Lisa Harper | 01.10.21

those of y'all who are regular zealots you run hard after jesus through the ministry of zeal you know that i am a stinkin proud adoptive mama of a little girl named melissa price harper i brought missy home in 2014 she was four years old i had started the adoption process when she was two a week after her first mama a woman named marie that i cannot wait to meet in glory marie died of undiagnosed aids and there was nobody else to care for missy and too long a story to tell you how god wove me into hers but aside from jesus um missy is the greatest gift god has ever lavished on me i love being her mama but as it is with anything that's worth having anything truly beautiful there is some heartbreak woven into that our adoption journey was arduous it was hard and then once i got her home to nashville april 14 2014 there were still other hard things to deal with two days after i had brought her home i was putting her to sleep we lived in this little cottage and leapers fork at the time and i took her upstairs to her bedroom i cannot tell you how many hours i spent in that bedroom and the two years i was waiting for just walking those floors praying over those floors weeping on those floors anointing every um material surface anything that was wood was anointed with oil it was the shiniest room you've ever seen in your life but i was taking her up to that just little girl's room and i was so delighted i had my own daughter to sleep in there and and as we were walking into her room i reached up because i was going to fix her hair i love curly hair my baby's got the best looking afro you've ever seen in your life we do braids we do afros i told her she can use chemicals on her hair when she's 35 but until then we're all about curls baby can i get an amen jay um i love me some some natural curly hair but anyway i reached up because she had gotten something in her fro and i reached up to get it out and when i reached up missy flinched and i realized that she flinched because she thought i was going to hit her and so i pulled her into my arms and i sang her to sleep and i explained as best i could she didn't understand english very well at that point and my creole was abysmal but i explained as best i could that i would never ever hit her i found out later that one of the nannies at her orphanage made a habit of slapping missy across the face and hitting her in the head there was a lot of abuse toward my daughter because my little girl has hiv and the nannies there thought that if they touched missy that it would be transmitted to them they would get aids they would die and so there's a lot of stigma a lot of abuse and so as best i could that second night she was home i told her that she didn't have to flinch when i hit her and i walked out of her room after she fell asleep and leaned against the wall and just cried because i thought oh jesus jesus jesus only your spirit can cover the wounds of abuse that my precious little girl who's only four remembers that she carries in her heart i grieve the abuse that my daughter had to endure as an orphan and i also grieve the fact that she didn't know me yet as her mama blah as her white mama she didn't know that i would never raise my hand to slap her across the face or hit her in the head that i would never show physical violence toward her a couple of months after that another heartbreak was we were at vanderbilt children's hospital meeting with her doctor her infectious disease doc and he had to explain to missy in very stark terms that her medicine missy is on antiretrovirals to keep the hiv undetectable which is a a miracle but he said you have to take this medicine melissa one of these days god's gonna give me a face-to-face meeting with one of these big pharma people who makes pediatric hiv because why they don't have bubble gum or grape flavoring i don't know as if these kids lives aren't hard enough but her medicine is just oh it just tastes awful so of course she doesn't like taking it twice a day and the doctor said melissa if you don't take this medicine you will die i wanted to punch him in the throat yeah i'm like don't be talking my girl about death doctor but he had to he had to get her to the point of recognizing the harsh reality that this medicine represents life to you you know the the harsh sounding reality i want to talk about today is that this is life to us and we've got hundreds and thousands of believers who claim to know jesus who raised their hands who listen to worship in their cars and they are dying on the vine because the vitality of your relationship with jesus christ is not illustrated by your enthusiasm by what you do with your hands it's illustrated by whether or not you hold this in your hands and you actually know the story that we've been written into knowledge of god is predicated by knowledge of his word you cannot have an intimate relationship with jesus christ contrary to popular belief by just soaking in podcasts you have to know god's word it's not the best analogy because i don't want to say this is medicine but i do want to say this gives life i do want to connect the dots between gods and scripturated revelation which all too often people dismiss and characterize as boring this is the antithesis of boring we've got some boring preachers and bible teachers we've got some undisciplined christ followers who won't take enough time to understand the context that these promises were written in but this is anything but boring this is is shocking sometimes it's life-giving it's interesting craig keener who's a modern theologian as a matter of fact i'm i'm going to ask pastor jd to make it required reading for the dream team to read one of his most recent books he's written a ton but he's written a book it's about this thick so it's it's not one you'll read at the beach over you know it's not like a people magazine it's i mean it is it's me baby but it's called spirit hermeneutics and in that book spirit hermeneutics dr keener says this he says if he says if you get out of the bible what you're expecting to get out you need to change your expectations regarding the bible in other words the bible is bigger and it's better than our finite human understanding and expectations an older long-dead theologian i have platonic crushes on all the dead guys but spurgeon said the spurgeon said a bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn't this series as we kick off 21 is all about knowing god this morning i want to connect the dots between knowing god having a real authentic intimate relationship with jesus christ and knowing god's word so speaking of expectations about scripture open up yours even if it's on your your ipad or your phone or turn to a grinner around you with a bible and we're going to look at a passage in exodus chapter 20 so that's toward the beginning if you'll turn the very beginning and then just head to the right about a half an inch you'll hit exodus exodus chapter 20 i'm reading out of the english standard version and so your translation translation may read a hair different but this is exodus chapter 20 beginning in verse 8. remember the sabbath day now if you come from a jewish background that some would pronounce it shabbat remember the sabbath day to keep it holy six days ye shall labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a sabbath to the lord your god on it you shall not do any work you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your livestock your your golden doodle or hyperdoodle or burn a doodle or whatever your livestock is or the sojourner who is within your gates the second cousin who's camping in your backyard and an rv for in six days the lord made heaven and earth the sea and all that is in them and rested the seventh day therefore the lord blessed the sabbath day and he made it holy hagon holy now when y'all read a passage like that don't you think that i'm a big fat liar i mean don't be honest don't be lying up in church you read a passage about sabbath and you're like she was she was being hyperbolic i mean that was not riveting that was not exciting there's nothing about that that makes me want to like dive in deeper right when i used to read that passage the first picture that would come to my mind is me as a six-year-old getting in trouble for wearing a bikini my mama um is she's great godly woman but she especially when i was growing up was baptist to the bone and so she took the ten commandments keeping the sabbath as the fourth of the ten commandments god gives us i mean she took that super seriously and that meant that we spent about six hours every sunday you know for baptist sabbath a sunday if you're a jewish background or you keep to an orthodox orthodox understanding of scripture your sabbath or shabbat might be sundown friday night to sundown saturday night but in southern baptist world in southeastern u.s sabbath a sunday baby and sunday meant i put on a very uncomfortable dress and i put on tights i grew up in central florida it was always hot i still hate tights or hoes i think they're all made in the devil's factory and then i put on really uncomfortable patent leather shoes and then i went to a big pink stucco building with a lot of joyless people and then i was forced to sit in a miniature chair and drink warm kool-aid out of a tiny dixie cup and then they showed us stories about the bible on a flannelgraph board and i would dutifully sit there in church for half a day on sunday and i thought if i can just be good enough to earn going home when i get home i get to swim grew up in florida my dad was cheap so instead of turning on the air conditioner we had a pool so if you ever complained about being hot he'd say go get in the pool i can't tell you how many middle of the night times when i was in high school i'd go float around the pool because it was 80 degrees in our house so sounds fancy pools in florida weren't fancy they were just a means of survival and so i thought if i could just get home i can go swim and have fun and one sunday i was six years old and i had the audacity to put on a bikini instead of my one suit now y'all we had a big fence in our backyard nobody could see what we were doing we were swimming i'm by myself in a bikini but my mom called me out baby patty is about 120 pounds soaking wet but when she's mad and she tells you to pick your own switch whoo it's scary i got in huge trouble because mom said i was not keeping the sabbath holy and i didn't really understand a six-year-old i thought i guess our god is offended by belly buttons i mean i don't know what the big deal is but i was duly chastised because i had broken the law of the sabbath by wearing a bikini my dad used to get in trouble for mowing the lawn on sunday not not more than maybe two or three times after he faced mama's wrath that he attempt this but he would mow the lawn while we were at church and mom would come home see that the lawn was mowed and i mean she would take my dad just to task over it because she said john if one of the neighbors saw you they would know we were working on the sabbath and not keeping it my dad didn't even know god he was i mean he was a staunch agnostic he's like what's the big deal i didn't think he's up there well because it's making our whole family look like pagans and so that's what i thought exodus 20 was all about i thought it was this kind of parameter that we had to follow that sucked all the joy out of our life on sunday flip to the right stick a finger in exodus 20 and head to the right and see what jesus says in mark 2 about sabbath gives you the context that god gave us this promise it's not a punitive rule mark chapter 2 verse 23 one sabbath or shabbat he jesus was going through the grain fields and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain and the pharisees the super rigid religious boogerheads were saying to him same people who cuss on social media and say that they're making a christian point and the pharisees were saying to him look why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath they're referring back texas 20. and he said to them have you never read what david did when he was in need and was hungry he and those who were with them how he entered the house of god in the time of abby athar the high priest and ate the bread of the presence which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat and also gave it to those who were with him and jesus said to them the sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath so the son of man is lord even of the sabbath in other words because you haven't taken the time you reject rigid joy-second pretend christians to read the socio-historical parameters that our creator redeemer gave us these promises in you're focusing on the religiosity instead of the liberty he said god didn't give us these parameters to make us rigid or suck the joy out of life he gave these to us for our good he said god i always perverse people over policy but y'all so many of us even today are like missy we flinch because we don't really know god all too often subconsciously we have this image of this unibrow librarian in glory walking around with a 50 town bible just waiting for us to step out of line so he can smack us over the head with it i've met so many christians who think into intimacy with god is equated by rigidity and that's not at all biblically defensible these promises weren't given to us to be stiff and joyless they were given to us to be liberated and to have abundant life do you remember the context that god gave them the ten commandments in exodus do you remember what was going on with his people the israelites that is the theocracy that god set his name and his favor on to illustrate how much he loves mankind that he wants to be in a covenant relationship with all of us do you remember the context do you remember what they just come from young talked back they've just come from egypt they've just come out from under captivity in egypt they were enslaved by the egyptians do you remember how long they were enslaved around 400 years there's some different nuances in that depending on how you read numbers but let's just say 400 ish years while they were enslaved in egypt they were under the egyptian ideology that included belief in the sun god ra now the egyptians believe that when the sun came up raw had come back to life i'll tell you why he wasn't alive until the sun came up when the sun comes up raw comes up and then as the sun is in the sky ra is hovering over the world he's a dispassionate god the sun god ra he also is a cruel god because he beats down heat on those who have to work in the sun if you read about the lives of jewish slaves during the captivity they worked almost always 18 hours a day they did not get a day off sickly vacation days it was 365 days a year 18 hours a day some theologians will tell you that the average age of a jewish slave in uh captivity in egypt was in their early 30s the men died in their early 30s because the physical labor was just so difficult and so they believe they labor all day and then when the sun goes down raw is eaten gobbled up this is egyptian mythology he's eaten by another god called nut which i think that name is kind of apropos and then after nut gobbles raw then there's a serpent god and he's all over the earth during the dark so their entire existence as slaves in egypt was you kill yourself during the day under cruel god name raw and then you've got to be scared to death at night because there's a snake slithering around and he's trying to eat you and kill you too some of you all have children or nieces and nephews who are afraid of the dark don't shame kids who are afraid of the dark goes back generation after generation the human fear of the dark gently share that that's not part of their story anymore don't shame them don't don't chastise them just show them the better story their story that's exactly what god does you remember they're in captivity for 400 years and then god texts moses through a flaming topiary and he says i want you to lead my people out of captivity he sends these wild plagues i mean broadway's got nothing on the plagues hamilton can't touch the exodus it is wild what happens sends these plagues rescues them in dramatic fashion out of captivity the last scene they have of egypt what they had known for generations is the entire egyptian army who is pursuing them to kill them being swallowed up by the red sea red sea had just split apart when they got to it they walked through on dry ground all of god's people the egyptian army trailing right after them the sea just swallows them up can you imagine how discombobulated they were by the time they got to the base of mount sinai it's their first pit stop you know they're just like going through the drive-through at mcdonald's just shell-shocked just like what just happened to us went 400 years in captivity and we knew the we knew that kind of the game plan there we knew the rules i mean we had to kill ourselves during the day and then at night we had to be scared and then we got off the next day and did it all over again because according to egyptian mythology after nut devoured raw then somehow raw was resurrected at sunrise and he came back again to rule in a cruel and hot way that was what they lived under for 400 years and so it makes sense when god brings them out of captivity they're sitting there at this in the sand the base of mount sinai god doesn't start with a dissertation about himself he doesn't say now let me tell you about my inherent core values it's not what he does he goes let me tell you a story about creation let me tell you about how i breathed the sun into existence to warm your bodies to give you light to see by and then i hung stars in the sky and a moon to even illuminate your way at night because i love you i don't want you lost much less devoured and it's in that context when he is actually recalibrating their warped and corrupt understanding of identity that god gets to sabbath and so when he says i want you to take a day off what he's actually saying is you matter to me you matter so much to me i'm not interested in killing you you are not a person to just run into the ground to me you're not a worthless slave remember i told you i made you in my image you bear my thumbprint you're my sons and my daughters and you matter to me so you're not gonna understand everything about it right now but from the get-go i'm establishing a day that y'all get to be restored you get to be rejuvenated you get to refuel you get to sleep late you get to focus on me where your love comes from where your identity comes from you get to laugh at your kids jokes at the dinner table you get to exhale and i want you to protect this day in your calendar because i want to protect you because you matter to me so these parameters are for your good y'all it's not a bikini band it's not about taking the joy out of our lives it's actually about injecting liberty and protection into the life he's called us to he's given us a different story so many of us we calibrate our lives based on the story we see outside of our homes and on social media and it breaks my heart how many christian leaders have you seen fall in the last two or three years and i think they fell because they forgot their own story they forgot the heart of what they were preaching that we matter to god that there's a different way there's a higher way there's a better way not because we're better people than an unbeliever but because we had this glorious perfect compassionate god and he's he's flipped the script for us he's given us a way to live that is abundant that's full of grace old testament writers the psalmist they say that his boundary lines for us fall in pleasant places the sabbath isn't to restrict us it's actually to liberate us to care for us i want you to head to the right about two inches from exodus to second kings because i want to show you what happens when we forget our story when we lose our story and you see it really colorfully illuminated in the life of the 16th king of israel by then israel had gone through this soap opera split and so you have a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom the southern kingdom retain the city of jerusalem it's called judah and the 16th king of judah anybody remember who he was i'll give you a hint his name rhymes with rosiah josiah do you remember how old josiah was when he took the helm of southern israel he was eight years old so god says i'm a school y'all through a second grader because if you study the old testament you'll see that after god rescued them out of captivity gave them the land of promise the land of milk and honey you'd think they'd run right right no those people forgot their first love so fast and by the time you get to the time of the judges and that's around 1300 bc they've completely forgotten their own story during judges were taught that there was no king on the throne in israel and the word of god was not being taught in the land and that's putting it nicely because they literally lost the bible they lost the bible and that's what happens at the beginning of chapter 22 we read in second kings josiah was eight years old when he began to reign and he reigned 31 years in jerusalem his mama's name was jedidah the daughter of adeiah and that's not a good name to name your boys right there you'll never find a license plate at gatlinburg and he did what was right in the eyes of the lord and walked in all the way of david his father and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left isn't that a beautiful appetite it's one of the things i love about your pastor he is crazy he is enthusiastic he is passionate he will tell you the truth he doesn't turn to the left or to the right he doesn't i love to look at the life of someone who's their trajectory toward god is so unmistakable they may stumble they may fall flat on their face but when they get up they're going right back toward jesus man wouldn't it be incredible somebody said that of us her story was straight straight toward jesus she was a hot mess but with everything she had she was running hard toward jesus verse 8 and hilkiah the high priest said to shaphan the secretary i have found the book of the law in the house of the lord and hilkiah gave the book to chapan and he read it and shape him the secretary came to the king remember he's eight years old he's got bunk beds in the palace and and this this guy comes up one of his royal emissaries and says josiah we found this book and it's it's called torah it's actually the story jehovah gave us and it's our story it's our guidebook this is this is what we're supposed to order our lives by we lost it but now we found it let me read it to you and they read the book of the law to that eight-year-old kid and after he hears this story he says we've got to change ours yes he said we've got to recalibrate our stories so that we're actually living under the canopy of grace that our god established for us and one of the first things this boy king does is he gets rid of the high places do you remember why the high places except for one high place and that's the temple in jerusalem god said i don't want any other high place i don't want any worship done at any high place except for the temple in jerusalem do you remember why god hated the high places young talk back false idols so they had idols on top of high places and high places isn't a fancy multi-syllabic seminary word high place just means one of the high places so it's like one of the the high hills here in nashville you know where they've got the cell phone towers or or where you can see that from the top of percy warner park if you go there radnor you've got a high place one of those high prominent hills they would go to the high places and they would put asherah poles and idolatrous symbols on those high places so we all know there were idols on top of the high priest places and idolatrous worship took place there any idea what that worship entailed sexy time it was absolutely it was sexy time i mean this is like h-b-o-o-o because what they thought and by they i mean jews that had gone back to the mythology they had learned under egypt they'd been given their own story written by a god who loved them who made them in his image but they forgot their story and they went back to a false narrative lord have mercy if i had two words describe social media i'd say false narrative they went back to a false narrative or really good angles because i look skinny on my instagram pictures but false narrative and the false narrative they went back to was the narrative they had been taught in egypt because the egyptians worshiped the pantheon a collection of little je gods and goddesses and the egyptians like the israelites harvest was everything to them this was an agrarian culture if their crops were full then they had enough food to eat and survive another year cycle if their crops if there was if the sun was too hot there wasn't enough rain and their crops died there was no food and there was famine in the land and people died and so rain was everything in this ancient society water meant life in this ancient society and so the egyptians in the absence of any real knowledge about science about physical science about where precipitation comes from they went back to the false narrative of mythology and their narrative and be careful with the peanuts if you've got headphones or something to put on them i'll use metaphors but i don't want them here and what happens next you're going to have like weeks to explain this but what what they thought was when it rained in the earth the gods and goddesses were having special play time and i don't want to be overly explicit but most of y'all are adults and connect the dots they thought rain was something that came from a man during special hbo playtime if y'all are catching my drift i want to be careful about the kids people tell me the bible is boring i'm like this makes jerry springer look like quantitative analysis i mean this is wild stuff this isn't boring so they thought rain happened when the men you know and do you know what they thought thunder was well this is crazy they thought thunder was the boy gods chasing the girl gods above them and that thunderstone was them chasing them because they wanted to get jiggy with it but the girls weren't sure and so the egyptians said hmm how can we manipulate the gods to have play time so that there will be rain gross ick so that our crops will grow and we'll have something to eat and we'll survive hey how about this idea we'll hike up to the high places and we'll have group scx at the high places and maybe our group scx as if they can't spell until they spell or they can google but our group extracurricular activities will be on the high places so the gods can see it they'll be titillated that will cause them to have happy time and then there will be rain and our crops will grow and we can eat and god comes into the story and says yo yo you don't have to manipulate me you don't have to subjugate yourself to an orgy in order to have rain i love you i've created the sun and the moon and the stars and the rain so that you can live so that you can have abundant life don't go back to that false narrative this is your story when someone tells me they want to know god i always ask him about how often they're in his word because i actually don't think you can know god intimately if you don't dive deep into this love story if you don't take the time to figure out the socio-historical context you don't have to be a brainiac there's amazing stuff on the internet nowadays but you have to dive into this story because it's our story if you don't recalibrate your heart and your mind by this truth you will wax and wane by every other false narrative spewed by mankind and they're interesting for a season and they're captivating for a season and then come monday you find yourself hungry and depressed all over again because only that truth only that hope only that story can sustain us that's that's our umbilical cord yes that's how we live yeah about 20 years ago i had an encounter that really changed my life i was at a church event near chattanooga a pretty pretty conservative church most of the women there were in stretchy pants and matching sweater sets and had quilted bible covers and there was one woman at the very back of the church this was a church with pews for those of you under 30 those are long wooden benches we used to sit on in church she was in the very back of the church on a pew she didn't look like she fit she's wearing a dress that was kind of inappropriate for church looked disheveled but she stayed all day throughout this conference and at the end of the day she raised her hand to commit her life to christ and so when i walked to the back of the church i was just talking with some women and she sheepishly approached me and she said i know i don't really look like i fit here and i said well i i don't fit much places either i kind of enjoy being an outlier and she said well this is actually a borrowed dress and i said it is i said what what made you do you go to the trouble of borrowing a dress and coming to this conference today and she began to tell me her story she told me that she was raised in a home with a dad who hit and the abuse in her childhood sent her careening into the arms of abusive boyfriends and substance abuse and one of those boyfriends introduced her to prostitution and that was her evening job and had been for about 10 years her day job was working at a restaurant and she said you know most of the women who come into the restaurant won't talk to me because it's a small town and most people know what my evening activities are but she said this one woman for the last year has been so kind she said her name is carol and she always talks to me she always initiates conversation with me she's always really polite with me and she said she gave me a ticket to this conference several weeks ago and she was so kind and so persistent that i just didn't know how to say no so she said i borrowed a dress and she said my plan was just to come in this morning and just make a quick appearance say hi to carol and leave because she said i assumed i wouldn't fit in a church much less in the embrace of god but she said right when i was planning to walk out you came walking up and you weren't what i expected you were loud and you started off with something funny and she said and then you told the story about a woman in the old testament named gomer who was a prostitute and you talked about how god went out of his way to woo her back to him and she said i didn't know there's a story in there about a woman like me and she said i found myself thinking if god could forgive and love gomer then maybe he could actually forgive and accept me 20 years ago i thought you know i am a windbag i tell a lot of stories i can quote some old dead guys i've memorized just enough greek and hebrew and seminary to be dangerous but i thought all that is just noise if i can't usher people toward this truth if i can't say this is where you'll find hope this is where you'll find the portrait of the god who will never leave you or forsake you this is where you'll find life this is where you'll find abundant life this is where you'll find peace and joy to know god is to know this love story he's written us into how well do you know it how often do you open it up most of you have committed to at least a partial fast for the next three weeks and i want to strongly encourage you to take that energy and that attention that you had used to look up something on doordash or ubereats i want you to use that attention and that energy and begin reading some of the stories in this book the life in this book find yourself on these pages more importantly find the god who loves you more than you can possibly ask or imagine the more you read this the more you'll begin to see this isn't a this isn't a rule book [Music] this is a redemption story this is all about hope and life how much we matter to god let me ask you to bow your heads before we get out of here [Music] i know there are several guests in this room this morning thank you for coming into our family room that's one of the things you'll find about zeel this is less church and more family this is not a country club more of a family hospital where people come who are in all different stages of healing you won't find a lot of pretense here you'll find real people who are desperate for a real savior who actually gives us peace and hope and joy when life is real hard and so if you are here as a guest maybe somebody like carol who you just couldn't deny her kindness invited you here this morning if you're here and you don't yet have a relationship with jesus christ the son of god who laid down a scepter in glory and came to this earth in a suit of skin that's what we just celebrated at christmas and he did that so that you and i could be reconciled into a right relationship with a holy god whether you wear bikinis on sunday or not if you want to know jesus it's not about joining this church it's not about being religious it's about acknowledging that you're a mess and you need a messiah it's about acknowledging you want a real relationship with jesus christ if that's your story we're not going to ask you to come forward we will not in any way single you out or humiliate you there are several stories in scripture where jesus allowed people to come to him privately there is a place for a public profession of faith but there is also a place for you to pray quietly in your seat as god moves on your heart and so if you're in this room right now and the cry of your heart is to be known by god to have a real relationship with god through jesus i'm the only one with my eyes open would you just real quickly raise your right or your left hand welcome to the family welcome to the family welcome to the family there are several with their hands raised y'all can put your hands down and so we're going to join them and praying this simple but profound prayer that we're instructed to pray in the book of romans in the new testament paul tells us if you confess with your mouth and you believe in your heart that jesus is the son of god sent from the sent from the god who loves us so much that he made a way for us to be saved he made a way for us to be reconciled with him he says you confess that with your mouth you believe it in your heart and jesus will take up resonance in your heart and mind through the holy spirit you'll have a new life here and you'll have abundant life in the future and so we're going to pray a simple prayer that is simply a practical application of that promise i'm going to ask you to pray after me out loud that kind of gives you an ebenezer a stake in the sand if you will to go that's the day i feel like i'm at jesus face to face a lot of you've been walking with him for a long time running straight toward him and i'm asking you to pray it out loud too because it's just a tangible reminder of the miracle we've been written into this glorious gospel dear jesus i'm a mess i cannot make it by myself i cannot make myself good enough to be accepted by you [Music] jesus i need your grace i need your forgiveness i need your mercy i can't be connected with god apart from your perfect sinless life [Music] so i put my hope in you jesus [Music] i give you my whole heart and i pray that you would teach me what it is to walk in your ways [Music] and to rest in your affection amen

Channel: Zeal Church

Views: 67,248

Rating: 4.918582 out of 5

Keywords: Nashville, Bellevue, Tennessee, Sermon, Zeal, Church, West, Jd, Ost

Id: 6FltMHm18Uk

Length: 43min 8sec (2588 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021