nope, I had to give up my opinions. So you have to give up your opinions. If you want to get any closer to Jesus, you have to have my opinions.
[00:26:32] You can only have the ones that match mine. You can't get any closer to Jesus until you have my opinions.
[00:26:41] Which is interesting because we wind up doing is standing right in the way of someone getting any closer to Jesus, don't we?
[00:26:46] This tv, I didn't think through this analogy with the tv.
[00:26:52] You see what I mean?
[00:26:55] And sometimes other people have opinions and they can get all the way to Jesus. Their opinions aren't even tied down. And you had to give up a bunch of opinions, but they. They get to hold onto theirs. And then you got really mad about it.
[00:27:06] Why do they get to keep thinking that? Here's the thing. The idea isn't that all opinions are equal. There are things that are clearly biblical. The idea is that my goal should not be to make him agree with me. My goal should be Grant come to Jesus. Grant come to Jesus. And when Grant eventually lets go of that opinion because he's coming to Jesus, things will be okay. My goal should be to drag him to Jesus, not to micromanage his opinion opinions.
[00:27:31] Here's another temptation. Another temptation we have. Oh, you lost your string. Have to retie that for second service. He is to say, I know this analogy is not working. Just roll with me, have grace, don't be a cynic.
[00:27:48] Sometimes we find other people whose opinions match ours. Look at those. Same color. Mine's a little small. And then you know what we'll say, because you believe the same thing I do, so it must be right.
[00:27:59] So we'll be. We'll be the liberal Christians.
[00:28:02] We'll be the conservative Christians over here. We're going to be the. The God and guns Christians over here. We're. No, we're going to be the sex isn't that big of a deal Christians.
[00:28:15] Oh, we're going to be the smoke weed and love Jesus Christians.
[00:28:20] We're going to be the it doesn't really matter how much you drink Jesus Christians.
[00:28:26] We're going to be the as long as it's not hurting anybody Christians.
[00:28:31] And we start defining our faith by our opinions instead of our opinions by our faith.
[00:28:36] We start creating little circles within the church.
[00:28:40] These are the people who are like us. And because we found someone who agrees with us, why in the world will we change our mind? Because we're comfortable together. Why in the world would we try to get any closer to Jesus? Why in the world would we ask if these opinions are right if we've got other people who tell us they're right?
[00:28:57] But the goal is not to find people who agree with us. The goal is to agree with Jesus no matter the cost and let our opinions go. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
[00:29:09] See, the question is not what opinion do you need to change or do I need to change right now? That's not the question for this morning because, whoops, man, just going to stand here, not going anywhere.
[00:29:31] Opinions get in the way, don't they?
[00:29:35] I can't tell you every opinion that you need to change right now. I can't micromanage your opinions and you can't micromanage mine.
[00:29:43] We can't just go through a list and say, Here are the 15 things our culture believes that you need to get right. We'll talk about some specific things. But the goal today is not to make sure all of our opinions are in line with Jesus.
[00:29:54] The goal today is to make sure that we can say what Peter said.
[00:29:58] Do you want to leave, Teacher? Where else would we go, Teacher? Only you have the words of life.
[00:30:08] Teacher, this is what I've believed my whole life. But if you tell me it's wrong, then I'll do my best to submit it.
[00:30:17] Teacher, these are my politics. What are yours, Jesus? These are my views about my own identity. What do you tell me, Jesus? Here's my career path. What's your career path, Jesus? Here's how much money I want to make. What's yours?
[00:30:31] The goal today is for us to be willing to say, where would I go?
[00:30:37] Because nowhere else can give me life.
[00:30:41] The goal for us today is to say, king Jesus is so beautiful that I would let go of anything that would hold me back from him. No matter how good or beautiful or fun that thing is, I would let go of anything that would hold me back from Jesus. And yes, it's Going to be difficult, it's going to be uncomfortable, it's going to hurt sometimes. But that is the goal for us today, is to say, Jesus, you are better than any opinion I have, than any sin that I could hold onto, than any perspective I can celebrate, than anything. You are better than anything you have the words of life. So I will open my hands and you take what you want, leave me what you want to leave me. My hands are open for the rest of my life. I'm following you, Jesus.
[00:31:26] That's the goal.
[00:31:28] And if you can. If we can say that honestly, I don't really care what our opinions are, because the opinions aren't going to get in the way anymore because we're submitted, our knees bent to King Jesus because he's good.
[00:31:45] So we're going to close with a song. And while we close, I just want. I want you to consider this question. It's going to be right here on the screen as we sing. I want you to ask yourself, will I let Jesus change my mind about anything he desires?
[00:32:03] I don't know what it is today. I'm not saying there has to be anything today. But are you willing to look at Jesus and say, change anything, Change anything.
[00:32:14] He's king.
[00:32:16] He loves you and he forgives you, but he's still king.
[00:32:20] Will you let the king rule?
[00:32:23] Will you open up your heart and say, jesus, show me what is not of you so that I can lay it down as we sing. I want you to remain seated, but I want to give you a little bit of a challenge as you pray about this question.
[00:32:38] If you get to the point, there's no judgment here. Just sometimes taking a physical action is a really helpful way to respond to an internal commitment.
[00:32:47] If today you are willing to say, Jesus, I don't. I don't even know maybe what I need to change my mind about.
[00:32:56] But I'll change my mind about anything you tell me. If you're willing to say, jesus, you are king, and I bow to you and no one else, not even myself, then I want you to stand up as we sing, remain seated while you pray about it. And don't just jump up, because bowing your knee to King Jesus is a big commitment. You shouldn't just make it on instinct.
[00:33:15] You should think about it.
[00:33:17] But as you think about it, if you're ready to say, Jesus, anything you want, you can change, then stand and sing, Jesus, you are good and you are kind, and you are king.
[00:33:31] And all of that is true at the same time.
[00:33:34] Teach us to bow our knee to you.
[00:33:36] We love you.
[00:33:38] Amen.
