You Can't Walk Into Your Future While Living in Your Grave

• TRANSCRIPT

  Letting go of old habits and patterns is what I get to talk to us about this morning. And the key scripture that I'll focus on today from the Bible is from Romans six, verse six and seven. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with anyone who has died, has been set free from sin.

  So it's a powerful topic and, there was a lot as I was preparing that I was thinking through what will I share today? But la last week, pastor Len, as he said earlier, really focused on, f stop trying to fix our lives through a change of scenery, but settling into a total change of identity. So a real understanding of who I am in who in Jesus.

  So we learned at Easter that the resurrection brings life and change. And the resurrection isn't just a historical event that took place, but it's something that we carry as Jesus followers into our lives every day. And it replaces old labels and old ways of thinking. Into an old mindset. So I'm gonna call it a dead dog mindset.

  And there's a link a little bit later in my message that will explain that, but changing our dead dog mindsets as we discover what Christ's finish work looks like in our lives. While Pastor Lynn talked about I Identity, I wanna talk this morning. Implementation of that identity so we can know that we are new in Christ, but how do we actually apply that and implement it in our daily lives?

  Because if we're honest we can probably say that most of us would come here on a Sunday. And agree that God has set us free and agree that we are new in him and connect with all of the messages that are shared. But then on a Monday or Tuesday when we're actually walking our everyday life, how often does our old self and our old thoughts come knocking at our door and start to annoy us?

  Just that background. Annoying voice in the back of our head that says differently. So I wanted you to imagine a person who's battling chronic illness. They are in the hospital. Their world is tiny. They're confined to a small hospital room, and it's because they have had a sickness that. Has not enabled them to live life fully.

  They have been locked down. They are living, they're having to say no to every invitation, no to the long hike, no to the late dinner invitations and no, to the fun things that all their friends are doing because that's who they are. They are the sick person. That was their reality. One day that person gets.

  Miraculously healed. There's a healing that comes and they are they can now do everything they couldn't do before, but instead of walking out of the hospital room into a life of freedom we come back six months later and find them still sitting in that darkened room making the same choices.

  Their body is healed, but they have. Still, they're still adopting that mentality of, I can't do it. I have to say no. My body won't do it. So their freedom was purchased through their healing, but they never moved into the house of freedom and started to operate in it. So that's a key thought around.

  So their thinking wasn't changed. Their situation had changed, but they didn't make different choices that changed their thinking. They are medically free, but mentally they're still a patient. And I was thinking about that story or that analogy and thinking many of us do the same thing spiritually.

  It might not be a practical thing that we do or a physical thing like. Being well again and being able to walk. It might be a spiritual thing that is holding us back. And we are just stuck in that old mindset, that old way of thinking. Let me tell you about Barry. Barry was a friend of our family.

  And he had been an inmate, he had been in prison most of his life. He had a life of crime as a young person. He got in the system. He was put into prison. He spent decades in there. He served his, sentence and was released and he was placed into a program at the church I was attending at the time in Ipswich.

  Had a program where they would welcome people in and rehabilitate them for life. He came and joined our team at the church where I was just a volunteer then in my early twenties. And we would we had, it was a large church and he, Barry had learned while he was in prison to make great food.

  He was a chef and he came to our church and we just. Let him loose in the kitchen. He was making meals for youth on a Friday night. He was serving he was serving our charity program that made meals for people who needed it. He also served dinner after our Sunday night experience, and he was a lot of fun.

  He was a character. He had a lot to share. And he just joined the kitchen team and started serving and using his gifts. But Barry struggled. He came. He was. He was part of the team. He was part of the family. He joined in. But when he left the eight hours of spending the day with us and went home to his place on his own, he had no family.

  He really struggled. He struggled because he had been institutionalized. He had spent so many years. In prison with someone telling him when he stood at the door of his room, you can go to the dining room or you can go to the gym, or, yet he had his life was very scheduled in prison and he came out and he found the freedom really hard to the point where he spent maybe six or nine months with us.

  And one day we, he didn't show up and we were like, where is Barry? He's not here. Kev had to go searching for him. Anyway, we'd found out he had committed a silly crime and ended himself back up in he had been arrested and put back into jail. When Kev went to meet with him in the, at the police station and questioned Barry why, like it, we were going so good.

  It was really great. He just said to Kev, I can't do it. I have to make so many decisions in the outside world. I just want to go back. He actually was way more comfortable in his prison environment than he was in a free world now. He spent the rest of his days institutionalized in that prison environment.

  We kept in contact with him writing letters. And he, in that process, he found Jesus. He had he had a great connection with the people inside, but I tell you that story to share about how easy it is to be contained to a mindset and be unable to break free of something that you have known for a very long time.

  Yeah, Barry was free but unable to live out that freedom because of the prison that his mind put him in. I'm wondering today. That's an extreme story, but if you are locked into some old patterns that are inhibiting your ability to live fully alive today, and maybe it's not something that what you can physically see or the people around you can see on the outside, but maybe it's something that's happening inside your mind and heart that's causing you to live in a little bit of a prison rather than as a free person.

  Because if we're honest, our grave or that prison place feels cozy, it's comfortable. It's really easy to live there because we have learnt the rhythms and routines and patterns of how to do that, our old coping mechanisms. So maybe if it's a sharp tongue. And the sharp tongue gives us control because if I speak sharply to someone, they do what I say, and that's a form of an old pattern that can be comfortable for us.

  Or maybe it's a scrolling habit that numbs stress. That could be a prison that we're. Attached to something that, it's our phone, it's our digital. We often talk about teenagers having a digital addiction to gaming and things, but I wanna say today that I think a lot of grown adults who have had technology introduced later, have an addiction as well, and it's an addiction to a social media, a and share addiction or an addiction to even that zoning out at the end of a day. It's how we cope with our stress. I'm just gonna scroll. My mom, who's in her sixties, she's so funny, she calls it doom scrolling. I was lying in bed and I was doom scrolling on my phone.

  I'm like, mom, but she said, oh, and I saw this and I saw that. So that can be a real thing. That can be something that we turn to. To cope. Maybe a long held excuse or the prison that we're in is I'm just a worried person. I just worry. That's what I do. That is an old pattern, an old way of thinking. When we are invited to live fully alive in who Jesus is, he calls us out of that pattern of worry and anxiety.

  So we celebrated Easter a few weeks ago and we celebrated an empty tomb, and many of us are. Happy about that, and we know that Jesus has set us free, but have we walked into the future of what that freedom means in our lives? My, sticky statement for today, or the thing that I want you to remember is that you can't walk into your future if you are still living in your grave.

  So something I want you to think about as I'm talking this morning is do you have any grave type addictions or patterns? Do you have anything that is keeping you in the grave? What if we didn't have to live that way? What if the grave of our old habits and our old patterns of thinking had actually been broken and we just haven't learned to fly yet?

  Fortunately, God has a lot to say about this. So in Romans six, the verse I read at the start, I wanna have a little look at that scripture 'cause it looks at the legal side of our freedom. So the whole chapter, it's too long for me to read today. I spent a lot of time preparing for this message, just reading whole big chunks of scripture and then thinking, I don't have time for that.

  I don't have time to talk about that, but there is a lot in this whole chapter that looks at the legal side of our freedom. So Paul uses language in this chapter that would've made total sense to the people in the Roman world to which he was talking to. But. This information is a bit of a recalibration for us and our thinking.

  So Romans six, verse six to seven says, for we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away. With that, we should no longer be slaves to sin. Because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. So Paul is saying that when you gave your life to Jesus, a death occurred.

  So when we say yes to Jesus our old self, so not a physical death of our body, but our old self, the person who we were before is we no longer have to be slave to that habit. That temper that addiction or the paralyzing anxiety, we saw it in the baptism video. So baptisms represent a dying of the old self and a raising up in a newness of life.

  So it's symbolic, but we can believe that when we say yes to Jesus, that is actually something, a transaction that's taking place for us. So think you could think about it like this. Imagine a toxic boss, someone you work for, you work 20 hours a day. He demands that he owns your schedule. You must be available.

  He belittles you, he's not kind. And then one day you think, I'm not doing this, and you quit. Better yet, the old self. Dies and that person says, I'm not going to be controlled by this anymore. And then the next day after you quit, you've made that choice. The boss shows up at your bedside at 6:00 AM and says, get up.

  Go and do the thing. You're supposed to be working. You are not going to just say, okay, and get on with that. You are going to think I quit that. I don't have to respond to that old boss anymore. I don't have to do what he says. I don't have to go back to those old thoughts and those old patterns. You try to ignore him, but you realize he has no legal authority over me because I made a choice to quit.

  Being raised in newness of life and accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior is actually us saying, I quit to that old self and choosing to walk in a new pattern of life. So I wanna encourage you today that when you pull up an old pattern, you can tell yourself, I don't work for that boss anymore. I don't have to do that as a way of recalibrating your thinking around the new way of life that you've chosen.

  And that's something we can take practically into our life every day when we realize, oh, that could be, oh, I'm yelling at the kids, or I'm, oh, that's a pat. That's an old pattern. I don't need to do that. It's an old self. I actually have quit that. Way of life and I'm choosing a new one. You can tell yourself as an internal dialogue, I don't work for that boss anymore.

  Does anyone else have an internal dialogue? Like you talk to yourself? Yes. Sounds a bit crazy. It's important, right? David talked to himself. There's lots of scripture about people who talk to their soul. Come on, get up, do that thing. I had to talk to myself a lot to get on the stage today. Come on, you can do this.

  All right the. To understand and implement some of this teaching around the new self. I wanna talk to you about one of the most beautiful stories in the Old Testament, and it is a story about Mephibosheth. Now, I practiced saying that my whole family practiced saying that in the car on the way here this morning to get it right.

  No. So Mephibosheth is. A story that is in first and second Samuel, and if you follow along with our devotion readings, you would've read about him in the last little season because we've been reading in First and second Samuel. That is the old Covenant of Israel, so it's in the old part of the Bible.

  It's a story about a man named Mephibosheth. Oh, a fun fact about the first and second Samuel that I found out in my research for this message was that they were actually originally one single. Samuel was just one book, and when it was divided into two parts was when it was translated into Greek, and the reason being is that it didn't fit on one scroll.

  When they were writing it, they had to actually create two scrolls, so they split the book in half. Nothing to do with my point, but I thought it was interesting. Okay, so remember we can learn great things from the old Covenant, from the Old Testament, the old part of the Bible, but as believers, we should apply Jesus teachings from the new covenant to our lives.

  So here's a little bit of a story about Mephibosheth recorded in the book of Samuel. Mephibosheth was the grandson of Kings Saul. He was only five years old when news came that his grandfather and his father, Jonathan, had been killed in battle. Now, there was chaos and panic. The Bible says at that point, his nurse grabbed him to flee, but in the panic she dropped him.

  And he was left permanently crippled in both feet. So in my deep dive into this story, I was trying to understand why there was chaos and panic, and I learned that in those times when a royal Dynasty fell and someone was killed, so in this case, Saul, the king and his son Jonathan, were both killed in battle.

  They would often send. Someone to execute the entire family of the previous rule to eliminate any future rivals to the throne. So that was what had caused the panic. The nurse knew that David's men would arrive at any moment to kill the five-year-old prince to ensure that Saul's bloodline had was ended forever.

  So she picked him up, dropped him, and he was crippled in both feet. For years, Mephibosheth lived in a hiding place called Lo Debar. And that in Hebrew means no pasture or nothing. We've got probably not actually Mephibosheth, but I put this story into AI and said, please create me a close picture. I think he looks a bit too clean maybe, but it gives you an idea, it's a visual for the visual people in the room.

  Sometimes we need something to look at. So he would, he was crippled. He lived in this place of nothingness and. Yeah, he was living in obscurity, desolation, and in the constant fear of the new King David, who he believed since he was five years old, had been told, was trying to kill him. He was part of an old failed regime, but if we look at the heart of our king David doesn't look fores to execute him.

  He looks for him because of a covenant. Promise that he has made with Jonathan Mephibosheth's father. So Jonathan and David were friends and at one point he says. They make a promise to each other. So it's David's hesed is the word. So it means covenant love, and it's a shadow of a greater covenant love.

  And the word here means unfailing or covenant bound. And Mephibosheth did nothing to earn this. He wasn't sought out because he was impressive or important to the kingdom. He was sought out because of a promise that was made between two friends. So I wanna read to you from two Samuel nine. It was hard to capture the heart of everything in a short passage because it's across.

  This story spans across chapters. But I'm going to read you this part. When Mephibosheth's son of Jonathan, son of Saul, came to David, he bowed down to pay him honor. David said, Mephibosheth, at your service, he replied, don't be afraid. David said to him, for I will surely show you kindness for the sake of your father, Jonathan, I will restore you to all the land that belonged to your grandfather's soul, and you will always eat at my table.

  Mephibosheth bowed down and said, what is your servant that you should notice? A dead dog like me? So Mephibosheth ate at David's table like one of the king's sons, and he lived in Jerusalem because he always ate at the King's table. He was lame in both feet. I wonder if you can capture the tension in that reading.

  David treats Mephibosheth like a son because of a promise he's made to Jonathan, his father. But Mephibosheth has the mindset and sees himself as a dead dog. Who am I that you would notice A dead dog like me? When he finally stands before David Mephibosheth is terrified. He has lived his whole life since five years old, believing that this man was going to kill him, and he falls down and says, what is your servant that you should notice a dead dog like me?

  That's not a line from a movie that is a line from a man who genuinely believes that he's worthless. That was the mindset he had. That was the life he had been living, and that was his grave identity. David says three things in this passage that changes everything from me, from Mefi, Mephibosheth. I nearly got there, okay?

  He says, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. He says, I am restoring your inheritance. I'm giving back everything that belonged to your father and your grandfather. And he says, the third thing you will always eat at my table. So Mephibosheth had some work to do in the area of his mindset. He had been told these things from David in a moment.

  It was like he had been pulled out of the grave and put in front of the king and been told these things. He had a decision to make. He had a recalibration. He had to recalibrate his thinking, moving from a dead dog logic to a sonship reality, similar to what happens to us when we walk into the kingdom.

  We might come from a place of brokenness, a place of wondering if we have any worth, and we need to recalibrate our thinking around what Jesus is asking of us at the table. So at the king's table. The chef had to do three things. He had to recalibrate his fear. He was fearful around the things that he would face.

  For 20 years. He was on autopilot. He was hiding, he was running the king's shoulders, soldiers showed up at Lo Debar, and he thought that is the end. He had to consciously decide to stop. Viewing the king as a predator and start viewing him as a provider. The second thing he had to recalibrate was his worth.

  So he had to learn how to handle a silver fork with hands that were used for. Usually begging for scraps. He had to learn to sit at a table like this with kings and generals and people of importance when if you compare this to the previous photo that was where he had come from, a place of nothingness.

  So a place of, from a place of nothingness to a place of plenty in his head, and I'm sure everyone has a voice in their head that sometimes says this, you don't belong. Here is what he would've been feeling sitting at the table that day. He had to bury that thinking, push it down, push it out of the way, say to that boss.

  I don't work for you anymore. I'm here at the King's table. He had to recalibrate his worth and then he had to recalibrate his walk. So an interesting thing about Mephibosheth's story is that he was never healed from his crippled state. Even though God could have done it, we don't know. In cases of healing, we often don't know.

  We wonder, God is God, why doesn't he do all the things we don't know? And in this case the Bible actually mentions twice in this chapter that he was lame in both feet. So we can assume that he continued at the king's table, living in the palace with them in this lame state. He didn't get his physical miracle of healing, but he definitely got his positional healing in that he got to be in that place.

  His position had changed, his physical ailment hadn't, but his position in Christ had changed. And I wonder if that's the case for anyone here today where you have walked. Into a relationship with Jesus and maybe some of the scars of your past have not been wiped away. They are still there. They are still causing, they are the thorn in your side still causing you trouble.

  Maybe it's a physical healing, maybe it. Something that happened to you. But you choose to rise above that mindset and sit at the king's table because the king has invited you there and brings you to the table to have relationship with him. I wanna say today that you don't have to walk perfectly to belong at the table.

  We come as we are. It's a come as we are culture. Jesus invites us exactly where we are today to come and be in relationship with him. Recalibration is a process of train, training our heart to believe what the king already says about us. Each person in this room is specially designed by God, knit together in your mother's womb with the breath of God on your life, and every single person here.

  And on joining us online today has a story to tell. You have a, there's something important for you to do in this life, and you have the breath of God on you because of who he created you to be. We can't walk into our future, though if we are still living in the grave. Mephibosheth had to leave the grave of lo debar, not just physically, but mentally.

  He had to decide. I'm no longer a fugitive to the house of Saul. I'm a guest of the king. I wonder if you would choose today in your situation to think about what you need to walk away from and say no to, and quit. To function as a guest of the king, it requires a bit of a wardrobe change. So how we practically work this out there's a verse in Colossians verse five.

  Sorry. Colossians chapter three, verse five and verse 10. It says, put to death what belongs to your earthly nature and put on your new nature. That's a bit of a paraphrase of those scriptures, but basically putting off the old and on the new, it's a bit of a wardrobe change. You can't put on your resurrection grace coat over the top of your grave clothes.

  I considered having grave clothes here today and having someone demonstrate this, but you can picture it like the grave clothes are smelly, dirty, gross. We put on the resurrection the grace coat over it, and it just doesn't fit. It inhibits our movement. It causes problems for us when we try and wear both coats together.

  We have to put off the old, the anger, the malice, the gossip, the things of our old nature, the things that don't fit, and we have to put on the kindness, the compassion, the humility, the gentleness, the fruits of the spirit that God calls us to. So thinking back to pastor lens message, last week he talked about wearing a puffer jacket.

  On the Gold Coast, on the beach, so we don't need to wear a puffer jacket in Burleigh on the beach most of the year. Okay? Unless you're a 5:00 AM walker and it's freezing, you could do that. But we don't wear a puffer jacket on the beach, not because the jacket is evil, but because it doesn't fit our environment.

  So we are in a new environment of grace, a resurrection environment, and we need to put on the clothes that suit, that environment. We also need to address and push against the gravitational pull of the old nature. So Galatians five verse one says, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Do not let yourselves.

  Be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Some of our old habits are that yoke of slavery, the thing that holds us back. You may have spent 20 years being a worrier, someone who worries about everything. There is a well worn, deep worn path in your mind. Draws you to be a warrior. The gospel doesn't just give us a new path, but it gives us the power to break the old.

  And I'm not gonna give away what Ruth's going to share next week, but talking about the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God in us, that gives us the power to walk the fully alive life. That's what we need. We need that power to be able to make those choices and change those patterns of thinking. It's about renewing our mind, and that's another whole message and another whole teaching about how we go about doing that.

  Lots of people have different practices about renewing our mind, but one of the things I know is to think on good things and on scripture, if I'm worried about things I can have. Scriptures in my mind that I can recite back and I can talk to myself, talk to my soul, and tell that worry and that old boss that I don't need to worry about that anymore because God's got me.

  David was in this place and he was anointed as a as. King as a teenager, but he actually didn't sit on the throne for years following that. He was hunted. He lived in caves. He was a fugitive. He had to put on the heart of a king while still living in the grave of a cave. So I wanna say today, you don't have to feel like a king to stop acting like a fugitive.

  You can make that choice and start to make. Those changes in your mind. David didn't rush the process. He waited for the old house of Saul to be fully buried before he fully reigned. And even in the waiting, he refused to act like the old soul, but chose a new way of life. He made a different choice. So the prison door is wide open.

  It is called our name. We have a seat at the table. Each person with our name on it, we have to decide are we going to continue to live like the old dead dog in lo debar, or are we going to make a choice to have a new way of life? So that we can experience what it means to be fully alive because we can't walk into our future while we stay connected to our grave.

  So we often use excuse cards, I think, in modern day life, or I'm just an angry person. My dad was angry, so I'm angry. That's just how I. Too bad. Or that's just my personality. You can't tell me I can't do that 'cause that's how I was born. It's my personality to do that, or I've always struggled with that, so I'm always going to, so they are excuse cards that we pull up and we say we just use it so that we don't have to change.

  Change is hard. It's hard to change our brain to retrain, to do something different. Our bodies want to do what we've always done. We want the world warm path because it makes us feel safe and comfortable. Similar to Barry, choosing to make another mistake so he could go back to what he had known because change was too hard.

  He couldn't face the reality of what it meant to walk in freedom. We do that. Those are lo debar words and thinking. And today the king has called us to be at his table. So the challenge, I guess for all of us today is to think about. What is a pattern that we have been using or excusing or sharing in our life?

  I wonder if you could think of one thing. Maybe it's small. Maybe it's an excuse about why you can't exercise. That's me. I'm talking about myself. Oh, I hurt my back. That was a long time ago and, but I still haven't got back to that regular exercise I need to be able to do, to be my best self. Okay. Maybe it's old thinking.

  I want you to think about, could you write it down and surrender that to the cross? Maybe it's old thinking about, oh, my family of origin, they did this, and so then I'm like that, or, this happened to me when I was younger and that's why I am the way I am. About you using that excuse of what happened to you, and that's why you are the way you are today means you're not living fully alive at the king's table.

  Not to say that thing wasn't terrible. It. It could be the most awful thing, but you, there comes a point in our lives when we need to choose to say, I'm not having that anymore. I'm not having that excuse attached to me. I want to make a choice to confess it and to write it down and surrender it to the cross, and then take one.

  Concrete step today that fits your new life or your new way of thinking, or what God's called you to. So if your grave is gossip, maybe it's the storytelling maybe the challenge that you wanna write down today is that you will stay silent or you will say to someone, I'm not gonna share that. 'cause that would be gossip.

  Like maybe that's the thing today. Or maybe your grave is isolation. I'm better by myself. Sometimes we do isolation because then we don't get hurt. It's easier to be by myself 'cause people hurt me. Maybe that's an old way of thinking. Something that you have a well warm path and you've chosen that you're actually quite happy by yourself.

  But God calls us into relationship with others. And relationship with him so that we can be our best. Maybe that's your old way of thinking, that you want to recalibrate. And add to what's one concrete step. So maybe for the, if you're in isolation and you've chosen that, maybe it's sending a text to someone, I'm reaching out, Hey, you wanna have a coffee?

  And making that connection and growing through that. So the purpose of our liberty and freedom. So why does God give us the freedom that he gives can be found in Galatians five verse one. It says, it is for freedom. That Christ has set us free stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

  And then in verse 13 says, you, my brothers and sisters were called to be free, but do not use your freedom to indulge in the flesh, rather serve one another. Humbly in love. Christ didn't set us free so we can do whatever we want. Although there is fun in that as well, he set us free so that we wouldn't be subject again to the yoke of slavery.

  So the power in the gospel is actually that it breaks the gravity of our old addictions and thought patterns so that we can bring that and serve one another humbly in love. I wonder if there's an old pattern or an old way of thinking that you shared with a friend and it would really help them to be able to come out of their grave and into a life that is fully alive.

  I wonder this week, if you could think about that pattern and who you could share it with. So that you can serve that person in sharing your story and work together to really love them and call them out of the place where they are stuck. Imagine our church community who didn't just talk about being forgiven, but lived as free people.

  A community that doesn't hold grudges because the old man who is offended is dead. Kev always says that he's dead. People don't get offended. If I'm fully surrendered, I'm not gonna be offended by something someone says because I can surrender that to Jesus. We sometimes live in a pattern of being offended, but if we are fully surrendered to God and who he is, someone can say something and I'm okay because I have a foundation that's set on him and what Jesus thinks about me and not other people.

  So that's a little point there. Yeah, about being forgiven. So we don't hold grudges because the old man or the old self is fully surrendered. I can't be offended com a community where we cheer each other on to live in our new, fully alive life. So live in the resurrection, DNA, of who we are to live in that freedom.

  That comes in, Christ, our freedom is our greatest testimony. It's a recalibration to being fully alive. Our word for the year at our church is recalibrate, and we've been doing that in a lot of different ways with systems and talking about how we're structuring things and lots of practical ways, but there's also a recalibration that needs to happen in our hearts, in the heart of every person.

  So that we can walk into that freedom that Christ has given us and people outside will look and say, Hey, what have they got? Like I see something different because of that freedom that they're walking in. So we can't walk into our future if we are living in our graves. So I wanna encourage you today to grab a hold of that freedom that is.

  Easter Sunday, the freedom that is the resurrection and life of who Jesus is and make those changes to be able to walk into our future so that we live fully alive. Can I pray with you this morning, father? God, I just thank you that the old has gone and that the new has come. The new came when Jesus came.

  Lord, I just thank you Lord. I thank you for the deposit of the Holy Spirit when that transaction takes place, that we can take off our old grave clothes and excuses. And Lord, I pray that you would give us the bravery that's required to forge a new path and a new way of thinking. Lord, I pray for those of us who have been in patterns of thinking for many years, where it's comfortable, Lord, that you would prompt us to, to make that change and then to daily make the change so that we can move to a life that is fully surrendered and live fully alive lives.

  That will be an example to those around us. Father, I just thank you for your faithfulness to us. Lord, I thank you that you are with us, that we have a place at your table, and that we are sons and daughters of the King. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.