Why Rules Never Change People (And What Actually Does)
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In case you don't know me, my name is Megan. I grew up as a pastor's kid. Um, don't hold it against me. No, it was great. Uh, but there was one thing in me when I was young, I realized I was just curious. I was a curious person. I'm still a curious person now. If someone tells me something, I'm not always gonna believe you straight away.
I wanna figure it out. I wanna go, "Hmm, can I discern whether that's right?" It's just how I am. And I remember when I was younger, anything to do with scriptures and things like that, my dad, I, I have to call out my mum and dad, well done. They were so great in helping me in this, and I remember having little books where I'd read parts of the Bible and I'd fill in the missing words, and I would learn information about different people that were from different parts of the Bible.
But that was, for me, it grew this love of learning. A love of learning about what is God all about? What is all this plan all about? And so I've been my, you know, I've had my ups and downs in life, guys. I haven't been full steam ahead that whole time. But I realized that God had placed this in me so long ago, and so I am continuing on now, and I love doing this.
I love being able to come and just share some of the things that God's speaking to me about. Um, and we're doing this series, it's called The Way: Becoming People of the Way. And if we look at that word becoming, becoming is something that's forever happening, right? You're not quite there just yet, and I think we never are quite there just yet when it comes to everything about God.
We don't know everything. But it is a process, and we have been talking about this already today. Jesus was the start of something that was going to change. And over time, something new was going to be released, and that's the freedom that I'm going to look at for today. But here's a little story I'd like to start off with.
So I am a school teacher in my job, my official job, as well as working here as well a little bit. Yeah, all that, teachers, well done. Um, but my very first year teaching, there's something when you're a first a-- look at my teacher friends over here. Um, when you first become a teacher and you get your first class, you are pooping yourself.
It is so scary. The very first time. You've done all your study, you get into a room, all of a sudden, I'm in charge of all these kids, and there's a whole bunch of different kids in that room, right? And when I started off, I was teaching grade sixes and sevens when I did all of my practice teaching, and my very first class on my own was a grade two class.
How scary can grade two kids be, really? Extremely scary. In my very first class ever, I walked in on the first day, I'm assessing the room, and there was one kid that really stood out. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about him today 'cause he was a very special case. I really do believe that God positioned me in a place to have this particular student as my first experience, to be honest, 'cause it changed the entire way I taught for the rest of my entire career.
And, for the purposes of today, I'm gonna give him a different name. I'm gonna call him Caleb. So Caleb, he was extremely disruptive, hyperactive, but the main thing that stood out for me, he swore like a sailor, whenever he wanted to, wherever he wanted to in the room. And I was like, "This is interesting. I didn't know that word was known by a year two student."
But the thing with Caleb was he had a condition. It was called fetal alcohol syndrome. So as a child, his mother was alcoholic, still was. She regularly came to pick him up drunk from school. She had drunk a lot when he was young, and so he had intellectual disability, he had a hyperactivity, and there was something else that was in there, and I think it was a spiritual thing.
Okay? And so I was trying to put all these rules in place. So like, I'd just come out of uni. They teach you how to set expectations. They teach you how to do this stuff, right? And I'm like, "Great, I've got all the tools in my toolkit that they taught me at uni," and I'm trying to do this list of dos and do nots with Caleb.
That did not work. It did not work because I realized it wasn't about the list and do- lists of dos and do nots for him. There had to be an internal change that happened in him. And I love a system, I really love a system, but the system did not work for him. The system was not actually matched for him.
And so it didn't take me very long at all to recognize that with Caleb, it had to be a change. There had to be something that started to change inside him But we all love a system, don't we? Really. We like a list. Uh, uh, do we all like a list? Yeah, we do. If I need to do this to get this result, I'm all, uh, I'm all for that.
Just, like, tell me what to do, please, you know? Give me five steps. Give me three habits. Give me the little checklist. Sometimes I'll write something on the checklist so I can tick it off the checklist immediately. Anyone else in the room? Yeah, satisfaction. Um, but we can take this sort of tick and flick into so much of our life, and we can start coming into our schools, and we can come to our studies, and we can come to our parenting.
Like, just tell me what to do. It doesn't work with our parenting, right? Um, we can take it into our jobs. We can take it into our relationships, and we, we like this formula because we think the formula is the secret to success. But actually, it doesn't necessarily always bring independence. So we can have our little list, and we can tick it off, and what ends up happening is we wanna try and have just compliance, and this is what happened with, with Caleb.
Okay? I wanted compliance. I wanted him to comply with the things that school needed him to do, right? But I recognized the only way that I'm gonna get through to Caleb is if I start to have connection, if I start to build that connection with him, and that's what I needed to change my focus to. I needed to shift from about being rules to about being something personal.
I don't know about you, but I hear a lot of people when they're talking about or if they're, they know people that are, are in Christian circles, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, I know everything about Christianity. It's a list of the stuff you can't do." That is how Christianity is perceived in so many places.
And so we can actually sometimes enter into this same tick and flick when it comes to God because we kind of think in our head, "Okay, how good do I have to be? Like, what is good enough, God?" I hear some chuckles. I'm glad it's not me. What, what enough is good enough for me to be okay? What do I need to do, God, for me to be okay with you?
Like, is this, is this all right? And it's actually meant to be different because that model is a very old relationship model with God. Super old. A model that was never our model. That model was an ancient model for a group of people who were trying to make themselves do the right things in the sight of God the best that they could in the time that they lived in for a reason, because it was compliance.
And I have to say, the compliance was pretty outstanding. The amount of things that those guys had to do, and they did it? Wow, that is impressive. Compliance was needed though, because something was missing at that particular time. Jesus hadn't come yet. For those people, they never saw Jesus. Jesus had not come yet.
Jesus is the thing that made it different, and Jesus came to solidify connection, not compliance. Connection, connection from what? How? The Holy Spirit. This was the brand-new thing that no one else had had a chance to experience apart from select few people that God deposited in before that. And this is important, and this is what we wanna look at today.
And here's my main question that I wanna pop up for us, is this: what is meant to power my life then? In my every day, what is meant to power my life? Is it my effort, or is it His Spirit? And even more, we could say, what is powering my life at the moment? Is it my effort currently, or am I fully engaging with His Spirit?
And as I said earlier, God hasn't hidden the answer for us. God has given us the answer for this in multiple ways, and so are you guys ready for a little bit of a history lesson? Yeah. I'm not a history teacher, but I'll do my best. So in the Old Testament that we can read, all of those books in there, there were, let's see, 613 commands in total.
That's not 613, but you get the, you get the gist. Um, there were 248 things that you shall not, uh, that you should do, and there were 365 things that you should not do, one for every day of the year. Isn't that phenomenal? Wow, okay. Um, but the first of this huge list, 'cause this didn't e- the, the law didn't exist originally.
Abraham had no law. There was no law back then. But it first started with a man called Moses, and many of you might have seen movies about him, The Prince of Egypt, The Ten Commandments. But here's a little highlight of Moses' life. Chaos, to say. But anyway, he's born to Hebrew parents. At that particular time, they want to kill all Hebrew children, so his mum puts him in a basket, sends him in the river.
Down the river he goes. At the end of the river, the pharaoh's daughter finds him, picks him up. Becomes the Prince of Egypt. That in itself is a huge story of life, right? Doesn't end there. Continues on. So he becomes the Prince of Egypt. When he's in Egypt, he sees a Hebrew man getting beat- beaten by an Egyptian taskmaster.
So he goes and fights the Egyptian taskmaster, and guess what he does? Kills him. Then he becomes a fugitive. He runs off into the desert, and when he's in the desert, he encounters God through a burning bush. Crazy. And God says to him, "You're the person that's gonna go back into that place you just ran out from, and you're gonna bring all those people with you that are slaves."
Thanks. Oh, the place where everyone wants to kill me? Sounds like a great plan. And then you might know this part. He goes in, he saves the entire people that are slaves there of the Israelites. He takes them through the parting of the Red Sea. My goodness, what an epic story, hey? One man's life. It's crazy.
But then Moses, you gotta think about this. Moses has gone in, he's gone into Egypt. He's taken all these Israelite slaves, and now they're just walking around the desert. No person who's governing them. They're all there all together, and God looks down and goes, "Yeah, I think we need some guidelines." And this is where the very first parts of the law gets written.
Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, and he's up there, and God meets with him, and God physically carves into stone what we first know as the Ten Commandments, and so the law begins. And that was there for this sort of purpose, okay? The... It was a collection, I'm gonna write up here, a collection of religious, moral, civil, and ceremonial rules that God gave to a- to the ancient Israelites.
That's what that originally was for. It was to help to govern. It was heaven helping to guide. And if you look at how this continued for generations and generations, like it started at 10 and ended at 613. That's a lot, right? There's a lot of extra notes that had to be added over time. But the law was a lot for a human person to have to live up to.
People had to abro- try to obey hundreds of these laws and commandments from the Torah, which is the first five books in the Bible. You can read that. But then also all the extra rules that religious leaders started to add on top of it, and that's why the list kept getting longer. And then you'd have your neighbors checking up on you.
"Huh, you doing that?" The Pharisees, "Huh, I don't think you did that right. You didn't wash your hands properly before you ate that food." Always someone watching you. And every part of life, from the way in which you farmed your food, to the way you cooked your food, to the way in which you lived your life, was in line with these religious duties And the list kept growing and growing and growing because people weren't changing.
More bad things were still happening and so they had to keep adding extra things. "Oh, that one's not good. Do not do that. Oh, don't do that either." You can imagine. The, the list just keeps going and going, and that's why we end up with this. That had occurred. But this was always a temporary solution. Always a temporary solution.
And how do we know it was a temporary solution? 'Cause God said it himself. And there's a guy, his name's Jeremiah, and he was a prophet from a very, very long time. He was actually in the 6th century BC, so hundreds of years before Jesus, and God actually says to him this in Jeremiah 31:33-34. He says, "I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they will be my people." And this was radical. What do you mean? You're gonna put it in us? You're gonna take the instructions for life and put it in us? What do, what do you mean? This is radically different. Not on, not on a list. Not on the tablets anymore It's gonna be internal. And that had not happened before for the masses.
And we know how that was done. God was gonna send Jesus, and then he was going to release the Holy Spirit. God had planned it from the very beginning. No more of this compliance. We now need to come back to the connection, the connection that I always wanted with my people. Not compliance, but connection, 'cause compliance can become mindless.
I don't know, think about that. You know, it's like when you have a party, when your parents are gone out of the house. No one's done that here, have they? No. So you, so nobody knows what I'm talking about anyway. Move on. We do know. When they're there, the rules are there. When they're gone, excellence. Never did that.
But it turned from external to internal. It was going from stone to flesh. And then God follows through on what he said to Jeremiah all that time ago, and he brings Jesus, sharing the message himself. And Jesus comes into all of these different places, and he says, "The letter, that letter that you had before was great for then.
You don't need it anymore 'cause it's been fulfilled." The moment when Jesus was resurrected, the plan for the connection was released 'cause the Holy Spirit got released. And the Spirit of God, Jesus is like, "The Spirit of God is now going to guide. The Spirit of God is now going to help you to govern what things are best from your heart and your spirit," not from a list of, 'I need to tick this off to make God feel happy.'
It was about formation starting to happen. Don't take my word for it, though. Let's have a look what Jesus had to say. This one in Matthew 5:17, Jesus himself, he said, "Don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the Law of Moses or the writings of the Prophets." So he's not saying, "I'm not here to say that's all rubbish."
Okay? "I'm not, I'm not here to oppose the law. No, I came to accomplish their purpose. The purpose of that was for those people, but I've come to accomplish that now because there's something new." Can you see how clearly Jesus said it? Can you see how it rubbed people the wrong way? Oh, yeah. But he knew he needed to tell everyone.
These whole list had now been completed in that form because of the new thing that was coming, and this, I love this, Matthew 22, we read this. Jesus replied, so people are asking, "What do you mean? What about all those commands?" He said, "Well, here you go. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.
This is the first and the greatest commandment. A second is equally important," okay, guys, "and that is love your neighbor as yourself." And then we need to look at the next verse. And it says... We getting it up here? No? That's all right. I'll read it on here. "Second is equally important. Love your neighbor as yourself.
The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments." That's the, that's the main thing. He's like, "All of this
Isn't this?
Love God and love other people 613 to two. Can you understand why the people are like, "What? I don't have to wash my hands a certain way before I eat my food now?" Nope You don't need to do that because this is freedom. Can you see the difference in the freedom from this to that, to the people of the time?
It was radical, and people were absolutely mind-blown. How is this possible? Is it, is it sacrilegious? Is this sacrilegious? He's like, "No, it isn't." It's about connection now. It's not about compliance anymore. Here's the problem, though. Some people think that not having that long law means that there's no standards anymore.
No. In fact, the standards are higher than before because everything that wasn't on the list, people were like, "Well, it's not on the list. I'll just do it." Whereas now, it's like, is that loving God? Is that loving others? It's not okay. So it's not about standards lowering, it's actually about standards becoming higher, and people started to walk in that freedom.
They were moving in that freedom. They were connecting with the Holy Spirit, and they were going around and they were connecting with other people, and they're sharing. They're like, "You don't need that anymore. You just need to learn how to love God, and then we need to love each other." But you know what?
A lot of people still liked the list. A lot of people still liked the list because, you know, the list is familiar. The list was tradition You can tell people what to do with a list. Hmm. You can control people with a list But it wasn't God's way anymore, and that is actually what rubbed the religious leaders the wrong way.
It wasn't Jesus, well, it was that Jesus saying he was the Messiah, but a lot of it was, "You're taking away our control of the people." And ultimately, I think that's what, uh, what actually got him killed They did not want to lose that. And so people that are becoming followers of the way, the way of Jesus, they started to walk in this freedom, but it started to get a little bit crooked because other people wanted to continue to bring stuff into that, and other things were starting to be added back in.
And this frustrated Paul so much. Paul, who had a full life change, and he wrote so many letters to other groups that were following Jesus and starting the first churches, and he saw that so many people were bringing in other things. It wasn't Jesus plus anything anymore, but they were bringing, "Oh, yeah, it is Jesus and this thing.
Yeah, that, that was a good, that was a good one. And although 16-- 613, no, we definitely need that one back in. Oh, that one's pretty good too. Number 550, come on. Let's pop that one back in." And Paul got so angry with this, and so he was trying to get them to realize, "Please just stop. Stop trying to go back and continue to walk in freedom."
In 2 Corinthians 3:3, I'm gonna read just these couple of scriptures. This was Paul, just one example. He, he wrote this a lot. He says, "Clearly you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This letter," and the letter was what they used to call the law, "This letter is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God.
It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts." He got it, and he was trying to remind them, "Like, let's not keep adding stuff in. God-- Jesus said it's these two things. Everything else comes underneath that." And then we go down to verse six and it says, "He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant.
This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old covenant ends in death, but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life." The result was life. And we can read that and go, "Oh, does that mean the law was, like, evil?" No, the law wasn't evil. But if you continue to hold yourself under the law and all of those rules, you never open yourself to the freedom and the life of the Spirit of God working in you.
And I would encourage you, if you wanna read a little bit more about this, in Galatians chapter three, 'cause I have so much to say on this topic, and I'm not today 'cause I'm not gonna try and beat Kev's record. In fact, I'm not gonna even get close, I hope. Galatians chapter three. Write down right now. Paul is very clear.
It is just literally a whole chapter on this, and he does not hold back on telling you how it was. And I, I really trust Paul's words. I can see so much of what Paul was saying in every other part of what God has said previous, which is why I put a lot of emphasis on trusting Paul's accounts. Um, everything that Paul has said, I've seen elsewhere in scripture.
So it has backed up, which is why I believe it's also in there. But the way was releasing and inspiring a spirit-led life. 'Cause the new covenant, when Jesus came, he's like, "It's not a rule book 2.0, guys. Not slapping a new cover on the top and adding an extra word and going, 'It's the next one.' Okay? New edition."
It was none of that anymore. It was about a heart transplant. It's about our hearts beginning to change. And all I can say is, thank you, God, for putting me in this century and not back then. I say this regularly to my friends, "If I lived in biblical times, I'd be dead by now." All the stuff that I did wrong, I don't even think I'd be good at following the list.
Probably forget half of it. Thank you, Jesus, for putting me in this period of time So at our church, our top value in all of our family values is spirit-led. And this is the reason why. This is the reason why. Some of you may not, we-- know, but we have a mission statement for here at our church. Every single thing that we ever do filters through this, and this is what it is.
And some of you would know this, especially if you're in my teams. We do, we go over this every year. But our mission is to partner with the Holy Spirit, to teach people to love God, love others, and make disciples who make disciples. And the very first part of that is intentional, to partner with the Holy Spirit not to try as hard as we can To teach people to love God.
No, we are going to partner with the Spirit, hopefully teach people how to love God. In turn, they will go and love others. We'll tell them about Jesus, and then get them to do the same for somebody else. And every single thing that we ever do here is through those things. And so we s- stick to four main things at our church that we kinda cover.
There will be other initiatives and, uh, and things that the Spirit might breathe on that keep coming and going, depending on what He wants to do within us, but these are the four things that we actually do and offer. And the whole thing is for you to learn how to become a Spirit-led person. Pretty cool, right?
Let's keep it simple. Won't put the last word in there. Kiss. First one, SOAP devotions. Ever heard of it? Yeah. Good job, Gracie's like, "Yeah, I have." Great. Phew. SOAP devotions in community, so that we can read scriptures together, and we have an opportunity to grow and learn together. SOAP devotions in community.
Next one, we have missional villages, and our missional villages help us with accountability, a chance to be able to iron sharpens iron, keep each other on the right tracks on what the scriptures are saying, not what my head tells me is right. We then have our family gatherings. This right here, where we get to come together, we get to learn some things, we get to process it.
How do I apply this in my life? And we also do this with kids and youth. The only reason we split it, to be honest, and have other ones, is because there's a different developmental stage. And so kids need it presented in a little bit of a different way as well, and youth is the same. But we're all the same family gathering.
Does that make sense? And then the last one is we then go out and we have our living mission, where we go and insert ourselves into the lives of other people and just help them on their journeys, and that links back into our missional villages. Four things. That's it. All of those four things, very intentional for us to step into this freedom that God has given to us so beautifully through Jesus and the ability to have His Holy Spirit with us So here's my big question for you as we're heading to finish up today.
Coming back to what we had before, what is your current walk with God powered by? Is it powered by willpower or by the Spirit? What's it powered by? Straight away you might be thinking, "I don't know, Megs. How do I even know that? How am I meant to know that?" Well, I'm here to help you. What does it look like in your life?
How do you approach each day? When you wake up in the morning, how do you approach the start of that day, and then how do you walk through the rest of that day? It might give you an in- an insight. Am I using willpower? Am I using the spirit? Hmm. How do you respond to things when they happen in your life?
Ooh. Sometimes I respond with the spirit. Sometimes I respond full Megs mode. I'm aware of it. You never wanna go full Megs mode. How do you see others around you in your world Is your life starting to change? That's a big one. Because of the Holy Spirit that's starting to do things in your life. If you're thinking, "Well, how do I answer that question?
What, what do I think about those things in my life?" And it's very clear in Galatians, it gave us a list of the things of the Spirit. The fruits of the Spirit, the fruits that are gonna come out of your life if you are walking with the Spirit, you're gonna see it. You're gonna see it 'cause the connection to God is evident.
A connection to the Holy Spirit is evident. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. What an amazing list. If you start to see those things changing in your life, there's a good chance you're starting to walk with the Spirit, which is super cool
I'm gonna revisit Caleb. Did you guys think I'd forgot about Caleb? Probably. Everyone like, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about that guy." That was a long time ago in this message. Well, here's the story of Caleb. I recognized the rules were not gonna work for Caleb, and so I had to take a good hard look and think, "How am I gonna change a human being?"
I knew how. I was gonna start inviting God into my classroom. Remember, this is my very first year teaching, so it was all brand new, but I recognized this needs a lot more than my power right now. So I would start to walk behind, and in the day I would just pray behind Caleb specifically when I was marking kids' work He didn't-- no one else knew.
On one particular day, um, Caleb decided it would be fun to snap every pencil in his pencil case.
Chew some of the rubber, a whole bunch of stuff. Throw the pencil case out the window. That was a fun day. I enjoyed that one. I decided I'm gonna get him a new pencil case, I'm gonna fill it with all the stuff. But you know what I did? I filled it with all the stuff, and I brought it here on a Sunday morning.
And then I asked the elders to pray over the pencil case. We prayed over the pencil case. I took it back to school, and I gifted it to him. And bit by bit, Caleb started to change. The rules were the same as before, but I wasn't needing him to comply by the rules. He began to change as a kid So much to the point that by the end of the year, they asked me to come into our special needs meeting with all of the professionals, and they sat me down and they said, "What was your secret?
How did you do it? How did you do this?" And I work in a state school. And my answer was, "I prayed. I prayed for Caleb." And I said, "Here's something else I did. I bought a pencil case, and I prayed over the pencil case." There was a lot of wide-open eyes like, "What?" I said, "You asked me what my secret is. That's it."
And then I also said to them, or one of them said to me, "Well, we can't do that every year." That was the actual answer. I said, "But you can. You actually can. You can do this all the time. Would you like me to teach you how?" "Whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no." But I had that experience, which changed my entire career, to be honest.
I've always met a child now and I'm like, "Who is this kid?" It's not about rules, it's about who's this child? How are they gonna learn best? And I've done everything from that point on. But here's my challenge for you today. This week, when you start off in your mornings, instead of asking yourself, "What am I supposed to do today?"
In my list, what am I supposed to do today? Let's start asking the Holy Spirit for yourself. Ask the Holy Spirit and say, "What do you wanna do through me today?" And then just head into your day and see if that one thing is highlighted to you, and act on it. That's it. Just start small. And some days it might be something so small, like, oh, I took someone's trolley back from them f- at the shops.
But some other days you're gonna have a story that you're like, 'What? What? How did that happen today?' And you know that has to only be God. And I can tell you that life is exciting. It is fun. It's scary. But it's what Jesus did for us. It's what Jesus did for us One big question, and some of you might be thinking this: Why is this even important to me?
Fair, and also ouch. No. Why is this important to us? Okay, this is why this is important to us. Jesus was the start of a global movement that was brand new, a reconnection of humanity to its creator. But a lot of people now are never, ever getting to Jesus. Some people in our world never get to Jesus because they're turned off straight away by the people that represent him.
How tragic is that? They never get to see it for themselves because they are blocked by sometimes groups that have brought in the law, brought in things that were never meant to be for us, and made it really difficult for people to find him. God has entrusted this to us. He's entrusted to us to have the opportunity to be able to walk into our world and introduce people to Jesus.
That's it, and the Holy Spirit does the rest. Here we are known for the Gold Coast, so it's one of the things that we've done, and that's because we recognize so many people knew what the church was against. That's the old law model. But we wanted to know, you guys in the community, we want you to know what we are for.
We are for loving people. We are for families. We are for singles. We are for the struggling. We are for all the groups because that's who Jesus was for. And the very first apostles, they were doing miraculous signs. They were healing. They were going out and they were preaching, and multiple thousands of people were coming to Jesus because the Spirit was working through them, and I read it in the books, I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing."
And that exact same spirit is the spirit that we have. It's not a different spirit. That's the same spirit that we get a chance to be able to walk with in our life, and it's a life of freedom. Coming back to that word, freedom We're about to sing in just a moment, and I might get you guys to start playing for us A life of freedom is one that's not locked down by a set of rules, but it has the opportunity to move where God wants it to go That's the sort of life that God wants for you.
And I didn't actually finish writing my message. This whole last part's kind of just been on the cuff, 'cause I recognize, I said to God, "Look, I just wanna see what you wanna say in the moment." So I didn't finish writing it, but then this morning at 8:00 AM just before I left to come here, God gave me this, and I think it's for today.
I'm gonna show you just a quick little video. There's a game that you can, that we sometimes... We haven't played at youth yet, but in this little video, it's called the march on the spot challenge. Can we just play that for a second? So what you have to do, there's a square on the floor, and you have to march in the spot with your eyes closed, and you just gotta stay inside the square.
That's it. Just do your best to stay inside the square. And as you can see, one guy is not doing so great. The guy on the right, he's way off. Guy on the left's doing quite well. Isn't it bizarre? God gave me that video in my head. I was like, "What?"
But I get it. He's saying, "Just stay alert." Don't be distracted. Don't start walking your Christian life like this, and not being aware of all the things that maybe have come in to rob some of the truth of what he has wanted to deposit in there. I think that's really important. Stay aware, 'cause we have the opportunity to become the most amazing, loving people.
Yeah, right? We do. Ones that people look at and go, "That's actually impossible to love like that." Well, actually, it's not with the spirit. And so we're about to sing right now, and maybe you haven't experienced the spirit yourself completely before. I encourage you, open yourself up to it. How do I open myself up?
I just say, "I'm ready. I'm ready to experience your spirit move through me." And God will meet you in that place. God will meet you in that place. Because you know what? We don't need more rules. But we do need more spirit. Let's pray and then we're gonna sing together. Father, I thank you that you have made it so clear in your word the freedom that you have given us, and Jesus, I just wanna thank you.
Jesus, you are amazing what you chose to put yourself through to release this within us so that we can head into a world and show them that people care, to show them that people love generously. And Father, I just thank you for your generosity to us. And just as we continue to sing today, God, keep this in our minds and don't allow us to be distracted, Holy Spirit.
Teach us when we're getting slightly off course so that we can stay the cou- the course of becoming the way, the irresistible way back to you. And we thank you, God, just for being in our presence even today, Holy Spirit, and continue to speak to us right now as we sing. Holy Spirit, come and rest upon us.
Connect with us. Connect with us, Jesus. Connect with us, Holy Spirit.