The Starting Point of the Christian Life | The Fullness | Luke Humbrecht

Discover the life-changing truth about your identity in Christ and what it means to be truly blessed by God. This powerful message explores Ephesians chapter 1 and reveals how believers are blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. Learn why understanding your blessed identity is crucial for overcoming anxiety, comparison, and the constant need for validation. Many people struggle with chronic blessing deficit, constantly seeking approval through performance or achievements. This teaching shows how to break free from that cycle by understanding your complete blessing package in Christ, including being chosen, adopted, redeemed, and sealed by the Holy Spirit. Explore the three biblical components of blessing: seeing others with intentional presence, speaking life-giving words, and giving your life away through acts of love. Discover practical ways to receive God's blessing daily and extend that blessing to others in your family, workplace, and community. This message addresses common struggles with self-worth, identity crisis, spiritual depression, and finding purpose in life. Perfect for anyone seeking to understand their value in God's eyes, overcome insecurity, or learn how to bless others effectively. Topics covered include spiritual identity, biblical blessing, overcoming comparison, finding security in Christ, and practical Christian living. Whether you're struggling with self-doubt or wanting to become a more effective blessing to others, this message provides biblical foundation and practical application for living as a blessed child of God.

This sermon was recorded at a Sunday morning gathering at Church of the Lookout in Longmont, Colorado.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast. Church of the Lookout is in Boulder, Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love. Visit us online at thelookout.church. Alright. He's excited to be at church today. Thank you. Thank you for those woos. I appreciate that. Um, so today we're going to open the scriptures. If you have your Bible, open up to Ephesians chapter 1. Ephesians chapter 1. We are gonna start today a longer journey through the book of Ephesians. Any Ephesians fans out there? So, some of you who are maybe newer to the scripture, this is a great time to dig into the scriptures, okay? Ephesians is this this small letter, it's six chapters in the New Testament, and it's written by the Apostle Paul. We'll talk about that here in a second. And my my encouragement to you today, I just want to ask you to commit over the next several weeks to just to journey with us, to read through Ephesians multiple times and just passage by passage and pray through Ephesians and ask questions about the words. And we're gonna journey through that together and explore that together. And my hope is that the gospel continues to um to open up and expand within our hearts. So let's jump in to Ephesians chapter 1, starting in verse 3. And this is a good one, by the way. It's all good, but this is a really good one. And uh, feel free to get excited as we read. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time. Everybody say, fullness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. In him. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be to the praise of his glory. In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory. Can you guys say it with me? This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Come on, somebody give a shout to him today. You have been chosen, adopted. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And Jesus, as we open your word today, we thank you just to expand it within us. God, remind us of what we've forgotten. Remind us of what has been true about us even before we took our first breath. Remind us of what you have done and what you will do for all of time. We thank you, Jesus, as we submit to your word to speak to us today. Amen. Amen. So this series, thematically, we're gonna call the fullness. And it was in the fullness of time that Jesus came. And he came that we might grow into the fullness of the measure of the stature of Christ, as we read in Ephesians 4. And Paul would pray in Ephesians 3 that uh he prays for us that we would have the strength to comprehend, to know everything that Christ has done, that we may be filled with all of the fullness of God. Who wants to be filled with the fullness of God? I think sometimes we are tempted to be satisfied with the taster, the Costco sample of Jesus. But that's not the invitation of the scripture. The invitation is you were made to grow in capacity for the Son of God, that you would be the temple of the living God, and that the fullness of his life would be made manifest inside of you. And my prayer for us as a church, my prayer for myself and for my family, my prayer as we journey through this is that we would, we would be ruined for anything less than the fullness of life in Christ. What we need on this planet, what we need in the church is a people filled with the fullness of Jesus. And that means we are constantly baptized and permeated with the truth of who he is and who we are in him. And we wake up every day with that one obsession of God, let your fullness be made manifest in my life. And so we're, as we enter this passage, it's it's amazing. This letter was written in a Roman prison around AD 60 to 63. And Paul, he's doing his best in a Roman prison to pen a letter to this group of house churches in Ephesus. He had no idea this letter would be shared 2,000 years later all around the world. He had a few dozen people in mind. You gotta remember, at this point in time, it's not a huge amount of people. This is a collection of house churches, and yet he he writes one of the most masterful, theologically rich letters because he wants the substance of Christ to even be established in this small group of people. He said, I want this to get inside of you. And what place does he start? He starts with a word of blessing, blessing God and being reminded of the blessing that we have received in God. And you can feel it in Paul's being as he's writing that this is not a small thing, this is a cosmic thing, that something has happened in the fullness of time, that time was ripe, all things converged to where when Jesus came, he came to pull back together what God intended to be together, which was heaven and earth, united as one. And he said, It has come, this thing has happened. And if you have ears to hear, you hear Paul just saying this, this thing is explosive. This thing is, you cannot contain it. There is a fullness, there is a life, there is this radiance to this whole thing. Paul is, it's not unlike him just taking us by the head and shaking us. Do you get it? Like you would to one of your kids. He's like, you guys wake up to what God has done in Christ. And so he starts with this idea of fullness. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. Paul begins by blessing God, which doesn't sound completely out of the ordinary. Um, and even in the ancient world, everybody was used to blessing God, but for all kinds of different purposes. NT Wright. He said that the ancient world knew about praising the gods for their power and superiority, but the ancient Israelites blessed him because he had blessed them. It was not a foreign thing to bless the gods, and even in Ephesus, you have to remember that this new group of believers in the church, they had just come out of the goddess worship, the goddess Artemis, who is a the goddess of abundance and provision and security. They were worshiping and blessing her all the time that they may be blessed, and maybe if they blessed her well enough or earnestly enough, if they just raised their voices loud enough and prayed loud enough, maybe she would hear and extend to them abundance and provision and security and blessing. And so they were gripped by kind of rituals and formulas and sorcery and superstition, a fear of the gods, so much so that we read in even in Acts chapter 19 as the gospel reaches uh Ephesus, as it's being established there, there was a coming to Jesus. Once they experienced the power of God, it was so powerful that they had a book burning session. They took all of the magic books and sorcery books, all the witches and sorcerers and Ephesus said, These are no longer good. They got a pile and had a burn party as a worship service to God. Like these are no longer any good because we've met the God who blesses us, who's already blessed us in Christ. How good is it that we don't bless God in order to get blessing? We bless him because he's already blessed us. And this is our starting point, guys. There is no other further journey in Christ until we've seen and recognized that we have been blessed in him. The old system was are the gods happy today? Is he in a good mood today? What did I do? Did I do enough yesterday? Am I cursed? But Ball says, no, you are blessed, you are saints, you are adopted. Okay, that's great. So what do we have to do? Nothing, you are blessed. Okay, which blessings? All of them. Name one, it's yours in Christ Jesus. Great. Well, how do we stay blessed? You are already blessed, and you will always be blessed because you are hidden in Christ. Come on. You are hidden. You have been enveloped into Christ, which means that what is true about Christ is true about you. What is true about Jesus is now true about you because you are in Christ. Do you guys see that? His very belovedness is the new package through which God the Father sees you. That's how hidden in Christ you are. You are blessed. This matters to us. Here's why this matters and should matter to us. This is maybe not a new idea to many of us, but it's one that we have to be reminded of daily, potentially multiple times a day. Because we put our hope in so many things. Do we not? As a culture, we put our hope in so many things. And even now, every day, these things that we put our hope in, and the people that we put our hope in, the things that we trust in, are oftentimes exposed to not be what we thought they were. And I feel the weight of this even as I woke up this morning, even as I pay attention to the news cycle this last week. The weight of disappointment can be paralyzing. Disappointment in governments, disappointment in leaders, disappointment in sadly, church leaders. Scandals, injustice towards the poor, towards children, financial concern, instability, volatility. We wake up and realize all the things that we're hoping just stay stable. All of a sudden, they're not as stable as we thought they were. And I think what we have to practice in the church as believers is standing on something more firm than the world that we're living in. Because when our outward world crumbles, we need an inner reality that we can stand on. When our outward world is not what we thought it was, and the people that we trusted in aren't what we thought, who they thought we think they were. There has to be something more certain, established on the inside so that we have a firm footing in the world that we live in. Where does that come from? It comes from knowing that something has happened in Christ for all of time that will never be robbed or taken or stolen. It will never be shaken from us, even when the kingdoms of the earth are shaken. We are in a kingdom that will never be shaken. So we have to wake up and baptize our thinking and our mind, immerse ourselves in what has happened in God. If we want to live a life that is able to be a blessing in the world that we live in, we are blessed. Somebody just, just every everybody say it out loud. Say it. I am blessed. I am blessed in Christ. And this phrase in Christ is just gonna be just it's just on repeat. It's on repeat all the way through the book of Ephesians. Something has happened in Christ that we get to be a part of. So let's just back up real quick. What is blessing? Can we talk about that for a second? Because there's a lot of different phrases that we use in our culture. Blessing is not flattery, it's not just wishful thinking. It's not like in the South, oh, you know, uh, you know, bless their heart, right? I mean, it's not like this, it's not this uh cute, sentimental, we don't actually mean it when we say it type of thing. Like blessing in scripture is powerful, it's profound, it goes way deeper. It's the operating system of the kingdom of God is blessing. Um, Dallas Willard said it like this. He said, blessing is the projection of good into the life of another. Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another. We read this from the very beginning of scripture when it said that God created the heavens and the earth, he created everything, and he didn't just walk away, he created everything, then he blessed it. This is good. And he projected good into what he created, even us. And so that's why it's very fitting, even in the new creation, when we're, you know, when we're remade in Christ and the world is being remade. What Paul is saying is here, there's a new kind of blessing. God blessed us at creation, but then when he recreated us, he blessed us again. And in Ephesians 1, this blessing looks like a lot of different things. Let me just kind of run through this list. He blessed us, which means what? That we are chosen, which we are made holy and blameless in love. This blessing means we are adopted, received into the family of God. We are redeemed, forgiven. We are lavished with grace. We are brought into God's plan to unite heaven and earth in Christ. We are now given an inheritance. We are sealed by the Spirit. We are blessed in the beloved. How good it is to be blessed in the beloved. And here's why this matters, because we project into the world what we see and believe about ourselves. This is why this matters, says. Do you realize that your life, what what you actually bring into the world, it's not your words necessarily, it's not what you think it is, it's not the exterior. You project into the world what you've come to believe and see even about yourself and your own identity in Christ or lack thereof. This is why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when he was doing his work in the civil rights movement, he used this phrase, the beloved community. And he said, Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require qualitative change in our souls as well as quantitative change in our lives. And he was talking about just the something new that needed to happen even to reform the injustice that was taking place with racial equality, racial injustice. And he said, we need a belovedness that actually is qualitative. And how many of you guys know that blessing, when we enter into blessing, it there's a quality about it, it changes qualitatively who we are from the inside out. And it gives us a substance from which we live into the world that we're given. So one of the problems though, as we talk about blessing, some of us come from backgrounds like this was not the operating system of our home. Or even the churches we're part of, or the groups that we are part of. Some of us, you know, we just didn't have, we don't have a roadmap for what that looks like. Very few of us wake up every morning thinking, I am blessed in the beloved. Is that the first thought that comes to your mind when you wake up in the morning? Or is it, oh, I gotta get back to that person? Or dang, I've got to go pay that bill within the next couple days, or so on, or so forth. When we wake up, rather than rather than being waking up into blessing, we're all we're often just waking up into chasing something. We're chasing proof, we're trying to feel enough, earn enough, live up to, compare, perform well enough. If we weren't blessed by our father or mother or leaders in our lives, then we are so wired, so hardwired for blessing that we will find it in any particular way we can. And this is part of the human condition. Is if we if we're not blessed in the Father and blessed in the community that He's given us to, we will try to find blessing in all kinds of ways. We will compare ourselves endlessly to people online, people we will actually never meet, and yet somehow they have authority to speak into our sense of value and worth in our lives. We will chase success however we define that. We will chase belonging and significance however we find that. We will chase abundance. Its remedy can only be one thing, which is blessing. So much of the anxiety, I believe, that that we deal with on a day-to-day basis comes from a lack of awareness of how blessed we are in Christ. And this is why even Jesus, we talked about this before many times, Jesus, even before he starts his public ministry, he's baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and the Spirit. And the Father's voice comes from heaven and says, This is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased. And it was out of this blessing that Jesus moved into the work that he was given in the world. And he extended the blessing. And people felt blessed by Jesus because he lived in blessing. Jesus turns to people and blesses people who don't look blessed, and he says, You are blessed, and it's possible to be blessed even if when your life doesn't look blessed. Which is why in the Beatitudes he would go and he would say, Blessed are those who are poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst, blessed are those who are persecuted. Those aren't particularly already blessed people, but he said, There is a way of living in the Father's blessing that even if your life looks unblessed, you can still live as blessed. And that's a good word for you today, too, by the way. How do you talk about your own life? Do you talk about your life and your well-being as blessed? I'm not saying living in denial of the pain and the grief and the things that I'm not saying that. I'm just saying there is a way of understanding that everything in your life is still encompassed in Christ. It's still blessed. And so you can speak blessing over every part of your life. And some of you, I mean, even like God, He created the whole world and then He blessed it. How many of you guys are blessing your own work? How many of you go to work on a Monday and you work and you bless the work that you produce? How many of you bless the work that God has given to you at the end of a workday? How many of you come home to your home and bless your home and bless your kids and bless your friends and bless your community and bless your food? It's the life, it's the practice of those who have been blessed in God. We find ways to extend blessing to everything we touch and see. Even the very land under our feet we bless because it's our agency in God. So blessing is what we're given, and delight is a byproduct of blessing. If you want to live in more delight, then you need to grow in both receiving and giving blessing. When you bless others, you will you cannot help but feel delighted. Have you ever blessed somebody and Been in a bad mood? It's not gonna happen, guys. Come on. You bless like bless your enemy, bless somebody in your life, bless a friend, and you still be in a bad mood? No, it's like it's not gonna happen. It's like somebody said, Have you ever tried to ride a wave runner while not smiling? You know what I'm saying? It's like you could try. But man, you're gonna give it five seconds, man, and it's gonna change everything. Why? Blessing is what we're made for. So when it comes to blessing, here's what we need to remember blessing can be practiced. Blessing has components to it. Ronald Rollheiser in his book Sacred Fire talks about kind of three components of blessing. Um and again, another definition, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it like this: a blessing is a visible, perceptible, effective proximity of God. Visible, perceptible, effective proximity of God. You're extending the goodness and the presence of God in your life. So Ronald Rollheiser says this blessing starts with seeing someone. Blessing is seeing someone. To bless is to offer presence that says, I notice you, you're matter, you matter, and you're not invisible. You're not invisible. This is why in the Old Testament, when when when when they pray to God and they ask God to turn his face towards them, God, let your face be turned. It was synonymous, your face was synonymous with presence. Let your face be turned. It was the same thing, let your presence come near, because the a face is the same thing as a presence. And so blessing is becoming a kind of people that we turn our face towards each other. And it's the power of being seen, it's the power of looking somebody in the eyes and saying, I see you, I notice you. You're not invisible to me, and you're not invisible to God. I love that our kids are hardwired this way too. They come into a room and they're looking for blessing right away, aren't they? Little boys and little girls are a lot different. My daughter will come into the room with this dress, and her thing is, Daddy, look at me. She'll go and change her clothes again, come back down, Daddy, look at me. But the boys, it's different. It's they come in the room and say, Daddy, watch this. Watch this. You know, they want to be seen for what they're able to do. And little girls want to be seen for how they appear and who they are. It's but it's it's a desire hardwired that I want somebody to see me and to notice me from the inside out. And this is what we get to do. This is what God has done with us. He looks at us in the eyes and says, I chose you. You're the one I want. You're the one. I opted for you. That's why we adopted our second son, and that was I was looking at that. We're in the adoption process, it's just every day was the decision to choose him, just to choose him. We're choosing him through the paperwork, we're choosing him through all these meetings, we're choosing him through finding all the legal ways to bring him into our home. And this word to to adopt actually means to opt for. I you are my option. You are my one, you're the option I pick. How many of you know that you are God's option? He chooses you, not because you were the last in line, but because before the foundation of the world, he knew that you were an idea in his very being that he wanted to create unto this earth. Let that get inside of you. He sees you. I love that the late John Freeman, who many of you know was just this beloved member of our community for so many years. Every morning I would come in on a Sunday morning. He wouldn't even say hi to me. He would just say, You are blessed in Christ Jesus. He put his hand on me and just started saying, You are an amazing man of God. I see you. You're the man of the moment, and I love you, and God has blessed you. He wouldn't even say hi. He just, you just bless me just from the start. In a way that only he could do that. When I try to do that, people think it's weird. But he did it. And I was like, this is the best thing ever. My day is like already better because of John Freeman. He's he saw me and he knew what he saw when he saw me. Do you know what you see when you see others? Do you know what God sees when he sees you? You are blessed. So blessing is seeing somebody, blessing is speaking well of someone. We use our words to build a home in somebody's heart. Words create worlds, is one said. And so when we use our words to say what we see, we project good into those that we are with. We project good into those. So what do you see? I mean, so what how faithful are you to project good into those that you see and that you're spending your time with? It's amazing that we think people can hear our thoughts. They don't hear your thoughts. You have to say what you're thinking. You have to say it out loud. And it's amazing when you say what you see, it has life. And so we don't have to be we don't have to exaggerate, we don't have to be inauthentic, we don't have to just make up things to flatter somebody. It's just we, if you've been blessed in Christ, you have a new worldview because you project what you believe about yourself into others. And so however you see yourself as what you see in others. So, and this works on both ways. If you see yourself as blessed, it's really easy to bless others because you see how much of a blessing they are. When you see yourself as lacking constantly every day, then you will see the lack in others. When you see yourself as I am ashamed of who I am, then you will see you will be ashamed of others and you'll project shame into the life of others. If you are critical about yourself, you will be critical of others. The very degree that you talk to yourself is what you bring into your relationships. You guys get that? So this is why this has everything to do with the lives that we live. Your greatest responsibility in the kingdom of God and on this planet is to live as a blessed son and daughter of the Most High God. Come on, thank you for that. Amen. So blessing is also giving away some of your life. It's not just seeing, it's not just saying, it's actually a giving away. It actually costs something of us attention, time, forgiveness, generosity, advocacy to stand up for others that need it. You share your life so that others can have more life. That's sitting with somebody who is lonely, that's paying attention to somebody who's overlooked, that's offering help without being asked. That's about employing or empowering somebody who needs an opportunity in your life. You've been you have power in your life and your degree to that you give away, use that power to make space for others, is how you give away your very own life. So we see others, we speak well of others, and then we give our very own life because that's what Jesus did. And when we do that, guys, we're taking the blessings and heavenly places that Christ has made true about us, and then we just we uh release them so that the kingdom of heaven can come to earth. Are you guys with me here today? Okay, so a few things here. I'm gonna have the worship team come up, and we're just gonna have a little bit of a time of response here and have a specific invitation to actually receive blessing today. But as we talked about, you know, the the the beginning of this passage in Ephesians, it walks through the blessings, these identity passages. For some of you, if you're just starting to walk with Jesus, this is just like the best way to spend your time with God is just every day reminding yourself of who you are in Christ, of what God has done. So when I when we read the scriptures, I always ask the questions what does this passage say about who God is and what he's done? And based on who God is and what he's done, who am I and how then shall I live? Right? So if you're just starting in your scriptures, I would just say walk through Ephesians 1 and just replace every time it says you or us, just put just fill in your name. Who has blessed the Luke in Christ Jesus with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places, even as he chose a Luke in him before the foundation of the world, right? That Heather should be holy and blameless before him. You just walk through the passage, insert your name in, and you say it long enough and you pray it long enough until you believe it from the inside out. This is one of the most important things that happens. You can do even this week. Wake up every day and pray the Ephesians 1 blessing over your life and see what happens. So we practice blessing by receiving blessing, but we practice blessing by taking a moment to give blessing. I just want to want you to think about as we leave this place, and even today, before we leave, you may be in some conversations. You maybe just need to tell somebody what you see in them and just say, Hey, I just want you to know that I see you and I'm praying for you. Whatever words that you're given that feel authentic to you, but are just a way of saying, Hey, bless you in Jesus today. Maybe it's somebody in your life that you need to call or send a text message to this week that needs a blessing, and you can call them and say, Hey, I was praying for you. Just want to let you know that God really loves you and he sees you and he knows you. All of us have those people in our life that need to know that. Maybe through that's a that's through a word, maybe it's a work of service or just spending time with him. I'm just saying, all of us have a chance to be a people of blessing, right? And then, like I said before, you bless what you build in your work. I want to challenge you that the work of blessing is something that we practice before you send an email tomorrow at work, before you sit down and do all that paperwork or you're finalizing that deal or whatever it is you're doing. Say, God, before I start, I want to bless the work that you've given to me. And I want to ask that everything I do is flavored with the kingdom of heaven and life and peace and joy. How would that change your work day? How would that change your conversations if you prayed for the people that you're gonna be interacting with that day? See, some of us, we just we take this, we read this, and then we set it down on Sunday, we go into our lives and we kind of live to next Sunday. No, this is the operating system of Monday through Saturday. This is the operating system of the rest of our lives. We are a people wired for blessing. Come on, who's with me? And so we extend blessing. And listen, look, we talked about last week. This is the final picture. The Christian life begins with blessing and ends in blessing. Here's how Ronald Rollheiser puts it: this is a vision for our lives. Just imagine this. He said the final picture of human and Christian development is that of a blessing grandmother or a blessing grandfather, not suffering but joyful, smiling and beaming with pride at the life and energy of the young, basking in that energy and radiating from every pore of his or her being the words of the Creator. It is good, indeed, it is very good, and in you I take delight. All of us are headed that direction. It is good. In you I take delight. So here's what we're gonna do as we end our time. I'm gonna invite, well, we're gonna have we're gonna have a chance to sing, but what we're gonna do is I'm gonna invite some of our ministry team and our elders, if our elders are in the room and um elders' wives as well, and they're gonna be kind of around the sides of the room, and they're going to be available just to pray a prayer of blessing over you. Now, listen, some of you are here today, and this is like you're listening to me talk, but you've never had this experience of somebody actually pronouncing blessing over you. So what's gonna happen is we're gonna sing, and as you want to, as you desire this, as you feel certain, you can go to some of these people that will be around the room. And as you come to them, all they're gonna do, they may ask if they can put their hand on your shoulder or on your head, and they're just gonna pray a player prayer of blessing. You know, may the Lord bless you and you know, show you that you are adopted and that you're his child, and he's proud of you, and he takes delight. And he they're just gonna pray some words of blessing over you. You don't have to do anything, you just have to, you can just receive it. And maybe that's the first time you've ever been blessed like that. I'm just telling you, there is no better way to end this Sunday than to receive a blessing from God and to leave as a blessed son and daughter of God. Amen. And so I'm gonna pray. Let's all stand together. I'm gonna pray. And as we sing, and as we sing about being children of God, don't be bashful. Go to somebody, receive a blessing. Don't leave here without a blessing. If you never experience it, go and experience it because this is what God has for you. And maybe some of you, if you've never experienced this, this is a chance to actually take your first steps into Christ. And if you don't have a relationship with Jesus today, you can start. You can start walking with him. It starts by believing what he says about you, warts and all, right? You are beautiful, you are beloved. Even with the broken places in our lives, he loves us. So, Jesus, I thank you today. We thank you that we are blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing. We thank you that it's already been done. I just ask as a community, God, that this would just get into us at a whole new level. God, and as we share this time and some of us even receive blessing, I just thank you just to solidify your words inside of our hearts. That as we leave, we can extend your blessing into the world in which we live. We thank you, God, for who you are and who we are in you. In Jesus' name, amen. Let's sing together and then feel free to go to any of the people on the sides of the room. Put your hand on your heart to say with me, I am a child of God. Say it again, I am a child of God. God, I thank you this morning to solidify that, cement that into our very being. There's no one who can steal that identity from us because it's already happened in Christ. And Jesus, today, I just bless our family here. I bless even the guests that are with us today, God, that we're all a part of what you do. And as we put our faith in you, as we believe in you, Lord God, we get to receive what you've done for us. So I just thank you, God, for a gift, the gift of life, the gift of freedom today, the gift of adoption. And as we go from this place, let us bring that gift to those that we meet, those that we talk to. You are blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. Amen. Amen. Come on, let's give it up for Jesus again. Hey guys, so good to spend the morning with you. Listen, a couple things as we leave. If first of all, if you're a guest with us, I'd love we'd love to talk to you in the back. You're gonna see that connect with the sign in the back. We're not gonna bombard you. We just love to meet you. There's also a table in the back. And uh, if you want more information on the creative access countries and the work that's happening around the globe, go talk in the back, and there's some information there. And then uh, besides that, um uh we will see you back next week. Don't forget to sign up for the emotionally healthy relationships or I'm sorry, emotionally healthy spirituality course starting February 17th. It's gonna be incredible. Go in the grace of God. Love you guys.