Galatians 4:8-31 | Voices that Enslave | Alex Culpepper

We are going to be in Galatians again, Galatians chapter four this morning. Chapter four, verse seven. So I'd ask you to go ahead and open up to there if you don't know me. My name is Alex Culpepper. I am the lead pastor here at Renovation Church, and it is my joy to be able to open up God's Word with us.

If you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus, one of the first things that I want to let you know that is that it is our great heart as a church that you would come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, that you would understand what it means to have your sin forgiven, to place your hope and your faith and your trust in him, that you could know that you have sure promise and foundation, that you could experience his call to be drawn from death into life. And so if you're here this morning and you haven't trusted Jesus, my hope and my prayer is that by the end of today, you will come to know him as your Lord and Savior.

So I'm going to frame this morning with a question. For those of you who have been in the faith for some time or have been walking with Jesus for some time, I want you to think of a person who maybe you've poured into spiritually, or maybe you've been responsible for their development in some way. Maybe you were a mentor to them, or maybe this is parents and grandparents. I'd like you to consider this as well. Kids that you pour into, or maybe you're a small group leader or a Bible study leader, or maybe you've even just simply led somebody into a profession of faith in Jesus.

And that's all good and right, but you had the unfortunate reality of having to watch that person subsequently in some way walk away from the faith. Right? And I just want to tell you that whenever God starts working in someone's life or whenever God starts drawing someone to himself, you need to also know that at the same time, there are forces working to build a wedge between them and you, because you're a godly influence in their life and between them and the Lord ultimately. And so sometimes this. This wedge can come from a friend or a group of friends.

It can sometimes come from a relationship like a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Sometimes this is from a teacher. Sometimes this can be from a family member, maybe an uncle or an aunt or sibling. Sometimes this can be another parent in kind of more complicated relationships. Occasionally what happens is you get somebody who writes something or promotes themselves as some kind of expert on something.

And so like an author or a guru can be this kind of person to drive a wedge as well. And it used to be that all of the stuff that I just named were the basic categories that we'd have to think about for the kinds of people who could drive wedges between those who are being drawn to faith and the godly influences in their life. But technological changes in the last hundred years have just added a huge number of categories that could fill this blank. It could be a TV show, it could be a video game, could be an online personality, somebody who has promoted themselves as an influencer. It could be a chat, like an AI chatbot on their phone.

It could be social media algorithms. Now I say all of this, the point of this is not for me to fear monger and to make you afraid of all of the things that I just said. The point is to say that if it is God's goal to redeem a people for himself, then all the powers of this world that are arrayed against God are literally hell bent over on finding whatever access point they can to put ideas into the minds of people who you influence for the kingdom, so that those ideas might become the tip of a wedge which they seek to drive between them and God. So today we're starting a new series in the book of Galatians. The series is called True Freedom.

This is a two week series and what we're looking is at the core of Paul's concern for writing. He doesn't want the Galatians to fall away from true faith. He doesn't want his time with the Galatians that he spent loving them and investing in them to have been in vain. He doesn't want them to have seemingly found freedom in Christ only to then be enslaved to a different false way of thinking that's brought about to them by false teachers. We've been calling these false teachers Judaizers.

And so what he wants for these Galatian believers is actually for them to persevere in the freedom that they have found in Christ. Now you got Galatians 4, 8. It says here, formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. We have to, we have to pull in a bit of context to remember what's going on here. Last week we examined the verses that are prior to this one, where Paul actually told the Galatians, you used to belong to things called elementary principles of the world.

And we talked about how that word, elementary principles, it's a Greek word, Stoichia and it refers to what are demonic spirits that are behind the false beliefs and systems and ideas in the world. And Paul says you used to be enslaved to them. Paul told them that you used to belong to the demonic order of things, to the kingdom of darkness. That's what you used to belong to. But God has redeemed you.

He has purchased you out of that, rebought you by the blood of Jesus, and he has now placed you into his family. He has now put his spirit inside of you. He has now called you his son, his daughter. He is giving you a heart to learn the art of being close to him and simply being loved by Him. This is all stuff that God has done by purchasing you out of that way of things and bringing you into his family.

And so Paul is now, when he says this in verse 8, Paul is now recalling the elementary principles of the world when he says, before, when you were enslaved to them, when you didn't know God, you were enslaved to those things. And the word that you used to speak of them, you called them gods, right? In just a Greek pagan culture, the gods were in charge of everything, every happening in the world, whether it be the weather or whether it be just the reality of how your life is working. Gods. The gods are responsible for these things.

And you called them gods. This is a direct reference to their former paganism that the non Jewish believers in Jesus had. But then he says you left those things behind when you responded to the gospel. So Paul infers for them, he kind of draws some conclusions for them. Just so you know, the things that you worshiped and you got to a place of acknowledging this, the things that you worshiped were, were not gods.

You used that word for them. But they were not gods. They were in fact demons, right? They were, they were not gracious to you, they were not loving to you, they were for you, slave masters that held you captive. So we can't forget what Paul already said.

It's just so important. We can get hung up on single verses or even small sections of scripture without remembering, like the broader context that they set sit in. And this is part of a bigger argument that Paul has already been developing. So Paul is talking, what he's doing, he's talking about two categories of power. There's the demonic power and the things that sit under demonic power.

And then there's God's power, right? That's the other category. And as he does that, what Paul is doing is he is providing the logical conclusion of what was his initial thought. And his initial thought can be found in Galatians 3:3, where he's creating two categories of operating, two categories of relating to the world. He says in Galatians 3:3, are you so foolish?

Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Right. So those are the first two categories. The two categories that human beings can operate in are the Spirit and the flesh. And the logical conclusion of those two categories is that there's one of them that belongs to the demonic and one of them that belongs to God.

There are powers, he's saying here for us, there are powers in the unseen realm, powers that operate in the realm of the flesh. And now certainly our sin operates in the realm of the flesh. And that is a power that is against us. But in the realm of the flesh is also where evil spirits work and operate. So that's that category, right?

But then in the other category, having begun by the Spirit, you have God's power that interacts with us based on activity done in the Spirit. And so Paul's conclusion is that there are things, the flesh itself, that it belongs to things that are not gods, and that the Holy Spirit belongs to the only true God, and all that is done in the flesh belongs to captivity, and all that is done in the Spirit belongs to freedom. And so now, later on, Paul is going to get more explicit and helpful with us and detailed about what this word the flesh is. But I just want to give us a bit of grounding for what we're saying. When we say this phrase, the flesh, we're generally talking about our tendency towards sin, the fallenness of the state that we live in.

But if we could kind of sum up in a way that is understandable for us what the flesh is, we could say simply the flesh is this. The flesh is everything you do when you're trying to be your own God. That's what the flesh is. And when you live by the flesh, it is a life full of exhaustion and ignorance. Now, let's face the truth.

It is really enticing to be your own God. Like, there is something that is very appealing about that. Whether whether that being your own God means you propping up your own ability to impress others, or whether that being your own God means you propping up your religious performance for God to somehow make God impress with you, or whether that means living for yourself to indulge your every whim and find some sen of satisfaction, or whether that's striving to give your kids the good life, or whether that's trying to be for others. The ideal picture of a life that they ought to emulate or fill in the blank, right? We could keep filling in the blanks of ways that we try to be our own gods.

And those things, when they become ultimate to you, will at first first seem very appealing because you look at all that you can accomplish for yourself, and we actually can accomplish quite a bit, for what it's worth.

But they will eventually exhaust you because what they lead you to is to becoming entirely dependent on your own effort or. And at the same time, they will also blind you into having to ignore the truth about God or the truth about yourself or the truth about others. Because if you admit the truth, it will cause your false idea of who sits on the throne of your life to fall down and crumble. And so you either have to be ignorant or you have to be exhausted, or you have to be both. That's the flesh.

That's the logical conclusion of the flesh. And what it draws out to is that you end up enslaved. And so these are. He's drawing out these conclusions for us about the flesh and the Spirit. And in what we read in verse eight, he says, we were enslaved to a kingdom the flesh inherits.

We were enslaved to those who are not gods. And so it goes on in verse nine. And he says this, but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, and even in this, there's a bit of like, you have a relationship with the God of all gods. You did not have relationships with these other things that captivated your life. You served them, you bent the knee to them, they enslaved you, they entrapped you.

But you both know God and are known by the one true God. Now that you've come to know him, how can you turn back again to weak, worthless elementary principles of the world whose slaves you now want to be once more? These elementary principles, these are the elements. They're the highest order of the world system. Now, there are some who say, and this is important, I need to let you know this, because if you hear other Bible teachers, they might tell you that this word, elementary principles, it represents ways of thinking, false ways of thinking.

And in that that is true in part, there are ways of thinking that create captivity for us. But when Paul attaches that little phrase to the end of elementary principles, and he says of the world, he's identifying things that govern the way the world works. And specifically, if you were to go to Colossians chapter two, I'm not going to go there now. But if you were to go to Colossians chapter two, you would find that he speaks again of the elementary principles of the world in chapter two. And his conclusion of that argument is that the elementary principles of the world are the hierarchy of demonic forces that are in the world.

And so when you apply Paul's logic from other places, when he uses that phrase weak and worthless things, he's speaking about weak and worthless spiritual powers that claim to have power, but actually when compared to God, have no power at all. They speak lies to appeal to your flesh, that to appeal to your own desire to be your own God. So part of what I want to do as we think about these wedge driving forces between those that we develop and God, is I want to ask this question, how do people return to captivity after tasting freedom? Like, what does that look like? And the first way that this happens is that they are driven by the flesh.

Whether the flesh means power that's sought out through occultic ritual, or whether the flesh means power of a life given over to self indulgence or a life given over to self promotion, or whether the flesh means striving, your own striving to make yourself acceptable to God. All of these in their own unique ways, are the whispers of demons to puff us up in pride and help us sit on the throne of our own lives. And so Paul, as he's talking about this, he is truly confounded, like he does not understand what is going on. He says, you have met the God of all gods in the place of humility, to receive gift from him, to receive the experience and power of the truth and the truth of the Holy Spirit. But you're now returning to gods that are not gods.

And what we witness happening in Paul, because he talks about being further on, being perplexed and being confounded and not getting it. This doesn't make sense to him. He says, I wish I could be with you, but I can't be with you right now in the midst of this. And what we're witnessing is what happens in every person who has to watch someone that they love depart from true faith in Christ. He's saying, like, how after having met the God who has welcomed you, can you be enamored with something that is so empty and powerless?

So he goes on to explain himself. In verse 10, he says, you observe days and months and seasons and years. I'm afraid I may have labored over you in vain. This reference to days and months and seasons and years is reference to the feasts and the patterns of living that were set out the Jewish calendar There was adherence to the Jewish calendar, part of when the Judaizers came in and they started teaching their false gospel. They said, in order to be saved, you must become Jews, which means living your life according to the Jewish calendar.

Paul says, you're now doing this. You're listening to these voices and you're doing what they say in order that your own effort can somehow prove you before God. He says in verse 11, I'm afraid that I may have labored over you in vain.

He equates those who are seeking to obtain righteousness through the Jewish law. This is actually what he's doing. He's helping us put the picture together. He's saying, those who would seek to obtain righteousness through the Jewish law.

It's the same thing you did when you were worshiping false gods. Like it's the same thing. It operates according to the same principles.

I'd love to tell you that. That Paul is not the first person to even suggest this. Jesus said it before Paul said it. In John 8:44, Jesus speaking to the Pharisees and the way that they treated the law and the way that they made it about effort and trying to be impressive. In John 8:44, he said, you Pharisees are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires.

He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. So Paul's concern is that some of these Galatians are going to end up in the same boat that Jesus was identifying here. And so in the next verses, what he does is he kind of moves into a bit of a personal plea with them. He leverages his own relationship with them as kind of a way to calling them back to the truth.

And so in verse 12, he says, Brothers, I entreat you, become as I am, for I also have become as you are. You did me no wrong, you know, it was because of a body, bodily ailment that I preached the Gospel to you at first, verse 14. And though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus himself, himself. So Paul here, it seems that there's something that happened, that he was either wounded or sick or ill in some way through his journey. And the Galatian believers, every town that he went to throughout Galatia, they actually had to provide significant care for him.

As he resided in that town with them and proclaimed the gospel. And so as they cared for him and provided space for him in their homes and provided food and lodging, and all of this, Paul provides for them the declaration of the beauty and the wonder of the gospel of Jesus. And so they display to him hospitality, and he gives them message and truth about Jesus, and they come to believe and respond to the gospel. And Paul feels loved and cared for by these people. And you can see how this would create a beautiful kind of symbiotic relationship where Paul feels very close to them.

And these are precious and intimate moments. And out of these moments, Paul is kind of trying to draw their attention back and speak to them like plainly about the truth of who Jesus is and what he came to do. And so in verse 15, what then has become of your blessedness? My goodness. Am I like.

Am I making up this stuff that happened? Like, you were loving me so well and I was investing in you, and you were listening to me and you were wanting to hear the things that I had to say. For I testify to you that if possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me. Have I then become your enemy now by telling you the truth? So this is very personal to Paul because these false teachers who are telling them to follow the law of Moses and somehow prove themselves acceptable by becoming fully fledged Jews according to the law, these people who are telling them that are directly contradicting the message that Paul gave to them.

So how does this happen? Verse 17 says, they make much of you, but for no good purpose. They want to shut you out. Shut you out of what? Well, shut you out of the grace that God has shut you out of the kingdom, shut you out of receiving the gifts, that God has shut you out from experiencing the rest that it is to know that you are a son or.

Or a daughter. They want to shut you out that you make much of them. You see, there's this social dynamic that happens with those who teach falsely about who Jesus is. False teachers and false leaders who either preach a message that falls short or live a life that is inconsistent with freedom in Christ. There's this social dynamic that happens where those teachers are remarkably concerned about their own platform.

And so being concerned about their platform, they will speak things that the people who listen to them want to hear. Those teachers will maybe even treat their own personal repentance as a last resort. Those teachers know how to say the right things to the right people. Those teachers know how to make people feel good. Those teachers will fight to preserve their platform and their influence at costs.

And so Paul says, can you just listen to what's happening? They're speaking flattery over you so that they can maintain you to prop themselves up. Could you just pay attention to that? Look at their character, look at their heart, look at the way that they're operating. He says something kind of similar in second Timothy 4, 3 as a warning to Timothy, but also subsequently to the church.

He says, for the time will come when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears. They will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions. They will have things that they want to hear, and then they will find people who will tell them the things that they want to hear. So how do people return to captivity? The second of our points in this is that they find teachers to, as Paul said, suit their own passions.

So we need to know that the word of God ought to confront us with some regularity.

One of the main things, like there are many things, several things that Jesus teaches that the Holy Spirit does or that the Holy Spirit will do after he ascends into heaven. One of the main things that the Holy Spirit does is convict us of sin, right? To reveal to us when our own hearts or our own actions are out of alignment with what God is trying to accomplish in the world, right? So you ought to hear me preach or any preacher that you listen to, you ought to hear the people that you listen to preach things from the pulpit that bring you into a place of self examination like the word of God ought to bring you into a place of humility before God. You should hear teachers of the Word who encourage you to be broken over your sin.

You should have people in your life who are willing to speak uncomfortable truths to you so that you can further and better pursue God. And this speaking, this, this drawing attention, this, this speaking in truth and love, this is not heaviness for the sake of heaviness. This is heaviness for the sake of freedom, right? Teachers and leaders who love you, they should affirm you for things that are good to affirm, but they should also call you into greater surrender to Jesus and call you away from your pride and call you into humility.

And if people are falling away from the truth, you can almost always connect it to a voice or voices that are speaking directly to their passions and giving them permission to sit on the throne of their own lives.

And Paul, instead of speaking flattery to them, he speaks plainly to them. And the degree to which a person is drifting into captivity is reflected in how they respond to the confrontation of plain truth. What do they do when truth is plainly presented to them? Verse 18. Paul goes on and says, it is always good to be made much of for a good purpose, and not only when I am present with you, my little children, for who I am again, in the anguish of childbirth.

Again, he's kind of referencing back to the relationship that they had. And you made much of me, and I made much of you. And those were for good purposes. Notice that these false teachers are not doing it for good purposes. I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you see, it's wrong to be made much of when it's.

And when it's happening for not the right reasons. And so the implicit kind of understanding of what Paul is saying here is when it's happening, when flattery is taking place, you need to be discerning, is there a good reason behind this, or is there a bad reason behind this? Or is it questionable? And do I just need to kind of ask the Lord and pay attention to what's going on? Paul's concern is that the Galatian believers will believe these Judaizers, that they will abandon true faith in Christ because they have let the flattery from these teachers get the best of them.

So from here, what happens is that Paul is now going to use an illustration, an illustration from a story in the Old Testament. And he does this. He uses this illustration to call people back into freedom. And because of the reality of time, I am not going to walk through every aspect of this illustration, but I want to highlight key points, parts of it, so we understand the foundation of what Paul is saying here. So in Galatians 4:22 and 23, he says this.

He says, for it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. And the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through the promise. So the story that he's referencing takes place in the book of Genesis. So Abraham had a wife, Sarai. And Abraham and Sarai, they were promised that God would give them a son, even though they were very old, like Sarah was beyond childbearing years.

Sarah, it says that Sarah laughed when she heard this story, that God was going to provide her a child, but God gave a promise. And so Abraham believed God's promise, and they followed God. And then at a certain point, they realized that this child's not coming. And so Sarah suggests to Abraham Hey, I have this maidservant. Why don't you get her pregnant like, and maybe that will be the way that God fulfills His promise.

And so what Abraham did is he listened to that and he tried to help God's plan along in his own power. In other words, Abraham took the place of God, right? Like God, you're just like, I don't see it happening. Maybe you need. Maybe you need my help a little bit.

God does not need our help to keep his promises. God just wants us to trust him. Several years later, so Ishmael the son, Ishmael the son, the one he refers to as the son of the slave, Ishmael was born. And several years after that, Isaac came along, being born of Sarah according to God's promise, miraculously, even though she was beyond childbearing years, God did it. God did just what he said he would do according to the promise.

Paul's point is this. These Judaizers are telling you that God needs your help. Instead of leading you to rest and to glory and to find strength and hope and sustenance and peace in what God has promised to you. To pull life from the gift that God has already given, to just trust his word to be sufficient, and that he will do and has done all that he said he will do and has done. Would you just trust that?

But the Judaizers don't want you to simply trust that. They are telling you that God needs your help. So verse 30, he goes on and says, but what does Scripture say? Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. So in this story, what happened is that ultimately it was figured out like God said, hey, Abraham, this isn't going to go well if, you know, one of the mothers of your children and her son are here with you along with your wife and your child.

And so you need to send Hagar the slave woman, you need to send her away with her child. Now, I want you to know, God saw Hagar in the midst of her suffering, and God made promises to her and cared for her in the midst of that as well. God compensated for Abraham's failure in trying to help God out, right? But Scripture says, cast out the slave woman and her son, and the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. They have different inheritances.

And Isaac is the son of promise, right? Isaac is the one who has been given a promise. And so what he says is, brothers. Now again, I didn't go through the whole thing. But what he does in this is he says the Judaizers and the law that they are trying to put over as a yoke around your neck, they're like Hagar, which is the most offensive thing that you could say to Jewish people, right, Because Isaac, their ancestor, is the son of the promise.

But Paul says, actually they're descended from Ishmael. That's the implication of what he's saying. But anyway, so he says in verse 31, so, brothers, we who have faith in God's promise, who know that we don't need to help God out in order to receive the promise that he's giving us. So, brothers, we are not children of the slave, but of the free woman. The point of Paul's illustration here is to call the Galatians into a ruthlessness with their discernment.

If there are those who are telling you that you need to help yourself out to get in nearness to God and to receive the benefits of relationship with them, he's saying you need to cut those voices off, stop listening to them. Would you discern for yourself? Would you listen to the voices that they're listening to? And so this is. This is what you need to understand.

The Judaizers were getting the Galatians to stop trusting God and to trust themselves instead. And so the drift into slavery, this is our main point. The drift into slavery comes when we stop trusting God. Paul says that everything that would take you out of this dependence, God, this trust in God, everything that would take you away from trusting him to be all that he says he will be, it is a threat to your spiritual life and it needs to be removed. Because what it does is it constantly seeks to usurp God's place on the throne of your heart.

And everyone that you or I have ever had to watch drift or even turn from true faith in Christ has gotten there because they have been enticed by their own passions and by some other voices that allow someone else to sit on the throne that belongs to God. Okay, so what? I have two for us this morning. Number one, the key testing question is whose power does this way of life rely on? As I've called you to discern, part of Paul's whole framework as he's thinking about this is you need to ask whose power is required to do this?

There are many different distortions of faithfulness to Christ. Some distortions will say something like this, or at least think in a way like this, that God's grace is a license for me to never deal with my sin that I can indulge. Like, thank you God for forgiving me. I can now indulge whatever I want to indulge. Like, I don't really need to read the Bible.

I don't really need to pray that God's not holding that over me. And so what they do is they corrupt this idea of grace to say that I never really have to pursue holiness, I never really have to go after God wholeheartedly, that I can carry out any passion. And you know what? Because of what Jesus did, I am entitled to God's forgiveness. That's treating what Jesus did as a license.

There's a false belief in that way of thinking.

And the false belief is this. It's that I am meant to be satisfied by my passions and my comfort.

And if you are meant to be satisfied by passions and comfort, then your life is reliant on passions and comfort. And my prayer for you is that God will allow you to experience in this life the weight of how fraudulent it is to let your passions and comfort sit on the throne of your life so that your heart will be grieved over the emptiness of false gods and so that you might actually surrender the throne of your heart to Christ to let the spirit of God become satisfaction for you, to let the word of God become your sustenance. Some distortions might say something like this, that it's your kind of the flip side of the one that I just mentioned. It's your responsibility to impress God with your religious principle performance, right? It's your responsibility to do the rituals, to go through the motions.

And you every moment you don't do them, you put your faith in jeopardy by not doing them. Follow the rules, wear the right clothes, show up to the right events, say the right words, and instead of making your life with God overflow from gratitude for the gift that you've been given, what they do is they make your life with God burdensome with rules and commitment and heavy handedness that rely on your power to come through for God.

And we want lives, we want to live lives that are characterized by trust and gratitude that God has given me everything I need for today, that God will give me everything I need for tomorrow, and that he has already secured the greatest of my forever needs in Jesus. So the more that we live in this place of gratitude, his power actually transforms us from the inside out and makes us responsive to the next steps that he wants to take. So as you think about any way of life that a person would put in front of you, you have to ask the question, whose power does this way of life rely on? So what, number two, would you discern and eliminate wedge voices.

Anyone or anything that would build a wedge between you and God, or you and godly behavior, or you and confidence in the Bible, or you and your God pleasing relationships, or you and even your spiritual authority, right? All of these. Like, there are conversations in your home that you need to stop having because as you let your mind run and speak out things, you begin saying things that are actually driving a wedge in between you and your relationship with God, right? There are groups in your school and workplace where you will walk up and you will entertain the conversations that they're having. And you actually need to walk away from those conversations.

Conversations because they are driving a wedge between you and your relationship with God. There are some people who for a season you may even need to like to take a break from, to remove from your life. There are relationships that may need to actually just be broken off. There are people you are trying to impress who have no concern for the things of God. And so what I'm trying to call you to do is not just say like, break away from everyone who's a bad influence, but because we are called to influence the world for who God is, we're called to shine the light of God into our relationships.

But you need to discern the influence that these voices have over you and do whatever it takes to cut their power off from over you. And you need to know that some like this will be excruciating. This is never easy when God calls you to do it.

And you also need to know like, it doesn't matter, like, oh, they have a good heart though. Like, saying that somebody has a good heart is our excuse to entertain all sorts of wickedness in the process. So people are often just not aware of the spirit that is controlling or influencing them. And the invitation for us is to find the place of gratitude and resting and trusting that God is who he says he is and that that would be the place from which power to live the life that he calls us to live would flow. So, church, I'd invite you to pray with me, please, God.

In recent weeks you have been pressing on my heart. The reality that time is short, Jesus, that your coming is near.

Lord, we believe that you are returning. And my heart for your church is that you would not return to a church whose lamps have burnt out, who have given up on waiting, who have given up on watching and pursuing and making ourselves ready for the return of the one who loves us.

So, Holy Spirit, my ask is that you would fall upon each person in this room to let you work into their lives the holiness that you desire to bring about, the preparation that you desire to bring about the loving and the longing of you. It is your love and your goodness and your kindness that transforms, transforms us from the inside out. Lord, would we learn to let you just live in your place on the throne of our hearts knowing that you've given us gift, you've given us privilege, and we simply receive it and let that become the most important thing in our lives?

God, would you teach us what it looks like, God, and would you give us discernment, discernment over ourselves to know which ways our hearts are being pulled, discernment over those we're called to lead and invest in, to see and to give word of warning at the appropriate time?

Holy Spirit, would you fill us that we may have the true and blessed experience of freedom from captivity grounded in the love that you've shared with us? So, Jesus, we honor you with this space and time. As we turn our hearts and our attention to the table, would you allow us to stand on firm foundation as we exalt you into the place of rulership of our lives? We ask this in Jesus name, Amen.